[Anime Reviews]
12 Aug 2008
Posted by Martin [Tags: arthouse, Kaiba]
Right from the get-go Kaiba proved to be certainly one of the most unusual but also one of the most thought-provoking shows of recent months. In light of Masaaki Yuasa’s penchant for the extremely odd (when I mean extremely odd I mean it in a Holden Caulfield-italicised extremely) I wasn’t sure if it would try to carry itself on its unique visual style alone or whether Yuasa would back it up with a richer thematic approach too; for all its artistic innovation, Kemonozume was engaging, unpredictable and even shocking at points but as a story nothing revolutionary. Kaiba in contrast looks like NOTHING before seen on God’s green Earth and also kept me guessing from the first episode to the last.
For some viewers, especially those who followed it from afar or dropped it entirely, the ‘look’ may be the one thing they remember it for. It certainly flies in the face of everything that even the most eclectic animation fans are familiar with: the outlines are bold, the character designs childlike and the animation flowing like something Tezuka may have had come up with if he’d taken LSD. In some ways it distances the viewer from the gravity of the situations the characters find themselves in: vehicles look and move like bubbles, weapons appear to be innocuous lumps of rubber and when a character dies they disappear into a puddle of colourful gunk instead of a spray of crimson and dismembered limbs. Had the emotional heart of the story not been so strong I’d actually count its Astro-Boy-Gone-Wrong aesthetic as a hindrance - I certainly wouldn’t think less of anyone who was put off by this.
The opening episodes took a bit of getting used to for this reason: I was still worried that the artwork was a gimmick and that the story was a limitation as it was with Kemonozume. As we met the likes of lecherous Vanilla, the idealistic Popo and the delightful Chroniko however, I began to realise the true nature of the trump card that Yuasa and Madhouse had up their sleeve: the cutesy, hallucinogenic alien world with an amnesiac at its centre took on some very grown-up themes concerning identity and sense of self despite its juvenile and dreamlike appearance.
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[Anime Reviews]
07 Jun 2008
Posted by Martin [Tags: Kaiba]
If I hadn’t promised myself that I wouldn’t blog episodically any more Kaiba would be one show that I’d find easy to blog episodically. It’s an interesting experiment in playing around with the linear narrative idea - while the instalments are clearly in chronological order each one is a self-contained piece that examines a particular planet and situation before our hero moves onto another planet, learning more about the bizarre universe he’s found himself in as he goes.
The recurring issue of memory rears its head again, most notably in the cases of Patch, the lonely inventor whose former assistant lives on in the form of a dog, and the elderly couple in episode 6. In the case of Patch, maybe ignorance is bliss…he is saved from the full extent of the realisation of what he’s lost through forgetting every day. The conclusion to the latter situation, if you emphasise the hopeful aspect, bore a passing resemblence to the end of Place Promised… in that we see the two of them for the last time setting out to spend the rest of their lives replacing the memories that were lost. It is a tragic moment of course, but is a result of the ease by which memories in the Kaiba universe can be moved and exchanged; cruelly ironic in that the old couple had avoided these very practices to enjoy their lives and memories in the conventional way. I’ve covered some of the implications of how memories are portrayed and used in this show but the other half of this issue - that of the question of identity - has come to the fore too.
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[Anime Reviews]
17 May 2008
Posted by Martin [Tags: Kaiba]
After a shaky start I’m finally beginning to warm to Kaiba. I was initially disappointed with how it took a similar tack to Kemonozume in that it relied rather heavily on its superficial quirkiness when other aspects were all those we’d seen in the genres before. Kemo was a fairly straightforward show conceptually but its visual style and the accompanying storytelling approach made it special; similarly Kaiba looks unlike anything else but I was desperately hoping it would follow up on its promises and offer more than this. In episodes three and four it did just that.
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[Anime Reviews]
01 May 2008
Posted by Martin [Tags: First Impressions and Retrospectives, Kaiba]
The fact that the next three in line, Kaiba, Kamen no Maid Guy and Kanokon, all begin with the same letter is pure coincidence by the way - I’m not trying to be clever or anything here. It’s the ‘Experimental Edition’ of my Spring 2008 first impressions: the first is itself experimental while the other two were another attempt on my part to try something a bit different in another sense. The results were mixed.
You don’t know if fifty minutes of your life will be wasted on something until you waste those minutes on it. That’s the price for being open-minded I guess
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