Whenever anyone asks me what my favorite ‘thing’ is, that
thing I have the most irrational passion for, the answer is always easy.
Berserk.
This answer usually takes people aback. Not so much that I give that answer, since
people that know me know I have great affection for it. It’s more that there’s no hesitation in my
answer. I don’t even have to weigh
options.
Nothing else comes close.
The inevitable next question is exactly how much I love
Berserk. My response is always the same:
“If I could only keep one nerdy thing in my life and had to
get rid of all the rest, it would be Berserk.”
People can’t believe that it wouldn’t be something like
Captain America ,
Star Wars or even my other anime fixation, Mobile Suit Gundam. There are a LOT
of things I’m ‘into’ on a level that could be described as obsessive.
But in the end, Berserk
would be the last man standing.
I believe in Gundam’s
message, its themes and characters, its fascinating and believable political
intrigues and the question of evolution and how humanity deals with it. In fact, I’d say that Gundam is a vastly more ambitious storytelling venture than Berserk, which is a dark fantasy revenge
tale with dynamic characters possessing believable motivations and complex
relationships with one another. The
characters of Gundam act more
thematically, while the characters of Berserk
respond more organically.
This is not to say that Gundam’s
characters are somehow less worthy because they serve a theme more than their
own interests (at least, from my point of view). But Berserk’s
heroes and villains are all worthy of starring in their own series because
they’re all so interesting, whereas with Gundam
most of the supporting cast are foils for the primary characters to convey the
show’s themes. And what Kentaro Miura,
the manga-ka of Berserk does so well, is mix his cast together in ways that
naturally bring them into struggle and resolution. The conversations and conflicts of the
players have such strong foundations that you never feel that a particular
narrative is being pushed. It’s just how
they would react if these people met one another in real life.
So much of anime and manga is focused on the purely visual. And that’s understandable since anime and manga are visual mediums. The reason I am not a fan of the current visual
trends in anime is because the characters are all overused tropes that exist
first to attract audiences and second to tell stories. On those occasions when I do deign to expose myself to modern
anime, I am inevitably disappointed in what I’m seeing. It’s always the same. Cute ennui laced girl with a big
sword/gun. Bouncy and spirited girl with
big boobs and a big sword/gun. The super
young jailbait girl with gigantic pig tails and a big sword/gun. The ‘average’ girl of earthen charm with a
big sword/gun.
Do you see the problem?
All of these anime-ALL OF THEM-are so derivative of one another that the
inevitable result is disappointment and frustration because they don’t move
towards any compelling plot twists or narrative resolutions. And the reason for this is because these characters
are all satellites that revolve around the invariably bland protagonist who serves
as little more than wish fulfillment fantasy portal characters for an immature audience
that craves acceptance from others. The
second these fans emotionally hitch themselves to the H-wagon, they instantly
mistake their attachment with investing of themselves in a quality
production. They stop challenging it or
asking questions because they’re getting what they want out of it.
It’s not that I hate people for liking things I find
unworthy of the attention. I’m doing my
best not to criticize the audience. I
just get frustrated when I see them enjoying something that isn’t really any
good and, if they were to be truly honest with themselves, they’d come to grips
with that as well.
The other side of the coin is all substance
and no style. Slice of life shows are
the prime suspects in this regard. And I have to ask…what are these shows in service
to? How do they advance, specifically,
the visual mediums of anime and manga? There’s
nothing ambitious about them as visual forms of storytelling. Even the few that have sci-fi or fantasy
elements are generally so dramatically understated in their presentation that I
have to wonder why any effort went into the production at all. Anime nd manga aren’t necessarily the best
vehicles for telling those stories because they’re ultimately so mundane and
uneventful that, again, they don’t merit a visual presentation in my opinion.
Ironically, I am a
big fan of Genshiken, which could be
classified as a slice of life story about a continually evolving anime and
manga club that some of the university’s otaku
join and contribute to. The neat thing about Genshiken is that the culture of the club itself changes as its
members rotate in and out as the student body cycles with the
passing of time. And I find the
character motivations and relationships of Genshiken
extremely compelling. But I always
wonder…does this need to be anime or
manga? There’s nothing interesting
happening on the page or screen.
Now, some manga fans out there will take issue with
this. They will argue that the panels
and their arrangement can help to convey a complex range of emotions. Simply by tilting the frame or showing juxtaposed
characters standing in relation to one another, the distance, the lighting, the
objects between them and such, an emotional connection or conflict can be
established that helps the reader get invested in the plot point.
But my takeaway from such rationale is never ‘man, how
awesome was that page layout?’ Not when
it’s just a scene of people drinking sake
in a bar, two characters separated by friends seated at the table as a means
of conveying social distance and lamenting the cruelty of unrequited
affections. I don’t see how this,
visually represented, has any more impact to me than it would by simply reading
it in a novel. In fact, this paragraph I
just typed carries all the emotional weight of those scenes. Do I see it?
Do I get it? Okay, then.
Anime and manga like Berserk
and Gundam are about establishing
worlds that audiences can’t truly understand unless they see them. Of course, you can say a guy is in back armor
or a gal is piloting a giant robot, but these abstractions aren’t things that
we can immediately relate to. It’s why
costume dramas like Game of Thrones
are so striking-the wardrobes are unlike anything we would ever wear except at
Halloween. The elegantly dressed
characters, placed in fantastical settings, help to envelop us in that
world and understand how the players exist beside these incredible things.
Action is a very important part of any visual medium in my
opinion. Whether it’s a shootout on an
episode of NCIS, Rick Grimes and
company dispatching a zombie horde in The
Walking Dead or Daisaku Kusama commanding Giant Robo from the palm of his gargantuan
robotic ally’s steel hand in Giant
Robo: The Animation, action helps us to bring us that much closer to the
exciting and extreme circumstances that these characters have to deal with on a
daily basis. By comparison, a TV
show or anime where its characters stroll
down a sidewalk while ruminating on life’s pitfalls is just too drab to hold my
interest for long.
I am not blind to the reality that the industry is simply
reaching out to audiences that aren’t conditioned to appreciate fantasy and
science fiction adventures. It’s a
business and people need to pay for this stuff or else a lot of talented
individuals will be out of work and nobody will make any money. But you have to remember that when you start
appealing to the lowest common denominator for the sake of economic prosperity,
you’re already compromising more than you should in terms of artistic merit and
it means, in my opinion, your creativity has gone to the wayside in favor of
commerce. There is a way to tell stories
that engage audiences and profit by that.
James Cameron has been proving that for years. Love him or hate him, the guy makes movies
that are tightly constructed, directed with passion and know how to connect
with audiences as sci-fi and fantasy vehicles with arresting visuals.
So there’s a way to do this.
But modern anime and manga has lost way in it furiously dogpaddles in
the sea of relevance just to keep its head above water. It would seem that creatively, we spend too
much time ‘finding’ things to like about mediocre anime (Attack on Titan, for example) rather than unreservedly celebrating
them for their artistic brilliance (Gundam
0080: War in the Pocket, comparatively).
Now, what does all of this have to do with Berserk?
My answer to that is that you have to understand my mindset in order to
appreciate my reasons. I want you to
remember this blog when I come back to publish the second part. I won’t be bullet pointing it for you. That would be appealing to the lowest common
denominator, and I’d rather challenge my audience by expecting that they know
how to read an article and absorb its message, whether they agree with it or
not. See you soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment