25 January 2010
Texhnolyze [テクノライズ] – (2003) – Rogue 01 “Stranger”
An anime by Hirotsugu Hamazaki, with characters by Yoshitoshi ABe. I used to watch more anime than I do now, the last two series being the truly funny Abenobashii Magical Shopping Arcade and the really beautiful Heibane-Renmei. There’s something about the characters that Yoshitoshi ABe creates that have really appealed to some inner artistic urge for me – the bear suit in Lain, the sad little girls who work in bread factories in Heibane. But there are some conventions of the format that wore a little thin the more “critical” I became (w/r/t ‘the writing process’) – the endless monologues that explain explanations, the vague (unfinished?) endings. I’ve pretty reliably watched Hayao Miyazaki’s films in the theaters and loved them, barring Howl’s Moving Castle which is hilariously bad, from what I remember.
And there are some series I remember fondly, His & Her Circumstances, or FLCL (you pronounce that “Fooly Cooly”). But for the most part, I can do without it. So a friend at work has insisted I watch Texhnolyze and has provided me with the means of doing so. I finally put in the first episode tonight and it was baffling. But something about the stories that ABe aligns himself with (or maybe it’s just his pretty drawings) pulls me into this. There’s a characteristic of the animes he’s been involved with: yes, they’re annoyingly abstract but they don’t succumb you to needless explanation – instead, a lot of the images and actions are just presented as, and the rest is left up to you, almost as if it’s a challenge (unwinnable, if you ask me). But there’s something a lot more engaging about watching nonsense when its justification isn’t presented. If you prefer a good example of this in live action, see Mulholland Drive. If you want to see a bad example of this in live action, see Inland Empire. I thought Ghost in the Shell was such a superior version of The Matrix in my first year of college, but am so disheartened by that lengthy gas-bag conversation after the tank scene that I can’t bear to watch it again. That whole scene is imbued with such a sense of sorrow, of an acceptance of a fate that’s resolute – do we really need 5 minutes of un-animated explanation about this? I’m sure the explanation she gives is far more in-depth and interesting if you’re willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, but the emotion of the scene is what’s imprinted on me, not the philosophy. The emotion points a direct arrow to the philosophy. So that’s what Heibane-Renmei (kind of a perennial magic hour anime – it’s like Terrence Malick got a pen almost – at least you can always replace a brown pen when you run out of the color) and Lain and Texhnolyze (at least appears to be) are: the tank scene without the chattiness afterwards.
But the converse of that is: I’ve watched a 20+ minute episode of this anime, and written a whole two paragraphs about anime, and not said a single bloody thing about what it’s about. Here’s the “brief” description of the episode from this site:
In this episode, we learn that Ichise is currently living his life as a fighter in an underground fighting ring. He is incredibly strong and is rewarded for his efforts with a nice whore. She goes kind of crazy and he throws her off during their ‘love making’. As a result, her ‘employer’, Aida, calls up a member of Organ, Isshii, to punish Ichise. Isshii cuts off Ichise’s right arm.
At the same time, we see our first sighting of Yoshii, a member of the Class who has come down to Lux for reasons unknown at this point. When he gets to the bottom of the stairs that connect the two worlds, he meets Ran, a girl from the nearby village of Gabe, which is situated on the outskits of Lux. Ran leads him to the Elder of Gabe where they are soon accosted by a couple members of the Alliance. Yoshii protects Ran and the Elder and fights them off.
We are also introduced to Oonishi, the leader of Organ.
Hm. Really? I think I counted four lines of dialogue in the twenty minutes. Here’s what I took out of the episode: there’s a dude with nice hair, he has sex with a lady, some shit happens, and then they cut off the guy’s arm. There’s something about some guy being a leader, some girl named Ran, and then there are credits which have a song that references something about wearing a white t-shirt.
So here’s the thing: in order to ‘get it’, you need to watch it and then can you only retrospectively ‘get it’. It was the same with Heibane, where all the girls were angels, they came out of eggs, they baked bread. But the pacing was so deliberate and slow, when you eventually got answers to questions like why is it everyone seems so sad and where are the boys, you’re really invested in not only the world and the story, but the feeling. Less so with Texhnolyze I think – maybe because of the pacing, but it seems so intentionally oblique. The world is well rendered – everything looks great, and I have to admit, afterwards, I really wanted to watch another one, but I can’t exactly say why. I tire of the ‘question narrative’ that’s so popular in television, where mysteries are presented in compellingly well-rendered cliffhanger style for the purpose of viewership vs. answers. I think the story telling angle here is more that you’re being dropped head-first into a Sci Fi world with different rules, and instead of explaining everything, you just need to give it the benefit of the doubt for a couple hours. Sure, why not.
