Behave, granny.
I have a hard time believing that a fan such as yourself would describe it as "cult telly" … I suppose we have a discussion over what constitutes "cult telly". But that's really neither here nor there, methinks.
Yeah, sorry. That was lazy of me. I tend to use terms like this without clarifying them, or use the same term in two totally different contexts, and then wonder why people don’t telepathically *get* what I’m trying to say.
I agree with you that my usage of the term wasn’t particularly relevant to what we’re talking about right now, but maybe chatting about these kind of terms and what they mean might be interesting later on.
And it also has the well-established conventions and stereotypes, which I think helps convey ideas much quicker. How many times have you started watching a series and, one episode in, you feel like you've already seen half the characters and know how the story will go (and, come to think, how many times have you been disappointed by how very predictable a given show is)? I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Talented writers and directors can take these conventions and twist them into interesting shapes and really take you for a ride. This isn't unique to anime, but I do think it's much more evident in anime than any other media.
I guess you could make a similar argument about a lot of TV in a certain genre. I mean, shows like Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Babylon 5, Blakes Seven and all incarnations of Star Trek all have a huge amount in common with each other, are basically very similar shows. That’s not taking anything away from any of them, I enjoy some of them very much. But there’s a rough template there for what you expect to see.
Anime generally takes it just that bit further in places, with very specific and easily noticeable references to other shows. This is something that I find really interesting, and while there can be a fine line between the generic copycat and the knowing multi-referential riff it’s almost like there’s a Crisis of Infinite Anime each show feeds into others. It has some strange effects, in that after the very clear technobabble pastiche in the Aim for the Top! science lessons you know that any show that references Gunbuster is likely to be quite knowing and playing fairly fast with the silly science that provides its background.
But...but but but but but...there's the believability factor to deal with. Just because you and I are quite capable of suspending our disbelief to absurd levels if it means we'll get to the good stuff doesn't mean everyone is willing to, and that does hold anime back as a whole.
I think this issue is infinitely weirder and more complex than the manner in which you’ve described it. I agree that not everyone will be able to cope with such an onslaught of the bizarre (especially if they have next to no familiarity with the tropes and how they’re used), but the relationship between anime, *realism* and believability is something that deserves to be discussed at length.
First of all, it might be worth mentioning in passing that I don’t think it’s just me that’s tired of a lot of what passes for verisimilitude and gritty realism in modern film and TV. It’s a matter of style and not substance in a lot of cases, with a lot of supposedly naturalistic acting and lighting and shaky camera work and a bit more of an edge in the sex and violence stakes. The difficulty is that this has the reverse problem. Having set up a world in which they want things to at least appear *real,* the instant that the writers, or the actors, or the effects staff slip up is the instant the house of cards falls apart and you as viewer lose a part or all of your investment. Of course it was all an illusion to begin with, the show was probably as bobbins as The Next Generation but because it was set up to seem real people had a greater level of acceptance for it from the start.
I would argue that suspension of disbelief and how its treated in anime is frequently the polar opposite of this approach and one of the things that makes it so singular as a medium. It often appears that creators go out of their way to emphasise the pulp and trashy aspects of their work in order to set up a framework of disbelief at the outset of the story. Sometimes the manner in which this is done reeks of pomposity, but at its best it’s evidence of an extremely silly sense of humour, irreverence, fond homage, pop culture riffing, imagination and a general playfulness with ideas.
As it’s meta beyond meta and can be spoken about without spoiling the meat of the plot, I’ll site Gunbuster as an exemplar for a lot of my points here. The first episode sets up the series as a very deeply silly mix of Aim for the Ace! (a sports anime) and any number of giant robot series you might care to mention (I’ve heard Macross is the most cited example but I’ve never seen it myself). The episode is filled with a lot of robots doing press-ups, sit ups and building human pyramids. The training montage blatantly rips off Chariots of Fire. It’s very funny, but what exactly does it have to do with the subsequent five esisodes of the show besides establishing that Noriko is misunderstood and bullied?
This is a heavily constructed medium, after all. Why is the whole first episode so totally different in tone to what is to come. It’s not an accident, everything in there is intentional, even if it may seem to have subtext that the creators may not have noticed.
It’s my contention that creating an atmosphere of disbelief, of not knowing quite exactly how to take what you’re seeing, lays a great bedrock to suddenly inject realism in a manner that’s quite unexpected. Think of the number of shows that feature grossly exaggerated emotional displays, with all the usual red in the face shouting, sweat drops, sweat clouds, veins bulging on foreheads, that are all essentially played for laughs and deal with the awkwardness that often surrounds emotional outbursts, and then suddenly the emphasis changes and a character’s emotional response is understated, or genuinely frightening, or complex in its subtext. Often in anime there can be a large number of these shifts between seriousness in tone and the bizarre in a very short space of time.
They’re doing something very different with the notion of suspension of disbelief. Many creators know that they’re working in a trash medium and they seem to love the fact. It’s a cartoon. They know that you’re not supposed to take cartoons seriously. They love the freedom it gives them. And so they overload it with all sorts of strangeness, get you to the stage where you wonder exactly what it is you’re seeing and how you should take it, push you further and further into the absurd, and then all of a sudden sucker punch you when you’re not looking. I think they’re trying to take you to a place where the way in which you understand the show makes you not care whether its believable or not, and then they’ll throw in their curveballs. It’s suspension of belief by re-writing what the audience thinks they can believe in.
Take Aim for the Top! It’s a common anime device to have sections like this, in which characters poke fun at themselves and the series, talk to camera and generally act very silly. Noriko makes a ton of anime in-jokes, they take what many shows would treat as the bedrock of believability behind a sci-fi show – the cod semi-science that explains how the world operates – and overload it with irreverent references to women’s jewellery, starbows, ice-seconds and the like. The audio-only talent show in which Amano and Ota do some deeply daft karaoke is juxtaposed against a transcript of a total gobbledygook science lecture that scrolls in the background. It’s such a jarring mix that you have no idea how to interpret it all, what reading is intended. And then Noriko has the nerve to appear at the end of episode four and tell you that Studio Gainax’ budget has only just been approved to finish the series and that they’ve only got the scripts and titles ready for the final two episodes.
Virtually every anime I’ve seen breaks the fourth wall in this manner, generally in seemingly superfluous sections at the end of episodes or the next episode preview. Probably to save money on employing a narrator for these sections the voice actors reappear, in character, and talk directly to the viewer, with Misato provocatively promising us more Misato fanservice in the next show and Haruhi and Kyon squablling over what episode should get shown next in the running order. What are you to make of this?
Or how about Bleach? After seeing some super-serious flashback sequence you’re all of a sudden pitched into Shinigami Cup Golden, in which we find out how long it takes psychopath Zaraki Kenpachi to do his hair, why Byakuya carries sweets in his sleeves, the terrifying fact that Yachiru is the head of the Soul Society Women’s Institute and far too many references to the size of Matsumoto’s breasts.
Hang on. We’re not supposed to see these characters acting like this. What’s canon here? How am I to take this? There’s something very different going on with what you’re being taught about believability.
Or how about all those occasions where an anime breaks its own rules? How many times in a series have you seen a mech control panel, seen the pilot operate it with switches, handlebars, pedals and (in Eureka Seven’s case) a gearstick, only to suddenly find that when the going gets really intense an inexplicable psychic connection suddenly forms between robot and pilot. Take the climax of the Gunbuster’s final mission, the way in which it activates Buster Machine No. 3. I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, and I’ll write about this sequence more in the GB I & II thread because I think it’s almost symbolic of the whole medium and the weird things it does, but when Noriko and Gunbuster act as one and tear themselves open, have we seen a precedent for that in the show up to that point? It’s one of the emotional cruxes of the whole series, but what has happened to believability? Is it important at this point? And could such an audacious effect have been achieved without spending a lot of time watching robots doing push-ups earlier on? I doubt it.
Or take Shinji’s alternate reality in the final episode of Evangelion. It’s arguably the most powerful scene in the whole series, it works on about four or five levels at once. But it wouldn’t have had a hundredth of its power without a preceding thirteen episodes frontloaded at the start of the series that were literally littered with silliness.
I guess the distinction that I’m trying to make is that a lot of my favourite anime doesn’t try to make you believe, it tries to disorient you. It tries to undermine your usual critical faculties by whatever means necessary, to work a change in the viewer in which they become accustomed to a very different take on what is acceptable and believable. In this respect I don’t think FLCL is that different to most other anime, it’s just more of the same only more extreme.
A lot of anime seems to belong in spirit to a different strand of television, much more akin to The Avengers, Dr Who, The Prisoner or the original Star Trek. If these seem high benchmarks then by way of explanation, I tend to do a lot of research into a show before I’ll watch it. I’ll avoid spoilers if possible, of course. As a result I rarely watch any that I don’t like. I’ve certainly seen a lot of rubbish, but most of it dates back to when it first started getting major releases in England and I’ve seen very little that I haven’t enjoyed in recent years. |
