Madmind

Gage recently added a comment to my review of Akira (the one anime that made anime famous as anime in the West) and this one made me think. He mainly writes about Kaori who is the girlfriend of Tetsuo i.e. the Guy Who Goes Horribly Nuts. Gage not only correctly points out that Kaori is only on screen in two scenes in Akira but also that in each segment Kaori is in a living hell and no one seems to care. I addressed his second point in a comment of mine in the original post, so I will use this space to address the first point: the role of Kaori in Akira since her two moments seem to be not that important at all.

Before I start please note that you need to have watched Akira at least once to understand what I’m writing about. If you didn’t, you can gladly skip this blog post if you like.

Synopsis

In a post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo a member of a biker gang is turned into a psychokinetic that runs amok in the search of ‘Akira’.

Key Data

1988: Year
Katsuhiro Otomo: Director
Katsuhiro Otomo: Writer
$60M: Box Office

Madmind Synopsis

Some idiots forget the off-switch while turning an even bigger idiot into a walking weapon.

Akira is the anti-thesis to Disney in any way you can think of.

In other words: you can take almost anything except animation and the negative version is Akira. Where Disney is easy to understand, Akira is hard to understand. Where Disney is fluffy, Akira is hard as a brick. Where Disney animates people as if they are bad over-acting actors, Akira is about realistic animation. Where Disney is “for children”, Akira is for adults etc etc pp ad nauseam, I think you get the picture.

I really can understand that Akira, at the time of its release in 1988, blew the mind of western audiences.

Basically this is also the reason you have to watch Akira, even if you don’t like anime or animation. Even with all its flaws Akira is not called a landmark animation, even a classic, for no reason.

She snaps…she literally snaps…

Thank god for YouTube’s recommendations because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have found this extremely funny scene  from the anime Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei (Farewell, Mr. Despair).

As the title suggests, the series is about a teacher who often is trying to kill himself (or on the verge of being absolutely in despair) and his group of eccentric female students.

She snaps…she literally snaps…

Now, if you wonder how eccentric they are: this scene shows you what happens when someone who is extremely fixated to do everything perfectly prepares to cut a cake when people start flooding in.

The solution of this problem is as simple as hilarious:

You know, I don’t want so much from life. There are only some things I wish for – a good  and entertaining movie is such a thing. Hence I love each and every movie that just gets this one thing right that entertains me, makes me laugh or wonder. As I recently had again to learn with Avatar this is rare nowadays. But it’s not impossible. Because where Avatar failed so miserably Tokyo Godfathers succeeded.

Tokyo Godfathers blasts Avatar to atomic dust to with its funny and lovable characters, with its simple yet engaging story. Even more: it does it so well I even don’t care about the deus ex machinas and some other small problems it has.

Take the average internet geek and you get something like this: Stupidity + Coolness – Money.

It’s hilarious that Moondrive – a short movie of the anime anthology Genius Party Beyond – accidentally exploits just this prototype to tell its hilarious story which follows a bunch of bankrupt thieves on their hunt for a treasure. Nevertheless I can safely state that Moondrive is one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time. This includes movies, by the way. It has tons of cool moments, interesting characters and style wherever you look. Admitted, the characters turn out to be a little bit flat but since this is a short movie that completely goes for “style” I can accept that. If you haven’t seen Moondrive or Genius Party Beyond, do it now. It’s only about twenty minutes long so you cannot say you ruined too much of your life afterwards.

So, and now let’s take a closer look at the best moments of Moondrive with an absolute disregard of spoilers (therefore the red flag on the left side of the title if you’re on this site and not using feed reader. This post was the reason I implemented all this technical AJAX stuff).