Anime (Science Fiction): Last Exile [SPOILERS]

Some spoiler comments on character fates in Last Exile. See comment #1. Read more!

Anime (Science Fiction): Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

One of the frustrating thing about collecting anime is the habit publishers have of releasing the first volume or two on DVD, then re-releasing the first volume with a fancy box (and maybe a soundtrack CD) to hold the set. I already have the first volume -- I can't justify re-buying it just to have a box! For not-quite-entirely compulsive collectors, it's a pain.

Manga Video did something smarter with the TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: they released the box with the last volume of the set. Much nicer! And it's a lovely metal box with a t-shirt and everything. Great geek value.

Ghost in the Shell is best known in North America as a 1995 film by Oshii Mamoru, though it started as a manga (comic book) by Shirow Masamune. The film has a lot in common with Ridley Scott's Blad Runner, dealing with the question of just what makes an individual human, and whether artificial life forms qualify. The "ghost" in the title is essence of sentience that makes a human human -- more "mind" than "soul". The term was taken from Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine. The main character in Ghost in the Shell is a cyborg, Major Kusanagi, is a cyborg, a human mind transplanted into a prosthetic body (the shell, of course).

A couple of years ago a sequel movie, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence came out (which I haven't watched yet) as well as a new TV series, Stand Alone Complex.

I'd only collected volumes 1 & 3 of Stand Alone Complex up to now, and hadn't watched any of them, but with the release of the final volume box, I figured I'd start filling in the set. And since I was home sick, I figured I'd catch up a little. Yesterday I got through volume 1 (the first four episodes).

Ghost in the Shell pits Major Kusanagi and her security organization, Section 9, against a hacker named "The Puppet Master", who provides many opportunities for Kusanagi to ponder the meaning of sentience and so on. Translated to TV, Stand Alone Complex adopts a form that has been seen several times before, in shows like Dominion Tank Police or Patlabor: a casebook from a special police force that deals with out-of-control robots. (Again, very Blade Runner). So far, though, it has not lost its philosophical bent, and has added in some nice speculation about how the existence of things like prosthetic bodies and swapable brains could affect society, religion, and so on.

My favourite example -- or, at least, the most amusing example -- of how they work philosophy into the show comes after the credits. Section 9 uses spider-like AI tanks called Tachikoma. In order to make the Tachikoma more flexible and adaptable, Section 9 has removed a number of the controls and contraints on the AIs; as a result, the Tachikoma have very child-like personalities which (I'm guessing) are going to develop and differentiate over the course of the show.

At the end of every show there is a short whimsical cartoon called "Tachikoma Day", in which the Tachikoma argue about things and stuff. This isn't that uncommon in anime -- little slapstick toons featuring chibi ("cute") versions of the main characters are often attached to TV episodes. What struck me about the "Tachikoma Day" toons was how, in the first two, the little tanks spent the cartoons arguing about the function of language as a means of communication in a culture which allows the direct exchange of data from mind to mind. In the second cartoon, the lead Tachikoma argues that the benefit of language and wo5rds over direct data exchange is not in mere communication, but the self-programming nature of language which allows it to adapt to situations beyond the communication protocols it was established for.

I love that sort of stuff. Read more!

Anime (Science Fiction): Last Exile

When we moved into our current place, we found a nice nitch to put the treadmill in, and got ourselves an LCD TV / monitor and stuck it on a wall mount in front of the thing. Combine that setup with DVDs of TV and anime series and you have a pretty nice workout setup.

Of course, we aren't very good about using it; we barely used it at all over the summer, but we're getting back at it. And, as it happened, the final DVD of a series I'd been collecting a while back finally came out: the last three episodes of Last Exile.

Last Exile caught my attention in trailers because of the style (as often happens with anime series), but held up pretty nicely on substance as well. It tells the story of battles between three power groups on an artificial world: Anatoray, Disith, and the Guild (the Guild controls all advanced technology) and their attempts to control some mysterious thing called "Exile". The bulk of the story is told (as is almost inevitable in anime) from the point of view of two teenage kids, Claus (a Vanship pilot) and Lavie (his friend and navigator).

The bulk of the story takes place in the air -- Vanships are sort of levitating WWII-flavour airplanes; Anatoray and Disith also have massive fleets of levitating airships, powered by engines lent them by the Guild.

The influence of one of my favourite film makers, Miyasaki Hayao, is quite obvious in the flight sequences. Claus & Lavie's home town looks almost identical to the mining town in Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Unlike Miyasaki, Last Exile uses computer graphics extensively to render the vanships and airships, and does an excellent job of blending the computer rendering with the characters' cell animation (something many animated series that mix the two don't do very well at all).

I won't go over the whole story, but I do have a few comments on the finale...

Traditionally, one of the things North American anime fans will tell you they appreciate about the storytelling in Japanese animation is that the writers are not afraid of doing nasty things to characters you like. In North American animation, you might get one token sacrifice character for the big dramatic death scene that inspires the hero to finish his quest (and you can usually tell who it'll be early on), but in anime things aren't so predictable. Of course, this may just be because North American fans aren't as familiar with the formulas used in Japanese storytelling.

Last Exile, in the last several episodes, kills off a few characters the audience has become fond of -- I won't go into details, so as not to spoil things. But I will mention that it was a shock to see a favourite character not only killed off, but killed off in such a way that no-one else even knew it happened -- a stupid, pointless death. Which was probably the point, really: stupid, pointless deaths happen in wars.

The biggest problem with the finale, once you're over losing favourite characters, is the timing. This is a common problem with anime, which often runs long storylines over 26 episodes (in contrast to North American animated TV, which requires that each episode be self-contained). The big wrap-up has to happen in the last 20 minutes of an 8.5-hour series. In fact, in Last Exile, the revelation of what Exile is happens halfway through the last episode! With the entire resolution crammed into the last 10, it's rather hard to figure out what's happening. It was only on reading some of the liner notes and some web pages that I caught some of what was going on, for which either I'd missed the set-up, or the set-up just hadn't been there.

Still, that's not that major a problem overall; a series that's good 8.25 hours out of 8.5 is nothing to complain about! Read more!