The Cutprice Guignol

Look, I know I’m late to the anime game. My only knowledge of the genre came, for a long time, entirely from the hilarious and incisive parody series Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged which I’m in the midst of rewatching and killing myself over. Then I stole all of the Death Note manga from my brother (Sorry Dan) and found myself pretty entranced by the ridiculous high-concept sci-fi/fantasy battle between good and righteous evil. I sought out the anime, and it was those fantastically well-executed episodes that brought me to see what the anime genre had to offer. As someone who’s been obsessed with TV for so long, and Western TV specifically, it’s kind of refreshing to come to a genre where you have to idea what the tropes are or what you’re expectations will be. I’m sure many hardcore anime fans will dismiss my mainstream picks, and if they do, please go write your own damn list. No, seriously, do, because I want to read it and find more awesome anime to watch. So, without further ado, let’s talk about the three best anime I’ve seen so far, and why you should watch them whether or not you’re an anime fan already.

1. Neon Genesis Evangelion

Phew, where to begin with this one? I’ve touched on the topic of this show before, in a post about madness of TV, and I think that still pretty much sums up why I find this show so interesting: it’s just an all-out exploration of mental health disasters, told through the lens of giant robots fighting aliens. Set in a post-apocolyptic Tokyo where mysterious beings known as “Angels” launched periodic attacks on the city, the story revolves around fourteen-year-old Shinji, who’s brought in to defence organisation NERV to pilot one of their prototype weapons, a giant robot known as an Eva. What starts out as a beautifully animated if slightly off-beat sci-fi epic soon descends into outrageously perceptive journeys through each character’s psyche and how it’s been impacted by the horror of the situation they’re facing. I love it particularly for the excellent female characters, but also for it’s utter insistence to make the audience shift in their seat at least four times an episode, with rapid-fire changes of tone and suddenly stark animation.

Oh, you came for the giant fighting robots? BAD LUCK MOTHERFUCKER

The story behind the show’s creation-which included a massive cut in budget that forced the animators to use mostly still frames and prototype sketches in the last few episodes-gives a lot to it’s distinctive animation design, but be warned: you will need a cup of tea and a lie down after the opening credits alone.

What happened at 0:55? Did someone fall on a button or something?

2. Attack on Titan

I’ve watched this anime three times through in the last two months, as well as foisting it on my friends and assorted family. This could have been created for me: an alternate-history sci-fi (Yes!) surrounding the last dregs of humanity walled off from the world in a giant enclosure meant to protect them from attacks by the man-eating Titans. While things have been quiet for a while, when the Titans launch another attack on the city, the population must fight back, and the story follows three teenagers as they train up to take on the Titans and regain some of the autonomy they lost. The visual style, of the medieval-style city matched with super-futuristic weaponry, is genuinely mind-blowing, and marks out the action sequences as some of the most exhilarating and breathless moments I’ve ever seen in any medium. It’s dense with plot, intrigue, and layered characters, and also the only character from a cartoon I’ve ever had a crush on:

Look, he has a really deep voice in the sub, so ignore the fact that he looks like a fourteen-year-old.

And you know how much I love genuinely scary villains? Well, the Titans are some of the most utterly creepy, unstoppably scary bad guys I’ve seen anywhere. Sometimes, you can keep your nuanced ghost stories and intricrate psychological thrillers- all I need to scare me is a giant, unstoppable creature with an inexplicable lust for human flesh. Look, here comes one now!

I can’t be the only one who gets the heebie-jeebies watching this, right?

3. Psycho-Pass

Maybe I’ve not made it clear that I love sci-fi, but I LOVE sci-fi. My first introduction to it was a book of short stories by Philip K. Dick, and this anime is a love letter to his take on the genre- dark, gritty, thoughtful, and not afraid of being a little tongue-in-cheek. In a dystopian future, justice is not based on whether you’ve committed any crimes, but how high your propensity is to commit them. If you’re psychological state is deemed dangerous, you’re in trouble. Some of these people deemed psychologically unstable become Enforcers, recruited to police teams to help think like the unstable people they’re trying to catch. The story follows new recruit Inspector Akane, and her dealings with the suffocating system, as a mysterious villain starts influencing normal citizens to commit horrific acts of violence.

I can’t stress this enough: this guy is one of my favourite villains in recent history. So fiendish! So pretentious! So evil!

They say most good stories should be summed up a few words, but this one leisures in adding layers and layers to it’s universe. A neo-noir police procedural, it takes some cues from the superb Hannibal, with brooding Enforcer Kogami tussling mentally with arch-nemesis, the master criminal Nakashima. It’s one of those shows that delights in pushing boundaries, testing just how far they can go with their big themes- the price of safety, the meaning of justice, and the danger of an isolationist system- without letting their nuanced ensemble get lost in the mix. I love the sharp, slightly cynical sense of absurdity Psycho-Pass displays, because it reminds me of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, with all it’s sugar-coated horribleness (if you haven’t seen that movie, by the way, stop reading this, and watch it now). It paints in broad strokes, but it manages to conjure up some impressive character arcs despite the fact that most of it’s brutalized women somehow end up with their boobs out (whoops).

Inspector Akane and her arc are an example of how the best thought-out character arcs can reflect the central themes of a story. AND they didn’t even have to make her someone’s love interest to justify her existence on the show!

So, that’s my list- what’s your’s? What anime should I watch next?

I’m going to go ahead and stick a trigger warning here for discussion of domestic abuse.

You know Sean Penn, right? That guy who beat the ever-living shit out of his wife, was charged with domestic assualt, and then got an Oscar? Maybe Roman Polanski is more familiar to you, as the guy who took a plea bargain back in 1977 that laid out his unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old child? We gave him an Oscar, too, and a Palme D’or, even after he fled the USA to avoid be imprisoned for his crimes. Ozzy Osbourne was happy chatting to an interviewer about the time he was arrested for trying to murder his wife, Sharon, but he’s still just that wacky rocker guy to most. Charlie Sheen, sitcom star and internet meme, was charged with third-degree assault on his then-wife, Brooke Mueller, but we remember him for his Emmy-winning turn in Two and a Half Men. Chris Brown continues to see his songs chart, even as the harrowing pictures of his one-time girlfriend Rihanna crop up online, depicting her black and blue face after he assaulted her. This are my cut-offs. These are the things that I will not support someone after hearing. You might have different standards, but it’s always good to remind ourselves that the people the media idolizes for us aren’t always worth idolizing.

I’m talking about the misogyny and general nasty undercurrent in our media that allows us and encourages us to embrace these men to our screens. We, as a culture, have found a way to forget the violence many of our treasured cultural icons have committed against people, especially women. We hold our desire to be entertained above the right of the people they abused not to see their attackers idolized. And it’s not about justice, it’s about the fact that, time and time again, we’re happy to ignore the flagrant ways celebrities abuse their power, to hire them, to watch them, to promote them, even to go as far as holding them up as humanitarian icons. I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel a little gross. Either our cultural memory is that short, or we’re simply willing to hold the notion that Sean Penn once left Madonna tied to a chair after roughing her up for hours on end so that he could go out and buy more booze and that we still want to see his movies in our heads at the same time. I’m not sure which is worse: the fact that we might just have collectively forgotten, or that we remember and it just doesn’t register high enough on our “things that matter” list to stop us wanting to see his mannered, average performances.

And look, I’m not saying that it’s pleasant, having to think about what and who you’re supporting when you just want to watch half an hour of television or a couple of hours in the cinema. But that’s the problem- it’s easier for the media to stamp down on these issues, to try and blot them from our cultural memory, than it is to question why it’s okay to hand a self-confessed sex offender who never saw a day of prison one of the highest cinematic trophies in the world. We prefer to remember Sean Connery as James Bond, not as that guy who said that hitting a woman was fine if she was “being a bitch”, because it’s easier not to muddy the waters of our one-dimensional vision of him with the fact that he’s a piece of shit.

And I know it’s a shitty, awful, saddening, infuriating thing to think about, but we have to consider who we’re supporting when we choose what to see and who to spend our money on. I think it’s up to you to decide who you want to support, because we all have different cut-offs for what constitutes unforgivable behaviour, but also to try and wade through the media’s effort to negate the bad things that their highest-grossing celebrities have done. We’re taught to consume our media mindlessly, but only by questioning what and who we lend our time and money to will we weed out those who are abusing the power we’re giving them, and encouraging us to forget their unpleasant histories.

You can’t work in the media these days without being tripped up by people making, protesting against, or apologising for offensive jokes. Whether it’s Frankie Boyle joking about how lucky the late Jade Goody’s husband was now that she had passed, to Jimmy Carr saying that he blamed Reeva Steenkamp for her own shooting, to Rickey Gervais suggesting that an overweight woman walking down the street eating chips should be sterilised. It’s comedy’s business to make the unthinkable thinkable and to tackle subjects that we might feel uncomfortable about tackling in our day-to-day lives. And I get that. I don’t think comedians and other entertainers should be forced to stop making jokes that offend people, because then all we’re left with is the kind of half-hearted comedic mush that doesn’t offend anyone, but doesn’t entertain anyone either.

But what really irks me about offensive humour is how protective people are about it. Let’s take, for example, the big shitstorm that surrounded comedian Daniel Tosh a couple of years back. After a woman in the audience protested his take on rape jokes always being hilarious, he replied with ” “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like, right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…”. He apologised, but the incident turned out to be the comedy’s Helen of Troy, the comment that launched a thousand thinkpieces. There were people defending his right to make rape jokes, there were people arguing that the gang-rape of a random woman was not fair game to joke about, but there were also a lot of people screaming into the void on social media and other platforms: “Get over yourself. Get a sense of humour. Loosen up. Stop being so uptight/feminist/sensitive.” These comments were coming from comedy fans and comedians alike, and those are the people I want to address.

Look, I love comedy. Who doesn’t? I watch a lot of it on television, and I watch a lot of stand-up .I think a big part of the problem that comes with making offensive jokes is that people forget the point of near-the-knuckle humour. And therein lies the rub: often, when I don’t find an offensive joke funny, it’s because I just don’t think it’s funny. It’s not because I’m too busy rushing for the smelling salts to eke out a grin, it’s because simply having someone yell an inane statement about a touchy topic in my face doesn’t make me laugh. People who defend these kind of comments seem to forget that it’s the comedian’s job to make me laugh, not my job to find them funny.

Take the best rape joke in the world, told by Louis CK: “I’m not condoning rape, obviously. You should never rape anyone. Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” This is a joke that actually has some thought behind it; by presenting the unbelievably stupid and simplistic reasoning behind the act of rape, he’s making the rapist look like an idiot. He’s doing more than pointing at someone and shouting “HAHA YOU SHOULD BE RAPED!” (interestingly, CK tweeted his support to Daniel Tosh during the furore, so make of that what you will). That’s what makes it funny. I’m not saying that everyone in the world should fall in line with my sense of humour, just that writing off our ability to laugh because we don’t think the very concept of gang-rape (or whatever “edgy” topic the comedian has taken on in this  week’s controversy) is hilarious.

Because a lot of people seem to think that the offensive topic itself is what makes the humour intelligent. I’ve written before about Family Guy and it’s complete failure to say anything new about controversial topics, even as it visibly pats itself on the back for addressing them. Identifying a touchy topic and immediately adopting the stance that is least socially acceptable for it’s target audience is pretty shallow humour, as it rarely says anything about the topic at hand.

Really, what I’m saying is this: if you’re keen to go down the offensive humour route, try and actually say something. Because when comedians blurt out something akin to the comment Daniel Tosh made, they’re often not being half as edgy as they think they are. You can find them all over your screens: Family Guy having a character throw up for thirty seconds straight after he realizes that he’s been in contact with a transgender woman, or Trevor Noah tweeting about how fat women are grateful for the weekend because then people will get drunk enough to find them attractive, or Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner laughing about how Black Widow is a slut. These kinds of jokes, and hundreds like them, the kind that skewer people who society has done a really good job of skewering already, aren’t so much pushing boundaries as they are falling in with the party line. Now, I’m not saying that means they shouldn’t be allowed to exist, or that no-one should find them funny, but rather the people who crack these kind of jokes shouldn’t be held up as pantheons of forward-thinking, ground-breaking comedy, when they’re doing nothing that dares undermine the status quo.

And that’s where the problem with offensive comedy lies, at least for me. It provides a safety blanket for comedians and entertainers who are too belleigerent or arrogant or whatever else to accept that maybe, just maybe, their audience does get the joke, but it’s just not that funny.

So, with Comic-Con taking place over this weekend, I’ll be putting up a few trailer reviews for the teasers that tantalise me the most. Let’s kick things off with a look at Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, whose latest trailer was released today. You can read my impressively underwhelmed reaction to the last trailer here.

0:01: This is three minutes forty seconds long? What will there be left to show in the cinema?

0:15: “Oh, so I’m heading out to a protest about how I’m an abomination? BETTER WEAR THE FULL SUPERMAN OUTFIT, DON’T WANT ME SLIPPING BY UNNOTICED”.

0:21: That cape is not suitable court attire. I should know. Don’t ask how.

0:26: BRUCEFLECFK!

0:31: He looks pretty cool, but I will defend Christian Bale’s louche charm as Bruce Wayne to the death. He might not have been the best Batman, but he was the best iteration of his alter-ego.

0:40: Running dramatically into dust! Hugging children! This really is a Ben Alfeck Batman, isn’t it?

1:00: He just doesn’t look right. I’m willing to be disproven about this when I’m strongarmed into watching this movie, but he looks like an aloof dad that I would have had a crush on in high school.

1:10: I love it when a trailer tries to stylistically interesting and just renders every shot too dark to watch. I LOVE IT.

1:16: YUS LARRY FISHBURNE! If you haven’t been watching him in Hannibal, you should have been watching him in Hannibal. Unf, his voice is what salted caramel desserts would sound like if they could talk.

1:17: I don’t like the fact that I’d consider paying to see this movie just to look at Henry Cavill for a couple of hours either, but here we are.

1:29: Every time Superman appears onscreen in full garb, my mind wanders away to wondering when someone’s going to adapt Red Sun as an awesome TV miniseries. I would never stop watching that.

1:36: I think whenever Henry Cavill leaves the house, he’s surrounding by people trying to touch him, just like in this shot.

1:50: Fuck tho, Jesse Eisenberg looks amazing. He’s absolutely one of my favourite actors around at the moment, and I can’t wait to see him play a bad guy. Note: Go watch The Double, starring Jesse Eisenberg(s), because you like to use words like “dynamic” and “stylised” to describe movies the same way I do.

2:02: That’s a Joker reference, and I will be purchasing out an entire cinema just to fully appreciate that moment on the big screen.

2:13: It would be hilarious if someone recut this with the Adam West Batman in place of Batfleck. I’m not saying you should spend all of tomorrow doing it when you should be working; I’m just saying.

2:33: GUNS! SCREAMING CHILDREN! COFFINS! FIRE! DID ZACK SNYDER MENTION HE’S AVAILABLE FOR WORK?

2:37: If you squint, you can make out the moment everyone remembered that Wonder Woman was in this movie. Wonder Woman in a Xena cosplay, that is.

2:44: No-one will admit that the outfits look hilariously silly against the serious backdrop, but we all know somewhere in our hearts that it’s true.

2:51: Jesse Eisenberg has young Heath Ledger hair, and you do not want to remind me of The Dark Knight, Snyder. You’re on a knife edge.

3:02: All of that was good because Jesse Eisenberg, and my distraction over wondering if metal-plated underwear would rust.

3:08: Jesse Eisenberg looks SO GOOD, but then I did see Man of Steel. Fool me once, DC. Fool me once.

3:25: OMG THE LOGO IS SUPERMAN’S S INSIDE THE BAT SYMBOL IT’S A METAPHOR YOU GUYS BATMAN EATS HIM INB4