Anime

You should watch this movie, I think. It's pretty interesting in ways I didn't expect it to be, but I don't know if I'll watch it again. 7.5/10.

I'm going to take this time to share three little vignettes from this movie and share what they made me think about and how they made me feel. I want to do this because it's parts are better than the sum of them, I think, but without the sum of them the parts are lacking context.

Vignette 1: An aircraft carrier and also "wait, how much do they make?"

This movie opens on a Top Gun. I'm kidding, but even still the movie opens on this absolutely cool-as-hell military tech fetishistic aircraft carrier plane takeoff. Right away we can tell we're in some sort of kinda analogous-ish alternate reality mid-century of sorts. It's not our timeline but it's not entirely foreign. I'm a big mecha lover who thinks the minutes-long reveal of the Enterprise in the first Star Trek movie is one of the best sci-fi scenes ever so this is all immediately up my alley. And after a bit we meet our main guy, Shirotsugh. Our fella is a pretty sad guy, and not just because he's sad but because he's in the loser branch of the military--the Space Force (that our modern Space Force is also a joke is pretty funny).

What immediately stands out as we begin to seep into the world of the movie though is how...precarious everything feels. There's an almost palpable sense of unease--and we get this revealed to us in small ways, like the fact that everyone keeps telling Shirotsugh that he should be lucky he has a job at all, or that his salary is tossed at his feet and we see he makes more money than most of the regular poor folk in town could even imagine.

Just dropped at his feet.

I was technically alive during the cold war. I was born in 1987 so the only world I was making memories in was the Pax Americana one, but as the world of this film revealed itself to me, it did it all so beautifully that I could almost sense what it all must have felt like, especially outside of the US. War and collapse was in the air the way you can smell a thunderstorm coming. How could I smell it myself?

Because things feel that way now. I get a paycheck for doing some computer touching in a tech job. It doesn't get thrown at my feet and gawked at by people watching me from behind a fence, but it's not too far off. Maybe the reason I can smell collapse in the air in this movie is because the creators sensed their impending collapse (the asset bubble was nearing its pop in Japan) as they made it, and maybe I can sense it in my own reality now, in the spring of 2025.

Vignette 2: Why does he do that?

Shirotsugh assaults the woman he falls in with. It's a genuinely startling scene near the end. He's spent the better part of the movie in this combination of falling in love, wanting to have sex with and being inspired by this woman but every time he's pressed on the sex thing, she's rebuffed him. So he assaults her and she hits him and then tells him he's done nothing wrong.

Viewed through the eyes of our gal here--it's maybe an indictment of both me and the movie that I don't remember her name, but for what it's worth I don't remember anyone but Shirotsugh's name's--the world of this movie--the world she inhabits--is a sinful one. Her entire worldview is structured around what passes for the Bible/Christianity in this setting. She's a street preacher, a millenarianist who thinks that the sinful world is in need of cleansing. And Shirotsugh becomes inspired by her. Her hatred and disgust for what the world has become, which originated when her familial town was dispossessed and her sister killed, begins to spread into Shirotsugh and his mini-conversion is what propels him to want to commit fully to being an astronaut and getting into space.

And also getting into her pants, it would seem.

When the assault comes he's about to leave and he hasn't sealed the deal. He's learned that his spaceship is being used as a bait and no one actually believes in the mission anymore, except him and a small cadre of true believers. And this woman in front of him. So he assaults her.

She slaps him and then tells him he's done nothing wrong. The world is sinful and awful. Go blast off in your rocketship, nevermind that they cut of our electricity because I don't have any money. Never mind this starving child, go off into space.

Vignette 2: I cried

Our guy gets into space in what is now one of my favorite sequences in a movie--I think about this sequence regularly since I watched it. The closing action of the movie is that the ship launch point is changed to be in an active war zone. Shirotsugh's government move it there because they know their enemy won't be able to resist invading to steal the rocket. And that's exactly what happens.

But the launch crew persist, and they get the rocket launching. All of the fighting stops and even the fighter jets circling one another in the air stop and gawk at this machine hurtling through the sky.

Shirotsugh has broken free from this sinful earth. As he breaks the atmosphere and begins to orbit, he broadcasts on a radio message that he thinks no one is listening to. After all, who, down on that sinful world wants to hear a message from the heavens?

But what's being sent in his broadcast isn't just a message, it's a plea. Having now become the first human in space, Shirotsugh knows more will follow, and with them will come more sin.

He begs of those listening, or short of that, he begs of God:

"As it becomes a familiar place for us, it'll probably end up as bad as everywhere else we've meddled. We've spoiled the land, We've fouled the air. Yet we still seek new places to live, and so now we journey out to space. There's probably no limit to how far we can spread. Please. Whoever is listening to me. How you do it doesn't matter, just please; give some thanks to man's arrival here."

By this point I was bawling and watching through tears. Shirotsugh is desperate to be heard, desperate to have his prayer answered. How many of us, in this moment in our own history, have begged to be heard?

We're in an absolutely awful mess in our current time, and somehow I feel like this movie understands that. It's the story of a man who decides to go to space to demonstrate we're capable of doing something good. Because we are capable of those things. I know we are. I hope we are.

He ends his prayer like this, which also ends the movie, and which is my own prayer for this moment:

"Please, show us mercy and forgive us. Don't let the way ahead be one of darkness. As we stumble down the path of our sinful history, let there be always one shining star to show the way."

My wife and I finished the first "season" (half season?) of the Ranma remake alongside the new Star War (Skeleton Crew) like a month ago, and as part of my resolution to log and reflect on all of the art I watch/read/play this year, I had writing about them as a to-do for some time, but have felt really stymied by the sort of "blank piece of paper paralysis". But as I sit here now, forcing myself to write about them, what I'm really stuck with is that I didn't emotionally react really *all that much*.

And that's fine, of course! But, I think it's kinda interesting. For example, like with, say, Yu-No or Re:Cutie Honey or other things I've been really, really struck by lately I have tended to feel almost *compelled* to write; the words have come really really quickly and really really easily. But, when it's come to things that I found myself really not liking all that much or just being a bit "meh" about, I fired off a quick thing on Letterboxd or whatever and called it that.

With Ranma and Skeleton Crew, they've sat in this sort of interesting mind queue of sorts where I felt more than meh--a LOT more, in fact--but less than absolute love, and that's a middle ground I'm finding myself really challenged to write about. I think it's also that both of these mEdIa PrOpErTiEs hold real meaning to me: one is an anime series whose original show I watched as a kid through bootleg swap-meet fansubs and the other is stinkin' STAR WARS--and whether it's gauche to say in TYOOL 2025 or not, I love Star Wars.

So I'm left to ponder: have I been finding it hard to write about these two because I didn't feel very much that made me compelled to write in the first place, or is it because some part of me feels like I "owe" these shows some sort of deeper level of capital-c-Criticism writing/reflection? Maybe a bit of both? Lacking any sort of broad throughline, I'll just sort of stream-of-consciousness my thoughts of each as they occur to me now and we'll call it good.

Skeleton Crew: I expected to really dislike this, I'll admit. I don't think I'm alone in that. I don't dislike the brief, exactly--I loved Stranger Things despite being too young (1987 birth) to really feel all that strongly for kids-on-bikes style stuff--but I've never seen The Goonies for instance and I tend to not really trust post-Disney Star Warses very much. But this show had the juice! It was really, really nice that Jude Law wasn't phoning it in, and I do love me some robots, and I loved the pirate ship robot. "I don't know anything about no At-Attin" has become a sort of inside-joke catchphrase between my wife and I, and a stuffy of ours we love very much (who is a cute little bear named Patches and who "watched the show with us" and who we built a pirate ship for and no I will not be taking any questions) loves to quote that line as well. I was charmed! I dug it.

Ranma: In my sort of platonic ideal minds-eye, the Ranma remake looks how anime """"should"""" look. My formative animes were all of the sorts of shows/OAVs/movies that formed the bedrock of the anime con viewing rooms throughout the 90s and very early 2000s, and this show looks to those shows what Shovel Knight looks like to NES games. It looks how my memory of 80s OAVs looks, and I adore it for that. I also just think it's charming and cute and funny and I just really had a lovely time with it.

So there you have it, I can check off those to-dos in my journal now at last. Cheers.

Growing up is a really fascinating process. Try telling a 15 year old that there are foundational, fundamental things that they can't grasp about the world and the response you'll get will very likely be incredibly strong pushback. I was the sort of teenager you couldn't tell anything to; I had everything figured out. When I read old Livejournal posts from high school, what I'm most struck by is the certainty. I expressed essentially zero doubt that I would ever change, or that my viewpoints would ever evolve, or that the world had anything left to show me. And I think, in some small part, that kind of certainty and purity of purpose has its own virtue, but it's humbling reading those same Livejournal posts and seeing not only how wrong I was but how much I've grown.

But also, in the same surprising way, how similar my 16 year old self still is to me now 20 years later.

Part of that maturation and growth becomes most noticeable when one looks back at their thoughts and experiences with media as a teenager compared to their experiences with that same thing as an adult. While there's tons and tons of things that still form foundational parts of me that I loved then that I still love now, the way those things make me feel and the way I think about those things are often radically different!

An archetypal example that also applies to me exactly is how, as a 14 year old watching Evangelion for the first time and being wildly, over-the-top frustrated with the characters. When the main characters are your peers, you identify with them differently—you see yourself in a more direct way, and with less worldly experience and less wisdom, growth and age, you miss the horror and the suffering. As an adult, I think most viewers would recognize the plight and empathize with being forced to do the things those particular characters are forced to endure. With age and experience comes a different set of lenses to view the world, and that changes the whole thing.

I watched Gunbuster as a young teenager as well and I'm mildly disappointed with myself at how little of it stuck with me. There's an old Gundam-related meme with the RX-78 shooting a gun over someone's head with the text "war is bad" while the person says "wow! Cool robot!" It's perfect, A+, no notes. My remembrances of the first time I watched Gunbuster are mostly of the "wow! Cool robot!" variety: the incredible mechanical designs (I could watch the capital ship laser gunports open over and over again), the awe-inspiring power of and scale of the mecha and combat, the perfect Itano circuses.

When I started rewatching a couple weeks ago, I was a little shocked and embarrassed at how little I remembered, except from the mechanicals, which is even more surprising because this show is immediately memorable!

The overwhelming presence looming over Gunbuster (and Gainax, for that matter) is Hideaki Anno, and it needs be known that the man's output are amongst some of my favorite shows—and what he explores throughout a lot of his shows is explored in the same way here in Gunbuster. Chiefly: the weaponisation and exploitation of youth (including youth sexuality and naïveté). As an aside, it needs to be noted of course that Anno/Gainax were far from the only ones exploring Japan and it's youth—I know for a fact that actual literal academics and academics of Japanese art/literature have written extensively on the war/post-war and its relationship with especially teenagers, and especially during eras that were really formative for creators/mangaka who came of age in the 60s/70s—of special note being the student protests and whatnot.

But I digress!

I went a long, long way to say that I love how a show that ends with perhaps one of the most powerful (Non-Gurren-Lagann) mecha I've ever seen in a show begins with an episode that is more or less just High School sports hijinks. It makes sense how firmly tongue-in-cheek the 'Aim for the Top' is as a name when the first episode sure reads like we're gonna get Oka (from 'Aim for the Ace') out into space.

From that point on, we journey into space as humanity wage a horrid war against space monsters. We get bits of Eva-style body horror (who doesn't think for a second that it's actually a space monster inside the Gunbuster? In fact, one of my favorite things about the sequel to Gunbuster is how it makes everything subtextual into text—including 'Gunbusters are alive'), we get highly truncated romance as a way to teach our heroine that war brings real, actual death with it, and we also get one of the other core ideas of Gunbuster, which is how war separates soldiers from those at home—in this case demonstrated by literally arresting the development of those in space because of relativistic faster-than-light travel.

Watching Gunbuster as a teenager, I remember thinking it was pretty cool. Watching Gunbuster as an adult I recognized I was watching a stone cold classic. Gunbuster has a well-deserved reputation as the mother of a certain type of mecha show and viewpoint, and it's essentially required viewing for anyone who has a love of anime of any kind.

I was a literature major in undergrad, and as I'm sure most literature majors in undergrad also thought, I reckoned I was going to be A Writer. Note that's capital-A capital-W Writer. I was going to tick all the boxes: suffering and wretched personal relationships (so as to experience quote-unquote "real" emotions), moving to Berlin, chain smoking Lucky Strikes (or cloves—Djarum Black was my choice). My problem—apart from talent that is—is that I didn't read. I'm being a little facetious when I say that; of course I read, but what I mean more broadly is that I didn't engage with literature in a meaningful and thoughtful way. I was arrogant and assumed I couldn't learn anything from other art, and so I struggled to find my voice. I thought I knew everything.

As a full-on adult all of these years later I'm embarrassed at my undergraduate self, and I wish I had opened my brain to the things I've loved back then in the way I do now. All of this is to say that I know nothing, and in surrendering to that knowing nothing I can learn even more.

Re: Cutie Honey is the sort of work that is so layered with influences and pop culture—a pop culture different from the one I was born into and raised within—before you even get into the original Cutie Honey it's drawing from. The context from which I arrived at Re: Cutie Honey was from a Hideaki Anno / Gainax kick. Honestly, it would be more accurate to say it's a Gunbuster kick.

This is all started about a month ago when I revisited Gunbuster for the first time since my teenage years and found myself absolutely mesmerized. That lead me to Diebuster—of which this very review is also a kind of stealth review—and then to Aim for the Ace! and then to Shin Kamen Rider and Shin Ultraman and now here, to Re: Cutie Honey. Across that journey I found myself soaking things up like a sponge because of how little I knew, and how threads connected through time and influence to create the art I was seeing before me.

Let me give you an example: before reading Aim for the Ace! I had no idea that Coach from Gunbuster was any sort of archetype or send-up, and so I went along into Diebuster and then found myself gobsmacked to find that the first episode of Gunbuster is a send-up of the first few chapters of Aim for the Ace!, including Oka's coach Jin Munataka being not just the inspiration for Coach, but an almost 1-to-1 analogue. I dug even deeper however, and after then hopping over into Shins Kamen Rider and Ultraman, learned that Coach is, even more than Munataka, a riff on Ultraseven/Leo from Ultraman—including the one-arm crutch!

I say all of this to humble myself once again at the feet of Anno and Re: Cutie Honey, knowing that as I assemble my thoughts while staring at this puzzle before me, there are foundational inspirations and pieces "missing"—influences and send-ups and riffs and explorations lost on my American self. I shudder to think of how little curiosity my undergraduate brain would show at digging into this puzzle!

If you've come all this way, let me say plainly that I loved Re: Cutie Honey. I thought it was absolutely marvelous. It has incredible style, it's laugh-out-loud funny while also being incredibly tender, it's got a surprisingly forthright lesbian relationship between Nat and Honey and I think the action choreography is perfect. It's hard for me to decide between this and Diebuster as my favorite-looking show I've seen in the past few months, they both look so good.

I tend to watch anime while I'm riding my indoor cycling trainer, and the room that has the trainer has an enormous window that looks directly out to the apartment complex parking lot. For Diebuster I thought sometimes, "ehhh maybe I should close the blinds?" but for Re: Cutie Honey once Honey showed up in the first scene I was desperately wishing I had closed them. It's impossible for me to write about my thoughts on Re: Cutie Honey without talking about all of the breasts and nudity. But let me first say that I'm an adult, and ostensibly we're all adults here: I'm not bothered or scandalized or anything like that. In fact, I don't think Re: Cutie Honey works without the nudity.

And as a companion to Diebuster, I actually think Re: Cutie Honey informs the nudity and sexuality of that show as well—they work in conversation with Anno's other works, including Gunbuster and of course, Evangelion. The more and more I watch of Anno and Gainax's output and synthesize that with my knowledge (existing or new) of those works' influences, the more I feel the connection between the message and what folks would describe as "fan service". For a laugh, outside the context of capital-C Criticism it would be fair to describe Re: Cutie Honey as titilating to the point of bordering on Skinemax-tier hentai, but I think that's doing it a disservice. Honey, like Nono in Diebuster, is almost unaware of her own sexual appeal and nudity and appears to have effectively zero shame. Both characters are robots who desperately want to feel human, and both are robots who fall into either an S-Type or explicitly romantic relationship with a fully-human woman, and in that process, reveal truths to the human. Part of that truth is vulnerability and connection, and what better way to demonstrate vulnerability of heart than to just be like, naked more or less all the time. Like with Diebuster taking subtextual themes in Gubuster and raising them directly to the surface level, Re: Cutie Honey takes subtextual themes from Evangelion and brings them right to the surface: our protagonist, catatonic from exertion fighting the enemy and desperately in need for human contact, is resuscitated not just with love, but with literal skin-to-skin fully nude human contact.

As I'm writing this, the art world is mourning the passing of David Lynch. Lynch was a genius and an iconoclast who created works that clearly expressed a vision; Lynch's movies act as a gateway directly into the man's soul, and his voice will be very missed. Anno is another iconoclast, and one whose work I must admit resonates more with me than Lynch's. In the Anno work I've seen—and this includes Re: Cutie Honey—we watch as characters grapple with inexorable realities faced by we mere humans: we want to be loved, we don't want to be alone, but we will die, and being alone is worse than death perhaps.

The final action of Re: Cutie Honey sees Jill reject Honey, saying that if she can't be herself anymore, she'd rather die. Honey pleads with her and begs of her, "no, Jill, that's not true!". Honey knows that being together with someone—loving someone—isn't surrender at all, it's joyful and beautiful. That's a lesson our villain never gets to learn, but that lesson is what our protagonist (Lal'c) spends all of Diebuster learning. Anno has spent his career coming at these ideas in incredibly diverse ways, including in live action! The final confrontation in Shin Kamen Rider is shockingly similar to the final confrontation between Honey and Jill.

_{I just have to interject here really quickly—it's going to absolutely kill the rhythm of my writing here I've been building but Final Fantasy 13 is my favorite one and can I just say when I watched Diebuster and Lal'c was the princess' name I about had a heart attack! AND MAAYA SAKAMOTO VOICES LIGHTNING AND LAL'C?! I'm like that Always Sunny conspiracy theory meme right now about FF13 and Diebuster}

I couldn't be more thrilled to be a curious adult rather than a hubristically-certain undergraduate literature major, because the understandings that can come from opening yourself to reading other art and putting together a puzzle with those connections is wonderful beyond words.

Re: Cutie Honey was a joyful ride that I really loved, and it helped me understand a lot of other works I love as well. What more can we ask for?