Gen X Otaku 1971: the OG blog

Kodocha; Kid's anime with adult-level emotions.

When I first started watching Kodocha, my first thought was, "Hey, this is kinda like Crayon Shin Chan", insofar as both Sana and Shin are hilariously age-inappropriate at times (the same appeal as South Park, for that matter).

(Sana Kurata being less-hilariously-age-inappropriate and more disturbingly age-inappropriate in the above image.)

Yeah, forget I ever said that.  Holy cow, Kodocha is on a completely different level than your typical "kid's" show.  Don't let the crude animation fool you:

Kodocha has surprisingly deep and heavy emotional content from fairly early on that will have you choking up with tears before you know it.  Yes, Sana Kurata is indeed a goofy, spastic character...Yes, she makes up her own corny rap songs on the spot...Yes, she dances in her room at night like you'd expect an eleven year old girl would...she's voiced expertly by Laura Bailey, who also voiced the lead role in Fruits Basket and is a well known name in Anime voice acting circles.

But the story gets serious and deep fairly quickly.  Adults should provide parental guidance to the shows themes and plot developments....the story is very good and very high quality, but could be emotionally upsetting and disturbing to younger viewers.  I'm not saying don't let them watch, I'm saying, watch it with them because they will need you there when the intensity ramps up.

I'm a Gen-X'er and I swear there were parts of this series that had me crying my eyes out.

My favorite actress, Monica Rial, voices Sana's good friend Aya, who later becomes the girlfriend of Tsuyoshi (voiced by Greg Ayers), who is the best friend of Akito, Sana's early seeming bitter rival and later good friend.  Aya features prominently in the opening sequences of Kodocha, alongside Sana, Tsuyoshi, and Akito.  Aya is sweet & shy, but also very good at heart.  Not much of a stretch for Monica ;-)

Also wonderful in the voice acting department is the phenomenal Colleen Clinkenbeard who plays Sana's eccentric mother.  Colleen's performance is mostly low-key here, but still thoroughly enjoyable.

 

This is a well-done series and well worth your time.

It is entertaining as physical comedy, sure, but it's the heavy-duty emotional content and coming-of-age story that keeps me coming back for more and more.

I'm on volume 6 and still eager for more.  It's opening and closing credits are one of the few cases in an anime show where I just let them play all the way through instead of skipping through them.  The songs are too darn catchy not to...

See if you don't agree... (btw, this particular ending is a fairly pivotal scene early on in the series)

The Artistry of Satoshi Kon, Part 2

The opening sequence to Paranoia Agent is kind of a head trip in its own right.

 

 

Some keys to helping you understand Paranoia Agent include...

....Watch the episodes in sequence from start to finish.  Don't watch it randomly on TV, start from the beginning, don't jump around, stay in episode order.  The story builds on itself sequentially and is hard enough to get a handle on in the original order it was written.  You won't be able to identify all the characters in the opening sequence until nearly the end of the show, as they get introduced one by one as the plot moves along.

As I stated before, the action really does center on Tsukiko Sagi (鷺 月子 Sagi Tsukiko^?), but this fact isn't readily apparent since Sagi seems to drop off the radar not long after being introduced as a main character.  But if you're observant, you'll notice she's always still around in the story.

Tsukiko Sagi (鷺 月子 Sagi Tsukiko^?) is important because she's the creator behind this cute lil' fellow, named Maromi and voiced creepily by veteran voice actress Carrie Savage:

Carrie Savage is expert at voicing incredibly cute critters and little kids...but she's also skilled at making characters sound ever so slightly demented and creepy in ways that can make your skin crawl.  It's a rare gift.  Though Maromi gets limited screen time as a moving, speaking character, mostly as a figment of Tsukiko's deranged imagination, Carrie's performance in the English dub truly brings this lil' critter to life as a pivotal character.

More often, Maromi is just an ubiquitous cultural icon seen all over the fictional Tokyo of this series.  He's a parody of other cutesy animal-creature stuffed toys and other pop culture icons in contemporary Japan.

I also have to compliment Michelle Ruff's performance as Tsukiko Sagi (鷺 月子 Sagi Tsukiko^?), since to me it seems a departure for her.  I'm used to Michelle Ruff as the voice of Rukia of Bleach fame, where she's kind of a bad-ass and plays up the sexual tension and friendly bickering between Rukia and Ichigo, voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch.  In other anime, Michelle Ruff seems to play either saccharine-sweet characters like the tragic Princess Euphemia of Code Geass, or else rather haughty/mean girls...her performance in Dears comes to mind.  But Tsukiko Sagi (鷺 月子 Sagi Tsukiko^?) is so emotionally sensitive and physically frail...at other times emotionally distant and withdrawn...I really think the character is probably slightly autistic or at least "aspie".  She's a person who clearly prefers the world of fantasy to that of reality...which is the central moral crisis at the heart of Paranoia Agent...which is ultimately about facing down our fears and coming to terms with grim, ugly reality...of finally putting an end to one's escapist diversions and jumping bravely through life's hurdles instead of running from them or making excuses.

This is, in some ways not unlike the moral crisis faced by Mima Kirigoe of Perfect Blue, which is exacerbated by the fact that, as an actress, it is her job to bring fictional characters to life for a captive television audience night after night.  Mima does a lot of soul searching, wondering if becoming an actress really was the right move...if only she'd stayed on with her pop-singer trio, who now seem to be having even greater success as a duo...the emotionally disturbed character she portrays on television seems to bleed over into her real life...

The only thing that makes Perfect Blue harder to watch now than when it first came out is all of the references to very early Internet technology that now are commonplace and passe.  It definitely shows its age and some of the suspenseful elements that were captivating in the late 1990s just don't have the same force today.  Today if some creepy stalker started an anonymous blog pretending to be a celebrity, he would get his pants sued off and his P.O. Box would be filled with "Cease & Desist" letters by some pretty high priced entertainment lawyers...but in the late 1990s the internet was so much more new and mysterious than it is now...

Still, the final twist in Perfect Blue is worthy of Hitchcock--I totally didn't see it coming--and the resolution of Perfect Blue, for me, is highly emotionally satisfying.

So, too, the final resolution of Paranoia Agent, especially the final speech delivered by the police inspector's terminally ill wife to Lil' Slugger.

I think probably the creepiest character in Paranoia Agent is Masami Hirukawa (蛭川 雅美 Hirukawa Masami^?), a corrupt low-level neighborhood beat cop with the Tokyo police force.  He is a regular customer of the prostitute named Maria...and when you later figure out WHY he makes all of the prostitutes who service him call him "Daddy", it truly makes your skin crawl...two pairs of two words:  Hidden camera -- daughter's bedroom.  Yeah, pretty sicko.  He later gets in way over his head with the Yakuza, and fate/karma itself sorta bitch-slaps him by the end.

Satoshi Kon must have believed that the monsters we bring to life in our fantasies and imaginations have real power...almost a Jungian idea...and that we must be mindful of them and their potential power.  Art imitates Life, Life imitates Art.

I did thoroughly enjoy Paranoia Agent, finally having an opportunity last weekend to sit down with all four DVDs and finish watching the series.  It is mentally challenging, very entertaining, and mind-blowingly weird.  I would say that it is probably Satoshi Kon's final crowning achievement, having produced an entire half-season series...as compared to Perfect Blue and Paprika, which for all their artistic merits, are in the end merely feature length films, entirely self-contained.

The artistry of Satoshi Kon, Part 1.

I recently finished watching Satoshi Kon's 13-episode Anime series Paranoia Agent.  It is a highly acclaimed series and deservedly so.

As I've come to expect from Satoshi Kon's work, Paranoia Agent is a show that seemlessly weaves reality and fiction to produce a highly compelling narrative.  I first discovered Paranoia Agent on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim network a little over a year ago, maybe.  Since I would catch episodes at random it really didn't make a lot of sense and I just blew it off.

I came back to it later having watched Satoshi Kon's other famous works, such as the mind-bending Paprika, and more recently I enjoyed his older classic title, Perfect Blue.  To be incredibly sloppy, I guess you could say if you took Perfect Blue, smooshed it together with Paprika and then stretched it out to a half-season length series of 13 episodes (full seasons in Japan are 26 episodes, fyi), the result would be Paranoia Agent.  Actually, my lazy description is not wholly baseless, since the Wikipedia article on Satoshi Kon states that Paranoia Agent is all of Kon's left over ideas that he was unable to squeeze into his earlier feature films but still wanted to do something with.

On an artistic/stylistic level, there is definitely a noticeable continuity that runs through Perfect Blue and Paprika and Paranoia Agent.  The characters are drawn in stylistically similar ways...they are definitely Satoshi Kon characters.

Think of the main protagonist in Paranoia Agent, Tsukiko Sagi (鷺 月子 Sagi Tsukiko^?) , pictured far left and voiced in the English dub by Michelle Ruff (arguably most famous for her voice role as Rukia in the long running series Bleach).  All of the action revolves around Sagi, ultimately.  She is an artist, but also very emotionally sensitive and physically frail...she's so withdrawn and socially awkward it wouldn't surprise me if she were on the autism spectrum.

To me at least, she's highly reminiscent of Perfect Blue protagonist Mima Kirigoe, a pop-idol from the J-pop group "CHAM!", who decides to leave the group to become a professional actress. It's a difficult transition, and Mima is full of self-doubt, and has to take a lot of emotionally grueling and very edgy roles to take her career to the next level.

With both characters, Satoshi Kon is clearly fascinated by the creative power of The Artist.  The power of the artist to create myth and narrative that have a real imact upon the mundane real world.  It is an idea that Kon clearly derives a great deal of pleasure in playing around with creatively as an artist himself.  Both Perfect Blue and Paranoia Agent derive their storytelling power from mixing reality and fantasy seemlessly to the point where the line between them blurs and fades.

The show that is most divorced from reality is Paprika.  Paprika makes no pretense of being even slightly tethered to the real world.  Paprika is full-bore fantasy...true, the main character has her "real" persona and her "fictional" alter-ego, a.k.a. the titular character of Paprika, but this pretense doesn't hold up as well as in the earlier Perfect Blue and the later Paranoia Agent.

One continuity that does exist between Paprika and Paranoia Agent are the two hardboiled Japanese police inspectors who represent the world of science and rationality and gumshoe gumption.  Both are shown often to be completely out of their depth, but still, they have a resolve that is admirable.