This post compiles various links and snippets I collected in February.
Scroll to the bottom for a quick report on my own writing progress this month!
Light burden
Animation Obsessive [substack warning: here] carried an interesting piece on the exact quality of light in cel-and-film era anime.
I knew the broad strokes, such as that, for instance, these lighting effects came from real lights. A bunch of analogue anime techniques have this pleasing simplicity: when focus shifts between layers in a shot, that's just the physical camera shifting its focus, and so forth.
But I certainly didn't know some of the detailed points here about how light dispersed through the film during the split-second process of photography.
Easy though it is to talk about this as a 'lost' technique, I think this account really backs up the line that almost anything analogue cel-and-film technology could do, digital compositing/'photography' can recreate--if someone somewhere cares hard enough.
Animal Kaiser
I nipped over to Camden Market, which holds a couple of, let's be honest here, weeb shops.
There's Japan Craft, which feels slightly fly-by-night and has a Moderoid Imber that they've been slowly discounting for ages. I'm pretty sure I know the UK's Xenoglossia fan, and they already own the kit.
And there's an official Bandai shop, full of things Bandai thinks you should want to buy. Sometimes that category overlaps with things you want to buy, sometimes it doesn't. Right now, it also hosts a dedicated Gundam pop-up shop. I liked nosing around that and spent no money.
I also got a kick out of stumbling on an Animal Kaiser machine next door. I only recognised it thanks to Dave Cabrera's write-up of the game from last autumn. Which deserves a read, I think: I enjoy this kind of informed account of a sphere I perceive but do not know, like simplified fighting arcade games with cards for persistence.
Andreas
An arresting image from the Old English poem Andreas:
geseh he geblowene | bearwas standan
blædum gehrodene, | swa he ær his blod aget.
('he saw flowering groves standing adorned with fruit, where he had poured out his blood’, 1448–9, ed. and trans. Mary Clayton.)
I imagined that this might be a rote or inherited idea. Certainly shed blood as fertiliser has a long rhetorical history, but the notes in several editions of the poem have nothing to offer as a close analogue.
Andreas is a curious beast, with what are, I guess, the strengths and failings of its age ('Tell us how the Jews rejected His message' is an instruction that never ends well). It's vivid, though, and contains lots of startling cannibalism, plus it's one of the few pieces of evidence that anyone bothered to read Beowulf within the Old English period.
Both the lines I quote alliterate on b-. I think multi-line alliteration matters rather more than alliteration within the line. Old English poets had to alliterate within the line. They were probably stunting when they strung the tie across several lines.
Cosmic Princess Kaguya
Making an original anime film takes a lot of effort. From my surface-level grasp on the topic, people climb mountains just assembling the backing to make an original anime film. Cosmic Princess Kaguya represents a big achievement just by existing.
It didn't quite wow me, and I think stands as one of the first anime films to make me feel old, truly and in the bones.
I blame chance and interest for that, not chronology: 'World Is Mine', one of the songs charmingly covered here, comes from 2008, after all. Only chance left me largely disconnected from the worlds of vtubers and vocaloid music.
Meanwhile, I suspect the metaverse hype was bubbling up during the film's genesis. If the team rode that to get backing, good for them, but the idea's already fallen by the wayside now, by the time the film emerges. Or, more generously, some of us have lived lives online before Zuckerberg had ever thought about the metaverse, and still live lives online now. In stronger moments, Cosmic Princess Kaguya might get at that.
Anyway, 's worth a watch. You might like it more than I did, and I liked it decently well.
David Jones, In Parenthesis
The early phases of In Parenthesis have a lot of quiet fun applying high register to trench life's mundane annoyances, like so:
Then was great to-do and business, then were butt-heel-irons opened, and splintering of thumb nails with the jammed metal, and jack-knife blades shivered.
or
They complained each to each other, they blasphemed the whole order of Being, they hoped breakfast would soon be up.
But you know that by the book's end we'll have travelled from bathos to pathos. Mametz Wood makes mythological suffering heroes of Jones's slightly bumbling soldiery.
MSB on G
Mobile Suit Breakdown have returned to start their coverage of G Gundam. My favourite podcasts structured around television occupy one of two stools:
- shooting wholly from the hip
- carefully researched
I tend to ignore outfits that fall between the two stools. MSB sit firmly on careful research and have offered reliable listening over the years; long may that continue.
Richard III (1995)
I revisited the 1995 Richard III film starring Ian McKellen. It's still good! Probably at the top end of what you can do with filmed Shakespeare. McKellen's screenplay cuts about half the play, but a route through survives, and it makes for an admirably snappy movie.
Then I found:
- A neat, if short interview from a couple of years back
- McKellen's put the whole screenplay online, with annotations
Things done
In February, I
- wrote about 2,300 words of my next poem;
- came up with a title (to be revealed later!) for my next poem; and
- made one editing pass on Deep-Step and Twice-Mortal.
In March, I hope to make roughly the same amount of progress on my next poem. I think, probably, that should get me near to finishing its first draft!