Hige vs. Otaku

First, props are due to the wealth of coverage Kaiba is getting in the ‘sphere lately. Not only is the attention surprising (though wholly deserved) but impressive, too. This is why left-field anime shouldn’t be feared; it’s not out to rape your mind and make you feel stupid (like Mike Tyson with a First from Cambridge). It makes beautiful and intelligent things happen.

So, seeing as I’m hopelessly slow with my coverage of the show, I’m going to use Mike and itsubun’s recent postings on this episode as points of reference. Both consider different elements while tapping into the general consensus well, and direct acknowledgment avoids any shifty acts of plagiarism. I guess those coat tails are just little too inviting when you’re slow on the uptake.

Let’s start with the visuals – something I rarely get around to genuinely talking about with Kaiba. Mike mentions the noticeable jagginess of the linework in this episode, which I picked up on, too. I couldn’t discern any deeper meaning for the slight change – the most obvious guess being a different animation director – but it didn’t detract from the visual experience at all. If anything it gave the story arc its own particular visual feel, which would be an interesting quirk if it continues to change from episode to episode. The grandma character, through physical mannerisms alone, reminded me a lot of Belleville Rendez-Vous’s super granny. Both works seem to be spiritually akin in how visual expression is favoured over the verbal, and Kaiba has a very continental feel to its approach (that Mike further expands upon with reference to The Little Prince). Granted, it’s filtrated through the Japanese cultural prism, but the sense of movement and physical quirkiness still reminds me a lot of its European counterparts.

Storywise we get a slightly less intense experience than episode three, but something no less interesting and affective. Particularly when Vanilla freezes the fleeing Kaiba and investigates his mind – I found myself wondering what would happen if Vanilla actually hit mind-Kaiba with his little green gun. My best guess was that his mind would be wiped, but how does Kaiba’s embodiment (as in, the physical appearance of Kaiba we see when Vanilla is chasing him inside his mind) relate the library of memories? So far, memories have been represented as books – does that mean the visual embodiments we see, usually how they physically appear in reality, are their souls? The distinction hasn’t been given much explanation but it’s interesting that there is a distinction. With it Kaiba seems to agree that we are more than just our memories, because surely the interior of its character’s minds would merely be rows of books if it believed otherwise? Assumptions ahoy, but it’s a curiosity that caught my imagination. The fact that Kaiba appears as his original self in his mind also suggests that some appearances linger in the characters ’souls’ regardless of how disposable bodies are. Queue mind-body identity discussion . . . now.

Vanilla’s chase of Kaiba was very shrewd in how it diverted our attention from what otherwise would’ve been a major revelation in the quest to unlock Kaiba’s countless enigmas. The vault-like appearance of his mind immediately suggests much of it is locked away from access, and equally that he has a fuckton of memories and thus a lot of life experience. The size of his memory library was comparable to the aged grandma character which provoked a lot of questions about Kaiba’s age. In the comment thread of episode three’s post usagijen mentioned the topic of immortality and with it some hypothesising about Kaiba’s age kicked off. To me, immortality is the elephant in the room when it comes to the show’s themes and ideas. It hasn’t really addressed the implications of how memory storage has affected the length of people’s lives, regardless of the monumental implications, and I brain-farted the idea that this reticence is because Kaiba himself has lived for a very long time. The size of his memory bank is suggestive of this and it would explain why the show hasn’t reveled in one of the biggest upshots of its sci-fi concept. Then again, maybe I’m just being obvious and/or impatient. We’re not even half-way yet.

itsubun manages to explain exactly why the grandma of this episode is so fantastic, but I will add my four cents (<3 GBP/USD exchange rate at the moment – half price sale on everything!) in saying that grandmothers in anime seem to be relentlessly badass. Mega-baa from Dennou Coil; Sofi from Howl’s Moving Castle (for the sake of argument). For a nation infamous for sending its aged up the hill to die when they hit 60, OAPs seem universally well represented in Japanese fiction. And rightly so: anyone who’s had an awesome gran will understand there are few comparisons in the spectrum of humanity. itsubun also ably covers the grandsons and their tiny-minded materialism, so I shan’t add anything more. God bless the ’sphere; it works so I don’t have to!

Another sterling episode, then. I agree that it wasn’t as zomgzomgzomg amazing as the previous, but its method and intention were completely different. And, happily, wholly successful. As much as I hate hyperbole (why are you laughing?) Kaiba is rapidly burrowing itself away in the Favourite Ever temporal lobe of my brain. Judging by the ‘sphere’s inspired musings, I ain’t alone.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Current, Kaiba. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.