Hige vs. Otaku

In Search of Number Nine recently posted an interesting article on anime and the pretentious, using the analogies of Hemingway and Joyce as proponents of story-telling and artistic purpose (for lack of a better phrase) respectively. My reply comment verged on the epic, nearing 400 words (as a Lit student and possible future journalist, my life revolves around the dreaded word count) and it whipped up all sorts of thoughts on the subject. Enough, I thought, to justify an entry of its own.

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It says a lot about a show that seemingly makes a murder the centrepiece of an episode only to concentrate on the social consequences rather than the actual deed. We witness a man being chased at the very beginning; Tarou and Miyako find (in their own particular ways) his floating corpse in the dam and the whole village gather around the crime scene, creating a sort of nexus for the events to progress from. Not once are we given information on why/how/who and not once did I feel cheated for the want of information. Ghost Hound truly is a practise in quietly brilliant writing and direction. Serial Experiments Who?

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Welcome to the new version of Hige vs. Otaku.

I’m still in the process of updating things (and stuff, quite literally), so please be patient for any blanks to be filled and links to be added. Here is the updated RSS feed, so please update that as well as any bookmarks or links you may have. Thankyouplease. <3

Special thanks to Randall (temporarily here) for the gracious hosting and support, and Orion for his CSS jutsu.

Production I.G., along with GAINAX, are bastions of my anime fandom. Without them the deep-seated passion I have for anime, the faith that it is capable of producing entertainment unlike any other medium, would be diminished to the point of nonchalance. I would be one of those irritating casual types that evangelises about how cool that ‘manga’ bit in Kill Bill part one was and presume everything else is either tentacle sex or animated for paedophiles (a phrase coined by Bateszi long ago and something still despairingly appropriate when shifting through AnimeSuki today). Luckily, Evangelion happened. Then Cowboy Bebop happened. Then Studio Ghibli happened. And then, most importantly, FLCL happened. The rest is easy to surmise; my journey of appreciation is nothing unconventional, even if it resulted in a preference for the darker, weirder avenues that I write about here.So, I tend to associate quality with these two particular companies. Even though they’ve frequently, time and again, upset and shaken that faith, I’ve never wholly dismissed their ability to completely ruin the competition. Enter Tokyo Marble Chocolate and again I am astounded.

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I initially wrote this as one post that covered all three episodes but Ghost Hound is proving impossible to analyse with any brevity, so I’ve split it up into one episode per post. This is the final part, episode ten. (more…)

I initially wrote this as one post that covered all three episodes but Ghost Hound is proving impossible to analyse with any brevity, so I’ve split it up into one episode per post. This is part two, episode ten. (more…)

I initially wrote this as one post that covered all three episodes but Ghost Hound is proving impossible to analyse with any brevity, so I’ve split it up into one episode per post. This is part one, episode eight.

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In the spirit of a feature (II. III) I wrote at the beginning of the autumn season I’m introducing Firsties, an on-going column dedicated to first episodes of newly released anime. This time I’m looking over Macross Frontier, H20: Footprints in the Sand and Rosario + Vampire. Brace yourselves for lots of sighing and ambivalent shrugging of shoulders.

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