“Screw it ! What’s the point ? Life sucks ! This is so unfair ! Why me ? Why can’t things just be easy ? Is it ever going to get better ? I’m tired of all this. Should I just… give up ?”Everyone at one point (Forever)
SPOILERS: This editorial can contain mild spoilers on Kara No Kyoukai: Overlooking view, Paranoia Agent and A Whisker Away.
Man, this year has been rough, hasn’t it? I can safely say that there exist no one that hasn’t been affected in some fashion by these troubling times. In a way, it’s both depressing and reassuring. Like, it’s comforting to know that everybody knows what you are going through since we’re all in the same boat (kinda).
Personally, I think I’ve become even more introverted than before. It’s a bit scary you know? I catch myself thinking that my university making all courses online for the foreseeable future isn’t so bad after all. (I won’t have to deal with the anxiety of meeting new people, maybe, it’s better that way…) Horrible horrible thinking, I know. I’m not proud of it, not one bit, but I can’t lie and say that that thought has never crossed my mind either. I’m scared that this has permanently changed my view on having a social life. Those four months of forced isolation have left me with the following questions: ” Should I ever bother meeting new people? I’m comfortable with the friends I have. I don’t like being bothered nor being anxious. I adore peace and quiet. So then… should I just give up?
In spite of it all, I suppose there was a little positive side to this madness.
I ‘ve conquered my chronic laziness and started this little blog with my good friend XGregZ. Since then, I watched a lot more animes and tried to be more analytical about them. By perfect chance, I came across 3 animes that cover the topic of losing hope (back-to-back in fact, would you believe that?). Today, I’ll talk about Paranoia Agent, Kara no Kyoukai Part 1 and A Whisker Away. A bizarre trio of vastly different shows with vastly different tones that nevertheless have a lot more in common than you would think!
A Whisker Away
The first of the three I saw was the new Netflix anime movie : A Whisker Away. It’s a pleasant urban fantasy about a cheery high school girl, Muge, who’s deeply in love with the quiet and somber Hinode. Hinode, being the aloof 14 year old we all remember shows no interest at first. The fantasy part comes from the fact that she can transform into an adorable white cat thanks to a mysterious mask. With those new found powers, she decides to spend time with her crush, unbeknownst to him, as the new cat he adores (he’s sweet to animals). All of this in the desperate hope that she will discover a way to make him fall for her.
Now here’s the thing. If you have seen your fair share of anime, you might have encountered the term “Yandere” somewhere before. You know that character that is so irredeemably in love that he or she will do absolutely anything to get their crush to love them back (even if it’s evil). I realized while typing that synopsis that there was no way to explain the plot without it sounding creepy and yandere-ish. And you would not be complexly wrong in thinking that. A Whisker Away is a weird movie but I love it… I think. It’s so bizarre, the tone of the film has the same levity as a fun Ghibli movie but deep down, there is a real darkness beneath that whimsical love story.
Yes it is about two high schoolers getting swept in a hidden magical whimsical world and their adorable love story. It is, also, a story about despair, obsession, loneliness and death. It really is but it never feels like it. For instance, the hidden fantasy world where Muge’s mask comes from is a land of humanoid cats who you find out later were once humans who gave up on life. Thus, they chose to escape, with magic they gave their humans bodies away and became cat people. In return, they can live in a land where life is finally free of any trouble.
Muge, likewise, wants to escape. She hates her family situation: her dad remarrying and being forced to live in a house that no longer feels like home. I honestly feel like Muge started obsessing over Hinode more as mean to run away metaphorically than for Hinode himself. She in fact, began to understand Hinode as a person much later in the film.
To be honest, not many characters blew me away in this movie. I found Hinode and Muge’s dad really bland. The classmates were just okay. (special mention though for Muge’s stepmother who is a pure woman whom I shall protect).
I guess it is obvious which character did stuck with me huh ? Yup, Muge herself. A character who I have read has annoyed many people who tried to enjoy this movie but couldn’t because of her overly upbeat chatty self. At school, Muge is like the Sun, you always know where she is by how loud and boisterous she always appears. Well … spoiler alert ….
It’s fake, all of it. She acts like this at first not because she’s strong enough to smile in spite of her situation. She gives a thousand-watt smile because she completely gave up. In her mind, she can never feel part of this new family, with this new woman she has to call mom now. Moreover she gave up on other people. She has one friend that she cherishes dearly, the rest of humanity though, she views them as NPCs essentially, beings that are incapable of understanding her so why bother? Just act ecstatic all the time so nobody will pester you, nobody will suspect that you’re actually miserable.
Well, I’m saying nobody in the movie. They did an excellent job making her antics look deliberately awkward. In real life, it would be easy to see that someone like that is hiding her pain.
She wants to be left alone with her goal of making Hinode fall for her. She develops such a tunnel vision about it that she decides to offer her human body to the mask seller ( wait that sounded wrong… not that way) if it means bringing joy Hinode’s life. Afterall, if she can’t as a human, why not as a cat? Muge is for me, the embodiment of losing hope in people. Even if she loves her friend, even if her parents are good people that want the best for her, her unhappiness makes it all feel tasteless, meaningless. Hinode, someone she knew very little about at first, someone she greatly idealized in her head now means the world to her.
I sympathize heavily with Muge. I also realize how messed up her thoughts can get. Every so often, I think like her, I very rarely talk about what bothers me in other people (or in general), because … it’s bothersome ^^. My “Hinode” being the dozen ASMR videos I have to consume daily to function efficiently.
Especially since in real life, you don’t often meet real assholes, most of the time, it’s just people offending one another for reasons they both don’t know and most likely won’t ever know. I love how in Whisker Away, they did not make the new mom a villain, thank God. She is visibly trying to connect with her new daughter that is constantly pushing her away. She is probably going through the same turmoil as Muge through the whole movie. She’s just better at hiding it.
What I took from Whisker Away is that sometimes you will have to work extra hard for a relationship to work and it can seem unfair. Sometimes you will feel that you won’t ever understand the other person and vice versa. However, the most fruitful relationships are not always the easiest to manage. It is a waste to engage with people that make you miserable but it’s at the same time, a waste to throw away a rapport at the first sign of difficulty, I think. For me, Whisker Away was pretty mature in its message. I just wish the characters were a little bit more fleshed out. I’m very curious what you guys think about this movie.
Garden of Sinners: Overlooking View
The second movie I sat through was the gorgeous and complex Kara no Kyoukai: Overlooking View. I have watched this movie twice now in the span of just thread days. Well one, I cannot get enough of weird concepts and dark urban fantasy, two, I admit, I did not get the message of the movie at first. It’s a very small-scale story, short in length and events, with very abstract ideas. The tale follows Shiki, an enigmatic girl with the ability to see spirits. A bizarre string of suicides hits the city of Tokyo. Young high school girls that seemingly had nothing wrong in their lives suddenly jumped to their death from an abandoned building and nobody knows why. Motivated by her friend falling victim to the accursed building, she goes to investigate.
It can seem like a basic ghost story which it is in its execution. The beauty of the film for me is the themes and artistry.
You could say it’s a story about finding meaning in one’s own death, a nuanced take on the morality of suicide or a dabble in cosmic horror. Kara no Kyoukai or “The Garden of Sinners” is… about all of those things but also not. One flaw also pointed by the youtuber Digibro is that the film never dives deep into any of its themes, never gives answers but always leaves questions. In order to talk about those questions and themes, I’m gonna have to get into spoilers now…
The big set of apartment buildings where the poor girls committed suicide was a failed creation. It was constructed in a time where the economy was booming, it was meant to be a great landmark giving an overlooking view of the beautiful Tokyo. With time however, it fell into decay, eventually, the tenants were asked to evacuate the place a few weeks before the beginning of our story. As such, the big block of apartments was left a sad hollow world where time seems to have stopped entirely.
Later in the movie, you learn that the girls were pushed to suicide by the troubled spirit of a terminally sick girl that simply wanted friends. The girl in question being the daughter of the building’s owner. I always questioned why the girls in question were roaming around in the first place. One theory could be that the ghost girl was manipulating them from afar, leading them to their demise from start to finish. The other I find more interesting is that they experienced the Call of the Void to an unprecedented degree.
You know… that eerie feeling when you are standing near a very tall building and suddenly think of jumping (it can be any dangerous thing really). Even if you aren’t suicidal at all, a thought simply pops into your mind: “I could just jump right now” or darker “maybe I want to jump”. I like to imagine the area in its entirety was the Void. Upon seeing that building, a part of the girl’s minds simply snapped, and they felt compelled to walk up those stairs beyond all logic and reason. I’ve read about people that stuck their hands into fans or drove into traffic, just because why not. It would explain why none of them wished to kill themselves at all. I know it can seem silly, but the human mind is not free of its bugs.
When the brain is confronted with something it was not programmed to deal with, it can sometimes give false information to “patch it up”, to rationalize it. That’s the secret behind optical illusions after all. It might sound creepypastery but what if there was really a building or a work of art that had the unique ability to break the human psyche just by viewing it? I just find it so fascinating and creepy. I love it. ^^
It’s all very Lovecraftian. How “reality” is but a vision through a safe microscopic lense of what’s really out there. Any who has the immense misfortune to ever pear beyond that lense is destined to become mad…
Man, that’s pessimistic isn’t? So are we just supposed to accept that the human mind is fragile like glass. Should we never attempt to see beyond that tiny lense ? What happens if we come across some otherworldly alien knowledge? Should we just give up on it? Bury it in the ground and forget about it forever? Or rather, should we dear to enter the territory of the gods themselves? I’m really not sure. I think humans are destined to something great, but godhood might be pushing it. What do you guys think?
Existential dread can come from a lot places you see. It can stem from the distant galaxies that make you look insignificant or … your very own day to day existence. The movie declares that two kinds of people exist: those who are flying and those who are simply floating. The lucky ones that fly through their life are pursuers of goals. They live and breathe for a purpose. Some believe they are the only ones who are truly alive. The less fortunate just float through life, kept in place in a hell of stagnation where nothing moves.
The ones that float have since long forgotten about dreams and aspirations, the only thing they know is their day to day lives. I personally think humans are problem solvers and dreamers at heart, as such, a life devoid of a calling really can be Hell. It should not be surprising if people living such lives want to end it, especially if the way they end it gives a meaning to it all, in their minds at least. It’s really heartwenching … I wish everybody was flying… Kara no Kyoukai as many have said gives a really nuanced take on suicide. It has enough maturity to not blame the suicidal or suggesting that it’s a cowardly act. It does not say you should do it or not, it solely presents different things that might push people to end their lives.
Overall, I enjoyed Kara no Kyoukai. It’s a very transient movie, similar to a weird dream. It can be both its strength and weakness. Don’t expect to know the main characters well by the end of it. They are not focus of this story. Even so, I think you should check it out, if only for the masterful soundtrack and Shiki’s cuteness. The themes are cool too. ^^ PS: If you like urban fantasy in anime, you might enjoy our post about Wicked City.
Paranoia Agent
Let’s see, I’ve talked about abandoning all social ties and creating an obsession, losing the will to live (or progress) in the face of ideas beyond our comprehension along with the horror of stagnation. What if I told you society itself could be the source of terror ? That is friends, where Paranoia Agent comes in. I’m going to be fairly concise on it since I refuse to spoil anything. It’s a very narrative driven show therefore spoiling could really ruin it for you.
Here’s the synopsis.
In the streets of Tokyo, a new menace has surfaced: Shounen Bat, a young boy who wears golden roller skates and a baseball cap, and likes to whack people on the head with a golden baseball bat. These seemingly unconnected and random attacks soon become a police investigation… but after all is said and done, is there a pattern to this chaos? Anime Planet
Paranoia Agent is very similar to another beloved series called BoogiePop. It studies complex societal issues through its dark urban fantasy. There is probably a thousand posts you could make about that one show. For today, I’m going to focus on the stress of societal expectations.
You may or may not relate to this but… I had a hard time with family dinners when I was a kid. For a long time, I grew up thinking I always had to be “the good kid” and mostly I was. I very rarely spoke out of line and was suuuper polite to elders. I was quiet to the point that my aunts would ask me if I was sick. This got reinforced by my relatives viewing me that way too.
It made me persistently scared of disappointing them. Now, bless them, they are in no way responsible for that. I’m the one who created that alien expectation for myself. At the same time, I felt like I was not being a true kid. I should be louder, derpier, funnier like those kids on TV but I never was. Somedays, I felt like I could burst open like a ballon.
I’m sure many characters of Paranoia Agent would relate to that image. Societal expectation is a cruel nebulous thing you see. It can come from so many things like the media we all consume or the values of one’s country. The protagonists of Paranoia Agent all are suffering from too much pressure put on them (or pressure they put on themselves). What Paranoia Agent deeply understand is that any society that expects a perpetual perfect behavior from all their citizens will turn into a machine of despair.
From the little I know of good old Japan; this message really hits close to home for them. Japan is probably the only place rumored to have perfectly well-behaved inhabitants. It is also one of the safest countries to walk around in. The cleanest and arguably prettiest country in the world… But all of this comes at a price. I don’t think it’s too far off to say that they have a shame culture where not fitting in what society demands will get you ostracized, rarely celebrated like in the West. The pressure will be so great that a good amount of people will chose to … escape reality completely.
Escape in that context usually mean suicide. While Paranoia Agent touches on that, it shows as well other methods of escaping a life that is too hard to bear. The main one being lying to yourself, believing your own delusions. About that, I respect the fact that it does not glamorize delusion, nor does it entirely put the blame on Japanese culture. It also holds the characters themselves accountable for their shitty situations and bad ways of handling them. They are deeply flawed people, some of them are straight up vile but you will always get where they are coming from. Most of their horrible acts is the product of Despair and crippling loneliness. To conclude, there is a short sentence in Paranoia Agent that will probably never leave me : Take a rest.
It’s both equally the sweetest thing to hear but also the most devious one. We often feel tired, some far more than others. I truly think people should take a rest more. My desired version of taking a rest entails not worrying so much about what people want you to be, not be ashamed of your shortcomings and embracing your bad thoughts. They are a part of you after all. What’s important is the actions more than the thoughts.
On the dark side of that coin, taking a rest can also mean taking your life, succumbing to delusions or drugs. All things that supposedly make the pain go away. There is a huge amount of irony in the story of Paranoia Agent. Those unlucky souls could not take a rest the healthy way so they took a rest in the worst ways imaginable.
I realize this is a very dark time. A lot of my friends tell me they started to feel apathetic to the horrors we hear every day. Personally, I have found my solace in making this little blog and keeping in touch with friends. What about you ?
