The first rule of Blog Club is… Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
I started to write this post with an introduction to the whole ‘Blog Club’ idea, then when I was about three paragraphs in, Tammie beat me to the punch. Seeing as how this idea was her baby in the first place, and I don’t think I can explain it any better, I point you in the direction of the linked post for more information.
Basically it boils down to this: we have two weeks to discover a 9rules community and write something inspired/based on/about that given community. Simple. The aim of blog club is to discover the communities in 9rules and to highlight these communities. As a new comer to 9rules the sheer wealth of fellow blogs is a little overwhelming, so a little structured reading seems like a good idea.
So, without more ado or further gilding the lily, here’s my Blog Club submission:
The community for this round is Anime. After history, anime is the smallest community on 9rules with just three blogs. In one respect that makes it a good (and easy) place to start. At the same time my heart fell because the amount I know about anime could be poured into an egg cup and still leave room for a decent sized egg. So I apologize at the start of this post for any factual errors and confusions that are bound to rampage their way through my words.
Japanese movie and television animation, often having a science fiction theme and sometimes including violent or explicitly sexual material.
That’s the definition my dictionary widget provides me. A dig further using Wikipedia doesn’t exactly clarify matters in my brain.
In fact I could spend this entire post talking about what is and what isn’t anime, leaving both you and myself even more confused, and not talking about the pretty blogs I discovered, so I won’t. In my mind ‘anime’ is 1) animation, 2) Japanese. Let’s just leave it at that.
For someone who has held a life long love of science fiction and fantasy, has played one or two role playing games, and watched a fair few cartoons growing up, anime never really figured on my radar. You’d think I had geek credentials enough but clearly not. So when someone says “anime” to me I think straight away to the two Studio Ghibli films I’ve seen (and loved), Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. Then I remember that I got Appleseed out of the library on DVD on impulse and really rather enjoyed it. But that’s it. Three animes (is that an appropriate plural?) in near twenty four years. Ouch. My geek hat is clearly slipping.
As I pretty soon exhausted my own experiences of anime, my thoughts started to wander into territory that isn’t strictly anime: cartoons and graphic novels. In my brain anime, cartoons, and graphic novels all share something, and that is their artwork. It is the artwork that links them all together. I read V for Vendetta in the same spirit I watch anime - sometimes with the words, sometimes without. Each time I come away with a slightly different story because I’ve ‘read’ the pictures differently. For someone who is much more comfortable with words, this is slightly odd, but I can stare at this form of artwork (graphic/manga/anime) for stretches at a time and understand volumes.
With anime pictures really are worth a thousand words.
I love how meaning can be conveyed without speaking. I also love how drawn characters can be more believable and truthful than standard actors.
More than all that though, I’m left with the impression of how frelling pretty anime is. Even when portraying horrific war and destruction it’s… breathtaking.
Now, I’m not saying I’m going to rush out and empty Forbidden Planet of their entire anime stock this weekend, but if anyone has some anime they’d like to lend me (burn to DVD and post me, whatever), I’ll be more than happy to watch it. Look on it as a way to fill in what I’ve just realised is a big gap in my education.
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