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To set the scene, I spent a day last week in Kelly and Elisa's charming but extremely cold home. Here I am, watching anime while huddled for warmth in a fox hat, with Elisa doing a ninja-like vanishing act beside me:
( Read more... )
Yukikaze
Kelly and Elisa described this as "men who love men who love planes." Kelly added that it seemed like an attempt to capture two large markets at once: people who like fighter jets, and people who like gay love stories. Unfortunately, it ended up appealing to the much smaller market of people who like both fighter jets and gay love stories. Luckily, I like both.
Mysterious aliens known as JAM attempted to invade the Earth, but were beaten back to a planet called Fairy. A number of years later, the general population of Earth doesn’t much care that a completely pointless war is still being waged over the skies of Fairy via fighter jet. On Fairy, Rei Fukui is the pilot for the amazing plane Yukikaze, who talks to him and protects him. His commanding officer is in love with him - well, there’s no on-screen kissing, but if they were a heterosexual couple, there would be no doubt whatsoever in any viewer’s mind that their relationship is romantic. But Rei, who is socially impaired to say the least, doesn’t quite know how to deal with this strange thing called love, especially when it emanates from one of those strange beings called humans rather than from his beloved plane.
Yukikaze is beautifully animated and designed, with a lot of shots that evoke the loneliness of a futuristic Edward Hopper painting. The details of how the planes work are very realistic, given that they’re super-jets. Despite the many aerial battles, the series has a hypnotic, meditative atmosphere, aided by the unsettlingly mysterious nature of the war and the JAM: no one has ever seen a JAM, only their jets.
I liked this a lot, though I was glad to have Kelly and Elisa on hand to explain some of the more confusing moments. It’s understated in the extreme, but gathers a lot of emotional force by the satisfying end.
This is a short series, of 6 episodes. Four are thirty minutes long, and the first and last are about forty-five. Yukikaze
The series was based on a book series, Yukikaze
, which is out in English from Haikasoru.
Texhnolyze
I only managed to watch the first episode of this, and I liked it less than any anime I’ve seen yet. There was no background music, and almost no dialogue. In episode one, in a moody dystopian landscape...
- A boxer stares zombie-like into a mirror, then has zombie-like sex with a creepy woman with a prosthetic arm. She pokes him in the eyeball with her sharp nail while having an orgasm (I had to look away) but luckily, he has a prosthetic eyeball.
- A CGI ceiling fan gloomily turns.
- A man gloomily cooks boiling glop.
- A girl with a fox mask stares at people and has visions of people getting killed.
- The boxer lurks gloomily in a sewer littered with prosthetic limbs.
- People hack off the boxer’s arm and leg.
End of episode one! Also, end of me watching any more of this. Don't blame Kelly and Elisa for it - it was one of a handful of random anime DVDs I bought for a dollar at a garage sale. I was robbed!
Texhnolyze
( Read more... )
Yukikaze
Kelly and Elisa described this as "men who love men who love planes." Kelly added that it seemed like an attempt to capture two large markets at once: people who like fighter jets, and people who like gay love stories. Unfortunately, it ended up appealing to the much smaller market of people who like both fighter jets and gay love stories. Luckily, I like both.
Mysterious aliens known as JAM attempted to invade the Earth, but were beaten back to a planet called Fairy. A number of years later, the general population of Earth doesn’t much care that a completely pointless war is still being waged over the skies of Fairy via fighter jet. On Fairy, Rei Fukui is the pilot for the amazing plane Yukikaze, who talks to him and protects him. His commanding officer is in love with him - well, there’s no on-screen kissing, but if they were a heterosexual couple, there would be no doubt whatsoever in any viewer’s mind that their relationship is romantic. But Rei, who is socially impaired to say the least, doesn’t quite know how to deal with this strange thing called love, especially when it emanates from one of those strange beings called humans rather than from his beloved plane.
Yukikaze is beautifully animated and designed, with a lot of shots that evoke the loneliness of a futuristic Edward Hopper painting. The details of how the planes work are very realistic, given that they’re super-jets. Despite the many aerial battles, the series has a hypnotic, meditative atmosphere, aided by the unsettlingly mysterious nature of the war and the JAM: no one has ever seen a JAM, only their jets.
I liked this a lot, though I was glad to have Kelly and Elisa on hand to explain some of the more confusing moments. It’s understated in the extreme, but gathers a lot of emotional force by the satisfying end.
This is a short series, of 6 episodes. Four are thirty minutes long, and the first and last are about forty-five. Yukikaze
The series was based on a book series, Yukikaze
, which is out in English from Haikasoru.Texhnolyze
I only managed to watch the first episode of this, and I liked it less than any anime I’ve seen yet. There was no background music, and almost no dialogue. In episode one, in a moody dystopian landscape...
- A boxer stares zombie-like into a mirror, then has zombie-like sex with a creepy woman with a prosthetic arm. She pokes him in the eyeball with her sharp nail while having an orgasm (I had to look away) but luckily, he has a prosthetic eyeball.
- A CGI ceiling fan gloomily turns.
- A man gloomily cooks boiling glop.
- A girl with a fox mask stares at people and has visions of people getting killed.
- The boxer lurks gloomily in a sewer littered with prosthetic limbs.
- People hack off the boxer’s arm and leg.
End of episode one! Also, end of me watching any more of this. Don't blame Kelly and Elisa for it - it was one of a handful of random anime DVDs I bought for a dollar at a garage sale. I was robbed!
Texhnolyze