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Tadayasu, the young heir to a small-town sake brewery, has the power to see microbes. They look more or less like this. The manga begins on his first day at a Tokyo agricultural university, where his unique ability makes him sought-after by a maniacal professor with dreams of using microbes to terraform new worlds, a dedicated microbiology student whose punk boots hide a colony of athlete's foot fungus, a germ--phobic student, a pair of money-hungry students attempting to use their disgusting dorm room as everything from a sake brewery to a lab cultivating medicinal caterpillar fungus, and everyone on campus who doesn't want to get food poisoning.

In the tradition of many reluctant heroes struggling to balance great power with great responsibility, Tadayasu complains, “What has it ever gotten me? Being fed creepy and disgusting food.”

Moyasimon practically defines oddball, combining gross-out comedy, nostalgic college-days humor, and meticulously presented lessons on microbiology, fermentation, and agriculture. The word-to-image ratio is as dense as Death Note, using cute microbes and funny situations as the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine sake-brewing demonstration go down.

I could have done without quite the amount of grossness, but I enjoyed the college hijinks, the science, and the sheer bizarreness of the concept.

I leave you with this representative quote: “You know what they call worms? Dragons of the earth! Respect their power!”

Moyasimon 1: Tales of Agriculture
rachelmanija: (Default)
( Jun. 26th, 2005 06:53 pm)
JB and I went to see Mysterious Skin, a movie about two boys who are abused by the same man when they're children, and grow up to be affected by and interpret that in very different ways. It's written and directed by Gregg Araki, a gay indie director who I almost interned for when I was an undergrad, but ended up going for an internship at Castle Rock instead.

After the movie:

Me: Wow, Gregg Araki has really grown up. The last movie I saw of his, he was still pretty heavily into "Let's see how much I can shock you."

JB: Yeah, this was great. And it didn't have any gratuitous shocks at all.

Me: Well, there was the dead cow fisting scene.

JB: Yes, but it wasn't gratuitous. It was completely relevant to the plot.

Me: That's true. And the end-- which I thought was extremely touching--

JB: If the cow fisting had been less graphic, we might not have remembered it, and then the scene at the end wouldn't have had the same impact.

Me: I think you're right. Though possibly cow-fisting is always memorable, even if it's not graphic.

For the two-or-fewer people reading my journal who won't be turned off by a little non-gratuitous cow-fisting, I have to say that I liked the movie a lot-- it's thoughtful and moving and has some neat hyperreal images. But though I don't know what the actual rating is, I have to give it a mega-warning for sex, drugs, sexual violence, really disturbing stuff involving children, and, of course, cow fisting.
.

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