Feminism in Animation: "Slayers"

This is basically the sum of a bunch of different thoughts I've had bouncing around in my brain for a while. For a while I've been wanting to highlight some media products from Asian cultures, most specifically Japan since it's the one I'm most familiar with, that feature strong feminist themes, and since it's International Women's Day, what better time to kick it off? There's this prevailing idea floating around that Eastern cultures are more “backwards” and oppressive toward women than we are in the West, and while there are certainly problems in Asian countries in regards to gender equality, I really can't say the West is any better in many ways. It's an unfair viewpoint, and I've been wanting to challenge it for a while now, but I also want to talk about some feminist viewpoints from Western media products, specifically in terms of animation. For the purposes of this list, I'm looking specifically at Disney products, since Disney is very often viewed as being un-feminist, which is fair, but that's ignoring the feminist ideas that do exist there as well. So this is my list. It leaves out a bunch, I'm sure, but these are the TV shows, movies, and comics that I'm most familiar with and have the strongest ideas on. My goal here isn't to compare these shows with each other and try to rate how each culture is doing, my goal is simply to examine them in their own rights and maybe provide a different viewpoint or raise awareness of a product that might be less known.

Slayers
The first anime I ever saw that I actually liked, and to this day I still enjoy it, even the dated parts. Originally based on a series of novels by Kanzaka Hajime with illustrations by Araizumi Rui, Slayers is an epic fantasy adventure story that in part spoofs epic fantasy stories, while at the same time creating its own story with messages all its own. It's a great adventure saga, full of humor, action, at times suspense, and loads of great characters. Kanzaka really created his own world, with its own history, culture, and mythology, and even an intricate and fascinating system of magic, with sub-groups and spells that clearly do their own different things, and that interact with each other in different ways. And at fifteen original novels, and over thirty spin-off novels, not to mention the comics and anime series that spun off from those, there's plenty that gets explored. I especially love that this series is proof that the idea that 'guys don't identify with female protagonists' is bunk because not only is the lead character in this series a female, but the novels are written in first-person perspective. So not only did Kanzaka, a man, write a lead female character convincingly and uncondescendingly, but it became one of the biggest hits of the '90s in Japan, with four TV seasons (to date), countless manga spinoffs, a string of direct-to-DVD releases, successful movies, radio dramas, and hit songs, to say nothing of the merchandise that must have been produced. To this day it has an enduring fanbase, enough to warrant a fourth TV season years after the previous one aired. Lina Inverse is an anime icon because she's a fantastic character, and the series is full of many more.

In the novels Lina describes herself as a petite, brown-haired, brown-eyed girl of fifteen or sixteen who's been traveling for years already-- gradually her hair and eyes were both lightened to a dramatic red, which admittedly does suit her personality more. She's not on some grand quest to save the world-- although she does usually wind up doing it anyway-- she's doing it because she loves adventure, kicking the butts of roving tribes of bandits (and making herself money in the process) and building up her reputation as a sorceress. By the time she's in her mid-teens, her name is already feared far and wide and she's almost a living legend-- although not quite in the way she'd wanted, since her nickname Dra-Mata (“dragon spooker”) is less flattering than her own title of “beautiful sorcery genius”, and she's very often regarded as a public menace. She has an ego the size of a small state, but the thing is, she really is a genius. She is a force of nature to be reckoned with, both in terms of her magical power (which is portrayed literally as an atomic explosion in the anime), but in terms of her personality. She's loud, brash, egotistical, angry, opinionated, educated, fearless, ambitious, greedy, hardworking, adventurous, confident, funny, and totally relentless. And yet, as much as she brags about how gorgeous she is, it overlays this insecurity about her figure, since she's willowy and petite and seems to be surrounded by women far more well-endowed than she is. She's awkward and shy when it comes to things like romance and tries to avoid thinking or talking about it at all, let alone pursuing it. Her temper is legendarily short, and she's been known to blow up entire villages just to let off steam when she gets riled up, which only contributes to her reputation as a menace to society in general. She's very well-versed in magical theory as well as folklore and legends, and will often explain things to less-educated people. She also loves food and has been known to put away as much as twenty helpings in one sitting, which I believe was once attributed to the amount of magic energy she channels on a regular basis. Her abilities with magic, especially black (destructive) magic are astonishing for someone of her age; her signature spell is incredibly powerful, and one only a handful of people in the world know, but there's one even more powerful that she herself managed to figure out on her own that taps into energy so powerful it can destroy the planet if miscast. She's also tactically very savvy and will use creative and unorthodox methods of solving problems and getting out of trouble.

I could go on and on about how much I love her and all her foibles and shortcomings and amazing humanness, but she's also far from the only worthy female character in this series. In Lina's earlier wandering days, she had a sometime traveling companion/rival in Naga the Serpent, another powerful sorceress looking to establish a name for herself-- the fact that the name she establishes is "goldfish poop", after the way she follows Lina around, doesn't seem to slow her down much. Naga is a largely comedic character, with many moments of supreme idiocy (poking her own cheeks with her spiked shoulder pads while casting a spell springing immediately to mind), and an outfit that defies nearly every rule of practicality and common sense, but there's a lot more to her than that. She does come off like an idiot a lot of the time, but I don't think she really is-- she's shown frequently to also be pretty canny and proves a good foil for Lina a lot of the time. She's a skilled magician, especially with nature-related magic, and her blistering confidence and complete lack of self-doubt about anything is really pretty cool when you step back and look at her. The signature laugh that drives sane people mad at the sound is the manifestation of that confidence, and it's what drives her tenacity, her ability to wear that ridiculous outfit without shame, her ambition, and her ability to drive Lina absolutely crazy. It's never directly stated anywhere, but there are big hints dropped that she's actually the older sister of another main character, Amelia, and the crown princess of a very powerful kingdom. She left home after witnessing the murder of her mother, which is why she faints at the sight of blood, and seems to prefer the life of a wandering adventurer to that of being royalty, although she's hardly lost the viewpoint of the upper echelon of society. She is also a woman who loves her alcohol, and delights in stealing Lina's food when the opportunity presents itself.

Amelia Wil Tesla Seillune is the next most prominent female character in the story, especially in the anime. Back when I was first into the series, she was widely despised by the fanbase, and I'm glad to see that's died out now because she's a great character. Amelia is a princess of the kingdom of Seillune, a large and powerful country that specializes in white (protective/healing) magic. The kingdom even has a series of walls built through and around it in the shape of a protective charm. Amelia is a very powerful white magic priestess, but she also has a great deal of proficiency in shaman (nature) magic, which gives her a greater diversity of spells to draw on than Lina in some ways. She's also an accomplished physical fighter, but has an inexplicable need to climb on the top of something tall and give righteous lectures to villains about justice before entering the fight-- also she will frequently fall off the tall things and land on her head, which often ruins much of her credibility as a threat. A year or two younger than Lina, she's a bit shorter than her, but with much more curve in her figure, which a thorn in Lina's side from time to time. Like her other family members, Amelia has a love of adventure and travel, but she also feels a great sense of responsibility to her kingdom, and so frequently returns home to take up her political and diplomatic duties instead. Raised by her father after her mother was murdered when she was small, she has a very strong sense of filial duty, and takes after her father in many ways, not the least of which are exuberance and an iron-clad belief in justice. Once stated that she didn't want to be the princess who gets rescued, but rather the prince who saves the damsel in distress, and very often refers to herself as a warrior of justice. Is probably the most naive character in the entire series, but grows considerably during its course into someone with a lot of sense and diplomacy, an even temper, and a really formidable opponent in both court politics and battle.

Sylphiel Nels Radha is the least like any of the other major female characters in the series. She's the epitome of the “ideal” woman and everything Lina isn't; kind, gentle, nurturing, domestic, beautiful, graceful, soft-spoken, shy, obedient, dutiful, sweet, and friendly. Lina hates her instantly, but that's likely due in large part to Sylphiel's very overt designs on Lina's traveling companion and romantic interest, Gourry, and Lina's own buried insecurities. A very powerful white magic priestess, Sylphiel lives in a legendary city that once saw the destruction of a major demon and is renowned for its holy tree that played a large part in that battle. Though she starts out as the obligatory rival character, she soon starts taking on her own life, after enduring an unimaginable tragedy and playing a very important role in the defeat of a major demon. Little tidbits of her past and hidden parts of her personality are revealed slowly, and they add a nice dimension to her, even though she's still not one of the more well-developed characters in the series. But she serves her purpose well and even offers a number of surprises toward the end of the second anime season that showcase just how far she's willing to push herself for the sake of her own dreams. A character that, similar to her namesake Radha from the Hindu tradition, is completely devoted to the object of her love, but is doomed to a life of loneliness, waiting for the love of a man she'll never get. Even though she knows this, she still doesn't back away, and even then never bears Lina any ill will or overt resentment about it. She brings out the insecurities in Lina as she would in anyone, since she is too good to be real, and yet you can't help but feel badly for her since she's lost everything she cherished and deserves much better than the lot she's been given. She is the character who seems most fragile, and yet is able to endure the unendurable and keep moving forward without losing her kindness.

There are more supporting characters that are worth discussing, as the series ran for a long time and had a huge supporting cast, but these are the major female ones. I love the cast for its diversity, and for the sense of human-ness that abounds in each one of them. Some characters are tragic, some comic, some both, some tomboys, some feminine girls, but none are invalidated or made lesser because of their traits. There was clearly thought put into each of them, and while they might seem on the surface like the embodiment of long-standing tropes, each has qualities that defy their categorizations and raise them up into something more thoughtful and interesting. It's also just a great overall series, full of cosmic battles between Good and Evil, silly side-quests, giant slugs, lots of magic, a little romance here and there, complicated family ties, loads of silly gags, lots of food, and plenty of concussions. I still have fun with it even ten years after the fact.

Spotlight On: Satoshi Kon

(To view a preview for each film, click the title.)

Upon learning I'm a film student, often first question I'm asked is, "who's your favorite director?" Very often I don't have an answer-- I've never been one to have an absolute favorite anything-- however one name that does leap to mind with pretty solid consistency is Satoshi Kon. Even though he only has four films and one television show to his directing credit, they are all of such high quality and unusual content that every one of them would be worth discussing in detail. (I should note that I haven't seen the television series, Paranoia Agent yet, though I plan to soon.) While there are certain unifying themes in his works, they are all distinctly different in tone and genre, which only adds to Kon's skills as a director-- instead of staying with the genre that he first found success with, he tries something new each time, which adds a new dimension to the credibility of his range and vision.

It Really Is a Medium

Probably my favorite aspect of his body of work is that he uses animation as a medium instead of a genre. Many people automatically associate animation with a genre, such as children's films, or fantasy, and this is especially so in the US. To the best of my knowledge, this idea is not as firmly rooted in Europe, where many countries have their own rich animation legacies and France in particular produces films like The Triplets of Belleville and Persepolis to great worldwide acclaim. Recently the Israeli film Waltz With Bashir also used the medium to effectively tackle adult subject matter in a highly effective way, and there seems to be a dawning realization that animation is capable of much more than most people ever considered.

Asian countries, in particular Japan, have not traditionally been as wedded to the idea that animation is a medium strictly for children and have produced a staggering amount of television, video and DVD releases, and feature films with it. There are more variations on genre in these instances, though there is an emphasis on children and teenaged-audiences, and more of the popular titles tend to fall into the fantasy or science fiction categories, so it's not all that different in that respect. Even a legendary director like Hayao Miyazaki stays to these genres, though his mastery of the medium and talent for storytelling elevate his films above traditional "anime" in the minds of most.

So where does Satoshi Kon fit into all this? While Miyazaki produces epic fantasies for all ages, full of messages about self-esteem, environmentalism, war, work ethic, and devotion, Kon produces quiet, more introspective, psychologically ambiguous works that deal with the blurring of reality and fantasy, and the nature of the media in modern culture and its impact on the human mind. Both men craft films of staggering detail, emotion, and artistry, but where Miyazaki brings realistic detail to the fantastic, Kon very subtly weaves the fantastic into reality.

Films

My first exposure to him was the film Perfect Blue, his directorial debut. I was fairly new to my appreciation of Japanese animation (I'd held it in universal disdain for quite a number of years until my very early twenties), and to say that this film disturbed me is something of an understatement. While very skillfully made, and scenes from it have haunted me in the years since, it's only recently that I've managed to bring myself to watch it again. The story revolves around a young pop idol from a dime-a-dozen pop music group try to branch out into a successful acting career. She finds that in order to gain the kind of exposure she needs to garner serious attention is to cast off her innocent, wholesome pop singer image and pose nude for photo shoots and partake in a graphic rape scene for a TV show. As this happens, she finds herself stalked by a fan from her pop idol days, and discovers an internet page claiming to be written by her with intimate details of her life on display. She begins to see hallucinations or possibly dreams of her pop-idol self chastising her for the choices she's made for the sake of her ambition, and eventually people around her start dying. Both Mima's and the audience's sense of what is reality disintegrates through the course of the film, and until the end, neither she nor we are entirely sure if those fantasies of her murdering the people exploiting her are really fantasies or not.

I'd heard about Millennium Actress, Kon's next film, probably a year or two after I saw Perfect Blue. I didn't wind up seeing it until two years ago, convinced it was another violent psychological thriller, and no matter how well-made it might be, I simply didn't feel up to coping with another one from him. This impression could not have been more wrong. Actress is the flipside of the situation in Blue, where the connection between a star and her biggest fan is touching and impacts their lives in positive ways. It's a sweet, heartfelt film that captures the essence of Japanese history and film from World War II through to the twenty-first century in the life and career of one legendary actress.

It's a love story between her and a mysterious figure she met only briefly in her early teens, but whom she spent her life chasing after, as well as that of a man so inspired by her image, he spent his career chasing it. Chiyoko begins her career as an excuse to chase after the man she helps rescue one snowy winter morning, traveling all the way to Manchuria to film a propaganda picture during WWII-- he left a key near her house as he fled the Japanese secret police and she vowed to bring it to him. Her movie career blossoms and her roles take her as far back as 1,000 years in Japanese history even as her own life keeps progressing forward through adulthood, middle-age, and even old age. Whether the roles she had eerily match the events from her life or her memories have become so intertwined with them that they're inseparable, it's never clear, but neither is it that important to figure out. The snippets she recalls from her films continue to drive forward the story of her own personal quest for the man she's compelled to find just as easily as a literal enactment would have been, and it creates a fascinating and entertaining vehicle to contemplate the depths to which films can become a part of our lives.

Tachibana, a longtime fan, seeks her out for a documentary of her career years after she retires in seclusion. He's worked in films and even managed to create his own production company ("Lotus", named for her favorite flower), spurred by his fascination and admiration of her. Though often played for comedy, he and his assistant further the blurring of reality, memory, and fantasy by becoming involved in her flashbacks, even able to directly affect them and bring back mementos when the scene shifts back to the present. To attempt to understand what's literally happening here is futile and misses the point: the film is demonstrating how involved the audience becomes with the films it views, how potent the fantasy is, and how much it becomes a part of the culture and collective memory of those who view it. It isn't science fiction or fantasy, it's a visual, stylistic method of conveying a complex idea while at the same time, driving forward the story without breaking our concentration.

There's even more to talk about with this film, but it's best left for debate amongst people who have seen it. Suffice to say, I was so surprised and moved by this film, it completely overshadowed my fear of and anxiety towards Kon's work and I rushed to watch his next film.

Tokyo Godfathers is yet another departure from his previous films. While Blue is a thriller and Actress is a love story, Godfathers is a slapstick comedy with a very unusual subject: the homeless. The three protagonists of the film are a sort of dysfunctional family of homeless people: Gin, the "father" figure, a former family man who's haunted by his past; Hana, the "mother" figure in the form of a homosexual transvestite who longs for family, and Miyuki, the "daughter", a sixteen year-old runaway hiding from her father. While dumpster diving for presents on Christmas Eve, they come across an abandoned baby and set out to find its mother. Of course, through the journey they each wind up confronting their pasts, usually through a series of miraculous coincidences, each one becoming more implausible than the last.

Kon's go-to animation studio Mad House retains its hyper-realistic style that they used for his previous two films, but couples it with more exaggeration and "cartoonish" facial expressions to heighten the goofy comedy. However, the film also doesn't shy away from the more realistic and serious hardships that come with living on the streets, as well as the characters' backstories, and there is very much a solid, emotionally resonant core beneath all the humor. The blurring of reality and fantasy inside the story isn't as pronounced as in Kon's other works, though it does crop up occasionally. Personally, I see it happening most often with the coincidences, almost like an accentuated version of the type of thing that happens in a lot of Hollywood films, where destiny drives the characters to their inevitable resolutions and happy endings.

It's no coincidence that the story takes place in the week between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, the time of year when people are most likely to believe in miracles, and also when family connections feel culturally most important. The human connections in the film are what drive it, be they between the protagonists, their real families, or the people they meet along their journey-- every one of them is significant and unlikely, reminding us that no matter how high or low we may go on the social ladder, we are all still connected. Kon goes out of his way to shine a light on society's most forgotten and ignored, from the homeless to drag queens to Brazillian migrant workers, it's a side of Tokyo that doesn't get focused on much, and the fact that he does so in such an approachable and inalienating way is impressive. It's a feel-good movie, but one without as many empty calories as many of its brethren, and it's far more likely to get me in the holiday spirit than most.

Once again, Paprika is a departure from Kon's already eclectic body of work, this time delving into a more conventional arena for Japanese animation, science fiction. The character design also changes, Paprika being the only example that is recognizably Kon's style, with everyone else looking closer to the style used in Miyazaki's Spirited Away (coincidentally, also a style change for the director, and yes, I know the same character designer worked on both, but he also worked on Kon and Miyazaki's other works in their signature styles).

This is by far the most blatant example of the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy, and if Actress works to gently twine the two together until one doesn't notice the difference, then this film has them crash together violently in a noisy cacophony of images that go by almost too fast to catch. Also like his previous films, it dialogues with Hollywood film, in ways more blatant and also more subtle than before: one of the characters has a reoccurring dream with scenes from various Hollywood films like Roman Holiday, and at one point has a conversation with someone about different film techniques as the camera demonstrates each one as he explains it; the film itself takes the Hollywood idea of the "destined pair" and turns it on its ear, while underhandedly critiquing its perpetuation of male sexual entitlement at the same time. It deliberately defies audience expectation by playing on these very commonly used techniques, which a lot of people found dissatisfying but which was frankly my favorite part of the entire film.

Like with Perfect Blue, Kon incorporates the internet into the list of media being used, this time as its own immersive world with very fuzzy boundaries to reality. Like Tokyo Godfathers it focuses on the interconnectedness of humans, this time through the idea of collective dreams. These ties don't seem to be accidental, as in the final scene, a character goes to a movie theater displaying movie posters for all of them-- instead of keeping them in the background, the camera pans slowly over all of them in chronological order, stopping on the poster for Kon's upcoming film, The Dreaming Machine. In a lot of ways, this film is very consciously telling the audience that they're watching a movie (outside of the fact that it's rendered in animation), and now that some images from Dreaming Machine have been released, it's much easier to see the scores of visual references littered throughout Paprika. So not only does this film dialogue with Hollywood and its influences and conventions, but with Kon's own body of work, past and future alike.

"Why wasn't this live action?"

One of the more interesting questions asked about Kon's works, and one which has many relevant answers. Perfect Blue started out as a live action film but ran into budget problems and delays, so animation was turned to as the next best option. Kon and Mad House's skill at creating detailed, realistic-feeling worlds served this story well, since the medium allowed them to seamlessly bend the laws of physics to allow a hallucination to skip effortlessly down a row of lamp posts, or appear in the reflection of a pane of glass-- instead of special effects that on some level impress upon the audience that the frames they're watching were altered, it's simply a part of the narrative, as seamlessly interwoven into the frame as the characters themselves. Despite its glaringly obvious lack of reality, it's also able to create higher tension in the audience because there is no real-life actor on screen, and the physical punishments that happen in a sense "really" happen to the character; in other words, there's no effects person gluing prosthetic wounds on before the scene is shot, no rubber knives, no trick shots, no digital effects added in later-- an animated character gets stabbed, they're stabbed with as real a weapon and have as real a wound as they themselves are. Of course there is also the impact of taking a medium that is generally thought of as being for children and telling very adult stories with it, which for many people is a profound one. If the recent trend of adult-oriented animation continues, this will likely lessen as people become accustomed to the idea.

The fact that Kon chooses to animate stories that for the most part could just as easily be filmed in live action is significant because it demonstrates the range it's capable of as a medium and the different psychological effect it can have on an audience. He was the first director I know of to really stretch the boundaries of what had been done with it up until then, particularly by utilizing its particular strengths in such subtle ways and to the best of my knowledge he's the only one still using this particular method. He's experimental and full of ideas and things to say, which is always exciting for me as a viewer, and I hope he continues to gain more exposure. The Dreaming Machine, his next film, is yet another departure for him into a more conventional animation standard, the children's film. I can't wait to see what he does with it.