Oh! Edo Rocket

March 11th, 2008 by Brack

Boy meets girl. Boy builds giant firework to get girl to the moon.

This ridiculously multi-layered 2007 series from Madhouse based on the 2001 (?) play by playwright (and Gurren Lagann screenwriter) Kazuki Nakashima has been overlooked somewhat in English speaking anime coverage.

I’d hazard a guess it’s down to the somewhat era-specific references it partly leans on to make it’s points. It takes place in Edo in 1842, when the city was under the strict frugality reforms introduced by Mizuno Tadakuni. Mizuno appears as a character, as does Toyama Kinshiro, a character from the historical detective drama Toyama no Kinsan (not sure of his historical existance) and Torii Yozo, another real government figure who also features in the anime Ayakashi Ayashi.

Also the main character and an “anime exclusive” supporting cast member are named after the rival guilds of firework makers that took part in the Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival.

But that density of historical reference shouldn’t put you off. The series is well aware of just how dense and Japan-specific a lot of their references are. They joke at one point that certain gags won’t go over with international audiences. And more importantly, it’s not all about history.

For as well as being dense with cultural references of the era it’s set, the show is accutely aware of both it’s existence as an anime and as an adaptation of a play. It periodically makes reference to it’s own production, breaks the fourth wall to address the audience and has characters interact with the animation in a way to break the fragile illusion of reality it creates.

And it throws gag after gag of varying levels of obscurity, making pop culture references, poking fun at itself, and the anime industry in general (Production IG and Mamoru Oshii in particular get a rather cruel barb thrust their way). Lots of visual, script and audio cues come from who is playing a particular character, there’s FMA, Cowboy Bebop and Gurren Lagann gags that all come up in this way.

But don’t think it’s just an Excel Saga-esque array of obscure references and satire.

There’s a strong story at the core, that takes some surprisingly dark turns early on, and has a great conclusion that has it’s cake AND eats it. However even the story isn’t the point of the show.

The story, the historical references and the pop culture gags and satire are all in service of an overall theme, which is looking at the role of populist entertainment. It draws a comparison between how entertainment, art and craft still flourished under the frugality of Edo at the time and how the frugality of limited budgets effect the way anime is made. And it looks at what cheap, populist entertainment means to the common man, and the motives behind the people who make it.

Assuming this is a relatively fair adaptation of Nakashima’s play (and beyond expansion of the plot, there’s no reason not to - Nakashima shows up to write an episode later on) then the themes of the story closely mirror the intention of Nakashima and Hidenori Inoue’s Gekidan Shinkansen troupe - the creation of a modern equivalent of kabuki, telling lively, relevant and populist stories.

There’s still much of the theatrical origins about the anime - the credits are written using theatrical terms, background paintings are treated occasionally as physical set dressings, one character is played by the actor who played him in the original play, and in one great episode, the characters put on a play recreating the events of previous episodes.

Now I know some people balk at this level of folding in on itself in a cartoon, prefering a straight narrative. I say these people are wrong. Almost straight out the box, animation has been experimenting with it’s own form, with the best of that experimentation being done in popular vehicles. Max Fleishcer’s Out of the Inkwell series from the 20’s had drawn characters, exist as drawn characters within the “real” world rather than characters in their own drawn world. Tex Avery had characters played with what you could do once you acknowledge the cartoon as frames on film. Bugs Bunny would address the audience directly, providing his own commentary on his actions. Breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging your existance as a fictional creation trapped in film is at the heart of animation innovation, and when a cartoon finds a new twist on that, to actually examine it’s own role in culture it should be embraced.

Oh and in the last 3 episodes it even finds room to take a pop at nationalism (Japanese nationalism in particular, but a lot of the points clearly apply to all nationalists).

Mononoke might have been more visually innovative, Denno Coil might have been more nuanced, Tenga Toppa Gurren Lagann might have more thrills per minute, but Oh! Edo Rocket is a little gem that deserves your attention.



2007 was a great year for TV anime, I’ve still got more series I need to talk about (To Terra, Shigurui, Kaiji, Moyashimon).

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Initial Thoughts on Oh! Edo Rocket

January 21st, 2008 by Brack

I’m now 6 episodes into this series, an adaptation of the Gekidan Shinkansen play by Kazuki Nakashima (who also wrote a little thing called Gurren Lagann last year), and I’m enjoying it greatly.

To a certain extent it’s another anime ABOUT anime, but it’s going a bit further than that. From reading about Gekidan Shinkansen and an interview with Nakashima, they have a strong belief in accessible, escapist, mass market entertainment. This has led Gekidan Shinkansen to claim their productions are a modern Kabuki, in that they fulfill the same role as a Kabuki did in it’s prime.

Oh! Edo Rocket is about that belief that art and entertainment should be escapist and available to the masses, not only the elite. This isn’t a metatextual theme, while the plot is ostensibly about getting a shape-changing girl from the moon back to said satellite, the message about art is upfront and blatant. It’s a view the majority of the characters seem to hold, especially the main character.

The story is set in 1842 making much of the enforced frugality in Edo of this era, and what impressed me in the sixth episode was how they drew the connection between this and the budgetary considerations of TV animation production. For a self-admitted filler episode, the script and direction had surprising depth. I’d like to get hold of Murakami’s Superflat book as I understand similar connections are drawn there.

Overall I’m finding it wonderful to find an anime that has something say about the form that isn’t pandering to otaku or overly cynical.

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Some Gurren Lagann thoughts.

October 6th, 2007 by Brack

Gurren Lagann finished last week. Here are some thoughts have occupied my mind since it finished.

* Playwright/Stage Director Kazuki Nakashima could well prove to be the best thing to happen to anime writing for ages. For all it’s ties to mecha shows of the past, the story is stripped down of the sort of filler and padding that dogs most anime shows. It arguably fits 2-4 different series into 27 episodes, changing tone to fit the story, but still maintaining core themes all the way through.

* Talking of themes, the story is revolves around what seems an essentially Japanese heroic archetype. The hero isn’t predestined, instead relying on hard work and the help of his friends/team. But there’s an interesting trick Nakashima seems to have done to reinforce this. Littered through the story are hints that things are predestined, that there is some “bigger story” unseen as yet. But there isn’t, in the end it’s clear that it boils down to human nature, and the simple choice of fight or flight.

* But it’s not just the writing, any other year this would be the best animated TV of the year. I’d give that to Dennou Coil at present as that looks to be pushing things forward somewhat. GL, polished as it is, is firmly mired in the imagery of anime from years past. Hiroyuki Imaishi does have a style that I’d like to see him use in a longform work (namely the one used in the ED of Paradise Kiss), but his more commercial style is in the shadow of the likes of Yoshinori Kanada and Osamu Dezaki. As well as borrowing Dezaki’s trademark postcard memory freezes at various times, one key shot is taken directly from Ashita no Joe (which Dezaki animated). In fact it’s kind of sad that the one episode where a director’s own visual style comes through the clearest is the one that was least liked, namely Osamu Kobayashi’s episode 4. At least in the final episode, where Imaishi’s fingerprints are most clearly visible, we get some of the heavy black lines he brought to Dead Leaves and Trava.

* Despite those gripes, the animation is amazing. The disgustingly talented Sushio really comes into his own on episode 15.

* Here’s how much I loved it - I won’t wait for the boxset when ADV release it. There’s enough quality on an episode by episode basis to warrant buying it in single volumes.

* I’ll probably return to it at the end of the year, or at least when I’ve seen all of Denno Coil, Mononoke and Oh Edo Rocket (based on a stage play by Kazuki Nakashima), as I think they bear looking at in comparison with each other, in terms of what they do with animation and story. And then I’ll return to it again when the ADV DVD releases come out as I’d like to do an episode by episode look at it, but the fansubbed versions were admittedly weak in accuracy, so I’d like to do that with a professional translation.

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