Blue Funnies: May 2008

The following list is a testament to Japanese animation’s unceasing ability to warp and terrify any viewer (particularly children) placed before its gaping maw of complex storylines and high-quality animation. Perhaps you recognize some or all of the following sequences, and share similar feelings to those I experienced. Watching these clips feels very much like having your brain run through a sausage maker and thrown back into your skull. They may have terrified you as a child, and terrified you still more as an adult. I have selected these sequences for their cultural impact, their power to emotionally scar audiences, and the weirdness that makes us keep thinking about them. Relax, enjoy, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

[Writer’s note: I acknowledge that this list is far from being comprehensive or complete. I am merely noting the sequences that have personally warped my mind and influence how I approach Japanese animation. I encourage and invite all readers to submit their own suggestions and additions to the list. Together, we can truly begin to chart just what the hell Japan has done to us. Group effort!]
[One more note: I've been fiddling with the blog's code... if I did it right, you can now click on links to open up any jumbo-large posts, like this one! Isn't technology great?]

5: Darien is brainwashed to become evil and - by extension - badass, in Sailor Moon (1993)

Now keep in mind, everything’s relative. This scene is quite tame compared to its contenders on the list, but I was first exposed to it as an impressionable young girl who religiously followed every new development in the Moon Kingdom. All us girls knew that villainess du jour Queen Beryl was evil bitch incarnate, but we were not prepared for her scheme to turn vapid love interest Darien against our miniskirted heroine (at 4:00 in clip). This was, of course, before we realized that every cartoon has the token evil guy who’s “good, deep down in his heart!” No, this was serious business in our day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvgIiZ5LmWA
(Sorry, can’t embed the video)

In retrospect, however, you have to concede that the vilification of Darien was not altogether negative. In fact, he became kind of a badass. Consider: in the clip above, he attains the ability to jump at lightning speed and displays impressive skill with a sword. This is an important development. Darien’s most famous - and considerably un-macho - alter ego is Tuxedo Mask, whose only visible power is throwing a rose into the field of battle, and departing without doing, well, anything. This is no problem to the swooning Sailor Scouts, but as a character, his character was trapped in a vortex of perpetual suck.
Perhaps this scene (before Sailor Moon dials up the dinner-plate eyes at about 6:45) provided Darien a brief respite from hopping around like a fruit before he’s seduced back to the side of good. And by a locket, too. Jesus.

4: Yeah, basically the first eight minutes of Elfen Lied (2004)

Oh, what an exciting year 2004 was for animation in the land of the rising sun. Most of the buzz generated was for a single show, specifically the first eight minutes of the first episode of said show. Why? Several experts now agree that the opening sequence of the controversial anime Elfen Lied was scientifically designed to make your brain’s moral center shrivel like a California raisin. Let’s count the evidence, shall we?
• Our subject, an utterly naked woman named Lucy, is in the middle of escaping from a facility. What kind of facility? We are certain it was designed to do terrible, terrible things, because she wants to get the hell out.
• Aforementioned naked chick proceeds to get the hell out by tearing off the head of any guard unfortunate enough to be in her way (4:20). One has his legs ripped off; another is lobotomized by a ballpoint pen. All of this is done by a pair of horrifying invisible nightmare arms sprouting from her back.
• After determining that guards’ blood is in fact a kind of magenta neon paint, Lucy finishes by beheading a clumsy secretary and using her corpse as an improvised meat-shield before going on her merry naked way (6:45).

With this evidence noted, our collective of anime scholars can safely conclude that this modest eight-minute sequence serves as a sort of gift for the world - a key to an unceasing chamber of terror, gore, and boobs. We should have noted earlier that this video is not safe for most workplaces. Chances are, you’ve already watched it. Oopsy.

3: The way robots were meant to rumble - by dismembering enemies and traumatizing children - Neon Genesis Evangelion (1996)

Having one example from this show was almost a given. You guys knew this was coming. A million-dollar franchise, Evangelion revitalized the giant robot genre of animation, but it took several unorthodox turns during the show. The adolescent children that serve as main characters are from what we like to call “circumstances:” they’re one repressed memory or antisocial tendency away from being carted off to the funny farm. But of course that makes them the perfect candidates for piloting unruly, biomechanical monstrosities that fight an assortment of aliens and large abstract shapes. Right?

Okay, We’ll give them that. In the above clip, pilot Shinji expresses misgivings about attacking another robot, albeit one hijacked by a creepy fungus. Operation commander (and supreme asshole) Ikari, nonplussed by Shinji’s irrational reluctance to kill a fellow child with his monster machine, decides to do it for him - by throwing the robot on autopilot (2:20).
In the scene’s most chilling moments, Shinji uselessly flails at the controls as his EVA unit proceeds to viciously dismember the rogue robot, splattering robo-juice on nearby buildings (3:15). The pilot survives, and as Shinji emerges from a bout of screaming he discovers that the poor kid being pulled from the wreckage is one of his classmates. More screaming ensues.
And on a kids’ television block, too. Lord, I can’t wait for the children of the 90s to grow up and enter society.

2: Fun times with Barry the Chopper on Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)

We all think we know how a shonen (boy-focused) anime is supposed to fly. A couple of precocious whippersnappers go on epic adventures, becoming pirates or ninjas or doing whatever the hell they do. It is usually a very safe bet that the self-confident hero will not find himself running around for his life in a meat-packing plant.
Yet this is precisely where we find ourselves now. Fullmetal Alchemist has received well-deserved praise for its captivating and sobering tale of brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric, but it was this sequence that gave its audience night terrors.

Searching for his missing friend Winry, towheaded young alchemist Ed gets konked on the head, and wakes up tied to a chair with his prosthetic arm sawed off. He is then menaced by his kidnapper - a gleefully scary serial killer named Barry the Chopper. And not just any serial killer - yes, that’s right - a cross-dressing serial killer (0:25). Ed escapes, and begins a frantic fight for his life through endless rows of death and meat (2:05). Things turn out all right in the end, but there’s no covering those emotional scars.
In fact, it’s these scars that makes the scene, and the series as a whole, so special. Once he’s out of harm’s way, Ed breaks down, confessing his fear of death to Al through a burst of sobs. It’s heart-wrenching, and more importantly, it’s honest. No over-confident shonen jackassery here. Maybe that’s why this particular event sticks out so well to me, after 5 years. At the core, there’s some real trauma here.

1: Good old-fashioned mutation thanks to Akira (1988)

We owe Katsuhiro Otomo’s animated trip of a film for this list’s existence. Twenty years ago, a studio somewhere in Japan thought it would be a really neat idea to show a kid mutate into a horrible oozing giant and release it in theaters, starting a shockwave of pure anime grossness across the globe. In the clip itself, a cocksure psychic teenager touches some things he was not supposed to touch, and mutates into what looks like an inside-out fetus. Only it’s three stories tall. He and his friend on the motorcycle exchange bouts of screaming (“Tetsuooooo!” “ Kaaneeedaaaaa!”) before the entire thing implodes into a ball of utter weirdness.

Thanks to Akira and these others, the world will never be the same. The children of today’s world go forth boldly, knowing that the world before them holds a Pandora’s box of robot fights, monsters, tentacle porn, and way more besides. Sure, one generation of impressionable minds have been warped beyond all recognition by this cavalcade of horrors. But I believe that it’s prepared us in a way, for life’s unexpected turns and grapples with the darkness. For just when we think it can’t get any weirder, a new season of anime starts. And we’re facing it head-on, dammit!

With big warm fuzzy secret heart