Feb
27
Winter anime
Filed Under Reviews, anime | Leave a Comment
Rideback is one of the more interesting of the winter season anime. Rin Ogata, a college student and former ballet dancer, discovers the college “Rideback” club one rainy day. Ridebacks are a kind of cross between motorcycle and robot. Rin is persuaded to have a go on a red “Fuego” Rideback to pass the time, and discovers that she has a natural affinity for controlling these machines, and that she finds it thrilling.
Politically, she lives in a world controlled by the GGP, who (we are told) are an obscure group who have suddenly conquered the world by the use of advanced military technology. They face some opposition in Japan from a group using terrorist tactics, who also use Ridebacks for their missions.
Soon Rin is racing against a much more experienced female club member, and matching her. She is entered for a national race, but using a less highly modified Rideback, the “Balon” which she doesn’t get on with so well. Afterwards, she uses “Fuego” to rescue her friend from a terrorist attack, in spectacular fashion.
I felt that the weakest part of this so far is the political stuff. Clearly a major objective of the story is to get a nice-looking girl riding a cool piece of machinery, but the political background lacks some credibility. To take over the whole world the GGP would have needed some very impressive weaponry and the strategic skill to use it, but we haven’t been shown it so far, and they just look like the usual totalitarian regime.
I’m also following:
Toradora! but the script seems (episodes 19,20) to be running out of steam. In episode 19 there is a lot of random and somewhat pointless action, and there is little sign that the scriptwriters are going to get a grip and resolve the relationships between the characters. Nevertheless I like the small and furious Taiga Aisaka, the caring Ryūji Takasu, the redhaired and changeable Minori Kushieda, and the tall, clever and gorgeous teen model Ami Kawashima. This series seem set to end in some disappointing and infantile way. Could it be that the “light novels” this is based on are also disappointing and infantile?
Maria-sama ga Miteru 4th: Back on form again with a uniformly interesting 4th series. Sachiko has charged Yumi with finding someone to be her younger ’sister’, but will it be Kanoko, Touko, or someone else? At episode 6, Yumi seems little nearer to making her mind up.
I also downloaded “Macross – do You Remember Love” Curious to see this 25-year old movie again; I first saw it at an anime convention, and later got a dub release of it (possibly as “Clash of the Bionoids”) M-DYRL is a an alternate retelling of the events of the original Macross television series, with new animation. Super Dimension Fortress Macross, to give it its full title, is a huge space ship that can transform itself for battle to something that looks more like a giant robot. The film revolves around three chief characters, Hikaru Ichijyo (a hot-shot pilot), coquettish pop-star Lynn Minmay, and the Fortress’ first mate Misa Hayase.
Sora wo kakeru shoujo (The Girl who Leapt Through Space) is a light space fantasy/comedy about a schoolgirl who resists an attempt by her family to marry her off to somebody she has never met, by embarking on an adventure involving a deserted space-colony controlled by a talking computer. On the whole I’d rather watch Macross DYRL.
Also checked: Genji Monigatari Sennenki - an anime adaptation of the famous Japanese classic writings. Gorgeous to look at, and the first episode is unexpectedly full of sex and sensuality. Kurozuka first episode set in the historic Heian era, I think – fleeing noble is given refuge by a beautiful but blood-thirsty immortal. Gorgeously animated, but have the feeling that the plot goes rapidly downhill as it goes rapidly future-wards. Michiko to Hatchin is set in South America (where real-life Japanese settlers have a small foothold). Poorhouse girl being graphically and grossly mistreated by a selfish family of bourgeoisie who have “rescued” her is reclaimed by her gun-toting criminal mother, who in a keynote scene arrives crashing through the window on a motorcycle. Looks like a lot of fun.
Feb
21
Winter reading
Filed Under Books, Reviews | Leave a Comment
Over the winter I have been reading several books related to Germany and World War 2.
The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940 1945 by J Friedrich. This is about the destruction of German cities by aerial bombing, and from a German point of view. It reveals quite a number of facts that make uncomfortable reading today. The destruction by the end of the war was remarkably complete, with no German city or town of any size escaping destruction, and in most cases suffering the destruction of something like 75% of the buildings. Many towns and cities were so shattered that they had almost ceased to exist. Civilian casualties were correspondingly high. The author describes the suffering of the bombed population, and rather pointedly, town by town, describes the fine or historic buildings that existed pre-war and were destroyed in the bombing. There was little pretence at precision bombing of military targets; at first, area bombing was all that was possible, and when it proved singularly destructive, area fire-bombing was refined, and if the primary target was masked by bad weather, a secondary target of no military importance would do, or failing that, anything German.
The cost to the attacking airforces in men and material was also high. And for what? The fire-bombing was designed to break civilian morale, and in this it signally failed, just as it failed in Britain. In the latter, post-Normandy phase of the war, when the bomber fleets went increasingly unchallenged, the raids were supposed to encourage the German troops and civilians to surrender, but, as the author points out, they lived in a totalitarian state, and it is very difficult to surrender to an air force…
(No wonder the British and American governments have been unwilling to condemn the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza in forthright terms.)
After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh. This is a massive 600-page book about what happened in the German territories after the end of the war in Europe. The dying didn’t stop in May 1945, when Germany surrendered, and things didn’t start to get better till around 1948.
3.6 million homes had been destroyed, leaving 7.5 million homeless. As many as 16.5 million Germans were to be driven from their homes, and some two and a quarter million would die during the expulsions from the south and east. The victorious Russians seized eastern territories from Poland, and gave to the Poles large tracts of eastern Germany, lands such as East Prussia that lie now deep within 21th century Poland. The nine million Germans living here were driven out of their homes, beaten, robbed and starved. Tens of thousands of those trying to flee died in refugee ships sunk by the Russian forces in the Baltic. Others died when trying to escape across the sea-ice. Others died of starvation while waiting for permission to travel westwards. It was a similar picture in the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia. The ethnic Germans were forced to flee to Germany, but not before the victorious Czechs had rounded them up into unofficial concentration camps, where they were beaten up, robbed, starved and sometimes killed.
In the Soviet-held territories, Russian soldiers raped and robbed at will, and in the French sectors the French colonial troops were equally energetic rapists. Everywhere, mobs of hungry and homeless former prisoners and slave workers took revenge against the Germans. The victorious Allies were slow to take control and restore order, and were more interested in apportioning blame and sorting out the more guilty from the less guilty in a wide-sweeping “de-Nazification” process. The prevailing feeling was that the German people as a whole deserved to be punished, and as is well known a number of prominent Nazis were tried and sentenced at Nuremburg. In the West, the Allied troops were given orders forbidding “fraternisation”. In the Soviet sector, rape and looting were tolerated at the highest level, right up to the Kremlin. Soviet troops stole anything that took their fancy, being particularly attracted to watches, gramophones and bicycles. Much German factory machinery was removed, particularly in the Soviet sector.
Meanwhile the Germans starved and shivered among the rubble. In any case, with the most fertile farmlands under Soviet occupation, there wasn’t enough food in Europe to feed them. Mostly, it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death, but women, children and old men. And despite the trials, quite a number of nasty Nazi war criminals escaped any punishment.
A striking feature of the book is the personal stories of individual Germans caught up in the aftermath of the war. Collectively, they paid a terrible price for having lived in Hitler’s Reich.
Reading the whole 600 pages, and the accounts of what happened to individual Germans, one cannot help but feel that this is a second holocaust that has been largely unknown to history, and that if it hadn’t been for two events: (1) the war and (2) the Jewish Holocaust, the fate of the German populations would have been the cause of some international outcry. As it was, they paid a terrible price for living in Hitler’s Reich.
Also received:
World War Two BEHIND CLOSED DOORS by Laurence Rees. This book accompanies a six-part BBC documentary series. This is a well-written and revealing book about the Allied leaders’ dealings with the Soviet leader, Stalin. British readers may recollect that the trigger for Britain declaring war on Germany was the German invasion of Poland. A few days earlier the Germans and the Soviets, formerly ideological enemies, had concluded a treaty of convenience. Rees explains the reasons why they did this. There had been feelers from the West about a possible treaty with the Soviet Union, but Stalin saw little point in making a treaty with unsympathetic nations. And two weeks after the Germans invaded Poland, the Soviets invaded Poland from the east. Their occupation had all the usual features of Soviet rule: terror, the pretence of coming to liberate, the destruction of the monied and educated classes, arbitrary arrests, mass murder, deportations, pillage, and the devaluing of the Polish zloty.
So did we declare war on the Soviet Union in defence of Poland? No we didn’t, because Britain had little enthusiasm for a war with the Soviet Union. There was also a secret treaty with the Poles that limited Britain’s obligation to defending them against attack from Germany. And did the conclusuion of WW2 leave Poland at liberty? No it didn’t; in common with the rest of Eastern Europe, the Poles endured another four decades of tyranny.
In 1941, however, Hitler found it expedient to break his treaty and mount a blitzkreig invasion of the Soviet nion. Stalin ignored warnings that an invasion was imminent, but later stalled the Nazi advance with his characteristic determination and brutality.
Rees criticises Churchill and Roosevelt for their poor handling of meetings with the Soviet leader. Stalin made demands for an immediate second front in Europe, and for massive shipments of war supplies, niether of which Britain could readily accomplish.
In the Ruins of the Reich – Douglas Botting. An earlier work, one of the sources mentioned in “After the Reich.”
A Strange Enemy People – Germans under the British 1945-50 by Patricia Meehan. An earlier work, one of the sources mentioned in “After the Reich”.
Postwar – a history of Europe since 1945 by Tony Judt. Massive 900-page volume giving the political, social and economic history of Europe from 1945-2005. ‘A masterpiece of schloarship’.