I just marathoned the now infamous Endless Eight story arc of fan favourite anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzamiya and I’m feeling somewhat fatigued. You don’t really need to know anything much about the show to understand the issue other than that it’s probably the anime of modern times with one of the most loyal and dedicated fanbases. The show’s producers apparently decided that they’d put that fanbase’s loyalty to the test by developing a story-arc based on a very short story, in which events repeat themselves to infinity until the characters work out how to stop it. Not a particularly original premise, I’ve seen it in movies and I’ve seen it done particularly successfully in an episode of Star Trek : TNG ‘Cause and Effect’.  The Enterprise keeps blowing up at the end of a looped sequence of events and Beverley Crusher has to work out how to stop it. The difference here is that, whereas in other incarnations the narrative repetition is used as a device to move events forward and over 45 minutes to an hour it can be a lot of fun seeing the same thing differently, here the narrative is replayed 8 times, once per 20 minute episode per week, and nothing changes. There’s no building sense of drama, no characters leaving themselves messages to pick up, no significant differences episode to episode, it’s pretty much the same thing every week only directed slightly differently.

The result is a complete artistic failure, but one you can sort of admire at a distance, given that I’d rather a world in which insane creative decisions such as this can get the go ahead than one where we just get the same old story dressed up differently for mass consumption. In all probability this was the point that the show’s creators were trying to ram home, if you’re going to watch the same old anime week in week, harems, panty shots, walking in on girls in the bath etc etc you may as well have exactly the same thing week in week out and have it nicely animated. After the third or fourth run-through though, I confess I was beginning to look for interesting spots on the paintwork rather than the TV screen, my interest only really peaking to see what Haruhi’s new bikini was like each episode and to laugh at a couple of parts of dialogue I happened to find particularly funny. Ultimately though, despite the fact that the ending to the sequence -namely the final 5-10 minutes of retelling number eight - stood tall with any previous episode of the show, I felt that my time could have been much better spent.

Yet, I’m not filled with outrage about the whole affair like the anime community seem to be. For instance, this is a typical online response

“Great, it’s over. But guess what? The damage has been done.

By wasting eight episodes of the new season that I waited for years for, they’ve effectively lowered my opinion of the anime as a whole. I probably won’t be purchasing any DVD with Endless Eight on it. A story that should have taken two episodes at the most doesn’t deserve a buy.

I almost want to throw out the Haruhi DVDs I already have. If I could return them, I would, and buy something from a company that doesn’t spit on the fans of its works.

(If I could find such a company.)”

Kyonami - Melancholy’s studio -  may well have predicted the petty small mindedness of the majority of people when deciding to go through with this arc. Some people are going to appreciate the experiment, some will be bored, some may even tune out of the show. Others, however will destroy their DVDs and their merchandise because they did not like 8 episodes of a show they used to be incredibly passionate about.

You have to wonder who is giving who a bad name, really?

Another blogger has summed up why the Endless Eight arc of Haruhi was the anime event of 2009

http://m3.dasaku.net/twelve-memories-of-anime-2009-02-endless-eight/1396/#more-1396

so I won’t repeat his words other than to emphasize that I agree that sometimes the primary interest of art can be in watching people’s reactions to it and maybe sometimes that’s why art is actually created. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzamiya was never a show that did things by the book and it built it’s fan base on that very fact, the first series of the show notoriously airing it’s episodes in an apparently random order, just because it felt it could. Now it seems that following this “stunt”, if stunt it was, a movie has been released adaptaing the story arc that all of the fans were complaining they were missing out on because the Endless Eight arc was taking so long (The Disappearance, or Vanishment of Haruhi Suzamiya) and one can’t help wondering if partly the whole exercise was meant to get people talking about the show purely as a bid to market the movie.  Therefore, one could argue that the whole point of the show is to get people talking about the show.  It’s paradoxical maybe, but whilst most art is pertaining to being an emotional truth, or perhaps just a rollicking good time, here’s a show that’s deliberately being dishonest, is begging people to hate it and basically existing  just so as to be noticed.  the subsequent flamewars and constant accusations of televisual trolling by online commentators are maybe the end in themself that the producers of Haruhi were looking for. 

Regardless, it seems to have worked out for the best.  The movie’s ticket sales have been very good in Japan and despite the fact that Endless Eight didn’t set my world on fire, I for one will still be watching the feature as soon as I possible can.

Finally, one of the funniest Youtube videos I’ve seen in a long time. Hitler himself complaining about his frustrations with Endless Eight.

It’s probably been about a year since it was originally announced that Keanu Reeves is to play Spike Spiegel in a forthcoming live action movie version of anime classic Cowboy Bebop. I had a good healthy rant and moan when I found out (only a few close friends lost their lives in the incident), but it’s still taken approximately a year for me to assimilate and process the knowledge and as yet I still haven’t found my peace with this.

For those that don’t know, Cowboy Bebop is probably the most widely admired and well respected anime TV series of recent times. This is partly because it’s an all round well made and produced show with great characters, great artistry and a good sense of fun and excitement. I suspect it’s also partly because it’s a show that borrows a lot from western sensibilities and modes of storytelling. It’s a sci-fi western featuring a crew of ragtag, good for nuthin’ bounty hunters with compromised morals just trying to get their next meal and to get by. One is a young, dashing guy, good at martial arts, sarcastic, selfish but also in love. Another old and wise and more benevolent than he’ll let on. A third is a sexy, dangerous woman trying to find answers about the mystery of her past, ad so on. It’s a great show to watch for anyone interested in finding out about anime as it’s sharp and cool and usual anime convention is largely absent. It also has the advantage that it was a show that actually aired on US TV at a time when TV companies were interested in giving it a shot.

But the point is, I needed to explain what the show was.

Those who don’t know the show probably outnumber those who do by about 100,000 to 1. As well regarded as the show is amongst die hard anime fans and a few casual geeks, realistically if you walked into your local cinema and questioned the people you found there, you’re going to get a lot of blank looks if you start asking people what they think of the decision to cast Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel.

In theory I’m not against the idea of bringing a Japanese TV show to mainstream attention by making a live action movie version but I do wonder at the motivation of those who are prepared to spend a lot of money and effort in doing so when the first thing they do is cast Keanu Reeves as the main character.

Remember Constantine?

Most probably you don’t, and that’s largely because Reeves was cast as John Constantine, a character who, in the comic Hellblazer is a blonde chain smoking foul mouthed abusive, vicious cockney who in image and tone couldn’t be further from your generic Keanu Reeves hero type. When Reeves was cast as Constantine there was outrage in the fan community and this is because anyone who had read the Hellblazer comic knew from that moment that there was no commitment from producers to adapt the comic; just to use the name for commercial benefit. And yet, Constantine the movie didn’t do very well despite Reeve’s supposed star power even though the film was as solid in an average way as most blockbusters are, and that’s probably because no-one in the world except the die-hard comic fans had ever heard of Hellblazer and had no real buy-in to see a movie. Fans of the comics – of which I wasn’t one at the time, but am now – would only have been irritated by the adaptation, particularly as many comic fans love to see their favourite series turned into a good movie, and would only have given the film poor word of mouth. The upshot is that the movie won’t have made much money and very few people will have been encouraged to check out the excellent source material for this dire movie, wrongly assuming that it’s similarly generic in tone and feel.

So here we are again. A studio has offered up a lot of money to bring a much loved show to the big screen presumably with the hopes of making a lot of money and getting a lot of people interested in the franchise (footnote), but they’ve done so with the proviso that the movie features a big name star as a marketing pull. Yet again this star is the hopelessly uncharismatic, bland and frankly incapable actor that is Keanu Reeves, and as with Constantine, I couldn’t imagine anyone less suited to play the lead in this movie. So, yet again we have a situation where studios are going to be pushing a movie based on a property that no-one has ever heard of, the upshot of which will be no-one’s going to be going “ooh, Cowboy Bebop, awesome!” and director Watanabe won’t be propelled to international stardom as a result. Fans of the show who could potentially help broaden the appeal for this kind of thing – like me - are simply going to be cursing everyone involved with this project for blotting the copybook of one of their favourite shows. I’m aware the original series won’t be tarnished by a bad movie – I don’t even like the original anime movie much, for it’s portrayal of Faye as victim – but for those who even notice, it will tarnish the very idea of the franchise in the heads of the west and serve to make it even more difficult to persuade people that anime is a medium worthy of their time.

With the popularity of both comics and anime fading in the West and many genuine companies and distributors of these things struggling to keep their heads above water, I confess that I find this ignorant attitude continually frustrating and annoying. Ultimately it would be much more rewarding for everybody if, instead of pushing more junk on us, the time and effort were put into marketing and promoting the original quality franchises in the first place,