The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya

[Author's Note: If you're just curious about what I thought of the movie, skip down to where you see the asterisks. Otherwise, this is a very lengthy post. I've noticed that no one tends to read the entries about anime (except for the dozens of people who keep coming here for Tekkaman Blade pics), so I went crazy with it. If you want to read a 2300-word post, knock yourself out. I promise you none of it will be on the exam, though.]

It is difficult to find good, creative, original science fiction. Sure, some people might have that one friend who does nothing but read science fiction anthologies and keep up with all of the latest material on the web, but the rest of us have few sources and even less time. What the popular multimedia world is most often known for are the scifi retreads – either of old works or old ideas. “It’s the delivery that matters!” we say to ourselves. While true, it also opens ourselves up to eating the same cereal so long as the marshmallows are offered in new shapes and/or colors. For example, I loved four and a half seasons of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica despite the fact that it was a retread of the original BSG that invoked the darker and edgier trope and borrowed heavily from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Blade Runner and a little from the rest of the Philip K. Dick library. I recognized the sources clearly but still moved forward. That may very well be the reason why I was able to move forward with it.

There are no more original ideas. It’s all be done before. The movie trailers on TV look like items from either a few years to a few decades ago. It seems like movies are being made just so the studios have a steady flow of product coming out. No one holds off for the great ideas. No one devotes time to meticulously perfect a creation. Having something out there is generally regarded as being much better than having something great.

I’ve always been an anime fan. The general anime fan likes to cite creativity as a reason why s/he prefers Japanese output over American. I’m not that fan. I’m not an otaku, as I’ve said before. I watch what I watch. While the ideas over there are decidedly different in origin, they area also quite plagued by hackneyed ideas. Watch enough Japanese content and you find that it becomes increasingly more difficult to find original ideas. (Even in writing this introduction to a review about The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya I’ve realized that it is not entirely original because it could be considered a lighter and fluffier version of Akira. I’m still moving forward with this idea of original content, though.) No matter where you look, people borrow from ideas that they find interesting.

A look at Doctor Who and Mythology – DW series 1 and 5

Dum-dee-dum-dee-dum-dee-dum-dee...

In a previous entry I mentioned that the British scifi series Doctor Who could very well be considered a modern myth. Since then I have watched the entirety of the ninth (Christopher Eccleston) and eleventh (Matt Smith) Doctors’ runs on the show. This is two full series – 26 episodes. Based on this sample alone, which is a drastically small microcosm of the television show, I cannot liken Doctor Who to mythology. It certainly has some mythic elements, but I refuse to let that be an indicator of anything based solely on the fact that writers far and wide decided to consciously include mythical elements into their works after the publication of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.