Jinki: Extend - 01

Mecha shows have had a bit of a hard time since Evangelion.

I don't mean that Eva set a new high-water mark for quality; I like the show, but actually I think its quality above a certain baseline wasn't really relevant to its effect on the industry. The effect I think Eva had, rather, was to call the genre conventions into question. According to classical genre theory, that should have sparked a "revisionist" movement within mecha shows, which would examine and question those conventions, followed by a final descent into parodies and the end of the genre life-cycle.

The defining parody, though, when it came, ended up being Nadesico, which not only came too soon, but wasn't even sure it wanted to be a parody - it really, deeply revered its source material. The effect has been glorious confusion; directors who want to make mecha shows aren't really sure, anymore, what the conventions are, or if they're "allowed" to approach the subject matter without irony.

I'm mostly in favor of this, since it means the genre's become delightfully unpredictable, but it also means that new shows are awfully hard to pin down. It's mysterious to me, so far, what Jinki is trying to do. Making Aoba a mecha otaku seems to be hinting at a Nadesico-like self-awareness, but on the other hand, nobody's questioned the core conceit that flighty teenagers are really the best people to pilot giant war machines.

Not that they've ruled it out. The story arc's already been suggested by the first two scenes, assuming that the first is the flash-forward that it appears to be. In particular, the art: the first scene is gray and shadowy, and the second (Aoba at home with her grandmother) is bright and pastel, but both are designed to make us aware of their art as an unusual element. It's meant to consciously not look like the anime we're used to.

Then, once Aoba's in the military base (and, by inference, in an environment where she's comfortable, as opposed to girl-otaku-in-a-men's-world, where she doesn't seem to be) the colors and drawing style revert to an essentially neutral palette.

This is an arc that's practically the reverse of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey - Aoba starts in a place that's not really home, journeys to a place that is, and then returns. Or, alternately, mecha-pilot life turns out to be not so wonderful, which I don't really need to do visual analysis to predict. It's one of the oldest conventions of the genre.

Not to mention another very old trope that appears in Jinki: the mecha's cockpit is in the head. That was its location in the very earliest shows, but it was quickly moved to the heart for very sound Jungian reasons. I'm not sure if Jinki is trying to reverse the standard meaning of that placement and imply the primacy of reason over emotion, or if they're trying to evoke an older generation of mecha designs.

Or could it be a subtle hint at the wrongness of the mecha crew we've just been introduced to? My first reaction to that Biblical quote was to worry about it as a sign of Xenosaga syndrome (how sad that Namco's legacy is probably going to be nothing but knee-jerk negative reactions to religious symbolism for years to come) but it's a quote about temptation by evil, and it's placed on a pedestal after the credits. Obviously, we're supposed to be made uneasy.

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