In Defense of the Obvious

Until about two years ago, I was a film student at one member of the loosely-affiliated gob of mediocre colleges spread over Chicago's South Loop neighborhood. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant experience; Columbia's administration tries their best (at least aside from the scandal-prone president) but they're crippled by an open-admissions policy that leaves the school with far, far more students than it can handle.

Film school, of course, influences the way one watches movies in quite a lot of ways (sooner or later, I'm going to do shot-by-shot analysis in this space, and half my readers are going to die of boredom) - but one of the least obvious and most profound has turned out to be the lasting aftereffects of watching well over a hundred student films, a good 98% of which were earnest, enthusiastic failed attempts at making an original idea work.

I came out of that experience with two things: one, absolutely no tolerance whatsoever for fan films, and two, the following principle ingrained deeply in my approach to creative work: It is more important to be right than to be original.

As with most of the beliefs I hold about how moving pictures ought to be made, I've managed to convince myself that it's widely held among anime creators. Exhibit A is the character designs, which have happily managed to avoid anything like the Klasky-Csupo bout of Ugly that animation went through here in the US a decade or so ago, and have done it by hewing close to (and developing a truly deep understanding of) one basic sort of design model.

And besides, it's only by drinking deeply from the well of the unoriginal that you understand just how much can be done without ever straying from it.

Kaleido Star



I imagine there have been shows more predictable than Kaleido Star in the last few years. I've probably even seen the first episodes of one or two. But there's not much margin left.

Seriously, was there any doubt, from the first moment the words "Mystical Act" or "True Kaleido Star" (in the second season) were uttered, how the story would play out?

The trick is, that's not a problem. In fact, it's exactly why I could never stop watching this show until I ran out of episodes and had to get more. I burned through Kaleido Star in a way I can't imagine rushing through more innovative shows like SaiKano or Haibane Renmei.

Kaleido Star - along with all the other really good sports anime - is about mythic triumph. Inevitable triumph. It's about how much fun it is to watch characters you like succeed. And it's about repeating what you already know.

You know, the idea of the novel, in the sense of a "new story," is just a few hundred years old in the West. Shakespeare never told a story his audience didn't know (and if he was even a little worried, he gave them a damn outline at the beginning.) It used to be that the whole art of storytelling was saying the same old things in a new way.

Every so often, we need that. And I don't, for a minute, mean "comfort food." I have trouble even grasping the concept; I don't see how a person can be reminded of the things they thought they believed, or the things they wanted to believe, and not be a little shaken.

What I mean is that, every so often, you need to ask yourself: Do you really believe in yourself?

What do you want to be the best in the world at? Are you trying as hard as you could be?

Did I leave behind a film career in favor of computer science because it wasn't my real calling, or was it because nobody tried to bring me back?

Give it a shot sometime. Watch some sports anime. (Hikaru no Go isn't bad either, and Battle Athletes Victory has a startlingly good grasp of its metaphor.) Ask yourself if you'd do as well in the main character's place. See if you don't have somewhere in your life where you could ganbarimasu a little more.