Anime For Beginners

I know it’s not universally true, but I feel pretty secure in saying that most people probably view anime as a very niche interest that’s mainly for perverts and shut-ins. Well I'm here to say – NOT TRUE! Or rather – NOT ENTIRELY TRUE! There is a lot of great anime out there, and if you give it a chance I'm sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I'm not professing to be an expert on anime, in fact I'm very much an amateur. I was planning on naming the post something like Top 10 Anime or My Favourite Anime but a more accurate title would be – Most of the Anime I Have Seen. This is by no means an exhaustive list, this is more just a summary of what I've seen so far and liked as I've begun to develop an interest in anime - a starter pack if you will. 

Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood

These two shows are adaptations of the same manga – they start the same way, but then diverge and each go in different directions. They’re both amazing and I'm going to talk about them here like it’s just one show because that just makes things easier.

So the show takes place in a universe where alchemy is like an advanced form of science, and the military recruits alchemists like soldiers because they are so incredibly powerful. The story follows two brothers – Alphonse and Edward Elric who were in a terrible accident when they tried to use alchemy to bring their dead mother back to life (something which is considered taboo in the world of alchemists). In this experiment Edward lost an arm and a leg, and Alphonse loses his entire body and his soul is alchemically fused by Edward to an empty suit of armor  So far, so ridiculous. Over the course of the series Edward and Alphonse search for the Philosopher’s Stone so that they can restore themselves to their original bodies, and they uncover a lot of secrets about the nature of alchemy and the country of Amestris along the way.

The thing about anime is that no matter how weird or silly the premise is (often: very), it tends to take its subject matter and characters seriously in a way that makes you really care what happens. It doesn't talk down to its audience and instead offers complex and flawed characters, complicated plot-lines  and serious moral questions that have no easy answers. This is something you don’t really find that often in Western media, especially cartoons. Fullmetal Alchemist is no exception to this, the cast of characters is huge but you end up caring about every single one of them, even the bad guys! There are constant plot twists and revelations, you are questioning what is going on until the very last minute, and it has some of the best and most nuanced female characters I've ever seen in an animated series (or any series for that matter). I really don’t think any of my gushing about this series is going to do it justice, so just watch it. Oh and as a general rule with anime series – you have to give them at least 5 episodes (preferably 10) before writing them off, because sometimes they take a while to get going.

Studio Ghibli

I couldn't bring myself to only select one Studio Ghibli film to put on this list, so I'm just going to talk about all of them. Pretty much every Ghibli film I've seen ranks among not just my favourite animated films of all time, but my favourite any kind of film of all time. I know Studio Ghibli isn’t some obscure underground studio that nobody’s heard of, so I hope I'm not patronising anyone when I say – go and watch some Studio Ghibli right now.

Ah, how to I begin to describe the brilliance of Ghibli movies….OK first of all, they’re beautiful, if you have any interest in animation at all you’re bound to enjoy them because if nothing else they are visually stunning. They often have incredibly weird elements – woman turns into giant crow, fish grows chicken legs and then turns into girl, tiny cat statue comes to life, WW2 fighter pilot has pig’s head….the list goes on, but despite this, the stories being told are generally incredibly simple and easy to relate to. They’re about universal themes, like accepting yourself, falling love, growing up, getting along with others, and no matter how weird they are, the stories are always both touching and powerful. When you contrast them with Disney films (and even some Pixar films to be honest), they explore much deeper issues and have a much more nuanced approach to their characters and subject matter. There’s something Miyazaki said which I think really sums up why this is - “The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.” 

So as for which ones I recommend - Studio Ghibli has released 18 films so far, and I've seen 12 of them. All the ones I've seen are undeniably brilliant, but if I had to choose my favourites they’d be Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle, with Ponyo as a close runner up. Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbour Totoro are a lot of people’s favourites, but they’re both a little light on plot, so maybe not the most engaging introduction to anime. A lot of people get very sniffy about the English dubs and especially about the use of mini-Disney-kids as the voice actors (Dakota Fanning, Noah Cyrus, Frankie Jonas etc) but I saw screw those people because they are elitist snobs. Personally, I enjoy a film a lot more when I can focus on the actual animation rather than on reading the subtitles, and I think all the dubs are fantastic SO THERE.

Hotarubi no Mori e (Meaning: Into the Forest of Fireflies' Light)

I don't really know whether to call this one a film or not, since it's only 45 minutes long, but whatever it is, it's great. This one's definitely very Ghibli-esque, it reminds me a lot of both Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. It's about a young girl who meets a strange spirit in the woods near her grandfather's house, and their ensuing friendship. It's a very short, sweet and tragic story, and I think it would be a great introduction to anime for anyone. 

It's technically categorised as "shōjo" which means it's target audience is young girls ("shōnen" is anime targeted at young boys, like Fullmetal Alchemist) but don't let that sway you, labels like shōjo and shōnen are more like guidelines than actual rules.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

This was the first non-Ghibli anime film that I ever watched and I love it, definitely one of my favourite films. The animation style is gorgeous, the concept is really interesting (regular girl suddenly gains the ability to time travel), the characters feel realistic, and it's also often really funny. I love a good time travel story, and this is definitely one of the best I've seen. Makoto, the main character, is just a regular teenage girl, and when she suddenly finds herself able to time travel, she uses it to solve all her regular teenage girl problems (with predictably terrible consequences). I love that Makoto is just kind of a clutzy idiot, it makes the film feel more authentic to me, and it makes me care more about what happens to her because she seems real. This film doesn't have any of the truly bizarre elements that can make anime feel not very accessible when you're first introduced to it, so it's probably a good place to start.

Summer Wars

Summer Wars is from the same studio, director and writer as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and is equally brilliant. It tells the story of what happened when a globally used social networking site called 'Oz' (which most people use to do their banking, work, and most other important things in their lives) is overrun by a powerful virus. It's got some really cool action scenes, and as well as all the stuff going on in this virtual world, it also tells the story of the Jinnouchis, a huge and very old Japanese family (loosely based on the real life Sanada clan). Because Japanese culture is so different from Western culture, it's really interesting to see a film that explores family history and family relationships, and of course a story about a whole family working together to defeat evil is pretty heartwarming.

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OK, so I guess that's a top 5 of sorts, and by that I mean I've gotten to 5 and then gotten bored, so this is going to be the end of the post. THE END!

My Favourite Irish Writers

I recently went on my second trip to Dublin. The first time I was there I dragged my mum and brother to the Dublin Writers Museum, and the most recent time I spent one of the days of my trip traipsing around the city going to every bookshop I could find, and it also happened to be Bloomsday while I was there (coincidentally, Bloomsday is also my birthday). All this Irish literary...ness inspired me to write this post about my favourite Irish authors, or rather...some of my favourite authors who also happen to be Irish.

Oscar Wilde 1854 - 1900
Oh, Oscar, I love you so much. People don't tend to think of Oscar Wilde as an Irish writer, despite the fact that his full name was 'Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde' (pretty damn Irish), because after attending Trinity College in Dublin, he spent most of his life away from Ireland. But despite moving away and losing his Irish accent, Wilde still said of himself "I am not English; I'm Irish which is quite another thing."

Bram Stoker 1847 - 1912
Dracula is one of my absolute favourite books, and I never actually knew that Stoker was Irish until my first visit to Dublin 2 years ago, but he is - surprise! Stoker was actually a friend of Oscar Wilde's family, and ended up marrying the girl who Oscar wanted to marry (or...said he wanted to marry).

W.B. Yeats 1865 - 1939
By most accounts Yeats was kind of a fascist crazy person - he was pretty publicly anti-semitic, he spent 27 years pursuing the same woman and then proposed to her daughter, and he had a fairly hardcore obsession with the occult...but dang, homeboy knew how to write a damn poem. Consider the following - Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury, the Joni Mitchell song Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the Van Morrison song Crazy Jane on God and No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. All Yeats quotes. Because everyone wants to get in on his amazing word magic. Seriously, that list could be way longer, kinda seems like any time someone can't think of a title for something they just go "Hey, whack a Yeats quote in there, that'll do".

Jonathan Swift 1667 - 1745
Jonathan Swift was a SATIRE BOSS and I love him so much. Gulliver's Travels is awesome and everything, but my favourite things by him are without a doubt 1. This hilarious poem about a stanky lady and 2. A Modest Proposal. Ah, A Modest Proposal, I love you so. Personally, my favourite kind of satire is the kind where the people it's critiquing are too dumb to get it and they all flip the fuck out. In this essay, Jonathan Swift suggests that the poverty problem in Ireland could be solved by the Irish selling their children for meat and rather than being like "Lots of people are starving to death in Ireland and obviously we need to do something about it", all the rich English people were like "OH MY GOD JONATHAN SWIFT IS A CANNIBAL AND HE WANTS US TO MAKE GLOVES OUT OF BABIES!" Hilarious.

George Bernard Shaw 1856 - 1950
This dude wrote a lot of stuff, but is most famous for the play Pygmalion (which in turn is most famous for being turned into the musical My Fair Lady). Shaw won a Nobel Prize in 1925 for his contributions to literature and initially wanted to turn down the prize, but his wife convinced him to accept it because she considered it a 'tribute to Ireland'. Yeats had become the first Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature two years previously.

Seamus Heaney 1939 - STILL GOIN' STRONG
Seamus Heaney is considered by a lot of people to be kind of the "new Yeats" in terms of important Irish poets. He wrote a lot of poems about the unrest in Ireland in the 60s and 70s (the Troubles), and many of his poems talk about the political situation in Ireland through talking about preserved bodies that were found in peat bogs. I realise that sounds incredibly weird and morbid, but they're very beautiful poems. My favourite thing by Seamus Heaney is actually his translation of Beowulf, it's totally the best one and it's lovely.

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This list is a bit of a sausage fest, and for that I apologise, These are all writers I studied over the course of my Bachelors in English Literature, and sadly for me my curriculum was a little light on ladies. I have resolved to read some more books by Irish women though, so this list is my new friend.

For those of you who noted that Beckett and Joyce were both absent from this list - sorry, but I hate them both. Deal with it.

Read This Thing: Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Disclaimer: this is going to be a glowing, gushy review. I will not be critiquing this book, I will be squeeing over it - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

I downloaded this book for two reasons, firstly because I saw it recommended in this Rookie Mag article, and I thought it sounded interesting, and secondly because when I then googled it the first thing that came up was this New York Times review of it by John Green where he says: "“Eleanor & Park” reminded me not just what it’s like to be young and in love with a girl, but also what it’s like to be young and in love with a book", and that is exactly how this book made me feel, too.

I don't read a lot of YA, and when I do I tend to feel a little embarrassed about it, it's a guilty pleasure. I also never read Romance. I mean, obviously, a lot of the things I read have romantic subplots, but if a book's primary genre is Romance, I am extremely unlikely to even look twice at it. So this book - a realistic, YA Romance, was a pretty big leap from my comfort zone but I decided to pick it up anyway and I am so glad I did.

I'm not going to bother discussing the plot here, because if I'm not giving anything away then it all sounds like pretty standard boy-meets-girl stuff, which I guess it is technically is, but it's also a lot deeper than that. The only way I know how to explain it is that this book snuck up on me and wormed its way into my heart. Normally when I read about teenagers falling in love, I find myself rolling my eyes a lot and thinking about how glad I am that I'm not a teenager any more, but reading Eleanor & Park I was just sitting there with a huge grin on myself, rooting for these two ~*misunderstood teenagers*~ to work it out.

This is going to sound a bit cheesey and personal - but Eleanor & Park reminded me of how it feels to be in love when you're a teenager, when you've never been hurt before and you think that no one will ever really understand the deeply special and unique love the two of you have for one another. With this book, you're not just seeing that phenomenon from the outside, reading it makes you feel like you're really living it.

There are two final things I want to mention about how great this book is. Firstly - the cover is adorable, but it's mostly adorable because it's so different to other YA covers, especially YA romance covers, and especially especially YA covers aimed at girls. Books like that typically get slapped with a miscellaneous object or with a picture of a girl with her face cropped out  (they like doing that, they think it's clever). But Eleanor & Park got a great cover and after all this talk about how gendered marketing for YA books is harmful to readers etc etc that's something I find really encouraging.  The other thing I wanted to say about how great this book is, is that it's really refreshing to read about characters who are a bit different than standard YA protagonists, because there's one thing that YA authors love to write about even more than vampires:

Specifically white, skinny, conventionally attractive characters. I'm obviously not saying there aren't any other books that feature minority or marginalised characters, but it's definitely a comparatively small number. In this book - Park is a half Korean boy who likes to wear make-up, and Eleanor is a plus-size girl who looks a little different to everyone else and suffers for it. To be honest it makes me sad that this is remarkable, but it is. There's a quote I've seen around (which I now can't find for the life of me, obviously) about how not seeing yourself reflected in the media is the quickest way to feel dehumanised...something like that anyway...so the characters in this book are another thing I find really encouraging, and that makes me really happy.