Poliglocia

Ich hatte die Autorin auf einer Messe getroffen, ihre multitalentierte Kombination aus Zeichnung und Erzählung zeichnete eine stimmige, düster-romantische Steampunk-Welt. Doch erst im Nachhinein verstand ich, wie lange sie schon im Genre unterwegs ist. Mit mehrfachen Romanen und Erzählungen ist Annabelle Talleyrand schon eine etablierte Serienheldin, und darüber hinaus bestehen noch mehrere andere Titel sowohl im Genre Steampunk als auch abseits von diesem. Von den ersten Seiten an ist das Buch packend und gut geschrieben. Das semi-historische Setting ist voller epochengerechten Details, von Technik bis Kleidung und sozialen Strukturen, die es sensorisch nahebringen. Talleyrands London ist besonders düster, sowohl im historischen Elend der Slums und zügellosen Frauenmorden, als auch im fantastischen Spuk von Wintergeistern und mechanischen Körpern. Ich muss zugeben, ich musste das Buch nach dem dritten Kapitel einige Zeit zur Seite legen. Die Beschreibung der konfliktiven Beziehung...

My original plan was to write a review comparing two Netflix animated fantasy series about warrior princesses that came out during the same time period: Disenchanted and She-Ra. The gesture in itself is already important enough: the setting known as "high fantasy" has been a bastion to conservative imaginations of an idealized past, excusing its imprecision and ignorance to construct an impossible primitive male hero. Surely, there have been numerous exceptions going against the stream, but the figure of the female heroine is finally taking the full spotlight, decentralizing the mainstream of this genre. On the other hand, the personal quest, friendship and transformation also seem to assimilate some of the anime genre of the magical girl. This is why I had high expectations of this entire movement taking place. However, I must confess I was somewhat disappointed by the first season of She-Ra. I was probably overinterpreting things. But since in previous cases I have lea...

A new take of an old title seems like a safe bet, but it is always an enormous risk. It has to conciliate two opposing elements: the fans of the old title, who want to see more of the same, and the new public, who needs an accessible point of entry. Unfortunately, in this case I am clearly part of the former. I got into Boogiepop like the many few who did back in 2000, by watching the desaturated, obscure and existential anime series. Some kind of interquel to the books it was, pending by threads from larger plots and spinning around one important, unknown moment. After that, I made my way to the life action film and some (not all) of the novels of this magnificent bizarre universe. At first glance, sure, there is a lot more color, and a whole lot cuter character designs. The tone of Boogiepop even contradicts the title, since she is always smiling. Although it sometimes goes with the intricate multiprespectivism of the novels, it also regularly breaks down into chronological narrati...

To begin to imagine the impact of Watchmen on a die-hard superhero comics fan like me, visualize a train-wreck taking place in twelve monthly installments. I may not have recognized Watchmen as a deconstruction of the hero, but certainly I realized (with a combination of horror and fascination known to rubberneckers everywhere) that there my precious heroes were being shattered before my very eyes, taken apart from the inside-out, in the pages of the medium that had always loved and cared for them, and in a style that demonstrated an obvious mastery of the medium that it now set out to implode. Thomson, Iain: "Deconstructing the Hero". In: . Superheroes and Philosophy . Open Court, Chicago 2008, P. 102. As for me, I never experienced superheroes as part of my childhood. When I was around 7 years old, everybody was crazy about "Batman Returns", but my parents wouldn't take me to watch it because it was too dark for a kid. In a way, they were right. I must ha...

This weekend the Europe's largest game fair, the Spiel, took place in my neighborhood. Since it has proven impossible to fully describe events that cover several days, I will focus on the Roleplaying Games I met on the fair this time. Of course, there are many others I didn't get to know enough about even to mention them, but here's a report on the bits I learned. Meikyu Kingdom: I had one more chance to try what calls itself a "cynical pop dungeon fantasy" with an experienced GM. The setting is a world consisting in its entirety of a massive dungeon and full of every random eclectic cliché of fantasy you can imagine, only even a little weirder because Japan. Characters are rolled together to produce absurd, but somehow consistent combinations. This time I was a butler called "Champion of the Messe" who had a constant itch for fighting. The system is confirmed for hilarious, random story driving and fun adventuring. In a long run, the party should a...

As every year, the Oberhausen Film Festival delivers more than anyone could possibly chew or swallow. The Latin American theme screening delivered excellent insight beyond the clichés the region often loses the perspective of itself. I also missed out on the retrospective on grand Chinese animator Sun Xun. Still, I will for now focus on the animation films in the international competition. One of the big winners of the year was Hayoun Kwon's "489 years". The film uses 3d animation to reconstruct the real testimony of a soldier on the border between South and North Korea. Of course, this reminds both of popular 1st person shooting games and of the "serious games" used for reconstruction of traumatic military situations, widely known through the work of Haroun Farocki. The director is conscious of these connections and sees it as placing her work between reality and fiction. The visions can, after all, only be true to memory and not to fact, and are mostly the i...

I believe Tale of Tales recovers the subversive potential of fairy tale. The synopsis for the movie in Germany presented it as "Fantasyfilm". It may be useful to know that the German word for fantasy is actually spelled "Fantasie", whereas the English word has come to be used by Germans what the rest of the world tries to make sense of as "high fantasy" or "swords and sorcery", thus covering the wide range from Conan to Harry Potter. But should this cover fairy tales as well? Opinions may differ. Although professor Tolkien would argue that all folk narratives, from Beowulf to Briar Rose , have a particular though anonymous author, some poet, behind them, I prefer to believe in collective creation (as posed by, for example, Levi-Strauss) that shapes a tale bit by bit like the ocean shapes a round stone. Of course, such unconscious processes can't be considered to be fantastic. I'd rather follow Stephan Frings, who claims that fan...

I know I'm late to the party, and probably most of what I'm saying has already been said anyways. I just want to get it off my chest. I think it is only fair to judge a work by the goals it declares itself to have. Pacific Rim declares through the voices of its narrators and heroes, to attempt to unite the different peoples of the earth against the disasters that are threatening to destroy its planet. Disasters that take the shape of giant monsters, but which are a product of pollution and environmental destruction. The first half hour of the film also seems to step towards its goal in a qu ite exciting way. The very fact that characteristically Japanese genres as kaiju, mecha and tokusatsu is being respawned by a Mexican director in Hollywood into such a self-conscious tribute is already of notice. Whereas other productions would turn it into a cheap parody, Del Toro treats the topic with unusual detail. Even in Japan tokusatsu and kaiju have always had a certain "B-S...

Proto Anime Cut is the first exhibition and the first publication outside Japan that presents these works as what they are: testimonies to a kind of individual and highl y inspirational artistic practice on the border of film, visual art and pop culture. In deed, it is a whole new sensation to have the sketches of Ghost in the Shell and Rebuild of Evangelion right there, in front of my nose. It gives me that profound, inside vision I've been craving for so long ago. It even gives me a bit of the sensation Walter Benjamin called aura, the mere mystification of metonymy. As for publications, I must point out that I am only the most humble and unnoticed of many western academics that have been writing seriously about the matters for a couple of years now (Vanina Papalini, Thomas Lamarre). As for exhibitions, it is also notorious how this brings anime once more closer to people who in other contexts would discard it as just weird cartoons. The group that went round with the guide was...