I was trying to watch another Kobato episode earlier tonight and I just could not stand it. The show is absolutely dull and you would be hard-pressed to convince me otherwise. I’m following Kobato as she goes around a giant university campus looking for some dude (I think his name is Fujimoto) and the big elephant in the room just kept jabbing me in the face with its nose: who gives a damn?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, a really big movie just opened last night. You might have heard of it… N…. New…. New Moon? Ah yes, the proud sequel of the mega box office hit Twilight. In honor of this momentous event (is there any doubt New Moon will gross hundreds of millions of dollars domestically?), let’s take a look at the vampire mythos and how one anime re-interpreted it.
In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom (which is quite a mouthful so, from this point on, I shall refer to this arc simply as Cherry Blossoms) is a metaphorical story of man versus woman, rustic masculine ideality versus progressive feminine liberation.
I’ve come to dread writing about Aoi Bungaku as it usually leaves me disappointed. I could spend an hour diving into both the novel and the anime to write an entry, but I’d get more than twice as many views had I written about some trashy harem anime instead. After seeing the last episode of the No Longer Human arc, however, I guess it deserves one last entry.
I had written before that I wouldn’t touch on No Longer Human again until I had read the novel and also seen the arc in Aoi Bungaku, but after getting about halfway through the novel, I felt compelled to note the drastic differences between the two. Spoilers for the first episode and first half of the novel.
