Cartoon Heroes

Happy Spring! I'm sure most of you lovely readers are preparing for Passover, Easter or just the end of winter (albeit a very mild/practically nonexistant one)! Things have been very springy here in the store; flowers, bunnies, and matzoh-patterned pot holders adorn our store along with all the other spring holiday goodies just waiting to be brought home!

In my usual preparations for this spring holiday weekend, I have been spending my free time for the past few weeks stitching together brightly colored garments and detangling my unnaturally colored, four-foot-long wigs, and listening to Asian pop music.

I know what you're thinking: "Wait... what?"

Yes, this weekend I will be joining my fellow nerds and attending Anime Boston, New England's largest anime convention. Every year, about 17,000 otaku (anime fans) gather in the Hynes Convention Center (often dressed as their favorite characters) to celebrate their love of anime, manga, video games, J-pop music, and other nerdy type things originating in Asia. It also happens to usually fall on the same weekend as Easter and Passover. So in honor of this glorious event, and to inform those not familiar with anime and its fandom, I will share some of my wealth of knowledge and passion on the subject.

In order to talk about anime, you have to talk about Japan and its history. For most of its history, Japan was basically isolated from the rest of the world. In fact, for about 260 years, it was isolated by policy: Between the year 1600 to the 1860s, no foreigners could enter Japan, save a small number of Dutch and Chinese merchants, who were mainly confined to a small island off the coast of Nagasaki. Some of you may have read David Mitchell's novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which chronicles the story of a Dutch merchant who travels to Nagasaki during this period and falls in love a young female scholar. Beautifully written, this novel gives the reader an excellent picture of life during this unusual period and the clash between two very different cultures.

Then, in 1868, Commodore Perry of the USA sailed into Tokyo Harbor on a huge battle ship and After American Commodore Matthew Perry forcibly opened Japan in 1867, everything changed. Not only did Japan rapidly modernize its government, infrastructure, and society, but culture rapidly changed as well. One of the people most responsible for introducing this cultural change was Yukichi Fukuzawa. Born into a low-ranking samurai family, he went on to learn English, travel around the world, become a translator for the government, and found his own university with an entirely new way of teaching. Basically, he's the most impressive guy ever, and his autobiography is absolutely fascinating.

Since then, Japanese and Western cultures have influenced each other immensely. While Japanese citizens were adopting Western dress and customs, artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet were becoming inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and incorporating Japanese style into their own work.

Early anime (Japanese animation) and manga (graphic novels) were based largely on the style of Walt Disney, but the style has since developed into its own unique entity which now has become popular in the United States. Cartoons such as Avatar: The Last Airbender are clearly influenced by anime, and many contemporary Western artists have adopted the flat, simplified, kawaii (cute) style epitomized by Sanrio and Hello Kitty. Children's books, too, have adopted this style: French artist Annelore Parot's Kokeshi series clearly imitates that of Sanrio and many other Japanese artists, while Felicia Hoshino's bilingual book Sora and the Cloud uses a much looser, painterly style.

Finally, for the animation enthusiast, I must recommend The World History of Animation. This hefty and rather epic book shows year by year some of the most important works of animation from around the globe, including many Japanese films such as Akira, My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke. Looking through this book, I basically wanted to see as many, if not all, of these films as possible... but I think that would take a long time.

Anyway, I'm really excited about Anime Boston, guys. I look forward to a weekend full of crazy costumes, music, skits, dancing, panels, artists selling stuff, and everything else that happens at these things. If you find yourself in the Copley Place/Prudential Center area, you're sure to see many of my fellow otaku enjoying the weekend. Don't be afraid: even though we look kinda weird, most of us are pretty cool people. You might even see me! I'll have blue hair, if that helps.

 

 

 

If this blog post has inspired you to even join in the festivities, check it out! Create an instant anime costume with our Anime Eyes glasses; it's all you really need to look like a genuine otaku. Grabbing a few of our sushi-themed accessories or cute Japanese erasers can't hurt, either. Banzai!

warning: graphic (novel) content!

So, I know that I am terribly late to this particular party, but I just finished reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, which came out in 2006 and was immediately nominated for every book award ever to exist.

If you had told me, even a year ago, that I was not only going to read a graphic novel but finish it and want to read it all over again, I would have told you to get real. Graphic novels? Pshaw. A fancy name for comic books, and I grew out of comic books when I realized that Betty was never going to triumph over Veronica, back when I was about...oh...eight years old. So, year-ago me would have told you NO. I am not going to read a graphic novel. I am fully grown out of picture books.

Ah, but now, after reading Fun Home, I am converted. Bring on the graphic novels (the well-written ones, anyway -- just like I don't want to read a bad novel, I don't want to read a bad graphic novel). Pile graphic novels in front of my door and lock me in my room until I have read them all. I will do so with a happy heart and a smile on my face.

Hyperbole and triteness aside, I really did adore Fun Home. The storyline is as complex and delicious as any well-loved novel. Bechdel chronicles her somewhat tumultuous relationship with her late father, slowly discovering his homosexuality -- and her own -- over the course of the memoir. Only a few weeks after Bruce Bechdel comes out to his daughter, he is hit and killed by a truck -- whether his death was accidental or intentional is for the reader, and Bechdel herself, to figure out. What juice! What depth! Bechdel's chronology is wonderful and twisted -- we know of her father's death and potential homosexuality before the book really digs into the meat of the text. Bechdel also dialogues extensively with other texts and authors, including The Odyssey, Ulysses, The Importance of Being Earnest, Fitzgerald, Camus, and Proust, and does so gracefully.

Bechdel's skilled, thoughtful illustrations added immensely to her text. They don't just illustrate moments in the text -- although some do exactly that. They, instead, dialogue with the text itself; there's a wonderful sequence in which the text is discussing Oscar Wilde and his encoding of homosexuality in The Importance of Being Earnest, and the illustrations are of a community theater group rehearsing for the same play. Speech bubbles coming out of characters' mouths are indicative of the text above: it's hard to describe with no image, but in one panel, the caption text reads Then Wilde was tried for committing indecent acts and sent to prison while both The Importance and The Ideal Husband were playing to full houses. In the accompanying illustration, the director instructs the actors to "take it from 'please don't touch.'" Aghh! My little English major heart goes pitter-pat.

As worried as I was that the illustrations would make it seem as if I were reading a comic book, Fun Home is anything but. Some illustrations are quite adult; there are depictions of dead bodies and lesbian sex, and there is nudity throughout. And they're skillfully done; facial expressions are lovely, and Bechdel draws in different styles depending on what she's depicting -- maps, photographs, or real-life moments. And the final illustration brought a lump to my throat.

So, bringing it back to me (as always!), it's like Evan wrote a few weeks ago -- try something that you don't think you're into, be it Booksmith events or graphic novels or anything in between. I fully plan on devouring the next Bechdel material I can get my hot little hands on, and I definitely recommend Fun Home as a starter graphic novel for anyone who thinks they might be even slightly interested in the genre.

__

P.S. We're having a graphic novel author right here at Booksmith at the end of the month! On November 29, at 7 PM, Phoebe Potts will be reading from her new novel Good Eggs, which deals with her journey on the road to motherhood. Come in and try graphic novels out for yourself!

Books: The Movie

I love books and I love movies, so I'm always interested when the former become the latter. I know plenty of people who moan over it, but I don't.

For one thing it often brings people to books they may have otherwise forgotten or overlooked. The Coolidge Corner Theater recently played the new adaptation of Brideshead Revisited and we've sold more copies of that title in six weeks than we did all of last year.

I also think you can like the book better (you'll always like the book better!) but still find a lot of value in the film. I remember getting into a pretty fierce argument with a friend over an adaptation of Mansfield Park. She argued that the director had totally misunderstood and abused Austen's characters and as a result she absolutely hated the film. In some ways she was right--the Fanny Price of the movie was a very different heroine than she was in the book. But I still loved it. I enjoyed what it was for what it was and I appreciated that it made me reexamine the book, what I liked about it and how I understood it.

I got to thinking about all this as Wednesday's Publishers Lunch posted an item from The Hollywood Reporter about a kerfuffle regarding the series of movies in the works based on Tintin. I hadn't even realized movies were being made! And the kerfuffle is over whether Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson is directing? I'm smiling either way.

What do you think about movie adaptations? Do you have any favorite (or hated!) book-to-movie translations?