[Footnotes] What Qualifies as "Deep"?

Hello everyone hope you're having a lovely day, and allow me to introduce you to a new feature of this blog. "Footnotes" will be a series where I give my biased opinion on whatever subject that I've heard through the grapevine, or something that was I've been turning over in my mind for a long time. Now, I must stress that this is NOT a review; where I'd take one certain anime/book and analyse to determine whether it's worth 12-24 episodes/100-500 pages of your time. While I may use a certain anime/book as an example for my argument, or even go as far as study themes of a certain show or book, no 10 star ratings will be made here.

So with that out of the way, let's get on the topic at hand, a topic that really occurred to me after watching an anime movie last night. That movie was none other than the 1988 classic Akira, the story of a young member of a biker gang whose suddenly given psychic powers, and sees this as the perfect opportunity to get over his massive inferiority complex. Oh, one more thing, I'm basically going to spoil the entire movie in the next paragraph, so...spoiler alert. Now my thoughts are still a little jumbled; I'm still on the fence about how much I actually liked the film. But that was until the ending. What do I mean?

Well basically after the young biker boy Tetsuo Shima's psychic powers become so powerful that Tetsuo can no longer control them, they start literally tearing him apart...and reproducing flesh faster, until he becomes a growing ball of skin and blubber. Now I'm not going to put a picture here, since that scene is truly one of the most grotesque and disturbing things I've seen come out of anime(and keep in mind this is anime), so if you want a mental picture trying imagining your ball of brown Play-Doh growing in all directions until it becomes something vaguely human shaped and starts crying for your help while it crushes its blue Play-Doh girlfriend against the wall. So understandably, these three psychic children view this event transpiring as a "bad thing", so combining their powers, they call down the first psychic being to ever exist: Akira. Now Akira was ascended into a greater existence then most people I suppose, for some reason, and after he arrives, he makes a huge explosion of death and exposition. What I mean is that whoever is caught in the explosion has their memories flashed across the screen(again for some reason), where we learn the origin of Akira through the memories of the psychic kids. Then the explosion pretty much engulfs almost the entire city, and in the aftermath, our hero Shotaro Keneda finds himself in a huge crater, and sees that Tetsuo has vanished; presumably taken by Akira before he vanished into the freakin' ether.

Now after looking over people's reviews and opinions on "The Wired",  I found most people see this movie as either a masterpiece or overrated, but nobody seems to question how "deep" it is. And you know what? I hate that word. Because when it isn't being used to justify Neon Genesis Evangelion, it just seems like an excuse. That you can say something is "deep" because it flashed some symbolic images across the screen, or that the show is "deep" because their story was so convoluted by the end that they had to throw in some religious bull and blow everything up(OK sorry, talking about Evangelion again). Now apparently Akira somewhat mirrors the story of the Bible(read about that here), but here's my question: why? What purpose is there to adding a religious undertone in this film, besides making yourself look smarter. My thoughts are similar with Evangelion(yeah we're going to be talking about this show a lot), it throws so many subtexts at you that the story it presented to us: the story of a 15yr boy who needs to save world, becomes drowned out, and now needs to support the undertones, so cue End of Evangelion where a character gets turned into a literal angel. Evangelion didn't seemed to understand that with all this metaphoric stuff it  has added to its already broken plot, it made its original story pointless. Subtexts should support the story's meaning, not make the story change itself to support the subtext, at least in my opinion, and I understand if you disagree. Now trust me, I understand that the creator of Evangelion himself even admitted that his story was "meaningless", but that doesn't stop people I know in real life saying how brilliant. How "deep" it is. Guys, I'm sorry if you disagree, but Evangelion isn't "deep", it's just confused, and it needs someone to show it where I know that hidden message is buried, somewhere underneath a pile of religious metaphors. Now let's turn back to Akira, whose ending may or may not support the subtext as well. Now Akira, I'm not against you having some second meaning, not at all, but I shouldn't need to go outside your own story to completely understand it, though I know some will be inclined to disagree. You can have a meaning behind your story, but, as I've stated before, you can't rely on it to understand your surreal ending. Why? Well for the reasons I've already stated, but here's the most obvious. People have different interpretations of things, convinced a story has some sort of meaning when it doesn't, and that's fine, but you can't assume that everyone will pick up on the same meaning. I didn't. Maybe that's why the ending makes less sense to me than other people. I just assumed Akira was just a huge examination on the human psyche, but really, I'm not going to state that with confidence. I'm sure the meaning behind the story will be changing a lot during these next few days. And that's exactly my point.

Lil' Slugger from "Paranoia Agent", armed with his trademark golden bat. 

Let's change gears to something more positive shall we? Let's talk about Paranoia Agent: a 2004 anime series done by Studio Madhouse and directed by the late Satoshi Kon. Again, before we begin, I would urge to stop reading now and skip to the last paragraph if you don't want to be spoiled, OK, good, let's go. Long story really, really short, Paranoia Agent's plot follows events surrounding the mysterious vigilante: Lil' Slugger, a grade-schooler who apparently has nothing better to do then go around on his roller blades and whack people with a crooked golden bat. But not any random person. Once we find out that he only targets individuals that happen been driven in a mental or physical "corner", and have nowhere to go or run, the subtext alarm in my head instantly went off. Turns out that by some happen-chance cause by being hit over the head with a baseball bat, the person's problem that originally drove them into a corner will just...vanish. For example we see a girl who finds out her father has been taking pictures of her undressing in her room. Completely emotionally wrecked, she wanders into the rain, and wishes desperately that she didn't know, that she had never found out. Cue Lil' Slugger, and with once swing with a bat, she has amnesia, and doesn't remember everything. As the series progresses, we see Lil' Slugger attacks become more and more common, and strangely, he doesn't seem small anymore, but more like a fully grown man. At the very end, when Lil' Slugger becomes so powerful that he begins to engulf Tokyo as a black cloud of some sort, we learn that Lil' Slugger was originally a made up story woven by cartoonist Tsukiko Sagi at a young age, when she convinced her poor father to buy her a puppy. After relaxing the leash one day walking the dog, it ran into the street and got promptly hit by a car. Unable to admit to her father that it was her fault, Tsukiko made up the story of a boy with roller skates and a golden bat hitting her over the head, thus making her let go of the leash. Now of course, there's a lot more to it than that, but I gave the most summarized version I could, point is I'm sure you get the idea. Lil' Slugger represents daily distractions and conveniences. The more and more you rely on them and don't take responsibility for your actions, the more it becomes a tumor making you think that things will instantly fix themselves. When Tsukiko is able to take responsibility for her actions at the end of the series, she finally banishes Lil' Slugger, and the message is as simple as that. Well, of course there needs to be some more symbolic stuff going on in the series, but the reason I can get behind Paranoia Agent's message is that is actually relates to the story, and at the same time doesn't get in the way of it. The anime isn't perfect with the execution granted, there's some parts of the anime that won't make sense unless you pick up on the message, but this is more forgivable, since for me, Paranoia Agent is undoubtedly trying to convey this one message and this one message alone. A message that doesn't need to be understood in order to understand the story, and a message that can only enhance what you've seen instead of being a pointless side-show that has little to do with anything.  If you want the full story on Paranoia Agent, this guy does a load better explaining than I ever could. 

The question: "what qualifies as deep?" is a question built on a steep slope of sand and ice if you know what I mean. The answer is, of course, different whoever you ask, but I'm just going to say mine. A deep story is one with multiple layers, layers that build on the story you see, enhancing its themes and ideas. These layers can't be like Evangelion however, layers located a thousand miles away not relating to the story at all really, and at the worst come off as pretentious. These layers can't rely to be noticed as well, because everyone has different interpretations, so whatever subtext exists can't shape the original story. Having a deep story isn't easy, I never said it was, but they do exist out there. I'm not saying that deep stories particularly have to follows these rules I've set down, because there's exceptions to everything, but more me at least, this is something I can look to when I'm judging a story. Now, if you excuse me, I haven't had lunch today, so I'm just going to mosey over the the market and get a hoagie. Oh, by the way for the record, I did like Akira...just not the ending. Goodbye for now guys.

How about checking out my other 'Footnotes' discussing School Days here?

Or click here for my review on Angel Beats.

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