Anime Review | Weathering With You

A scene from the anime movie, "Weathering with you". Image credits: https://images.app.goo.gl/f5VgJ6NmwAaUXASa7

There might be some spoilers here and there so approach with caution if you have not watched the film.

My first thoughts after watching this movie was that this was a wonderful mix of Japanese folklore and a realistic depiction of the trying years that job-hunting teenagers go through. The story opens with a young boy who came from somewhere suburban and detested the boring, unmeaningful life he once led. He made his way to Tokyo and had a fateful encounter with a middle-aged man who wrote magazines (the boy would eventually work under him). When he parted ways with the man, he went all over the place looking for a job but was told he was not of the legal age for employment. He almost collapsed at a McDonalds outlet when a girl working there, whom he would come to love gave him a hamburger free of charge and saved him from going out cold due to hunger. The rest of the story surrounded the popular legend of the weather maiden and how she would influence the weather.

This highly acclaimed film directed by Makoto Shinkai was well-timed, as the world increasingly experiences the effects of climate change, such as more unpredictable and extreme weather. While we grumble about how whimsical the weather could be and how it would affect our livelihoods, we yearn for certainty and comfort, such as being in a long, passionate relationship as exemplified in this anime. There were many crazy scenes on how the protagonist chased after his lover, which was a stark contrast to the reality check and existential crisis that the film painted at the start.

 While loving someone else with all your heart and soul is admirable, I find that the buildup of romance in this film was too extreme. There was law-breaking, skydiving and war-mongering (using the weather) included in this film. While these rebellious scenes might look really thrilling, their means were too extreme. I am sure having a blissful life is more than two people making love - there would be no point in enjoying life with your lover if you bring down the whole society in the process! But that was the choice made by the protagonist in order to save his lover from the tragic fate of being a weather maiden (which I won't spoil here).

Generally, I quite liked the theme of two worlds - one being the scientific and logical society we are so familiar with (other than the idiosyncrasies we face at times) and the other being the fantasical, legendary world we come across in our myths and stories. This conflict provided the staple for most of the drama in this film.

The animation, colours and music were wonderful, as always from this particular film director. I did not know the sky and a metropolis could be so beautiful (even though the former was mostly blue and the latter was mostly grey). And I could listen the soundtracks for a while day. The songs made me feel that I was speaking my heart out. As an introverted person, this was a really special feeling. Once you listen to "Daijoubu" by RADWIMPS, you might know what I mean.

Overall, this anime was a really good piece of work. It would feel more personal if you watched it on a rainy day.

Anime Review | Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

Original picture credits: http://shanabrian.com/

Before writing this post, I did some research online to get a second opinion of what other anime fans think about this anime. I was surprised to see that the opinions were quite mixed and divided, despite the fact that this anime enjoyed immense popularity.

With that being said, I will try my best to write something that does not overlap with the other reviews out there. For me, I just watch an anime as a form of recreation, and I am not a hardcore anime fan, so I do not know much about the technical aspects of anime production. My opinions are as good as any person you find randomly on a street, so do not expect too much of this post.

Rather than focusing on how this anime fared in comparison to other works or whether someone should watch this anime, I will emphasise on what I learnt from it and what I enjoyed while watching this anime.

The Visuals

The animation and the colouring looked way, way more stunning than a fireworks show. The movements were bursting with action, and reflected the characters personality well. I have never realised so much information can be expressed by a single movement or a single frame in the anime. It made me understand "a picture is worth a thousand words" all over again.

The smallest, subtlest details, from the patterns used in the clothing and buildings, to the different shades and tones of colours that were masterfully applied in the anime, had a great impact on the overall visual effect. They could even help to express the feelings of the author or the artist, be it the fierceness of one's anger, or how dazzlingly brightness of a city. I learnt to be able to appreciate that the smallest details of life play a big part in a person's success, because when these details add up, they could elevate the performance of a person entirely. Putting in more effort for the details is definitely not a waste.

Many of the graphics in the anime have a purpose too. They communicate the time, location and the culture of the various story arcs in this anime. It allows the audience to learn more about Japanese culture, folklore and history, giving the story more meaning and making the anime more memorable.

The Music

There are a lot of earworms in this anime. Even though it had been a few weeks since I completed watching the anime, I could still remember how the background music, the opening and closing music sounded like. The amount of effort put into creating these beautiful melodies must have been unimaginable.

One thing I liked about the music was how it incorporated traditional and modern elements. Respecting tradition and bringing it to life via innovative ways such as combining it with modern music to bring a refreshing experience is something that other cultures can seek to emulate. In this way, tradition can preserve its original flavour and still remain relevant enough to be passed down to future generations.

The Morals

The character development in this anime received quite a bit of criticism, but I am not critical of it. I still liked the straightforward and pure personality that the characters in this anime present. To me, what stands out the best in this anime, beyond its highly acclaimed audiovisual effects, is the traditional morals that it promotes through the storylines of every character.

In the beginning, the values of filial piety and industriousness are shown when the main character, Tanjiro Kamado, works hard to sell charcoal for a living to support his family when he was still in his teenage years. The job involves chopping down trees, as well as travelling up and down the mountain he lives in - all of which are extremely physically exhausting. Yet he persists so that his family could get by and be able to live under decent conditions. Later in the anime, industriousness is also demonstrated when Zenitsu only mastered one form of thunder breathing by putting in much effort for his training, but it was powerful enough to beat up demons, proving that anyone can become great by giving their all even at a single thing.

The value that is expressed the most in this anime is the kinship between Tanjiro and his family, especially the acts of kinship displayed with his only surviving family - Nezuko, albeit her being turned into a demon. Tanjiro never gave up on his sister when she turned into a human, and gave everything he had in search of a cure to turn her back into a human, even though most Demon Slayers would not have hesitated to kill her. 

Familial bonds and love were also demonstrated through the backstory of various demons. The story of the "Spider Demons" family in this anime proved that familial bonds could not be gained through fear and subjugation, but by unconditional love and trust toward one's family members. Nowadays, many families are fractured, separated and twisted. Such values are sorely needed to improve the dismal state of families in many places around the world.

Other values expressed in this anime would include respect and gratitude for others. Some humans tried to turn into a demon because their work was disrespected by others and fell into despair. On the other hand, Tanjiro exemplified this value well by not looking down at anyone, including demons. Instead of simply killing demons, he was actively trying to understand the motivations behind their heinous acts and help them overcome their troubles, going as far as to offer them a kind act in their final moments in life. As for gratitude, Zenitsu became a demon slayer because an old man helped him pay off his debts caused by falling for a scam by a woman. Zenitsu wanted to work for him to repay the debt, despite whining a lot about the old man's training.

It is not hard to spot references to these traditional values which had been honoured by millennia in much of Asia. Many of these values come from Confucianism, a philosophy that heavily influenced the politics, society, economics and culture of East Asian countries. Unfortunately, Confucianism did not sell off as well as the American Ideals which were widely known through popular media. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba provides a promising future to which these Asian values and beliefs can be more widely known and understood by people around the world.

"Mother" - a tribute to Mother's Day

Image from GIPHY.

Mother's Day is the time of the year when mothers still carry on with being mothers. They take no breaks from the most important role in their life, and we can only cheer them on along the way.

Old fashioned ways of celebrations include handwritten letters, a feast, a bouquet of flowers, a combination of warm hugs, kisses and "thank you"... No! Please save the hugs and kisses for after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, thank you. These means of showing appreciation are very much in trend today.

However, with the coronavirus hitting hard, many people could not be with their mothers. They can only talk to their mothers via video call and cannot be physically there for them due to movement restrictions.

It is the perfect time to unleash your creativity! E-cards can be sent to your mother's email or social media app as long as she is tech-savvy enough to open it. Colourful graphics, sleek animation, enjoyable music, and your own personal voice message... It is as good as a card you can get for your mother. Another means of celebrating Mother's Day on the cloud is more popular in Singapore, and that is singing songs. Many people dedicated songs to their mothers over live streams and radio stations. There are also those who choose to sing with their mothers and have fun together.

My Mother's Day present is my rendition of a song, "Mother". My voice does not only speak about the gratitude I feel about my mother, but also about what I can do for Mother Earth and all mothers around the world. Something tangible coming out from this idea can be to waste less electricity (save money on bills and have a lower carbon footprint) or to comply with COVID-19 mitigation measures such as staying at home and wearing my mask outside (to help make the day when this nightmarish pandemic will end and the start of our mothers' unrestricted movement to every place come faster).

I first recorded and released this video on Instagram with a thought-provoking description. Enjoy!

"Mother" for Mother's Day You stare into nothing but a voice. It tells you what to be grateful for, our mothers, and Mother Earth. Let's be strong and overcome COVID-19 so that they can enjoy the freedom they deserved. We can all be traced back to a single mitochondria, so we are a big family spanning across many generations. To that end, let's unite, and not divide, to do our part to save lives through our actions (stay home, waste less, spread joy). Together, we can hope for a brighter future and see the light at the end of the tunnel.

What I learned from "Terror in Resonance"

Terror in Resonance. Zankyou no Terror. This is basically an anime about two beings who technically should not exist threatening to blow up places around Tokyo to get their voices heard. It has a beautiful story.

Poster for Terror in Resonance.

These two boys were part of the three who made it alive from the failed experimentation on children under the age of five using an accidentally developed pharmaceutical drug that is thought to cause superintelligence in the subjects of the experiment. This experiment is called "Project Athena" and as of the end of the anime, all 26 children who were part of the experiment died. The motive for the experiment was to create superhuman intelligence (inspired by people with Savant Syndrome) - the ultimate weapon - that would help Japan to be independent from its misery and humiliation ever since the end of World War II. The desire for a few politicians created such a horrific experiment, as well as the theft of a new atomic bomb prototype created by the US, and resulted in a crisis when Nine (one of the two boys) released the atomic bomb to the stratosphere and its explosion will release powerful electromagnetic waves that destroy all electrical appliances.

What got me interested and started researching was savant syndrome. It is a real condition in which the mentally disabled are able to demonstrate qualities that far surpass others in aspects like memorisation, language learning, creating art, crunching large numbers...

After more researching online, I was amazed by Daniel Tammet's story. Not only he had savant syndrome but also synesthesia, which allowed him to perceive numbers with other senses, enabling to give each number a unique shape, texture, colour and feel. I really think there is a high probability of this person inspiring the anime. Synesthesia was mentioned in the anime too, as Twelve (the other boy) was able to see colour in sounds, and told Lisa that her voice was a rare pale yellow. Incidentally, Tammet was able to learn Icelandic, which apparently is a difficult language, in 7 days and made it in time for an interview. In the anime, there were many references to Iceland, especially in the music Nine liked to listen to, and the Icelandic word von which means "hope".

Although having such awesome mental capabilities might not be possible for most of us, I believe there is something that can be learnt from such mental conditions. They provide insights in how learning occurs, and how we can optimise our learning process to increase the effectiveness of the learning.

I understood some concepts from a video summary of Barbara Oakley's Learning How to Learn book. It takes a considerable effort for our brain to form neural connections that play a crucial world in our learning process. These connections need to be consistently maintained not by repeating the learning of the content but by actively trying to retrieve the memory. Otherwise, such connections would weaken and eventually break off over time as the brain does its own "pruning" to forget things that are not important for us to know.

Back to savant syndrome and synesthesia, I believe that when we add more flavour to what we learn and incorporate more of our senses, what we are trying to learn can be more deeply etched in our brain. In addition, these mental conditions allowed me to gain a new understanding of how intelligence works - a large number of connections that function to help the brain make sense of the world and survive in it. It seems like this is similar to how machines work - the more the number of connections, the higher the amount of operations they are able to perform, and the higher their efficiency and "intelligence" will be. Each data point represent a new set of connections, thereby causing these machines to increase in complexity and in turn, their abilities. Likewise, if we are able to connect something new to what we already know, to make it more colourful and tangible, our brain will be able to digest this more easily. This could be similar to Tammet's thought processes when doing Math, the numbers change in their shape and form while he processes complex calculations, and memorising more than 22,000 digits of Pi to him was describing what he saw in a film (that conjured out of all these numbers).

However, before we are too quick to accept that this theory of how the brain works is true, my beliefs on these were mostly dispelled by an article on Aeon. It wrote that thinking the brain as a complex machine might not be the most accurate. Our brains do not actually make any signatures of what we learn. That means that all our perceptions and knowledge are not stored physically, and we can only guess as to what the brain is thinking through its electrical activity, which has no obvious pattern that tells us what is going on in the brain.

All these sound so magical. The brain is the most complex object in the universe, and there is so much we do not understand about it. The Aeon article fascinated me so much that I began to wonder whether our brains are even more powerful than quantum computers, which make use of quantum properties like superposition and entanglement to greatly boost the computing power we already have on this planet. It would be a wonder if technology can catch up and even surpass this organ and it is closer to reaching than we think - look at artificial intelligence, and we already have a robot citizen, Sophia.

Tammet is such an interesting person. I cannot wait to view his TED talk once I am finished with this blog post.

References:
https://www.aruma.com.au/about-us/blog/5-amazing-people-with-savant-syndrome-the-truth-behind-rain-man/
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2005/04/man-who-memorized-pi
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
https://www.research.ibm.com/ibm-q/learn/what-is-quantum-computing/
https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_tammet_different_ways_of_knowing/transcript

Movie Review: The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu)

It was one of the most thoughtful and beautiful works of art I have ever seen with my own eyes. I feel ashamed for myself after watching this film.

This movie is a tribute to Jiro Horikoshi who designed the A6M World War II fighter plane. At word of this, people may think: What is so beautiful about a weapon of mass destruction, for does not it bring out the most evil of humanity? But that, and all other great planes engineered, would have been merely a product, destined for failure, destined to be overtaken and destined to meet its end. It sounds like a sisyphean ordeal - to work so hard for something to be of success, only to have it destroyed and restart again. But the real beauty should lie in the satisfaction gained from inching one step closer to a faraway dream. Plus, if certain things are never to be removed, how can there be more progress and innovation?

I personally feel the most important takeaway of this movie is not about the technology that makes the country which owns it proud, but about the power of dreams and how far they take us into our long, winding lives. A lot has been packed into this two hour film, every detail in it holds a certain significance to this message contained within itself. I did not even understand what its meaning at the first look, but when thinking more deeply into it, I felt that without myself having the privilege to be able to chase my dreams, I would never relate to this movie nor appreciate how important dreams are to my life.

The transversal between reality and fiction in the movie jogged my memory of another work called "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". Even though I merely studied a passage about it in Secondary School, it left quite an impression in my mind. At that time, when I was in Secondary School, having worked my way up with my good academic results, I did not know of what dream I wanted to chase. I was hiding myself away from it. I was even scared of people asking me what was my dream or what I would want to do in the future. Studies, school, work, survival was all that I could think of and I had no interest in what the future holds, not until later in life did I discover how fascinated I was with the future world. I realised that my soul had been a cold dry wind blown over the empty shell of my body, unnourished, uninspired, undefined. Alas, how much I have grown!

The film also gave some perspective to Japan's pre-World War II history. Life was hard. There was the Great Kanto Earthquake, economic depression and a lot of trouble. But it was also a time of excitement, when things were progressing faster and engineers like Jiro were continuously innovating on the next big thing. There was also a bit of insight about Germany and their attitudes toward the Japanese. A lot of these were quite new to me because I did not study much of history, but the amount of thought put into the production of movie inspired me to research further into it to understand the context of the plot, as well as its historical backgrounds.

What was especially important too was the essence of innovation - inspiration. Inspiration always comes first before technology plays catch-up, as what the movie claims. As shown when Jiro was in pursuit of the design of the fighter planes when he found that a mackerel fish bone was in line with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) standards. I also know of many influential people like Martin Luther King and Neil Armstrong who made immense contributions to mankind because of their grand dreams.

I hope more people will be able to appreciate the beauty of this movie, and be able to find it of some use in life.