Posts Tagged ‘ulysses’

Multimedia adaptation and the act of consumption: an outline

By Pontifus on 24 November 2009 | Art and Culture, Literature | 5 Comments
Live action Tanyuu is...live action?

Live action Tanyuu is...live action?

Like Cuchlann, I find myself mired in schoolwork and related things. It’s Thanksgiving break, yes, but it’s still difficult to blog when I know I should be writing an essay about Darwinian rhetoric in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or researching transversal poetics and presentism. But fortunately, my research interests being what they are, schoolwork and blog-work overlap from time to time. More often than not, maybe.

What follows is the list of notes (and a few visuals) I used to give a presentation on adaptation and all it entails — or, rather, as much of what it entails as I could fit in twenty minutes or so. My research has centered on the novel-to-film variety, but most of it seems more broadly relevant. These being personal notes more than anything, I make no guarantees as to their cohesiveness, but they should at least be legible — and, with any luck, somewhat interesting.

Of Diebuster, structure, and the parents of gods

By Pontifus on 4 June 2009 | Anime, Literature | 14 Comments

Breaking into the super robot genre has proven difficult for me, so I asked the wise OGT to point me toward a few shows that might help. Among other things, he recommended Gunbuster (aka Top wo Nerae!) — you may already know this, given all the fanboying I did over the show and its sequel. Gunbuster was probably just the sort of thing I needed, tempered as it is by enough drama and pain to sustain my interest through the genuinely awesome moments, which I can in fact enjoy on the level of genuine awesome if I stay interested long enough.

Diebuster, though.

You want to put it into words. You really try. But the last episode explodes your mind, and you’re left with assorted pieces, slightly charred, floating through space. You could leave it at that, but these pieces practically beg to be reassembled, and I’m nothing if not tenacious when it comes to weaving my webs.

“I close my eyes, and can see…”

By Pontifus on 23 October 2008 | Anime | 11 Comments

Side note: how the hell is that thing a cat?

Aria the Animation — just typing its name gives me a sense of peace, both because of its predominant themes, and because there exist human beings capable of producing something like this, which means there must be hope for our species after all. I wanted to sum this one up in a single post, but I realized around the end of the fourth episode that a mere one post would not be enough, could not possibly be enough by any stretch of the imagination, so consider this the first in a series of indeterminate length. And the funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have liked Aria at all a few months ago, back when I was writing off Lucky Star and Hidamari Sketch, or at least I probably wouldn’t have liked it enough to see past my dislike and run it through my infernal criticism machine.