(Knowing how much of a coffee addict I am, this is quite an accomplishment.)

It’s like the family’s life unfolds, but what ties it together are these long slow moments, where they can just take time out from feeling busy and strange. No matter how quirky their lives seem to us, they have a level of mundanity and comfort they can go back to. They all unwind – playing go, drinking tea, bicycling – going through slow moments. The images carries this out: trains pass through the boy’s head and the giant version of the girl sits behind her, and these moments don’t seem out of place or even unrealistic. They’re just part of life.

Apparently, it’s going to be remade for American television. I don’t understand this – the commentary and references made in Little Britain is can be applied to North American society just as easily as British. Take Daffyd Thomas, for instance: the “only gay in the village”, Daffyd will kick anyone out of the village if they do not match up to his standards of what it means to be “gay” – even if they genuinely are gay. He manages to sum up both homophobia and provincialism at once. When I used to live in Small Town B.C., people like Daffyd were everywhere – people who would actively push people out of their chosen circles if they threatened their chosen place at the top of the Small Town heap. (the dance teacher, the art teacher, the harpist, etc.) Daffyd takes this mentality to the absurd. Being gay, for him, is his small town niche.

The fact that there’s two more series excites me. I think I’m going to spend winter break watching all of those TV shows and movies I haven’t been able to watch because of school, or at least series 2 and 3 of Little Britain.

Visually, it sums up why animation should be far more respected than it is: anything can and will happen here, and it can happen far more convincingly and seemlessly than if it was live action using the same budget. One of the things I thought was brilliant about it was how well Kon blended the “real” world and the “dream” world. The dream world, with its phantasmagoric images, is colourful and vibrant, contrasted with the dull real world. Another brilliant point: there is no such thing as a dream sequence, as such, because of this blending. Dreams spill over onto reality; reality spills back over onto dreams. Even when there is a certain degree of separation between dream and real, conscious and unconscious, the film still blends the two. Dreams are made tangible through technology; they can be entered and recorded. They are treated as if they are realer than reality. I think the film plays with this to an extreme level: maybe Kon is commenting on the point that technology is further encasing us in a dream world, one it is becoming increasingly harder to awaken from.

One of the film’s central messages is that consciousness can truly be set free only in dreams – for better or for worse – and everything about the film reflects this. Beyond the visual imagery, the soundtrack, composed by Susumu Hirasawa, drives this idea home. Hirasawa, an electronic musician, fills out the dream world with his audio, a soring and pulsating score. (He also offers samples of his music for online free.) Go listen – this is the ending theme of the film.

susumu hirasawa – the girl in byakkoya

I must see more Satoshi Kon.

I recently saw Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) in a theatre. If the film is like someone else’s nightmare, watching it in a theatre is like being trapped in the said nightmare. The image is all compassing. As the film berates you with bizarre and surreal imagery – like the singing, swollen-cheeked radiator girl or the suggestively bleeding chicken – you sit there, with nowhere to advert your eyes, watching and digesting the images, enfolded in the entire experience. Eraserhead, which is as about as logical as a feverish delusion, is based on personal interpretation. Everyone who sees this film walks away with something random, while Lynch has stated that no interpretation yet has matched his own. It is a personal nightmare that must be worked through, must be dealt with, must be fought with and dreamt again and again and again. With this, the film is an experience, one that you feel and react to as you watch  – and best experienced if you are totally immersed in it.

So, to achive total immersion without a theatre? Watch on a laptop, with huge headphones on, all the lights turned off, a sheet over your head, and enclose yourself inside the nightmare.

This blog is my attempt to defeat my mental clutter. Watch as it wrenches in agony!