Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
The last episode of City (the Animation) was really good. A "grand finale" in the real sense, with the episode ending in a twisting and turning musical number where dozens of characters slowly come together into an increasingly raucous party. Its rare to see musical numbers in anime, I'm unsure whether this is because its difficult to pull off or whether the musical is just not much of a cultural force in Japan. We often get "MVs", but the only other true musical I can remember is that one episode of Excel Saga. Although my familiarity with the structure of musicals is limited (never been to one, unless you count pantomimes), I am informed by people on the internet that over the half-dozen or so songs City manages to cover the standard repertoire of genres common to a West End musical in both emotion and musical harmonics (or however you describe the theoretical structure of music). My favourite number is the last one, played as the credits roll (and everyone jumps onto a tatami-time-machine). Its a jubilent and manic song which montages through every single character no matter how minor from the course of the show. The ensemble-singing and layered orchestra (+ operatic backing singers) really make it feel like the finale to some extravagant Victorian play, or occasionally like the end to a well-done primary school performance. The complexity increases into a crescendo as more and more characters gather together and eventually explode into space, literally finishing it off with a bang.
In the world of dramatics, stories are traditionally categorised into the two broad modes of "comedy" or "tragedy". The placement of a work will depend entirely on its ending, be that happy or sad respectively, no matter on the contents of the preceeding acts. While usually a tragedy will indeed be more melancholic throughout and vice versa, many stories contain both ends of the spectrum at various points often in close proximity or even overlapping with each other. It's therefore a necessity to look only at the final scenes of a story to categorise it lest we confuse things. For example we can place the original Star Wars Trilogy into the category of "comedy" purely owing to its happy ending, despite it not being particularly "comical". And conversely we can place the Prequel Trilogy into the category of "tragedy" because of its tragic ending, even though scene-for-scene it probably has more humour (or at least attempts). That is to say that culture judges a story by its fate, no matter the journey it takes to get there.
Dramatic storytelling has a complex history, originating in oral retellings of stories which is an activity older than even our species. It was the Classical Greeks who codified the idea of the tragicomedy divide, but its a divide that can be seen in the earliest collections of tales we have access to. One can imagine the tension that this coin-flip of conclusions conjurs, any story of drama could end in either way, and in the case of an oral recount, the bard could even change that ending to suit his rapport. "The drama" itself comes from this suspense: will all these characters die or get married? Who knows?
The stageplay has of course declined in the technological age, but from the Dionysia of Athens until the Musicals of the '60s the theatre was the highest form of storytelling, the closest approximation to the Wagnerian "Gesamtkunstwerk": "the universal artform". The development of theatre during the 19th and 20th centuries is fascinating and incredibly rapid, with "fads" emerging and dying in cycles lasting only a few years. Genres which were the height of cultural fashion in late 19th century London or Paris have definitions which are so of-their-era that they seem incomprehensible to us today. Emerging from the Italianate "Opera", a lighter form of entertainment made roots in Northern Europe ("the operetta"), soon developing into indigenous forms including Music Hall, Cabaret, Vaudeville, Burlesque, Circus, Singspiel, Pantomime, Revue, or Extravaganza. The only real survivor of this era is the Variety Show, which is still a staple of television, at least in Britain. I suppose circus and pantomime are still around too in their little niches, but can hardly be called dominant cultural forces. What these all have in common is a move away from the classical trag/com split towards a "popular comedy", where people of all classes could come to enjoy a fun, bawdy or risque evening without the tension that everyone might horrifically die at the end. This change led to the sentiment which is still common today, that "tragedies" are erudite and for the educated classes only while comedies are for the more coarse crowds, as the only tragedies being put on were in the older forms of theatre (like Shakespearean or traditional Opera) which were decidedly old-school despite both being for the masses in their time.
City places itself squarely in this "mass media comedy show", taking tropes from the great Victorian styles to build something that feels grand and sentimental. It does this while riding that line between heartwarming and kitsch that makes it feel immediately nostalgic, which is a feeling that I suppose emerges from the style being so out-of-fashion. As well as the finale, City also played a similar trick at the mid-point of the shows running in episode 5. In this episode we see a complex story develop out of one, splitting into a dozen different simultaneous story-threads which all play on the screen at the same time making a visual crescendo which is purposefully bewildering. All these thread eventually weave themselves back into one another until we get a large Where's-Wally-esque scene of all the characters together and all the conflicts resolved. Stuff like this is clearly difficult to pull off, with Kyoani having had to animate the equivalent of five or six episodes just for this one scene to work, which is something it feels like only Kyoani would do. After the tragedy its great to see them back on their feet and delivering anime of as high a quality as ever before.
As seen in City, this "grand finale" is always an impressive and satisfying conclusion to a work of comedy. Pretty much every musical will do something like this, saving the grand musical number for the end along with the "curtain call" where every actor can return to the stage and receive applause. For an ensemble cast like City's its the perfect thing to do, serving a role like an comic epilogue and a celebration of success.
^ Episode 5