Michael Collins: January 2022

Chainsaw Man vol 7 & 8 - Tatsuki Fujimoto (2021)

Chainsaw Man, is, at its heart, a series of excuses to introduce wonderful and inventive characters. Volume 7 introduces a whole range of eccentric bounty hunters intent on killing Denji, including a mopey couple who seem to have stepped out of Fire Punch and a a pederast Father Christmas. Most interesting is probably Quanxi, a hard hitting Chinese assassin with an eye patch and a bed full of sexy devil girlfriends. Yes, it's a bit edgy, but it's fun and it's striking and whatever.

Starting volume 7, I was struck by the realisation that, for a shonen series, there are surprisingly few battles in Chainsaw Man. When they do happen, for example the battle with the sword demon and the bomb demon, they are ridiculous, hyperviolent affairs that see Fujimoto's exquisitely scratchy penmanship dissolve the universe in to an ocean of jet black offal and exploding body parts. But volume 7, for the most part at least, is happier both introducing new and absolutely bonkers characters, while heartlessly and abruptly killing off old characters.

However, the downtime doesn't last long, and volume 7 concludes with a series of chaotic battles. And when volume 8 resumes, it's been a few weeks between me finishing 7 and starting 8, and it's all a bit confusing. I'm about to re read 7 for the sake of continuity (any excuse to reread Chainsaw Man) when the principal cast and a bunch of hangers on and bloodthirsty assassins are sucked in to hell itself, a place where "the devils with the names of the primal fears" live, which make even the (let's not forget) unimaginably metaphysically powerful Gun Devil seem like a trivial matter.

The arrival of The Darkness Devil is utterly sublime, wonderful, and genuinely shocking and inventive. Long time Chainsaw Man fans will of course know of the semiotic power of the devils. The more powerful the adjective, the scarier the devil. Therefore darkness is, of course going to be awful. Yet longer term Fujimoto fans will remember just how utterly bizarre he can get, as evidenced particularly in Fire Punch's lyrical and even quixotic conclusion. Hell itself manifests as a decidedly Bunuelian montage of ants crawling across a severed arm and a cavalcade of endless doors floating above a nondescript, if disarmingly bucolic field. This isn't the first time Chainsaw Man has evidenced facets of classical surrealism: the endless hotel of volume 2 had elements of Bunuel's El Angel Exterminator, but this is rather more reminiscent of Un Chien Andalou.

The darkness devil emerges through carefully regimented rows of dismembered astronauts, heads bowed in reverence. He slices the arms of each and every character clean off through his very emergence. It's dreamlike and striking and ridiculous and beautiful, and reminds the reader once more that Chainsaw Man is a cut above the average Shonen fight fest. It also only gets more bizarre.

It's rare to see such an impressively expressive display of metaphysical imagery in a mainstream media product. The closest wholly successful example I can pull from the top of my head would be the exquisite final act of End Of Evangelion. Main characters and beloved foes are off'd in a flurry of hyperviolence. It's utterly wonderful.

I am both highly trepidatious and extremely excited about how these scenes could be rendered in the upcoming anime.

The Perpetual Race Of Achilles and The Tortoise - Jorges Luis Borges (2010)

A slim collection of many essays by Borges on a variety of subjects, from literature to film criticism, mathematics and translation. The prospect of 'straightforward' essays by Borges is exciting and fascinating, as his fictional work generally belies the boundaries of fiction, often taking on the characteristics of essays, accounts, and fragments of encyclopaedic information.

A few of the essays here might as well be Borges non-fiction. The essay on the many translators of The Thousand And One Nights is especially Borgian, essentially being a riveting story about stories. Elsewhere there are denunciations of anti-Semitic propaganda, a somewhat scathing contemporary review of Citizen Kane, and a charming set of rules that murder mysteries should follow (Borges is ever the eager taxonomist).

The Animatic Apparatus - Deborah Levitt (2017)

Levitt's enthusiastic and refreshingly effusive consideration of how animation in film imbues a sort of 'life' is both serious and wide reaching. Touching on a broad variety of disciplines, The Animatic Apparatus explores the notions of simulacrum and simulation, biopolitics, the real, automata and gynoids. It's as fascinating and at times unfocused as this description suggests.

Levitt covers many different texts, but focuses perhaps most of all on Mamoru Oshii's sublime exploration of transhuman identity, Innocence (2004). Innocence provokes a very particular sort of exegesis in a very particular audience. A not-quite-sequel to Oshii's earlier Ghost In The Shell (1995), Innocence takes the philosophical musings and experimental imagery of Ghost, and pushes it way beyond what would normally be accepted in a mainstream animated film. It's extensive use of intertextuality makes it an excellent jumping off point for the concepts of this book. To be frank, I would have been delighted with just a straightforward analysis of this one film.

Levitt's analysis is novel in the sense that it doesn't just consider the vivacity encoded by the practice of film making and animation to be of note because it resembles life. Quite the opposite; Levitt is far more interested in the concept of the 'anti-Pinocchio', a life defined and indeed emphasised through its quality of otherness, and its difference from traditional, anthropocentric representations of literary automata. Innocence is of course the perfect example of this, with it's hyper augmented cyborgs either using their neural networked brains to cite all human knowledge in a permanent disaffected stalemate, or the unheimlich, Bellmer-esque sexeroids, perfectly imperfect in their beautiful deadliness.

Several other diverse texts are analysed, as disperate as Hatsune Miku, Daffy Duck cartoons and the inauguration of Donald Trump. Ultimately this book falls in to the 'food for thought' school of media and cultural studies as opposed to positing something new and concrete and tangible. Additionally, it functions more as a traditional textual analysis as opposed to a genuinely revolutionary consideration of animation bestowing animus. But it's a breezy and vertiginous and highly readable primer regardless.