Forum - View topicLiving in a post-Apocalyptic world.
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vashna
Posts: 1313 |
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The effects of the Second World War naturally influenced Japanese art. To a lesser extent, the First World War historically did the same. Japan has a history of seismic and meteorological disasters. Understandably, quite a bit of anime deals with post-apocalyptic scenarios. Many of these are also influenced by the numerous popular science fiction stories involving these kinds of things around the world, which in turn were influenced by numerous environmental and political problems.
However, one thing that I've noticed is that unlike so many other genres, anime actually often depicts people living in these scenarios as going on with their normal lives. Sea levels rose and extraterrestrial forces fought in Neon Genesis Evangelion, but students kept going to school and enjoyed listening to music. In the Super Dimension Fortress Macross, people seem more interested in a pop start than the fact that interstellar war wages around them. I was thinking about it, and considered if these things are actually representative of strength in the characters. Though they might seem to be weak willed and selfish while not paying attention to those things around them, I've always said that when disaster strikes, the best thing to do is keep up your chin and continue life as close to normal as possible. This is perhaps evidenced by the solidarity of those in the face of natural disasters even in the modern world. Does anyone else have any thoughts on the issue? |
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TitanXL
 Posts: 4036 |
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I'd say that's an accurate assessment. I know Go Nagai has strong feelings about war settings and depicting it a certain way in his works. Keeping a positive attitude while not facing away from reality seems to be a common theme and motto. Just learn to adapt.
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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But very few actually deal with 'normal' disasters. It's always a mutant reptile (Godzilla) or a huge island forming in a harbour (s-CRY-ed) or the Kanto plains becoming a desert (Desert Punk). Or else they deal with war or social conflict. Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is pretty much the only Anime I can think of that is styled in the Hollywood 'disaster movie' where a natural event - earthquake, volcano, tsunami et cetera - ravages a populated area and the survivors must cope with the direct aftermath. Perhaps it is because Japan is so prone to earthquakes and storms that its entertainment industry doesn't want to dwell on the mundane and the real? |
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15557 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Interesting observation, I that oten point they try to make is that it is post, and that anime likes to show daily lives to convey how the world may have changed, or stayed the same. How can really care about characters we know nothing about them, perhaps it can make the audience just think of them as aliens, and not on Earth. Possibly a weakness of Gurren Lagann that it just felt so foreign tha it can be hard to connect. though it did try a couple times to make it feel relevent to modern life (beach and hotspring) but I tend to think that those situations made it more confusing.
Though Something like So Ra No Wo To seemed to have some recognisable bits of culture, but taken slightly out by the idea of what could make young girls be part of the military. And even more twisting that we saw the remnants of a Japanese culture, and have them puzeled over the pre-apocolypse. Strangely that we spent a lot of time of them just enjoying themselves, and in the military which runs against the idea of daily life, but played against the idea of music out of military being as strange to them. |
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vashna
Posts: 1313 |
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I know it might sound weird, but I related to the characters in Gurren Lagann in a sense. They are, once more, people that are trying to live a normal life despite the fact that they are thrust into an extremely surreal surrounding. If anything, Simon actually seems to realize that his surroundings are rather surreal from my point of view, which is a weird bit of self-awareness in its own right. However, he always seemed to be keeping his chin up as best as possible - even if it took Yoko and Kamina to always make sure that he could see his true self.
That being said, dtm42 brings up a good point, and I have to say myself that I'm not really a fan of over dramatic Hollywood disaster films. They actually almost seem to be a bit disrespectful to people that actually live through those sorts of thing, and I think the message in some of the anime we've been discussing is a bit more powerful. I have yet to see Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, so I can't comment on that yet. |
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HaruhiToy
 Posts: 4118 |
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I suspect we tend to read too much into the meme.
The thing about the after-the-apocalypse genre is it lets the writer set up completely new conventions and story lines that would be (more) implausible if the setting was current-day Japan. Yet in most cases they don't want to make up everything -- so they pick and choose what seems useful to their story and bring that forward. It can be taken too far. In Gurren Lagenn you start out with people living in wasteland and in a sealed off cave in a microscopic community. Yet somehow late in the story they all transition to living as urbanite Japanese from one scene to the next. Yoko turns into a school teacher. I don't chalk it up to any cultural thing -- it is more likely laziness (or practicality) in the writing. |
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kaiser11492
Posts: 164 |
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Vashna makes an interesting observation. I too thought it was funny how their has been no complete societal collapse in Neon Genesis Evangelion despite the fact that the sea levels rose dramatically, the earth's axial tilt was altered, climate patterns going haywire, and the human population being a fraction of what it used to be. It seems to me that most Western post-apocalyptic stories are initially pessimistic.
The whole idea of Japan's post-apocalyptic stories being influenced by it's history of earthquakes and weather disasters is also interesting. However, the United States for example, has the earthquake-prone West Coast, hurricane-prone Southeast, arid Midwest, and the snowstorm-prone North. Shouldn't our disasters influence our literature and art just like Japan? |
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vashna
Posts: 1313 |
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I'm not sure that the North American disaster tradition hasn't been influenced though, but the product that's come out is decidedly different. In the disaster movies of the 1970s and more recent films like The Day After Tomorrow, the theme continues to be the disaster itself. Movies like Waterworld, Judge Dredd and Demolition Man all focus on radically different futures. Maybe it is a case of returning towards certain tropes in anime, but it certainly seems like a horrifying future in many ways is less terrifying in Gurren Lagenn, Neon Genesis Evangelion and such. Of course, some series depict a stark and horrifying future, like Ghost in the Shell, but generally for very different reasons. That show in particular seems more like a traditional cautionary science fiction story, though we've said on here before that it departs shockingly from the manga that it was derived from.
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