It's so weird, seeing these characters do the same thing over and over. I think I'm beginning to manufacture differences where none exist. (And of course, I've forbidden myself to go back and look.) Did Yuki really wear the brown-striped frog costume once? Did Mikuru not take home a fish? Has Kyon never before shot balls of fire from his hands, laughing maniacally?
I think that the aspect of this sequence that succeeds brilliantly is in recreating that feeling of summer vacation, where every day stretches just like the one before, where one marks time with a feeling of suspended dread, knowing that it has to end -- but not for what feels like a very long time. Eventually it ends, of course, but for a month or two, it seems impossible that that could ever happen.
Endless Eight just takes that feeling, magnifies it, and lays it out clearly for all to see.
And that's a respectable artistic decision. Eliot was a fan of the effect, as I recall, as was Lawrence. One sees echoes of it in Artuad's theatre of cruelty. More recently, Penny-Arcade parodied the idea by saying "Listen. Any hack can make a movie
about Silent Hill. It takes a true master to transport the audience
themselves into a realm of perpetual suffering." It's one of the basic aesthetic axes -- should art represent the thing itself, or the notion of the thing which we carry in our minds? With
Endless Eight, Kyoto Animation chose the latter, and the result is interesting, cruel, intelligent and fey, and banal -- just as life is banal.
Yes, it's not really fun to watch, but we can still enjoy it, if we work to reach it on its own terms.
words from chris, 2009-08-15 13:05:04, los angeles
