RIP, Satoshi Kon

Hello all,
I had a different entry planned for today, but as usual, I got distracted. Unlike usual, this won’t really be a piffy or lighthearted entry. Sadly, it’s commemorating something that I couldn’t in good conscience let pass unnoticed.
As some of you may know, I was a French and Japanese major in college. While I’m not a huge anime* freak, I still enjoy some of the more skillful anime in an artistic sense. And I’m sad to spread the news that Satoshi Kon, one of the masters of the genre, has passed away.
For those of you who are not familiar, Satoshi Kon’s animated movies deal with human subject matter, so much so that he could have easily chosen live-action as a medium. But instead, he preferred the artistic freedom that was afforded by anime. Needless to say, he paid excruciating attention to the intricacy of his drawings. Unlike many animes where characters look like a bunch of identical blobs with different hairstyles and eye colors, Satoshi Kon’s figures were so realistic that watching his movies is like watching a living, moving portrait. He directed one of my favorite movies of all time, Millennium Actress (Sennen joyu in Japanese), a haunting love story that questions reality and the objectivity of perspective and memory.
If you have a free evening and you like foreign films or if you’ve been meaning to break out of your usual filmic monotony, rent Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers, or one of his many other fine films this week. Give a little kudos to a fine artist and innovator.


*Anime is a catch-all term for any animated movie that comes out of Japan. Much like non-animated western movies, an anime movie can be about anything from porn to the story of the life of the Buddha to a kid’s cartoon. Most of the people in the States who enjoy anime also enjoy video games, hanging out on online forums, having detailed debates about obscure Japan or video-game related topics, and hats with furry animal ears on them. (I know this because as a Japanese major I had to spend WAY too much time in the company of such people.) Because of this, anime gets an underserved bad rap. In Japan it’s a lot less stigmatized.