Mindbender marathon: Lain/Kon/Ōtomo simulwatch

[Neil.T]

Tokyo Godfathers is a great film, in no small part due to the core trio, who are all likeable and form a solid chemistry that grows as the story progresses.

Agreed. Satoshi Kon really understood the importance of strong characterisation.

 

[RadFemHedonist]

I love Tokyo Godfathers!

 

[D1tchd1gger]

Watched a couple of interesting YouTube videos on Tokyo Godfathers recently:

Spoiler: Beyond Ghibli

Spoiler: Bonsai Pop

 

[Neil.T]

I'm sure this has already been pointed out but the tag line "Close the world, open the nExt" is a deliberate referance to NeXT computers, Steve Jobs' project in his years in exile from Apple.

It hadn't been pointed out here, and I wasn't aware of that. I'd noticed the odd case that it's written in, but I'd never been able to come up with an explanation for it.

Very interesting.

 

[WMD]

Watched a couple of interesting YouTube videos on Tokyo Godfathers recently:

Spoiler: Beyond Ghibli

Spoiler: Bonsai Pop

Those are 2 great videos, thanks for sharing them. It's interesting how they approach the film from different angles but both are effusive in their praise for it. Goes to show how much there is to think about in Kon works.

It amused me in the second one how he says I wont spoil this film and then spoils it in its entirety you cant discuss these films without going into specifics.

 

[Dai]

Well that answered nothing. A load of pretentious philosophical nonsense obfuscated behind a load of techno-babble! And again it comes down to the logical thing for me, how can a program, a piece of software have a physical presence.
If it had gone with the twist that the "real" world was actually some sort of Matrix like world and the people who were killing themselves had woken up to that fact then that might have made sense.

If you try to apply logic to Lain, it's natural to come away frustrated. It's a question of genre expectations, I think. If you go into it expecting hard SF or traditional cyberpunk, it becomes a total head-scratcher. While Lain does have cyberpunk stylings, at its core it's primarily supernatural/body horror, and has more in common with Videodrome than it does with Ghost in the Shell. Like Videodrome, it's a piece of speculative paranoia that takes all the fears surrounding an emerging new technology and dials them up to 11, and like Videodrome it becomes an anachronistic time capsule when viewed decades later, though I still find both works fascinating.

 

[Neil.T]

If you try to apply logic to Lain, it's natural to come away frustrated.
. . .
it's's a piece of speculative paranoia that takes all the fears surrounding an emerging new technology and dials them up to 11

It's interesting, because, speaking personally, I saw Lain for the first time about six years ago, and I must say that it never occurred to me to try to explain everything in it on a logical level. It's intentionally very open-ended and really doesn't lend itself to that. The last part of that quote is a perfect description of the series, for me.

I don't think I actually mentioned this during the simulwatch itself, but certain fixed ideas I had about it from my previous watch were nowhere near as clear-cut as I'd thought. It really is one where how you interpret what you're watching is highly subjective, and that's one of the reasons why I absolutely love Lain.