Bess
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May Updates
🕑 Added 2021-05-14 11:40:41 +0000 UTCHi everyone!
This is the fifth week of work on the new video, so I thought it was about time I updated you all on how it's coming along. The plan at the start of the process was for the video to be up by the end of week eight, and I'm on track to meet that deadline—namely, the 6th June. With any luck, maybe it'll even be up a bit sooner.
I only finished up my rewatch of Shiki last night—as is becoming increasingly typical of my video-making process, most of the time spent working on the video over the past month has gone to reading supplementary stuff.
When I decided that I'd talk about Shiki at some point pretty much right after I'd made my channel, it was one of those video ideas where the title came to me immediately: Shiki: The Definitive Horror Anime. This title was as much an acknowledgement of the relative lack of horror anime as it was of Shiki's success in this realm. I knew, then, that this would be a discussion about how we define horror, and what its place is in anime, as much as one about the show itself. When the series won the poll last month, I thus needed some time to think about this before I actually revisited the show. I spent a bit of time reading about the horror genre, the author's and other anime fans' views on it and on the show, and got to thinking about what kind of horror Shiki really utilises.
Shiki is an incredibly impactful series—certainly when it's making you feel overt fear, but equally when the end credits roll and you're left to think about the wider implications of what it portrays. I spent some time with my usual psychological literature looking for the language to explain this, only to realise philosophy would be much more appropriate. Philosophy isn't an area I'm remotely knowledgeable in, so I spent a good amount of time getting a beginner's understanding of various schools of thought within the discipline and seeing how they might be applied to Shiki and its various characters alongside looking at the more concrete social psychological phenomena present in the story. Finally, when looking at some of the discussion around horror anime, I found this really bizarre idea that animation can't be scary. This made me especially excited when I found some fantastic articles exploring this concept, and I'm particularly interested to talk about this element of Shiki: how it works not as horror, but specifically as a horror anime.
All of this is probably a good insight into the mess you'll find in my brain between the planning and writing phases of making a video. It should also somewhat explain the shift in the video's title, which you'll see showcased in the thumbnail below. Considering I haven't even started writing the script, both could change, but I have a feeling they won't.
So, yes: the hope is to get the script written and edited by the end of next week at the latest, after which two weeks should be ample time to make the video itself. Planning has taken a bit longer than I'd like, and I still have some further reading I want to get done this weekend, but as always, I think you'll all agree when you see the end product that the time spent on this part of the process was well worth it. As for how I'm going to organise all these disparate ideas into a coherent script, or how many will even explicitly appear in the video, I'm as eager as anyone to see what actually emerges from my seventeen pages of notes (not as scary as it sounds, I just tend to paste a lot of long quotes, but still). Suffice it to say this should be an interesting one, and I'm quite excited to be tackling something a bit bigger than "just" analysing the content of an anime. I'm conscious of people (especially non-patrons) expecting some huge overview of the history of the genre as per the scope of some of my other videos, or just something huge in general after the wait for the video, but hopefully the title makes clear this is something of a case study—an exploration of a wider topic through the lens of one show. My aim is to make this one between twenty and thirty minutes, but I'm confident the shorter runtime will be more than enough to create a truly enjoyable and compelling video. (Of course, I could just end up way overshooting, and then we can all laugh at me.)
There'll likely be a few more posts to come on here before the video itself (including my next podcast ASAP), but for now, I hope you'll all look forward to...
Comments
Bess
I will definitely be talking about the implications of Shiki being set in a rural village in the video! I knew Fuyumi Ono was married to the author of Another and I've read some interviews with each of them, but I don't know anything about Japanese horror/mystery literature, so I hadn't heard of The Decagon House Murders or The Summer of the Ubume, nor, somehow, the anime you mentioned. I'll have to look them all up. Thank you for sharing!
Mizumbastrosis
I have been watching Shiki in preparation for your video. This is not the first time I've started running through the series though, since a few years ago I made it through to episode 10 or so... I stopped then for no particular reason, just had too much on my head going on at the time. It's nice to return to it. Beyond its being a horror story, it was interesting for me to think of its implications as a story that takes place in middle-of-nowhere Japan. In that sense, it has ressonances with Higurashi. And yet, on the other hand, the portrait of a rural life in Shiki is a lot darker and more discomforting. Even before the tragedy begins, many key characters are quite unhappy with living in that place. Life is boring, people are always gossiping, etc. It's weird seeing this in a post-Shinzo Abe reality, in which animes have more and more focused on how great it is to leave the city behind to move to the countryside. I wonder if Shiki would have adopted the same tone had it been released nowadays... Maybe I'm projecting, but I also feel there's a bit of a commentary regarding gentrification going on. The historic population of Sotoba is gradually "displaced" as okiagari come in bringing fancy new shops, services and manners. Was this even a problem in rural Japan back then? I've been pretty interested in how the horror/mystery literary genre blends in with horror anime in the 90s. The book Shiki was written by Fuyumi Ono. She is married to Yukito Ayatsuji, who wrote the book which went on to become the horror anime Another. Before that though, in the 80s, Yukito wrote the classic Japanese mystery novel The Decagon House Murders. This novel, which probably inspired the Umineko VN to a great extent (it's even mentioned in the VN itself!), was part of a larger movement of Japanese mystery novels, sort of a golden age of crime novelists in Japan. I'm pretty sure that 90s writers were still inspired by that previous generation. Fuyumi Ono, by the way, also wrote the light novel for the Twelve Kingdoms, one of the inaugural isekai novels. There is a very interesting line from 70s/80s Japanese mystery leading to 90s/00s light novels. (By the way, there is an amazing Japanese horror novelist called Natsuhiko Kyogoku who wrote books such as "The Summer of the Ubume" where crime, mystery and traditional Japanese folklore blend in quality horror narratives. I can't prove this right now, but I bet Nisio Isin from Bakemonogatari fame was inspired by his works. Kyogoku also wrote the book that inspired Requiem from the Darkness, another staple of horror anime!) I'm very much looking forward to watch your video :)
