Bess

2022 Q4 Media Roundup

Added 2022-12-31 18:56:54 +0000 UTC

Good evening everyone!

I'll be posting my general update post right after this, but for now, here's the media roundup for the last few months. It's quite a diverse list this time:

Sonny Boy

The final anime I managed to finish this year was 2021's Sonny Boy. I'd heard a lot of raving about it and not much else when I decided to pick it up. Any synopsis will tell you it's about a group of high school students who find their school has drifted into another dimension and that they've gained individually unique superpowers at the same time. Sonny Boy is not, however, a show you go into for the plot.

I can't say Sonny Boy resonated with me quite in the way it seemed to with others, but for me the best way to experience it was to simply accept it for what it was and go along for the ride. I did end up enjoying it, and there were some sequences that married animation and music in a way that will absolutely stick with me. It's a beautifully imaginative show, the definition of experimental, and uniquely anime.

All of Us Are Dead

A real standout for me this year was the Korean drama All of Us Are Dead. I don't watch many Korean dramas or TV shows in general and only heard about it by chance on Twitter, but stuck it on my list as it sounded entertaining.

The Netflix show is adapted from a webtoon and tells the story of another group of high school students, this time trapped in their school as it becomes ground zero for a zombie virus outbreak. I think the trailer gets the vibe across better than I ever could.

It is definitely a show that's exactly as thrilling as it looks, and it made for an un-put-down-able TV experience. What I didn't expect was for the series to have quite as much heart as it did. The characters are intricate and real, their relationships are complex and emotionally arresting, and the series poses interesting moral dilemmas on both a macro- and micro-scale. If you want perfectly-paced, edge-of-your-seat action, AoUAD is definitely the show for you. But it equally provides plenty of quieter moments, brilliantly acted and genuinely moving. I ended up loving this show far more than I expected to, and it's become a favourite. I don't know if it needs a second season, but I'm frankly thrilled it's getting one if only because I don't want to say goodbye to these characters.

The Banshees of Inisherin

A month or so ago, I was looking for something to see at the cinema with my friend and we decided on The Banshees of Inisherin. I'd heard good things and it's a film with a lot of personal relevance (set on the same cluster of islands off the west coast of Ireland that my grandparents are from, partially filmed on one I periodically visited growing up, and I later found out that the director's family are acquaintances of mine).

Banshees is a black comedy set in the 1920s and explores a friendship between two men suddenly and inexplicably terminated by one party, against the backdrop of the island community they belong to.

If I made video essays on non-anime films, I could easily talk about this one for some time. It's a sparse, quiet film, often leaving its beautiful shots to do the talking, but holds great depths. Banshees explores themes of mortality, death, finding meaning in life, masculinity, emotional honesty and conflict masterfully, and it was a film that, the more I spoke about it to others who had seen it, the more I realised it had to say. It's far from fast-paced, but I found it utterly captivating, and seeing it on the big screen transported me, even as so much of it was very familiar. I can imagine it won't be for everyone, but I'm thrilled I got to see it.

My Neighbour Totoro (stage play)

A while ago news came out that the Royal Shakespeare Company had somewhat miraculously been given permission to adapt Studio Ghibli's classic My Neighbour Totoro into a stage play and I instantly knew I had to get a ticket. I finally got to go a little over a week ago and the experience was unforgettable.

I really wasn't sure how they were going to go about the adaptation and deliberately kept myself as in-the-dark as I could, which wasn't hard, as there isn't much info readily available online either. The performance began with a request not to photograph Totoro and friends as they're shy, and so that everyone could discover the magic of the play for themselves.

Magical is definitely the word for it. From the sets, to Joe Hisaishi's score performed live, to the reveal of Totoro himself, the play was a wondrous experience, and the atmosphere at the Barbican was amazing. I loved every second, and hope there'll be more performances in the future so as many people as possible can go, or perhaps even further RSC-Ghibli collaborations.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

I'm really not managing to read many books these days, but David Mitchell is one of my favourite novelists and over the years I've been slowly but surely making my way through his works in the same order they were published. This most recently brought me to Black Swan Green, a novel spanning one year in the life of a 13-year-old boy growing up in the Midlands in the 1980s and all the tribulations this entails.

I adored this book with its poetic prose and sometimes shattering descriptions of its protagonist's emotional highs and lows. It's said to be a semi-autobiographical novel and it shows in its vivid descriptions of an adolescence unique to 1980s rural Britain. It drew me entirely into its world and I'll miss it, all the more so because it's not David Mitchell's usual fare (he's most known for Cloud Atlas, a story that entwines six disparate characters' stories). It equally made me excited to carry on with the four more novels of his I've yet to read.

And some videos I enjoyed:

When LOST Became "TV'S GREATEST MESS" by Billiam

It's STILL Impossible to Live as a Crunchyroll Translator by The Canipa Effect

How Anime Portrays Collective Anxiety by Daryl Talks Games

Wednesday Campanella - Buckingham by THE FIRST TAKE

The IMPORTANCE of Heartstopper by lines in motion

How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos by People Make Games

Nice White Teachers, Bad Brown Schools: Hollywood's Pedagogy on Urban Education by Yhara zayd

The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Greta Gerwig, Representation, and the Universal Girl by Broey Deschanel

A Measured Defense of Aku no Hana by Ozzy II

Influencer Courses are Garbage: The Dark Side of Content Creation by Super Eyepatch Wolf