(no subject)

At some point either late in my freshman year or in the beginning of my sophomore year, I ended up going with aridice and probably js20 to a colloquium about feminism and anime. Thereafter, for a while during sophomore spring, I ended up going fairly regularly to Anime Club for their Friday evening screenings of Revolutionary Girl Utena, the addictively bewildering and metaphysical series which the speaker had partly focused on. Near the end of the semester, the Anime Club also did a marathon showing of all 13 episodes of Gunslinger Girl, which I liked very much for its music, its Italian scenery, and its dystopic plot. Some people might consider the ending's use of the "Ihr sturzt nieder, Millionen? / Ahnest du den Schopfer, Welt?" section of the choral finale of Beethoven's 9th to evoke something enduring about the human spirit in spite of the death of one of the characters to be trite, but at the time I thought it was well done.

Well, yesterday I was going through boxes in the basement, and ended up perusing some of the later chapters of Roig-Francoli's Harmony in Context that we would have covered in Music 13 and 14. In so doing, I ran across an example, the opening of Faure's haunting "Apres un reve." I instantly recalled this as either the opening or ending theme for Gunslinger Girl, although I'm pretty sure it was sung in Italian, not in French.

I don't suppose I'd mind watching Gunslinger again at some point. If you read enough into it, it certainly has something to say about humanity in the face of brutality and possibly even disability. Now, I certainly don't intend to develop an anime addiction, but I suppose also that Utena is so convoluted that no one could hope to glean everything from one viewing...