Strange Quark posted:

CloseFriend posted:

I watched Lady Snowblood again last night, and something struck me… A consistent aesthetic dots the film's major moments throughout: the Japanese flag (nisshōki/日章旗). Red as a foreground element and, to a lesser extent, white as a background/secondary element suffuse most of the shot compositions in the film. Hell, look at the title: red blood and white snow. The Japanese title has 修羅 for red bloodshed and again, 雪 for white snow.

In this sense, the film exhorts us to see the title character's story as one of Japan in general. Indeed, throughout the film, Yuki's costumes betray Japanese flag imagery. The reddish colors vary between a bright, bloody scarlet, lavender, maroon, purple, auburn, burgundy and orange, but the dominant shape remains near the center of the screen against desaturated or bright negative space. Just look at her birth—surrounded by a large cluster of prison jumpsuit orange against a white bed in the dead of winter—or her very first adult appearance—holding a circular umbrella above the snow-encrusted landscape…





From this, we infer that Yuki embodies Japan… or, more specifically, pre-Meiji Japan. We infer that Japan's entire history has the same driving force as Yuki herself: revenge. The film implies that up to this point in history, Japan has lived in a Saṃsāra-esque cycle of revenge. Look for the subtle Japanese flag composition in these sanguinary backstory paintings: a red splotch against a mostly-white background…




Nearly all of Yuki's costumes have a reddish element against a white background. When they don't, the entire costume becomes that element. Just try not to catch your eye on Yuki's lavender kimono in its contrast against the otherwise quotidian tea room.



As for her other costumes, with their reddish sashes against the white, Yuki spends most of the film looking like a five-foot Japanese flag turned on its side, especially when blood mottles her clothes.





The Japanese flag, then, recurs in the film to keep us cognizant of Japan's history. This becomes strikingly apparent in this scene, where a blood-read rickshaw blanket anchors a Dutch-angle composition wherein deuteragonist Ryūrei Ashio comes face-to-face with his shameful past, and later in the scene where a rufous safe does the same.




The film avers, in essence, that even before the Meiji Restoration, Japan's history had problems of its own. Look for bright red elements in the middle of the screen in these scenes featuring gambling, a release of poison gas, a prostitute's recompense (linked for spoiler), and an unprovoked murder (linked for spoiler).




Since Yuki stands surrogate for Japan itself, her upbringing then tells us the story of the formation of the Japanese mindset through unforgiving inculcation. We see it in this shot of young Yuki—wearing in a red sash to indicate her status as the rising sun—tethered to her punitive yet motivated guardian Priest Dōkai, clad in white as the sky against which she rises to take her place.



In a cyclical note, Kobue wears mostly red throughout the film, hinting that she represents the incipient successor of the "rising sun" mantle, herself marred by adversity and injustice and motivated by revenge. The relative lack of white tells us that unlike Yuki, her youth leaves her in the beginning stages of her own trip through the revenge cycle.



Even the villains get in on the composition; take a look at Tsukamoto Gishirō's headband as the blood therefrom drips down his rubicund face, Shokei Tokuichi's eye-grabbing bright red loincloth in the compositional center, Kitahama Okono's fiery invocation of the Vajrayana god Acala across her backside, and the way the blood stains the white foam that buoys Takemura Banzō's hemorrhaging body in its last moments.





All of this points to the film's idea that revenge, bloodshed, and remonstrance underpinned Japanese history up to that point. The turning point of the climax—where Gishiro dies dragging down the flag of Japan and staining that of the United States in his failure to grab it as well—tells us that Bakumatsu marked not only the end of Japan's isolationist foreign policy and shogunate, but the end of Japan as the Japanese knew it.

The decidedly Pyrrhic nature of the victory also tells us not to regard Japan's sea change as entirely a positive. The film ends with Kobue becoming the new symbol of Japan by nearly slaying the old one, thereby positing that while Japan itself may change, the themes governing its history never will.

Julias posted:

I usually hear the Ruroni Kenshin live action trilogy is pretty decent, though I haven't seen enough of them or the original series to compare. Has anybody else here given them a go?

Parallax posted:

which one

Parallax posted:

Parallax posted:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/9/11612530/ghost-in-the-shell-anime-asian-representation-hollywood

wow someone actually wrote something interesting about the new gits

Julias posted:

Posting this here since even the OP seems to have forgotten about this thread.


It's actually a decent read.