Now and Then, Here and There (Complete Collector’s Boxed Set)

by Us Manga Corps Video

Since incorporating a book/movie list in my right sidebar, I’ve only barely touched upon the items listed there, despite my original intentions. Other subjects have occupied me.

Today, I’ve had the serendipitous discovery of a correlation between life and art — an unfortunate discovery, actually. I’ve been visiting Coming Anarchy for some time now, following discussions of 5GW and more lately a history of Empires, not to mention the political cartoons. A recent entry called The Dark Continent addresses the Ugandan practice of forcing children into the Lord’s Resistance Army, and reading it, I realized the entry could almost have been taken from the animé series Now and Then, Here and There, by Japanese director Akitaroh Daichi:

At the age of 16, Charles was abducted from his rural village by northern Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and forced into a life of unspeakable fear and violence.

“I was caned 150 strokes,” explained Charles, who escaped from the LRA late last year. “[Later,] there was a shout, ‘Where is the new recruit?’ And I was brought in. ‘We are giving you an order now and if you refuse to obey the order, we will kill you.’ ”

A group of captured civilians were then lined up in front of Charles with their hands bound behind their backs. The quiet, wide-eyed teenager was ordered to beat them to death with a two foot piece of freshly cut timber.

“I was fearful for my life. So I beat them all to death; all seven of them. I was then ordered to lick the blood and brain matter from [the] victims. And I did all that.”
[from National Post]

I watched the entire animé series, all 325 minutes (13 episodes), in one night, and I wanted to blog about it the next day, but the effect the series had had on me limited my ability to respond to it via a blog entry. I might not have written of it if not for the entry on Coming Anarchy, which hits too close to Here.

The animé is a work of genius far surpassing most of what comes out of Hollywood or Japan, although the first episode had me worried. Shu, the main protagonist, coming home one day from kendo practice, spots a mysterious girl sitting atop a smokestack at an abandoned factory. Unable to climb the same smokestack (because the ladder leading up is broken!), Shu climbs another and proceeds to engage the girl in conversation across the distance. She’s not into conversation, though, but stares at the sun. The episode is comical, quite cartoonish at first in the manner of some animé, and when a portal opens up in the sky and mecha “snakes” come out of it to abduct the girl, Shu reacts with his kendo stick and fantastic moves trying to save her. Instead, Shu is whisked away with girl, mecha, and human attackers, through the portal and into another world.

The cartoonish aspect ends utterly at that point. Looking back on the series, I realize the extraordinary decision the director, Akitaroh Daichi, made when he decided to open the series in the lighthearted and half-serious vein. The title of the series should be a clue to what I mean. At the end of the first episode, after the initial entry into the other world and the initial action following the initial entry, we and Shu are left hanging as Shu asks, “Where the hell am I?” In following episodes, we are given a relentless drawing of that place, development by development, uncompromising.

The first half of the series after the first episode takes place entirely within “Hellywood,” a giant mechanical fortress run by Abelia, who serves the mad King Hamdo and is in love with the king. King Hamdo once ruled the entire world, but his empire is failing, reduced to Hellywood itself, a dystopian, militaristic society of mostly male children and the adults who themselves were once child soldiers in Hamdo’s army. In order to replenish his supply of soldiers after battles, Hamdo orders those child soldiers to villages, to capture more children. Female teens are captured for breeding more soldiers. The children who serve in Hamdo’s army are threatened with death, should they attempt to leave or refuse to serve, and are bribed with the promise of a return to their villages “once the war is over.”

Reviewers at Amazon.com have commented on the violence in the series, but it’s not violence. It’s brutality. There are beatings, rape, and torture. The children murder in their service to Hamdo. The environment outside Hellywood is also brutal: a huge sun hangs in the sky, most of the planet is desert, food and water are scarce.

Now and Then, Here and There is only the second animé series that I’ve watched, although I’ve watched many animé feature films. Amidst the brutality and the plot, the incredible visuals (the “camera” angles are genius), the great music, all 325 minutes are used to develop the characters in ways Disney has never attempted. The characters are complex and most change over time in response to the environment of that world, sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically. Because it is a series, each episode closes with end credits and a preview of the following episode: I recommend listening to the music and lyrics at the end of each episode, although they are always the same, because the effect and meaning of those lyrics subtly change as the series develops. (As a purist, I also recommend watching it in the original Japanese, with subtitles. The tone, the acting, is exactly right.)

The most tragic feature of the series may be in the vision supplied by Akitaroh Daichi — that vision, like everyone’s vision, must have come from the past and the present he has actually witnessed. Uganda is only part and parcel.