Singleton-Grave of the Fireflies

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Fireflies are seen as interesting insects because of their ability to glow up at night.  Even though they seem like pretty cool bugs, its sad to say that they only live for a short period of time.  In the anime Graves of the Fireflies, the two main characters are symbolic to the insects.  Seita and Setsuko are brother and sister that are caught up in World War II.  Although things were bad in Japan, like random air raids, they were able to handle themselves along with their mother.  However, this only lasted until the mother of the two children past away.  In the mist of all of this chaos, Seita immediately realized that he had to step up and become a little more mature for his sister.  He does this by trying to provide what he can for her while staying with their aunt.  Even though an aunt is not an immediate relative, they should show compassion and love towards their nephews and nieces, just like all other family members should. This has to be true especially if the aunt is the only family member available to take care of them.  However in the anime, that wasn’t the case.  The two children’s aunt was okay with looking after them at first, but when she found out her sister died, her behavior changed.  She started feeding them less food and verbally abuses them.  For example, she would call them lazy.  After getting fed up with her, the Seita decides to move out.  He and Setsuko moves into a cave like shelter.  Living by themselves, this gave them the aspect of immortality.  They had it mad for awhile, until getting food was hard to do.  They tried to make due of what they had and became creative.  In one scene, Seita actually tried to steal food from a farmer.  He failed miserably, but just the fact that he tried, showed how badly they needed food.  Food definitely became a must once Setsuko became ill.  Seita did everything he could for her, but in the end she died.  Unlike their mother’s death, the two children death was unique because they resembled the fireflies because they didn’t live long either.

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Singleton-Harp of Burma

           

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     Death is the termination of a person biological being.  Being around the present of Death, one can become very sad and have come into mourning.  Death is also very hard to come around when it is associated with a love one.  In the film Harp of Burma, death played a big part.  First, death was portrayed by the young soldier.  When he was sent away to go fight and didn’t return, his comrades thought that he died.  They accepted this belief until they saw him at a passage way.  They were all excited to see him, until he did the unexpected.  He walked right passed them and didn’t say not one word.  Although not physically dead, he was dead to them because he has found a greater purpose to do.  This relates to the reading because it showed a form of heroic suicide.  Even though he didn’t really kill himself, be still detached himself from earthly things in order to fulfill he’s mission to properly bury the corpuses of the other Japanese soldiers.  Also, the film is associated with one of the scenes form Iwo Jima.  In the scene, it presented death similar to that of Harp of Burma.  For examples the letters in the films.  Both letters where around in the present of passing away.  In the Harp of Burma, the letter explained why the soldier couldn’t live amongst his friends anymore.  However in Iwo Jima, the letter was a symbolism of hope towards the young American solider that died in the war.  Another way these two films were alike, was the tow deaths.  In Iwo Jima the captain committed suicide. Like the solider in the other film, his was also heroic.  The captain lost his eyesight due to the explosion that occurred.  To him, he became useless in the war and to his troops.  So instead of counting on, he shot himself with his rifle.  Even though the two deaths were different, they were still link because the spiritual dead young soilder also allowed his comrades to go on without him.  These two films were very good and really brought insight about death.

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Singleton-Gosh in the Shell

        

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    Of course we may have certain traits and characterizes in common, but there should still be something that separates us.  Your identities are the things that you connect with in this world and make it apart of you.  Also, the Main part of Identity is that it should be yours and yours alone.  However Akira, Perfect Blue, and Ghost in the Shell, were all perfect example that showed the opposite of what identity should be.  In Akira you had the government taking experimenting on little kids and turning them into monstrosities.  Then there’s Perfect Blue that questioned how much control we really have over our lives.  Last, Ghost in the Shell displayed how our identity can be easily removed from reality.  From watching these films, now I personally question what do we really control in our lives.  Also wonder if events that were showed in Akira are actually happening or will happen.  The internet also plays a big part of how identities can be manipulated.  Just like in Perfect Blue when Uchida took advantage of Mima’s hyper reality, individuals are doing that in our world.  Every day, people have the potential to pretend to be others and obtain their life.  From there, they can do whatever they want with it.  Ghost in the Shell kind of sort of had both elements in the movie.  In that world, individuals were either mostly human and part machine, or mostly machine and part human.  Either way, each were prone to getting hack by people such as the Puppet Master.  In this movie, a lot of manipulation over identity was really visible throughout the film.  Two scenes that I can remember is when the Puppet Master took control over the woman and the false life of the garbage man.  The garbage man story was interesting because this guy actually thought he had a wife and little girl.  Also he swore with is heart that he was in the process of getting a divorce.  After being captured by the police, his reality became unstable because the life he thought he was living wasn’t real.  He didn’t have any of those individuals in his life.

            Now that I have seen these films, I think everyone has some control of their lives.  However due to other social factor, I think we are influence to have something in our lives that’s not ours.  For example, as we discuss in class about nicknames and how people view us.  If everyone else is choosing names for us and telling us how we act or what we should act like, then are we really ourselves.

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Singleton-Vampire Hunter D

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Before the film screening on Wednesday, I have never seen Vampire Hunter D.  When it comes to supernatural creatures, I’m more of a werewolf type person.  So, I didn’t really know what to expect from a Vampire movie.  Growing up, I only saw few shows with vampires.  Usually the Vampires I know of are from cartoons, such as, Scooby Doo, Disney Channel, etc.  Since I have witness these productions, I knew the basic of vampires.  They had supernatural abilities, they hate garlic, they can’t stand sunlight, crosses, they didn’t have reflections, and some can turn into bats.  All of these facts are typical vampires.  However, their biggest feature is sucking blood.  I know this is well known to everyone, but in a lot of vampire movies, each uses blood sucking in a variety of ways.  When some vampires suck you blood, you might become hypnotized, some people die, some lose their energy, and others turn into vampire them elves.  Although I knew a huge amount about vampires, I still didn’t know what to expect from Vampire Hunter D.  As I entered the screening and the movie started playing, I was really into it.  There were many aspects of the movies that I liked about the movie.  The conflict and fighting scene were okay, but as the movie progress I started to feel my eyes get heavy.  Eventually I fell asleep towards the end of the movie.

            Vampire Hunter D wasn’t a horrible movie, but it just got boring and tiresome near the ending.  Everything just seemed too predictable and cliché us.  After watching the movie for about a good hour, I already figured out what was going to happen and how the movie was going to play out.  When I go see movies, I expect them to pick my brain as I try to figure out what is going on.  Although, there were a few things I did like about the movie.

            On thing that kept me entertain for awhile was Vampire Hunter D himself, I really appreciated his personality.  He had the whole I’m a loner type personality.  Typically characters with this type of personality stay in danger and can never find time to relax, or truly enjoy their life.  Also, I liked that he was a dhampir, because it showed how he really had conflicts within himself.  He personally chose to be a hero, but his vampire half shows its ugly head sometimes.  This shows how in order to defeat evil; you must have a little evil in yourself.  This really captured my attention.

            On the other hand, I didn’t like the westernization setting of the movie.  To me, this made the movie really dull and ridiculous.  Not only did they live in a western world, but they also had futuristic characteristics. For example, their horses and guns were all mechanicalized.  This was unacctrative to me because I like everything to connect with one another.

            In addition, this movie was very decent for the first time.  I probably will never watch it again, even if it’s to see the last 15 or 20 minutes I missed at the screening.