1) Fans of Utena should be no stranger to the “twisted” music that was played in Kanba’s descent in the hospital building. Touga also played this piece of music on a gramophone in episode 15 of Utena (that was during his period of sulking after being defeated in duel by Utena). It was the second movement of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony “From the New World”.
Actually, the weird part of the hospital has already appeared in CM 4 (see YouTube video here). Just looking at the hair colour, the person in the CM seems to be Tabuki?
As usual, the rendition of his descent is so abstract that you can take your pick of what it means:
i) Kanba physically walking through those weird stairs to save the kidnapped Shouma.
ii) Kanba remembering little by little who Masako was in the depth of his memory.
iii) Kanba diving into his mind of things/people he dislikes in descending order – lunch box on level 3, wedding cake on level 2, hand-knitted sweater on level 1, and Masako as well as Shouma on underground level 1.
Any other alternative explanations?
2) The penguins of Kanba and Himari both bear a mark of their past wrongdoings from a defining episode of their lives. No.1′s band-aid corresponds to the injury Kanba caused his father in dashing out of home during a typhoon in a fit of hot-headness. No.3′s ribbon refers to the injury Himari caused her mother in a fit of vanity to become a pop idol. These marks are like the mark of Cain.
No. 2 does not have any defining mark that the eye can see. That is the scary thing about No.2 and Shouma. At least the actions of Kanba and Himari are more or less “in sync” with their penguins, but Shouma always seems to be “out of sync” with No.2.
For example, I already mentioned that in episode 8 Shouma was chatting pleasantly with Tabuki while No.2 was outside slaughtering birds (ie. its own kind) for food.
In this episode, while Shouma is chatting pleasantly with Ringo while No.2 devoured a thermometer with mercury (ie. poison) in it. Why the death wish?
3) The only thing I have to say about what No.1 does while Kanba swears to Himari nervously that he would happily wear any muffler she knits in the middle of the Sahara desert is that No.1′s examination stick looks very phallic.
Still, I wonder if what No.1 does is within Himari’s eyesight since she can also see No.1. Given that there are so many women around in the hospital, this may well be the first time that No.1 has the opportunity to misbehave within Himari’s eyesight (because Himari seldom ventures out of home).
4) Shouma had the choice to tell the truth or lie to Kanba about what really happened with Ringo, and he chose to lie to Kanba.
Kanba had the choice to either save Himari (by keeping the Fate Diary) or Shouma (by handing over the Fate Diary), and he chose to keep the Fate Diary to save Himari first and foremost.
You know how the two brothers have their backs facing each other in the OP? These choices in this episode may well mark the diverging point between the two brothers.
5) I fully anticipated this episode to be below average, because I can see that a lot of staff resources must be diverted to the next three episodes where Ikuni himself does the storyboard. It turns out that this episode was passable with the exception of certain drawings of Kanba’s face. Hopefully they will have get that fixed when the Blue-ray discs are released.
This was a solo episode by Keiji Gotoh, he probably just didn’t have time to go over and redraw the characters. I don’t really mind since the second half looks amazing.
Two things in this post seem to jump out at me:
>> That is the scary thing about No.2 and Shouma. At least the actions of Kanba and Himari are more or less “in sync” with their penguins, but Shouma always seems to be “out of sync” with No.2.
>> 4) Shouma had the choice to tell the truth or lie to Kanba about what really happened with Ringo, and he chose to lie to Kanba.
The point of Shouma always being “out of sync” with his penguin is likely due to this, wouldn’t you think? His actions are always contrary to his true thoughts. Perhaps Shouma’s greatest discontent is the role he’s been given – the ‘nice’ brother, the brother who stays at home and prepares the meals, and behaves platonically to all the girls in and around him (contrast with Kanba, whose character is considerably more virile.)
Sometimes I wonder how much mise-en-scene suffers due to resourcing issues. Did they decide to rely more on long shots in the Kanba/Himari restaurant scene so they could draw fewer frames? Or including certain scenic objects into a montage to draw it out? Usually fixes in bluray are mainly just fleshing out the details so maybe there’s not much sacrifice, but I’m always curious…
For some reason, the ceiling in the patient’s room is lined with piping. This is the same with the trippy section that Kanba wandered into to save Shouma. What’s up with that :S
Aw, shit, I completely missed this one. And I love it: it seems to tie in strongly with this theme of people not being entirely what they seem I’m seeing everywhere.
Shoma isn’t in sync with #2; Kanba is doing something shady and nobody knows what; Himari wants to be the gentle and carefree princess, but is as troubled and as bitter over her failed dreams as anyone else; Ringo says she could tell the happy family act was just an act from the beginning; Ringo herself is extremely duplicitous, and beyond that her crazed sociopathic obsession is hiding the broken down little girl at the root of it all; Masako seemed to be directing Kanba’s exes against him- it turned out she wanted him for herself (or, that’s still surface too: we haven’t really seen enough of her to say what is going on); Yuri has taken special pleasure in twisting the knife in Ringo so that Tabuki doesn’t notice.
God only knows what Tabuki is hiding: I doubt it’ll be pretty.
Yes. Ringo’s rant to Shoma at the end of ep 8, calling him out as a faker, took me by surprise: she said it was obvious, but I hadn’t picked up on it at all. I decided then that I hadn’t been paying nearly as much attention to this show as I should have been. Rewatching, the disjunction between Shoma and his penguin is striking.
It’s there right in the very first scene establishing the penguins: Kanba is cutting lettuce- #1 is cutting cucumber; Himari is knitting- so is #3 (and with much greater skill than Himari. Implication: Himari is not as helpless as she appears?); Shoma… has just run screaming from his. He’s perturbed by them. I think the closest #2 comes to mirroring Shoma is in exterminating insects whenever he’s (aheh) bugged by something.
The furthest, or at least the most shocking to me, was the end of episode 5. Shoma chases Himari’s hat into the street. Where the hell is #2? #1 is with Kanba every step of the way in that chase. Kanba even goes to far as to save the penguin when it slips. #2 is…? Last we saw him he was clinging to Shoma as Ringo ran off to attack Hat!Himari. So, he just… didn’t come with? Implication: Shoma doesn’t really give a fuck about Himari after all?
If it’s true, he’s hiding it very well. No, it doesn’t gel for me: not as caring as he likes to present, sure, but not that uncaring. So I have another explanation. The last time we saw #2 before the sur-reality of seizon senryaku he had been, for the first and only time, overcome by the bugs. Specifically, Ringo’s bugs. Implications, then: Shoma’s distress over his argument with her is strong enough to momentarily override his concern for Himari. Shoma’s bond with the psycho stalker girl has overpowered his bond with his sister.
What I’m saying is that I think Shoma is in love with Ringo.
I have some other stuff to back this up. The way #2 acts around Ringo in episode 8 is pretty straightforward; he’s always close to here, on the train and in the flat; when she turns off to go to Tabuki’s, Shoma has to stop and gawp and waffle and reorientate- #2 follows immediately. Of course, #2′s not after her, not really: he wants her curry. But then, #2 is all about satiating his hunger; filling that need is his happiness. We’ve already seen, by this point, that other food is ceasing to interest him- the sandwiches in ep 7 couldn’t hold his attention. Ringo’s curry, by stark contrast, fascinates the penguin from the point he first sees it to when he consumes it.
The frog scene in ep 7 is not so straightforward. #2 eats the eggs; what’s with that? This is another thing that struck me as very significant on rewatch. It seemed like a direct escalation of #2 failing to follow after Shoma and the hat in ep 5: that was a passive refusal to help Himari. This is actively fucking with the plan to get the Penguindrum, so that #2 can fill his belly.
The scene’s also interesting in that it seems to foreshadow ep 8: here, #2 eats the frogspawn, destroying the frog’s attempt to have children; in ep 8, Shoma strips Ringo of her disguise, destroying her attempt to have Tabuki’s child (alright, so, Yuri probably deserves most of the credit there, but even before she showed up- when the lights went on- the scene felt over; Yuri’s appearance was presented more as a symptom than a cause). I already suspected that frogs symbolised Ringo (as she was transformed into one in one of her ep 4 fantasy sequences), this convinced me.
So, why is #2/Shoma fucking with the plan? He wants the ‘drum, right? That’s the entire point of all of this, right? He says it’s because he thinks Ringo should give up and respect Tabuki and Yuri’s feelings. That he cannot counternance rape, not even for Himari’s sake (though I suspect Kanba would have gone so far as to help strip him). And sure, that’s a pretty good reason. I’m suspicious, mainly because at this stage I’m disinclined to believe that Shoma is doing what he says he is doing for the reasons that he says he says he is doing it for, but it is entirely possible that that is what is going on here.
Likely, even.
My immediate reaction was that this was like the bug spray, indicating some emotional distress of Shoma’s that’s not otherwise apparent. On second brush, that doesn’t work for me.
If that were the case, why not use the bug metaphor? It’s been used repeatedly and consistantly for these situations all the way up to now. Why change the visual language when we’re just getting fluent in it? It’s also a different sort of metaphor: with the bugs, #2 was killing something external to himself, trying to control the situation around him. (And, incidently, it’s always struck me as a kind of spasmic, scrabbling twitchy, obsessive-compulsive, mean little act. Reflexively beating down on the irritating little problems right in front of you instead of actively stepping up and addressing the root cause; very Shoma; very un-Kanba.) This, with the thermometer, is as you point out, suicidal: it’s self-directed harm.
If this is a replacement for bug extermination, then ep 8 and Shoma’s accident has radically altered his internal state.
No, the parallel I’d rather draw is with #2 eating the curry Mont-Blanc: he knew it was drugged; he’d sat there and watched Ringo drugged. He knew it was dangerous, and he ate it anyway. Why? Because he wanted to. He was hungry, and his desire to sate his primal urge overrode his self-preservation instinct. Same with the thermometer: he knew it was toxic, he just didn’t give a fuck.
So, what does Shoma want, even though he knows it’s dangerous?
Right.
(Am I twisting everything to support my hypothesis? You decide ;))
Talking about animal motifs, I’ve had a few thoughts on the subject that I suppose I might as well append here. (I mean, what can it hurt? This comment is already stupidly long).
The Takakura siblings are obviously associated with penguins. This is a fairly interesting choice: penguins are birds, but with the odd distinction of being able to fly only underwater. Implication: …what? That the three are supposed to be part of this celestial, higher element, but due to some flaw in their intrinsic nature are forced into the pelagic depths with Ringo?
(But then, penguins are not flawed; they are exactly what they are, like every other creature in existance. And, while ungainly on land, they are truly beautiful in the sea, in their proper element. They only seem ridiculous because we view them in our enviroment, on our terms, rather than theirs.)
Masako, and I assume her brother, are also associated with penguins, but of a different sort. #0 (as I’m going to call it) is crested, for one thing. The iconic crested penguin is the Rockhopper, but it doesn’t seem to fit. It’s not elegant, for one thing- even by penguin standards. I mean, it hops. That’s not elegant. The Royal Penguin might fit, if only for the name. But then, #0′s crest is black, not yellow, and the hat-penguins are also crested. They seem like a more obvious fit for the “royal” penguin. So maybe Masako is a silly little rockhopper after all, and all her elegance is just a sham.
Really, we don’t know enough about her to make any useful statements.
Ringo, as I have argued above, is a frog. An amphibian, caught between two natures (like the Takakuras). Ugly, slimy and unloved (and another hopper). It eats flies; celestial, flying creatures, but of a lesser order than, say, birds. Another thing that jumped out at me, rewatching; that shot in ep 4, Ringo clinging to Tabuki’s arm and Yuri, just arrived, standing there in her hat and dress with her long golden her. Together in the same frame like that, I thought, “Ringo is fucked.” She never even stood a chance. She has brought a knife to a nuke fight. Silly little frog, trying to compete with a cat.
Ringo’s mother and father are associated with kappas and otters, respectively. Those two may have been chosen just for the sake of the pun, I don’t know, but if they were it is remarkable how neatly they fit into the scheme. The otter and the kappa are also amphibious, dual natured. The otter, though, does not quite fit: it is amphibious, but not amphibian. It is a mammal; it has more of the land and less of the sea in it than the kappa or the frog. This, I think, parallels the difference between Ringo-papa and Ringo/Ringo-mama. Ringo-mama took Momoka’s death much harder, or at least took longer to recover; Ringo herself is still warped by that death. Ringo-papa got over it; he moved on, is moving on. He’s getting remarried. He’s set apart from his ex-wife and daughter.
On the back of this, I think I’m going to posit, tentatively, that water, underwater, is depression. Ringo is hurting, her mother is hurting, the Takakuras are hurting. Masako, by inference, is hurting.
Water does not seem like a kind element to me. It is cold and dark and suffocating.
Eels represent Ringo-papa’s new wife and new daughter, but are also used more generally for anything hostile to Ringo’s family. That cellphone strap, that argument between her parents and, most significantly, a pair of eels are to be found on the cover of Momoka’s diary.
Momoka is a toxin.
Tabuki is very interesting here. He turns up in Ringo’s fantasies as a fish and a seal; harmless little sea creatures, preyed upon by others. During episode 6, talking about Momoka, he is clearly represented by a cat. So is Momoka. (This scene also contains a statues, of a particularly derpy frog and some birds.) But most commonly he is juxtaposed with birds. It’s even in the OP, for fuck’s sake. What’s going on here, I think, is multiple points of view. Ringo is part of the water; she thinks of everyone else in terms of water, and she thinks of him as a helpless victim of Yuri’s. Tabuki thinks of himself of a cat. Or rather, Momoka was a cat, and while he was with her he thought he was a cat too. The bird is suggested not by a person but by the world itself; this then I think is the true, objective viewpoint.
And if it is true, then Tabuki is thus far the only inhabitant of this higher, heavenly element. He soars above the rest of the cast; is distant from them in a way they can only vaguely understand. He is distant too on screen: we never see what he’s thinking. We never see past his surface. I said before that everybody seems to be hiding something- with Tabuki alone we have no idea what.
Yuri crops up as a cat and a killer whale, both in Ringo’s fantasies. Subjective, then; untrustworthy. The cat is interesting, though, and not just because that might also be Momoka’s animal. It preys on both fish and bird, but is not part of the sea or the sky. It is sleek and elegant and predatory.
That’s it, I think. I am sorry for dumping a mini-blog-post in your comments section; it is a thing that happens sometimes, and is mostly accidental. :(
And sorry for the overabudance of semi-colons. >_>
Dez691:
It appears that there were two people assigned to do ”second original drawing” [第２原画] in episode 9, but there seems to be none assigned in episode 10. Like I said, it may just be a case of staff resources being diverted to make sure that episodes 11-13 with Ikuni’s storyboard look absolutely amazing.
The second half does have many merits, although personally I wish they had put in more effort to Masako’s jump to kiss Kanba, because that was supposed to be the climax. Somehow the center of gravity of the body mass of Masako jumping at Kanba didn’t look quite right… and I wish they had framed the shot of them kissing in more creative way than just their two faces leaning together…
Celeste:
I think Auto explains very well about Shouma in the comment above.
humbug:
>> For some reason, the ceiling in the patient’s room is lined with piping. This is the same with the trippy section that Kanba wandered into to save Shouma. What’s up with that :S
I hear you. Usually, you would expect the hospital in Part A to have smooth ceilings because it is the “external face” to the outside world, and you would expect the hospital in Part B to be lined with pipes because it is the “interior”. I don’t really have an answer to that at present – it may just be a design thing.
Auto:
>> Yes. Ringo’s rant to Shoma at the end of ep 8, calling him out as a faker, took me by surprise: she said it was obvious, but I hadn’t picked up on it at all.
For all we know, Ringo may able be the saner of the two. Which one is crazier – living out the will of the dead (Ringo) or trying to revive the dead (Shouma)?
>> It’s there right in the very first scene establishing the penguins: Kanba is cutting lettuce- #1 is cutting cucumber; Himari is knitting- so is #3 (and with much greater skill than Himari. Implication: Himari is not as helpless as she appears?); Shoma… has just run screaming from his. He’s perturbed by them.
This is a very good point. It is spectacular how seemingly innocent scenes in this show are packed with such rich messages. This goes to reinforce from what I have said at the outset of blogging about this series – *nothing * ever appears in Ikuni’s animation for no particular reason.
Also – at some point, they would probably have to do a flashback of episode 1 to elaborate on how Kanba and Himari found out that the penguins cannot be seen by other people.
>> No, the parallel I’d rather draw is with #2 eating the curry Mont-Blanc: he knew it was drugged; he’d sat there and watched Ringo drugged. He knew it was dangerous, and he ate it anyway. Why? Because he wanted to. He was hungry, and his desire to sate his primal urge overrode his self-preservation instinct. Same with the thermometer: he knew it was toxic, he just didn’t give a fuck.
I really like your impressive analysis of Shouma – I take my hat off to you. Bravo. ^^
One more thing about Shouma and drugged food. I wonder how Masako came to know for certain that Shouma would eat the pudding (and eat the pudding first at that). She could have drugged the whole tray of food just to be safe. Only someone who is close to him would know what he eats and doesn’t eat…
>> Those two may have been chosen just for the sake of the pun, I don’t know, but if they were it is remarkable how neatly they fit into the scheme. The otter and the kappa are also amphibious, dual natured.
Just for the benefit of other people reading this and wondering what the pun is:
Kappa -> kaa -> かあ-> 母 = Japanese word for “mother”
Otter -> otou -> おとう-> お父[さん] = Japanese word for “father”
My only reaction is that kappa is a youkai instead of a real animal, and kappa cannot live without water being poured into the crown of its head from time to time.
>> On the back of this, I think I’m going to posit, tentatively, that water, underwater, is depression.
This is an interesting idea…
Note that there is always water around when Shouma saved Ringo ‘s life – the first time in a lake, the second time in the rain.
>> Ringo, as I have argued above, is a frog. An amphibian, caught between two natures (like the Takakuras). Ugly, slimy and unloved (and another hopper).
But the queen mother in the Versailles fantasy is also a giant frog…
As far as I can see up to now, the frog is really a shorthand for maternity. The queen mother is a mother and therefore it is a frog. Ringo wants to become a mother and therefore she turns into a frog.
In a way, the magic frog that laid eggs on Shouma’s back is really the externalized desire of Ringo to become a mother.
>> He turns up in Ringo’s fantasies as a fish and a seal; harmless little sea creatures, preyed upon by others.
One thing that drew my attention is how Tabuki showed up in the cowboy fantasy – which reminds me of the Hanged Man in the Tarot. He was also “riding” on Shouma in that scene… and Shouma also led the horse in the Versailles fantasy. Shouma is a kind of horse to the supposed Prince Tabuki in Ringo’s fantasy.
>> And sorry for the overabudance of semi-colons. >_>
Actually I am more curious about the overabundance use of html codes in your comment. ^^
I have blogged for several years, and you are by far the first visitor to include html codes (which are all manually typed) in your comment. ^^
Thank you! ^_^
That… is interesting. My initial reflexive objection was, “Surely Shoma would have recognised her, then?” But no, of course not: she was in disguise. She’s been very careful not to come into direct contact with the Takakuras, in fact. In previous episodes, she works through proxies, and from a distance. Here she’s in disguise; she’s hidden behind laundry; she’s speaking through the walls; she’s hidden in the dark. Though I have no idea how to square that with her spending the entire latter half of this episode trying to get Kanba to remember her. She wants him to know her identity, but not her appearance?
It is a mystery.
An idle thought strikes me. Himari- a sick girl, revived by the hat, with two protective brothers. Mario- a sick boy, revived by the hat, with… one protective sister? Does Masako have a blue-haired sister waiting in the wings? Who picked up the diary?
Idle speculation, of course.
I’m painfully aware that the connection is tenuous. There is another possibility (assuming that everyone needs to map to an animal) that I neglected; the starfish. It’s a recurring image, when Ringo’s in her bed, dreaming. But the show doesn’t do anything with it, so I had nothing to say. :p
Hmm. The Hanged Man is usually depicted hanging upside down, suspended by the foot. I have a Marseille set around here somewhere, and Le Pendu is upside down there. I believe the Rider-Waite and Thoth sets are the same. Now, I’m not a big Tarot person, but I know that there’s a lot of significance placed on these sort of incidental elements of illustration. If Tabuki’s Le Pendu here, he’s Le Pendu reveresed (or; Ikuhana and co fucked the symbolism. The Tarot has a history of being misused in pop culture :p).
Now, the Hanged Man represents Sacrifice, Letting go, Surrendering, Passivity, Suspension, Acceptance, Renunciation, Patience, New point of view, Contemplation, Inner harmony, Conformism, Non-action, Waiting, Giving up.
Which is… pretty Tabuki, actually.
Reversed: Introverted personality. Clinging to the past. Attachment. Immaturity. Refusal to accept responsibility. Selfishness. Emotional suspension, anxiety, guilt. A traitor – one who has turned his back to friends and loved ones and in effect on himself in the process.
…also very Tabuki. He can seem very childish at times. And we still have no way of knowing how much or how little Momoka’s death is hanging over him.
Somewhat disturbingly, Le Pendu reversed would put him in the same place, emotionally, as Akio. Or, perhaps, Mikage. I desperately want to examine this show as a thing in its own right, seperate from Utena, but it’s just not going to happen. :(
(interpretation courtesy of Google and Wikipedia- my book on interpretation is in a box somewhere).
Well, I guess it’s because I spent quite a lot of time when I was younger on forums, handling bbcode. Now, you could use the buttons at the top of a post to add code. But it was a little awkward. You had to take your hands off the keyboard, put them on the mouse… typing [i][/i], [b][/b], [quote][/quote] by hand was faster, if not necessarily easier.
So by this point I guess it comes naturally to me; HTML is not very different to bbcode.
And I’m a programmer by trade, so that might have something to do with it. ;)
Auto:
Actually, come to think of it, Tabuki is not conceived exclusively as harmless little sea creatures in Ringo’s fantasy.In Ringo’s Versailles fantasy, he is referred to as “the prince of birds” in one of Yuri’s songs. My knee-jerk reaction was… Lohengrin… the knight whose name/origin must never be asked by his wife or he will depart, never to return… But then it may well just be me thinking too much…
Haha, I hear you about Utena… ^_^
I like to collect old-style Tarot cards as items of art. (I own more than a dozen set of Tarot cards and my favorite by far is the Visconti-Sforza set. You must be a kindred spirit in getting the Marseilles set. ^-^) To me, the Hanged Man is a unique card because it depicts a person suffering and at the same time seeing the world upside down (ie. opposite of what everyone sees). It could just be me thinking too much … but we will see later on in the series as I truly believe that nothing that ever appears in Ikuni’s animation is there for no particular reason.
I just thought of other points to back your excellent theory. Gluttony as manifested in No.2 has never been apparent in Shouma. The only time his mouth ever watered was in the third episode when he watched Ringo cooking curry, and it was also the only time his hungry belly ever made a sound. In a way, his hunger is not for physical food (you never see him eating more than ordinary guys his age) – his hunger is perhaps for something abstract, like love.