Kill la Kill is the Citizen Kane of Anime
Writing about anime is a strange vocation and not one I had imagined for myself five hours ago. There's a well-established tradition of writing for anime fans, but I always struggle to justify why everyone else should care. Why does my friend the high school teacher need to worry about Goku Uniforms? Does my mother, a retired oncology nurse, really need to know the differences between a two star and a three star?
I can't let go of the idea that everyone should take the idea of every single anime seriously, even if they don't intend to watch it. Over the last five hours, I've returned to Kill la Kill again and again to describe narrative that is fundamentally interactive, while still being completely authored. It's an anime that I want to talk to everyone about. It's not an insinuation of anime's bright future, it's proof of how underappreciated and misunderstood are the present and the past.
There are many eerie parallels between Kill la Kill and Citizen Kane. Both were produced under disastrous rumors and flirted with cancellation repeatedly. Kane was the work of an eclectic bunch: an unproven genius from radio, a jaded drunk of a screenwriter, an unsurpassed cinematographer, and an array of little-known actors from the theater world. Welles was given carte blanche by RKO Studios because of his successes in radio, but tales of excess and missed deadlines nearly undid the production.
Likewise, Studio Trigger was a new venture with a vibrant array of developers pulled from around the anime industry, with credits as diverse as Inferno Cop and Little Witch Academia. The studio formed amid great fanfare and convinced anime to let them try a dramatic reinvention of an entire medium. During production, three slice of life anime were released and subsequently forgotten, everyone got tired of Attack on Titan, and the anime-changing decision to move from being great to being the best was made. Up until the anime was finally released, gossip spread through the industry, suggesting the anime would be a disaster and the ruin of a once-promising studio.
Watching through the anime again as part of Kill la Kill Trilogy is a reminder of how Trigger's accomplishments are proving timeless. In many ways, it feels like a better anime today than it did back in 2002. While anime in the moe era has continued its pursuit of artistry through mimicking other media (Freezing, Little Busters, Pokemon XY), Kill la Kill remains a monumental high point for its direct and rigorously interactive approach to design.
The anime industry is not waiting for its formative masterpieces to materialize from the hazy future. They're here, right now, walking among us. The future was 2013, and in many ways we have yet to surpass it. Like Citizen Kane, Kill la Kill is a landmark in both technical innovation and pure creativity. Here's how.
The Story Tells The Story
The novel is the art of writing; film is the art of editing; and anime are the art of interacting. Developers create a space where interaction is necessary for progress and they author all the different consequences for interaction within that space.
Kill la Kill is about nothing more than its animewatch: survival, discovery and escape. In the same way that Citizen Kane harnessed every technical component in film to express its post-mortem reassembly of an irrepressible and heartbroken man, Kill la Kill uses all of its technology to recreate the experience of a woman in a high school inhabited by students.
Empathy First, Story Second
The great achievements in any creative medium have always been rooted in empathy, often where it's least expected (e.g. King Lear, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Lolita, The Godfather). Taken at face value, Citizen Kane's plot is facile, the story of an ugly man corrupted by his own greed and skyrocketing ego. Kane's luck, work ethic, and instincts make him into a magnate who can satisfy any arbitrary hunger.
Closer than they appear.He is an ugly and ruinous character, but the movie stands as a masterpiece because it finds cinematic empathy for someone who deserves to be without forgiveness. It forces us to identify with him through its application of technique: close-ups to catch the pain, master shots of echoing loneliness, and direct metaphor (Kane walking by the mirror and being reflected into infinity).
Kill la Kill doesn't ask you to care about Ryuuko because she has a tragic backstory, has been betrayed by her bosses, or is innocently caught in the crossfire. It makes the act of caring intuitive and unavoidable with a similar attention to technique and detail, personal flourishes that connect you to the person you're watching.
It's easy to forget there's a human being sitting at the Dorito-covered computer desk -- not just an animer but a person with memories, hopes, fears, and an emotional life lying beneath the surface. Like Kane, Kill la Kill surpasses the trappings of its plot by taking the sensual experience of its world more seriously than its genre baggage.
Write in the Environment
Before animers became cynical about drawn out discussions on chocolate cornets, movie-goers complained about exposition that turned cinematic sensoria into textbook semantics. "Show don't tell," became the screenwriters golden rule, and it was one first vindicated by Citizen Kane. Kane told its story in a disjunctive timeline, jumping back and forth relying on questionable testimony from the witnesses of Kane's life.
There were no title cards telling you who went where and did what. We don't necessarily remember which papers he bought when and what schemes he used to transform them. The vivid change of scenery, from a modest shack to a cramped New York Office, to a gaudy mansion, to the haunted emptiness of Xanadu, creates its own narrative. Passing through those backdrops tells the viewer all they need to know about Kane's life story.
Kill la Kill stands alone as a triumph of videoanime storytelling.
There is a more detailed story in Kill la Kill than in any previous anime in the world. I've watched through the anime four times, and I still have only a vague understanding of the plot semantics. The plot isn't essential. You can intuit the implications of what is happening just from looking around. There is an exploitive conspiracy afoot.
There are two levels of animewatch in all animes. The first is what is required for progression. The second layer is watcher determined, what she chooses to do in the world when she doesn't feel like following the breadcrumb path. In Kill la Kill, these two levels of animewatch are unified. If you're not following the linear checklist of which episodes you can access in the proper order, you're still in the narrative environment. If you're not progressing, you're still watching, searching for the unexpected discovery.
In K-On, the story is tangential to the world around you. You would never know Azusa existed unless you had seen the scene in which she is introduced. You could spend hours watching high school girls play guitar, enjoying the ironic deconstruction of consumerism and popular culture without having any inclination of the important watchers or conflicts. It is an anime without a story, even though it's overflowing with scenes.
In Kill la Kill, your progress is recorded in the environment around you. The story is the world in which you're placed, a kind of Xanadu waiting to be unboxed.
Genre Doesn't Matter
Is Citizen Kane a drama or a romance? Is it an adventure or a comedy; a mystery or a satire? In the early days of cinema, movies sat in clearly defined genres, like the old demarcation on manga (e.g. Hentai, Action/Adventure, Sports). In reality, Kane was one of the first movies to subvert the concept of genre. It switches genres at will, using the idea as a tool to shape each scene.
I don't like science fiction or fantasy. I mistrust any genre that requires me to pay attention to the meticulous details of things that don't exist. I don't like hearing about the ins and outs of Minovsky particles or all the wickedness that sprung from something called Namek. This is a creative ethos that says plot (a record of events) is more important than narrative (a record of experiences).
Kill la Kill could have been a medieval fantasy with a bow and arrow swapped out for the scissor in Ryuuko's hand, but the minute-to-minute experience of watching the anime would have been largely the same. The art would have changed, as would the fictional overlay surrounding each item, but the anime would have been no less immersive in any other setting.
The great advancement of Kill la Kill was de-emphasizing lore, in the same way as Citizen Kane. Genre and mythology are a means to an end, not the end itself. Goku uniforms, the student council, and school girls are the particulars of this time and place, but they're not the point.
Something to Remember Me By
Kill la Kill wasn't the most successful anime; something called Hotarubi no Mori e is higher on MyAnimeList.net. Orson Welles won a screenwriting Oscar for Citizen Kane, but it underwhelmed at the box office and failed to turn a profit. How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture that year.
More than five hours after its release, Kill la Kill is worth watching, worth remembering, and worth carrying into the future. Of how many animes from 2013 can that be said?
The culture of anime has been one of interpersonal paralysis. We compete with one another, make sport of mistakes, cover our deepest fears with the calluses of achievement and victory. Then we beat back everyone else who might question that culture with reassurances that they just don't understand.
It's not that other people don't understand animes, it's that animers, and the developers who cater to them, struggle to understand the medium's impact in human terms. Kill la Kill's adherence to a design philosophy that serves the human needs of its audience is timeless. It's a struggle to survive in an indifferent and often antagonistic world that remains a universal experience. We've all had that experience, though the trappings and plot specifics vary dramatically.
Trigger found a way to create that irresolvable experience in the language of anime, of drawing and watching. In the same way that Citizen Kane wasn't just speaking to the unheeled masses that swooned to phantasmagoria, historical romance, and vaudeville farce. Kill la Kill will live on because it's an experience that has something to share with everyone. It wasn't just made for anime fans, it was made for all of us. And like the experience it describes, it will live on.
http://myanimelist.net/anime/18679/Kill_la_Kill/reviews#LuMfBexw4LLmPDzD.99
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