Skip to main content

Rest In Peace: Satoshi Kon

Truly, this is a sad week in geekdom. The anime world lost one of its great, a man that was and possibly is a legend in and around anime circles. The Japanese animator, Satoshi Kon, passed away this week at a young age of 47. Kon created such titles as The Perfect Blue (possibly my favourite anime movie), Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika, as far as full length features go. He was skilled in blending together adult themed storylines with a distorted dream-like tapestry all the while connecting to the audience with its emotional grab. When I think about who my favourite animator is, it falls between Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon. Well ff it can be considered a deciding factor, I have all of Kon's movies on DVD but not all of Miyazaki's. I am saddened that we will no longer see new ideas, new creations and new worlds from the mind of this master artist. But life is what it is and we have what we have. So thank you for that. Rest well Mr. Kon and peace be to your family and your friends.






Comments

Sean Clark said…
I just watched Paprika after hearing about him, I had never heard about him or his movies before, and I was blown away. I think I'm going to take a break from regular anime and watch some of these movies now.

Popular posts from this blog

The League of Denial (2013)

The topic of concussions in sports is a dialogue that’s been growing the past number of years.  Do a search on ‘concussions’ and ‘football’ and you’ll get several thousand hits on the controversy that’s surrounded the sport.  It’s a challenging topic as the research is all relatively new, and the topic itself challenges the mentality and philosophy adopted by football loving Americans.  Now, I’m not a fan of football or NFL but when I saw this book lying at the local bookstore, my interest was piqued.  Although I’m not a fan of football, those that know me know that I’m an unabashed fan of prowrestling.  Talks about concussions are also quite a hot topic even within the prowrestling sub-culture.  Earlier this year, one of the hottest wrestlers of the current era, Daniel Bryan, retired early at the age of 34 due to a history of concussion related issues.  Interestingly, he was not permitted to return to the ring due to the disapproval by WWE’s medic...

Finally, the Xbox 360!!

So as I mentioned in a previous post, I received an Xbox 360 for Christmas from my dad. A great present it was! I've had 3 weeks to enjoy it so I guess I can give you my impressions of it now. First the controller. In truth, I haven't felt a controller this comfortable in my gaming life before. As a child who grew up on the 8-bit generation, with just a directional pad and 2 buttons, there was quite a learning curve getting used to using two analog sticks at the same time. You might say, "Hey Lam, how bout the PS2? You have that machine, and that has analog sticks". True, but of the twenty or so games I have for that, all of them used either only 1 analog stick, or allowed the option to switch on to the directional pad. Using 2 sticks at the same time was at first just uncomfortable. This made for all sorts of trouble as I was playing Gears of War . Luckily for me, I had computer controlled teammates that watched my back. I love the Media Center capabilities...

MAX PAYNE was oh so PAYNEFUL!!!

What a failure this was. An EPIC FAILURE~! And I'll tell you why. This movie had everything going for it which was why it made the failure seem so huge. It had star power. It had a very competent director. The visual style was there. It had a simple storyline... a storyline that was basically fuck-proof because it's so basic. The effects (when there were any) were also pretty great. So where did they go wrong? Pacing. If the first two-thirds of the film was like the last third, I think it would have been a fine film. Not great by any means, but fine. I mean, there was hardly any action in the first hour. It was all talk and build up. Every 5 minutes I was saying to myself, "okay, something cool is gonna happen now". But it never came. I think had they added 2 or 3 big action sequences during that hour, that it would have helped the film breathe and flow better. I mean, didn't they realize that the source material was an action game? Max Payne is ba...