Rusty dream or not, isn't anime fundamentally unhealthy? I find myself thinking this kind of thing...it's cartooning for adolescents and no longer for children. Exaggerate the looks, the maturity, the coolness, the stakes, the sexuality, the childishness and the animation–but make it more static too. It's a snapshot of a dream out of childhood and into the oven, still uncrushed but made unhealthy. Put like so, it makes for a revolting medium. Late night anime, anyhow: a perversion of fantasy, a cynically designed dream. Not that anime's trying to be malicious: it's just fundamentally flawed. Or maybe not. Whatever anime is, it's got to be something special to keep attracting people into the nightmarish industry. I think that's the real testament to anime. Not only does it manage to stay afloat, somehow, but it attracts people willing to sacrifice their lives for it. I just hope the perversion doesn't run too deep, isn't too corrupting. Or animation could be similarly, fundamentally flawed, and this is just an implicit symptom of the medium. But I doubt it.

"He found a formula

for drawing

comic rabbits:

The formula for

drawing comic

rabbits paid.

So in the end he

could not

change the

tragic habits

this formula for

drawing comic

rabbits made."

A quote from Robert Graves from The Animator's Survival Kit. Applicable to the industry, and also, to no great surprise, drawing. After this we get "Life drawing is the anecdote to this" and there you go. There's something admirable about drawing the way animators do for anime. It's romantic, to devote oneself so completely to a craft. Or maybe not; I cannot see how the hunger artist makes good works. The life artist, however...

Why do we draw or write? It's not enough for it to be an end in itself. Where is the vision? Art is a pitstop, not an end. It grows late and the mind duller yet.