AMV chronicles #65: A Step Back

 

I “officially” got into anime during the early 2000s, but unlike so many other Americans at the time, my introduction to it didn’t come through Toonami or Adult Swim. Still, I was definitely aware of how popular some of the series were that aired in those programming blocks and how they pretty much defined what it meant to be an anime fan during those years. Some of those anime series weren’t currently airing or even the least bit new by the time they became staples of Adult Swim’s regular anime programming (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop or Trigun, to name a few that had already been around for a few years but were nonetheless aired and consumed by fans as perennially-relevant titles). Others like Fullmetal Alchemist or Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (perhaps even One Piece, I don’t really recall), which weren’t being simulcast and may have even been a few seasons behind with whatever English-dubbed episode was then being aired, still passed for anime that was “current,” giving viewers that sense that they were watching something that was happening now. Maybe back in 2004 there was a way to download fansubs of last week’s episodes in Japanese, putting the tech-savvy fan far ahead of the casual TV viewer, but the process to do this was either too inconvenient or too slow for my tastes. Besides, I preferred being able to kick back on the couch and watch this stuff on a real television. I’m not making excuses for being a lazy fan, that’s just how I rolled.

As time passes, it’s no surprise that the flagship series that defined anime as a whole would pass their torches onto new franchises. So it goes for anime or film or popular music or any ongoing platform that people consume culture through. A dozen-plus years later, however, and half the anime-themed spam that finds its way into my email is pushing the latest One Piece movie, another Dragonball video game, new Sailor Moon projects, rumors about the eternally-in development conclusion to the Rebuild of Evangelion films or the perpetual memorialization of Cowboy Bebop (the 25th anniversary is only five years away). Lost in all of this is almost any mention of Inuyasha, a series familiar to millions of anime fans that has lost most of the relevance it once held to the community. Looking more and more like a relic of the early 2000s, Inuyasha seems to have lost its status as a gateway/must-see title for anime neophytes, rarely discussed any longer as an essential series that every anime fan needs to see. Even if it still is, at 167 episodes it’s an imposing commitment for any viewer to sign up for (a heavy regimen that doesn’t even include the additional 26 episodes of Inuyasha: The Final Act), one that would necessitate time spent not watching new anime, an inconceivable venture for the typical anime fan in 2018.

I would never include Inuyasha on a list of my favorite anime series, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was still a foundational experience to watch, both as mindless escapism and the kind of timeless quest story that we don’t get very much of these days. I watched many English-dubbed episodes on Adult Swim back in 2004 and 2005, the first time I ever had cable TV and the last instance of my life when I felt perfectly content to sit back and watch hours of it in a single sitting (time moved slower back then and I had fewer distractions on my mind, unfortunately this is no longer the case). I eventually watched the entire series in Japanese with English subtitles alongside with my girlfriend soon after we started dating (she owned the entire series on bootleg DVDs, fansubs that occasionally took hilarious liberties with the dialogue). Even at the time, the series had a comforting air around it, one that’s only been inflated by the nostalgia appeal it’s picked up on as the years have passed. It’s so unlike anything airing today, clichéd but not to the cynical degree we’ve come to expect. Yes, it’s a padded with filler that you could skip, but at the time I didn’t know any better and was content to watch it for what it was. I don’t begrudge anyone for not sharing this attitude. Life felt simpler back then, I guess, and watching an Inuyasha AMV like this reminds me of how little urgency or impatience I experienced while watching the series, a mindset I really can’t return to but can still get a familiar taste of in a small dose like this.

Even by the standards of 2006, “A Step Back” is not a technically impressive video. moinkys claims, “I used my own DVDs to create this, so the quality is pretty good.” Why the vertical resolution comes in at a sorrowful 240p, then, is anyone’s guess. More troubling than the resolution is the 15 fps framerate, which becomes especially apparent in the many, many shots composed of lateral and vertical pans, or any clip where there is movement across the frame. Looking again at my original written opinion of the AMV (written all the way back in 2009), I see that I somehow not only overlooked these flaws, but actually praised it for its video quality (awarding it an 8 out of 10), remarking “Good quality footage and sound. What this lacks in high-resolution it more than makes up for in clean and crisp clips.” It’s definitely possible that I was watching this AMV in the same mindset as if I were reading a comic strip or graphic novel, taking in the characters and the setting and the general sense of what was happening in each frame and letting my brain fill in the blanks. Like looking at a static page covered in drawings and perceiving characters who are moving about in a living, breathing world, perhaps my imagination was willing to override the fact that I was looking at a hideously manged video clip, preferring to delude myself into seeing fluid, smooth motion that just wasn’t there at all. I suppose I am somehow able to still do this today, for I can watch “A Step Back” and still completely lose myself in the illusion that the editor is trying to create. Asking every viewer to do this is probably very unrealistic or even hypocritical given how I’ve slammed other editors for making very minor technical errors compared to the parade of mistakes that undermine moinkys’s efforts here.

The many technical shortcomings of this AMV are unfortunate, because it’s edited with a patience and a smooth sense of pacing that’s a huge step up from her first AMV. It’s structured in the basic character-focused montage style of countless AMVs from this era, an approach that’s time-tested and not the least bit surprising but feels refreshingly thoughtful compared to the basic mode of AMVs today. Less concerned with the overall plot of the anime than crafting a sentimental romance video, moinkys crafts mini-character profile segments for Inuyasha and Kagome in the first and second verses of the song, before finally bringing the two together in the final round of the song’s chorus. The pace of the editing picks up significantly in this final segment, bringing the video to a satisfying climax. It’s the basic roller coaster theory of editing, the kind of thing I used to think viewers would internalize and respect the more they were exposed to it, but some days it feels like a misunderstood lost art from another age. In the scheme of things, however, maybe that’s exactly what it is.

I wish I could smoothly segue from discussion of both Inuyasha as well as the editing of this AMV into this final chunk of the entry you’re reading right now, but I’m not quite sure how to do that. It’s probably where I should have started since I’m pretty sure it was the reason that I found this AMV in the first place, as the seemingly random AMVs I was downloading and reviewing back then were almost always chosen because they contained some music I either loved or somehow related to, for better or worse. Oasis were never a favorite band of mine growing up, just an ever-present popular group who were always there and always sort of hit and miss for me, although never to such extremes that I either bought any of their CDs or bothered to turn off the radio if one of their songs came on. At their height, I was only dimly aware of their status in the UK but knew they were as big here as any group was between 1994 and 1996 (that strange time after Nirvana and the peak of Pearl Jam, where they could have been the biggest band in alternative rock if it weren’t for Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails or Rage Against the Machine…even the worst of this stuff at least possessed a sense of personality that’s completely lost in rock music today, to say nothing of pop as a whole). I was content to passively absorb their music, although completely confused by how hard they seemed to be trying to copy The Beatles and even more so as to why no one else seemed to notice or want to say anything about it. As time passed, the inevitable nostalgia for their music or what it represented to me began to kick in, persisting even as I finally bought some of their albums and found them literally painful to listen to even at very low volume.

“Wonderwall” does not suffer from the overdriven, mutlitracked production of so many of their other hits…which is certainly my opinion, as I’m sure the case has been made elsewhere that it absolutely does. Every time I hear it, I’m brought back to afternoons spent at a friend’s house, baking in the sun as we jumped on the trampoline in his backyard. Even faint memories of it playing on the radio as I was getting my ass kicked in wrestling practice somehow feel delightful in spite of the fact that every one one of those afternoons was a completely miserable experience to endure. In spite of its clichéd reputation, it’s a song that remains unsullied in my memories, a timeless example of classic songwriting that I reflexively reach for as a “back in my day, we had…”-song whenever some annoying indie folk music invades my airspace. The same radio station I’d heard “Wonderwall” on dozens, maybe hundreds of times, ostensibly never changed their alt-rock programming at all. Yet it’s now dominated by a mix of said indie folk, macho synth pop and second generation Passion Pit-clones. Complaining about this or remarking upon it as somehow being strange is futile and stupid, as if trends in music shouldn’t change, as if trends have ever meant anything at all but appealing to the lowest common denominator and this is somehow a grand revelation that’s suddenly just dawned on me. I guess this is that weird part of growing up where you really get a taste of how impermanent everything is, not just understanding that “change is inevitable” but really feeling the weight of that reality when it finally sets in. Yeah, some of us take longer to reach this truth than others.

I don’t expect this video to click with contemporary viewers, even as it stands as an example of so many things that I love about AMVs. I wish that more editors would return to editing videos with this kind of mindset, sitting down with a song that resonates with them and an anime they love and trying to suss out how those pieces can reinforce one another in a unique way that’s personally meaningful. Even if it looks unpolished by standards set over a decade ago or occasionally indulges in unnecessarily literal lyric sync, a simple AMV that’s made with a sense of sincerity and patience is something I value and place a priority on as a viewer. This would seem to hold a more universal appeal than AMVs as memes or as a means to prop up editors’ egos, but again, things change.

moinkys seems to have disappeared from the world of AMVs shortly after releasing “A Step Back,” with a third video that never saw the light of day. Based on stats from the Org, her videos were rarely watched, her participation in the community was nonexistent outside of the act of uploading the two AMVs she was able to finish, and her probable departure from the hobby went as unnoticed as her initial forays into it. This was a shame, as her most accomplished effort was obviously the work of someone who had quickly developed a good sense of scene selection and sync. With better tools at her disposal or some constructive advice for getting the most out of what she already had, the technical flaws in her work could have easily been corrected. Even if further efforts never built upon the simplicity of “A Step Back,” never even working in transitions or effects, I’m confident that her basic intuition for how to edit an AMV would have paid off in bigger ways than the potential hinted at here.