守って見せます。 by @YOJIRO_SN on twitter

Ultimate Anime Tournament: Round 1, Matchup 34

This blog is mainly meant to be about Showa Era magical girls, but, of course, I got into those stories as a way to contextualize the Heisei Era magical girls that I personally grew up with. Right now, one of the shows I'm re-watching with my partner is the TV anime, My-HiME (舞-HiME) from 2004. I happened to mention this series to a friend of mine from Japan and she immediately said, "Oh like the short story?" Of course, I had no idea there was a story by that name, but it turns out there is -- Mai Hime (舞姫), published in 1890 by Ogai Mori (森 鷗外). In English, it's apparently referred to often as The Dancing Girl. Now I really want to read it and try to figure out the ways it influenced the show, but it's not yet clear to me how available it is in translation. Apparently it's featured in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: Volume 1: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945, but that may only be an excerpt.

2005

Ever since I finished Doki Doki Precure, I’ve been in a bit of a rut when it comes to watching magical girl anime.  I want to take a break from Precure and start a different anime, but I can’t decide which, so I’m counting on this hellsite to decide for me.  No sign-in is required, so please vote!

[Lili] Ensei ~Mezame~ [Acapella Ver]

Pushing further into the first decade of the millennium, my latest choice from among my options for one year gets entangled with “titles that were merely popular in their time.” For that matter, there seemed to have been mixed feelings towards My-HiME from the start...

Mai Takes a Phone Call

@guri_gom on twitter

This is death itself. This is the biggest and baddest thing in all of fairy tale, and you want to set it free.

PRINCESS MONONOKE 1997 | dir. Hayao Miyazaki

I’ve been investigating possible connections between Ogai Mori’s 1890 novel, Mai Hime (舞姫), and the Heisei era magical girl series, My-HiME (舞-HiME), which is a process that has come with more than one false start. Anyway, I ended up watching the 1951 film Mai Hime, released in the US as Dancing Girl. My review is below…

I watched this film thinking it was an adaptation of the 1890 novella by the same name from Ogai Mori (森 鷗外), but that turned out not to be the case. I think I’m starting to understand that “dance princess” is just a way of writing “dancer.” Despite the confusion, I ended up enjoying the film. It was very much a post-World War 2 film. It’s interesting to hear all the discussions of freedom and how each character relates to it, even though it’s not explicitly setup as an idea coming from the US. And, it’s similarly interesting to hear so many characters explicitly blame the war for their inability to find emotional and artistic fulfillment. The theme of infidelity makes me think a bit of In The Mood For Love (花樣年華) from Wong Kar-Wai (王家衛). I wonder if he ever watched it.