One week ago today I took my niece to see some Godzilla movies in the theater. It was great, and the only pea under the mattress was that it was also (of course) the one night that the Kyoto Animation film Sound! Euphonium the Movie was playing in theaters. At least with subtitles, as I cannot abide dubbing.
While I was going to the theater showing the Godzilla movies I stopped at the library across the street, where I used to work. I picked up a couple of anime movie DVDs I had ordered in from neighboring libraries. One was Liz and the Blue Bird, also a spin-off of the same Sound! Euphonium anime series. I had watched it about a month ago, and mourned having not seen it theatrically. It is a simply sublime film, and I wanted to give it another go.
Earlier in the day I had given my niece an overseas complete series box set of my beloved K-On! God, I love K-On!, which is a Kyoto Animations series. It is, despite all the competition for that title, their masterpiece. At least I think so, and I know I’m not alone. I had ordered the gray market set* from overseas because Hulu didn’t have a couple of the first season episodes (technically, they are ‘OVAs’ or extra episodes), nor K-On! the Movie.
Although the translated subtitles on this DVD set weren’t nearly as good, my sister doesn’t have Hulu, so at least it was a way to acquaint my niece with the show. For what it’s worth, I have since also subscribed to the anime service HiDive, which does have those two episodes and the movie, if again with somewhat inferior subtitle translations.
[*There is a new deluxe K-On! set for the complete series with the good subtitles, but it runs anywhere from $140 to about $200. Currently it’s selling for $180. I was hoping the price would fall to about $100, at which point I would have bought it. However, this morning I donated that hundred bucks to the Kyoto Animation Go Fund Me. It’s a pathetically small gesture and I wish I could do more. I have no idea whether they can (literally, or figuratively) rebuild the studio. Buildings are replaceable, great artists and craftsmen are not. The fund has in less than 18 hours raised over a million dollars, which is spectacular considering most could only afford to give $5 or $10 or $20. I think this shows how many lives have been touched by the shows and movies these people created. The fund is earmarked to help offset all the various medical and other expenses of the victims.]Two days ago it was Prime Day on Amazon, and like a heroin addict, they enticed me to blow several hundred bucks on various books and Blu Rays. One such purchase was the box set for the Kyoto Animation series Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, a show I quite adore. I have access to it on Crunchyroll, but it was very heavily discounted, and I like owning things, and I figured I could loan it to people when the occasion arises.
I won’t pretend to be the world’s greatest fan of the works of Kyoto Animation, but obviously I have some fairly serious truck with the company’s oeuvre. This is especially true, again, for K-On! (And, for that matter, K-On!!) As simple as it makes me sound, I can only sum up my love for the show by saying that when I watch it I’m happy. In the less than a year since I gained access to it via Hulu, I think I’ve watched through the run of the show and the movie five or six times. I may no longer watch it every single day, but I doubt a week goes by when I don’t watch an episode or two on at least three days during that week.
One of the most bitter of truths is that while it takes genius, talent, determination, luck and often the combined efforts of brilliant teams made up of anything from a couple of people to thousands of them to create something great and meaningful, it only takes one imbecile with evil in his heart and the most primitive of tools to destroy lives and the potential of those lives. Works that took a lifetime or several of them to fashion can be so destroyed in an instant. Human lives, sadly, are equally vulnerable.
At last count the death toll of the murderous arson at Kyoto Animation sits at 33. That’s about half of the roughly 70 people who were occupying the building at the time. Nearly all the rest, it seems, where injured by the fire, many grievously.
As I mentioned this morning, while the industry standard for anime studios is to assemble a team of mostly freelancers to work on a show once it’s in production–and generally working them like dogs and paying them a pittance in the process–KoyAni was much admired for keeping their full stuff on salary, ensuring a continuity of artistic relationships that surely in large part explains the remarkable consistency of their work.
Again, this ironically means rebuilding the studio (assuming the company owners and managers aren’t among the dead) might prove an impossible task. About half the working staff is dead and surely at least a few more will pass on. Many will be permanently disabled. Given the rarity of salaried positions in the industry, as well as the impeccable reputation of the studio and it’s product, one can only assume the people who worked there were generally among the pinnacle of their field. They will not be easily replaced, or their synergy easily replicated.
Of the survivors, some (I imagine) will probably decide to retire from the industry. I can’t even imagine the trauma attendant to going through an event like this. I doubt many of us can. And so in the end, the murderer not only stole these peoples’ lives, but the art they would have created. That’s undoubtedly an astoundingly selfish and petty observation on my part, a fact I am painfully aware of. However, I can’t deny it isn’t another thing that wounds me.
One of the few bright spots in this horrible, horrible situation is that the studio’s most famous name, Naoko Yamada, apparently survived. I assume she was not on the premises at the time. I honestly consider Ms. Yamada to probably be one of the ten greatest filmmakers working in the world at this point. Her body of work is astounding, even more so when you consider the fact that she’s only 35 years of age. She was the director of K-On!, a show she oversaw at the tender age of 25. Since then she’s gone from triumph to triumph.
I realize it sounds like I’m prioritizing her life over those of the deceased. I feel that way myself, and again recognize that it makes me kind of an asshole, even if that’s not really what I mean.
Still, although her death would have been an irreparable loss for film, surely in a way this man killed her future art as well. In a very best case scenario, she musters the insane courage to continue working in anime, and somehow finds coworkers and collaborators able to replace the ones she’s lost. Even so, how can the work she would produce in the future be the same art she would have created? That bastard will surely leave his mark on her and many, many others forever.
When I got to work early this morning, I mentioned the tragedy to a kid who works overnight security in the building. I know he’s into anime. He seemed primarily interested in learning the killer’s motive. It’s probably a matter of our age difference, or maybe just my temperament, but knowing ‘why he did it’ doesn’t interest me at all. There can be no justification for this sort of mass slaughter, and no explanation that can possible make ‘sense’ of it.
Personally, I’d lock the murderer away forever and never have his name mentioned in public again. It’s inevitable, however, that whether I want to or not that I will learn about him and his supposed reason for committing this carnage in the days ahead. When I do, I’m sure his ‘reason’ will be a standard, trite one: Love affair gone wrong. Disgruntled ex-employee. Nut who thought the studio stole his work. Or, perhaps, he’s just simply a lunatic.
None of that really matters. Whatever his motive, he chose to kill and maim and disfigure and haunt dozens and dozens of innocents. In the process he also deprived millions of people around the world the joy their future efforts would have provided them. And there’s nothing we can do about that. As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, you can’t stop monsters. You can only, most of us, survive them.
Lord God, please watch over the survivors and the families and friends of all of the victims.
