#hiroshi mori

[hollowennes]

The Sky Crawlers (2008) Dir. Hiroshi Mori

[huariqueje]

Advent Angel    -   Hiroshi Mori , 2016.

Japanese, b.1977 -

Acrylic, urethane on canvas ,  162 x 162 cm.    63.8 x 63.8 in.

[deadscanlations]

MORI, Hiroshi - The BBB

Personal Page for MORI, Hiroshi. Japanese Novelist, Doctor of Engineering, and Modeler. He was born in 1957. While working in Nagoya Univers

If anyone's interested, the Sky Crawlers novels have been translated. I haven't read them myself yet, so I dunno what the translation or editing quality is like. The covers they used are ugly as sin though, they should've just went with photos of clouds or something like the original JP novels.

It looks like this is an indie publisher started by a Japanese novelist, Ryūsui Seiryōin.

[animewithairplanewings]

スカイ・クロラ

The Sky Crawlers is a series of alternate-history cyberpunk novels written by Hiroshi Mori.  The anime film of the same title was directed by Mamoru Oshii, written by Chihiro Itou, and produced by Production I.G in 2008.

The film is set in a world where literal corporate warfare has replaced traditional state-based war, where privately operated air forces fight for the supremacy of their parent company.

If The Princess and the Pilot is the fairytale version of an alternate reality that focuses heavily on flying, then Crawlers is exactly the type of philosophical cyberpunk one would expect from director Oshii, who also directed the far more famous Ghost in the Shell.  The pilots of these air forces are all an artificial offshoot of humanity known as Kildren, who are perpetually stuck in late adolescence.  The film explores the implications of this world through their eyes, focusing especially on Yuuichi Kannami, Suito Kusanagai, and Midori Mitsuya.  But that’s not what we’re interested in.

The film opens firing on all cylinders with a shot similar to, and likely an inspiration for, the first shot in Princess that we see Charles flying, but this time it’s the main cast in the Shinden inspired Sanka, with the Mustang inspired Skyly outperforming and downing the Rostock flight.  Crawlers pairs bombastic dogfight sequences with a muted, often stilted setting and editing, giving an overall oppressive feel to the movie.

But man are the flight scenes good.  The 3D modeling and animation on the airplanes is as beautiful as it is clearly well-researched, and while I would have loved for it to have been traditionally animated, beggars can’t be choosers.  The mechanics and physicality of the planes feels good, and they even got details like pickling external tanks and the look of the wreckage.

The radio-chatter is pretty good too, and it is all in English, which I guess is still the international language of aviation even in that world.  But while Oshii managed to get some native speakers for much of the English, the Japanese voice cast still performs for the bits of English that their characters speak, to varying degrees of success.

The Sky Crawlers has a decent amount of well-executed flying and aerial combat, and as such gets itself 4.75 out of 5 Airplanes.

Thank you to @konochiyoda for the recommendation.

[juseitou]

[juseitou]

[beneaththetangles]

The Playful Icons of Hiroshi Mori

While browsing Pinterest recently, I found this:

Beneath, some wags had christened this the “Moe Lisa” by “Leonardo Doujinshi.” The whimsical, anime-esque style reminds me of the playful appropriations of Western art by Hiroshi Mori (not to be confused with the novelist by the same name). (I was not able to confirm if the “Moe Lisa” specifically was his, though it wouldn’t surprise me.) Mori loves to blend Western art styles with anime techniques.

One area of Mori’s work I really enjoy is his treatment of Christian religious themes. He has, for instance, half a dozen portrayals of Joan of Arc as a cyborg centaur:

What is the value of such a depiction? Well, first of all, it’s fun! Second, it helps brush off the dust of familiarity that inevitably covers important things (and people) in our lives, so that we can encounter them again with all the freshness we did the first time. Do you remember the feelings when you first dated or married someone? How about when when you first consciously encountered Jesus, and gave your life to him?

Those were days of excitement, joy, and energy. Of course, they couldn’t last forever. Familiarity breeds, perhaps not contempt, but at least boredom. “Did I fall in love with the wrong person?” “Is the magic in our relationship gone?” “Did I really give my life fully and properly to God?” “Have I turned my back on Jesus? Or has he turned his back on me?”

Of course, none of our doubts are true; yet the change in feelings is undeniable. Is there a way to encounter someone for the first time again? It can happen by accident; we can also train ourselves to see things afresh. JRR Tolkien believed that Western fantasy could help us to see the familiar as new; I believe the same is true of anime. A love story with an elf, a saint who is a centaur, a god who (like the one in Noragami) is desperate for believers: All can help us experience what GK Chesterton called “Mooreeffoc”, seeing something we’re used to as suddenly strange and startling. (Why did Chesterton use this word? One day, he saw a sign that said “Coffeeroom” backwards. A normal word appeared in a new way.) And in doing so, we come to know the other thing or person better.

Here’s another piece:

What’s neat about this one is the way Mori blends the anime style with the iconographic art style prevalent in Eastern Christianity. The gold, the pose, the ornate detail: None of this would be out of place in an Eastern Orthodox church. But what about the large, round-eyed anime face? Could that have a place in church?

Of course, there was a time when no art style was common in churches, because there were no churches. Icons, banners, crosses, statues, stain glass: Every form of religious art is born from the womb of a particular culture, nourished in within a living society’s special forms of expression. I like to think that two centuries from now scholars of religious art will study the Mori school of iconography. Maybe we’ll see depictions of biblical events like this

The scene is the moment of the Incarnation, God becoming human. The angel, Mary, the Holy Spirit: I’ve seen or read about this a thousand times. But Mori is the only artist to put a nuclear blast at the center. Why?

One could of course read it as a deconstruction of Christianity as a tool of the colonizing powers to control Japan. But there is no sign of destruction from the blast, and the scene is filled with trees and animals, with life. The circle around the mushroom cloud even resembles a halo. To me, the image reads thus: The Incarnation fundamentally and irreversibly altered the world, and even the raw power of a nuclear bomb converting matter to energy pales beside the Son taking on human flesh and converting souls. “Let there be light.” A symbol of death in the world becomes a sign of life in the heart.

I encourage you to check out Mori’s art, both the religious and the secular. Your day will be a little brighter because of it.

[qsfrombooks]

Im In Debt to Akiko Originally written in Japanese by MORI, Hiroshi Translated by Ryusui Seiryoin

I'm In Debt to Akiko / Hiroshi Mori