Musings of the Editor-in-Chief

Hello everyone, this is Elijah Lee. It's a wonderful Sunday afternoon, the sun is shining, and I think it's a good time for me to take a minute to inform readers of how the site has been doing and what's going on in the near future.

The past two weeks have been rather busy for me. Midterms are being administered and I had to study for one I had Friday. In addition to that, Mass Effect 3 came out ten days ago and I just finished it today. I also must start work on a comic book script I'm being asked to write, and that will be done by April 15th at the latest; I'll let everyone know how that goes as the project develops. As far as this blog is concerned, I'm working on Kaze no Stigma and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It feels there's always work for me to do.

Writing for this website has been a wonderful experience for me thus far. I will be the first to admit that the first reviews were easiest to write; I started the blog over my college's winter break. Since then, I've at least gotten one review a week, which is good news as far as I'm concerned. Would I like to do more? Of course, but I cannot pretend that this blog is my only obligation, especially since no one is paying me to write. One day, perhaps soon, these reviews will serve as excellent resume pieces for when someone wants to see my writing potential. Until then, I will continue to conduct myself as if I were in charge of a professional writing company. At the end of the day, I will have a body of work I can be proud of.

Because I am in college and because a lot of what I do in Art History involves research writing, what I aspire to do when I get the time is begin an archive of scholarly writing for people who are interested observing anime's contributions to culture. One has to assume that anime does not exist in vacuum. Anyone who watches anime both affects and is affected by the genre. An issue I would definitely address in a paper is how anime is often an extension of manga paper media. I see that as a great limit upon what animation can do if its manga shackles were removed. Much like how the earliest movies were simply recordings of theater dramas (Tyler Perry's films are an excellent contemporary example of this), a great deal of anime is simply a transferrence of manga to television audiences. Once filmmakers realized that movies can have their own conventions apart from other mediums, that's when the powder keg of ideas erupted and directors like D.W. Griffith pioneered the earliest cinematic styles. Anime can do the same thing if it didn't try so hard to emulate manga. I will forever appreciate the efforts of shows like FLCL, Gurren Lagann and even Ergo Proxy because they are bold enough to discover how far the animation envelope can be pushed.

There's always more time to dream then there is to accomplish those dreams; your brain processes information and thoughts faster when you are asleep than when you are conscious. This disparity is a gap I wish to bridge someday, so that I may eventually have all the time in the world to accomplish what I desire to do most.


- Elijah Lee
Editor in Chief at The Anime Guardians
anime.guardians03@gmail.com