[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Friday, April 26th, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 8:02a | What Would Happen If a Nuclear Bomb Hit a Major City Today: A Visualization of the Destruction
One of the many memorable details in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, placed prominently in a shot of George C. Scott in the war room, is a binder with a spine labeled “WORLD TARGETS IN MEGADEATHS.” A megadeath, writes Eric Schlosser in a New Yorker piece on the movie, “was a unit of measurement used in nuclear-war planning at the time. One megadeath equals a million fatalities.” The destructive capability of nuclear weapons having only increased since 1964, we might well wonder how many megadeaths would result from a nuclear strike on a major city today. In collaboration with the Nobel Peace Prize, filmmaker Neil Halloran addresses that question in the video above, which visualizes a simulated nuclear explosion in a city of four million. “We’ll assume the bomb is detonated in the air to maximize the radius of impact, as was done in Japan in 1945. But here, we’ll use an 800-kiloton warhead, a relatively large bomb in today’s arsenals, and 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” The immediate result would be a “fireball as hot as the sun” with a radius of 800 meters; all buildings within a two-kilometer radius would be destroyed, “and we’ll assume that virtually no one survives inside this area.” Already in these calculations, the death toll has reached 120,000. “From as far as away as eleven kilometers, the radiant heat from the blast would be strong enough to cause third-degree burns on exposed skin.” Though most people would be indoors and thus sheltered from that at the time of the explosion, “the very structures that offered this protection would then become a cause of injury, as debris would rip through buildings and rain down on city streets.” This would, over the weeks after the attack, ultimately cause another 500,000 casualties — another half a megadeath — with another 100,000 at longer range still to occur. These are sobering figures, to be sure, but as Halloran reminds us, the Cold War is over; unlike in Dr. Strangelove’s day, families no longer build fallout shelters, and schoolchildren no longer do nuclear-bomb drills. Nevertheless, even though nations aren’t as on edge about total annihilation as they were in the mid-twentieth-century, the technologies that potentially cause such annihilation are more advanced than ever, and indeed, “nuclear weapons remain one of the great threats to humanity.” Here in the twenty-twenties, “countries big and small face the prospect of new arms races,” a much more complicated geopolitical situation than the long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union — and, perhaps, one beyond the reach of even Kubrickianly grim satire. Related content: Watch Chilling Footage of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki Bombings in Restored Color Why Hiroshima, Despite Being Hit with the Atomic Bomb, Isn’t a Nuclear Wasteland Today Innovative Film Visualizes the Destruction of World War II: Now Available in 7 Languages Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
| 9:00a | The Origins of Anime: Watch Early Japanese Animations (1917 to 1931)
Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. And the form has spawned some clear masterpieces from Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to Mamoru Oishii’s Ghost in the Shell to pretty much everything that Hayao Miyazaki has ever done. Anime has a far longer history than you might think; in fact, it was at the vanguard of Japan’s furious attempts to modernize in the early 20th century. The oldest surviving example of Japanese animation, Namakura Gatana (Blunt Sword), dates back to 1917, though much of the earliest animated movies were lost following a massive earthquake in Tokyo in 1923. As with much of Japan’s cultural output in the first decades of the 20th Century, animation from this time shows artists trying to incorporate traditional stories and motifs in a new modern form. Above is Oira no Yaku (Our Baseball Game) from 1931, which shows rabbits squaring off against tanukis (raccoon dogs) in a game of baseball. The short is a basic slapstick comedy elegantly told with clean, simple lines. Rabbits and tanukis are mainstays of Japanese folklore, though they are seen here playing a sport that was introduced to the country in the 1870s. Like most silent Japanese movies, this film made use of a benshi – a performer who would stand by the movie screen and narrate the movie. In the old days, audiences were drawn to the benshi, not the movie. Akira Kurosawa’s elder brother was a popular benshi who, like a number of despondent benshis, committed suicide when the popularity of sound cinema rendered his job obsolete.
Then there’s this version of the Japanese folktale Kobu-tori from 1929, about a woodsman with a massive growth on his jaw who finds himself surrounded by magical creatures. When they remove the lump, he finds that not everyone is pleased. Notice how detailed and uncartoony the characters are.
Another early example of early anime is Ugokie Kori no Tatehiki (1931), which roughly translates into “The Moving Picture Fight of the Fox and the Possum.” The 11-minute short by Ikuo Oishi is about a fox who disguises himself as a samurai and spends the night in an abandoned temple inhabited by a bunch of tanukis (those guys again). The movie brings all the wonderful grotesqueries of Japanese folklore to the screen, drawn in a style reminiscent of Max Fleischer and Otto Messmer.
And finally, there is this curious piece of early anti-American propaganda from 1936 that features a phalanx of flying Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice?) attacking an island filled with Felix the Cat and a host of other poorly-rendered cartoon characters. Think Toontown drawn by Henry Darger. All seems lost until they are rescued by figures from Japanese history and legend. During its slide into militarism and its invasion of Asia, Japan argued that it was freeing the continent from the grip of Western colonialism. In its queasy, weird sort of way, the short argues precisely this. Of course, many in Korea and China, which received the brunt of Japanese imperialism, would violently disagree with that version of events. Related Content: The Art of Hand-Drawn Japanese Anime: A Deep Study of How Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira Uses Light The Aesthetic of Anime: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tradition of Japanese Animation How Master Japanese Animator Satoshi Kon Puhed the Boundaries of Making Anime: A Video Essay “Evil Mickey Mouse” Invades Japan in a 1934 Japanese Anime Propaganda Film Watch the Oldest Japanese Anime Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917) Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
|
| << Previous Day |
2024/04/26 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |