Memory dynamics

Kaiba has two disorienting chase cam sequences, in episodes 1 and 11 respectively. The average chase cam keeps a fixed distance and perspective most of the time, and so it's less chase and more third-person racing game. In these two Kaiba sequences, it really feels like someone is behind the viewfinder, trying to keep up, occasionally accelerating, occasionally putting on the brakes, occasionally losing the lock altogether.

It's kind of silly that what would get any professional cameraman a sharp reprimand should be warmly received in an anime, but outside of the real world it's a lot harder to be fluid, creating "mistakes" that exploit the depth of the screen.

There can never be enough good chase cam sequences, and I'll take them in what whatever form I can get, although Kaiba's form is a convenient one, because the license to be simple and deform makes the motion parts of the anime more apparent.

Still, the look never felt out of place to me. You may have more intricate looking series to watch, but to say that you actually dislike the look is a tough sell. The only argument I could believe is that you hated Saturday morning cartoons that aired from the late eighties to early nineties. Looney Tunes type stuff was all about caricature and deformations, and it was funny and it was fluid.

(The only visually confounding episode was the fifth, affectionately coined the Mardi Gras episode, wherein a case is made for kindergarten scrawls being a rebellion against adult excess.)

Equally fluid are the basic building blocks of the Kaiba universe: memory. I guess that, within the confines on the read/writability of memory that the series imposes on itself, it works and leads to interesting ways of telling tales that range from bittersweet to outright tragic.

It this aspect, though, that gnaws at me some, more than even the ending, which had one of the chillest explosion-fests on hand to compensate for a reprise of Evangelion's Third Impact / Code Geass' Ragnarok / other similarly unifying apocalyptic event.

Why? Because memories are information, and one thing that the past decade (in particular) has demonstrated is that humans have become half-decent at copying information cheaply and reliably.

Yes, chuckle at the understatement. I'll wait.

The containers and mediums that we have developed or otherwise appropriated for our memories have come a long way: spoken language, rote learning, writing, stone, paper, sculpture, painting, piano rolls, photographs, vinyl records, analog video, magnetic tape. We now have the digitization of text, audio, and video, coupled with lossless and/or clever (and getting cleverer) lossy compression.

Will we stop short of digitizing our collective experience at the lowest level? Doubtful. If it can be digitized to some arbitrary precision then it can and will be stored. The real question is, how many bits are we willing to throw at the problem?

There was a time when I strongly objected to high-definition video on the grounds that the storage requirements were obscene, among other reasons. Today, I can get a 1 TB disk drive for the cost of a 500 GB drive a year earlier. So to answer the above, I think that we'd throw as many bits as necessary. Storage catches up eventually.

Could we one day be uploading our memories to free memory hosts? Torrenting the memories of others? Remixing them and tagging them? Will this be the real unifying non-apocalyptic event?

Whatever happens, it will be because of forces even more fluid than in Kaiba.

P.S.

Short of DRM for memories. That would be kind of scary.

Mike makes sense of Kaiba in whole and his assessment is spot on. It's a strike against me for not being able to let go of my realism grumblings for anything longer than briefly. Realism is like fire: great to be warmed by, but stray too close to what is possible and pray that you are not made of flammable stuff. I figure that's why I much prefer the exploratory "what if" first half.

04 Jan 2009: I thought I'd be so clever to put in a Soylent Green reference for episode 5, but then I went to Google and was immediately put in my place.