I had to keep myself from screaming at you guys for not coming out… I did my best to hold it in…”ĭogkeeper’s frail figure huddled over a sink with tears streaming down his or her face evokes the idea of the victimized, female Other. When Dogkeeper feels that Nezumi wasn’t quick enough to intervene, listen to how he or she describes the experience:ĭogkeeper: “Stupid… I hate you all. Upon the official’s discovery of subterfuge, Rikiga makes the following ambiguous comment: First, Dogkeeper is used as bait to lure the No.6 official. Dogkeeper’s sex and gender may very well be a male - I wouldn’t really know - but the anime treats Dogkeeper as distinctly female. I’m going to draw a distinction between what Dogkeeper’s sex and gender actually are versus how the anime regards him or her. There’s been some confusion over whether or not Dogkeeper is male or female. I do wonder, however, why the story waited this long to reveal No.6’s true ugliness. No.6’s biggest crime is that it doesn’t even treat the slum dwellers as people at all. No.6’s biggest crime isn’t that it mistreats the humans outside the city. We shudder in horror of the Nazi prison camps not simply because of death, but the way the Nazis herded and slaughtered their victims like animals. As a result, the greatest atrocities in history are the ones that nevertheless manage to defy our expectations. Few condones or excuses it, but most of us are not naive enough to think that death wouldn’t occur in war. We now understand Nezumi’s mindset and why he was so stubborn about so many things.Īlthough most of No.6’s inhabitants are innocent of any wrongdoing - hell, they’re simply ignorant of No.6’s crimes - when we watch the trucks simply dump the prisoners into the correctional facility, we can understand Nezumi’s seething hatred for the city. Perhaps for the first time in Shion’s life, he has had to confront the visceral horrors of reality. Oh sure, he saw the bee parasite kill his co-worker before his very eyes, but this is very different from watching warm bodies lying lifeless in the debris. Well, sure enough, No.6 proves Nezumi’s point. In this world, you never know when death will come a-knockin’. Nezumi confesses that he never thinks so far into the future. Shion has just started to make future plans: he would save Safu and his mother, and they’d all live happily with Nezumi. I like how the anime sets the audience up for the devastating massacre of the slum dwellers. Instead, he’s preparing them for the afterlife.Īs an aside, the song sounded like one of those rustic Asian tunes. He’s not singing about survival for this very reason. Nezumi knows these people will most likely die. As a result, to sing of beech trees and young maidens frolicking in the water is thus to sing of something phantasmagorical. Why might that be? Here’s something to consider: of all the people that Nezumi is singing to, how many of them can even imagine the content of his song? It’s doubtful that any of them has ever even seen a picture of nature in such a way. Nezumi, as noted above however, sings of nature. “Laughter became a necessity and a channel for the hatred of the enemy it became the catalyst for expressions of anger and bitterness when the means of struggle were still not clearly defined.” ( source) Jewish ghetto songs during Hitler’s regime served to arouse feelings of survival and humor: The oppressed has always relied upon music to get them through tough times. A song from the heart is natural and and beautiful while machines can only produce sounds that hurt. On the other hand, the harmful sound waves emitted by No.6’s vehicles seem alien and discordant. Nezumi sings of nature and a genuine human appreciation for it. Look at this as yet another extension of the nature vs. After all, if sound can heal, why couldn’t it also hurt? As a result, the killer sound tanks, as silly as they look, serve as a contrast to Nezumi’s song. Killing people with sound waves does seem a little ridiculous, but I’ll give the story a pass. No.6’s weapon of choice seems to be of the supersonic variety. On the other hand, maybe the cleaning operation always takes place annually, but then why would the slums be so ill-prepared? Oh well. What a coincidence that No.6 should stage its operation at this point in time just when our heroes are running out of time to save Safu. Nezumi and Shion were racking their brains over how best to infiltrate the correctional facility when, suddenly, the story provides them a way. The whole thing feels a little too convenient. Out of nowhere, the city decides to flatten the slums and its inhabitants.
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