Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

Lying down to die, his dreams of a better world crashing down around him. Now finished posting scenes from Kagirinaki Rakuen (Eternal Paradise), the 1981 anime short film by Hiroshi Harada while he was still in high school. Available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IWXAjHXCo8 If the Invidious instance is working, you can watch without ads here: https://inv.zoomerville.com/watch?v=5IWXAjHXCo8 Gloomy, but thoughtful and very worth watching. If you appreciate artistry more than how much money was spent on making it, you may well recognize Kagirinaki Rakuen for the masterpiece it is! Though the romance of school uniforms has waxed since, largely thanks to other anime, the issues with public mass education persist. Is school really educating and preparing the young for life, or merely distorting their desires to remake them into cogs for the economy? Schooling is geared toward short-term economic goals; the film suggests that no one is really thinking about where it is leading us in the longer run. Kagirinaki Rakuen is expressly anticapitalist; fittingly it seems to have been made for a film festival and never drawn a profit. An obvious criticism is that economic planning, such as is distorting students’ lives through public schooling schooling, is a key feature of socialism. However, in Japan as in other countries, the planning is essentially a public-private partnership, as big business and government work in concert, altering the curriculum to train the young for current and upcoming employment positions. This relationship appears to be strong and enduring. It could be called an equally key feature of really-existing capitalism and the “free market economy”. Please check it out! Worth it just for the beautiful theme song, “A Child’s Heart” by Takafumi Miki. Also tune in for biker gangs, school uniform inspections, and the nameless lead’s dreams of an Alps no Shoujo Heidi pastoral life with an oneesan. #KagirinakiRakuen #EternalParadise #HiroshiHarada #school #indieanime #animemovies #anime