Bleeding Fiction

In the comments section of a post a few months back I expounded on the virtues of not being bound by genre in writing. Part of that, as I said then, is that a lot of the most interesting stuff I'm seeing in fiction these days is genre-bending and part of that is I'm just getting bored with old genres that used to entertain me. Call it growth. I was always pretty sure, when I was a kid, that everything I wrote was going to have elves and dwarves in it. These days, with the things I'm working on and the things I have in mind to work on afterwards, I find the idea of writing about elves and dwarves at all to be vaguely funny.

One of the things, the sub-genres, if you want to call it that, that I've become a fan of lately is "Magical Realism." It's basically what it sounds like, and I define it in that post above, for your further edification. (Good example: Will Shetterly's Dogland. Read it!) But it seems to be turning up in some pretty strange places. To wit: the anime Air.

As a medium, I'm used to anime playing around in a lot of genres; Science Fiction (Macross, Yamato), Cyberpunk (Ghost in the Shell, Lain), Fantasy (Lodoss War, Escaflowne), Historical (Kenshin, sort of), Superheroes (Sailor Moon, Gatchamen), Urban Fantasy (Fruits Basket), teen melodrama (Peach Girl, Prince of Tennis) and so on.

I've never seen an anime do Magical Realism, though; a relatively straight, serious drama with a touch of the surreal to it, a hint that there's a deeper level at work. It's absolutely concievable that I've been missing something; I have far from a comprehensive catalog of anime in my head. But it's pretty novel to me, and pretty well done, too.

(Even if AMG did get lisenced and now I have to wait to see more of it. I hate waiting...)