Andy Warhol once made an eight-hour movie of nothing but the Empire State Building at night. Ditto a five-hour movie of his friend (poet John Giorno) asleep on a couch. Ditto a twenty-five hour movie cobbled together from endless reels of his buddies horsing around. Like most of the rest of his art, they weren’t about anything except looking at something. Warhol took things people normally didn’t pay attention to—like a Campbell’s soup can—forced people to notice them in the context of a painting or a lithograph (or a film), and called that his art. You didn’t have to agree it was art, but you couldn’t ignore the impact it had on the art world at the time. Why’s a soup can less interesting than a sunset, especially when we see both of them every day?
Now enter Lucky Star (if you dare), a smash hit anime with the fans, now available domestically thanks to the good graces of the folks at Bandai. It’s also not about anything except … well, looking. And like Warhol’s movies, you’ll either be enthralled or you’ll be thrashing around screaming for it to stop. The best analogy I’ve heard yet was actually drawn by a friend of mine: Lucky Star is like a moé version of Seinfeld. There was obstinately, deliberately, intentionally no point at all to the goings-on in Seinfeld, either: it was simply a document of Seinfeld and his buddies colliding with the real world, over and over again.
Review written for AMN. Click here to read full text.
