In my opinion, there aren’t a lot of metrics by which 2023 was a good year. There might be an exception for music: I read a very compelling list the other day of the best 20/21 tracks of the year, and music is generally not my scene, so I choose to trust that writer’s judgment. I definitely don’t feel that it was a stellar year for movies, games, or anime- though accusations that I “wouldn’t know” vis a vis movies because I never watch new movies would be entirely fair.
Still, it’s impossible to take a year as simply the end result of the new things that happened in it- and one shouldn’t try. The old has a half-life: it doesn’t simply shape the new, it pokes its head up to comment again. For me, the best parts of 2023 were when I looked to parts of the past I hadn’t explored before. It’s a year where I cast aside any hang-ups about emulation, and challenged my general disinterest in film by seeing some TRUE gems of Da Fuckin Cinema. And it’s a year I challenged my past impressions with the insight of the critic I’ve become with the last decade (and a bit) of experience.
To start off, we didn’t do an Iris In Audio award this year, because so much of the year was dominated by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. As such, there just wouldn’t have been much to say: when we started planning for the Gimmick Awards, we weren’t even sure the strike would be over yet, and we thought it might be in bad taste to do it. If we had, we’d have had so few nominees that it would have been a sad list. But let me tell you, there would have been some winners on there.
At the start of the year, we checked out Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog for Iris, and I came away grateful for the experience. First of all, I’d only seen his samurai films (not an uncommon statement, I’d wager), and seeing his take on post-war Japan and the cruelty that develops in law enforcement were a new side of the famous director to me. But it was also a reminder of just… yeah, this medium can do things, right? Games have chased movies for so long, and it’s been a mistake to do so basically the whole time, even without classics like this reminding you that for all that effort, games have never gotten close.
But the best movie I saw last year was The Long Good Friday. As is often the case, it wasn’t the movie I wanted our patrons to vote for us to cover that ended up being the right choice. The performance of Bob Hoskins is just… a really phenomenal portrait of a guy who’s solved problems with violence his whole life, learning only in the very last minute of the movie that violence isn’t enough this time. There are a lot of other great parts of that movie, and fantastic performances turned in by other actors, but the famous final shot of Hoskins experiencing surprise, anger, despair, and ultimately bitter acceptance of consequences is… I mean, it’s the most famous part of the movie for a reason. It really sticks with you.
In anime, we’ve already awarded Gunbuster for being the best anime we saw in 2023, and just an all time mecha anime in general, but there were others besides. Space Adventure Cobra really surprised me by how charming it can make a main character that I should on paper hate, as well as boasting some truly gorgeous art. The Hikaru no Go manga astonished me- I was hooked by a strong execution of the sports anime shonen formula, and then ambushed deep into its story with a truly devastating and heartbreaking plot beat that showed to me… you can always pivot, you can do anything. Your story can be anything, and what it’s been to this point doesn’t need to be a prison.
The professional pressure to actually finish it made me understand the genius of Disco Elysium in a way I never could, and showed me the high points of Library of Ruina that I absolutely would never have had the patience to see on my own. I gave Spelunky 2 another shot, and one of the biggest game disappointments of my life turned out to be a damn good game if I set my ridiculous expectations aside for a second. I took my first step into the Trails series, and I imagine at the pace I play I’ll be on that train til the day I die. I learned to actually enjoy Tekken, a series I’d had various levels of contempt or resentment for since high school.
Playing the past also brought me down to earth in ways I value. After decades of holding it up as the best game ever made, a return to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask forced me to confront the way my memory smoothed over the bumps, or even erased them entirely. Majora’s Mask is still an all-timer, still a favorite, but its flaws are real, and “Best of All Time” is a bit too heavy a crown for it to wear. Brave Fencer Musashi stood in my memory as a fun cool thing (though not as much as it did Jen’s), and a return to it showed me… damn, I was just a kid with no context when I played this, huh? It’s kinda not great, is it?
Don’t meet your heroes, but more than that, don’t meet your past self. Don’t meet the kid who thought Dragon Ball Z was garbage, who watched through all the nearly 80 consecutive episodes of Naruto filler at the end without quitting, who swore Nightshade was the sickest game ever (it’s pretty cool, but calm down kid). It’s disappointing to confront who you were. But on the other hand, do meet your past self, or at least what you can that’s left of them. Sometimes they were right, and that’s fun as hell. And sometimes they weren’t, and it’s important to know that. You can’t lean on take twenty years old and expect it to fly: you’re fooling yourself, and it’s gonna mislead you.
2024 has had better media offerings than its matching months in 2023 so far, by my calculations. I have hope that at the end of the year, recording Gimmick Awards again, I’ll be a lot more positive, I’ll have a lot more to champion. But more than I play new games, I hope I play old games. I hope I watch old movies. I hope I read old manga. I have no desire to return to the past, but when you compare the output of one year versus the entire history of human creativity… I mean, it’s less than no contest, right? It’s insulting to even ask. Embrace the art of the past, my friends. You may find what comes out next month doesn’t matter to you at all anymore.
Unless, I suppose, you’re the Editor In Chief of a games and anime crit site. Well damn. How about y’all take that advice, and I’ll try to find a way to get excited for (squints) the next Code Geass movie? Oh god. Trust me, you’re better off not trapping yourself in all this.