Hooray for you, Mari Sasano.

It’s an autism double bill! And I discovered it completely accidentally.

I’ve always been interested in the work of Temple Grandin. She’s the autistic woman who discovered that she has a special perception about animals, and one of her big things is designing humane abbatoirs. Animals in Translation is a book about her own autism and its parallels with how animals perceive and think, and it’s fascinating. She talks about how domestication effects behaviour, visual VS linguistic thinking, and the possible development of the modern human brain. I read that one first.

The Curious Incident is a novel, written by Mark Haddon who apparently did work with autistic people as a young man. It’s written from the perspective of Christopher, a high-functioning autistic teenager who starts to investigate the murder of his neighbour’s dog and finds out so much more than anyone was willing to ever tell him. He ends up putting himself into situations that he might otherwise found unsafe (talking to strangers, traveling to London on his own), and making breakthroughs with his relationships with his parents, especially with his father.

The first book really illuminated the second. Christopher’s behaviours and ways of thinking made so much sense in light of Grandin’s own explanations of how she sees the world.

Also, it made me think of Heather, from Next Top Model. What was great about her was that you could always tell that she was struggling with just understanding the other girls. She was probably blaming the Asperger’s, but really it’s because people’s motives are actually so hard to read, given how much we are willing to deceive ourselves and each other. And that made her a fantastic model. No filters meant that emotionally, she was really accessible.

And the same goes for Christopher.He was always being told not to ask questions, or being told white lies. It takes a mind like that to really get to the heart of the problems that were always simmering around him, something that really needed to be aired out. And like Heather, in the end, it actually becomes a victory for him, just realizing that having this disability doesn’t make you all that different, just more able to get past a lot of the noise that normal people put out.

I recommend reading these books together, if you haven’t already!

So we were in the video store and nothing really good was grabbing us. Then I saw Tekkonkinreet, and on the box it claimed it was one of the best animes ever. So we picked that up, along with Bender’s Big Score to make it an animated double bill.

Wow, what a great find! (Tekkonkinreet, I mean). Gorgeous animation, done by the folks who did one of the Animatrix sequences. And characters you care about, namely two street kids, Kuro and Shiro. They’re like brothers, looking after each other and working together as “The Cats” to keep the streets safe from other wannabe thugs. Life is idyllic, to a point: they have the absolute freedom of living on their own terms, and the friendship that keeps each of them in balance. Kuro has a dark streak in him (get it?) and Shiro floats away into his own imagination, and doesn’t let the violence or ugliness of the street ever get to him.

Then Kuro gets mixed up in some bad business and ends up on the wrong side of the Yakuza, who in turn are getting over their heads with a sinister guy with bad eyebrows and three huge henchmen.

It’s got plenty of action and weirdness, but it always comes back to the two boys. In fact, a large part of the beauty of the story is that the fragility of human caring is never taken for granted. Lovely.