"Monster" and "Eejanaika"

I wanted to point everyone to a somewhat relevant clip from Naoki Urasawa's "Monster." If you have a spare five minutes, this is a reading of a supposedly Czech fairytale done in a style and dealing with themes that reminded me of "Little Otik." I'm not sure if Urasawa pulled from a specific fairy tale for this iteration and adapted it to suit his story, but it certainly seems like he had heard an "Otasanek"-like story before writing it. Its contemplation of identity through consumption (and being consumed) and the negative connotations of consuming the other are particularly relevant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk8Il0gKhig

I also wanted to suggest watching or reading up on a film by Shohei Imamura called "Eejanaika" (1980). Imamura often dealt with how the lower classes consume media (pornography in "The Pornographers," schlock crime reports in "Vengeance is Mine") and "Eejanaika" is particularly relevant to our discussion of the festival. The film, while admittedly playing around with some historical details, concerns a number of wild carnivals that broke out across the Japanese countryside on the eve of the Meiji Restoration in the early 1850s. In this particular historical example, the festival becomes a reaction to the threat of modernism and almost a political statement against it. In a sense, the model of consumption without reservation was threatened by the coming modernization, and the people reacted with excess celebration.