天体戦士サンレッド/ Tentai Senshi Sanreddo / Astro Fighter Sunred

It took a long while to finish watching Sunred, because I waited months for the original subtitling group to release the final two episodes of the second season. Eventually, I decided to just track down the alternatives for my last two morsels of pleasure. Because short though its episodes were, Tentai Senshi Sunred has been one of the funniest and most likeable series I’ve ever seen, and a great companion piece to Detroit Metal City, as both began airing in 2008 and packaged themselves in short, snappy 10-minute episodes. Both were rather successful, although DMC seems to have struck much more of a chord in English-speaking fandom, perhaps being rather more immediate. Sunred is smarter, though, and has the honour of having its brilliant pastiche of an opening immortalised in my favourite Nico Douga medley.

Indeed, everything that Sunred is comes from pastiche, and a brilliant reversal. The starting point is the world of sentai TV shows, the best-known in the West being the heavily-adapted Power Rangers – heroes in colourful suits and masks battle against superpowered monsters sent by an evil organisation seeking to take over the world. But the twist in Sunred is that the cartoony premise is then overlaid by a heavy dose of real life: what does the evil organisation do when not in battle? How do they make a living and what happens to monsters outside the battles? What if they all live together in a big house, trying to get ordinary jobs? What if they live near one of the heroes and treat him as a neighbour and work colleague? What if he has a troubled relationship with his girlfriend, while the head of the evil organisation is actually a lovely guy who seems to be much better at understanding her than the hero is?

Sunred is often portrayed as a sentai story in which the good guy is a bullying oaf and the bad guys are all good people who happen to look like monsters, but that would be greatly oversimplifying. They’re all just ordinary people, with their faults and their virtues, and their mistakes cause them problems, whoever they are. And the result is utterly hilarious.

Many of the jokes revolve around the nature of the monsters. There are the ones who just look absurd or have very one-note powers for a quick gag or two. There are the ones who are completely useless, like the guy who is just a piece of prawn for sushi, or the ones who get laughs from trying to act tough when they are totally adorable and impossible to take seriously. But the real reason Sunred works so well is that most of the humour works regardless of the setting. With the relationship between Red and the main antagonist Vamp-sama, for example, the absurdity of the fact that these two archetypes are squabbling over cooking or how to go about doing chores is only an additional layer on what is already genuinely funny dialogue. That’s why Sunred is so good – it is simply good writing.

I will always remember Sunred with fondness. I’m even tempted to one day go to see Kawasaki, the city in which the story is set. It’s not hard to reach from Tokyo, after all, the two cities barely being separate entities – if you’re in Shibuya, for example, you’re about the same distance from the series’ beloved Mizonokuchi as from, say, Akihabara or Ueno.

バンブーブレード / Bamboo Blade

Sports anime tend to fall into three categories: slapstick manly comedy (Slam Dunk), moody and usually cheesy drama with homoerotic appeal for the girls (Prince of Tennis) or slice-of-life whimsy with lots of moé sweetness for male otaku. Bamboo Blade is in the latter category, and it does the concept the best I’ve ever seen it done.

Revolving around a kendo club and its quirky female members, it is reminiscent of other feelgood, small-scale stories about groups of girls like Azumanga Daioh and Manabi Straight. There are prominent male characters too, budding romances, powerful rivalries and a neat balance of very successful comedy with warm moments of friendship. Tama-chan, the central figure, is as moé as they get, spacey and innocent and childlike, but with a prodigious talent for kendo. It catered both for people with no knowledge of the game and those who have trained in it without alienating either, while good production values complimented the great acting, facilitating a very pleasant aesthetic and nice smooth animation. The characters are all loveable and the humour is some of the best I’ve seen in recent years.

The only thing I can fault about Bamboo Blade is the cheesy way it ended, with very artificial ideas of strong feelings allowing people to catch up on years of training, which simply isn’t the case in any sport, but then again, is rather a staple of anime. For all people moaned about the ending of Hikaru no Go, though, one has to respect that it was realistic and mature when it came to wins and losses. Bamboo Blade is, on the other hand, intentionally lighter and cuter.

If you want something heavy and sophisticated, or if you find moé frivolous and unnecessary, this may not be for you. But anyone who wants something nice and light and genuinely funny, I’d recommend Bamboo Blade highly.

(originally written 2.3.09)

ガン×ソード/Gan Soudo/ GunXSword

The title is indicative of the exuberance of this production. ‘Hey guys – what’s awesome? Eh? Guns, yup. Swords? Yeah, they’re cool, too. I know, let’s put BOTH of them in the title – and then add in some giant robots for good measure!’ Well, sounds like a fun ride to me. And so it was, if nothing more.

Van in an antihero who looks like Spike Spiegel cosplaying as vampire hunter D. His personality is also somewhere between the two, being both taciturn and a little bit goofy while also a very skilled fighter. Yup, he uses a sword that is also a gun, something like FF8’s gunblades…except more flexible and more capable of calling down...a giant mecha from space!!! Oh yes. Called Dann. Van’s Dann. Yus, there’s very much a specific audience for this, and there’s not a whiff of irony about GunXSword.

Van is on a quest for revenge, and on his search for the man with the claw who killed his beloved on their wedding day (for reasons that were never explained) he meets young Wendy, who is searching for her brother. After a series of episodic encounters, defeating baddies or helping the needy and getting several allies on the way, he finds the claw man, defeats his henchmen and foils his plan to destroy the world.

Silly, silly pulp, as you can tell. But for a few episodes, it seems like GunXSword is going to be something more interesting. For a while, it seems like the Claw Man is genuinely benevolent, that perhaps he had a good reason for doing what he did to Van, and that our hero, being driven by nothing more than a thirst for vengeance, might actually be in the wrong. That would be a novelty – a main character who is actually morally wrong, and a bad guy who is in fact right. In fact, this is not the case, and we soon see that while the baddie is a surprisingly kind, gentle man, he’s also a nutcase who not only kills easily (and, by his reaction, accidentally), but wants to return the world to nothingness, or destroy the concept of space and time, or enter the consciousness of every living person, or SOMETHING. It seemed to change every episode – indeed, it would have been hilarious parody, if it were parody. But it’s done straight-faced (so much the better for me, who might use that interesting situation myself one day), and therein lies most of its appeal.

Because it doesn’t matter that GunXSword’s story is crap, or that there’s a whole episode of the most embarrassing fanservice you’re ever likely to see. It’s got great stock characters (the cute naïve girl, the hopeless boy, the genki dancing girl, the prodigious little twins, the redeemed ex-prostitute etc) as well as some ideas just silly enough to work (like the five old men in an 80s-sentai-style giant robot, past-it both in the world of the anime and in reality). Van has appealing character quirks (he has to cover every meal with as much sauce as he can, before yelling about how spicy it is). The art is nice, the music is cool and some of the transient emotional scenes are, while entirely superficial, at least ephemerally touching. Loads of fun.

It will never be anyone’s favourite anime, nor would it win over anyone who doesn’t think much of animation. But for embracing daft fanservice clichés and having some great action scenes and cute girls, I won’t hesitate to say I very much enjoyed GunXSword.

(originally written 17.12.06)