一撃殺虫!!ホイホイさん/ Ichigeki Sacchu!! Hoi-Hoi-san / One-shot Insect Killer!! Hoi-Hoi-san

In the near future, insects have grown resistant to pesticides. What will mankind do? Well, the answer is simple – they must turn to moé-moé little palm-sized robots to destroy them with guns.

This is a ten-minute animation that is something of an orphan of a franchise I’m never going to explore. It would seem that the franchise started life as a Dengeki Daioh manga halfway between a parody of the girls-with-guns subgenre that includes the likes of Gunslinger Girl and Saikano, and a sincere attempt to be an ultra-adorable part of it. A PS2 game seems to be the main iteration, but I’m quite happy for it to be an amusing and silly little curio I watched for ten minutes and laughed through most of, featuring tiny dolls with lots of firepower and adorable squeaky booties on their feet.

There’s plenty introduced in the 10 minutes of screen-time. Not only do we have the blank-faced and utterly serious little robot, but she has a rival, Combat-san, who seems determined to hunt Hoi-Hoi-san down, but always ends up getting in scrapes herself – more often than not courtesy of Hoi-Hoi-san. Then there is the unfortunate Kimi, who wanted two cute little dolls to dress up but woke up to a pile of dead, steaming cockroaches and never got over the trauma. And poor Aburatsubo-kun, who loves the little dolls he keeps on breaking. For ten minutes, there’s a lot crammed in, and the overall impression was more memorable than many a 26-episode series.

The OVA is also fan-pleasing in that it brings together two very well-known seiyuu to voice the dolls, Kugimiya Rie and Tanaka Rie, who despite being both popular and prolific rarely work together (I can only think of it happening before in Toradora), and I get a small thrill from the idea of a chibi-Suigintou hunting rather uselessly after weaponised Shana-tan.

It’s probably good to keep Hoi-Hoi-san a little rarity and obscurity. Spinning it out into a series Di Gi Charat-style would probably make the little gunslinger-bots outstay their welcome. As it is, I find them adorable!

げんしけん / Genshiken

When the first season ended, back in March 2005, I didn’t think all that much of Genshiken. It was culturally interesting, I said, and had some classic pieces of character-based comedy, but I didn’t really see myself in the characters and was more amused by the parody anime-within-an-anime Kujibiki Unbalance, fleshed out into three OVAs and later a full series. By the end of the second season, though, I had a real affection for the characters and their club, and care enough about them to snap up every new manga ‘Genshiken II’ chapter, still released sporadically after the title’s official end.

Genshiken, quite simply, is the story of a ‘visual culture’ club in a Japanese high school. Everyman Sasahara at first wants to come over as fairly normal, but the rest of the club soon get his true otaku nature out in the open. The rest of the series follows the various members of the club as they attend cons, put together a doujinshi comic of their own and struggle to justify the club’s existence alongside existing manga and gaming societies.

Turning the camera – or, perhaps, manga artist’s brush – onto its primary audience is nothing new, and in many ways Gainax’s Otaku no Video is the predecessor to this. Other recent series have heavily focused on anime fans and shut-ins, from Welcome to the NHK and Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei to Eden of the East. Of all these, though, Genshiken is the most accessible and consistent, not attempting to make an epic story or satirical statement, but focusing on strong characters and their relationships. And the characters are great.

At first, the other men in the club seem daft caricatures: Madarame is a lizard-like oddball with delusions of grandeur. Tanaka is scruffy and laid-back. Kugayama is drawn almost like he’s in a newspaper gag strip, overweight and stammering. Then there’s feminine, slightly overly-perfect Kousaka, who is the quintessential geek but with a very pretty face and nice clothes, making for some great juxtaposed comedy when his girlfriend Saki tries to fit in with him. Later on come cosplay obsessive Ohno and prickly Ogiue, as well as other funny, odd characters like Kuchiki and Suzie. The latest manga introduces a new set of first-years, who have yet to grow on me and are a little harder to believe in.

The simple set-up gets developed in really interesting ways, mostly in conventional soap opera directions. The otaku element is the delicacy that brings the customers in, but what keeps them returning is the twisty relationship drama that could be in almost any soap opera. But the spice of seeing the characters go to cons, being awkward in very typical otaku ways or poor Saki trying to participate in her boyfriend’s hobbies – these make me care, and as a result this ended up a favourite.

ぺとぺとさん / Petopeto-san

Cute, wholesome and inoffensive, Petopeto-san was a throwaway anime that was fun to watch but hardly likely to change lives or produce hardcore fans. With soft, rounded character designs and one of the most insanely cute/grating intros in recent memory, it brought a smile to the face but seldom found itself at the top of the must-watch list.

The world of Petopeto-san is like modern-day Japan, except that all the spirits of folklore have become much more human-like and live alongside them. Some look quite normal – kappa look like everyone else even if their temperaments and abilities are still supernatural – and others less so, like the boy with no face and the girl who is nothing but a tiny brick with adorable little eyes and mouth, plus the ability to shape-shift temporarily.

Our main characters are a human boy, Shingo, and monster called Petoko. While superficially normal (but for her footfalls being cute squeezy noises), Petoko is biologically a seductive monster that clings to someone and never lets go. However, beneath her cheerful exterior lie many bad memories, which begin to cause problems as the two grow closer.

Amidst the cuteness of lil’-sis festivals and sticking-together misadventures, the usual trick of using a fantasy race to highlight real problems of prejudice comes out, and this light series also features many darker themes, though nothing that hasn’t been done countless times before. The traditional monsters, however, can do some spectacular tricks, and there are some moments that are really beautiful, and many more that are very sweet indeed.

Nothing overly special, but I don’t regret the way I spent the time I gave these 13 episodes one bit.

(originally written 6.9.06)