進撃の巨人 2期/ Shingeki no Kyoujin season 2 / The Advancing Giants season 2 / Attack on Titan Season 2

Season 2 of Shingeki no Kyoujin was woefully short, especially as it didn’t feel like it was that far above the rest of the crowd in terms of production budget or ambitiousness. There were some nicely-animated sequences, many of them strange things like Christa deciding to do battle, but there were some decidedly clunky parts as well, especially when it came to CG.

But if it feels woefully short, that means it’s enjoyable, and this second season certainly was. Absolutely one of the most prominent anime around just now, its popularity is backed by an intriguing setting and several layers of mystery.

This season brought us a lot of revelations – why Ymir is dotes so much on Christa, the identity of the most iconic abnormal titans (revealed in a brilliantly anticlimactic way), how the mindless titans are made and the true extent of Eren’s powers. Interestingly most of the season revolved around a plotline where Eren is a particularly grumpy damsel in distress. There are also new mysteries, like how the wall was made and by whom now that new details have been revealed, the identity of the beast titan and perhaps more about the smiling titan too. Then there’s the long-standing mystery of what Eren’s father did, and why.

Of course I want more. Much more, and quickly. But I’ll also wait patiently. I read a few manga chapters in advance but spoiled only the cliffhangers from that point, not any of the larger mysteries, and I intend to enjoy them animated first. I can make a few predictions based on what we’ve learned so far, but I can stress that these are not spoilers, only my guesses. Still, if you don’t want to read my speculation or haven’t finished this season, please look away now!

-       I think the beast titan is either Eren’s father or someone else very close to him

-       Since we’ve seen people can turn into titans, I think that more of the main cast will get titan powers later, especially Mikasa, Armin and Levi

-       Everything has been engineered by people, who probably live in a separate society ruled by the beast titan, and there’s going to be a huge battle against them

-       This season’s antagonists are probably going to be fodder for the big bads of the next arcs

It will be interesting to see if any of these are true or if I’m way off. Either way, it will be fun!

ハイキュー!! / Haikyuu!! Season 3

Given how much can be covered in an entire series of an anime, it feels almost redundant to write about 10 episodes of a sports anime covering just one volleyball game. The previous seasons have been 25 episodes, so this felt more like a series of specials than a full season. However, following the underdogs as they go up against the formidable Shiratorizawa was certainly fun.

Tragedy hit the series as Tanaka Kazunari, voice actor for coach Ukai, passed away during the production of this season. He delivered some fantastic final lines and his replacement of course doesn’t sound quite as he should, and it’s a poignant note to remember this production by.

This season is focused on the single game, but succeeds very nicely in the two core strengths of Haikyuu – bringing new light to the established cast, and introducing some highly compelling oddballs on the rival side. The intrigue of Shiratorizawa comes not through the powerhouse giant Ushijima, but the bizarre-looking jester-like Satori. Sports anime and manga have long thrived on being able to pitch the heroes against oddballs, be they the super-powered children of Inazuma 11 and Saki or the tactical mind-game masters of Hikaru no Go.

But this season is effectively Tsukishima’s time to shine, which is great to see. From detached, sarcastic cynic too afraid to commit his all, he’s become the team’s strategic cornerstone. It’s pretty great to see that change, while retaining his bluntness.

Hinata remains the reason I watch the show, though. With his boundless enthusiasm, determination, ability to shock and occasional blind luck, he’s what gets under the skins of the opposing team and what makes Karasuno an oddball team. He’s everything I want from a shounen protagonist and I have to say that I can’t get nearly as interested as the rest of the fandom in all these random captains and setters when they just don’t seem nearly as compelling as what’s at the centre of this story.

Catchy opening and ending songs, solid production, a pretty aesthetic and very strong vocal performances made for ten enjoyable episodes that are guaranteed not to be the last in this story. And I’m very pleased by that.

Haikyuu: Season 2

Haikyuu is a very popular anime in Japan, especially with the female crowd who love that passionate homoeroticism that’s a big part of sports manga. Maybe not up there with the sheer hysteria currently surrounding Osomatsu-san, but at this stage probably outshining all other sports titles, even Kuroke no Basuke and Yowamushi Pedal. A series of decent figurines have been released and usually take up at least a couple of the crane machines in every arcade, and the new theme song, ‘Fly High’ by Burnout Syndromes, gets a fair bit of airplay anywhere that plays anime songs.

It’s my current slightly guilty pleasure, though I have to say I avoid the ugly art of the original manga, running in Jump so I won’t win any ‘true fan’ contests. I’ve been a sucker for the figurines and conbini lotteries and find the eternally optimistic main character Hinata very sweet. The rest of the fandom largely fixates on the tall, handsome and confident minor characters, but the underdog type is much more appealing to me.

In the first season, we had the admirable theme of gimmicks in sports only getting you so far. Kageyama and Hinata developed a surprising and strange volleyball attack, but once they reached competitions with actually talented, solid teams, gimmicks stopped working. So instead of relying on their bizarre talents, they work on the basics until they can perform at a good all-round level – and more critically, they learn that volleyball is a team game and they have to fit in with the rest. Even if there are moments of glory or high individual skill, they have to be cogs in the machine to win matches, and this strikes me as an admirable direction for a show about sports to go. At some point, the players have to grind, cooperate and experience less enjoyable periods to progress.

To improve, the Karasuno team head to a training camp with a number of very high-level players. They begin as the worst team by far, but keep pushing to improve and hone individual specialities until they can compete.

The series moves on to the qualifying matches for the high school nationals. The keystone of many sports anime, going to the nationals is easy fodder for storytelling – passionate matches, emotional rollercoasters and the chance to introduce any number of quirky opponent characters. Between the training camp and the nationals, Haikyuu s2 introduces a whole slew of interesting new characters as friends and foes, my favourite being the somewhat strigine Bokuto.

The worst part of watching Haikyuu is knowing it’s not a long-runner, and as expected, it ended on a high note, but at a point where I was definitely wanting more, and soon. So I hope that’s exactly what I get. 

進撃！巨人中学校 / Shingeki! Kyojin Chuugakkou / Attack On Titan: Junior High

Enjoying Shingeki no Kyojin doesn’t mean you have to adore its various spin-offs. I watched the live-action movies recently, and can’t say I enjoyed them very much despite impressive visuals. The manga version of this gag spin-off also hasn’t been received too well, though I haven’t actually read it myself. But fully accepting it’s just a silly bit of comedy fanservice, I thoroughly enjoyed Chiugakkou.

I tuned in for the first episode and the new premise amused me quite a bit – exaggerated, silly versions of our main characters are attending a school split between humans and titans. Eren’s grudge comes not from personal loss but because his lunch was stolen and eaten. In fact, that’s what the nefarious titans do here – invade the school grounds of the poor defenceless humans and steal their bento. It’s silly and fun and I really like the characters rendered in such cutesy styles, especially Eren and Armin.

Character traits are amplified in the ways fandoms enjoy. Levi is an authoritarian upperclassman obsessed with cleaning and rules. Mikasa’s skills are superhuman and her devotion to an oblivious Eren boundless. Armin for some reason is extremely susceptible to the cold and needs to go everywhere wrapped in his futon.

The 12-episode season treads the usual ground for school comedies. The kids take part in sports days and go to a matsuri, where romance is in the air. There are mix-ups with love letters and fierce competition to be student president. It’s silly, innocuous stuff and much of the humour comes from seeing these characters who are usually in such a serious and grim setting transposed to one that’s so light and fluffy. I’d say it works better than it ever did for Full Metal Panic!

I’m not saying this is a superb anime or one to recommend highly. It’s cheaply-done, unoriginal and the laughs aren’t on a par with the likes of Azumanga Daioh or Nichijou. It’s very much a by-the-numbers comedy spin-off that plays it safe and follows a formula. But that’s all I wanted from it, and it certainly succeeded. 

ハイキュー!! / Haikyuu!!

If I said another sports anime was my favourite recently, then that didn’t stand for long. Because I fell in love with Haikyuu!! at episode one and basically watched the whole 25-episode season in three days.

I noticed Haikyuu!! figurines all over the place on my most recent trip to Japan, and liking the designs – the main characters represented being Hinata and Kenma – but decided against buying any (or taking chances on the UFO machines for them) because (a) I didn’t know the characters and might have ended up hating them, and (b) slightly embarrassingly, I thought they were actually characters from Kuroko no Basuke.

Haikyuu!! does something rather special, sitting in the middle of the cutesy passionate-boys-bonding thing Inazuma Eleven makes so enjoyable and the rough, relatively gritty, boys-with-issues-finding-purpose-through-sport thing that you find in the likes of Rookies and Slam Dunk. It also has the best rivals-who-become-allies story since Hikaru no Go, with which this series shares much. Since HikaGo remains my favourite manga of all time, that’s high praise.

Haikyuu!! has a classic rival-story opening episode: at a school tournament, there is a gruff and moody elite player, who goes up against a good-hearted, naive go-getter type. They clash but the go-getter is actually a genius and very much impresses the elite. The genius cannot carry the whole team, though, so they lose, but the episode has a deep effect.

A year later, the boys begin high school and discover they are now in the same club. They are chalk and cheese, so are soon at one another’s throats, but it soon becomes clear that the shortcomings of each are balanced by the skills of the other, so they begin to develop a real bond. However, will this allow them to compete with much more established players?

This central relationship is brilliantly-done. Our main character, Hinata, is short for a volleyball player, even mistaken for an elementary school boy at one point, but can jump extremely well and idolizes another short player recognized as brilliant. The secondary character is the tall, extremely intense setter, Kageyama, who has undeniable skills but is seen as very arrogant and hard to get along with. He’s the kind of gruff character I usually dislike, but as he reveals more of his goofy side and is coaxed out of his shell by Hinata – as well as shown that his way of playing is terrible for a team game – he really grew on me, until eventually I came to realise I actually identified with him more than I have with any character since Tomoya in Clannad. That was deeply unexpected, as was how much I enjoyed seeing the interaction between these two. They’re very like Akira and Hikaru in HikaGo, and that’s certainly no bad thing. They spark off each other, and it’s brilliant to watch, and by the time they start to rely on one another it’s like they’re in a comedy routine together. Very sweet.

Very much helping this is the fact that the minor characters are extremely strong. They come from stock, but they are extraordinarily well-developed. The volleyball team also contains a typical yankee, an extremely tall surly bully type, a dependable captain who has an extremely scary side, a wild child even smaller than Hinata, a gentle giant who has great spiking strength but the heart of a coward and an older setter who may not be a genius but has a lot of clever ideas and is very relatable as the underdog.

I very much enjoyed the art style, which was pitched very well. Production I.G. have done a lot of very flashy productions, but this one is more modest, yet moves slickly and captures the manga’s aesthetic well. It is not cutesy or pretty-pretty, and it is not ugly and scratchy, but can pull off elements of both styles without them seeming incongruous. Thus, Hinata and the diminutive libero Nishinoya are very cute, but the yankee types like Tanaka can pull faces right out of Cromartie High School without it seeming bizarre. This allows for both broad and subtle character-based comedy and the some very sweet good-hearted childlike characters, which I very much enjoy seeing together.

The series is of course based on an ongoing manga, and ends at rather a heartbreaking moment, though that makes sense for leaving the audience thirsty for more. This isn’t a feelgood anime where the characters power up to win every match like Inazuma Eleven, but a fairly realistic take on an interesting sport where there aren’t any superpowers – only particular strengths and weaknesses, none of which are infallible.

It’s perhaps telling that not only did Haikyuu!! make me want to try out volleyball, it made me want to go and compete in the sports I’m good at again. I don’t think that I’ll have a hot-blooded rivalry blossoming, but the series captured something of the adrenaline rush of a close competition, and I consider that praiseworthy. 

攻殻機動隊 / Koukaku Kidou Tai / Mobile Armoured Riot Police / Ghost in the Shell

For a long while now, I’ve been meaning to rewatch Ghost in the Shell and review it. And by a long while, I mean several years – since around the time I wrote my Akira review. After all, when I was growing up, those were the two most iconic anime films in the West – Akira and Ghost in the Shell, held up as the pinnacles of what anime can achieve. And having enjoyed Akira, I expected to love Ghost in the Shell too. But I must confess, I did not. I was disappointed at the time: it was beautiful, but rather sterile and dull. I never felt involved with any of the characters, and found the incessant nudity a bit puerile – too obviously titillation masquerading as art.

Yet I’ve always wanted to reassess, and to rewatch. This was especially the case on a recent trip to Japan, where I visited an exhibition of the artwork for the film and its various sequels. I hadn’t fully appreciated the sheer level of detail in the artwork, nor the obvious joy in machinery, weaponry and the human form that went into them until that gallery. It really is astounding and rather beautiful, and the long pan up on the city that ends the film made for a beautiful sketch and painting. That really set me wanting to watch the first film again – but still I put it off, and I’m quite glad I did. Last night, there was a one-off screening of the remastered version in a local cinema, and that really was the best way to see this visually stunning film.

Plot-wise, for an action piece, it actually moves very slowly and makes a point of making much of its more dramatic violence stately, with languid, epic music composed by Kawai Kenji rather than pounding rhythms. It’s remarkable how far that goes to elevate things. Based on the first part of the manga by Shirow Masamune, it tells a thoughtful but not very eventful story that unfortunately ends just as it gets most interesting.

In a world of cybernetic implants and enhancements, law enforcement officer Kusanagi Motoko is almost entirely robotic, to the point that she worries if she is still human or not. We see her and her likeable team of colleagues investigating the ‘puppet master’, a hacker capable of controlling others. Eventually, it turns out that the Puppet Master is actually artificially created, though now believes itself to have a mind and a soul. Trapped in a single body so as not to spread over the network, it engineers events to bring itself into contact with Motoko, realising that without the human element, it can never diversify in a way that it can protect itself through unpredictability. Everything works, a new gestalt being is created and...the film ends, just as it becomes most intriguing.

Still, the journey has many very interesting elements, including interesting philosophical questions related to the Cartesian ghost in the machine. Most affecting is the minor character manipulated into believing he has a wife and daughter: if the soul results from important memories and relationships, what is the soul when those are fabricated? Is the mind just a ghost and the body the shell? How is that affected when the body is artificial? For a film that also has a beautiful woman stripping off all her clothes to do physical battle with a huge spider-like ‘tank’ and beat up her target while cloaked to even scratch at the surface of such questions is quite satisfying, and this balances them well.

But the problem with that very elevation is that especially around the middle, without any real clear goal or motivations made apparent, the film is actually quite dull. I was kept engaged by simply enjoying the art – the detailed backgrounds, the interesting angles, the highly detailed machinery. But I ought to be engaged by the plot. And the thing is, I know that Oshii Mamoru can give his characters a whole lot of heart and soul and interesting character arcs. But I don’t really see it here, and that Motoko remains a glacial figure of intrigue and mystery works only if the real emotional heart of the piece is with her teammates. And while the beginnings of that are there with Batou and Togusa, it’s not taken nearly far enough. The result is something rather beautiful, but icy and distant. Conceptually understandable, but for 90 minutes, not especially enjoyable.

The film achieves much, especially visually. But I can’t call it one of my favourite anime films of all time. Nice to have finally, finally watched it in Japanese, though! 

げんしけん二代目/ Genshiken Nidaime / Genshiken the Second / Genshiken Second Generation

What a long way Genshiken has come since I started watching it eight years ago. I doubt many of the fans it picked up back in those early days would have expected the 2013 season to be quite like this – a very long way away from the video game tournaments, pornographic doujinshi and figure-collecting of the male-dominated first season and heavily into fujoshi and trap culture for the third. Of course, since Ogiue came on the scene, the comedy involving BL/yaoi was in place, but the Genshiken itself with the addition of a whole slew of rotten women became very female-centric.

This is a good example of why sometimes even as a manga reader it’s a good idea to watch the anime adaptation, especially if there’s a good couple of years between reading the chapter and watching it played out on the TV. The second generation – introduced in chapters several months apart at first – didn’t really resonate with me at all in the manga, as I said in my review of the first seasons. Yoshitake I found lacking in character, Mirei grumpy and uninteresting and Hato, who soon becomes the focus as a real-life trap character – and fudanshi to boot – I found quite sweet but too defined by that one facet, with little indication of the actual personality beneath.

Well, the anime restarting brought those characters to life again, really – and sent me back to catch up with the manga, where I was soon finding Yoshitake absolutely hilarious with her mischievous plans and perversion, Mirei very relatable with her constant bewilderment and brilliant tsukomi moments, and Hato…well, Hato by turns tragic and deeply enviable, most likeable as a boy but still the same character when dressed up as a girl, and with many laughs arising from his admittedly complex and painful situation. 

Then of course there was the wider cast – Sue being mad as ever with her random quotes (kudos to the manga translators for getting all the references), Madarame now all grown up and having to face reality – at least somewhat – Ohno trying to shut out reality and getting herself into a deeper mess and Ogiue now not only a professional mangaka but the voice of reason. They’ve grown up, and it’s lovely. And I’m even looking forward to the third generation, with Yoshitake’s reverse-trap shota-loving sister looking to bring a whole lot more laughs.

Going over to Production I.G. for this new season – presumably the relatively cheap leftovers from whoever is doing the Titans anime – the animation remains functional but is very pretty and the odd character designs really shine through, no longer seeming occasionally disjointed, even when there are characters with dots or fried eggs for eyes. 

The new characters are utterly perfectly cast, and I love that not only do the references from the manga make it (Madoka cosplays!), I.G. add a few of their own, including the rather self-deprecating scene of Kuchiki doing the deviant Titan’s run that I pointed out in my review of Shingeki no Kyojin was so absurd…but has certainly made a big impact. I was sceptical in general about the last episode, which was an anime original hot springs trip – kinda understandable they didn’t want the next sequential chapter, being an extended gag about a misunderstanding over a buttplug – but that scene was well worth it, and they deepened Hato’s dilemma quite neatly without shutting the door on what happens next in the manga.

Nidaime is really Hato’s anime, and since I’m a sucker for traps and reverse traps, that was always going to appeal to me. There’s a deft mixture of the melancholy of Hourou Musuko and the hilarious misunderstandings of Minami-ke in the treatment of gender-bending, and as the series points out with a visual novel, traps remain a big trend in Japanese culture just now. It’s respectable that Genshiken tries to cover that, as well as the ambivalence over sexuality that comes with it, and Hato is so gentle and awkward that I really rooted for him. 

I do wonder how much of the anime audience, especially in the West, is on the same page, though, as after all this is a long way from Genshiken’s roots, and from most other comedies around it.

If Genshiken has closed itself off to some, though, it is their loss, for it remains a brilliant drama and one of the funniest shows currently airing. It is also genuinely very funny, and as soon as I finished it all I wanted to do was catch up on the manga again. I know I can’t recommend it to everyone, but honestly, I rather wish that I could. 

進撃の巨人 / Shingeki no Kyojin / The Advancing Giants / Attack on Titan

When they announced the Shingeki no Kyojin anime, my first thought was nah, that’ll never look right. I wasn’t a manga reader – no hipster points for me there – but Titans got mentioned quite a bit before the anime, so I’d seen the distinctive art style. Based on that, I thought that the uncanny way of making the Titans look odd by drawing their faces in a jarringly realistic – yet ugly – way that derives from traditions of horror manga simply wouldn’t translate well to the screen. Anime after all by necessity simplifies manga designs, and having recently finished MÄR, my impressions on that front were not favourable.

But I was being premature in coming to this conclusion – which struck me when I saw that animation was being taken care of by Production I.G., who since Stand Alone Complex and especially with Seirei no Moribito have impressed me by putting out some of the most amazing animation ever seen in weekly production. Strictly speaking, the animation studio is Wit, but unless I.G. later decide on a complete transformation, Wit is basically a subdivision of that studio incorporating a merger with a manga publisher. And I.G. once again have pulled out the stops and made something fluid, beautiful and highly distinctive. And any fears those creepy faces wouldn’t translate well? Dispelled within instants, as the high level of detailing made them just as uncanny to look at in animated form. That said, the one famous sequence of a Titan doing a silly run down a street and kicking an unfortunate human away was so terrible that it has been correctly ridiculed, and really should have been re-done.

What, then, has made Titans the smash hit of the season, the next big thing in anime all over the world and certain to have a continuation within the next few seasons? Well, in my view it has done that unique thing that anime does so well – started with a stupid, exaggerated, crazy premise and then developed it so far, so sincerely and with such earnest characters that it forces you to ultimately take it seriously.

Attack on Titan managed to simultaneously stand out as something quite strange and different in anime and recall many familiar tropes. Of course, giants – and giant robots – are nothing new in anime. Nor are they unusual in wider media – the Jack the Giant Killer film only recently attempted to revive the old fairy tale. But Attack on Titan draws on old mythology to create a tense, Germanic world where humanity exists in tenuous safety from giants (as one fansub group insisted on pointing out, more accurately Ettin / Eoten / Jötunn than the Titans of Greek Myth, being lumbering, man-eating monsters) behind huge walls. There is a direct link here with the mythology of giants being kept outside huge walls, as can be seen in a browse of the complex mythology of Gog and Magog in Abrahamic religions, especially when conflated with Gogmagog. But these are not common elements in anime, and what Titans did so well was to meld the old stories – primarily the Norse myths – with a dark, early steam-age Germanic setting and distinctly anime high-action combat scenes. The result is a strange but instantly recognisable setting with weird but familiar monsters that functions as a remarkable set of allegories – reportedly, youths in Hong Kong have even found it resonates with their fear of their closed community being invaded by monolithic Mainland China.

Why it works, though, is that the human element is not forgotten. The story opens in a prologue to the main action, where our main character Eren Jaeger is given reason to truly hate the Titans. With his childhood friends – delicate but highly intelligent Armin and fiercely protective and highly capable only-half-Asian-in-the-known-world Mikasa, he goes through a terrible ordeal, but it is one that shapes the course of the rest of their lives. Once old enough (yes, sadly their cute kiddy designs are left behind, leaving me similar regrets to Tales of Graces), they join the ‘survey corps’ and begin to train to fight the Titans. But a series of strange memories marks Eren as something special, and he brings a unique weapon to humanity’s arsenal. No sooner is it revealed, though, than it becomes obvious he is not alone in it, and the abnormal Titans who don’t act like dumb animals may have their own secrets, too – but how is Eren involved? What did his father do to him?

The pace is slow, overall. In terms of the greater story, not a whole lot actually happened in the 25 episodes of this season. A lot of major battles took place, and many lives were lost, but generally the show was good at putting distractions in the way of the pursuit of the real plot. Eren knows that he needs to investigate the basement of his old home, but difficult training, invasions, trials, an enemy with the same power as him and long scenes of internal conflict mean that we really need another few seasons to actually get anywhere. Luckily, unlike what happened with possibly the show’s closest kin in terms of mood and aesthetic, Claymore, it’s certain that this adaptation has been successful enough to warrant a continuation – and soon.

Plus, as seen in a recent trip to Japan, the show is very easy to provide merchandise for, because it happily bridges serious and daft. You can have fearsome realistic busts and cutesy, silly Colossal Titan Nendoroids. I enjoyed a coffee mug that as you drink reveals the Colossal Titan peering over the wall at you, and a T-shirt with his face printed inside so that you can pull the whole thing up over your head to have his face there. The Body Worlds-inspired fleshy aesthetic of the enemy Titans is instantly recognisable, as are some of the weirder normal Titans. And the series also easily tapped the fangirl market, with shelves and shelves of yaoi already available over there – though I have to say this whole Levi x Eren thing is a bit…unlikely to me (maybe I identify too much with Eren), and I’m sad pretty lil’ Armin seems to be mostly ignored there! C’mon EruAru!

Titans didn’t do everything right, but what it did was so compelling and entertaining that I was happily swept along.  

Kid Icarus – 3DS animations

As part of the promotion for the upcoming release of Kid Icarus, Nintendo are releasing six shorts for the 3DS as part of the Nintendo Video program. I plan on writing thoughts of a few of the shorts on there, but mostly as part of their respective larger series. Kid Icarus doesn’t (yet) have one, though, and after all I’m quite excited abut the game overall, so they get their own entry – even if I have to update it over the course of six weeks, by the end of which I’ll have had the game a while. 

There are really three shorts here, each by a different studio. The first, Thanatos Rising from Production IG’s CGI wing, is a three-parter very much like a game cutscene in the Nintendo style, with bright colours, relatively simplistic textures and over-acting that I’m sure some will find very hard to bear. Obnoxious and overacted though Pit is, I find his voice pretty cute – though it goes too far in the second part with lines about blogs that presumably are an incredibly awkward translation of some Japanese pun and really don’t work in context. Basically, Medusa’s minion, the obvious showtune admirer Thanatos, turns the tables on an army coming to combat him by taking over a giant Trojan walker and attacking a town. Pit gets the gift of flight, as ever, and sets off to save the day. The main point is that Pit is adorable and looks cool, and if that’s all you’re looking for – and in a six-minute animation to promote a game, it should be – you will be satisfied here. Plus there’s something about gears that will always look awesome in 3D – and the 3D without glasses on the 3DS truly is the best kind.

The second, Medusa’s Revenge, is a single 3-minute short from Studio 4˚C, in more traditional anime style. For the first 40 seconds, it looks like 4˚C are going to be lazy and cop out with a whole lot of simple, barely moving animation made vaguely dynamic by camera movements – and Pit is drawn so stumpy and young-looking that he almost looks out of PoPoLoCrois. But while it’s very simple in terms of plotline – Palutena and Medusa exchange threats and Pit fights his way to her – somehow it makes the hairs on my neck stand up and comes across as very cool. I’d like it to be included in the game as an alternate intro, even. True, there’s quite a bit of laziness (a whole lot of those monsters are copied and pasted) and some of the 3D at the start is a bit overdone and flat, but I really liked this nugget. And somehow, perhaps because they were unused to the process and cranked it up too far, I actually got the best 3D effects from this film I have in any since the recent boom. It’s the first time in ages it’s seemed like anything is coming out of the screen at me. So kudos for that.

The third, Palutena’s Revolting Dinner is a two-parter from – of all people – Shaft. I was wrong to expect their trademark quirkiness, though: beyond the daft premise – Palutena accidentally brings some carrots to life and has problems with them – it’s really remarkably ordinary and predictable, which is frankly the opposite from what I’d expect from Shaft. They have anime on the more ordinary side of course – just look at REC – but they actually got Shinbou Akiyuki to helm this. The way the story builds to its chaotic ending felt quite Pani Poni Dash!, but otherwise it struck me as a pedestrian way to deal with the property.

That said, the art is really cute in it – though Pit looks a bit young – and it’s fun seeing Palutena uncomfortable, or with a big squash on her head. I just had hoped for something cleverer and a little less like any given anime for small children. 

スカイ•クロラ/ The Sky Crawlers

Another Production IG project from Oshii Mamoru – bringing with it the hallmarks of that partnership: beautiful visuals, main characters with blank expressions and glassy eyes and questions raised about humanity and existentialism. But all the flaws of the Ghost in the Shell properties are here – with very few of their virtues.

The plot here unravels incredibly slowly, with the audience disoriented and left to speculate. Two fighter pilots, young enough to be called children by some, go to a diner with their girls. They drink, smoke and take the girls somewhere they know they can sleep with them. But the younger, more childlike one is confused. He has just arrived on the military base, but nobody will talk about the person he’s replaced.
We soon learn that the country is at war, battles mostly waged in the air. The pilots are ‘Kildren’ (or kirudoru, ‘kill-dolls’ in the original), apparently unable to age, dying only in war – hence, perhaps, their willingness to indulge in cigarettes and alcohol. But these are not party people – that is very much emphasised. They are grim, angst-ridden youths, every day facing the possibility of death in battle, most questioning themselves, their pasts and those around them.

The main problem here is that the film is long – two hours long – and very dull. The idea is clearly that the sombre, slow-moving story will come over as mature, challenging and intellectual. But it just gives the impression of very little story to tell. The story comes from a novel, but for all that it gets spun out and for all the loose ends lead you to think there is more to be revealed than you see, it is just very thin and very predictable. We had figured out within ten minutes the twist that would come at the end – and what would happen after the credits – and the rest was just waiting to see if our expectations were to be bourn out, or if I’d just been watching too much Gunslinger Girl and Evangelion. In the end, nothing presented as a twist came as a surprise, and I disliked this for the same reason I dislike most of Chiaki J Konaka’s work.

Also, while there are two relatively normal characters near the centre of the story, they are very much secondary to the two main characters – who are always kept at arm’s length. They are strange, don’t understand themselves or one another and mostly deal with their feelings by staring.

Everything is totally beautiful – the character designs are simple but the lighting, the movement, the mise-en-scene and especially the backgrounds look amazing. The film superbly cracks the problem of how to make CG look right in traditional animation – which is not through making edges bold or cel-shading obvious, but by simply making everything else in the shot look every bit as good as the CG does. Visually, this is one of the best films anime can offer, and if you want something to show people to convince them anime isn’t all giant eyes and sparkles, this would be a good choice. But for fans of conventional storytelling, strong characterisation, a good balance between action and drama or anything that would resemble fun, look elsewhere. I would have much rather this were a 30-minute Twilight Q-style experiment.

東のエデン 劇場版 I+II / Higashi no Eden Gekijouban I+II / Eden of the East movies I+II: The King of Eden + Paradise Lost

I loved the Eden of the East anime series, but with a proviso – that the unfinished story would reach a satisfying resolution with the two movies that followed. Unfortunately, these two feature film sequels have not provided closure, nor more depth to its characters, nor even a visual spectacle. The ultimate feeling has been of two protracted episodes of the anime that stalled and went nowhere.

The first movie, The King of Eden, follows on from the slightly difficult situation left behind by the series: trying to direct all suspicion against the NEETs who helped him onto himself, Takizawa has once again erased his memory. However, he has also become something of a celebrity, the image of him pointing at the missiles iconic, making him seem like something of a revolutionary. The first part of the film is devoted to Saki searching for Takizawa, some false drama is created by another Seleção targeting the couple, and then the enigmatic number 1 decides that the best way to attain his ever-changing goals is to destroy everybody else’s Juiz supercomputers. The somewhat throwaway temporary antagonist ‘Johnny Hunter’ from the series saves Takizawa’s computer, and the film ends with Takizawa about to go back to Japan with his plan to become the country’s king – something Juiz might just be able to accomplish.

If all this sounds like half a film, it feels very much that way. There’s a lot of prevarication and not much action. The whole thing could easily have been truncated to half an hour, but instead is spun out. There’s not even much in the way of character development for anyone beside Saki, and if the viewer isn’t attached to her from the series, they’re likely never going to be, so it doesn’t feel too necessary. But of course, there is another film to come, another chance at resolution.

In Paradise Lost, the odd set-up finally comes to a head. Takizawa goes back to Japan, where he is considered either revolutionary or terrorist. Juiz has been leaking information that suggests he’s the illegitimate son of the ex-prime minister, with the undertones of him being groomed as a successor – as close as the computer can get him to being a ‘prince’, and then a king. He is immediately whisked off to be confronted by the wife of the ex-prime minister and lightly interrogated, Surprisingly, this sparks not an action-adventure where Takizawa becomes centre of attention for the world, but a slow quest for Saki to uncover who Takizawa’s parents are. Systematically, the film removes all interesting plot strands without developing them in an interesting way. Takizawa’s memories soon creep back, and Saki spends most of the film away from him, so the interesting direction the romance might have taken goes nowhere. The mysterious other seleção can do nothing, and the two most interesting antagonists end up taken out of the picture in a very artificial way at the end. And Takizawa’s loose plan is never revealed to be something that will manage to work brilliantly in the end. The final resolution is the desperate gasp of a writing team who need an ending, and the muddle of threats, gifts and misdirected social commentary not only doesn’t ring true for a second, but with its aftermath totally trivialises the previous explorations of younger and older generations, the social fears of Japan’s disaffected twenty-somethings and concepts of hereditary privilege within capitalist societies. It could all have been so interesting, but it was presented in such a pat, simplistic way.

The dénouement leaves things open for a final story or two, but after this, my enthusiasm has waned so much. I thought that the story would have links and parallels to King Lear. In the end, if anything, the ideas of the older generation bequeathing their kingdoms to the young could have been the seed for a fantastic story here; the fact that we had nothing but a shadow of it at the end reduced this to one of the biggest disappointments of recent years.

東のエデン / Higashi no Eden / Eden of the East

Four noteworthy things ran through my head in the first minutes of Eden of the East. The first was, ‘Wow, this has to have the same character designer as Honey and Clover’. The second was, ‘Hey, great, finally anime studios are getting American voice actors to do the English parts – not to mention having a great opening song in English’. The third was, ‘Well, would you look at that, censoring a naked person’s rude bits with a white scribble – that’s new.’ But ultimately, the fourth was, ‘It looks like Production I.G. are finally doing something I’m going to like as much as Seirei no Moribito.’

These were pretty insightful things to have thought, if I may say so myself! Well, apart from the one about the rude bits. The character designs were indeed from Umino Chika, mangaka of HachiKuro, which suited Saki’s character extremely well. That song was actually Oasis’ most recent single, which shows the kind of budget involved here – and was in fact more interesting than anything else I’ve heard from the band in years, with a nice reference to Pope. And the director was Production I.G.’s leading light Kamiyama Kenji, who also helmed Seirei no Moribito.

There are two movies following the series, so it’s a consciously unfinished story, but also a fascinating one. Taking its cues from The Bourne Identity, the story opens with a sweet-natured young girl very confused by the appearance of a young, good-looking, thoroughly naked young man outside the White House. He has nothing but a gun and a phone, but gets her out of a scrape with the police after she decides to try and throw a lucky coin into the White House fountain. They manage to get away, and she gives him her coat – but forgets her passport is in the pocket. Managing to find him again, moments after he gets to an apartment listed on his phone with several passports and takes one on as his identity – the most explicit Bourne homage – she is wrapped up in an intrigue involving an organisation that can seemingly do anything, twelve people with ten billion yen each, and missile attacks on Japan.

With a very near-future setting (towers have been rebuilt on the World Trade Centre site, and programming technology has moved on just a little), the issues explored actually turn out to be closest to those of Welcome to the NHK, with which this shares much thematic ground. Saki is involved with a group of NEETs and hikikomori (shut-ins) who very nearly became successful with their revolutionary augmented reality software. However, somehow the disappearance of several thousand such shut-ins and some mysterious missile attacks on Tokyo that hit only uninhabited areas seem to be related – and have links with a strange, deadly game to save society (with a fun football theme to it). Of course, some of those trying to win such a game take extreme measures, and others end up having to use everything they have to stop them.

Eden of the East looks great, has superb pacing and likeable characters, and is full of good ideas. There are some elements that just don’t satisfy, though, especially towards the end: would anyone really think they could win the game as the antagonists do, and was it not anticipated that the Seleção would just waste money to cancel out one another’s plans? No matter how powerful, how does Juiz pull off some of her feats? Was it really necessary for our loveable seleçinho to erase his memory? Why the shipping to Dubai when the men could easily have dissipated unnoticed? And while much of the series’ humour comes from inappropriate nudity, by the end none of it is really explained. Why was he nude at the start? Why are the men that pour out of the crates unclothed and shaven-headed? But these are either minor quibbles or things that may yet be explained. Eden of the East is definitely one of the better recent anime, and I’m eager to watch the feature films.

ブラッド・ザ・ラストバンパイヤ / Blood: the Last Vampire

This 45-minute theatrical feature animation managed to gain quite the reputation, but I found it difficult to see why; I can’t recommend it in the least. It has just one thing going for it: some above-average, albeit not stunning, animation sequences.

Released in 2000, Blood: the Last Vampire has spawned its own animation series, Blood+, as well as various video games. The plot is basic – vampires in an American military base situated in Japan must be hunted down by a kickass babe in schoolgirl’s clothes. Cue lots of bloodletting, lots of ugly, cheesy monsters and a fair few clichés that will have you burying your face in your hands. Not bad for three quarters of an hour.

If your idea of anime is stuck in the 80s, that is to say that you pick up a DVD from Manga Entertainment expecting a splatterfest of gore and maybe some idealised girls and explosions, but don’t care about plot, then just maybe this will be for you. If you like any semblance of plot or characterisation, look elsewhere, for our protagonist is a typical ice-maiden that it’s very hard to care about, and the sympathetic character at her side is even duller - although her character design (a dumpy middle-aged lady) is a welcome deviation from the rest of the clichés surrounding it. Much better action adventure anime can be found – just look at Princess Mononoke or Mai-HiME. Fans of vampire anime would do far better with Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust or Trinity Blood, which take their subject seriously but with strong characters and interesting storylines. There’s also the classic Hellsing, which is also cheesy in its way, but infinitely cooler than Blood: the Last Vampire because it revels in its schlockiness.

Perhaps the title was marketed heavily towards the English-language market because some half of its dialogue is in English. But this is to the detriment of the title, because the badly-written dialogue is made still worse by some stiff and lifeless English-language acting. And the way some of the black guys are drawn borders on offensive.

The integration of CG and hand-drawn animation is technically impressive, in the opening scene in particular, but that alone does not make Blood: the Last Vampire worth seeing. I also think it a little reprehensible that the running time is not supplied on the DVD case. I’m sure several people have bought this thinking they’re getting a full feature, only to have a piece of animation the length of a single TV special.

(originally written 11.9.07)

フリクリ/ Furi Kuri / Fooly Cooly / FLCL

So Furi Kuri exists to be weird and silly, and is amongst the strangest anime ever to be made. Because the Japanese love quirky stuff, or perhaps because that rather defines much of their history, it got animated by animation gods Gainax, becoming a high-budget 6-episode series. It’s not just because it’s only a short mini-series that means it won’t take very long to review.

Okay, plot…plot…right, so Naota is a 12-year-old boy who lives in a town with a skyline dominated by a giant iron. Uh-huh. After Naota's brother left Japan to play baseball in America, his girlfriend is on her own, so Naota starts to hang around with her - getting used as a substitute for her affection. Then another girl appears and hits Naota over the head with her bass guitar, making his head an interplanetary transportation device. He gets weird bumps on his forehead, and when he is sexually aroused (which happens quite often, since he’s a pretty twelve-year-old boy, and of course, in anime world, 12-year-old boys get lots of attention from the ladies), huge robotic creatures burst from these distinctly phallic bumps. Riiight. And things get weirder from there, with the girl with the bass manipulating Naota to summon various robots and get absorbed into them until he can call out a godly creature called Atomsk.

The point of this guff is to have a lot of parodies of other anime and movies, plus to just fill every episode with total rubbish. There are countless visual gags: Matrix bullet time, animated manga segments, even a part done in the style of South Park. Why? Because it’s craaazy.

Yeah. Except…for all its expensive animation and extreme zaniness, it’s just not very funny. And that’s that.

(Originally written 14.10.05)

デッド リーブス/ Dead Leaves

I wasn’t sure, going in, whether or not I was gonna like Dead Leaves. I’m not usually keen on Production IG, who wowed the world with Ghost in the Shell and then got lazy, churning out films and OVAs that have a lot of amazing animation and great style, but severely lack in substance, including Blood: The Last Vampire and, in part, Dead Leaves’ spiritual predecessor, FLCL.

On the other hand, this was the big break of Imaishi Hiroyuki after working as key animator on an episode of FLCL. It was on the back of this that he could go over to Gainax and make Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which is easily one of the best shows of the last five years. And stylistically, Dead Leaves has a lot in common with what makes Gurren Lagann great – stylised presentation featuring bold shadows, odd angles and exaggerated physics, a frenetic pace and ridiculously exaggerated set-pieces.

What it doesn’t have, on the other hand, is Gurren Lagann’s sympathetic characters, sense of fun, touches of seriousness or clever pacing. It may be similar stylistically, and that drill looks identical to one of Shimon’s, but writing is what really determines the style of a piece, and this 45-minute animation is what we might get if Viz decided to write a parody of anime, using all the Western clichés. Only without the smart sarcasm, and with an almost undetectable level of clever pastiche.

A girl with a spot over her eye and a guy with an old-fashioned TV for a head wake up naked in the middle of nowhere. After naming each other Pandy and Retro, they get on the wrong side of the law and end up in a prison on the moon. Trying to bust out, they start to learn about their pasts.

This shoestring is punctuated by fart and penis jokes, boobs hanging out, anal violation, sex in straitjackets through poop-holes and lots of people exploding, getting squished and having their heads chopped in two, not to mention sheer randomness and lots of guns and robots. It’s the kind of anime you see representing the whole industry in disapproving Western newspaper articles – surrealism, gore and sex, not to mention being tragically unfunny. This stuff can be fun, done right. But Dead Leaves is poor.

The voice actors are on autopilot, Yamaguchi Kappei inimitable as ever but simply cruising in Usopp mode, not bothering to think up a new characterisation (which he often does) and everyone else simply fits into the broad role their character comes from, mostly totty, dunce or tough guy. The ending is as by-the-numbers as the rest of it, and ultimately, I’m left with the feeling that I’ve seen something flashy but useless. Recommended only if you’ve never seen high-octane stylised anime. And if TTGL didn’t exist.

(Originally written 7.8.08. Production IG have since made anime I love, including Seirei no Moribito.)

精霊の守り人 / Guardian of the Sacred Spirit / Seirei no Moribito

Seirei no Moribito just should not exist. But I am so very glad it does. There just should not be an anime that looks this incredible, takes on such an immense and far-reaching storyline, especially not in a world where no-one’s heard of it because they’re all too busy watching Lucky Star.

Everything about Seirei no Moribito is head and shoulders above anything else in the weekly anime world. The production standards make the show look like a movie from a big studio like Ghibli. The theme comes from hugely successful J-Rock band L’Arc~En~Ciel (though does contain some rather strained English pronunciation) and the incidental music sounds fantastic. The art is stunning, from backgrounds you could stare at for hours to some very appealing character designs that never go off-model. Every frame is done perfectly, no corners cut, and the animation is as good as it gets – just look at how those fights are choreographed, and how they move! Weapons really have weight, characters try to outthink one another, and while the acrobatics are fanciful, they’re more believable than wire work in kung-fu movies. This anime is a feast for the eyes.

And fortunately, it’s coupled with an ambitious story. Seirei no Moribito’s plot comes not from a manga, but from a novel, and the difference in crafting, I must admit, becomes apparent. The story is slightly reminiscent of Scrapped Princess’s – the Emperor’s son is marked with the sign of the water spirits, so his own father tries to dispose of him, thinking it the mark of a demon. His mother sends him away with a spear-wielding female bodyguard, and they flee their pursuers, beginning to find out the truth about the water spirit as well as more about one another as Prince Chagum adapts to life outside the palace.

It’s actually quite a lazy storyline, driven like too many fantasy stories by the inevitability of a prophecy and magical creatures with magical rules that can be made up at will by a writer. Even accepting the magical setting, it’s only just believable that court advisors with access to ancient knowledge can believe something evil until one person actually reads the ancient texts left to them and realises that’s all wrong. There are some silly-looking magical fish-men and an old shaman who is an extremely adept fighter, both of which were just a little too daft to fit in here, with the otherwise realistic tone. Similarly, the arbitrary rules affecting battles with otherworldly creatures, like being able to fight them only after eating a certain kind of flower, make some of the climactic parts really rather hard to find exciting, in a similar way to the final sequences of Mononoke-hime. But very much like that film, it is the detail of the fanciful historical setting and the small, intimate moments of human contact that make this series transcend its rather uninteresting main plotline and become superb. Some anime bloggers complained of a slow patch around episode 7, but side-stories like Chagum beginning to get some idea of how the streets work and making some friends (even if they’re soon left behind) gave a vital human element to the story. Yes, perhaps it could have been done more quickly and effectively, but the main story was simple so the side-plots were spread out to a reasonable degree, and focus on the details of life, on how to survive in a cave in winter, on how a mill with a waterwheel works, on a spoilt child who’s never gone hungry realising food tastes so much better when you’ve gone without for a while, gives you characters you care about, and that was this series’ strength.

And also, having an actual child in the voice-acting cast enhanced the sincerity of the show’s presentation far more than I anticipated it would. Seeing a stern woman developing maternal instincts over what on some level you know is just a middle-aged woman pretending to be a young boy just doesn’t work as well as a real child.

Despite an imperfect and rather bland story, the art, animation, setting and performances here are superlative.

(originally written 18.10.07)

マインド・ゲーム/ Mind Game

Before the masterful, childlike Kaiba and the somewhat disturbing Kemonozume, experimental and fast-rising director Yuasa Masaaki made this critically acclaimed but undeniably avant-garde feature.

It is the story of a loser who suffers an extremely humiliating death, only to get a second chance. His rebirth leads to an adventurous escape from the Yakuza with the two girls he just might love, and then in a surrealistic turn and Pinocchio reference, a period of self-contemplation for all three of them with a strange hermit in the belly of a whale. Despite the strangeness of both style and plot, the vast majority of the film flows linearly and makes a kind of internal sense, although the ending is purposely ambiguous, focusing on the idea that tiny changes can bring innumerable possibilities for a person’s life.

There are recognisable stylistic links to Kemonozume, the rather ugly, sketchy drawing style, angular animation and inventive angles in the mise-en-scene. Kaiba is evoked by the pastiche-y clips of a retro anime with the time-turning belt that reinforces the theme of the film, in some of the forms of God and in the strange organic nature of some of the worlds the characters must inhabit, even just for a moment or two, as well as in the often disconcerting editing style. These links are more remarkable given that while Yuasa's later work came from Madhouse, this film was primarily by Studio 4°C – also behind such visually quirky works as Tekkon Kinkreet and Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu – with contributions from Gainax and Production I.G. That the style is similar across studios shows Yuasa’s great influence and command of his productions.

But if anything, Mind Game is weirder than either. Often using photocollage effects, real faces inserted into animated worlds, it constantly draws attention to itself as artistic expression. We see the film changing the media of its art, bursting into a wild and sexualised parody of an animated musical number, slipping between exaggerated parody and heartfelt introspection, and fully utilising the animated medium to express strange things, comedic things, surreal things, always seeming to be aware of Walt Disney’s dictum that animators cannot show the fantastic ‘unless we first know the real.’

But while Disney may have firmly established what is real before using a dream sequence or drunken hallucination to introduce the truly bizarre and formless, Yuasa delights in setting up expectations, and then subverting them, even if those expectations are that there will soon be another shift in style or pace.

What is remarkable, however, is that even though the audience is constantly reminded that the characters are only works of fiction, even though they are presented as shallow, changeable, detached and often duplicitous, even though the situations are weird in the extreme, they are still believable, sympathetic and more human than many in more formulaic and straightforward films. Mind Game’s chief achievement is that while it is incredibly strange, it has heart.