日常 / Nichijou / Everyday Life

From episode one, Nichijou struck me as a cross between Azumanga Daioh and Pani Poni Dash. Just look at the design of the Professor/Hakase – if that doesn’t look like Becky from Pani Poni redrawn by Kiyohiko Azuma like one of the Yotsuba&! kids, I don’t know what does. And fittingly, that’s how the humour seems to sit, as well – not quite the bewildering flurry of weirdness that is Pani Poni Dash, but certainly a few steps more surreal than even the frenetic first episode of Azumanga.

And like both of those series, my first reaction to Nichijou was confusion, followed by a knee-jerk reaction of not wanting to like it very much, and then finally as the series settled down a little into character development and stopped trying harder than it needed to, loving it. Well, okay, that last part is mostly reflective of Azumanga Daioh – it was what, in the end, was missing from Pani Poni Dash and could have made it much better.

Nichijou – a term that after learning it here I keep hearing in Japanese speech – means ‘everyday life’, ‘daily life’, ‘day-to-day life’ or any variation thereof you might like to choose. It means the ordinary and commonplace elements of one’s life, and thus the irony here is that the everyday lives of the schoolgirls here are extremely weird. At the centre of the piece sit the three friends, clutzy Yuuko, cheerful but hot-tempered Mio and quiet, mysterious Mai. They go to school and though other than Mai (who has a twisted sense of humour and odd fixation on religious carvings) they are fairly normal girls, very strange things happen around them – for example, Yuuko will happen to witness the school principal having an epic wrestling match with a deer, ultimately revealing that even the tiny bit of hair left on his balding head is a wig. Around them, things are weirder. A robotic girl’s everyday life features the sardonic talking cat Sakamoto-san and her eight-year-old creator, the selfish little girl they call Hakase (‘Professor’). One boy likes to ride a goat to school, accompanied by a butler, occasionally coming into contact with a girl from the kendo club whose tsundere character is so exaggerated that when she gets flustered she produces heavy weaponry and lays waste to all around her. Other segments involve the unfortunate boy whose hair only grows as a Mohawk, a teacher who wants to hunt and disassemble the robot girl, the various people who take a part time job selling little buns and have to wear a bun mask, the extended brilliant fantasy sequences set on a zeppelin Yuuko has about Mio’s hair and the misadventures of the ‘go-soccer club’. As you can likely tell, all very strange.

 There are also segments from the mangaka’s other manga, Helvetica Standard, which I must say doesn’t seem nearly as entertaining. The mangaka’s family name, Arawi, is also about the only place I’ve ever seen the rare ‘wi’ character, ゐ.

The series really comes into its own in the second half, when things become a bit more coherent and all the disparate parts come together – adorable robot Nano starts going to school, making friends with the main trio and uniting the two major worlds. The boy on the goat becomes the object of Mio’s affections, making for some of the cutest scenes, and her rival is in the kendo club with Mio’s big sister. Things start to make more sense in a larger context, and the humour is increasingly based on character quirks rather than random things happening, which works better, and the incredible overreactions become ever funnier, especially when Mio thinks her filthy yaoi drawings are about to be revealed.

Though seemingly nowhere near as big a hit as Lucky Star, I feel that this second attempt by KyoAni to make a simple-looking comedy series was by far the better, and when they segue into huge, absurd action sequences with sweeping cameras and explosive special effects, it works fantastically. I’m a little sad that the DVDs reportedly didn’t sell well at all, as that means we’re unlikely to see any more Nichijou, and it’s a much better property than Lucky Star overall. It probably just didn’t hook enough people in at the start, as after all I too took a long while to really get into it.

Well, KyoAni’s latest, Chuunibyou, is giving us the best of both worlds of KyoAni’s strengths – beautiful art/animation and humour – so I don’t think poor DVD sales will affect them overly. But Nichijou shouldn’t be seen as a flop. It just needs time.

とらドラ! / Toradora!

I didn’t think I was going to bother with Toradora! Another moé anime with loli ovretones, I thought, about a mismatched pair of teenagers who end up in an odd couple relationship but will inevitably realize their feelings for one another after a while. But hey, it’s in a format that I can put on my PS Vita to try out its improved movie player, and I have plenty of space on my memory card. I might as well slip them over.

And then after two or three episodes I got hooked. The truth is, the series is more or less everything I expected to be – it centres on the cuteness of a diminutive high school girl who looks much younger than she is called Aisaka Taiga. She has such a fierce reputation she has been nicknamed ‘Tenori Taiga’, or ‘Palm-top Tiger’, but has a very Shana-like soft side, putting her squarely into the ‘tsundere’ character mould. She is neighbours with Takasu Ryuuji, a gentle boy who loves cleaning but, like Sawamura Seiji in Midori no Hibi, is constantly judged for looking like a violent delinquent, though unlike Seiji has never earned this reputation by getting in fights. Each has a crush on a classmate who is friends with the other, and Taiga needs someone to look after her in her chaotic home life, so they become allies. Throw in a successful model who has a rough and judgemental personality beneath her sickly sweet façade and you get end up with a compelling love hexagon.

 Most of the series follows the usual high school romance clichés – we get a beach episode, a Christmas episode, a school trip episode and all the rest – but somehow, by centring its emotional heart on the theme of people being unable to express their true feelings and putting up a front, tied in with those old Japanese cultural nuggets of honne and tatemae, it manages to resonate beyond JC Staff’s usual fanservice and cuteness.

Ultimately Toradora! isn't what I would call special in any way – it’s all been done before, some episodes are very dull and the humour is often strained slapstick – but it is worth a watch. Because Taiga’s vulnerability, Ryuuji’s believable indecisiveness, Ami’s just-perceptible loneliness, Minori’s selflessness and Kitamura’s likeable but impenetrable ways of distancing those around him seem to cut that bit deeper than most anime characterizations, possibly reflecting the series’ roots in light novels rather than manga. I also like the little deft touches like the explanation for Ryuuji’s face – it comes from his bad-boy, absent father – and the theming of tigers (‘Tora’) and dragons (‘dora(gon)’) for the two main characters. Once or twice there seemed to be a gentle pushing of the envelope, with jokes based on sex and the Japanese word for ‘penis’, as well as presenting the possibility of lesbianism without it being absurd, disgusting or a one-sided played-for-laughs crush.

The last few episodes pushed forward all of Toradora!’s strengths with a surfeit of melodrama, with many tearful pursuits, grand gestures, unkind words that pushed relationship and family dramas to a head and secondary characters left waving off their friends with smiles that faded as soon as they were left alone, and I have to say that it all just worked. It’s a very strong example of its kind, and what holds it back isn’t the writing, the characterisation, the acting or the art – all of which were very high-standard – but merely the fact that I’ve seen all this done before too many times and at its core, it remains a moé tsundere fanservice series with a loli element: witness the cuteness of Taiga on tiptoes!

 After the main series, a few more bits and pieces have followed, including silly chibi SOS gag shorts (wherein silly parakeet Inko-chan got his own mini-segment) and a throwaway OVA where Ryuuji gets obsessed over making the best bento box for lunch – the latter of which actually had the biggest laugh of the series for me, when Ryuuji brought in a rice cooker and tried so ardently to pretend it wasn’t his. I’m not desperate for more Toradora!...but if more arrives, I will most probably watch.

バジリスク〜甲賀忍法帖〜 / Bajirisuku ~Kōga Ninpō Chō~ / Basilisk: The Kouga Ninja Scrolls

It’s been a long while now since I stared Basilisk, which was back when it started. I watched three new anime that day, and of them, Basilisk was my favourite: ‘the only one I’m particularly interested in following is Basilisk, a beautifully drawn (if rather 80s in character design) new series about a war between two ninja clans. Like Naruto taking itself seriously, this pseudo-historical drama has lots of blood, testosterone and refreshingly ugly characters, which I’m not a particular fan of but can accept if there’s good reason. The thing is, I’m not sure if it might take itself TOO seriously, and thus become a bit farcical and charmless. Still, I’m interested enough to find out the answer to this question, so I’ll keep watching.’

That was back on 6 May 2005, over seven years ago. I have indeed kept watching, but fantastically slowly. The more I watched Basilisk, the more I realised there was nothing bringing me back to it.

Basilisk is a historical fantasy based on the real-life Kouga and Iga ninja clans, who established much of the lore in Japanese culture regarding ninjutsu and played a significant role in the much-romanticised shougunate period. In a crisis of succession for the shouguns, it is decided that the two ninja clans will each represent one heir, breaking their uneasy truce to have their ten strongest fighters battle to the death in order to decide who will be the next shougun. Added to this is the Romeo and Juliet story of the two young ninja who are to be their future clan leaders – engaged in a romance that was meant to bring peace after generations of battle, but now doomed to fight.

Though there are still images that are beautiful, some impressive action and poetic stillness, and though the intro theme is one of the better ones Gonzo have used, the fact is that Basilisk is dull. It manages to avoid having a stereotypical shounen tournament in the MÄR vein, with one ninja clan getting a distinct advantage and making the most of it from the shadows rather than having fair fights, but that is only a slim veneer of complexity, and it soon becomes very tired stuff. The ninja are all basically given superpowers, but some of them are incredibly silly, like the big fat man made of rubber, a woman who has the natural ability to emit poisonous gas when close to orgasm and one whose super-strength is in his hair. There are cooler powers – slipping into walls, controlling minds with the eyes, the big bad having some sort of parasite that brings him back to life – but it’s all still very puerile and goofy.

And the 80s aesthetic brings with it other qualities, so that like Hundred Stories, I found it to represent some of the worst clichés of anime in the Western mind, which largely came from 80s fetishised titles marketed in the Occident as ‘adult’. There’s blood and gore by the bucketload, and whole episodes dedicated to quasi-erotic torture. There are hypersexualised women and rape scenes. And the story ends up irritatingly predictable, with a deathly slow pace that made me wish the season had only been 13 episodes. Sure, the series is based on an old novel from the 50s, but I bet the more juvenile themes are either added or exaggerated here.

Stylish and memorable, certainly, but in execution dull and turgid. 

デ・ジ・キャラット ウィンターガーデン Di Gi Charat: Winter Garden/Winter Garden from Di Gi Charat

Note, 10.2.07 Ehhh? What is it with Di Gi Charat and King Crimson? First a reference to the inside cover of the first album, and now the front cover appears on the door of a ‘Prog Club’ in Puchiko’s school in the serious reimagining OVA Winter Garden. 

Initial Impressions, 25.4.07. Bizarre, seeing the bizarre made mundane. Entertaining, though. That final twist was obvious from the beginning of the episode. Nice to hear the girl who debuted as Takahashi in Bokura Ga Ita in another role

Final thoughts, 18.9.12. I have to say, I didn’t notice that ‘Prog Club’ from five years ago when I rewatched the Winter Garden OVAs. Maybe between broadcast and DVD release the sign got changed. It was the weirdest moment in the otherwise largely naturalistic adaptation (along with a twitchy cameo for a piece of ‘art’…!), with the sign changing every few moments, and I’d certainly have noticed such an iconic image. This time I just smiled at how Puchiko was joining the Keiongaku club – and imagining her in K-On.

Anyway, five years later the idea of a complete reimagining of a series isn’t such a new idea for me, and at least to my mind this strange little nugget of seriousness in a franchise known for its ultra-cutesiness and insanity strikes me as very funny. It’s less like Mai-HiME becoming the rather different Mai-Otome, and more like the skits in Rock Lee’s Springtime of Youth being spun out to whole episodes and played much straighter, which lends considerable subtlety. It’s more like imagined universes with the Vocaloid characters, or, I suppose, Xenoglossia with the girls from The iDOLM@STER. The studio even changed: from Madhouse to J.C.Staff.

Winter Garden is not funny, other than a few little moments, mostly with Puchiko being either blunt or a cutey, having brought more of her personality from the original than her sister did. It’s not zany. It’s actually a very, very typical love story, starting with lots of coincidental meetings, and then being given tension with a misunderstanding and the possibility of separation. What makes it funny is the very idea that it’s based on Di Gi Charat, that these sweet, ordinary girls are based on Dejiko and Puchiko – that Rabi-en-Rose is a recognisable but consistently dismissed minor celebrity. It’s just a funny concept, and the disappointment of viewers like me who didn’t get told the nature of the adaptation beforehand and expected more me-kara-beams and kuchi-kara-bazookas masked that.

Well, years have passed now, and while it’s sad that more Di Gi Charat doesn’t seem anywhere on the horizon, I consider this one a bit of gem overall and am happy it’s part of the DGC canon, confusing all who stumble upon it unprepared.

And, y’know, it’s adorable how Dejiko doesn’t even seem like herself until she gets to the verge of yelling, and the old Dejiko can just be heard in that voice. Only just! 

まかでみWAっしょい！Macademi Wasshoi!

At first I really did not know what to make of Macademi Wasshoi! – a pretty, fast-paced and pervy comedy series from Zexcs, the studio responsible for the rather ugly first season of Da Capo and the anime of boys-love game Sukisyo, one of very few series I have on long-term hiatus and only vaguely intend to one day finish. For a somewhat minor studio, they made Macademi Wasshoi! – based on light novel and manga series Magician’s Academy – look great, there’s no doubt about that. But watching the first episode, the uninitiated viewer is bombarded by crazy images and there’s a feeling of having everything the writer can think of thrown at you all at once. We see a magical school full of elves and witches and robots, we see the summoning of a mysterious naked cat-girl, we see a crazy teacher who looks like a young boy but whose head is detachable, we see a whole range of mecha filling skies with rockets, we see packs of dwarfs and we see one girl with a split personality who has a sharp tongue and drains others’ magic when her hairband is off, but is so shy when it is on that she has to write her thoughts down like Shion in Shion no Ou rather than speak them. And that is only about half of the most memorable characters from Macademi Wasshoi!

Being thrown into the deep end sometimes works brilliantly, though – I had that same impression when I started to watch Azumanga Daioh, after all – and looking back, the set-up isn’t so complicated. It’s essentially like MahouSensei Negima (young magic-using boy gathers a harem of moé clichés and they compete for his attention while magical crises are averted) with a touch of Baka to Test, plus the anarchic humour, style changes and direct parodies of Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei and heaps of fanservice. Still, after a few episodes I was thinking there just wasn’t much to Wasshoi! – I’d seen it all before. I didn’t like the intro song – an attempt at the rapid-fire style of Damekko Doubutsu or Lucky Star with a festival dance feel that just meanders and sounds half-finished – and it felt like Tanarotte was painfully underdeveloped for a central character, like she was just Mikoto from the first episodes of Mai-HiME, never to develop beyond that.

Episode five changed everything with the introduction of Hapsiel, the masochistic, bisexual beefcake of an angel with a mission to spread love and peace by kissing everyone into submission – which was one of the most disturbingly hilarious episodes of an anime I’ve ever seen. He is so completely foul and the humour so gross that it’s brilliant – not even mentioning the Evangelion parody it builds from. There’s something homophobic about the humour of Hapsiel, how repulsive it is to have a big, muscled man acting so suggestively, but main character Takuto is just about as sexualised as the girls in his harem, and as the moé-loving teacher points out, he and his kind have no problems with cute love stories between younger boys (and the tragic one-sided love story of two minor male characters is more affectionate mocking than contemptuous), but Hapsiel’s sweaty, forceful, ultra-masculine love has long been a source of gross-out humour in Japan (Chou Aniki being a well-known example), with Hapsiel probably its brilliantly horrific apogee.

Moé sensibilities turn out to dominate the whole series, and it soon becomes the wider cast who steal the show – one brilliant episode plays straight the love story between a personified computer and a rocket about to be sent to space. The older male characters tend to be very into their moé and it’s very obvious that the otaku crowd is being pandered to, teased and complimented – which makes for some feel-good viewing and big laughs. Of course, the series tries to end on a serious note, with tragedy coming very close and the ending being uplifting, with a final Christmas episode doing such a good job of making the central three girls endearing that it really should have been episode 4 or 5, because their being underdeveloped and not actually very interesting was probably the show’s biggest problem.

It was also remarkable in being one of two shows from late 2008 that were purposefully highly censored to boost DVD sales – the other being Rosario+VampireCapu2, which went too far in every way and ended up with a ruined TV show and a vastly overdone DVD. Here, all the risqué scenes and nude scenes were replaced with clay figures. This showed a lot more effort and ingenuity than Rosario+Vampire managed, and other than shots of faces, I have to say that I rather preferred the clay versions, not because they looked good but because the uncensored version was just really awkward to watch. Tanarotte looks like a preteen but with oddly large boobs, and seeing them bare just…seems incongruous and isn’t at all a pleasant sight. It just looks tacked on and doesn’t suit her as a loli type. Macademi Wasshoi! is a fun, zany comedy with lots of explosions and random Kaiji parodies – it shouldn’t need nipples to shift DVDs, and feels cheapened by them. But perhaps that is just where I’m out-of-sync with the moé ideal…

けいおん! / Keion! / K-On! (season 1)

When I first entered the anime fandom, it was very popular to detest Dragonball Z. All those prolonged fight scenes and stupid cuts of characters just yelling at each other and powering up. Much better to watch this quirky little shounen about ninja called Naruto. Of course, the time for hatred for Naruto came along, and Dragonball was ever more associated with the halcyon days of childhood and is now well-loved and its deficiencies ironically celebrated. I expect the same to eventually happen with Naruto. The next trend was to ignore big shounen titles and to only watch late-night anime, which were often shows about young girls that were usually based on pervy visual novels – things like Da Capo and Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. This trend melded with the successes of cute, funny slice-of-life shows like Azumanga Daioh and Ichigo Mashimaro and suddenly, the moéblob trend was everywhere. It perhaps reached its pinnacle in the season when Lucky Star, Manabi Straight and Hidamari Sketch all came out at the same time, but the show that has become emblematic of the subgenre is K-On!

The life-cycle of a notable moé anime seems to follow this pattern: great immediate success where the pretty art and likeable characters endear themselves to almost everyone watching the newest anime; a swelling fanbase of more casual fans; a lot of the original audience realising that (a) the show is going to meander along and nothing interesting is going to happen and that (b) people they feel oh-so-superior to are now latching on to the same show; a backlash in which people get on their soapboxes – often the same ones who were so keen at the beginning – and decry the series as dull, inconsequential, annoying. Then after that comes a sudden and final drop in popularity, where the more fickle fans move on and the more vociferous ones pretend to never have liked the show in the first place, leaving only a hardcore who have fallen somewhat in love with one of the characters and the casual fans who occasionally get reminded of that show they watched a few months ago. This happened with Lucky Star. It happened with Kanon and Air, and to an extent with Haruhi. But emblematic of the concept of ‘moéblob’ – syrupy cuteness with a loose art style – is K-On!

You may notice that all of those shows are from Kyoto Animation. This is certainly true, and their shows have suffered severe backlash, but that’s more a result of their success than anything else – moé shows like Kyou no Go no Ni and C3 would get at least as much vitriol if they were as wildly popular to begin with, but because they’re more obscure, people care less and thus complain less. The iDOLM@STER got off lightly because by the time it came out people who disliked shows like K-On! knew to avoid it. Other shows like Ika Musume noticed that what allowed Azumanga Daioh to be cute, have very little happen and still be well-loved was a lot of quirkiness and a lot of laughs – something Kyoto have taken notice of with Nichijou. The moéblob fad is passing because frankly, its appeal was always limited and there are better alternatives already being mined that don’t mean the cute girls who look good on body pillows disappear.

To K-On!, then – explosively popular at first, now much-derided. I watched episode 1 when it aired in 2009, and then didn’t continue until about a month ago, three years later. The fact was that it didn’t hook me in. I knew what to expect, I more or less knew how it would be treated by its fanbase, and I didn’t particularly like the art style, which was far looser than Kyoto’s best. When I came to watch it, I knew very well that it was a show about cute girls doing cute things – and not a whole lot else. I had no complaints about that – after all, so are Azumanga Daioh and Ichigo Mashimaro. But K-On! makes two big mistakes – firstly, it ignores its gimmick, which is music. Music is the reason the five central girls get together and become friends, and one of Kyoto’s strong points – the concert scenes and dances in Lucky Star and Haruhi were highlights, and K-On! has great opening and ending themes. But other than short diversions to have band practices and a school concert, the music club does very little music-related and more time is spent on things like shopping, agonising over love letters and going to the beach. It’s not until the OVA that the focus turns to music performance, and it’s a real shame that this strong episode wasn’t in the series. But that’s rather the point – the music club is just an excuse to get the funny little girls together in one place and have them interact. But therein lies the second flaw – so little happens that it just doesn’t matter. Apart from possibly Ritsu when she wonders about her love letter, the girls never get any depth, keeping them always on the surface – Yui is the ditzy one with the adorably responsible little sister, Mio is the slightly stuffy one who is cute when she gets scared, Ritsu is tomboyish and irresponsible and Mugi is classy and elegant but with a cheeky side. Later, Azu-nyan is…just sort of there.

In Azumanga Daioh you get the heart-wrenching graduation and the hook of surrealism. In Ichigo Mashimaro Miu’s antics are extreme enough to be hilarious, but her vulnerability and loneliness make for a key scene. In Minami-Ke all the cuteness is broken up by potential romances. Even The iDOLM@STER knows to inject some healthy angst to give the series structure. K-On! stays true to the course set – cute girls do cute things – and ultimately feels utterly inconsequential, even boring.

I quite enjoyed the lightness of K-On!, the easy simplicity and the fact the brain does not need to be engaged whatsoever. But that was over 13 episodes and an OVA. Harsh as the backlash is, K-On! was still a major hit, spawning a 26-episode second season, another OVA and a feature film. I’m not too sure how much I’m looking forward to watching those, especially since the conceit of introducing a new character (usually a way to prolong interest into a second season) was used up before the 10 episode mark – but I will watch. Because, really, it’s simple and easy to do so, and it’s cute. 

デュラララ!! / Durarara!!

I started watching Durarara!! when it began to air, back in the beginning of 2010, and was being hyped up as the next big thing – which, arguably, it was. After a few episodes, I stopped to watch Baccano! My reason for doing so stemmed from a misunderstanding, really – I read that Isaac and Miria from Baccano! were in the show, so I decided I didn’t want to see these characters without understanding their origin story, and only when I resumed Durarara!! did I realise that in fact they only had a momentary cameo in a single episode – but I’m glad that’s how I did things.

You see, it's not just that they are from the same author and are made by the same anime studio, with the same director. In many ways, Durarara!! leads on from and is informed by Baccano!, and I really feel I understood a lot more watching the series after having seen that great, stylish, stylised story.

It’s not hard to make direct comparisons: both have a large cast of characters, all of whom have their own stories. Both have supernatural elements, and a lot of fighting. Both are about the strange things that can be found beneath the surface, and both are more slices of larger, ongoing stories than complete beginning-middle-end narratives. In more direct terms, too, it’s quite useful to draw comparisons: Baccano! probably has the more original and compelling setting, but Durarara!! has a more tight-knit story. While Baccano! has a few characters who are likely more interesting than any in Durarara!!, the latter develops its full cast more completely. Durarara!! shows from the very start that it has a lot of supernatural happenstances, so there is no jarring appearance of magic potions or slight disappointment things aren’t kept more naturalistic, but the stakes in Baccano! are much higher and its timescale far broader. The truth, though, is that they really compliment one another, and really work best seen concurrently – and trust me when I say that the weirder elements of Durarara!! seem to make more sense after having seen Baccano!

An ordinary boy with the brilliantly fancy name of Ryuugamine Mikado (with which his incredibly ordinary online handle – Tanaka Tarou – is an amusing contrast) moves to Ikebukuro, a built-up part of Tokyo that not many English-speaking tourists go to, and which I know primarily as Mami’s stomping ground in Super Gals! and for having an affinity with owls (‘bukuro -> fukurou, which means ‘owl’). What seems at first a simple story about a naïve country boy moving to the big city, meeting his childhood friend and his funny friendship group gets more complicated as it becomes apparent Ikebukuro has some crazy personalities: a waiter who goes on rampages with his super strength, a dark-skinned Russian immigrant who enthusiastically sells sushi in broken Japanese but is about the only one who can stop such rampages, and most iconic of all, a biker clad all in black who is actually a female spirit from Ireland searching for her head – a dulluhan, the creatures that inspired the likes of The Headless Horseman. Beneath the surface are other factions – delinquent gangs, a demon sword who possesses all it slashes, a man who loves to toy with others’ minds and some very silly doctors for the criminal underworld.

Unlike Baccano!, conflicts between the characters will most likely lead to cartoon violence rather than anybody’s life actually being in danger, but if anything that makes the contrast between daily lives and the big, exaggerated second lives the characters lead more believable. As the spotlight is turned on each character in turn, I found myself liking just about all of them, and never being bored – especially as there’s enough of a plot that episodes flow into one another rather than coming across as repetitive or, indeed, episodic. The fact that the most likeable characters, other than the boys at the centre of it all, are the most outlandish ones – the dulluhan who can only communicate through typing, the gentle giant from Russia, the misunderstood ultra-strong guy who so often ends up throwing about enormous pieces of the scenery – is testament to some clever writing. It’s also funny, and I love the nods to other anime – not just Baccano! but things like Wolf and Spice and Shana.

Durarara!! isn’t constantly the best-looking anime, but it’s definitely nice on the eyes and some of the effects –like Celty’s powers – are spectacular. There are some fun character designs, like the daft gals, and you definitely see a lot of things you won’t see anywhere else, like men hurling vending machines at one another. Witty, strange and yet also a little more heartfelt than its predecessor, I’d recommend it highly – but it’s best enjoyed after having seen Baccano!

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!

バンパイアハンターD / Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

It wasn’t until 1999 that I saw the original Vampire Hunter D film, but for all its schlocky 80s-ness, I found myself rather enjoying it. So when I found out about Bloodlust through a (pretty awesome) teaser trailer sometime in 2001, I grew quite eager for its release, which as was the way of things here in the UK, didn’t happen until 2004.

What I eventually got my hands on was a slightly mixed product, much like its predecessor. Parts of it look so incredible it takes the breath away, while at other moments you wonder why Madhouse couldn’t have spent just a smidge of the budget making these characters’ heads move a little as they spoke. Thus, while the film contains what is easily one of my favourite pieces of animation in any anime – when Grove’s projection goes up against the Barbarois – it also remains just a little frustrating for not looking quite as good as it clearly could have done, and having somewhat dated designs even for a film released in Japan in 2000.

The plot is both simple and a little convoluted. D, being a vampire hunter, is sent to rescue fair maiden Charlotte from the dastardly vampire Meier Link. Only Link is not a typical vampire, and nor is the abduction quite what it seems on the surface. D also has competition in the rescue attempt, and Link has hired bodyguards to keep away pursuers. In the end, though, the real enemy is not only unexpected but an intriguing version of…double-undead. Somehow or other!

Despite the various ambiguous allegiances and motives, the story is not hard to follow and works well as a conventional horror story, allowing for the unique qualities of the Vampire Hunter D world to shine through. And it’s the quirky details that tend to work the best – hidden powers put on display, pledges made in quiet moments on the road, and of course, that parasite that occupies D’s hand for the sake of both comic relief and simple exposition. He doesn’t steal scenes to the extent he does in the first film, but he remains one of the interesting details that make D somehow more relatable than the similar characters in many franchises.

Bloodlust isn’t the perfect anime horror it’s sometimes made out to be. It’s certainly better than most, but I’ve never been able to shake the conviction that it could have been so much better. Perhaps it’s time for a new D film.

美鳥の日々/ Midori no Hibi / Midori’s Days / Midori Days

I was still fairly new to weekly anime and the fansubbing scene when I watched Midori no Hibi, back in 2004. Fresh from Azumanga Daioh and Excel Saga, I thought that in the grand scheme of things, the concept of Midori no Hibi wasn’t all that weird. But it is. I was in a little bubble of surreal anime, and I’m not sure anything has had such a weird basis since. Even OreTama has a more coherent thought pattern behind it. Midori no Hibi is truly weird, and only weirder because once it slaps you across the face with its premise, tries to be a very normal odd-couple drama.

But the lead girl has magically replaced the lead guy’s hand, and lives there, attached to the stump of his arm.

Yes, Midori no Hibi is a zany romantic comedy about what happens when you wake up with a cute girl instead of a right hand. Sweet-hearted little Kasugano Midori has long admired delinquent Sawamura Seiji from afar – he has a reputation as a mean fighter and bad company, but she knows most of his fights are to protect the weak, and generally he’s very much like Ichigo from Bleach, down to the hairstyle. After a mix-up with wishes coming true and Seiji thinking that his reputation will mean he will only ever have his right hand for a girlfriend, the two are brought together indelibly.

Midori no Hibi has some of the most bizarre fanservice you could imagine, and is a truly surreal romance, but somehow it powers though with such self-belief and conviction hat it manages to cohere. The result is something certainly unique but also familiar and very funny.

I remember the series being popular at the time mostly through the highly influential Snoopycool scanslation group, and though the manga had several new characters and a slightly more adult tone to it, the only things that the anime missed out on by leaving out the crazy American girl or the strange yankee girl who obsesses over the adorable shy boy who Seiji always ends up rescuing was a few laughs, and those are easily accessible through the manga anyway. Ultimately, the anime feels more like a tool for getting people to pick up the manga, but in and of itself it’s a fun, silly, satisfying story with a surprisingly good romance story and the ability to take its absurd premise to serious places beyond wacky comedy.

And somehow, there’s something hilarious and adorable about how poor little Kouta has to suffer so much.

Fire Candy (manga)

I think few people knew what they were in for when they started Fire Candy, the mangaka included – something that’s more or less admitted in the apologetic afterword. The concept is quite interesting – half-human half-animal teenagers in a future that seems quite heavily influenced by Akira cope with their status as pariahs by forming rollerblading gangs, inevitably ending up surrounded by the passions and tragedies of gang warfare.

This is a seinen manga, meant for older teenaged boys and young men, so everything is stepped up a notch, made adult in the same way that Western comics tend to be made adult. An emphasis falls on sexuality, with emotionally fraught sex scenes and rape. And then of course the violence becomes extreme, more extreme than I’ve seen in any manga as far as I remember. When reading the chapters about Ryoaki, our main character, being angsty and trying to replace one girl with her sister and having occasional scraps with other rollerblading delinquents, or some middle-aged man who looks like a little girl being sexually provocative, I most definitely did not think that we’d eventually end up seeing kids getting sexual kicks from decapitating their enemies and sticking their thumbs through the eyeballs of the severed head. It walks a fine line between shocking and just plain melodramatic, but somehow, making vicious murder sexual keeps it the right side of cheesy crap. Some stunningly good art doesn’t hurt, either. The plot is loose, meandering about with no encompassing story, but each mini storyline is fairly direct and carries the characters to interesting places.

But the real shocker is that this ultraviolent, testosterone-fuelled and gang-centred bloodbath is that its mangaka is female. There are telltale signs (using, of course, huge generalisations): the sexualised representation of the teenaged boys, the delight in flustering them with a headstrong older man who looks like a sexy young girl, the close relationship between Ryo and his close comrade Leo (a rare positive, attractive representation of a young black guy in a manga), but really, given the kind of things you see in Bleach and Naruto, those aren’t obvious indications of the creator's gender. In the end, it makes very little difference what gender the people writing manga are, but sometimes expectations are confounded.

A strange, subversive little manga I only read because it was scanslated by one of my favourite groups, it’s far from world-shaking, but I certainly enjoyed it.

(originally written 6.11.07)

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.

マリア様がみてる/ Maria-Sama ga Miteru (seasons 3&4)

MariMite, that most unlikely of cult hits about the meaningful relationships between earnest young girls in a Japanese Catholic unisex school, not only followed up its second season with no less than five OVA episodes, each the best part of an hour long, but then bucked the trend for series that end up with OVAs by returning to televisions for a fourth season. The story, as might be expected, continued to follow the light novels that are the series’ origins, following Yumi and her circle as the oldest ‘roses’ leave and they have to make the transition from sweet ‘petite souers’ to responsible, respected figures within the school’s structure – and look for younger girls to take under their wings themselves.

On the other hand, the maturity of the presentation took something of a dip as the story went on. What in the first seasons was elegant, melancholy and very sweet has become…somewhat obvious, even exploited, to the extent that it lost a great degree of its sweetness. What made Maria-sama work was its self-belief, its straightforwardness, the cluelessness of Yumi and the fact that it really took some digging under the surface to find out that this was not at all an ordinary shoujo series (as numerous English reviewers labelled it) but aimed at the seinen audience who follow magazines like Dengeki Daioh and collect figurines and body pillows. When that was all tacit, obscured and vaguely inappropriate, everything was presented perfectly. When we started to have nude Yumi and Touko with their lips inches apart and hands clasped as part of credits sequences…it’s all a bit obvious and vulgar, and that knocks the charm back a lot. Marimite doesn’t suit fanservice in its canon. Well, at least, not fanservice of that sort.

Speaking of credits sequences, the fourth has probably the most bizarre and misleading the show could have chosen short of all-out surrealism or some sort of epic battle sequence. It involves Yumi and co teleporting through magic portals all over the school. Certainly confusing for anyone who might randomly check out an episode as it aired – although I suppose that given you had to get hold of DVDs to be up-to-date with the story thus far, they expected that by this stage it was really a series for the fanbase.

With Eriko, Sei and Youko having graduated, the Yamayurikai are reduced to five: Yumi and Sachiko, Rei and Yoshino and Shimako alone as Rosa Gigantea. In her typical style, but not without some lovely drama about religious beliefs, Shimako finds her petite soeur Noriko without too much fuss. After all she struggled for independence at first, Yoshino is too close to Rei to consider a younger sister just yet. Meanwhile, Yumi is conflicted: she has gotten closer to the prickly but vulnerable Touko, but never knows quite where she stands with her, while the hilariously tall Kanako is a fan of Yumi and may share a similar personality to her beloved onee-sama.

The loss of subtlety is not purely in the opening and ending sequences. It creeps into the dialogue and character interactions too. The girls end up daydreaming about one another and getting giddy over ‘dates’ in a way that could have worked played just right, but get presented in a way not many steps above the poor imitation that is Strawberry Panic.

On the other hand, while these elements prevent the series living up to its first seasons, that is not to say the episodes are not highly enjoyable, or that I would not eagerly watch each of them. I may not have liked Touko much, even after her reasons were revealed (not sufficient excuses), and I thought the way Noriko was manipulated was horrible and not at all like the dignified Yamiyurikai of old, I accepted both storylines and the decisions made by the characters. And enjoyed all of it – I care what happens to Yumi and Yoshino, and where the relationships go. The gentleness of the relationships and the soft character-based humour (as well as the zany omake DVD extras) always made me smile, and the pacing, acting and art remained distinctive and enjoyable.

Not, perhaps, everything it could have been, but still part of a favourite series, and highly enjoyable to watch.

D.C.S.S. ～ダ・カーポ セカンドシーズン～ / Da Capo Second Season

Let’s face it – Da Capo wasn’t a very good anime. Revolving around a magic cherry blossom tree that granted the subconscious wishes of the female inhabitants of an island, it featured some very silly ideas (like a robot replacement for a girl and a cat that had become a human) and put in terrible filler like lengthy songs for each girl and stupid side-stories about dreams. Despite this, there was an interesting love triangle at the heart of the show, and here, it succeeded.

The second season shows us what happened next: Jun’ichi and his sister continued their incestuous relationship (though they weren’t blood-related), but she left to study medicine, and Sakura (the third point of the triangle, who finally accepted the siblings’ love) disappeared. However, there is a new arrival on the island – a young, naïve mage called Aisia, who thinks Jun’ichi is a great magician. When she sees that the rest of Jun’ichi’s harem have been disappointed by his choice of lover (and since the show is based on an H-game, the harem is extensive!), she decides she’ll bring back everyone’s hope by restoring the magical tree. Plot devices ahoy!

The series pulls off the magical idea by presenting it in a realistic context. There’s magic, but the characters are all ordinary teenagers, living normal lives, and the magic is peripheral to their everyday existences. No more robots or cat-girls, making the whole thing rather easier to watch. It still has its faults – the plot meandered along for a long time in the middle, with too many extraneous plotlines that amounted to nothing, and too many characters who Jun’ichi could no doubt pursue in the game but were totally superfluous to the anime and existed only for the fans – overall, though, it was a much less frustrating experience than its predecessor, and Aisia and Sakura were both extremely adorable girls!

And hey, Nemu was quite a sweet person, even if the entire fandom seems to want to tear her limb from limb…I really don’t understand the people complaining because the show ends more or less as it began, without Jun’ichi deciding that actually, he loves someone else entirely. It was the journey that mattered, and the show IS called ‘Da Capo’!

(originally written 15.4.06)

BECK / BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad

I had mixed feelings all the way through Beck. In the end, I can only say I really enjoyed a handful of the episodes. In general, having tried out both, I'd say that the manga is high-quality, but the anime adaptation lets it down. The plot is simple but effective – a young boy called Koyuki, picked on at school and without any real friends, meets an older boy called Ryuusuke, a keen guitarist who used to be in a band with one of the most successful rock artists in Japan.

Koyuki-kun soon takes up the guitar, helped by his eccentric teacher, Saito-san, and practices as hard as he can. Soon, he’s good enough to play rhythm guitar in Ryuusuke’s new band, along with some other strong musicians – a band named after Ryuusuke’s dog, Beck. It is only when Koyuki reveals his angelic singing voice that the band truly begin to shine, and through Ryuusuke’s connections and a successful American independent release, they get to headline the third stage at a popular festival.

The band seems to be falling apart, based on the impossible wager that they can get more people watching the third stage then either of the others, and Koyuki is the only band member willing to perform. He goes up and sings a Beatles song, gradually joined by the other members, and they play such a storming set that the unlikely (indeed, faintly ridiculous) feat of drawing the biggest audience slowly comes about – helped by the fact that the main stage band have no integrity (as if THAT really matters!) and the second stage’s equipment broke down.

The real charm of the series comes from the relationships Koyuki has – the achingly ambiguous relationships with girls, the friendships with band members, the comic relationships with certain adults. Where the series gets somewhat daft is in a crazy crime-subplot about Ryuusuke’s stolen guitar, which involves people coming in helicopters to see him, assassins and shadowy rock legends.

The real trouble with this being an anime, not a manga, is that no band, no voice, is ever going to do justice to what you can imagine when you’re told that this band is incredible. I can forgive the dodgy Engrish and terrible animal noises. But I never once believed that Beck could be a success, because they just weren’t a good band. That, along with an often slow and far-fetched story means that this anime will never be a favourite.

For all I was unconvinced by the band, though, Beck had one of the most catchy opening theme songs I've ever heard.

(originally written 6.4.05)

アリソンとリリア / Allison and Lillia

I must admit to being a little suprised by Allison and Lillia.

I really expected it to be my sort of anime. It had a nice, simple yet pretty art style and a slow, lyrical pace, both in the World Masterpiece Theatre mould.

Set in an old-fashioned European-influenced world in the shadow of war, I thought it would be sophisticated, epic and ambitious. Which is why I am now more than typically hostile to it now, after it came to an end. What a letdown!

Adapted from a series of novels, it concerns a long-running war and its resolution, then the various adventures of those who were instrumental in bringing about peace, as well as the lives of their children.

The big problem with the series was its paucity of fine detail and horribly rushed storytelling. Stuffing full novels into a few episodes made resolutions stupidly simple and pat, revelations abrupt and babyish, and character reactions and dialogue irksomely basic and unconvincing. Far too many unintentional laughs in this show, when baddies go tumbling over balconies for no real reason, heroes are saved by stupid coincidence and big twists are revealed to be painfully badly thought-through. Not to mention painfully obvious dialogue, horrible cheesy speeches that melt the blackest hearts and over-simplistic resolutions that contribute to the sense of bathos.

There are cute elements, the comedy of an admiring partner and a totally clueless object of affections often genuinely eliciting warm laughs, and the main characters are likeable, if not enough to elevate them from being dull. It's just that the action is so lame and cheesy, the emotional attachment possible with the characters is so insufficient for the running time, meaning the abiding impression left by this series is of how shallow, goofy and very, very dull it has been.

And the dénouement at the end of the series made me want to punch things.

(originally written 22.2.09)

エイリアン9 / Alien Nine

I was expecting all the wrong things from Alien Nine. A lot of the anime and manga I love subvert expectations. Princess Tutu begins as a daft shoujo piece and then later on starts playing with your mind and you realise just how clever it has been. Narutaru begins a cute show with dark edges, and then evolves into a dark show with cute edges. 20th Century Boys purposely revolves around the kind of clichés preteen Japanese boys love. So when I heard it had dark elements, I thought Alien Nine might be similar. In the end, though, the only subverted expectation was that the annoying character flaws of the protagonist would be overcome and she would prove herself in some way – but no, despite several apparent set-ups for this occurrence, Otani remained the whiney crybaby she always was. The lolicon writer probably thought her bursting into tears every two seconds was moé moé. It really wasn’t. And attempts to make proceedings somehow more legitimate and adult by showing a lot of alien creatures getting graphically butchered and (though I suppose this was an ends in and of itself) Barbie-doll nudity for one of the ten-year-old lolis only cheapened everything and made it gratuitous.

And this is the kind of stuff that gets dubbed and distributed in the West. No wonder the uninitiated regard Japanese animation as porno splatterfests. And it falls into the trap of setting much of its climax in the minds of its characters, too, trying to be freaky and unsettling but mostly just being cack.

I watched this along with Ergo Proxy, somehow under the impression they would compliment one another. Well, it does quite amuse me that I thought they might be similar when in almost every way they are polar opposites, in terms of art, budget, sophistication, target audience, scope…but the only reason I’ll ever watch this again is to laugh at it, or to illustrate how sexualised even the cutesiest lolicon anime can be without being parodies or ecchi comedies.

(originally written 15.1.08)

かしまし ～ガール・ミーツ・ガール～/Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl

For all the adult nature of much of the anime business, and the easy availability of manga and anime with homosexual themes, if a show is going to have anything but clique success, same-sex love has to be hidden behind at least a veneer of orthodox heterosexuality. Thus, most anime with boys who act in a gay manner are comedies, as in Princess Princess, where the prettiest boys in a boarding school dress up as girls because the totally non-gay student population want to imagine them as females, or Ouran, where acting gay is a way to excite girls. Otherwise they’re pushed into a corner with Gravitation and Loveless and watched only by a very small subset of anime fans – more dominant in the West because of the high proportion of teenaged girls who love anime here, but certainly minor in Japan.

It’s fine, however, for mainstream shounen like Naruto and Hikaru no Go to have lots of hints at homosexuality, as long as it isn’t explicit. Strange roundabout way of thinking.

From this mindset comes the utterly stupid premise of Kashimashi: a shy, girlish boy is rejected by the girl he loves. He goes up a mountain to reflect, only to be taken by aliens and turned into a girl. Since he’s a boy REALLY, it’s fine to have him explore lesbian relationships. It’s a very bad premise.

But despite this, and despite some of the worst comedic characters I’ve ever seen (including a father who only wants to take dirty pictures of his son now that he’s become his daughter, an over-exaggeratedly dippy teacher and an alien duo consisting of one serious man in a silly yellow suit and a hyper girl who affixes ‘-puu!’ to every sentence), Kashimashi turned out to be a good anime – and a popular one, too.

You see, the story didn’t really concern itself much with the gender-switching, other than for some light humour. What the anime was really about was a love triangle. Hazumu, our newly-double-Xed protagonist, had his advances rejected by Yasuna, but also has feelings for Tonari, his tomboyish childhood friend and next-door neighbour. When it becomes clear that Yasuna rejected him not because she doesn’t like him but for reasons that will only slowly be unveiled, and Tonari begins to be more assertive in showing Hazumu she cares, tensions run high. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, but it’s done very well, and I really began to care which of the girls Hazumu would finally choose. And while the final decision wasn’t the one I would have liked to have seen, and there was a suggestion that a large part of what informed his choice was pity, there WAS more to it than that - and from the beginning he seemed to have a stronger inclination to sway in that direction, even if less rational reason. And whoever said love had to be rational? With that in mind, I was satisfied with the ending, and enjoyed the sadness of the rejection that was then inevitable for the bittersweet tragedy and display of braveness it was. Soap-opera melodrama, which probably would have been insufferably cheesy performed by live-action actresses, but very sweet.

Plus at 12 episodes, hardly a huge distraction.

Seems there’ll be an extra episode with the DVD releases. I’ll look forward to it.

(originally written 18.8.06)

シャッフル! / Shuffle!

I suppose one could call it ‘the nipple factor’. With the exception of R.O.D. the TV, every show that has female nudity and actually includes nipples, rather than trying to be artistic and tasteful with the Barbie-doll factor or concealing crucial areas, has been catering to the lowest common denominator, ended up being trashy rubbish and actually removed rather than enhanced most of the attractiveness of the characters. Let’s face it: a drawing is a drawing, and dots for nipples aren't going to do it for most.

Anyway, Shuffle! got a fairly bad rep in the anime community. And a lot of it really is very bad. However, it actually manages to be better than expected, but only because the first and second halves of the series seem like completely different shows.

The first half is pretty awful. Rin, an ordinary sort of a boy, is surrounded by cute girls, including one who lives with him and acts virtually as a servant of her own free will. Not only this, but the world he lives in is populated not solely by humans but also by demons and gods, distinguished mostly by their kawaii~ pointy ears. Rin’s daily life is disturbed when two new girls transfer to his school and announce that not only are they both princesses (one of the gods, the other of the demons), but both want to take Rin as husband and make him ruler of an entire dimension.

The absurdity only increases. We have the normal harem nonsense of beach episodes and comedic mix-ups. We then get utterly trite angst with the channelling of dead twins and split personalities, and an overlong subplot about little engineered lolis who can only be saved by the power of love.

The second half, however, mostly ignores this sort of rubbish as Rin seems to be leaning towards another girl altogether, a long-time friend who is the least cliché of all the girls. This part actually begins to work, even when jealousy is taken a very long way, but then it all tumbles down again because of lazy writers falling back on magic.

In the end, Shuffle! isn’t dire, and at times it actually leans towards Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien in a rather appealing way, but ultimately it’s laden with too much crap to be considered anything like a good series.

However, it brings to anime the rather excellent term ミスターロリペドフィン!

(originally written 11.12.08)

舞-乙 / Mai-Otome

Well, since it’s been well over a year now since Mai-Otome: Sifr came to an end, and it looks like the planned follow-up has turned into Sora–o Kakeru Shoujo, the preliminary plot possibly going into the new Mai-HiME manga, so I felt it was finally time to watch the very last episode and lay out my impressions.

Mai-Otome is the follow-up to Sunrise’s highly successful Mai-HiME, which I enjoyed very much. Rather than the usual continuation of plots and new perils for the same characters, however, Sunrise took the unusual decision of total reinvention. The general idea is that hundreds of years have passed, present-day sci-fi transformed into a futuristic and very, very silly vision. Sunrise are all for embracing the silliest concepts they can and then taking them very seriously, filling their plots with melodrama. That’s the case here – a naïve but sprightly young girl called Yumemiya Arika, looking for clues about the life her mother lived, goes to a special school where they train otome (meaning ‘maidens’), young girls who for whatever reason can use old nanotechnology to fly, wield huge weapons and become incredibly resilient. So incredibly strong are these girls that they have becomes the primary way wars are fought, all the leaders of the world employing an otome. Arika not only gets tangled up with her future queen, but manages to enrol in the school and in spite of her natural haplessness, becomes rival and friend of the best student.

The link between this and Mai-HiME? Strange. One character is, it is inferred, the same as in the original series, but the rest just happen to look identical to older counterparts. Some are reimagined cleverly, like Mashiro, while there are surreal turns in other places, one or two characters returning as animals. Essentially, the link is tenuous and if anything, it comes over as a hollow attempt to cash in on a successful series despite offering something completely different. Oh the other hand, Otome was successful enough to spawn not only a second series but a rather confusing and lowbrow OVA prequel as well. The characters are fun, pretty and likeable, the daft premise soon becomes deeply enjoyable, and when things turn serious, it all works well. Arika is a great character, and so are Nina and Mashiro. Mai-HiME was nothing very sophisticated, although it did get surprisingly heavy and emotional, and Mai-Otome was considerably lighter yet, but for something to relax to and enjoy, few action series did it better.

(originally written 6.3.10)