とある魔術の禁書目録 / To Aru Majutsu no Indekkusu / A Certain Magical Index

The To Aru series has been enduringly popular, but I never felt much desire to pick them up. There was something old-fashioned about the designs – especially Touma, with his early-2000s spiky anime hair. But more and more things made me inclined to check it out. Probably the main one was a huge poster in Akihabara when I was there last year, with lots of much cuter characters than I expected to see. Another was the fact that I got into the mobile game Million Arthur, which had its scenario written by Kamachi Kazuma, the To Aru light novel creator.

I’m glad I gave the show a chance...but I have to say, overall I was disappointed.

One thing I can say clearly: Index is totally adorable. Probably the cutest female character in any anime I’ve picked up since The Idolm@ster. Her stubborn, childlike and impetuous personality is adorable and the fact that she’s a nun is hilarious. I could probably do without the show’s endless fanservice and how much she ends up whoops! naked again, but she manages to stay on the right side of annoying with her clinginess over Touma.

So, other than having a nun involved, what is the story here? Well, the series is set in a near-future world where both magic and advanced science live side-by-side. Magicians make use of magic, while Espers have impressive powers through either scientific experimentation or by impressive natural talent. 

In the university-oriented Academy City lives Touma, the boy with the old-fashioned spiky hair who also has a bit of a tedious power, the same that makes everyone think so highly of the central characters of Gakuen Alice and...well, Twilight. 

Touma can nullify all other powers, be they magical or scientific. His right hand, for whatever reason dubbed the Imagine Breaker, stops powers from working, reveals magical tricks and apparently also saps kinetic energy from anything magical that’s moving at speed – though I think that might just be for effect.

Into his life comes Index, a cute young girl and a nun who is essentially a tool for the Anglican church. With the power to memorize vast amounts of information – in a strange robotic mode – she has been implanted with over 100,000 mystical grimoires, which she carries in her mind. This makes her a valued commodity to the church as well as a target. Oh, and her clothes are magically enchanted, so if Touma’s Imagine Breaker touches them, they fall off. Oh my! Et al.

I like the concept, especially the elements related to the Church, even if that’s common in anime and manga – from Hellsing to D.Gray-Man. But To Aru does a whole lot wrong, which is partly why I got bored and took a very long time to finish watching. 

For one thing, it seems like the writer gets bored of Index, and for most of the second half of the show she’s stuck at home while Touma interacts with more interesting characters like Misaka, or ‘Railgun’, who has a long line of sacrificial clones designed to power up the extremely powerful Esper named Accelerator – until Touma intervenes. 

Rather than concentrating on even these two main girls, the plot bounces around – now Touma has to deal with a magic spell that swaps people’s appearances; now all the psychic energy in the city has coalesced into a big-boobed girl who Index has befriended; now we’re following Accelerator as he gains a human side through bonding with a cute loli version of Misaka. 

It’s too much, and other than some vague guff about Aleister Crowley floating upside-down in a giant tube orchestrating everything, there’s no sense of an overarching plot here. The result is that the tension is very low, and the usual tired setpieces of Touma having to pose as Misaka’s boyfriend or walking in on Index changing a million times gets old very fast.

There’s charm here and I probably will watch the rest. The first episodes remain very engaging and most of the storylines that involve the Church were enjoyable. Misaka’s story, especially with the moral question of her clones, has some brilliant moments, but I wish it could have been better-integrated into the existing plot or a completely separate anime. The problem here was that the series felt like it was a new spin-off with every new arc, rather than part of one coherent world, and that was why for all I found the eponymous character adorable and liked most of the other major players, I didn’t feel at all engaged by To Aru Majutsu no Index. 

ソウルイーターノット! / Soul Eater Not!

Though I started to read Soul Eater Not! as soon as it began back in 2011, I didn’t really stick with it. It was probably because I was – yes, despite the title – expecting more Soul Eater, but what I got was a spin-off about three new characters who I never really got to know, plus occasional cameos from the major cast of the original series. Especially since at the time, the original manga series hadn’t even finished.

Somehow, I found myself liking the anime adaptation of Soul Eater Not! much more. I was even sad that it ended, wanting more than just twelve episodes. It may have had much to do with the fact I wasn’t expecting anything else. While it’s never been a problem in any other series I’ve watched, perhaps in anime form the girls’ colourings and their seiyuu’s assured voice performances contributed. Either way, I found myself far more engaged and eager to watch every episode.

In the original Soul Eater series, we see the adventures of the elite students of Shibusen – some incredible fighters are partnered with living weapons able to transform perfectly. But what of the other students? What of the ones who aren’t very good at it yet? Perhaps the living weapons can’t fully transform – or found out about their abilities late in life?

This is the NOT class – who are expected to Normally Overcome Target. Hey, English isn’t Oukubo’s first language! New student Tsugumi, cute and impressionable, has just started learning to use her powers. In the NOT class, she finds herself getting close to two other girls her age – the bizarrely forgetful and well-endowed Meme and the privileged, standoffish Anya, who is one of the better recent examples of a tsundere who’s actually likeable. It becomes apparent that both of these masters want to form a partnership with Tsugumi-chan, but how can she decide?

The kids learn to deal with their weird loli dorm mistress, with the totally reformable bully extortionist Kim (probably the character with the biggest role in both series), with part-time jobs in the local cafe and the brash sisters Liz and Patti they meet there, and in the end with a witch causing mayhem. The mystery of Sid’s death is made clear, there are cameos from characters as major as Maka, who is a kind of mentor figure to Tsugumi, and as minor as Ox Ford, who is treated with rather more reverence and respect in this series. We get more of the sweet chalk-and-cheese relationship between Kim and her rival/admirer, the ‘straight-laced chick’ with the incredible name of Jacqueline O. Lantern Dupré. She does not play the cello, at least as far as we were shown.

But while I never really grew to like Meme, whose entire personality seems to revolve around being forgetful, I really liked Tsugumi and Anya by the end of this. Tsugumi’s determined, innocent personality and Anya’s snootiness along with her fixation on things ‘commoners’ like were marvellous. There were other very funny parts of this season, like the guy who can transform into a dagger – except for his head, which stays there – and the poor bookish girl who Kim decides should be called ‘Eternal Feather’, a name that sticks.

The scale is small here, and the ultimate ‘Why not have both?’ moment is a bit unconvincing, but the journey was very satisfying and the characters very likeable. The occasionally clunky pacing of the manga was fixed, and the simple but effective animation was cute. A fun series – even if I’d much rather just have more Soul Eater. 

Soul Eater (manga)

It seems like a slew of manga I started reading a few years back have come to an end, though really it’s just this and Deadman Wonderland. I’ve been reading Soul Eater for longer, though, and in the end have certainly enjoyed it more, so I’m quite sad to see it come to an end.

When the anime adaptation ended with a rather rushed and dissatisfying final arc – though I did enjoy Crona’s central place – my main thought was that it was fine that it got botched together, because I could continue to read the manga for the true ending, and hey, maybe one day the rest would get animated in a special, a movie or a revival. And that’s remained my attitude as the series has faded from public view (as most manga do when their anime ends) and tied up its loose ends.

The final arcs have had problems – I found Noah’s final design very lazy and unappealing, the ‘I am your brother’ reveal (or close enough) is overdone and rang hollow for me, and both in the arc where the characters enter the ‘book of Eibon’ and have their genders reversed and in the painful first half of the very last chapter, which really ought to have been spent on better things, mangaka Oukubo Atsushi’s attempts at racy humour are without fail swings that miss. It actually stung that rather than giving more attention to my favourite character Crona’s grand and tragic gesture closing out the series, he wanted to do a series of bad boob jokes.

But still, Soul Eater was well worth the time I gave it. As I said, I adored Crona, completely gender-ambiguous, kooky and so vulnerable behind all that strength. Excalibur remains one of manga’s funniest creations, but his scenes with Shinigami at the end were judged so perfectly and his presence made the scene so much more poignant, which was deeply unexpected. Kid became far more interesting in his interactions with the witches (nyamu!), Black☆Star became ever less of a cliché (though never main character material) and of course Maka remains one of the only effective shouen protagonists that is not only a girl, but a girl absolutely held peer by the fighting boys around her. That she is also not at all written so that her gender is an issue or even a focal point makes her remarkable, and she is quite simply a good character at the centre of it all, which ought not to be something strange, but absolutely is – in all action series, not just shounen, with her closest parallel in my mind being the eponymous main character of Avatar: Legend of Korra. Of the newer characters, I found Gopher to be hilarious, for even if he was somewhat one-note, the daft variations on that theme were fantastic.

There wasn’t really much in the manga that would surprise those who stopped at the end of the anime, but that just shows a consistent story arc throughout a work – and there was one thing I didn’t see coming, the highly distinctive sun and moon ended up being given a bit more attention in quite a brilliant little twist. But to really see the way the story ought to have ended, the manga definitely does what the anime didn’t manage, which is to satisfy.

Though if we were to have some more, and there is certainly scope for more about what happened at the very end, I would not complain. Until then, there’s always the fun little Soul Eater Not! 

劇場版 鋼の錬金術師 シャンバラを征く者 / Gekijouban Hagane no Renkinjutsushi: Shanbara-o Yuku Mono / Fullmetal Alchemist movie: The Conqueror of Shamballa

The concept set out at the end of the Fullmetal Alchemist series was not inherently a bad one: while I'm not usually keen on mixing a fantasy world with the real one (beyond Narnia-style framing narratives), particularly not so late in a series, the idea was not really explored in depth. Which isn’t to say it was anything more than a starting point for a distinctly average story.

This wasn't a bad movie tie-in, but didn't really fulfil its potential. A little too much mindless action, and not as much character exploration as I would have hoped. I feel the potential was a little wasted; the peripheral characters get so little screen time that I wished the movie was twice as long, with less of Nazis and dragon-Envy and more discussion of why things were happening as they were.

Still, there was a great scene with the two surviving (non-dragon) homonculi, Wrath and a rather different Gluttony. Alfons Heinrich was a good character, sweet yet selfish and a great contrast to Alphonse Elric. Some great little in-jokes with alternate versions of major characters made me smile, though why they're all German/gypsies while Ed is apparently British I'll never know, and I wasn't keen on the way Hughes was used.

Despite this, I found it all highly enjoyable, well-animated (with a bit of dodgy CG) and with great vocal performances and some very funny moments. And the Flame Alchemist kicked some serious butt. They don't really try to answer all the questions the fans have had, instead just having a new story to concentrate on: you know what happens to pretty much all the characters, but whether your question is 'Do Roy and Riza get together?' or 'Will Ed ever get back home?', you'll just have to keep watching, or go to the manga. They had a very open-ended final sequence. If you don't mind knowing that, read on...

Ed and Al end up staying in our world at the end, Al with his own body, leaving poor Winry behind. WWII is looming, of course, and we don't know what has happened to Envy (who was used to open the portal between the worlds), so there is definitely no resolution.

Personally, I don't particularly want to see the next movie being Ed and Al Battle The Nazis...Hess and Haushofer were quite enough for me.

Not the story or ending I would have chosen, but definitely a worthy next step in the Fullmetal Alchemist anime story.

(originally written 24.7.05. There was an earthquake while I was in the Tokyo cinema! This was the last story in the original series’ continuity, as the next Hagaren animated by Bones was the Brotherhood reboot)

鋼の錬金術師 / Hagane no Renkinjutsushi / Fullmetal Alchemist (Original series)

Hagane no Renkinjutsushi is one of those iconic anime that dominates the community for a while. It made a big impact as a manga, gained a large fanbase when its anime begun airing and reached its peak once it was licensed and (very badly) dubbed.

Like Shugo Chara, it’s an anime based on a monthly manga that ends up taking the ideas and characters of the manga and rewrites the story (unlike, say, Naruto or One Piece, which are mostly direct translations from page to screen, with throwaway ‘filler’ to waste time if material runs out). Also like Shugo Chara, it’s one of the rare series I feel works as a companion piece to a very different manga as an alternate timeline, rather than as a replacement.

Besides, since then, a new animated series has been made, going back to the manga faithfully.

The story is complex and very well constructed save for a few small issues. Two boys, the Elric Brothers, live in a world where alchemy exists – the ability to transmute one material into another, as long as there is ‘equivalent trade’: all the right materials in place to be rearranged. Something cannot be created from nothing. One day, these boys attempt to bring their mother back from the dead, using all the raw materials used in a human body – but they do not take into account the additional element of human life, and the alchemical reaction claims not only all the materials they provided, but one of Edward Elric’s legs and his little brother Alphonse’s entire body.

In something of a trance, little Ed manages to save Al’s soul in exchange for his own arm, but not his body, so the younger brother ends up a real ghost in a machine – or, more specifically, a suit of armour. Two years later, Ed’s arm and leg have been replaced by metal prosthetics, and the brothers get involved with the military in order to further their search for the Philosopher’s Stone, which will grant unlimited power to any alchemist who wields it, and get their bodies back.

Hagaren’s greatest strength is perfectly balancing the serious (with moving deaths, some shocking psychological traumas and issues of racial prejudice) and the comic (Ed’s ‘automail’ prosthetics have stunted his growth and given him a complex; Barry the Chopper has a great grasp of bathos; Alex Louis Armstrong the musclebound nobleman is about the funniest character I’ve ever seen). With some incredible action sequences, it is original, intelligent and immensely enjoyable. Though occasionally cheesy and sometimes a bit artificial in its portrayal of how people think, nonetheless it comes very highly recommended, and I genuinely would recommend watching the first series before the remake.

(Expanded from original impressions, 21.2.05. I originally wrote that Mai-HiME was a manga first, which is not true. Movie impressions here)

ヒーローマン/ Heroman

Heroman was an experiment that caught the attention. Anime studio Bones seemingly approached comic book legend Stan Lee – creator of Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk, The Uncanny X-Men and many more – to collaborate on a new anime (and manga) with an all-American angle to it. And what they came up with was Heroman. It’s pretty obvious that all he came up with was the origin story and the very basic plot outlines, the rest coming from tried-and-tested anime tropes, but the octogenarian’s ideas of a good origin story – very naïve in this postmodern age, but somehow full of exuberance and conviction – completely transform what the series is and how its tone will sit, making it stand out from the rest of the recent shounen anime crop. It’s not deep, and it’s not clever, but it revels in that and embraces clichés with a sincerity that even other exuberant and silly shows like Gurren Lagann don’t have.

Heroman somehow catches a mood that almost nothing since the 80s has had, which only One Piece even approaches in my sphere of reference. It isn’t being self-referential or ironic in its excesses or silliness. It’s just delivering overblown daftness with such self-belief that I can’t help but be charmed. Add into the mix great characters with lovely designs and good old-fashioned humour and even a very poor plot doesn’t hold it back.

Here’s what I mean about a naïve origin story: Joey Jones is an (adorable, highly adorable) American teenager from a family without much money. He’s friends with the lovely Lina, whose big brother is unfortunately the local bully. When the latter discards the latest toy, Joey takes it home to repair, but it is hit by a bolt of lighting, and of course transforms into the amazing, astounding Heroman, a strong, silent, robotic aid to Joey, who himself gains a control device that grants him a powerful shield and super-speed. Well, makes as much sense as radioactive spiders or cosmic rays. Coincidentally – well, if you discount the dodgy ‘Earth knew it was the time’ line towards the end – at that point some lame beetle-like aliens invade with their superior technology, and only Joey and Heroman can stop them. With help from his friends!

But what would have been utterly stupid in other hands works so well because of the sheer blind self-belief of the makers. And of course, Joey’s endless cuteness, coupled with the sweet everyday stories here and there. Admittedly, if he had been a smug, loudmouthed protagonist with boundless confidence, I probably would’ve been much less inclined to bother with Heroman. But he is a skinny, wimpy, crybaby with girly hair and a pretty face. Who reminds me of someone special. It’s rather shallow, I know, but I would watch Joey in just about any story, even one that starts with a rubbish invasion of evil aliens, kills them all off, meanders about for a further half-season before bringing back the already-defeated bad guy for an incredibly artificial climax. Oh wait! That’s exactly what did happen. Ah well!

The truth is that this terrible sub-pulp story (and sub-Timely) manages to make itself extremely enjoyable through the power of childishness, cute relationship-based side-stories and a pretty face. And that is why Heroman is fun!

Soul Eater

I was cautious about Soul Eater at first. It looked somewhat childish and derivative, with very typical shounen designs and lots of elements hinting at brainless sexy fanservice. But there was something about it that was attractive; beside the typical designs were some that were very cute, some that looked like the stylised, bold and edgy designs of Jamie Hewlett, and some that were out-and-out insane. After a few episodes, you realise that the characters’ extreme and exaggerated personalities are soon tempered with real flaws and depth through relationships and a growing seriousness. The humour is some of the best of any recent shounen, and the somewhat simple art is partnered with some gorgeous animation and excellent plotting. The world is a very well-realised one and the fairly large ensemble of central characters is fully explored. Whether comedy characters like Shinigami-sama or Excalibur, bizarre but truly likeable characters like Crona, Stein or Eruka Frog, or the ostensibly superficial but eventually awesome Black Star and Death the Kid, after a little while it becomes very difficult not to sympathise with the students of Shibusen.

The main character eventually resolves itself as Maka, and it is a pleasure to have an action-packed shounen with a strong female protagonist who isn’t constantly finding herself to be a damsel in distress. (Gangan seems to do this much better than Jump.) She is an everyman character with a lot of potential, not always cute, not always nice, not even always sane, but very hard to dislike, and her bond with Crona becomes the highlight of the series. Indeed, alongside a rather more subtle delivery of its fanservice (actually rather minimal in the anime), this is the one place the anime actually outdoes its source – creating an arc for the retrieval of Crona, who quickly went from a character who annoyed me to one of my favourites of all time.

However, that doesn’t quite make up for the biggest flaw here, one shared with Kekkaishi, Claymore and so many others: the anime was only given two series, when really it ought to run and run. Thus, while the manga continued with an interesting new arc, the anime had to come to an end, and while the set-up was not a bad one, per se, the very last episode was so cheesy, underwhelming and unlikely that if not for the availability of the manga, I would have been very disappointed. As it is, I hope for a second season or movie, and continue cheerfully with the manga.

(originally written 6.10.09)

Soul Eater Not!: Link

Manga reviews: Fullmetal Alchemist

On the 27th May 2003, I made my usual daily check of Toriyama’s World. Back then, TW was without doubt the biggest and most important scanslation site on the internet, providing scans of big shounen series like Hikaru no Go and HunterXHunter. They were also not only scanning an up-and-coming series called Naruto but even releasing fansubs of the anime – but back then, I wasn’t too keen on the juvenile-looking series, heheh.

On that day, Toriyama’s World released a chapter of Hikaru no Go, which I was very eager to read, but also announced a new monthly manga called Fullmetal Alchemist. ‘it’s about an alchemist who can do a lot of cool stuff. it's pretty good. you should read it’, went the release, somewhat unconvincingly, adding as an afterthought a little note: ‘you’d better read fma, cuz we may or may not have hidden an integral page of the hng chapter in the fma chapter… tho really, who needs a gimmick to make people read a manga this good!’

Well, if that announcement was hardly auspicious, I downloaded the chapter and loved it. Some great artwork, really appealing characters, a superb setting and the great concept of magic deeply based in science.

It’s now more than seven years later, and Fullmetal Alchemist is huge. From the first episode of the anime, where I was very surprised Al sounded like a little boy, to seeing the movie in Japan on the day of an earthquake, to the new Brotherhood remake growing from redundancy to innovation, Hagaren would seldom be out of my life. It has a huge but fickle fanbase, and even though the manga has been a constant fixture for all these years, when the first anime stopped airing, it was remarkable how many people seemed to give up on their beloved title.

I’ve summarized the series in general as an anime, so I don’t need to go into that here, but it ought to be said that it’s always been the manga I’ve enjoyed the most. The art is unique and often very odd but beautiful to look at, and the pacing is superb – other than in the flashback segment. Few series have so perfectly balanced humour and action, and this series deserves to be a classic. Its concept, characters, world and storyline are all genuinely exemplary.

But the manga rolled on, and I kept reading, through the flabby chapters of flashback and through Arakawa’s other side-projects. And now it’s all finally come to an end with chapter 108, an extended special of over 100 pages. I thought I would rail against it. I thought that it couldn’t possibly end satisfactorily in one more chapter. But I was wrong: the summation of the homunculus storyline was also the climax of all the main characters’ paths and it ended neatly, cleverly and with so many little flashes of where the characters will go next, each one fairly moving.

This is somewhat the end of an era, for me. And I can’t help but feel a little moved!