らき☆すた /Raki ☆ Suta/ Lucky☆Star

Lucky☆Star was one of a slew of similar anime of the last two seasons. A light-hearted slice-of-life comedy about a group of teenaged girls drawn much younger than they were actually supposed to be, it had to directly compete with Manabi Straight and Hidamari Sketch.

In this race of silly loli shows, however, Lucky☆Star soon emerged as not only the front-runner, but gained truly widespread recognition and a huge fanbase, while the other shows faded into obscurity. With Hidamari Sketch, that’s no surprise, since it’s terrible, but as I mentioned in my Manabi Straight impressions, it was something of a surprise that show didn’t compete better, since it was warmer, more coherent, more consistent and cuter. Lucky☆Star, though, had a few things going for it that Manabi Straight just couldn’t compete with.

One was the reputation of Kyoto Animation. UFO Table are a big studio, but Kyoto are the new powerhouse and real otaku-pleasers, having produced their impressive animations of Key’s lonely-young-man-pleasing dating sims and the quirky smash hit Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu, so all eyes were on them for their first cutesy animation. Also, knowing well that they were appealing directly to the basement-dwelling feverish spenders that are the Japanese otaku, they targeted them specifically, putting in lots of references and in-jokes, as well as making one of their cutest characters an extreme geek, playing directly into the fantasy that the audience just might find an amazingly cute, young-looking, childlike girl with interests directly aligned to theirs. This also had the side-effect of drawing in fujoshi, female otaku, especially in the West, who saw themselves reflected in an idealised form, and declared an uncanny alignment with this girl, at the least in personality terms.

I had a lot of problems with Lucky☆Star. A lot of people complained about the show’s slow pace and plotlessness when it first appeared, but I actually liked it a lot more back then. The first episode has a very long discussion of the best way to eat a kind of chocolate-filled pastry. There was a distinctive Azumanga Daioh flavour back then, at the inception, with four girls simply talking about the random things in their lives, the humour deriving from their strong personalities – Kagami is a strong-willed, sensible girl, her sister Tsukasa is air-headed and childlike, Konata is brash and proudly irresponsible and Miyuki is brainy and feminine.

But as the show progressed and one director was fired to make way for another in a bid for better ratings, the show moved away from its 4-koma comic roots and became a smug, self-referential comedy that just loved to pat itself on the back, so that otaku could feel included and pat themselves on the back, too. Slices of life got reduced more and more, becoming little snatched scenes of families watching TV or visits to the dentist, while more and more airtime was devoted to references, especially to Suzumiya Haruhi. The girls go to a cosplay café and see the show’s signature dance performed, capitalising on the fact that Konata’s Seiyuu also portrayed Haruhi herself, or we see her dressed as Yuki and doing impersonations. The references at the beginning of the show were subtle but unobtrusive, so that if you’ve seen To Heart or Maria-sama ga Miteru, you get the reference and get a thrill of amusement (as with other anime with a lot of pastiches, like Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei) but if you haven’t, the context is still there and you don’t miss much – indeed, there are so many references that it’s unlikely anyone will get them all. But if you haven’t seen Suzumiya Haruhi or know about its cultural impact in the otaku community in Japan, tough luck, great long sequences can go right over your head, with you being made very aware you’re missing something. And even if you do understand, recognising yet another reference to the same show soon loses its sheen. Watching the entire season feels like going to see bad sequels to a movie you like, or turning on an episode of The Simpsons from its later series – you like the franchise and feel a kind of obligation to it, but ultimately it feels hollow and the jokes are less and less funny. New girls get introduced, but somewhat like Scrappy-Doo, they’re less interesting rehashes of the established cast, and don’t really bring anything new or refreshing to the formula.

I’m not saying Lucky☆Star is a bad show. It looks nice, with cute character designs and Kyoto’s usual fluid and detailed animation, despite the simplicity of the aesthetic. It has some great little pastiches and nice music. I loved some of the subtler references, and like most of the keen fans, felt a certain affinity with the habits of the otaku. But I soon grew tired of this show and its lack of big laughs and constant rehashing of ideas – as with the ending credits, which become strange live-action sequences in the second half of the series, funny for the first two or three, then utterly painful. I also disliked it when self-referential humour conflicted with realism, as when Hiraishi goes from commenter in the one-note ‘Lucky☆Channel’ end section (its main draw being the amusing contrast between its presenter’s adopted cutesy characteristics and her real, belligerent personality) to actual character in the main show, but still seems omniscient, for example when in the last episode he shouts out something one of the other characters said earlier in the episode, which he could not have heard.

Ultimately, the big problem with Lucky☆Star is that it’s just not very funny. Put it beside Azumanga Daioh or Ichigo Mashimaro, both slice-of-life shows about young girls that revolve around their character quirks, and you soon realise how lacking in laughs it is, as well as how limited its emotional range is – no heartbreaking graduation here, or sensitive side of comic characters seeping through. Lucky☆Star is superficial and never has any build-up for its jokes. An entertaining diversion but, much like Suzumiya Haruhi, vastly over-rated. Roll on Yotsubato! the anime…

(originally written 15.10.07)

Peace Maker Kurogane

PMK was one of the anime broadcast in that era, around 2003-2004, when just about everything I watched was great. And while it isn’t the anime I remember most fondly from back then, and nor is it Gonzo’s finest moment, I still love it and have been interested in the historical Shinsengumi ever since.

Indeed, Peace Maker Kurogane is based on historical figures: the Shinsengumi were a group of rōnin who came together in the mid-1800s to police Kyoto and protect the shōgun. This put them on the wrong side of the Meiji restoration and placed prominent members into key battles of that conflict; in the years since their struggle, they have became romanticised and are generally considered some of the last, greatest swordsmen of Japan’s history.

Ichimura Tetsunosuke, along with his brother Tatsunosuke (no, really. You couldn’t make those names up…) are historical figures, too. Tetsunosuke was just 12 or 13 when he joined the Shinsengumi, and became an attendant to the formidable Hijikata Toshizou. PMK ages him up to 15 (to time historical events with better pacing, I suppose), makes him very much adorable, and then turns life in the Shinsengumi into a strange mixture of silly fun and deep melancholy.

All the characters turn out fascinating in their own ways, even if they may not quite sit right with their historical equivalents. Tetsu’s coming of age is achingly compelling, and the silly pig mascot is surprisingly never unwelcome. The music is catchy – although one of the sillier episodes using the can-can was a step to far – and the voice acting superb.

A lot of viewers were turned off by spewing blood in the first episode, far over-the-top. But that was never again an issue, and there’s a realism to the violence here that makes it compelling and actually meaningful.

What starts out seeming to be one of Gonzo’s least mature actually develops into one of their most sincere and compelling pieces. And the characters are just so good that whenever they – or close equivalents – crop up in the likes of Kenshin or Gintama, it’s these designs I think back to.

天元突破グレンラガン/ Heavenly Breakthrough Guren Ragan / Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Not since One Piece has there been such an exuberant, wilful and just plan enjoyable anime, and indeed, Gurren Lagann is utter brilliance for very similar reasons. Both series thrive on being extremely over-the-top and power through their stories with big speeches and endless ebullient self-confidence, but both can switch gears to become something full of genuine emotion, something that really is epic despite poking fun at itself. This has to be the most fun action-adventure series I've seen beside One Piece, and can even go to places Shounen Jump’s flagship title cannot, because as a 27-episode series, it has a finality that an ongoing piece does not – or at least, has not as of yet.

There are several wrong ways to watch Gurren Lagann. It’s no good watching it as an important sociological comment, because it revels in saying that we should cast aside responsibilities to go and kick arse, and the consequences will work themselves out. It’s not good as a really coherent story, since it has a certain air of making-it-up-as-it-goes-along: this nasty king controls the moon, but oh wait, he’s in league with these anti-spiral guys, but oh no wait, he was actually against them all along and they just happened to be using his machines to their own ends, and this formless astral projection thing sends messengers and incrementally increases the power of its attacks rather than starting with full force because, um…because…it wants everyone to be in despair! Yeah! It’s also not exactly something that you can rely on for good science, seeming to forget evolution is reliant on aptitude for an environment, rather than just being indefinite. But those are all totally the wrong way of looking at the show. You sit back, you watch the show expecting it to just kick arse and go way, way over the top, and you’re rewarded with a magnificent display of silliness that will genuinely move you.

Here’s a story outline. Shimon is a young boy in one of the subjugated colonies of humans left on an earth ruled over by the giant robots of the beastmen. All he does all day is dig, so that the colony can eke out a meagre underground existence, until one day he finds a strange little drill, a drill that just might activate a little fighting machine. And good thing too, because the war between humans and beastmen soon bursts into the colony, a girl in a bikini with a very large rifle fighting against a giant robot. Along with his brother figure Kamina, a man so full of cheesy lines and dramatic poses that none can deny his awesomeness, they defeat the enemy and burst out onto the surface to wage war against their oppressors. But there may be more to the situation than they realised, and those that have long subjugated the humans may just be doing it for their own good.

Most of the early episodes are just plain fun, brainless fights between loudmouthed heroes and snarling baddies, but later on the series takes a brave turn and starts to question what it means to be a leader, when one should make sacrifices for the greater good, and how a society often runs on selfish, minor needs, but that angle is soon sloughed off when a few convenient attacks allow the heroes to reassert themselves as fighters and go rocketing off to kick some butt. But such out-of-hand dismissal works well; we see enough of the change of mood to know that the series could have covered that angle and done it very well, but prefers the adrenaline rushes of immense battles where galaxies and even Big Bangs can be hurled around, and huge personal sacrifices can be made. At its funniest, Gurren Lagann is hilarious, as when Kamina decides to try and make two robots combine for the first time, or when yet another massive robot grows out of the last. At its saddest, it really is moving, with all the self-sacrifices war films can allow. And it’s not afraid to just throw everything into the pot to see what happens. Got a mole-pig mascot? Let’s make it evolve into a cute boy-thing just for the hell of it, then forget about that in the next episode. Got a great voice actor who’s not gonna be used any more? Make him an exposition-spewing computer head! While you’re at it, take a typical anime side-story formula and give it to the gun-toting girl, but make sure you do it in typically awesome fashion. The whole point of Gurren Lagann is that it’s stuff you’ve seen before, done in such an excessive way, with so much style, that it’s totally brilliant.

And the show looks great, too, reaffirming my faith in Gainax after mediocre efforts like Melody of Oblivion and He Is My Master. The art style isn’t to everyone’s tastes, being loose and bouncy, but again, I think of One Piece’s often slapdash art and strange character designs that are made to work by the randomness of the setting. In Gurren Lagann, there’s no problem having talking armadillos or flat-nosed identical twins or a gunnery controller who looks strangely like Charlie Chalk – it all fits into the world, and helps tell the slapdash, hyperactive story, and looks awesome, especially the stylised eye-catches with snatches of the similarly overblown soundtrack (much of which is London rappers going ‘Ro! Ro! Fight da powa!’ while an opera singer screeches). It takes spirals as its theme, mostly because anime fans have a bit of a thing about drills, having appeared in some of the unintentionally silly 80s mecha anime and often being used in fanart for things like Marimite, and so big drills and loosely related things like DNA helixes are placed at the fore, and there’s nothing quite like an unfathomably huge robot attacking a huge stone face with a planet-sized drill!

Gurren Lagann exists for its moments of sheer idiosyncratic greatness, of ludicrously uplifting fights and moments of bittersweet love, of big speeches and bigger drills, and rushes of adrenaline. I’ll definitely file it beside One Piece in terms of fun, humour and all-round awesomeness, and I’m sure I’ll come back to it again and again. It’s not one for newcomers to anime, for thinking this is what all anime is like would be to miss most of the joke – the humour here derives from the fact that it’s so much dafter, so much camper than just about anything around it, which is why it will make fans of the genre laugh at it and love it all the more. If you’re an anime fan who’s even a little bit au fait with the tropes and clichés of mecha anime, you must watch Gurren Lagann.

(originally written 15.10.07. Spellings have since been solidified at least in fandom to 'Simon'/'Row! Row!' Movie impressions here)

じゃりん子チエ/ Jarinko Chie / Chie the Brat

Jarinko Chie is another pre-Ghibli movie directed by Isao Takahata, this one from 1981. This is perhaps his most immediate and light film alongside Houhokekyo! Tonari no Yamada-kun, and is similar in many ways: based on a popular humorous manga with a focus on a slightly dysfunctional family, although the storytelling here is for the most part more conventional.

Jarinko Chie has aged well: the animation is smooth, the acting (though there are some odd choices of obviously adult actors for children) is top-notch and it still hits the right emotional notes. The plot flows quite nicely: Chie lives in a little eatery with her meatheaded father, who is tough enough to beat up yakuza but embarrasses her in school. Her mother - having wed Chie's father for an arranged marriage - is estranged from the family, and lives elsewhere. However, although tough, athletic and forceful little Chie takes after her father the most, she idolises her mother and tries to be more feminine for her. She hides the fact that she sees her mother occasionally from her father, but this secret can’t last forever.

Intertwined with this is the rather bizarre story of some tomcats with visible testicles in the same style as you see in Pom Poko, who speak in human voices (although the humans cannot hear them). It’s a typical Takahata jerk in styles, and while yes, it works okay, it seems odd to use it for the climax of the movie. The slapstick and the warmth of the family, even when the father is a total meathead, are what work here, and the little things that jerk you out of the moment, like anthropomorphised cats or a weird cameo from that hideous Peko girl, I don’t think really enhance the whole, being too unsubtle to just fit in and be noted only by those looking for them. Takahata is at his best when either everything he shows is acceptable as real or there is consistency in the unreal.

The strong, dated Osaka-ben accents here and cultural references make it perhaps not a film for the uninitiated, but the non-idealised portrayal of a family, the slapstick and the way events really have an effect on the characters make this enjoyable for anyone. No Sero-Hiki no Gauche, but fun nonetheless.

(originally written 10.09.08)

Avatar: The Last Airbender

I’m quite proud to say that I have to be amongst the very first people in the UK to have started watching Avatar. Indeed, I was amongst the earliest members of the fandom even counting the US crowd. As I recall, I started to watch the show shortly after the first season finished, after some artwork came up in an online discussion about Teen Titans and how American cartoons were increasingly influenced by anime.

Since then, my feelings have been mixed about Avatar. I was constantly frustrated with the way that everything I loved about the show seemed to be balanced by something annoying or badly-done. Its main problem was how it rushed through things, showing in half-episodes what needed three to explore, leaving an impression of real shallowness. I didn’t like Sokka’s humour and was frequently irked by how easy it seemed for main characters to learn difficult things, or for really contrived solutions to problems to present themselves, and seemed to swing from love to hate.

Having seen the grand finale, though, I have landed finally, though not unreservedly, on love.

Avatar was a bold move from the start. Successful American cartoons on Nickelodeon are things like Spongebob Squarepants and Fairly Odd Parents. Even Teen Titans was cancelled prematurely. And then here’s this grand epic, unashamedly anime-based, with some hugely impressive animated sequences.

I’m so pleased the risk was taken. This is really a step in the right direction, and after the big climax, much more is planned: a Shyamalan-directed live-action adaptation, probably several more short chibi specials from DVDs and who knows? Perhaps there can be another season to come.

Most importantly, though is the precedent set. Who knows what may come through doors now opened?

The story is good and solid: a cruel empire is spreading over the world, and the only one standing in the way of total conquest is the avatar, Aang, the only person capable of manipulating all four elements. This is an unoriginal magic system – powers derived from air, water, fire and earth – but the way each culture is developed (as well as the martial arts systems used to represent them) works excellently.

The other winning element is Zuko, the antagonist, initially bent on finding and killing the avatar to ‘restore his honour’, but later given a lot of complexity in his search for his own sense of morality. Why his father didn’t think his uncle was obviously going to shape his sense of the world, though, I can’t say.

A lot of minor parts about this show are badly thought-out, and in all honesty, I never thought Toph’s blindness worked very well (even though her character outside of that was always awesome). A lot of miniplots get resolved way too easily and the humour often grates and errs too far on the side of the postmodern, but these gripes are far outweighed by the positive elements. The art is superb, and some animation sequences are of excellent quality, especially in the character models. Aang, Katara, Toph, Zuko, Iroh, Bumi, Ty Lee – these are all outstanding characters I will always remember with fondness. The voice acting is outstanding, which only makes me sadder that dubbed anime gets such useless performers. And the relationships, the way they develop and all those warm, fuzzy moments – very well done.

If this is the future of western TV animation, count me very much in. Along with, of course, my anime.

(originally written 28.7.08)

Additional: first mention, Dec 12 2005

Saw a bit of new anime-influenced kids’ show Avatar, which looked fantastic in trailers, and has some beautiful animation. It looked like it might be a bit of a disappointment, though, but I shall wait until I’ve seen more before I pass judgement. Anime’s influence is getting more and more pervasive!

First impressions from Feb 2006

Watched the first episode of Nickelodeon’s leap onto the anime bandwagon, a series called Avatar: The Last Airbender (which is retitled Legend of Aang or something in the UK, though I’m not sure what they’ve done about the numerous references to ‘benders’ – someone clearly didn’t check UK slang when they wrote the series, but hey, Futurama does ok). It’s so close to being brilliant, but it just doesn’t quite work. It’s a shame, but it doesn’t have that certain charm and sincerity that makes anime so special.

The presentation is utterly outstanding – the character designs are superlative, the animation breathtaking and the anime influence very clear, from the characters’ faces to a creature with more than a passing resemblance to Totoro’s Catbus. The animation for the fight scenes in particular is stunning. The story in itself is a nice archetypal tale: teenagers find another mysterious kid, the kid turns out to have strange powers, bad guys appear chasing him, lots of angst as he’s chased out of the village he endangered etc. It reminded me of Tales of Symphonia, and was very similar in tone. Nothing at all wrong with the overall picture. The two main characters, Aang and Katara, are great – Aang is very sweet and childish, and Katara is an excellent everyman character. Their scenes together showed what this series COULD be.

But the problems are in the details. Katara’s brother Sokka encompasses much of the unappealing nature of the dialogue – he’s a typical American teenager, always being sarcastic or wisecracking or goofing around. It’s not just him – Aang was given a few annoying wisecracks in his combat scenes, and when the big bad guy Zuko came along, not only was he undercut by the eccentricities of his uncle (who alone has a strong Japanese accent), but he was soon rendered mere comic relief through pratfalls and silly sound effects. It wasn’t funny, and it ignored the fact that if you want someone of a serious temperament to be respected, you can’t make them the butt of far-fetched slapstick.

Well, these faults are only small cracks, and I don’t yet know whether or not they’ll be enough to bring the whole thing crashing down. It’s just a shame that in the US, writing for the 6-11 demographic seems to mean talking down to the audience and never letting yourself take them quite seriously enough for the story to work.

ゲド戦記/Gedo Senki/The War Chronicles of Ged/Tales from Earthsea

The Earthsea of Ursula Le Guin is a long way off in this adaptation, and yet not far enough for it to work. As it is, the most entertaining thing about Gedo Senki is the drama that surrounded its inception.

First there was the drama of Miyazaki Goro stepping into his father’s shoes and shadow to make this film, documenting every step of the process on a blog that made it quite clear that he resented both his father’s absence in his childhood and the great expectations now on his shoulders, while of course being grateful and humble for the opportunity to be given a chance to be at the helm of the world’s most respected animation studio. Then came the drama as Ursula Le Guin went to the screening and declared her great disappointment, especially since she’d always hoped Miyazaki Hayao would adapt her books, which was why she’d given the rights to the studio. Both were very interesting for a fan to follow, but also prepared me for what turned out to be a rather tedious and disjointed movie.

How I wish father and son had exchanged projects, Miyazaki Snr. directing this film and Miyazaki Jr. taking on Hauru no Ugoku Shiro, the studio’s other recent disappointing adaptation of an occidental fantasy novel. That way, Goro-kun could have cut his teeth on the project that seemed just a little bit BENEATH Miyazaki-sensei (especially after his career reached its zenith with Mononoke and Sen to Chihiro), while the great man himself could have tamed the epic. While I wasn’t too impressed with Hauru, it at least showed that its screenwriters knew what to take from the source material and where to diverge wildly into original material.

For Gedo is just a mess. It tries to pick the iconic moments from books one, three and four of Earthsea and twist them into a new plot replete with clichés but bereft of the spirit of the novels – and then drops in little references to the source material (like Tenar’s past from book 2) that no-one but an established fan would understand or care about. It’s plain when reading the Earthsea series that book three, The Farthest Shore, is by far the best material for a film, despite its lack of a real antagonist – but that’s because it deals almost exclusively with the relationship between Ged (known throughout the movie, as in the books, by his alias Haitaka – ‘Sparrowhawk’) and Arren, who starts as a hero-worshipping naïf and comes of age on the journey. That gets lost in the film, since they only have a few real conversations, and the focus is shifted to the relationship between Arren and Therru, who in the book was a hideously scarred preteen who would speak to nobody, but here is a teenager with a fetching scar who takes about three scenes of grumpiness to defrost, predictable and inevitable as spam about Viagra in your inbox.

And this is part of the problem of the film – it’s so predictable, so full of ineluctable clichés and unredeemable platitudes. We see some slaves; slavery soon becomes a threat. A pretty girl is saved; she happens to be in the place the protagonists find themselves in. Add to that a totally meaningless and unnecessary plot taken from book one about a doppelganger, and some really dubious ways to get characters from A to B, and you have a mess. The only one who escapes with his dignity is Ged, whose magic remains nicely subtle, although he’s quite useless at the end.

It also seems once again that the only ones given enough time and money in Ghibli to make really top-quality films are Miyazaki and Takahata. While it doesn’t look as rushed and simplistic as Neko no Ongaeshi, this is no visual spectacle on the level of Sen to Chihiro. Characters are simple, all of them looking like they’ve walked out of Nausicaä’s Kaze no Tani, although the one who looks like Kurotawa doesn’t get away with his slimy looks by being a loveable rogue; he just has to be a cackling imbecile henchman, one of the most tiresome antagonists I’ve seen animated since Disney’s 80s slump, once again showing how Miyazaki Goro doesn’t have his father’s skill with undermining expectations. Arren is a typically good-looking Ghibli boy, though his dark side tends to be drawn with increasingly silly levels of exaggeration. The dragons, mostly cel-shaded CG, move stiffly and weightlessly, jarring with the animation and making me remember just how incredible it is to see the eel-like Haku in flight in Sen to Chihiro. And the less said about the way the baddie looks at the end, the better.

The backgrounds almost elevate the standard of art to beautiful. Some are breathtaking. But then mixed in with the ethereally beautiful skies and almost tangible cities are shots of desert sands that are pretty much monochrome, drab, thoughtless banquet halls and brick walls that look like they’ve been dashed off in minutes. Shame.

Shame, too, that the gritty, weather-worn, dark-skinned heroes of Earthsea are such simply-drawn Caucasian-looking figures. It just feels too obvious, too cheap, too much like someone on a board has said, ‘White sells better; stick to what we know.’ And yes, there’s a long debate to be had over whether anime characters are supposed to look Caucasian or Japanese which I’ve gone into at length before, but either way, they certainly ain’t dark-skinned.

Not that changes in an adaptation are a bad thing. I don’t think a straight adaptation of any Earthsea book would work as a movie, and Le Guin’s arrogance is showing when she imagines it would be a good idea to have a film set between two of her books, since everyone’s so familiar with them they’ll understand. But you can’t just use words that sound appropriate to a fantasy setting and assume they’ll have inherent relevance: since the seiyuu for Ged (Kamaji from Sen to Chihiro) sounds like he’s got a very sore throat all the time and the woman who plays Kumo (Eboshi from Mononoke) thinks she’ll sound really creepy and chilling if she just whispers all her lines, the nadir of the show was when they were almost inaudibly huffing at one another about ‘eien no inochi’ (‘eternal life') and ‘Sonzai no tatakau’ (‘battle of existence’) or something, I really did just want it all to end – and at nearly two hours, it’s much too long for the amount of story it contains. When the highlight of the movie is when two old flibbertigibbets are gossiping about the new ‘work’ they’ve seen up at Tenar’s, you know you’re in trouble.

A shame, because this could have been a great epic. But what I find myself really yearning for is for Takahata to make another down-to-earth, affecting story like Omohide PoroPoro.

(originally written 7.1.07)

ホーホケキョとなりの山田くん/ Houhokekyo Tonari no Yamada-kun / My Neighbours the Yamadas

Tonari no Yamada-kun was the second Ghibli film I ever saw, and the contrast with Mononoke-Hime couldn’t have been greater. However, I was impressed when I saw it, by something so different from any other animation I had ever seen, in terms of both presentation and plot (or lack thereof). I was, however, aware that plenty of people would watch it with a look of utter bewilderment on their faces – although my companions at the time remembered a fair few plot points when I reminded them of the film several years since that 2001 screening in the Barbican.

While I enjoyed the film back then, it’s only really since that time that my obsession with anime has developed, and so now I feel I understand and appreciate far more, in terms of both animation and cultural reference.

Based on a classic Japanese gag strip, Tonari no Yamada-Kun is the kind of quirky, unconventional work that Takahata seems far more inclined to direct than Miyazaki does. Essentially, it follows a very ordinary Japanese family unit – the mother and father, their little daughter and adolescent son, plus the grandma who lives with them – as they do various everyday things. Drawn in the manner of the comic strip, it looks extremely simple while actually containing sophisticated colouring and animation techniques, along with some hugely impressive tour-de-force sequences featuring thrilling action, pastiches of Japanese images like traditional watercolours and one very memorable shift into a more realistic presentation. Remarkably, the animation is 100% digital, not just the excellently-integrated cell-shaded 3D that is worked into various scenes with varying levels of subtlety.

However, a lot of the elements that seemed purely random to me on my first viewing have become elucidated by the things I have learned since – folklore references to babies coming from peaches and from inside bamboo, what festival chants sound like, even the way that Japanese people beckon…all went over my head before, but all are well-understood now. Too bad there weren’t cultural notes for me on my first viewing.

Tonari no Yamada-Kun (the ‘Houhokekyo’ part, an onomatopoeia for the call some bird or other, was added only so that the character ‘Ho’ (with or without ten-ten/maru making it bo or po) could be in all Takahata’s works, as ‘no’ is in all of Miyazaki’s), like Pom Poko, is a collection of episodic events deeply infused with the Japanese way of life – but rather than the mythological, most of what we see here is the mundane, and the focus remains always on the same five characters, so there is more of a feeling of a single, consistent movie here than the slight mess of Pom Poko’s shifting focus. Japanese or not, though, these characters are instantly recognisable, and their realism, the squabbling as well as the love, makes them so likeable that it’s hard to resist their charm. It’s very much like the Ghiblies shorts in the way it takes slices of life, presents them in a very experimental way, and yet still manages to contain enough emotional content to keep the attention, and I would consider those charming little pieces the film’s closest relatives in the studio’s canon.

The scale is small, so of course this isn’t going to change lives, but it can certainly entertain, and the must be fairly few people who cannot identify to some extent with at least one of the family members. See it for the warmth of familial love. See it for the laughs. See it for the incredible way traditional techniques mix with computer imagery for something unique and yet instantly recognisable and classic. See it for the strong, understated vocal performances, the seiyuu really finding the right ground between realism and exaggerated comedy in mixed dialects (though the son struggles with any heightened emotions). But mostly, see it because it’s a Ghibli film, and one that stands entirely alone.

(originally written 18.1.07)