Avatar: Legend of Korra (season 1)

I’ve already said much of the background stuff about Korra, about who is animating it and why it seems very much in-touch with its fanbase, in my first impressions post. That one became long enough that for the first time I’m going to have to keep it separate from this one – which is for final impressions having watched the season finale.

My feelings about the piece are on familiar turf, having been a long-term fan of Avatar. I ended up loving the setting, really enjoying the characters and seeing huge potential…but ultimately spending the entire season swinging between like and dislike, thrills and disappointments. Just like with the original series, I suspect my immediate feelings will be mixed but slightly on the positive side, but will grow in the direction of love with a bit of hindsight.

The point of Korra rather seemed to be to do something in a different direction from that of the original, to centre it on older characters to give it a more grown-up feel, which would be in keeping with the ages of its original target audience. Travelling from place to place has been replaced by the claustrophobia of an urban setting, so often associated with grittiness in American media, especially when it comes to comic books. The original had this with Ba Sing Se, but that was the diversion – here, Republic City very much forms the heart and soul of the narrative, showing its positive and its negative sides.

And yet despite its new direction, Korra falls back on familiar ground. We quickly get ‘the new Team Avatar’ established, and around the headstrong hero who must learn to overcome weaknesses and doubt, we have a wisecracking but reliable brother figure (Bolin was slightly more likeable than Sokka but had that same horribly irritating sense of humour), the standoffish but attractive and ultimately selfless firebender (though Mako was never an antagonist) and the idiosyncratic rich girl who is introduced later than the others and is born different from the rest (though Asami’s similarities to Toph are admittedly limited to these and very superficial). If you imagine Korra as a melding of Aang and Katara, it’s essentially the same set-up. And the awesome Tenzin fills the gap of Uncle Iroh, too – both stealing every scene they’re in.

But this is no bad thing and the team had potential for great adventures. But the main problems I had with Korra were that its pacing and scale seemed totally off and that its conflict was ultimately too inconsequential and badly-conceived.

Much of the 12 episodes are given over to the pro-bending tournament, which should have taken up an episode or two but dominates all but one of the entire first half of this season. Even Wakfu’s boufball episodes didn’t go that over-the-top. They were a convenient way to have Korra make strong allies but they were excessive, got in the way of real character development despite the shortcuts they provided and ultimately felt too throwaway because the whole plot arc got abandoned.

The writers clearly remembered that what drove much of fandom in the original was shipping, so we end up thrown by episode 3 into complex love triangles and squares. It’s all too superficial, moves too fast and feels too tacked-on, especially when it’s treated as so important. It worked in season 1 because you never did quite know if the kids had feelings for one another, and Aang was believably stupid about it. Here, all the young adults are upfront, so there’s little in the way of mystery.

And finally, we come to the story of Amon, which as it was clear from his first appearance it would, soon becomes the dominant element of the season’s overall plot. My first observation was that it owes a lot to The Uncanny X-Men – totally unrelated to how much Korra in Avatar State mode looks like Storm throwing her elemental powers about. Amon is much like Graydon Creed, creating The Equalists, who much like The Friends of Humanity are against humans with advanced powers. Like Creed, he is not all he appears, and he was set on his current course by family members.

One of the best parts of the season was the flashback to tell Amon’s past. It was nothing highly original – there were hints of Naruto and HunterXHunterand, perhaps, Thor in the siblings-and-father relationship – but it was no rip-off and had enough original elements to work. I very possibly would have enjoyed a dark season about its characters more than what we got. But it was only one positive when there were too many negatives, most of them as a result of rushing. The episode where Korra discovers a trusted patron is in league with the equalists is an absurd Scooby-Doo story of peeking through keyholes and snooping, getting proven right by the villain’s stupidity. Amon himself is dealt with much too expediently, not only arbitrarily deciding to stage a full-blown invasion when his advantage was clearly working from the shadows, but giving his own game away in a panicked moment I couldn’t quite believe someone so calculating would do. And then his sad final scene just seemed tacked on for the sake of convenience, not because it hit the right emotive notes or advanced the plot.

None of this is to say Korra wasn’t excellent. It’s likely the best cartoon coming from the US right now. Its characters are solid, its setting interesting and the animation pleasant to look at. But it was also disappointing in many ways, and putting a good episode of the original series on makes me remember that it had a spark that isn’t really here. I cared much more about the gaang and their quest than I do about Korra. But that doesn’t mean I won’t keep watching, or that s2 can’t be far better!

もえたん/ Moetan

First impressions, 14.7.2007: And now something that’s extremely cute and very silly indeed. Step forward, Moetan, with yet another adorable Tamura Yukari performance!

Final thoughts: Several times now, I’ve brought up Moetan as an example of a terrible, terrible anime. But it’s not quite so clear-cut – Moetan is terrible, but it’s kinda meant to be. It’s a parody of magical girl anime – and most of the parody becomes simply doing the same unsavoury things, but very much exaggerated. While this creates some very silly humour, it also means that ultimately, Moetan is getting its audience from the same tropes it mocks, while making them much, much worse.

Based on comedy study aids for Japanese students learning English, the title is a backronym – ‘Methodology Of English, The Academic Necessity’, which of course is a clumsy excuse to be able to use a word that combines ‘moé’ and the oft-used moé version of ‘-chan’, ‘-tan’. The book is full of magical girl parodies and direct references to other series, and the anime follows suit – with a whole lot of ecchi lolicon fanservice.

Our story revolves around Nijihara Ink, a 17-year-old who looks and acts like a preteen. She has a crush on her classmate Nao-kun but is not very good at studying. When she meets Ah-kun (short for Arcs), the magician banished from the magical world and trapped in the form of a little duck for perving on little girls, she is granted the ability to transform (in very pervy transformation sequences that make Ah-kun drool) into Pastel Ink, magical girl and English teacher extraordinaire. Of course, she has a rival, the similarly loli-ish Sumi-chan, given her powers by the little cat-mage Ka-kun, and Alice, the young idol who has a history with Arcs in the magical kingdom.

Though only 12 episodes aired, one of them a recap (seemingly because episode 6 was too explicit even for late-night anime, arguably having more overt imagery than episode 8, which is boldly stated as pure fanservice), Moetan struggled to get past its initial premise. Early episodes set up the exposition and the rivalries, and then Moetan doesn’t really have anywhere to go until the one episode where a dark force threatens the magical world and the girls must battle it – which could have been strung out but was thin enough as it was. Thus, you have episodes of cute girls doing cute things (Ink gets ill and the others care for her), silly romance (Ink’s perfect date with Nao-kun goes awry) and even one episode that opens with the anime staff discussing how stuck they are and that everyone just wants fanservice, so they basically go ahead and get everyone naked over and over again, in bathrooms, bathhouses, anywhere – with the flimsiest of excuses.

After their mini-epic battle, the girls are depowered but continue trying to do their jobs as magical girls in cosplay, which is quite sweet. The series ends with a daft throwaway side character becoming the new mage sidekick and turning Nao’s little sister into the next mahou shoujo.

None of it really works well, and it’s all a long way from original. The potential gimmick – learning English – was relegated to gags centred on poking fun at the anime industry at the end of each episode. Thus Moetan carves out its niche by just going to greater extremes than anything else. I wrote that after the ruling on late-night anime corrupting the youth made the extremes of perversion had to be toned down would probably lead to Kanokon being the most perverted thing ever to appear on late-night TV anime, but that was before I saw Moetan’s greatest extremes – and I think this pushes more boundaries, getting very, very close to the line where it would have to be classed as porn, falling short only in that it doesn’t draw details but opts for Barbie-doll anatomy. It really succeeds when it is directly parodying – there’s a parody of Jigoku Shoujo that works perfectly – but too often it’s just a general mishmash of Nanoha and Saint October-type fanservice that nudges and winks and says ‘Look how stupid these shows are’ – while doing it all far worse in the name of comedy.

The series would probably have benefited from (a) not exaggerating Ink’s design quite so much – if she was more Madoka and less Bincho-Tan, if she didn’t always look like a parody image with no nose and no real features, probably it would have been easier to identify with her (though that comes with the source material) and (b) wholeheartedly going into parodying the epic storyline by taking it seriously but subverting it at key moments. A big joke where a whole episode, even two or three, had to be taken seriously only for a big payoff of bathos at the end would have worked, and while the DVD-only episode 13 comes close by having a non-dramatic death and recasting Nao as a megalomanic with ambitions that echo those of the main character once he grows up in Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokoro-chan, but it needed to sustain and break its serious mood rather than keeping undercutting it with gags – especially if they have to be fart jokes – as out-of-place and unfunny here as they are in something serious like Korra.

I’ll always remember Moetan as an extreme. But not one that worked. It was a silly parody, one that occasionally raised smiles, but definitely not one to recommend, or that I would ever rewatch. Would I be tempted by a season two? Well, perhaps – but after all those jokes about how clueless the anime production committee were and how few people it pleased, I very much doubt that’s going to happen.

ブラック★ロックシューター / Black★Rock Shooter

Thoughts on the original OVA: here

Studio Ordet are likely here to stay, for while the full series of Black★Rock Shooter was a little disappointing, it was also extremely memorable, visually striking and really came into its own in its final two episodes. If this is what happens when KyoAni bow to pressure and fire one of their directors (Ordet being founded as a direct result of the backlash against Lucky★Star leading to director Yamamoto Yutaka being sacked), maybe they should do it more often.

Until near the end, I was finding Black★Rock Shooter something of a disappointment, which is why I fell out of the habit of watching each episode as it came out – the series ended back in March. It was, I felt, little more than the OVA stretched out a little and very slightly altered. After all, this series only got 8 episodes of prestigious noitaminA airtime, while the OVA was 50 minutes long – about 2 ½ episodes. And I wasn’t impressed by what was added.

One of the things I liked about the OVA was one of the things that I saw criticised most widely – the contrast between the exaggerated and fantastical world of Black★Rock Shooter and the rather mundane world of two girls, and how the small, rather silly problems of who is best friends with whom seem like the world-shattering battles that the alternate world makes literal. The very first episode of Black★Rock Shooter did all it could to destroy that nice subtle, observation by making the things that lead to the internal battles of the girls’ other selves generally screwed up: new character Kagari is a screwy wheelchair-bound Munchausen’s sufferer and masochist who is openly hostile when she meets young Kuroi Mato, making jibes involving macaroons and having loud screaming fits. This all gets translated to macaroon cannons and a creepy voice repeating ‘Kaere’ in Black★Rock Shooter’s world – it’s all just a bit too exaggerated to work and would have been much better if Kagari were subtly cruel and manipulative.

After the situation with Kagari gets resolved, the plot settles into a slight variation on the OVA’s – there, Mato and Yomi make friends, but Mato also making friends with Yuu causes a lot of tension. Here, Yuu and Mato have been friends a long time, and everyone’s relationships are manipulated by a creepy student counsellor at school – which is the stage at which I became a bit bored. I was also slightly saddened by the treatment of the sporty Kohata, whose story arc was pat and whose counterpart(s) in the other world didn’t impress at all.

However, it was all rather redeemed in the last two episodes where many things were revealed: the manipulative counsellor was hiding a connection with Yuu and had a very interesting relationship with her, told in a rather adorable flashback; Yuu herself was rather unlike what everyone had assumed; Dead Master was unexpectedly not going to have the role expected of her and there was actually going to be more of an explanation of who the characters in the other world were and why they looked like the main girls. While the OVA heavily hinted they existed independently of the girls and could simply enter their hearts – which made the physical resemblances as random as some of those in Kingdom Hearts – here, they were ‘other selves’ who take on the burden of physical pain for the girls, and when they are defeated, all the stored up pain disappears, though seems to take memories with it. This made for some interesting moral questions as to whether or not it was acceptable for the girls to offload their suffering, though some of the passive-suffering-while-another-fights when Mato became aware of the world was as creepy a glorification of suffering as anything in Loveless. Indeed, the series probably could have done without taking every opportunity to get its schoolgirl characters naked. It could be handwaved as showing their vulnerability, that they had been internalised by their counterparts, that they existed outside of any normal plane as something of an essence – but ultimately when it happens that much it just looks like fanservice.

That aside, the story ended up being quite an interesting and thought-provoking one and certainly better than I had expected at the beginning. The characters were likeable and the otherworldly designs were awesome – I had a particular fondness for the giant arms of Strength’s body (no matter who inhabited it). The CG work here was superb, cel shading good enough that most of the time it just looked like extremely dynamic hand-drawn animation, but allowed for great sweeping camera shots and those staples of girls-with-guns fans’ favourites: huge weapons and a rain of glowing bullets.

Perhaps it could have been more, and it got off to a bad start in my view, but its aesthetic was extremely memorable, its story turned out to be surprisingly strong for the limited number of episodes, and it eventually hit the right emotional notes. A near thing, but ultimately a success story.  

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin

I don’t often watch The Nostalgia Critic, but I happened upon a link to his thoughts on Orin and it brought back a heavy rush of nostalgia. Not because I had ever seen it before – it never got a cinema release in the UK and I was tiny when it came out in 1985 – but because as with The Adventures of Mark Twain, the trailer had been on a favourite video and stuck in my mind. Not nearly so keenly – I had entirely forgotten it until I saw that link. And it piqued my curiosity, even while it was getting slated.

It is indeed a pretty poor film – but it’s much better than I expected. For an early 80s production from a no-name studio (animated partly in LA and partly in Korea) it has some remarkably good art and animation, and CG spaceships that are leagues better than I had expected and fit into the film’s aesthetic perfectly. There’s also some incredibly dodgy animation, continuity slips and bad rotoscoping, especially near the start, but Zygon in particular is superbly realised.

The trouble is that the story is both badly-conceived and poorly delivered. It starts out with some good ideas that make it seem like an influence on later properties, but eventually it becomes so derivative of Star Wars that it’s absurd – as was pointed out in reviews at the time. The film opens with a highly clunky exposition showing that young, luxuriously-coiffured Orin and a whole society of humans are enslaved to work in the mines. Even though it seems he’s too volatile to have lasted this long without rebelling, especially given powerful weapons to work with, Orin breaks loose only when his drilling uncovers a strange weapon that is key to a new power. If you think this all sounds like Gurren Lagann, you’re not the first person to have noticed the connection. After the evil but excellently-animated (and, unlike most of the characters, distinctively and for the most part very well-acted) Zygon kills his girlfriend (she’s soon forgotten/replaced), Orin escapes and makes it to the surface. He is nearly cut apart by the nightmarish Man-Droids, whose aesthetic and desire to harvest parts in some ways prefigures AI: Artificial Intelligence, but escapes and runs into the rough-talking, roguish smuggler Dagg – and here it really starts to rip off Star Wars, only with even more reliance on prophecies, a lame lightsaber ripoff far too close to the centre of the story, sound effects lifted almost directly from Lucas’ films and an uncomfortable misogynistic streak that extends to a robot girl who is sexualised in a really cringe-inducing way. Orin’s journey is sloppy and based on a lot of made-up rules, and Zygon is thwarted in very unconvincing ways – plus the importance of the characters much like Navi from Zelda grates somewhat.

For all its useless plotting, its lazy resolutions and its bad storytelling, though, it was oddly enjoyable. 80s cheese is in vogue for a reason, after all – and it really is better than it seems at first glance. It’s usually very nice to look at, it moves along briskly and there’s plenty of unintentional humour. That said, the film would have been much aided by less attempts at intentional humour, especially when it came to Dagg’s weird delving-into-a-robot-girl’s-butt-to-reprogram-her-to-be-a-sex-slave antics, and the random ‘lol you are hanging out with a young boy so you must be having sex with him’ jibe from one of the film’s several offensively stereotyped non-white characters…yikes! Still, for all that, it was oddly entertaining.

It would also be interesting to see it in 3D, too, as it was the first ever 3D animated film…