銀色の髪のアギト/ Gin-Iro no kami no Agito / Silver-haired Agito / Origin: Spirits of the Past

Gonzo don’t make many feature films. Indeed, despite once being known for their wildness and experimentation, these days it’s quite hard to pin down what defines them as a studio. They went from being that experimental studio who took risks on things like Gankutusou, Gantz and Last Exile to churning out the likes of Rosario + Vampire and Strike Witches. These days they mostly either revive an old property or quietly slip under the radar, which is a shame. Other than this one, their feature films are limited to some cute-looking piece about a kappa I haven’t seen, an Afro Samurai follow-up that looks just as artificial as the original – but also Brave Story, a classic and charming little work I very much enjoyed. So I was curious about Agito, which is after all quite well-marketed in English territories and usually put next to the Ghibli DVDs to make it sell better (which used to be the strategy for KumoKaze, though that one at least looks like Ghibli).

So today I finally got around to watching the 2006 film, hoping for some of that old Gonzo edge. But it was not to be found here. Yes, they had their very-nearly-working-without-quite-fitting-in CGI machines that always make me think of Last Exile. Yes, they took it very seriously and went for the epic about the dangers of meddling with Mother Nature. Yes, the characters were pretty and the action was impressive. But Agito left me cold. It really just has very little heart. Its characters are underdeveloped, its world is unconvincing and its pacing is haphazard. It wasn’t dull and I’m glad I’ve seen it, but I wouldn’t recommend it and I doubt I will ever want to rewatch it.

In a dystopian future a few centuries from now, an experiment on genetically-engineered trees on the moon has gone awry. The moon itself is split now, with debris arcing across the sky (an image I’m sure is not original to this, though I can’t think where else I’ve seen it), and the plants – which rained down like nukes – have forced humanity into a corner. A militarised state retaining a good degree of the technology of the time before the disaster plans to wipe the forest out, while the forest itself is capable of attacking any who breach its perimeter – and to communicate with humans with creepy avatars. In the middle of this is Neutral City (at least, that’s the English name) which stands in the middle, and where our hero Agito lives with his friends – and with his debilitated father, who with some others made a pact with the forest and was given superhuman powers to establish this new status quo, at the cost of slowly turning into a tree.

Water is very scarce and cheeky Agito is on a run to get some more for his father when he is washed into a mysterious underground structure, and awakens a girl from the past. As girls from the past usually do, this one has a McGuffin – a device around her neck that can locate and activate a great weapon against the forests – and as girls from the past also usually do, she ends up having to make a moral choice between saving the world and maintaining the lifestyles of some people in a village who showed her kindness and just want to carry on as they are. Agito gives up his humanity to go to her rescue, but of course doesn’t have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else who does what he does because he has some very strong feelings. Rather than an uplifting end to his story arc, this just makes all the decisions he had to make seem shallow overall. Essentially, it’s Laputa with a volcano instead of a flying city, and with all those personalities Miyazaki manages to sketch so quickly removed…and the one point where they could have bettered Laputa – with a complex and deep villain – they basically have the same person.

They also managed to have a voice actor in the main role who for the first time in a very long while I felt was entirely inadequate in Japanese. With his very limited credits in 2006, I assume this seiyuu was a drama star who could pull in a teen audience, because he certainly isn’t a veteran of the scene and it shows badly. He has such a flat performance, and when he’s supposed to be screaming for his life or scared out of his wits…he just sort of says, ‘ahhhh…’

I wanted to like Agito. I liked the world, and the clothes, and the fluid movements and pretty much everything about the aesthetic. I liked the concept and the moral questions raised. But it just didn’t manage to develop in any gripping or satisfying way. A shame.

Dofus: Aux Trésors de Kerubim / Dofus: The Treasures of Kerub – series 1 part 1

 In the Wakfu series – and comics – there is a strange little man with nothing revealed under his hood but a long nose and big round eyes but who helps the heroes with his incredible fighting prowess by the name of Master Joris. When the Dofus feature film was announced, it was soon made clear that the protagonist would be that same Joris, his name now revealed to be Joris Jurgen, but his timeline a full 1000 years before the events of Wakfu, with hints of him somehow making himself immortal by transplanting his soul into a little puppet.

So fans were expecting something quite epic from the first Dofus series. But that’s not what The Treasures of Kerub is – or is meant to be. Refreshingly, and amusingly, it is a very light little comedy series about Joris’ childhood – living with the old Ecaflip treasure-hunter-turned-shop-owner Kerubim Crépin, who has adopted the future hero and takes care of him in his shop. Plus it becomes clear that Joris simply has jet-black skin rather than being hidden in shadow, in a rather Sand-People sort of way, and can even blush.

Though the action begins with a new cleaner coming into their lives to turn things upside-down, her story is really only there as a convenient introduction and the real thrust of the series is that in the short 12-minute episodes, a particular treasure is dug out of the shop and Joris asks his ‘Papycha’ to tell the story of how he came upon it – segueing into a fanciful story of when Kerubim was one of the premier heroes of the land…pretty much all of it true. He finds love and loses it, he meets gods and obtains a legendary dofus or two, he loses his best friend (but still lives opposite him and occasionally competes with him in present-day stories to break up the pace a little) and he amasses enough of a treasure collection to eventually open his shop.

It’s all very small-scale and light-hearted, which makes it not only a great compliment to Wakfu but gives a very strong basis to build a movie that gets rather darker from. I care about Joris and what happens to him, and I really don’t want his story to begin with the end of Kerubim – even if that’s quite likely to be what happens. Sometimes the pace is broken by stories in the present day, perhaps involving the heroes getting shrunk down to a tiny size, or the old gang getting back together, but all the action is tied to Kerubim’s colourful past, and more often than not stories are designed to pastiche other styles – from gambling films to kung-fu to potboilers. There’s also some brilliant experimentation where a giant woman is purposely put into the uncanny valley in some very impressive flash that’s on the realistic side, which I found very striking.  

Ankama have by now developed their Flash animation to a standard that it very much hangs together, looks distinctive and occasionally gets very, very impressive – even in a light and fluffy series like this. The old and young Kerubim are very identifiably the same character and the world is extremely well-drawn, especially with characters that are clearly the same class as some well-loved Wakfu characters without being very similar to them at all – like two hulking Iop sisters.

It’s all very cute and innocent and never challenging, but it has charm by the bucketload. More a complement to the other Ankama properties than a strong starting point, it nevertheless comes highly recommended and was a pleasure to watch every week, up to the satisfying three-part conclusion of this half-season, or possibly season. Likely there will be more before the feature film – the French wiki site says there’s going to be 52 episodes and we’ve only had 27 so far – but the time seemed ripe to write impressions, rather like with the new Thundercats. 

Pirates of Dark Water

Noy Jitat! It’s back to the 80s for another cartoon review – or at least, it feels like it, but Hanna-Barbera at the time were always a little behind the curve. Pirates of Dark Water feels and looks very much like an 80s series in the vein of Mysterious Cities of Gold or Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, but it actually aired from 1991 until its premature demise in 1993.

I remember seeing it as a child, possibly as repeats, but took little away from it. I remember it had a pretty-boy lead character, and hearing his name was the first time I thought ‘Wren’ sounded pretty cool – though in fact it’s spelt ‘Ren’. I decided to give it another try as an adult partly because of those memories, and because of how often the series is raised as a bit of a cult classic and even Hanna-Barbera’s finest moment.

Honestly, I think the old rose-tinted glasses have a big effect on this. I found Pirates of Dark Water to be a clumsy, very ugly, repetitive and highly derivative attempt to jump on a trend five years too late.

In a fantasy world of swashbuckling pirates, alarming mutant creatures and way-before-Avatar-tried-to-pretend-it-did-the-dual-species-thing-first animals like the monkey-bird, the young Prince Ren uses his father’s magic necklace to track down the Thirteen Treasures of Rule, which will save the world from Dark Water. Helping him are the sassy ecomancer Tula and the gritty, selfish Han-Solo-type Ioz, along with their comic relief monkey-bird Niddler. But standing in the way of the heroes is the hulking pirate Bloth and his massive warship the Maelstrom. Along the way, the crew save many innocent lives, liberate enslaved monkey-birds, swap bodies with the evil pirates, get into barroom brawls and gambling dens, and even find a cutesy little monster that is a living Treasure of Rule and can reverse the effects of the Dark Water. As soon as they do, though, the series suddenly ends – presumably cancelled – and the rest of the adventures go untold.

I do give Hanna-Barbera credit for trying something different – something epic and continuous – even if it’s only because so many other successful series were that way at the time. And while I also applaud their attempts to keep things relatively in-house by not shipping out the animation work to Japan, the fact is that this series is ugly. It’s really not nice to look at, and though the character designs are appealing, they’re obviously too much for the animators to deal with, with faces and bodies constantly going off-model and looking terrible. The motions are very clunky and often feel very off rhythmically, and for a series with so many fights, the animators really don’t get how to make impacts convincing or characters seem to have weight. Probably most distracting of all, though, is how they don’t seem to be able to deal with characters’ pupils/irises, with the characters’ slanted eyes meaning that when they look in different directions, the animators often put the pupils at the edge of the eye – meaning they are pointed in completely different ways and look absurd.

It also doesn’t help that the stories are often very, very dull. Some new island has some new madman and the heroes eventually win out with some clever plot that relies on their adversaries being stupidly unobservant. It just doesn’t work far too often and comes over as a repeat of the worst parts of Ulysses 31.

On the flip side, the series does benefit from excellent voice acting and the extremely memorable way that it makes up swearwords and uses them endlessly. Transformers stalwarts Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime) and Frank Welker (Megatron) have fun with atypical roles for them, and the silly little villain sidekick Konk probably gets a rather unexpectedly expanded role because, well, if you have Tim Curry on the cast you give him plenty to do. Jim Cummings does that uncanny thing he does of listening to someone else’s performance and then being able to seamlessly replace them when they leave, and Sisko from Star Trek makes a great villain. It’s slightly jarring to know that cheesy do-gooder Ren now voices Sephiroth in all major English dubs of Square Enix properties (when he’s not voiced by a Backstreet Boy, anyway), but that’s voice acting!

But the cast being excellent and having obvious fun doesn’t save the piece as a whole, and it’s too hurt by being ugly and boring to live up to its reputation. Which is a shame, as it seemed like something I’d very much enjoy. 

Despicable Me 2

The first film, even if I more or less ignored it, was a success – and the little minions became very recognisable in pop culture through a whole lot of marketing. So of course a sequel followed – with a spin-off starring those minions apparently planned. Of the many animated films released, Despicable Me seemed to me to suit a sequel well – it finished on a satisfying note, but Gru was left being a father and of course that leads to a whole lot of questions about how his life will be.

And those rich seams are what gets mined here, of course. Gru is a great dad, putting on a real show at his youngest’s birthday party, and the neighbourhood ladies are desperate to set him up with one of their single friends. Meanwhile, he leaves behind his life of crime – until the Anti-Villain League rope him in to be their undercover agent, searching for a mysterious serum that can turn the most innocuous creatures evil and vicious. Of course, Gru is given a female partner  who is a match for him, countering his weaponry and yet also making similar klutzy mistakes.

The two of them are set up in a mall to investigate various suspects, and Gru thinks he recognises El Macho, the brilliantly manly villain thought to have met his end skydiving on a shark into a volcano. (Brilliant.) Investigating his Mexican restaurant, of course Gru’s little daughters encounter El Macho’s suave, floppy-fringed, charming little son, and the eldest has her first crush – much to Gru’s paternal horror. Meanwhile, Gru’s minions seem to be mysteriously disappearing and an old ally who left the fold hopes that Gru will return to his villainous ways in time for the plan to reach fruition.

Like its predecessor, it’s unambitious and straightforward stuff, but very very enjoyable and silly. The minions are more central this time, but remain well-positioned between annoying and cute and don’t outstay their welcome. And once again it’s the fact that Gru himself is so likeable that makes the film work. It’s so easy to root for him and yet to enjoy seeing him make a mess of things as well. Margo, Agnes and Edith, the little girls with old ladies’ names, once again steal many a scene and while the scale of the final setpieces doesn’t quite match going to and shrinking the Moon, in terms of visual complexity it’s extremely impressive.

I laughed far more than I expected to, and actually felt it a shame that many will no doubt dismiss yet another animated sequel as an inferior rehash when if anything, it was more entertaining throughout. Well worth seeing. 

Despicable Me

Like Megamind and indeed, that target for a pretty unfair amount of my unjustified hate, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I didn’t go to see Despicable Me because I decided it looked like it was trying too hard to be funny and probably wasn’t worth watching – at least in the cinema. Maybe I’d see it in the plane one day, I thought.

But now there’s a sequel – and my friends want to go and see it. So I thought I’d better see what it was about. And of course, I found it a fair bit better than I expected it to be. Almost inevitably! Those minions that are pitched as something of a cross between the alien dolls in Toy Story and the insane Rabbids from Rayman really saturated the media – then and now, with the sequel – but were a lot less prominent, and therefore a lot less annoying, than I had expected. And the cheesy but adorable story was cheesy and adorable in all the right ways.

Despicable Me is centred on a typical cheesy supervillain called Gru, a cross between Blofeld and the Penguin, with an easy grasp on evil behaviour and a sinister eastern European accent. Despite his successes, Gru is considered yesterday’s news. When a cheeky young upstart villain with a better grip on technology named Vector steals the Pyramids, Gru knows that the only way to upstage him is to finally realise his lifelong ambition – to shrink and then steal the Moon itself. However, when Vector steals the crucial shrink-ray from him just after he steals it from some Japanese stereotypes, Gru has to enlist the help of three adorable little orphans with old ladies’ names to help him out. And adopting those orphans might just change him from a supervillain to a caring father…

Of course, there are heavy doses of cheese and silliness in that story, but it’s upfront about that from the start. The comedy is broad, with plenty of slapstick and even toilet humour to get the kids giggling, and of course the three little girls – the bookish one, the tomboy and the innocent little tot – are fit to make anybody coo. Those minions, too, with their multilingual babble and their childish fixations, are likeable too – voiced by the directors, there’s something very French about the humour they convey, which makes sense since the bulk of Illumination Pictures grew out of the French Mac Guff animation studio and the two directors are based there.

What really makes the film work, though, is Gru himself. He’s so dastardly and then so vulnerable and finally so loyal and loving underneath it all. His physicality makes for hilarious movements and the juxtaposition of a nasty villain with three cute little girls makes for some great comedy. Russell Brand also puts in a very by-the-numbers could-be-anyone performance as a gruff old mad inventor who facilitates most of Gru’s plans and does the job solidly, which was a bit of a relief given his usual need to call attention to himself, and Pharell Williams’ hip-hop-tinged songs fit perfectly.

A film that doesn’t try a whole lot that’s new or different and very much tries to fit in with other animated films around it, it still does what it sets out to do very well, and exceeds expectations by being cute, funny and fairly clever too.  

亡念のザムド / Bounen no Zamudo / Xam’d: Lost Memories

There’s an air of the historically significant about Xam’d. No, not because it’s my first-ever review starting with the letter ‘X’. But – though it’s similarly underwhelming – because it was the first series to premier as a download. Released over the Playstation Network, it was actually made available to American downloaders before Japanese ones, which is curious.

This little footnote lends a little weight to the series, but sadly…well, I’m starting to think of this sort of execution as having ‘Done a Bones’. Bones love making really interesting worlds, with attractive and interesting characters, and then meandering for too long, making things obscure and confusing, then ending the whole thing with a finale on a truly epic scale that couldn’t feel more distant and uninvolving. They are masters of making the apocalypse dull.

What makes it a bit worse here is that…well, basically, they’ve just rehashed Eureka7, but gone ‘What would happen if we replaced Eureka with Nausicaä and Renton with Rock from Black Lagoon?’ It’s not just the look of the thing, it feels like the same sort of journey, with the same sort of annoying made-up guff towards the end.

A young man is involved in some kind of altercation with a strange bio-engineered beast on a bus. Through a sequence of events, he ends up on an airship populated by a very eccentric but loveable crew, including some slightly obnoxious kids, where they go such lengths to deliver letters that a Tegami Bachi would be proud. He tries to fit in there while getting to know the mysterious, knowing girl on board called Nakiami, and discovers about the ‘humanform’, a person with some sort of gem embedded into them that allows them to transform into these monsters – a situation Akiyuki now finds himself in.

The rest of the series is basically about exploring people who have this power and how they use it. I really thought that the series had ended halfway through, when one character turns into a giant face-spider thing and rampages, with Akiyuki saving the day, but there was much more to uncover and a much bigger scale to go to. Of course, by the end, overambitious doctors have released a huge emperor monster-thing to turn everyone to stone with its ‘warm rain’, Akiyuki has gone through a period of having a mask fixed on his face but becomes mega-powerful, Nakiami is some sort of goddess who has lived thousands of years and there is some sort of cult of white-haired people ready to give their lives in a vague sort of purification ritual.

I’m sure that, like Eva, given enough time it could be unfolded and examined and most of it will make sense. But it suffers the same central flaw of Final Fantasy XIII’s story – it throws numerous terms at you (‘Xam’d’, ‘humanform’, ‘Tessikan’, ‘The Quickening Chamber’), which has the cumulative effect of being confusing at first and boring in the end. And without the coming-of-age angle Eureka 7 and Evangelion have, it feels even harder to engage and empathise. Ambitious, no doubt, and very attractive to look at, but sadly has an air about it of trying too hard and recycling older, better ideas. 

Kyoto Animation Commercials Series

With Free! looking to be one of the big series of the season, even if a huge portion of its fanbase likes it in an ironic sort of a way, I thought I’d write this after quite enjoying the first episode of the semi-viral ‘Swimming anime’ to highlight just why I thought Free! wasn't going to come to pass. Well, thought it highly unlikely. Though at the same time, why it was also a little more likely than some others aware of the series of KyoAni commercials were making it out to be. 

The now-(in)famous commercial that led to Free! was in fact the ninth in a series. And the other eight haven’t gone viral, nor become a new series. Indeed, there are other little shorts that I think I’d rather have seen made into a full series – especially the one about a huge robot woman in a traditional kimono who saves the day with the big metal arms on her back and then rockets off into the sky, which was even more brilliant in its absurdity than an openly homoerotic series about cute boys in very little clothing. But most are not animations that would lead to something bigger. That’s simply not what they are.

There are broadly speaking some obvious boundaries between three different thematic backgrounds here. The first mini-animations are basically eyecatches, pleasant adverts for the studio itself – kids plant flowers or skydive to form the Kyoto Animation logo. They, along with the little dance routine celebrating imagination and escapism that is the third in the series underline the KyoAni of K-On! and Haruhi – there’s a focus on cuteness, prettiness and that very nice-to-look at facial style that most of the studio’s leading series has, though it’s slightly disconcerting how the little kids basically look exactly the same as those oh-so-cute high school girls.

After that, the commercials become a place for animators to experiment, to create shorts in styles they otherwise wouldn’t get to try out. Little pencil sketch kids come to life, dive through the air and end up sitting on logos. A woman who looks like a fashion sketch imagines inanimate objects are coming to life and tries to interact with them – all drawn in a very slender way with colours that remind me of pastels, and the aesthetic comes over as very Western…despite the catgirls.

Finally, the last phase is little snippets of an imagined world – the shorts that could potentially be developed into something longer. Sure, one cute one about cat pilots reminiscent of Porco Rosso and a pretty girl going into a store in a lovely overgrown building is linked to KyoAni’s online shop, but the last four animations could definitely become series of their own. As I said, the one with the robot woman in traditional Japanese clothes and what seems to be a 1940s setting would be my favourite, but the guys doing magic and the cat pilots are also very interesting.

And then with the strange thumping song and the perfect muscled bodies comes A New Challenge, a snippet of a swimming anime. I suppose part of why it’s compelling is that it hints at competition and rivalry, that semi-obsessive sense of competition between young boys that made Hikaru no Go so good. But ultimately it seems to have hit a note because it’s absurd, even more absurd than robot women in kimono saving kids from a collapsing building. Not inherently, but in large part because it’s funny imagining anime fans watching the commercial. It’s funny to picture teenagers insecure in their sexuality looking at the taut bodies and unashamedly suggestive expressions and being discomfited. It feels a little inappropriate and yet amusing. It’s pure camp. And you don’t quite know whether it’s meant seriously or not.

But I’d like to see some of these other ideas fleshed out. Perhaps this commercial series will become the equivalent of What a Cartoon! for Cartoon Network…!

The Powerpuff Girls – season 1

After the previously-documented show pilots, The Powerpuff Girls made it to a full series at the end of 1998, a couple of years later than its partner Dexter’s Laboratory. Though clearly Craig McCracken’s baby, Tartakovsky is clearly still heavily involved, co-directing a majority of the episodes.

It’s clear from the start that the series was heavily developed before ever reaching the air. It’s not unusual for a series’ title sequence to show characters who don’t appear until many episodes in, but this one even has characters who don’t even appear until the early episodes of season 2 – the guy from The Collector and, more prominently, Princess Morebucks.

The series does that very syndicated-American-toon thing of having no establishing episode or premiere but simply launching into the setting without explanation with the assumption that the audience knows the scenario and characters already – so random episodes can easily be broadcast in any order. It even seems very likely that ‘Tough Love’ rather than ‘Octi Evil’ was written as Him’s introductory episode, but things were swapped around. Indeed, however the show was broadcast when I used to watch it on TV was likely pretty random – I’d seen most of these episodes before, but some, like ‘Insect Inside’ and series finale ‘Uh Oh Dynamo’ were new to me.

Split into 22 half-episodes and 2 full episodes, Powerpuff Girls is very easy to watch. Its exaggeratedly cute characters are of course adorable, but what makes the likeable is the heavy emphasis on their faults and failings despite their powers. Bubbles is childlike and gullible, a bit of a crybaby despite not wanting to be underestimated, allowing for her to be adorable, to learn and also for reversals like her deciding she wanted to be ‘hardcore’ being very funny. Tara Strong’s brilliant voice work (here still credited as Tara Charendoff, as she hadn’t gotten married yet) brings the role to life. Blossom is perhaps the least immediately distinct of the three, wanting to be a leader and taking charge, but getting a little boastful when she develops new powers and easily annoyed when Buttercup challenges her authority. And Buttercup is the quintessential tomboy character, making her most probably my favourite – she’s stubborn and self-conscious and that makes me feel like she’s actually the most vulnerable. And y’know, there’s something pretty heavy about an episode where she falls for a guy, he makes her feel really special and loved, and then only by happy accident does she see he’s actually just getting her out of the picture so he can brutally murder her two sisters. That’s a lot for a kindergartener to take on!

Indeed, the series gets its adult-friendly edge in two ways, really – first, by being irreverent with what’s appropriate for kids to see, taking pride in showing gross-out humour, its tiny adorable heroes being constantly abused both physically and mentally, a whole episode about how funny the mayor looks without any clothes on, and in its wanton destruction, the certain death of many thousands of Townsville residents. And second, with a real sense of bathos – some episodes feel they’re late in the run of a well-established show, like one with Mojo just trying to go about his daily routine in peace but the girls bothering him interminably, endlessly and indeed unendingly. A new superhero shows up but turns out to be engineering crimes, but the way the girls beat him is by doing the very same thing. And one episode is about the Gangreen Gang making prank phone calls, which ends up with the villains sorting the problem out while the heroes are unawares.

The strength here is really in the characters, major or minor. The girls are immediately engaging and understandable, Professor Utonium’s protective nature but vulnerability to women is easily understood and though some baddies are duds – ‘Roach Coach’, with power over cockroaches, for example, or some kid who eats glue before a radioactive insect turns him into a huge hulking glue monster that’s actually one of the girls’ toughest challenges – many, many more of them are brilliant and iconic. The Gangreen Gang and the Amoeba Boys from the pilots/shorts are great, but it’s really Mojo Jojo with his ridiculous pleonastic way of speaking and Him with his evil mind games that stand out as classics. The Rowdyruff Boys are an obvious but strong idea, and Fuzzy Lumpkins becomes much stronger conceptually with his pseudo-Southern attitude to people on his property. Plus you can’t help but love the Mayor.

The voice work is also top-notch, which is something that made 90s cartoons appeal so much to Gen-Xers and stoners. The three girls have an instant dynamic, two of them having starred in Rugrats before this, and of course Tom Kenny puts his stamp on every role he plays, from Spongebob to The Ice King. Where Mojo’s daft speech patterns came from I do not know, but they’re absolutely inspired, and Him’s voice sends chills down the spine.

Being ironic and going for a lot of parody – from Star Wars to Godzilla – protects the show from a lot of criticism. Of course it’s lame – it’s a joke on silly superhero tropes! But there are some real shortcomings. Sometimes the episode length means a strong idea has to just be randomly dropped, like when Him’s Octi just blows up because it’s made to drop the captive girls, or when a cure for a terrible disease can simply be taken out of the Amoeba Boys. It is also unashamedly politically incorrect to the point of being offensive – racial caricatures abound, there’s something anti-trans in how Him is portrayed, I don’t know why Mojo has that accent and with the mecha parody episode and all those unflattering representations of the Japanese, it’s amazing they loved it so much. And while sure, kids won’t notice or care, this is emphatically not just for kids and I don’t see what gets added by it.

But it doesn’t stop the real brilliance of the writing, how it turns typical Hanna Barbera-style cartoon making into something hip and intelligent, or how well-performed and well-executed the whole thing is. Impressive work.