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.
