Tokyo Babylon

I wasn’t impressed by the Tokyo Babylon OVAs when they were screened after Read or Die at the first meeting of my university anime club. In fact, all that I wrote on 13 October, 2002, was that ‘the comparatively dull Tokyo Babylon proved an unsuccessful follow-up’. But the scant two episodes, barely hinting at a main storyline, were never going to be a satisfactory adaptation of Clamp’s manga. They have the feel of a pilot, attempting to put over characters and themes in a short time, yet coming nowhere near to having a satisfactory plot arc or showing any real progression.

This is in some ways Clamp distilled, in perhaps the worst way. A twin brother and sister use magic to fight demonic forces. They are dull even for Clamp designs, and Madhouse make them even more ordinary than in the original manga. Meanwhile, a quiet, mature doctor with hidden powers provides some comedy with his homoerotic attachment to Subaru, the male twin. The girl is mostly useless, supporting her brother from the sidelines, while he is shy, gentle and submissive despite his great powers. The intended audience is clearly female, but even so, those of us who actually enjoy this sort of plot theme will find it far too obvious and dull to work.

I’ve never been a great fan of Clamp, despite Cardcaptor Sakura. And this is one of their lesser works. While the manga is better and even successful enough to have been adapted into a live-action feature, I cannot say I recommend this. Lacking originality, likeability or scope, it’s assuredly one to miss.

ちょびっツ / Chobits

I remember when Chobits first came out, it generated more buzz than the manufacturing plant for Toy Story action figures. I watched the first two episodes, and thought they were good fun, but for some reason never watched the rest until now. Chobits’ success has been huge – it’s on all sorts of ‘top anime of all time’ lists online, the robot ears are iconic, and it helped propel CLAMP even further to the fore than Cardcaptor Sakura already had, for better or for worse. I enjoyed Chobits rather a lot, thinking it was very cute, but with some huge flaws – certainly not one of the best anime I’ve ever seen, but still well worth seeing.

Hideki is a Japanese country boy who failed his university entrance tests, so moves to Tokyo in order to attend cram school. In Tokyo, everyone has a persocon (which is what the Japanese call their personal computers in real life), a computer looks just like a human being, only with cute metal cat-like ears. Initially distraught that he can’t afford one of his own, Hideki finds a persocon dumped in the trash, and takes her home, only to find she can only say one word – ‘Chii.’

Hideki decides to call her ‘Chii’ and sets about teaching her Japanese. In that typical way of TV language-learning, she seems to be able to understand corrections and instructions despite not knowing any words, and soon learns to communicate like a small child, and remains unaware of things like modesty or sexual allure. Because Hideki is a good soul and not the kind of teenaged boy who would just rape Chii even more senseless because she is, after all, just a very sexy machine, he gets very embarrassed and tries to teach her how to behave.

Now, it changes the way one perceives Chobits quite significantly, knowing that it was conceived by CLAMP, an all-woman group of mangaka. Chobits is a seinen manga, aimed squarely at older teenaged boys like Hideki. And Chii is presented as the perfect girl. But she is a robot who knows nothing except being joyful at her master’s happiness, serving him absolutely, and being adorably hapless. Isn’t there something wrong with that being all a boy should want in a girl? If it was written by a man, it would seem very possible that it was just a misogynistic but straightforward piece of wish-fulfilment. But from CLAMP…it feels like a cynical exercise in manipulation that exposes the superficiality of male tastes. Perhaps I’m just thinking too much about this, but it is kinda sad that someone would think Chii was perfect, being so utterly docile and simple.

But Chii is very cute. Given Takana Rie’s recent psycho characters, it’s odd to hear her doing such a gentle voice, but her voice is perfect for Chii, plaintive and sweet. She gets dressed up in all sorts of gothic-loli dresses and looks extremely sweet. You can’t imagine her really having a relationship with anyone, but I can see why anyone would have paternal protection instincts when her character was revealed. Other characters are very entertaining – a lot of people don’t like Hideki’s exaggerated character (he talks to himself, is totally sexually naïve yet honourable, and is an all-around moron – in other words, a typical shounen protagonist), but his huge over-reactions made me laugh and he was a good person. Hyper-genki Sumomo, a tiny portable persocon, was extremely cute and always entertained me, although she did cross the line into being plain annoying in the Chibits short spin-off.

When the story starts out, it’s mostly a cute comedy about an attractive girl who doesn’t know anything. It works well in this idiom, and is charming and funny – great viewing. As the show continues, it begins exploring relationships with persocons, how people fall in love with them, or use them to replace lost loves – and in general, it seems to suggest that a robot can never replace a real person, even if the love one has for it is genuinely pure. But towards the end of the series, it all goes a bit wrong. There’s a bit of a harem feel to the first episodes – Hideki has several potential love interests apart from Chii. But they all get brushed aside in the most far-fetched ways. The teacher goes off with Hideki’s best friend, the landlady turns out to have been married and is key to the whole mystery of Chii, and Yumi, the girl who seemed most likely to be the best partner for Hideki and was shown to blatantly have a big crush on him, is suddenly paired off with some guy Chii works for, given a backstory, and we’re expected to swallow that it was all platonic.

Then comes the stupid story of Chii’s creation. I can accept the magic technology that made her also enables her to have mysterious powers, but the super-elite persocons chasing her? The landlady being a technological genius who made Chii, even though it was (presumably) a coincidence that Hideki came to live with her? Why was Chii in the trash anyway? All rather silly, with a lot of big plot holes. And then, of course, comes the possibility that Hideki’s true love for Chii will make her more than just a robot, so they can live happily ever after. Rubbish!

Chobits should have stuck to being a silly little comedy, because it did that really well. Trying to inject angst and epic back-stories and cool leather-clad characters just cheapened the rather charming premise. A shame.

(originally written 16.3.06)

カードキャプターさくら/ Cardcaptor Sakura

Okay, let’s get this out of the way first of all: Cardcaptor Sakura has been a seminal success partially because even though Sakura is not only a ten-year-old girl but also about half the size of an average adult, she’s one of the most desired girls in anime fandom. But considering she could have been drawn exactly the same way and been labelled 18 (see the cast of Lucky Star), and considering that most of the time there’s no frame of reference to an adult, I can’t say I find it particularly disturbing – Sakura is adorable. Personally, I can imagine few things less appealing than Cardcaptor Sakura porn, but it’s all over the internet. This is just the way of the world, for better or for worse, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think the little loli was a cutey.

That, I think, needs to be said, not only as a reflection of the show’s success but because a large part of the series requires the audience to not only believe it’s appropriate for Sakura to be old enough to have crushes and fall in love, but to find that cute.

Because Cardcaptor Sakura is nothing if not cute. Written by all-female mangaka team CLAMP, CCS is less obviously aimed at pervy males than Chobits, and in fact draws much of its appeal from its girliness. Every single one of the main kids (except Eriol, who in the manga isn’t actually a child anyway) has a crush on someone else, half of them being overt about it, the other half blushing and acting tacit, but nevertheless making their feelings very obvious. If the idea of puppy love and little girls struggling with their feelings doesn’t appeal, then CCS is likely not the show for you. But since I can think of few things to make me grin more than my moé-meter maxing out, it certainly doesn’t put me off.

The basis of this long series (70 episodes, two movies and a comic relief mini-episode) is simple, the clichéd stuff of episodic anime and video games: Kinomoto Sakura stumbles across a book full of magical ‘Clow cards’ (rhyming with ‘cow’ rather than ‘crow’), which scatter. A cute little sidekick creature appears to grant her magical powers and help her gather them again. These sidekicks are often incredibly annoying (the main reason I can’t bear to watch much Pretty Cure), but Kero-chan (short for Keroberosu, a Japanese rendering of ‘Cerberus’) actually didn’t annoy me at all. His obsession with sweets and video games was endearing, his Osaka-ben accent and exaggerated enthusiasm actually were funny, and it was a nice (if hardly original) idea to have a cute sidekick who transforms into something much cooler.

In mostly interchangeable episodes, Sakura goes around collecting each of the cards, which typically of magical items in anime come along one at a time and confine their appearances to Sakura’s immediate surroundings and personal acquaintances. Once all the cards are collected, she then has to transform them into ‘Sakura Cards’, allowing another season’s worth of adventures.

There’s little that’s clever about CCS in writing terms. Most of the twists are signposted from miles away, despite some red herrings. There’s foreshadowing, but really, prophetic dreams are not nearly as clever a concept as they sometimes seem. The real strengths of the writing are the situations each card creates, usually affecting a relevant area of Sakura’s daily life, and in the developing relationships between the leading characters. It may lack subtlety, having characters suddenly become crazy about one another and blush during every conversation, but it allows for some cute situations.

CCS is a simple pleasure, writing decisions tending to err on the side of simplicity. Li Syaoran is very obviously named after Bruce Lee (Lee Shao-Long), and calling a character from England Eriol Hiiragizawa is just a little strange. No danger ever really seems real – characters can fall from great heights unharmed, and magical cards always seem to know just the right thing to do at the right times. But CCS exists as escapism; it’s supposed to be about a cute little girl who’s just about perfect (though the way she squabbles with her big brother shows another side to her that makes her more believable) and her relationship with the other adorable people around her. It’s simple, elegant and for what it is, extremely well-executed. Very much a show for a specific audience, but the fanboys should count themselves lucky, because there are few ways this show could be more satisfying. A show every anime fan should at least be familiar with.

(originally written 23.6.07)