劇場版 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ叛逆の物語/ Gekijouban Mahou Shoujo Madoka Majika Hangyaku no Monogatari / Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion

Well, this is the project that made the movies exciting. After two rehash movies, the third is the payoff – something exciting! Something all-new that advances the Madoka world. But once you’ve made your main character a god erased from all history, where do you go? How do you enhance such a neatly wrapped-up story?

Well, you subvert it, of course!

If I’m honest, there were a few things in the third of this movie series – and the only one that’s all original material – that disappointed me. I thought the world we were shown at the end of the Maoka series was worth exploring, and though this story nodded to that, it was set somewhere quite different. In many ways, the writing is deeply lazy – when you effectively create a character that has the powers of a god, plus an alien race with indistinguishable-from-magic sci-fi technology, you end up with a world where anything at all can happen, and you don’t need much logical consistency or detailed world-building. You can make time paradoxes, and have characters who are removed from timelines to fight alongside a godlike entity for no better reason than she quite likes to have them around. It’s lazy and simplistic and any problems can be very easily handwaved away.

But at the same time, this kind of story allows the writers to deliver fanservice by the bucketload. Not sexy fanservice – just things that the makers of the series would love to see. Characters are dead? Bring them back to life! An antagonist has gotten a big fanbase? Bring her back, make her good and reveal her human form! People have a real burning hatred for your intentionally sinister cutesy mascot? Arrange to have it dismembered, enslaved, tortured and more!

And while yes, it feels for much of its length like a cop-out, Rebellion is a hell of a lot of fun.

Everything is wish-fulfilment, by design. All the magical girls work together in a happy Ojamajo Doremi world of bright colours and cooperation. They even have cute sidekicks – Madoka has a Kyubey who is as cute as it looked like he would be at the start of the original series, and Mami has Bebe. Bebe, of course, an extra-cute version of Charlotte the Dessert Witch, able to communicate in weird gibberish that shows up as floating characters, and a staunch ally of the girls – perhaps the most enjoyable sequence in the film is where the girls chant a creepy nursery rhyme that leads to Bebe showing her true power.

Ultimately, Homura is still the main character and still the one to discover the truth behind this slightly perturbing alternate universe. Behind it, of course, are the Kyubey race, who having hypothesised the existence of the Madoka force of nature – which, after all, Homura told them about at the end of the series – and who want to try to counteract her wish so that they can tap this far more efficient way of getting the energy to save the universe. Neat, but not exactly hard to predict.

What comes as a surprise is that Homura has her own agenda, which is far more selfish than I had ever expected. It makes for some moral grey areas at the very end of this interesting and twisted story, and something remarkable that Madoka couldn’t have accounted for. How she is empowered to do what she does doesn’t really matter – it is poetic and has a bittersweet beauty.

The third film doesn’t feel necessary. It doesn’t feel like it completes an otherwise incomplete story. It feels added-on, an unnecessary appendage. But there’s no doubting that it was deeply enjoyable, especially for fans. 

劇場版 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ永遠の物語 / Gekijouban Mahou Shoujo Madoka Majika Eien no Monogatari / Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Eternity

It seems a little illogical, but actually it makes sense. What perhaps ought to be expected is that if I very much enjoyed the first Madoka film, based on the part of the series that I wasn’t passionate about, surely I should really love the part based on the episodes where I really started to admire the series’ writing. Right? But no – being repackaged as a movie did quite a lot for the first part of the series, especially as the result was a much-increased pace and more of a sense of steady progression. Sadly, the second movie doesn’t enhance its source in the same way here, and because there are far fewer episodes included, the pace is too slow for a standalone film.

Of course, this film covers the remaining episodes of the series after Miki succumbs to despair. She must be dealt with, and sacrifices must be made – so having grown close to Miki, Kyouko takes the fall. So as a result, the only one left to deal with the coming Walpurgis Nacht, the coming of a hugely powerful witch no magical girl can defeat solo, is Homura.

And we learn Homura’s story, which I didn’t see coming in the series and found quite genius – Homura has mastery over time, and has lived this story over and over again, trying to find a way to save Madoka by preventing her becoming a magical girl. Rather than, y’know, talking it through with her – and ‘as you will become the most powerful magical girl ever (thanks to my actions), you will then become an unstoppable witch’ probably would have helped – and rather than perhaps trying to go back and act much more supportive to Miki to ensure she and Kyouko are there to help with Walpurgis Nacht, Homura decides the end of the world is inevitable. Either she stops Madoka becoming a magical girl and the world ends because it seems she can never keep everyone together to fight Walpurgis Nacht, or she lets Madoka deal with Walpurgis, in which case Madoka becomes a far worse witch and the world ends.

Of course, Madoka also has a wish associated with becoming a magical girl, and because Homura has made her fate such a significant event, it can be an incredible one. Perhaps she could have thought of a better one – like, y’know, dealing with the root cause of entropy rather than the effect of Kyubey’s race having to harvest energy from human emotions – but nonetheless, Madoka’s wish makes her essentially a god. She removes herself from the timeline and changes the past and future so that every point a magical girl turns into a witch, she stops them. The girl will lose her power and return to her normal life – it is implied – but will not turn into a witch and need to be killed by her former peers. The result of this needs to be all but omnipresent is that she essentially becomes wiped from the real timeline, creating a whole lot of paradoxes because after all, if witches hadn’t been there before, she wouldn’t have been inspired to become this godlike existence. Nonetheless, the sheer magical power of her potential prevails – and there is a satisfying ending where the girls instead battle wraiths to battle entropy, in partnership with the Kyubey race, but only Homura remembers what truly happened.

It’s neat and it’s clever. It was a great ending to a series that cleverly challenged the conventions of its genre. It took childish concepts and later iterations that sexualised them and subverted them all – with a presentation that despite my initial misgivings because of Hidamari Sketch I think really work. Those potato-headed girls have a classic, winsome look that adds to the subversion.

I do sometimes feel Madoka is a little over-rated. While very good, it is not genius and isn’t nearly as thought-provoking as, say, Kaiba nor as clever a subversion as Princess Tutu. It is only the sheer silliness of magical girl shows that make it seem so intelligent by contrast. This is of course not to say that it isn’t smart. It emphatically is. It’s also compelling viewing and definitely well worth seeing, and there’s more to explore in its universe.

Which is why a third film makes sense – a chance to build on what has been established, and perhaps even subvert that. And that, as we will see, is precisely what the next film does. 

劇場版 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ始まりの物語 / Gekijouban Mahou Shoujo Madoka Majika Hajimari no Monogatari / Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Beginnings

Given that I ended up rather liking the Madoka anime, I left it quite a while before getting around to watching the movies – and even now have only seen the first one. Rather disappointingly, the first two movies are mere recaps of the series, which I could understand with Evangelion, because after all many years had elapsed since the series and animation standards had risen considerably, so it made sense. Here, though, there was only about a year between the series airing in 2011 and the film coming out in 2012, so it all feels a little redundant to truncate the series for the big screen. Most of it doesn’t even appear to have been re-animated, with the main changes being better backgrounds and a new opening. So in that sense, I’m pleased I left it a couple of years before watching, because I’d forgotten enough of the plot details to enjoy this again without the feeling of rewatching something I’d just seen.

Madoka was a series that I didn’t feel got really good until right at the very end, starting with the tenth episode of the twelve-episode series. Thus a film version covering the first seven or eight episodes didn’t hold that much appeal for me.

In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the flow of this adaptation. It works as a single film, pulling off its typical magical girl setup at just the right pace, Mami losing her head in a stressful situation making for a very good climactic moment in a feature-length film (albeit rather a long one), and then the gradual realisation that Kyubey is not what he seems – or at least, operates with an entirely different moral compass – and the ultimate fate of magical girls works well for a reveal-style ending. But what really makes this work is that it becomes Sayaka’s movie: her centre-stage moments are all there in the series, of course, but because of the way the other characters rise to prominence, she becomes rather peripheral in the overall view of the series. Being the centre of attention here, the film essentially following her story from being introduced to the world of magical girls, grasping somewhat the meaning of it, debating the importance of wishes with Kyouko and becoming ever more powerful and ever more lost until the end of the film, she gets a chance to shine more clearly.

I think this works well even if, ultimately, it’s to the expense of Mami, who gets even less of a chance to make an impression as a complete person than in the series, not even getting to talk about her wish.

There’s also a strange dynamic in taking a markedly short series and turning it into a film trilogy. It’s rather strange how there’s the same amount of material, yet the impression left is different because the series was shorter than the usual, whereas a film trilogy is longer than usual. It’s odd how less material seems to be longer and given more time to breathe because of this context, but it is palpable how simply being a feature film expands the sense of scope. It turns out that Madoka suited being a film all along!

Ultimately, I was on board from the beginning. I love how Madoka subverts the genre, not just by being dark and edgy – that’s no real innovation these days, and I talked about Nanoha a lot in my review of the series – but by subverting it early on and then going on to add in more interesting twists and changes of focus. I’m actually looking forward to seeing the second film, but looking forward the most to seeing what new developments the final, original film will bring.

But talking about subversive Magical Girl series that are more sophisticated than they seem at first, go to dark places and would make great movies, how about a Princess Tutu movie version, huh? Now there’s a series that would benefit greatly from reinvention. 

化物語 /Bakemonogatari / GhoStory

Especially considering it’s a Shinbou Akiyuki work for Shaft, the word I’d choose to describe Bakemonogatari is ‘stillness’. Part of that is plot related, with the second mini-arc of the story revolving around not leaving a particular place, but almost every episode largely features its cast standing still and talking at length in extended single scenes, with odd imagery usually based on colours or typography flashing up and plenty of typically Shinbou pastiche stills.

‘Bakemonagatari’ is a portmanteau combining ‘bakemono’ (monster/supernatural creature) and ‘monogatari’ (tale), which by happy coincidence can be easily, albeit clumsily, mirrored in the English ‘GhoStory’ – and while the entities dealt with here are not necessarily ghosts, the term ‘ghost story’ does tend to encompass various other supernatural creatures like the animal spirits who dominate this story. The anime is an adaptation of a series of light novels, and has been enough of a hit to spawn two sequel series, Nisemonogatari and Bakemonogatari as well as Monogatari Series Second Season and related Katanagatari.

Our main character Hiraragi-kun, whose hairstyle that covers one eye is not the only echo of Mushishi here (listen carefully to the music), is an unassuming but likeable high school student with a colourful past. When he discovers the strange secret of the standoffish but beautiful Senjougahara – that she has no weight at all – he pursues her and eventually breaches her prickly, even somewhat disturbing, defences to offer his aid. After all, he too has been afflicted by a supernatural ailment – he was bitten by a vampire and helped by a strange laid-back mystic. After helping Senjougahara and putting up with her advanced case of tsundere-itis, the two begin to date. But this action only brings him to the attention of various other girls, and his harem begins to gather.

It is undoubtedly a harem, and probably a cuter one than in most series. The girls here are all quite lovely, and all much more to my liking than the threatening and blunt Senjougahara. There’s the adorable loli, who Araragi shows the most personality with when he mercilessly teases her and gets a bit edgy with his molestation humour. There’s the tomboy who not only has the usual bokuko haircut, athleticism and adorable my-pace personality, but is actually an out lesbian, which is refreshing. There’s a quiet cute one, the bookish one who has always admired Araragi from afar, and then the mysterious little blonde girl who was the original cause of Araragi’s ‘condition’…as well as his saviour.

Underneath the witty dialogue, detached and cynical style and relentlessly odd imagery is a rather conventional story of a boy meeting a variety of girls who have some mysterious background, solving their problems and then having them become his close circle, to help out others when they come along or form rivalries. 

I have to say, while I didn’t dislike Bakemonogatari, I struggle to see why it was quite the hit it was. It certainly didn’t charm me like various other Shinbou works, and the style kept every single character at arm’s length.

There’s a fair bit more Bakemonogatari, as well as various related materials. There’s the sequel Nisemonogatari, and then a second season of Bakemonogatari, as well as the strange but fun-looking feudal story that I think is somewhat related called – I believe – Katanagatari. I don’t feel much attachment to the girls here, nor do I much like Araragi, but there was enough silliness, banter and action to keep me coming for another series. 

Just…rather like the other series this reminded me of despite the different levels of humour, Jigoku Shoujo, I expect the viewings of the episodes of progressive sequel series will become less and less a priority for me. 

夏のあらし! 春夏冬中/ Natsu no Arashi! Akinai-chuu / Summer Storm! Open for Business (season 2)

Natsu no Arashi grew on me with time. I know it’s only a few weeks since I watched the first season, but the more I thought about it, the less I remembered how divided it was, how ugly that retro art style was, how crass the fanservice was and how a fair few of the jokes went over my head, and the more I remembered the likeable characters, the sweet love triangle with additional gender-bending comedy with reverse-trap Jun, and how flat-out entertaining it was.

Essentially, season 2 is more of the same. It could easily have been a continuation of the first part without a break. The opening is probably more fanservicey than anything else up to that point, and a bath house episode is racy enough that there was censorship on the TV version to be removed from the DVD release, but that’s not exactly what one would call grand progress.

Given the amount of episodes between the two seasons, though, the disjointed nature of Natsu no Arashi softens and eventually becomes a non-issue. Yes, it’s an anime about ghosts who can jump through time, and about a group of strange people working a summer job in a café, and about a rather confused girl who has dressed as a boy before falling in love with another boy and yet not wanting to reveal her true gender to him, even when it gets ridiculously inconvenient. You can also expect just about anything to happen, like when quite randomly Jun wakes up to find herself possessing the body of a mature woman. 

The disparate elements still don’t exactly sit well together, but the fact they’re all elements of the same show is more palatable. And I’ve grown to like the strange ghosts from the 40s more, now, even Arashi herself, and while I’ll never get used to their strangely-drawn faces, their personality quirks make me smile and I shall slightly miss that daft episode-closing conceit of having an old anime or mange described in an outlandishly grandiose style.

I have to say, I still wanted the whole anime to be about Jun. The idea got a bit exhausted, with the poor girl having to decide how it would be possible to pretend to be female in swimwear on a beach, sharing a room at the bath house with the boy she likes and even having him try to drag her naked into the hot springs, but it still provided the biggest laughs and was deeply adorable. I very much like Jun and her softness of character, lacking in the rest of the cast and, indeed, in anything from the mangaka’s previous work School Rumble. 

I wouldn’t mind seeing more of how her story unfolds, even though it’s quite odd how in just about any series with a degree of fanservice AND a trap/reverse-trap, they usually end up being subject of more perverted scenes than any other cast member, usually because the comedy of other characters simply not getting it is consistently funny.

Otherwise, there’s not a whole lot more to say about the series. Because Hajime only has eyes for Arashi, and the two newer cast members are more obsessed with one another than any boys, this doesn’t feel like a harem anime in spite of its opening sequence that heavily hints in that direction. Other males are largely incidental, despite the silly muscly guy with shades eventually also being able to travel through time. There’s another possible love interest of Arashi, but he primarily exists to spur Hajime into action.

It’s a tangled web, and the ‘ghosts disappear at the end of summer’ thing feels rather tacked-on for a bit of extra angst. Overall, though, the daily lives of these strange characters are interesting and I may eventually turn to the manga to see what becomes of them. 

I don’t suppose Shaft will return to the series for another season, though – after all, salt guy FINALLY got his salt, and if that doesn’t signal that a series is complete, I don’t know what does.

Bonus! Super-fanservicey DVD scenes!

夏のあらし! / Natsu no Arashi! / Summer Storm!

In typical Shaft style, Natsu no Arashi! chucks you in at the deep end. The first episode is disorienting, as two duos of characters in a strange old-school art style hold hands to zip back in time, with attempts to stop a prank going wrong made extremely convoluted and successively more disastrous as different timelines intersect and various typically random Shinbou Akiyuki visuals flash up. Shaft’s immediate follow-up to MariaHolic, this show is decidedly less accessible, but soon becomes just as straightforward – if never as likeable. 

But as is fairly often the case with Shaft (lest we forget the episode of Sayounara Zetsubou Sensei where visuals, soundtrack and subtitles were a weird mash-up of an audio episode, a manga chapter and original material, or whatever it was, or the previously unseen characters who crop up unannounced in the Negima! OVAs), it feels rather as if the series is aimed not at fresh viewers, but fans of the manga – by School Rumble’s Kobayashi Jin.

But yes, the second episode goes back to the beginning of the story, and it runs linearly from there, gradually making that first episode explicable. In the world of Natsu no Arashi!, a thirteen-year-old hot-blooded boy with a silly face that directly recalls 70s anime design called Hajime takes a job at a café after falling for a sixteen-year-old girl working there and protecting her from a strange meathead. Though the café is of course staffed by some oddballs – including the foul-mouthed owner who is a capable confidence trickster – Hajime takes a job there, only to discover that Arashi, who he saved, is in fact the ghost of a girl who died in the 1940s…and when she touches Hajime, they ‘connect’ and can leap back through time. The two of them begin to help the people Arashi knew in the past, who would otherwise meet sad fates in the wartime bombings of Japan.

Natsu no Arashi!, in trying to flesh out its characters, does rather two much, so that it feels like two completely different anime. In hindsight things seem neatly settled, but while watching it felt too disjointed, like the anime pulled all the way in one direction and then in the other immediately after. There is this story about time travel, made more complex when Arashi’s German friend Kaja, also a ghost from the past, makes a connection too and starts a similar mission to change the past, with some action added on when a very silly post-credits sequence about two sedate young women grandiloquently describing the plot of classic anime as though terribly serious novels only to undermine the tone with the anime’s catchphrases gets linked into the main plot as two more dead classmates are revealed – and are a good deal less friendly. By the end, of course, these two are introduced to the harem of odd spindly girls in bishoujo art styles, making for rather less interesting background characters, but the comedy segment was certainly worthwhile – if only for making this an anime that ends on the punchline ‘DOSTOYEVSKY?!’ – you can’t really beat that, I have to say. Nods to Touhou, MariaHolic, Hidamari Sketch, Gundam and even K-On! also raised smiles, even if background gags sometimes don’t sit well with me. And nor do weird body-swap episodes.

At the same time, a whole lot of screen time is given to Jun, who in what seems to be fast becoming a Shaft tradition is a ‘reverse trap’ – that is, what seems to be a weak and pretty young boy but is in fact a girl pretending. I’m a sucker for traps and reverse traps as an extension of feminine guys and tomboys – making favourites of Minami-Ke and Mai-HiME for me – and this is no exception, as Jun is incredibly adorable and much of the humour surrounding her is about her being humiliated or Hajime being too thick to realise her gender, which for whatever reason always make me feel protective and affectionate, and I loved the episodes centred on her. I also liked how the series would swing towards being extremely serious, with Jun’s reaction to the wartime bombing in particular being affecting and well-executed. I also liked how time paradoxes were discussed, in a serious way with Arashi becoming worried her saving lives was snuffing others out until it was discovered time is linear and everything they did they had always done, and then in a fun but incredibly random last episode with a long discussion about the paradoxes of taking some expired milk back in time to swap it with its non-expired earlier incarnation.

For all I liked bits and pieces, though, and much as Jun is catered specifically to someone like me who loves gender-bending character types, I just found myself unable to really love Natsu no Arashi!. I might one day rewatch episodes, but certainly not the whole series. I got that the art style was meant to be a nod back in time but I found it very unappealing overall and most of the older girls never felt fleshed out. But that isn’t to say I won’t be watching the second series. I certainly will – sometime. 

Especially as it was heavily, heavily hinted that Jun is going to develop a one-sided crush on Hajime… 

まりあ†ほりっくあらいぶ/ Maria†Holic: Alive (season 2)

The second season of Maria†Holic was largely more of the same, but it was worthwhile watching and thoroughly enjoyable. A lot of the characters who had a limited role in the first season have an expanded part to play – Mariya’s sister Shizu is seen in her own school, with her own butler as a counterpart to Matsurika, creepy teacher Kanae becomes a comic staple and Kanako’s little sister appears towards the end to provide an adorable sincerity that serves as a great counterpoint to Kanako’s constant hysterics and histrionics.

Ultimately, the show once again boils down largely to Kanako suffering, usually through her own fault, and things are if anything a little more surreal than before. Kanako and the others brave the silly traps and games of a ‘forbidden’ old dorm, Kanako is put on trial, a 10-year-old boy arrives announcing he’s engaged to marry one of the girls (though let us not forget arranged marriages still exist), and in the last episode, Mariya and Matsurika show a softer side – after they are flushed into a strange underground passage from the school baths with Kanako and chased by expanding seaweed. Yup.

For all that it’s stranger than before, though, stylistically it’s a bit less playful – we get the same shoujo pastiche style far too many times – and I’m not a fan of all the fourth-wall breaking references. I never like jokes where characters show knowledge of being fictional, or that they’re in episodes, unless it’s a really obvious childish comedy like Rock Lee’s Springtime ofYouth. At the same time, though, the characters are in general treated a little more sympathetically and…well, fleshed out, which is welcome. Mariya shows a softer side, Kanako reflects on her selfishness, and…well, it’s amazing how much of a different person Matsurika seems without her maid headband. I also quite liked seeing Shizu as a boy, especially as her hidden side is much more pleasant than her brother’s.

At only 12 episodes, once again not a whole lot is going to happen, but I’m glad there was more Maria†Holic to enjoy and if a third season comes along, I shall be keen to watch that too. Also, I should make mention of the brilliant in-character intro song, which is the first OP in several years that I’ve actually enjoyed watching each and every time – not counting the little variations!

まりあ†ほりっく/ Maria†Holic (season 1)

For whatever reason, Catholic girls’ schools in Japan have a reputation for lesbianism. A certain very male-centric form of lesbianism. Nothing to do with Doc Martins, Dykes on Bikes or cute androgynous girls in saggy basketball tops with half their hair shaved off – nor, I suspect, any other stereotype that might come with the word ‘lesbianism’ in a Western mindset. In fact, the style has much more in common with books about English public schools where two boys become very close – a little too close to be good friends, and perhaps fittingly a lot of those books are in fact aimed at middle-aged women. The relationship between the girls at these Catholic schools is presented as utterly devotional, idealised, innocent and elevated. Typical associated clichés involve exchanging rosaries, referring to the older partner highly respectfully as ‘onee-sama’ and the adorably-old-fashioned greeting ‘gokigenyou’. Perhaps the most obvious example of this style is Maria-sama ga Miteru, which if it didn’t establish these tropes (probably found in novels and such before it) certainly brought them to a new audience, started a fashion and spawned unfortunate imitators like the execrable Strawberry Panic.

Maria†Holic, perhaps obviously given that it’s a Shaft anime, sets out to send up all these conventions and make a joke out of them. The creative aspect of this can’t be credited to them, given that this was a manga first and Shaft simply adapted it, but their signature fast-paced reference-filled style is immediately apparent and the artists clearly have a lot of fun taking every chance to mix up the art style, parodying absurd Yuri and Shoujo sparkly-eyed and spindly-limbed art, as well as stained glass windows and other Christian iconography.

Miyamae Kanako is an open lesbian whose aversion to men even has a physical manifestation – she breaks out in hives if a man so much as touches her. She is delighted to be transferring to the Catholic school Ame no Kisaki, where she hopes she will find her true love. Indeed, every girl in the school seems to be beautiful, and being a comic buffoon of a character, she will never be able to act on any of her crushes because when she gets excited, she gets a powerful nosebleed that usually leaves her unconscious – that typical anime sign of arousal that here becomes increasingly exaggerated, until Kanako is turning entire swimming pools red with blood and in the final episode, the planet, then the galaxy, then the universe gets the sanguine touch from her excitement.

Her life gets much more complicated as a result of Shidou Mariya, the grandchild of the school’s chairman, a beautiful angelic blond who also happens to be a boy in disguise. Kanako of course stumbles upon his secret, but this only leads to his true sadistic personality being discovered, and he and his laconic maid Matsurika set out to subjugate Kanako – which is not a particularly difficult feat. 

Add to this a cast of typical anime girls – the childish loli type, the strange and seemingly cold girl who seems to solve most of Kanako’s problems by declaring a love between them, the tall and glamorous archery star who has self-esteem issues…as well as, of course, an identical twin sister for Mariya who usually dresses up as a boy in the neighbouring school, and a truly bizarre ageless woman who looks like a small girl and serves as the terrifying dorm mistress. Oh, and in the last couple of episodes, a very silly male teacher/priest who tries to comfort Kanako in his own very strange but well-intentioned style, led astray by Mariya who makes up a story about a dead older brother he resembles.

Largely, it’s typical Shaft stuff, with typical Shaft shortcomings – the set-up is great, the humour is great, the acting is great (who would have thought Kanako had Dejiko’s seiyuu?), the references are brilliant and the pastiches are spot-on, but ultimately the problem is that…well, nothing really happens. I know it’s an episodic comedy, but after twelve episodes, when the season closes with the story of Kanako getting excited about the school’s swimming pool opening only to not get to partake in any of the lessons there, it feels anticlimactic. Yes, there’s a second season, and yes, this is really how most Shaft anime, from Pani Poni Dash! to Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei have worked, but the fact is that I would like some development to happen, some character arcs and some emotional involvement.  

Well, there’s a second season to come. I liked the scenario enough to be eager to watch. But I hope there’s a bit more to sink my teeth into, and not just the same repetition of lesbian-gets-nosebleed-over-cute-girls jokes.

Kid Icarus – 3DS animations

As part of the promotion for the upcoming release of Kid Icarus, Nintendo are releasing six shorts for the 3DS as part of the Nintendo Video program. I plan on writing thoughts of a few of the shorts on there, but mostly as part of their respective larger series. Kid Icarus doesn’t (yet) have one, though, and after all I’m quite excited abut the game overall, so they get their own entry – even if I have to update it over the course of six weeks, by the end of which I’ll have had the game a while. 

There are really three shorts here, each by a different studio. The first, Thanatos Rising from Production IG’s CGI wing, is a three-parter very much like a game cutscene in the Nintendo style, with bright colours, relatively simplistic textures and over-acting that I’m sure some will find very hard to bear. Obnoxious and overacted though Pit is, I find his voice pretty cute – though it goes too far in the second part with lines about blogs that presumably are an incredibly awkward translation of some Japanese pun and really don’t work in context. Basically, Medusa’s minion, the obvious showtune admirer Thanatos, turns the tables on an army coming to combat him by taking over a giant Trojan walker and attacking a town. Pit gets the gift of flight, as ever, and sets off to save the day. The main point is that Pit is adorable and looks cool, and if that’s all you’re looking for – and in a six-minute animation to promote a game, it should be – you will be satisfied here. Plus there’s something about gears that will always look awesome in 3D – and the 3D without glasses on the 3DS truly is the best kind.

The second, Medusa’s Revenge, is a single 3-minute short from Studio 4˚C, in more traditional anime style. For the first 40 seconds, it looks like 4˚C are going to be lazy and cop out with a whole lot of simple, barely moving animation made vaguely dynamic by camera movements – and Pit is drawn so stumpy and young-looking that he almost looks out of PoPoLoCrois. But while it’s very simple in terms of plotline – Palutena and Medusa exchange threats and Pit fights his way to her – somehow it makes the hairs on my neck stand up and comes across as very cool. I’d like it to be included in the game as an alternate intro, even. True, there’s quite a bit of laziness (a whole lot of those monsters are copied and pasted) and some of the 3D at the start is a bit overdone and flat, but I really liked this nugget. And somehow, perhaps because they were unused to the process and cranked it up too far, I actually got the best 3D effects from this film I have in any since the recent boom. It’s the first time in ages it’s seemed like anything is coming out of the screen at me. So kudos for that.

The third, Palutena’s Revolting Dinner is a two-parter from – of all people – Shaft. I was wrong to expect their trademark quirkiness, though: beyond the daft premise – Palutena accidentally brings some carrots to life and has problems with them – it’s really remarkably ordinary and predictable, which is frankly the opposite from what I’d expect from Shaft. They have anime on the more ordinary side of course – just look at REC – but they actually got Shinbou Akiyuki to helm this. The way the story builds to its chaotic ending felt quite Pani Poni Dash!, but otherwise it struck me as a pedestrian way to deal with the property.

That said, the art is really cute in it – though Pit looks a bit young – and it’s fun seeing Palutena uncomfortable, or with a big squash on her head. I just had hoped for something cleverer and a little less like any given anime for small children. 

ネギま!? / Negima!?

First impressions - 11.10.06

This remake, more an Alternate Universe retelling, is called Negima!?, based on the same manga as last year’s Mahou Sensei Negima but in a different style. The manga’s fans insist that the original series, which I thought was a dumb but occasionally charming throwaway comedy with little substance and a lot of brainless fanservice, was a hideous slight to the masterpiece that is the original manga (but I’m doubtful anything based on the premise of a preteen magician teaching a class of risible harem-anime clichés, including ghosts, samurai and technological geniuses, can ever SERIOUSLY be good). The new version wasn’t a hit with me. The jokes, especially the big comedy reactions, were just lame and badly-timed, and the little references to other anime on the blackboard, while amusing, didn’t suit the tone of the scene, dragging the whole episode down. The art style also isn’t as cute as in the badly-animated but nice-looking original version. Ah well. 

Final thoughts - 15.04.12

Given that it was way back in the October of 2006 that I started to watch this, and I can only blame the fact that I lost a lot of episodes when an external hard drive died so far for it taking five and a half years to get through, I have to conclude that though Shaft’s version was more entertaining and far more sophisticated than the Xebec Mahou Sensei Negima, I actually found it quite boring. Not in a good way.

For whatever reason, when Shaft got hold of the Negima property and gave it to their leading light Shinbou Akiyuki, he decided to make it very much like his Pani Poni Dash!, which had ended a few months before. With Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei, it became rather his signature style, though now has reached the point where it has further evolved into something a bit less zany, making something more straightforward like Madoka have a unique aesthetic.

While it took it further from its roots, Negima wasn’t a bad thing to adapt in this way. It’s about one little magical boy and his immense harem of anime clichés – from robots to ghosts to ninja to acrobats to scientist girls who can make large mecha. If ever there were an anime that leant itself to abrupt style changes, exophoric references and pastiches, it’s this. And the parodies are laid on thick – Negima!?’s style happily parodies just about any anime subgenre you can think of, plenty of film ones and even has a South Park scene, which while not especially necessary or insightful at least seems more affectionate than FLCL’s stab at the same. Add in a great opening track (‘1000% Sparkling’) that seemed to be a real hit in Japan (if remixes, stepmania/osu et al maps and Nico Douga medley spots are anything to judge by) and you seem to have great entertainment.

But it just…missed, for me, in a way Pani Poni Dash! just managed to avoid and Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei seemed to have outgrown – not that it didn’t have problems of its own. Here…I think the problem was with the story. With PPD you had plots where there was a problem to be resolved each episode, be it a bus teetering on the edge of a cliff or an alien trying to conquer the world: they were episodic and there were numerous tangents, but it went back to that at the end. Zetsubou-sensei similarly kept things episodic, usually focusing an episode on a particular issue facing society (or blown out of proportion by the media) and exploring it. But Negima!?...well, it tries to have more of a contiguous story, centred at first on the general concept of Negi and his pacts, then moving to a series of antagonists, with Evangeline, a ‘black rose baron’ and some family members providing adversity, but the snatches of plot progression there are largely buried under endless skits, some of which raise a smile, a few of which made me laugh aloud, but most of which just got in the way and failed to amuse – and not just because jokes were going over my head (though I’m sure that happened more than once).

Taken as a whole, I’d say I liked Negima!? and what Shaft did here. I liked the stupid new animal characters. I liked the useless mascot forms some of the girls took, and the cosplay cards. I liked the way the antagonists were by and large relatable and interesting. I liked the odd surrealism, pacing and switching. But I’ve never much liked the premise of 10-year-old-genius-teaches-class-and-makes-magical-pacts-by-kissing-them-and-making-them-transform-into-fanservice-friendly-outfits. I’ve never much cared about the characters beyond liking some of the peripheral ones, especially when they have manzai-like routines. And I will go on to watch the OVAs (eventually). But I would not dream of rewatching Negima!? from the start, and certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t already acquainted with the Shaft/Shinbou way of doing things and certain they liked it watch this. Too much confusion is seldom a good thing. 

コゼットの肖像 / Kozetto no Shouzou / Le Portrait de Petit Cossette

Corrected to ‘Petite Cossette’ for release outside Japan, Petit Cossette was an interesting, odd little OVA from 2004, probably the prettiest – and strangest – iteration of the Gothic Lolita craze in anime that also spawned the superb Rozen Maiden and the lamentable rip-off Saint October. While the visuals of Cossette are striking and impressive, the plot is rather loose and obscure, and while perhaps that gives it a sense of being more high-minded than Rozen Maiden, it certainly doesn’t have the charm, humour or memorable characters. But then, in three OVA episodes with horror as the dominant tone, that was never really going to happen, and after all, there are plenty of examples of sweet, beautiful young girls without much in the way of personality in horror stories becoming very well-loved characters – just look at Enma Ai.

The inspiration for the story is gothic horror, in all its cliché, with the primary source most likely being The Picture of Dorian Gray. A young Japanese man finds a portrait of a beautiful little white girl in the sort of frilly pseudo-Rococo dress beloved of the Lolita street fashion movement in Japan. She speaks to him from within the portrait, and becoming obsessed, he goes to the painting at midnight, and eventually learns that little Cossette’s spirit was trapped in the portrait when she was murdered byt the artist. She must haunt it until a man comes who can bear the punishment the artist should have received – and who better than what turns out to be his 21st-century Japanese reincarnation?

There’s a lot of silliness here. The amount of psychoanalysis that could go into a film about a young single Japanese man happy to bear almost unlimited physical pain – fetishised into something pure and devotional – for a picture of a barely adolescent, idealised white girl must be immense, as well as the exploration into who finds the concept moving. The minor characters who surround Eiri are all completely two-dimensional, something that stands out sorely in an animation that aims for depth, and all the girls in his life seem to want to save him from himself and from his obsessions.

I feel almost certain this is a property slyly written to appeal to obsessive Japanese collectors and hikkikomori, and indeed it would seem to have found an audience with them. Daume also deal almost exclusively in lolicon (in ‘loli’s other sense), branching out slightly to include traps in recent years. There’s a high-minded and elegant approach to Cossette, but beneath it lurks all the hallmarks of very lowbrow anime. Personally, I liked the imagery and striking themes enough to keep a copy of the OVA for the 7 years since its release – but I can’t say I have even once felt a strong desire to rewatch it.

ぱにぽにだっしゅ! / Pani Poni Dasshu!

The two animation studios who have really distinguished themselves in the last handful of years have been Kyoto Animation, with their beautiful KEY adaptations, and then Suzumiya Haruhi and Lucky Star, and SHAFT. While SHAFT have been around for quite some time and made several relatively conventional anime series (such as Rec) they have latterly distinguished themselves with utterly insane, disjointed and darkly comic series with large casts, lots of subversions of moé tropes and huge quantities of hidden details and references that it’s almost impossible for a single person to get all of, especially without frequently pausing to examine background details. SHAFT took the Negima franchise and made it far more bewildering and surreal. They stepped up their game with the complex and disillusioned Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei. Hidamari Sketch was softer but retained much of the oddness. They are currently continuing to baffle and daze with the cross-dressing antics of Maria Holic. And, as far as I know at least, it was really with Pani Poni Dash that the studio embraced all-out weirdness and dived with wild abandon into the realms of the surreal.

Pani Poni Dash is the story of a little American girl called Becky who is such a high-flying genius that she becomes the teacher of a Japanese high school before she enters puberty, or very soon after. She has a class of misfit students, both the typical anime archetypes and some outright weirdoes. Over the course of 26 episodes, the class are monitored by aliens, get featured on TV, become sentai rangers, defuse bombs, and Becky’s endlessly victimised pet rabbit Mesousa has several awkward encounters with the cat-god who likes to lurk in vending machines.

The series had a fair bit of charm and the characters were likeable. But because of the abrasive humour and surreal anything-can-happen structure it was impossible to really like them, as I did with, say, the Azumanga Daioh characters. Sometimes the quirky humour was brilliance; at other times it was annoying and unfunny.

As a 13-episode series Pani Poni Dash might have stayed fresh and clever and different. But somehow it just didn’t have the accessibility or humanising factor of Zetsubou-Sensei and as a result, got old very fast and by the end, was outright dull. Interesting, experimental and sometimes very funny, it nonetheless failed to be all it could have been.

(originally written 10.3.09)

魔法少女まどか☆マギカ / Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magika / Puella Magi Madoka☆Magika

I didn’t know quite what to expect from Madoka. I’ll admit I was cynical, and for irrational reasons: given where people were making the most noise about it, I assumed it would be the latest in a line of juvenile, schlocky, plotless and brainless anime that were beloved of many and then all but discarded when they finished, starting with Higurashi, through Angel Beats and to High School of the Dead. But that was a snap judgement, and after all, this was a Shaft anime. I love Shaft.

On the other hand, the immediate impact Madoka makes is that its legacy is part of the one Shaft production I really haven’t enjoyed watching: the character designer here was the mangaka for Hidamari Sketch, Aoki Ume, so the look of the piece reminded me instantly of that, making me wonder if this was going to be at all serious. All I had heard about Madoka was that it wasn’t your typical Mahou Shoujo series, and the opening animation made me fear that it was going to be a Moetan-ish send-up. Not so, though. It took a long time to assert itself as truly subverting the genre, even when it got dark, but ultimately it did so, and extremely well – and that opening became cleverly ironic, images of defeat rather than ideals.

The director, Shinbou Akiyuki, also helmed the original Nanoha – and thus he had credentials for directing Magical Girl anime. And not the sort that is actually aimed at young girls – such as Ojamajo Doremi – but aimed at the seinen crowd. However, since Nanoha he has gone on to direct most of Shaft’s best, including the productions steeped in irony and surreal humour like Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei and Pani Poni Dasshu, though at the very least Hidamari Sketch proved he didn’t have to go all-out with the chalkboard gags and utter bizarreness. I expected more depth and irony as a result, but it also struck me that Shinbou hadn’t really done anything requiring a strong narrative and neat ending since…well, probably Nanoha. Not even Negima?! really qualifies for that. Any doubts I had, though, were unfounded.

It took a while to convince me. The first episode was as expected, setting up the archetype to later subvert. Familiar stuff: an innocent girl has a dream about becoming a magical girl, then meets the real thing after getting caught up in an attack by a witch. The only really remarkable part was the way the witches’ reality was represented by techniques that were an extension of the collages used in Hidamari Sketch and played with in Zetsubou-Sensei: essentially, paper cutout animation of the Gilliam school, only with computer graphics making for a whole plethora of kaleidoscopic backgrounds. Striking stuff.

Things take a turn for the dark by the end of the third episode, and though it was signposted a mile away, I certainly didn’t expect it so soon. In a 12-episode series, though, it was well-timed. It was like reaching the darker parts of Nanoha in just a handful of episodes. After that the focus shifted to Madoka’s friend Sayaka, and it becomes increasingly apparent that the subversion comes from the fact that the dilemma is whether or not it’s really good in any way to become a magical girl at all. There are echoes of Bokurano in the motives of Kyubey (or should that be ‘Cubay’?), but instead of any malice or duplicity, he is pleasantly detached from everything and objectively may well be in the right – a nice touch.

Still, for a while I felt quite indifferent to Madoka, feeling it to think itself a bit cleverer than it was, not particularly liking the art and finding it all quite predictable despite the heavy themes. Mai-HiME had done much of this better. But then the tenth episode centred on a background character came along, and I begun to love the series. That episode gives her full backstory, at much greater length than I expected – indeed, long enough that you realise that the entire show is not really Madoka’s story at all, but that of this other character, who I don’t name in case it ruins a surprise. The remaining two episodes don’t seem enough to pack in any more surprises, but the final ending is cleverly bittersweet, arguably not the best solution at all, but certainly great for an aftermath and a satisfying conclusion.

There are a few things I would have liked in greater detail. It’s implied that the power of the wishes corresponds to potential, but it’s still quite vague and I would have liked to have seen more wishes than the final one be actually about the system the girls are entering into, or to give them personal power. Everything was set up carefully so that Homura never actually explains to Madoka the potential final consequence of her action, to the point it gets quite awkward at the end, and it would have been interesting to see the additional conflict if Madoka knew the final effect on the world she would cause.

Madoka set out to be different from other Magical Girl stories, but starting out just like them, continuing like only a few, and concluding in its very own style. The overall story is admirable, but the shift in focus made me love it.

ひだまりスケッチ / Hidamari Sketch (season 1)

Lucky Star, Manabi Straight and Hidamari Sketch: those were the three shows that came out in the same season, trying to appeal to the same audience. All of them featured the day-to-day antics of a group of girls in their late teens, yet drawn to look more like 10-year-olds. All aimed to make the audience laugh with exaggerated characterisations and cuteness. Lucky Star was the huge smash hit that everyone saw, Manabi Straight was my personal favourite, leaving Hidamari Sketch to be, honestly, the loser in this easygoing race.

Hidamari Sketch focuses on four girls living in the same apartment complex, full of art students – although one of them is a young novelist. Episodes tend to be structured around their interaction, with their bizarre cucumber-headed principal, with their cosplay-fanatic teacher, with the cute little sister of the novelist girl who’s supposed to be five years younger than the others but is drawn very much the same as them.

The trouble is how difficult it is to get to know the main characters of the series. Not all of the characters in those other titles were memorable, but it was only one or two of the characters who seemed undeveloped, mostly because they didn’t interact enough with the others. But even having seen all the episodes of Hidamari Sketch, I couldn’t tell you any of the characters’ names…and if I were to describe them, I’d say the ditzy blonde one (stupid and brash enough to be the standout, but a comic sidekick and foil rather than the focus), the cute and childlike one (too bland as a main character), the…uptight book-writing one with a tsundere side and the other one with pink-red hair who was just…there. None of them were very endearing, nothing about their lives was very interesting and the most entertaining character was the self-absorbed teacher who loved to dress up.

What could’ve saved the series would have been jokes. If it were funny, it would have been saved, even if only as funny as Lucky Star. Sadly, despite sharing a director with Negima!? and Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei - namely Shinbou Akiyuki - and having some of that characteristic Shaft quirkiness and disregard for conventional storytelling flow (lots of random little disjointed scenes and random photo collages inserted into scenes), it just didn’t have enough humour or amusing character quirks, and felt like a very poor rehash of Azumanga Daioh.

Without likeable characters, nice art, good humour or sufficient cuteness, this one goes into the small but growing ‘watch but then delete’ pile.

(originally written 29.1.08. Hidamari Sketch has since had two more seasons and several one-off specials.