Rozen Maiden: Zurückspulen (2013)

Rozen Maiden’s lauded revival, now with Studio Deen (in better form than usual) rather than the just-about-avoiding-being-defunct Studio Nomad, stumbled at the first step. They decided to devote the first of their mere 13 episodes to a lengthy flashback covering the original Rozen Maiden manga. It was so brief and rushed that newcomers would be utterly baffled, while established fans who found it unnecessary were I’m sure largely bored. It was nice seeing key scenes redrawn looking pretty, and the lack of Barasuishou heavily hinted that the Deen version was going to discard all the anime-original plots of the first seasons, but if the rumours that this season was relatively unsuccessful in Japan are true (though an upcoming Nendoroid of Shinkuu being promoted while we were there hints that there’s still plenty of interest in the property), this opening stumble may have quite a bit to do with it. In a strong season with lots to watch, I can see many outside the core fanbase being put off.  

And that’s a shame, because with episode 2, we saw that Deen were going back to the manga, where conveniently Peach-Pit had broken off their part one and dived into what they call Rozen Maiden II. The break allowed for a reset here as well. As so often happens to me – most notably with Fullmetal Alchemist  - I was a fan of Rozen Maiden’s original anime and kept up with the manga while it seemed the larger chunk of the fandom got bored and left, so was well-versed with II and delighted it was going to be animated. There are some wonderful moments and my favourite doll, Souseiseki, got great moments.

The second part of the manga focuses on an older Jun – a university student – whose life diverged from the protagonist of the original when he chose not to volunteer to wind Shinkuu’s key. This Jun continued in his lonely hikkikomori life, eventually dragging himself out to be a university student with a dead-end part-time job. As Kirakishou, the seventh doll without a body of her own, has set her rather unhinged plans into motion, Jun and Kanaria are trapped in an N-field and Shinkuu has to turn to the Jun of another timeline to help her.

Several fan-pleasing events can follow, although lovers of Hinaichigo are less fortunate than others. With a new antagonist, the ever-popular Suigintou can become a grudging ally, and her silly little squabbles with Shinkuu are adorable. When Kirakishou tricks Jun into giving her a body, Suiseiseki appears and her actions lead to the revival of her twin, which made me very happy. Kanaria finally gets to show a little more competence, and moved up in my personal order of preference to third place, after Souseiseki and Shinkuu. And Megu was given more depth, ahead of the events of the next arc.

But that’s the problem here, really – that Rozen Maiden was given just 13 new episodes, with only 12 having real content. That was enough to give Unwound World Jun his story arc (though it’s not the last we’ll see of him), including the satisfying ending where he realises how much his life has improved after opening up to others, working hard and making friends. But the part of Rozen Maiden II that’s really enjoyable is where it returns to the Wound World, and all we got of that was a cliffhanger that ended so abruptly it almost seemed a desperate bid to secure funding for a follow-up.

I firmly believe we’ll see more Rozen Maiden animated. It remains highly popular, even if the fandom has fizzled out somewhat, and not being the smash hit the original was doesn’t mean Zurückspulen (meaning ‘rewind’, by the way) is considered a failure. But I also am conscious this season hasn’t left the property in the best place. Unwound World Jun is compelling and sympathetic, but takes quite some time to grow on audiences, and it is having both parts of the equation that makes Rozen Maiden II so enjoyable, which is missing here. The story may have felt on a lesser scale than its predecessors, and Kirakishou is nothing like the villain Gin was. This would be a terrible time for the series to fizzle out, but there is certainly a possibility that will happen. Even more OVAs would be perfectly acceptable.

I hope there will be an outcry from the fans in Japan…and I’m certain there are things Deen will animate that will be less popular. So I am fully prepared to wait it out for another few years to see more Rozen Maiden. Because it remains something I love, and the new animation style – with funky wings for Gin, more doll-like proportions for the Rozen Maidens and cute, expressive faces – strikes just the right note with me. 

シャイニング•ティアーズ•クロス•ウィンド/ Shainingu Teaazu Kurosu Windo / Shining Tears X Wind

It’s probably on the strength of watching the Tales of Symphonia animation and feeling it was all so truncated that it was unfair to the story of the game, but I feel it’s just a little unfair to judge this anime adaptation of not one but two Sega JRPGs without playing the games. On the other hand, I like neither the world nor the characters enough to feel any drive to play the games through, and only watched it for the sake of the cosplay group we had going.

From what I surmise, this is really the story of the second game, Shining Wind, but also serves as a sequel to Shining Tears, with the major cast of that game showing up, offering support and key items. In the usual Fushigi-Yuugi-cum-Dog-Days-type plot, a group of students find out about a mysterious fantasy world in a book and are soon teleported there, where they find they have amazing powers and become the centre of attention. Two of the boys, Souma and Kiriya, discover that they can use ‘soul blades’, swords pulled directly from the chests of the girls around them that reflect their hearts – and so decide to fight for good. However, the third boy, the more mature Saionji, with the same power, gets a bit power-mad and tries to take over the world. Of course, there is a bigger baddie, a demonic dark elf, and only the soul bladers’ true ‘holy grail’ swords can stop him.

It’s all very by-the-numbers and formulaic, to be honest. Deen do their usual middle-of-the-road job, providing nice character designs and pretty close-ups but keeping movement to a minimum, letting action scenes get clunky and overall making the whole thing look a bit lazy. Pretty as they are, none of the characters are very likeable or interesting, none have much in the way of memorable character quirks or strong motivation, and Souma is a singularly dull protagonist. I liked Zero, the protagonist of the first game turned into a kind of guardian angel, but he does very little. Towards the end the cast gets huge, with random royalty and interchangeable giant warrior characters everywhere, none of them at all developed, and the problems of trying to please fans of two games in 12 episodes comes to the fore. The final crisis is abrupt, and ends without very much difficulty, giving the impression of not much done at all, and since none of them seem to miss home at all during the adventure, it comes as a surprise that any of them want to return home at all.

The romance is all very awkward as well, and it’s problematic when the most believable relationship here is the creepy one between Saionji and Hiruda. I get the impression that there’s supposed to be a slightly naughty air of homoeroticism to the whole thing, but it just comes over as very awkward and forced, especially when Zero randomly gives Souma a sponge bath, especially as both characters are fairly obviously voiced by the same person. As for Souma finding out who will give him his true holy grail sword in that pseudo-sexual lying-back-with-eyes-closed-and-lips-parted way, well, all I can say is no wonder Mao was crying at the end. None of it is titillating and none of it really works.

What Shining Tears X Wind has going for it is fantastic character designs. They are along traditional fantasy lines, but varied, interesting and very much appealing. Faces look cute, outfits are awesome and weapons are impressive. But that’s really about it – in terms of the world, the characterisation, the story…sadly, Shining Tears X Wind falls well short.

銀幕ヘタリア Axis Powers Paint it, White（白くぬれ！）/ Ginmaku Hetalia: shiroku nure / Hetalia Movie – Paint it, White

Don’t expect any Rolling Stones references based on that comma in the title – it goes no further than that.

If I were writing the review I expected to, that would be a neat way to start a rant about a franchise that likes empty references to poorly-understood ideas. And c’mon, a plotline involving aliens wanting to turn everyone on Earth into a homogenous mass of white blobs so that there will be no more conflict or war, only for our loveable personified countries to fight back in order to prove it takes all sorts, variety is the spice of life, and the different national characteristics are what makes the world such a wonderful place? It sounds utterly terrible. And they don’t even have enough footage to fill the feature-length run-time, so they pad the film with scenes from the weekly series! Sounds horrible, right?

Well, guilty pleasure as it is, I actually liked this quite a lot. Almost everything I disliked about the Hetalia series derived from the annoyingly inaccurate or short-sighted historical snippets. It would be much better, I said, if the mangaka had dropped ideas of historical commentary and concentrated on national stereotyping.

And that’s what this movie is. The only grating times are times that had grated before, like the snippet about France’s offer to join the Commonwealth being reinterpreted as a marriage proposal from France to England (who is really ‘Britain’ but generally gets called England). Other segments that randomly made the cut were more welcome, like the scene where England – presumably because of all our fantasy literature seen as able to see ghosts and mythological creatures – meets with a kappa while in Japan, somehow breaking up the pacing of the climactic scenes just right.

The shoestring plot fitted the adaptation of silly comedy shorts to a long piece, lazy as it was. Aliens called Picts have decided Earth is a sad, underdeveloped place, so decide to whitewash it – and everybody in it. The flying saucers send out a beam that turns people into mindless white blobs and architecture into crude wobbly line drawings. The minor characters of Hetalia are given little cameos as they are transformed, like Poland and Greece, while as usual any country in the Southern Hemisphere is not worth bothering with. Switzerland and Liechtenstein, meanwhile, are protected from all the film’s events because their permanent neutrality also protects them from interstellar war. The nine members of the World 8 (China thrown into the G8 for whatever reason) who had met at the beginning of the film but failed to collaborate now reunite (minus useless Canada) to strike back. Donning Pict kigurumi, they sneak into the alien mothership and divide into unlikely teams (the old Axis Powers, France and England and then the rest – ie the symbols of Capitalism and Communism thrown together without comment). They are soon caught, but for a moment sway the aliens with displays of their different cultures (Russia coercing the countries he’s conquered into cross-dressing and doing ballet), until England ruins it all by giving them scones, which of course nobody in the universe could think tasted good.

They beat a hasty retreat, but to no avail, and all the countries but Italy are transformed. The spirit of the Roman Empire returns to be one of the most surreal dei ex machina I’ve ever seen, singing an off-key metal version of the old (wish I knew HOW old) ‘In Heaven, the cooks are French…’ joke and bequeathing Italy with a pen – which is all he needs to show the joy of individuality to the faceless aliens. Then everyone does a Bon dance, by far the least annoying song ever associated with Hetalia.

It’s a simple outline, but it trundles along and allows for the interaction between stereotypes without it getting bogged down with historical inaccuracies. Things like ‘France and England always fight but quite like each other really’ and ‘China likes to produce cheap knock-offs of what the other counties do’ are the sort of thing the series needed more of. They ring true and are generally just funny. Of course, Sealand – who I always found the funniest – gets a brief chance to shine, and him jumping aboard his ‘country’ like a ridiculous mecha pilot was the biggest laugh the whole film got from me.

I don’t know why I decided to watch this film just when I did, but I wanted something light. It wasn’t easy to find, though – English subbed versions seem to have the rehashed sequences cut out and horrible streamed quality, so I watched a Spanish fansub in DVD quality, and pieced together the meaning from the Japanese and the Spanish subs, going to the streams the once or twice I couldn’t understand at all. I could always have just waited for the official English DVD release next month, but…I was in the mood for Hetalia last night, and that’s not something I can say often.

As pleasant a surprise as The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi, this was genuinely funny and didn’t annoy me at all.

トワイライトQ / Twilight Q

What a peculiar little piece of animation the Twilight Q OVA episodes are. I don’t know exactly when or where I got hold of these 1986 episodes, but it was at least two years ago. Very mysterious, I’m sure you’ll agree. With the title drawing immediate comparisons to The Twilight Zone, the episodes also revolve around mysterious supernatural events, and are rather unimpressively realised and unveiled. The biggest mystery about these two half-hour pieces are why they both fall under the same title at all – the only thing they share is the element of empty mysteriousness masquerading as something clever and sophisticated, and the concept of things slipping in time in ways that cannot be explained. Otherwise, they are extremely different, in art style, setting, execution, humour and characterisation – they are even animated by two entirely different studios – the first by Ajia-Do Animation Works, and the other by Studio Deen, back when the only series that had distinguished them were the second half of Urusei Yatsura and Maison Ikkoku.

Possibly the reason I originally thought to check out the OVAs was that the second was directed by Oshii Mamoru, famous for his Ghost in the Shell work, Patlabor and more recently Sky Crawlers. If anything, though, the second episode was the less engaging and intelligent one, though it was the one that took more risks, and more experimentation might have made Twilight Q truly memorable rather than a bit of ephemera connected to some big names.

The first episode revolves around a camera found by two girls on a beach. A picture of one of the girls is on the film, with a boy she has never met, and it soon transpires that the camera is still in a pre-production phase and ought not to exist yet. As the plot thickens, the camera ends up disappearing in a disappointingly lame scene, and ultimately it becomes clear there is no explanation beyond magical time warps. However, the mini-episode is at least engaging and brisk, and the inevitable final scenes give a sense of closure, at least in the story’s own terms. The art is also rather nice, extremely 80s in design but at least showing why the way characters were drawn in the 80s came about, still looking cute and appealing today – where so many 80s designs look hideous.

The second episode only really has three significant character designs – or two, depending on how you look at it – and they are meant to be comedic rather than pretty. One is a toddler drawn in more or less SD style, with a huge head about the same size as the rest of her body, enhanced by a big helmet. She lives wearing only the helmet and a t-shirt with her father, a filthy man who looks like a clichéd anime burglar or some such, and does nothing all day. Meanwhile, a private investigator is hired to look into the strange father-daughter pair from the room next door, and begins to suspect the man is also a private eye. Or perhaps one or the other doesn’t exist, or indeed, none of it does, but it is all a plot made up by a novelist to give him an escape from his own stifling life. Multiple levels of reality are toyed with, coupled with some very heavy-handed imagery featuring parallels between a koi carp, the child and aeroplanes that have been disappearing. It is full of good ideas, and certainly the multiple levels of reality make for a more engaging mystery than magically-appearing cameras from the future, but ultimately there is the same hollowness at the core, and the characters and setting are far less accessible and appealing than in the first segment, making this one by far the duller one.

I feel glad to have seen what seems a fairly significant piece of anime history, for its length, but I can’t say I hold Twilight Q in high esteem, or would care much for a repeat viewing.

びんちょうタン / Binchou-tan

Binchou-tan shared a half-hour broadcast slot with the very different but oddly complimentary REC, but of the two, Binchou-tan was the more naturally suited to the short format, being a winsome and gentle story of several little children in a melancholy fantasy world. The tone is the perfect mix of sweetness and poignancy, and there’s a real ‘classic’ feel and sense of timelessness to the narrative. Binchou-tan, a pun on the Japanese word for ‘charcoal’, is a small child, living alone in the woods in a leaky old shack after her grandmother passed away, making do with what little she has. Like the other children of the town, she is drawn in super-deformed style, with a head rather larger than her body and eyes that would need dinner plate-sized contact lenses. On occasion she goes to the town using a surreal bus system that involves giving acorns to birds to persuade them to take you on as a passenger, and looks for work that largely references the uses of charcoal. Taking home what rice she can buy, she keeps up her traditional Japanese home life – with the bow of her obi sash constantly crooked because she doesn’t have anyone to tie it for her so does it herself over her shoulder. She goes about her humble business in such an adorably quiet way that it’s almost unbearably cute.

Other characters are more boisterous, or more privileged, but their own typical anime personalities are also a joy to watch. It’s written like a fairy tale, evokes the childish, and revolves around children. Over time, Bin-tan meets new friends, from the hyper Chiku-tan to the lonely super-rich girl Kunugi-tan, so that by the end of 12 half-episodes, she is not alone any more. You’ll notice that the characters all have the honorific –tan, partly to make the pun on ‘binchoutan’ work, but also because –tan is a cutesy mispronunciation of ‘-chan’, and its use for mascot characters has become more and more commonplace since this series – see, for example, the popular OS-tan characters.

The anime isn’t supposed to be realistic, or, really, do anything much but make you go ‘Cuuuute!’ It’s the most stylised cutesy show I’ve seen since Bottle Fairy, and similar in many ways – not to mention that Binchou is voiced by Hororo’s seiyuu, in a fairly similar manner. Binchou-tan started out as the mascot character of Alchemist, a games company noted for porting and partly developing visual novels like Higurashi and KimiNozo. After a few manga aimed at the seinen crowd who love cutesy things (ie Dengeki Daioh’s audience), there came this anime adaptation, from knowing peddlers of cute Studio Deen. Drama CDs and even a PS2 game followed, but thus far, the anime remains as short and sweet as its subject.

While 12 episodes with about 10 minutes of story in each off them is very short for an anime, though, it’s worth remembering that’s as much screen time as most feature films get, so there was plenty of time to get to know Bin-tan, her world and the adorable bittersweet misadventures she has. Purposely nothing grandiose or high-impact, it was nonetheless a very appealing and likeable diversion.

(collated and expanded from impressions, 14.3.06 and 17.6.06)

マリア様がみてる/ Maria-Sama ga Miteru (seasons 3&4)

MariMite, that most unlikely of cult hits about the meaningful relationships between earnest young girls in a Japanese Catholic unisex school, not only followed up its second season with no less than five OVA episodes, each the best part of an hour long, but then bucked the trend for series that end up with OVAs by returning to televisions for a fourth season. The story, as might be expected, continued to follow the light novels that are the series’ origins, following Yumi and her circle as the oldest ‘roses’ leave and they have to make the transition from sweet ‘petite souers’ to responsible, respected figures within the school’s structure – and look for younger girls to take under their wings themselves.

On the other hand, the maturity of the presentation took something of a dip as the story went on. What in the first seasons was elegant, melancholy and very sweet has become…somewhat obvious, even exploited, to the extent that it lost a great degree of its sweetness. What made Maria-sama work was its self-belief, its straightforwardness, the cluelessness of Yumi and the fact that it really took some digging under the surface to find out that this was not at all an ordinary shoujo series (as numerous English reviewers labelled it) but aimed at the seinen audience who follow magazines like Dengeki Daioh and collect figurines and body pillows. When that was all tacit, obscured and vaguely inappropriate, everything was presented perfectly. When we started to have nude Yumi and Touko with their lips inches apart and hands clasped as part of credits sequences…it’s all a bit obvious and vulgar, and that knocks the charm back a lot. Marimite doesn’t suit fanservice in its canon. Well, at least, not fanservice of that sort.

Speaking of credits sequences, the fourth has probably the most bizarre and misleading the show could have chosen short of all-out surrealism or some sort of epic battle sequence. It involves Yumi and co teleporting through magic portals all over the school. Certainly confusing for anyone who might randomly check out an episode as it aired – although I suppose that given you had to get hold of DVDs to be up-to-date with the story thus far, they expected that by this stage it was really a series for the fanbase.

With Eriko, Sei and Youko having graduated, the Yamayurikai are reduced to five: Yumi and Sachiko, Rei and Yoshino and Shimako alone as Rosa Gigantea. In her typical style, but not without some lovely drama about religious beliefs, Shimako finds her petite soeur Noriko without too much fuss. After all she struggled for independence at first, Yoshino is too close to Rei to consider a younger sister just yet. Meanwhile, Yumi is conflicted: she has gotten closer to the prickly but vulnerable Touko, but never knows quite where she stands with her, while the hilariously tall Kanako is a fan of Yumi and may share a similar personality to her beloved onee-sama.

The loss of subtlety is not purely in the opening and ending sequences. It creeps into the dialogue and character interactions too. The girls end up daydreaming about one another and getting giddy over ‘dates’ in a way that could have worked played just right, but get presented in a way not many steps above the poor imitation that is Strawberry Panic.

On the other hand, while these elements prevent the series living up to its first seasons, that is not to say the episodes are not highly enjoyable, or that I would not eagerly watch each of them. I may not have liked Touko much, even after her reasons were revealed (not sufficient excuses), and I thought the way Noriko was manipulated was horrible and not at all like the dignified Yamiyurikai of old, I accepted both storylines and the decisions made by the characters. And enjoyed all of it – I care what happens to Yumi and Yoshino, and where the relationships go. The gentleness of the relationships and the soft character-based humour (as well as the zany omake DVD extras) always made me smile, and the pacing, acting and art remained distinctive and enjoyable.

Not, perhaps, everything it could have been, but still part of a favourite series, and highly enjoyable to watch.

フルーツバスケット / Fruits Basket

I finally finished watching Fruits Basket, and I have to admit a certain disappointment. It’s not because I was expecting too much (though everyone I’ve spoken to about the show has been almost universally positive), nor that the ending let down the series (as it did for many).

I simply didn’t like the show at all, from only a few episodes in to the very end. I hoped that it would improve, but sadly, the climax of the series was probably its weakest element.

Furuba belongs to a very specific type of anime that is very obviously written by a woman, along with Gakuen Alice, Hikaru no Go and anything by CLAMP. I don’t just mean shoujo (the loose genre aimed at girls) - which Hikaru no Go is not - and nor do I dislike anime with an obvious female mangaka, but there are certain characteristics which recur – in particular, lots of bishounen and biseinen (pretty male characters), usually rather androgynous and invariably hinted to be less than entirely straight; a preponderance of angst - lots and lots of angst, obsession and dark childhoods, through which the principle female character can often help the poor boy(s); and finally, cutesy mascots/sidekicks. This is all fine: in fact, most of it makes for some great drama. But in furuba, it’s so tedious and monotonous that I often finished an episode thinking the story could’ve been told in a third of the time.

The story is simple: sweet and pure Honda Tohru, who has been living in a tent so as not to inconvenience anyone, befriends and moves in with the Souma family. It soon transpires that the Soumas are cursed, transforming into animals from the Chinese zodiac whenever hugged by members of the opposite sex. This leads to some amusing farcical situations, especially as they return to human form sans clothing a la Woof, but it soon transpires that every single one of this accursed family has some weird personality quirk. As, indeed, do all the peripheral characters.

This means most of the characters are little more than one-trick ponies, never actually developing any depth. The comedy also falls short: jokes are repeated ad nauseum, and there’s only so much appeal to watching weird people being weird. This would be alright if the drama was compelling, but honestly, the endlessly formulaic appearances of tortured characters, who Honda persuades to cheer up by being terribly terribly earnest begins to grate.

Add to this unresolved and uninteresting love triangles, one bizarre mutant and an incomprehensible obedience to a clearly deranged head of the family, and you get an insipid, repetitive anime. Yes, there were some very cute moments, especially with the younger members of the cast and the animals, but I got the impression it was all supposed to be achingly pretty. It wasn’t.

(Originally written 05.05.05. I've been told many times the manga goes on to be far better, and genuinely intend to find out if that's the case. But six years have now passed...and I've never yet felt the inclination.)

ひぐらしのなく頃に / Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni / When the Cicadas Cry / Higurashi: When They Cry

I’m not going to deny it. I only watched this because of its great impact on the anime community. If it were one of those obscure series I often watch, it also would have been one of very few series I’ve dropped, and it’s quite hard to get me to forget something permanently.

As it is, I watched all 26 episodes, and will most likely subject myself to …Kai, the second season. But I cannot for the life of me understand this series’ enduring popularity, over here as well as in Japan. It is just one of the worst anime I have ever seen, in every aspect. The only thing I can say without reservation is that I like the song played over the opening credits…and I can’t even phrase that as ‘I like the opening’, because I really wish they didn’t have Rena’s face appearing over that splat noise on the bass just before the beat kicks in, because it’s always unintentionally amusing.

Anyway, there is very little to recommend Higurashi. I can only think of two reasons you would like this: you’re extremely squeamish but like things that make you cringe just a little bit, or you like the fanservice of tiny girls who look about 5, drawn so close to super-deformed that it doesn’t look like their hands could actually touch the top of their heads. Me, I found the violence unimpressive and the fanservice unattractive. Yes, having to rip off your own fingernails as a form of atonement will make anyone cringe, but it just makes me think of the yakuza, who in real life famously cut off whole joints from their fingers to make amends or just to pledge loyalty, which is rather more horrific, and realer. As for the fanservice, there’s very little attractive in the girls here, partly because they’re really annoying and partly because they’re really badly drawn.

Let’s deal with those two things separately. First, the characters. There’s nothing wrong with the two main boys (Keiichi and Satoko's brother Satoshi), plain old everyman characters, nor with the peripheral, functional cast. But at the centre of the story are the five girls. And all of them – every single one – can suddenly change from cute to psychotic. Ridiculously, the voice actresses are directed to totally change voices, meaning that the tiny little blue-haired girl with the cute voice will suddenly start sounding like a middle-aged woman. Not creepy. Just makes you think of the Japanese actress in the booth. Otherwise, the characters are annoying anyway, especially the little ones, one of whom goes, ‘Nii-paa!’ for no reason and refers to herself as a boy, while the other has a fixation on her brother. Really aiming low, this series.

Then there’s the art. Presumably drawn from an amateurish game, it’s very ugly. Exaggerated hair colour and jarringly cutesy designs, very simple lines, lots of off-model frames and poor animation, especially when the girls go nuts. I’m sure it’s supposed to be creepy, but the ridiculous distortion of Shion’s face when she’s shaking the ladder is just totally laughable, and the size of Rena’s mouth when laughing just makes her look like Kimura from Azumanga Daioh – surely not the desired effect.

All of which would be fine with a good story. This ain’t a good story. Telling events out of order may confuse people, but it does not make a story clever. ‘Which identical twin is which?’ really is just so lazy. And the overall concept? Badly thought-out to fit around desired events, rather than them arising naturally from it. Convoluted, lazy and not exactly watertight. The series’ climax? A girl has taken a school hostage, threatening to blow it up, with a timed bomb they know is plugged into the mains.

Not once does anyone think of, y’know, just shutting off the power.

Cheesy, ugly and unintelligent, it makes me sad that people might think this is the best that anime has to offer. It’s a triumph for marketing, I suppose, because people are talking about this show. I just cannot fathom why anyone would think it was good.

(Originally written 19.6.08)

マリア様がみてる / Maria-sama ga Miteru (seasons 1+2)

Occasionally, an anime comes along that is very different from everything else around it. It may not be the most prominent or the most successful show airing, but its influence can be discerned in its wake like ripples on a still pond. One such a show is Maria-sama ga Miteru.

No explosions, monsters or giant robots here. No zany comedy and every few stylised facial expressions. Maria-sama ga Miteru is a show about life at a very distinctive girls’ school, and the pace is slow, stately and elegant, the result best described as exquisite.

Lillian High School is a French convent-influenced Catholic school for girls in Japan. In order to help girls assimilate into the environment, there is in place what is called the ‘Soeur System’, in which an older girl takes a new student under her wing, presenting her with a rosary as a symbolic gesture. All the girls look up to the student council called the Yamayurikai, headed by the three roses – Rosa Foetida, Rosa Chinensis and Rosa Gigantea, along with their soeurs. The story begins when a quiet, insecure girl named Yumi is selected as a petite souer by Sachiko, a rather stern and distant girl who is Rosa Chinensis en bouton – the petite souer of Rosa Chinensis.

The underlying system is rather complicated, but the stories are generally simple – how little dramas in the relationships of the various soeurs are dealt with, told through Yumi’s eyes. Based on a series of novels that were unexpected hits with older teenaged boys who lapped up the homoerotic undertones of the girls’ absolute devotion to one another, and there is a romance and sophistication to the series, as well as a seemingly limitless charm, that makes it irresistible.

The art is somewhat inconsistent, and still frames often look very ugly – girls with strange pointy noses or painfully skinny bodies – and there is little to animate, but the simple, muted style suits the tone perfectly, and the real stars are the writers and the voice actors. Marimite (as it is known to fans) has one success that stands above the rest – the characters. They are quite simply the most believable characters I’ve seen in an anime, with varying levels of complexity. One of my favourite moments came when I rewatched the first episode of this anime after the end of the first series. When I first saw it, I was thrown in at the deep end, seeing all these unfamiliar characters who all seemed to be part of this one organised group, and I was barely able to distinguish between them, but the disorientation perfectly matched Yumi’s confusion. But then later, I had got to know all the characters and rewatching the scenes, I saw how each of their personalities were always there, but I just didn’t know them well enough to see them on the first viewing.

Everything is very gentle, stately and somewhat idealised – the girls are all very different, but all totally lovely, and life’s problems usually come unravelled in the end. Still, there’s a yearning quality to the beauty that I respond to, understanding why this ideal is so attractive. It’s the flaws that make it believable, the adult edge to all the innocence that make it seem so much more real.

And the fan community (as well as the official creators, with outtake-style DVD extras that are utterly hilarious) has responded to Marimite with great fervour, understanding transplanting the characters into bizarre scenarios works so much better because they’re presented so seriously to begin with. I for one can’t get enough of Nuclear Soeur The Fighter or Maribato, the totally inappropriate shooting and fighting doujin (fan-made) games.

But what really matters is that (while Yoshino is my favourite), Yumi is just the cutest person ever to grace a screen. Ever.

(originally written 31.3.06. Seasons 3-4 here)

地獄少女 / Jigoku Shoujo / Hell Girl (season 1)

When a person has been wronged and is desperate for revenge, they can turn to Enma Ai, also known as Jigoku Shoujo (‘Hell Girl’, but without such cheesy comic-book connotations). Through a mysterious website, accessible only at midnight, they can name the one who wronged them, and have them instantly taken to Hell for all eternity. But two holes appear as you curse a person – you cannot have them damned without being damned yourself, although unlike them, you at least get to live out the rest of your life.

Jigoku Shoujo is an interesting piece. Most of its 26 episodes explore its concept in a way reminiscent of Shinigami no Ballad – we get introduced each episode to a new character with new problems, usually having their lives wrecked by some amoral person, from abusive parents to bullies, see them have a crisis of conscience, and then finally they decide to damn those who wrong them. Although there are some mis-fires, some parts that become daft instead of creepy, by and large the damnation sequences, where Enma Ai and her associates torture the miscreant are effective, and the budget is high enough here to show some really impressive art and animation. The character designs are excellent, and Jigoku Shoujo herself is iconic. The main flaw is that things get quite repetitive, with over 20 episodes generally built upon the same premise.

Only towards the end do important questions get addressed: except perhaps the vet, who was evil but hardly deserved damnation, all the revenges seemed justified, and ia few times delaying only causes more suffering for the innocents. It’s painted as a noble self-sacrifice, bearing damnation in order to rid the world of some horrible person. But what if the person doesn’t deserve to be taken to hell? Does Enma Ai refuse? This is addressed in the final arc, when a little girl with a strange connection to Jigoku Shoujo and her detective father investigate her. Soon, they learn of her past, which is very typical of Japanese horror.

What Jigoku Shoujo has in abundance is elegance. It’s stately, and pretty, and concerns itself with beautiful things and tragedies. It has something of a Poe gothic horror story in its juxtaposition of a refined way of living and the horrors of damnation. It is never rushed, never concerned about keeping its audience’s attention with bangs and crashes. It moves at its own pace, and concentrates on building mood.

As it is well-written, well-acted and well-animated, it achieves this all well. There is a second season to watch yet, and I will certainly be checking it out – at a slow, even pace, no doubt!

(originally written 15.5.08)

プリンセス・プリンセス/ Purinsesu・Purinsesu / Princess Princess

How much of this can you swallow? While you’d be forgiven in the context of this pervy anime for thinking that question was a nasty bit of innuendo, in fact I really am talking about the premise. Alright, so here we go: -

In an elite boarding school for high school boys, a novel solution has been put forward to solve the problem of what to do about all those hormones flying about in an environment with no girls. They take two or three of the prettiest boys in the year, dress them up as girls and call them ‘princesses’. While as the disastrous debacle of the live action adaptation illustrated, this could never work in real life, since these are anime boys, they can pull it off convincingly. We follow a new boy as he joins the school and is selected as the third princess of his year. To convince the boys, who are of course rather unwilling to be dressed as girls, they are given special privileges. If they still resist, the student council resorts to blackmail. So to enjoy this anime, you must accept the following things: that boys in a boarding school will go wild for other boys dressed as girls, yet never actually, y’know, sexually assault them; that no-one will think of it as homosexuality, because all boys are fundamentally straight – unless it’s a deep dark secret to be hinted at obliquely, because that’s the most fun way; that anyone pretty will be lit with soft light and framed in roses, and that their beauty will bowl away anyone in the vicinity; that sports teams will improve purely because pretty girls are cheering them; that deep down, all boys WANT to be dressing up as girls with their friends; and finally, that blackmail, coercion and ritual humiliation are both funny and cute. Yup, the writers know their audience well. A whole lot of yaoi fans, mostly women between 15 and 45, absolutely lapped this series up.

I could give it a certain leeway because it’s a comedy show. It’s not supposed to be realistic, or serious, or anything but a way to get girls hot under the collar and/or cover. So what if the premise is daft, as long as the show’s funny? Indeed, the episode that worked least well was the one where an outsider came to the school and was shocked and alarmed at the system, only to find out that the system conferred privileges long after leaving the school, so let his objections drop; it was much better when everyone just swallowed the system hook, line and sinker, because if people actually doubted it could work, the fact that it really, really couldn’t was brought back and broke the spell of suspended disbelief.

But the real problem with the show is that it just isn’t funny. Oh look, someone has a huge over-reaction. Now this boy is being teased by the others, who are threatening to reveal his secret to the uninitiated. Now some stock thugs are being scared away by the handsome henchman character with super-strength. Various extremely artificial dramas are resolved in extremely artificial ways, and not one line of the writing is original, clever or well-done. Princess Princess actually made me yearn for Ouran High School Host Club, which had very similar faults but was at least funny.

I contemplated abandoning Puri-Puri (as it is often abbreviated by fans) after the second episode, but watched the rest as something light and inoffensive. In fact, I really should have gone with my gut instinct. Nothing here hasn’t been done a hundred times before, a hundred times better. The art is nice but bland. The animation is cheap and functional. The voice acting is above-par, but since I’m currently re-watching Gankutsuou, hearing the seiyuu who played Albert having to deliver such lame dialogue is a bit painful.

And the tallest princess, voiced by Paku Romi, didn’t even look like a girl except when his hair was up in pigtails.

(originally written 2.12.06)

グラビテーション / Gravitation

Really, Gravitation is three different shows: first, a rather sweet romance between an older and a younger man; second, the story of a J-Pop band following their idols; and third, a zany screwball comedy with lots of Super Deformed art, bizarre costumes and visual gags. Sure, there is a lot of cross-pollination, but the three elements are fairly distinct.

It’s a shame, because the first of these ingredients, the main draw, promises an enticing dish, but the others spoil the flavour and leave behind a taste that in the end is overwhelmingly sour.

Gravitation is a short series: 13 episodes. There is also a two-part OVA, which predates the series by a year or two, and presumably paved the way for it; the series covers some similar ground, but with a less rushed narrative and higher-quality animation. Both suffer from the same failings.

I really wanted to like Gravitation. The beginning was auspicious, with a promising love story centred on the typical anime same-sex coupling of a stern, emotionally repressed older character and an optimistic, cheerful younger one. The former worries the latter doesn’t care, while really their love of life is teaching them how to open up, and all the rest of it. (See also: Loveless, Maria-sama ga Miteru.) I identified rather more with the austere, emotionally repressed writer with a dark past, Yuki Eiri, than perhaps I would like to, and the winsome, cuddly, needy Shuichi Shindou admittedly seemed adorable. So far, so good. Yes, the flashback angst was a little overwrought and the push-pull dynamic got a tad repetitive, but if there was anything I cared about in this series, it was the central characters.

But they were left woefully undeveloped, because instead the series decided to get cheap adrenaline rushes from concert scenes, and I was subjected to probably the worst rising-band storyline I’ve ever seen. Yes, Beck made me sneer once or twice, but it was a mirror to the world compared to Gravitation. Bad Luck, Shindou’s band, go from unknowns with barely any material to million-selling artists after one or two publicity stunts. Yes, it’s J-Pop (the band has a guitarist, keyboardist and singer, but sounds like a nightclub), and whiffs of Johnny’s abound, but the story is so ridiculous, with so many daft insertions of how real-life drama affects every aspect of Shindou’s professional life that it really annoyed me.

But the comedy killed this series for me. Like Furi Kuri, it just wasn’t as funny as it thought it was. There were amusing parts, undoubtedly, but after the ninetieth ridiculous costume, explosion, stupid SD face or fatal-looking slapstick fall, I never wanted to see Shuichi Shindou again, the annoying little tit.

(originally written 30.3.06)

Read or Die

Upon watching RoD for the first time on October 13, 2002, here’s what I wrote: ‘Watched the utterly mad Read or Die, an insane story of an avid reader who is ‘The Paper’ – given the ability to forge shields, shuriken or (best of all) a giant paper aeroplane out of a briefcase full of A4 sheets. The Paper must foil plots to get a resurrected Beethoven to play his ‘Subliminal Suicide Song’, an eventuality which will cause the destruction of humanity! It was as bizarre as it sounds, and even funnier.’

While indeed, RoD is a totally insane piece of anime exuberance, my view of it necessarily changed in light of my fondness for RoD the TV, the series that followed. I actually liked the latter enough to rather wish that it had nothing to do with the original OVA (or novels), because that silliness doesn’t suit the slightly more serious tone that makes the series work well. Both stand well alone, but - despite recurring characters, setting and silly paper manipulation conceit - rather clash with each other.

It’s the OVA that endures as the more iconic and memorable work, for better or for worse. There is something impressive about its endless absurdity and sheer joyful exuberance. But for my money, RoD the TV shows what it could’ve been.

ヘタリア/ Hetalia

When did I first hear about Hetalia? Hrmm, a few months before the anime. I enjoyed a web-manga called Afughanisu-tan, and after it was all translated people online compared it to Hetalia. A few girls I know started talking about it, saying it was adorable, and then all of a sudden it was an anime, it was dubbed…it was huge.

Hetalia personifies the countries of the world, almost all of them as pretty or cute boys. A few countries are girls, but…well, none feature very prominently. The first season concentrates on the Second World War and the relationship between the Axis powers, while the second is more general, mostly twentieth century but with a bit of variety.

Its success is astronomical. Teenage girls in particular latched onto the characters and the numerous homoerotic hints and begun to draw, write and enact all sorts of perverted things. There can be few anime fans now who have not heard of Hetalia, and as with many popular things, it now attracts a lot of hatred. Much of this is directed only at the fans, who tend to be loud and obnoxious, and do things like have pictures taken doing Nazi salutes on Passover, or disrupt veterans' parades and drag flags around indifferent to whether they go on the floor or not.

This doesn’t bother me, but a lot does. I mostly get frustrated at how it just doesn’t seem like the writer really understands any of the history he is writing about (and yes, the mangaka is male). I accept that Hetalia is supposed to be about stereotypes, and how a Japanese person (presumably also influenced by life in America, where he spent three years) sees other nationalities - often very differently from how we do in England - but too much just doesn’t make sense. How is carefree, stupid Italy compatible with the Fascists and Mussolini? (There are occasional references to orders from ‘bosses’ but I’m talking about national characteristics.) Why is only Italy (and right at the end Germany) split into two separate parts, when other countries have at least that much difference between their different regions? Does he know about Finland and Russia’s war? Does he know about Italy’s campaigns in Africa, a continent almost entirely ignored here? The invasion of Libya and slaughter of the Bedouins? Does he think that the Holy Roman Empire was around at a time that it could interact with anything resembling modern Italy? Does he think that ‘Splendid Isolation’ meant the UK was politically alone…during the British Empire when it ruled half the globe (as opposed to isolated from the great powers of Europe)? Does he really think that Japan’s arguments in favour of whaling are eloquent and persuasive (even put in the mouth of a cat)? There were just too many little irritating mistakes or misinterpretations: I’d probably have liked Hetalia if it just stuck to stereotypes interacting and funny little nuggets of information, but superfluous and inaccurate bases for plot points just irritated me too much.

The only part that worked really well was Sealand. Not just because he was adorable, but because Sealand is just so simple and easy to understand, as well as fundamentally funny, so he couldn’t really get things wrong.

Otherwise, well, episodes were only five minutes long, and most of the humour was just character-based – if repetitive – so there was no great horror to watching it. But too much irritated me to recommend Hetalia.

I bet the feature-length film will be terrible, too.

ヴァンパイア騎士/ Vampire Knight

A popular young girl in a prestigious school is in love with a powerful and mysterious vampire schoolmate. However, she is also in love with her best friend, who hates vampires and is trained to kill them, restrained only by an uneasy truce. The girl for some reason seems to be special, though, with blood the vampires find irresistible and some strange, latent powers of her own. When she is threatened, will the men she loves be able to put aside differences and work together to protect her?

If this all sounds like Twilight to you, you won’t be the first to make that observation. But while Vampire Knight is indeed also highly derivative, about as lazily misogynistic despite being written by and for girls, and very nearly as downright poorly-conceived, it grows in a very different direction from Twilight (which itself supposedly grows in a challenging direction in the final book) and is a little cleverer. On the other hand, it contains elements to make the audience squirm every bit as much as glittering skin and yet shares a compulsive quality, where despite the overall plots being terrible and the characters being very hard to sympathise with, its screen adaptation is stylish and pretty enough to make it watchable and even compelling - though that's not to say it does not have irritating elements large and small.

I thought that this might just be the worst bit of vampire fiction I had ever come across when I first started to watch it. The academy the action takes place in has a ‘Day Class’ of ordinary students and a ‘Night Class’ of vampires – with the cover story that they are all models and celebrities, and work during the day, so have to study during the evenings. Thus, we’re shown a world where a group of elite students go to school each day with girls screaming at them for attention and getting overexcited about how beautiful they are. If there has ever been an awkward and contrived way to present a group of characters as attractive and superior, it is this. Vampires as teenaged heartthrobs. Vaguely acceptable as a background detail, but not centre-stage.

Later in the series, made up of two thirteen-episode seasons, the plot develops in more interesting directions. Yuki discovers her past is not what she thought it was, her vampire love interest Kaname is revealed to have been quite the puppetmaster, and her childhood friend Zero not only has to wrestle with his changing nature after himself being bitten, but meets his identical twin, presumed dead, for considerably more drama. There’s easily enough to keep the drama going, as well as some rather poor action, some spoilt by over-powered vampires just making lower life forms pop, the rest underwhelming because of the ‘level E’ concept in the world of this story.

True vampires, you see, are born and not made. Only children of vampires are really stable, and purebloods are the most powerful. Those who are bitten and lose their humanity are first puppets, and later feral ‘level E’ monsters, like the zombies of 28 Days Later. While at least offering an explanation why not everybody desperately wants to join the elite bloodsucking club, in practice the mindless zombie-vamps are extremely stupid and drag down the tone.

And Vampire Knight also has many of the worst shoujo tropes. The ‘Ouran High School Host Club with vampires’ opening episodes notwithstanding, most of those initial vampire characters ending up being unimportant, undeveloped peripheral figures, the main drama is replete with the things that mystify me: the strong-willed girl actually ends up constantly powerless in the hands of men, pulling sex faces as she is bitten and restrained. Rape – or symbolic rape, with neck-biting instead of violation – ends up being something titillating, helplessness being erotic. Identical twins are portrayed in annoyingly patronising manner, talking about being incomplete, stealing life from one another in the womb, wanting to be combined as one and suchlike. And the best kind of power is not earned through hard work or devotion, but what is given by birthright: nobility and influence trump earning or proving anything.

Vampire Knight was wildly popular for its run. It is now almost never mentioned. A shallow flash in the pan, I feel.

Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works

I didn’t know quite what to expect from Unlimited Blade Works, and for the first half thought it was just a remake, something along the lines of Evangelion 1.0, but with a series much less necessary to update. I shrugged off elements that I didn’t quite remember as my fuzzy memory of a series that honestly wasn’t all that memorable. But when Gilgamesh defeated Berserker and little Illyasviel was definitively taken out of the story, I knew that this was an alternate scenario from the game. And that was a good thing, because just retelling the original story but with a little more eye candy would have been unnecessary and quite annoying, especially as the first act was far too rushed.

Given that the story of a full season was squeezed into 105 minutes, that was no great surprise, but given that this film really makes little sense to the uninitiated and is purely for the fans, I thought the exposition could have been dispensed of altogether, preferably to give more time to Saber, who was altogether extraneous in this version, even being a damsel in distress for one chunk. The main storyline has a more satisfying ending, but the Unlimited Blade Works storyline focuses on the relationship between Shirou and Archer, which is a lot more complex than it may seem.

All the strengths of the series are here, and the faults are mostly only when the film is considered as a standalone work as opposed to a companion piece. And it is nice to see the characters, especially Saber, with a feature film production budget. Some sequences were utterly gorgeous, and there were some shots of Rin that showed subtle emotion in a way that was just perfect. On the other hand, the fight scenes were decidedly unimpressive and the stupid blob thing with the much stupider static Shinji head in it really let down the whole climactic section. Saving a fight with the assassin, who wasn’t a proper character at all, until right at the end also felt like awkward plotting.

But the purpose of the film wasn’t really great storytelling. It was putting a visual novel well-loved by a hardcore fanbase into motion, and if details are skipped, they know them all anyway. Too bad I just never liked Fate/Stay Night that much.

Fate/Stay Night

One of the stones that’s caused the most ripples on the anime pond this year, Fate/Stay Night has met with a lot of excitable rhetoric and some very mixed reviews. While it seemed to be aiming for last season’s Mai-HiME status, with beautiful art, animation and direction (lots of interesting little cinematography tricks, from quick cuts to Dutch angles) it didn’t create nearly so much buzz, nor prove anywhere near as exciting. It reminded me more of Shakugan no Shana, which I began watching at the same time – a pretty much ordinary boy is saved by a mysterious and powerful girl and is dragged into a strange world of magic and combat, while at the same time the girl becomes integrated into his private life and their feelings for one another get increasingly complex. And while it wasn’t as childish as SnoS, it also wasn’t as charming, and where it really fell down was in the character development.

The anime was based on a visual novel from Type-Moon, meaning that a lot of the fanbase was already established. Perhaps as a result of being an adaptation, the story felt rushed, cluttered and poorly paced. The story is a typical one: a young boy with a tragic past, aware of magic but totally lacking in talent for it, becomes involved in a battle of mages. This time, the mages are fighting for the Holy Grail. No, really, the Holy Grail. To help in their fights, these ‘Masters’ summon ‘Servants’, legendary fighters from throughout time, calling them by their ‘class’ rather than their name, to avoid betraying secrets. Just as we in the West find Eastern imagery funky, the Japanese love Western mythology, and draw on it heavily here, with the usual characters that pop up in role-playing games: Gilgamesh and Medea are just two of the fighters summoned. Our main character, Emiya Shirou, inadvertently manages to summon the ‘Saber’ class warrior, a beautiful blonde girl who turns out to be…King Arthur. Yes, a girl. Arturia.

I’m very keen on my Arthurian legends (in fact, since my enthusiasm for Middle English is growing, now that I don’t HAVE to study it, I should probably read Malory, who I all but ignored in college), but I don’t mind something a little different being tried, and all the characters are pretty far from their origins: Heracles is a huge brainless powerhouse with twelve lives, Medea a powerful energy-bolt-shooting sorceress, etc.

When Shirou is brutalised after entering this conflict, for some reason a classmate, Tousaka Rin, heals him and begins to help him. The true identity of her ‘Servant’ is never revealed, though I’ve found out the truth since from those who’ve played the visual novel. As successive enemies are defeated, Shirou’s power grows, and his relationships with various girls, especially Saber, become more and more complicated. This is compounded by the fact that more than one of his rivals in the war are cute girls who come to live with him. There are scenes reminiscent of Rozen Maiden, where the tensions of various different characters interacting are played upon for comic effect, but the characters just aren’t likeable, familiar or dynamic enough for this to work. Only Shirou and Saber get any sort of development, but most of it is terribly long-winded and reveals lots about painful pasts, but little about the characters those pasts shaped. Saber’s difficulty expressing emotion is cute, but soon becomes tiresome.

What really hurts the series is the convoluted story. It starts simple – there are opponents to beat against the odds, so they fight. Attempting to elevate this to something more ambitious, the writers throw in overlong flashbacks, introduce characters from behind the scenes who really do nothing to flesh out the story, and keep changing their minds about what can be done with the Holy Grail, but since it’s just a magic McGuffin, they can do whatever they like with it, ESPECIALLY if it involves crucifying naked young girls on it for no apparent reason.

The show had style. Great music, great art, great animation, great fights (until the end, where it was just energy bolts, and previously powerful characters were culled in moments). A good premise. But I’ve seen it all before, and I’ve seen it done so much better. Ultimately, a bit of a disappointment.

(originally written 28.6.06. Sequel movie Unlimited Blade Works here)

しおんの王 / Shion no Ou / Shion’s King

Perhaps unusually, I’m predisposed to like manga and anime about board games. Shounen Jump’s Hikaru no Go remains my favourite manga, and amongst my favourite anime. So even when people were mocking the exaggerated animations for shougi players making their moves, I wasn’t at all phased by the concept. This was one of the series the anime club watched in my masters’ year on the day of the week I didn’t attend, but the club president’s taste was usually pretty spot-on (possibly excepting Allison and Lillia) so I picked this up.

It’s taken me until now, more than a year later, to actually finish watching it, and however similar the titles sound, Shion no Ou is certainly no Hikaru no Go. While both revolve around teenagers playing board games with, despite any exaggerated animations for placing pieces, a generally realistic tone, the genres each borrow from to create their drama are very different, and I find Shion no Ou markedly less sophisticated.

While, despite its supernatural conceit, Hikaru no Go mainly revolved around the relationship between two rivals and interpersonal relationships, Shion no Ou has at its centre a murder mystery. Murder stories can be sophisticated and extremely clever, but this one is rather predictable, obvious and cheesy.

Shion was born into the world of shougi, or Japanese chess. Her father is a Kishi, a professional player, and by the age of four she was recognized as prodigiously talented. However, an unknown murderer kills both her parents, the trauma leaving her struck dumb. However, she is taken in by fellow shougi players, and the story starts when she is in her teens and ready to enter the world of professional players. Is the killer somewhere amongst them?

It’s slightly odd, considering the thought processes behind these characters. Shion is adorable, childlike and while very strong in her chosen field, rather hapless and very naïve outside it. It’s an increasingly familiar type of character, seen in other works aimed at an older-teenaged male audience, like Bamboo Blade, Gunslinger Girl, even the likes of Lucky Star. Essentially, she is a little child that the insecure male would feel comfortable dominating and find extremely sweet. Normally that’s just fine for me, but the way this anime seems to seek to make a character moé by making her experience a grisly murder and giving her a disability that can most likely be magically overcome later on doesn’t sit quite right with me, even if Shion is extremely likeable. The rest of the cast are largely uninteresting: a cross-dressing boy who will very soon see his duplicity is wrong, a girl whose primary characteristic is hero-worship of a father figure, a prime suspect who seems to snarl and posture far too much and thus more or less counts himself out as the actual villain, leaving only one other person it could have been, making for a very obvious ending.

For its shortcomings, though, I enjoyed Shion no Ou quite a lot. These characters may be unoriginal but they were all likeable, and Shion’s sweet nature and painful past makes you care what happens to her, even for rather cheap reasons in writing terms. There is real warmth in the interactions between the friendly characters and even if Kawasumi Ayako is just doing her default thoughtful-Nodame voice and Paku Romi has done this exact performance a zillion times already, the voice acting is strong. The animation is largely stilted and functional, but the penultimate episode has some nice experimental segments, unusual for Studio Deen.

Ultimately, though, Shion no Ou just lacks a real hook. The characters are likeable, but you’re never on the edge of your seat wanting to see what’s going to happen. The murder angle is clichéd and slow. So rather loathe as I am to say it, I can’t call this anime anything other than mediocre. Cute and worth seeing, but certainly no classic.

満月をさがして / Furu Muun o Sagashite / Searching For the Full Moon

For a long time, circa 2003-2005, Full Moon o Sagashite was #1 on Animenfo’s ‘Top 100 Anime’ list, which was based on fan votes. Arguably that was because its relatively small audience found little to object to in such a charming anime, while the more prominent and boyish anime it outranked, like Rurouni Kenshin and Akira, had their vociferous detractors. The show still made some big ripples, and even though its run was just when I was starting to become a real anime obsessive, it had started just that little bit too late, and only now have I gotten around to watching it.

In many ways, Full Moon o Sagashite is an archetypal girls’ series: a sweet, happy-go-lucky young orphan girl is living a stifled life with her overprotective grandmother, but has a big dream – in this case, to become a singer. But thanks to a sarcoma in her throat, little Mitsuki has only a year to live. For some reason, she has the ability to see the Shinigami (gods of death in Japanese mythology) who have come to ensure no-one interferes with her fate, and even manages to convince them to use their magic to transform her into a sixteen-year-old so that she can begin her singing career.

Everything in Full Moon o Sagashite is cute. Mitsuki is a thoroughly lovely girl, who has a pure ambition, pure love, and often acts selflessly, though rebels and argues when she feels she has good reason, meaning she’s believable as a very, very sweet twelve-year-old. The people working with her in the music industry have her best interests in mind, and even the nasty rival figure is soon won over. The gods of death are of course wonderfully pretty and not only have cutesy kemono-mimi but can transform into adorable mascot characters – that genuinely are very cute. Of course, Mitsuki’s rise to prominence is jarringly fast, her very first single selling hugely, though since she’s a heavily-produced, heavily-promoted aidoru (pop idol) this makes a degree of sense. Studio Deen, the show’s creators (responsible for other cute shows like Binchou-tan and Maria-sama Ga Miteru), made the excellent decision of actually hiring real singers to voice Mitsuki (and her rival Madoka) and getting good songs written for them, which you can really believe would sell well – for that’s often the crucial element that music anime (like Beck) lack.

Arguably the real meat of the story would have fit into a 26-episode series rather than a slightly slow 52-episode run, but the relaxed pace and episodic nature to the middle part actually helped create a mood of relaxed intimacy that helped make proceedings more likeable. The anime, which like many adaptations that begin while the manga is still running, veers off in its own direction when it runs out of source material, is perhaps less mature and less realistic than the version fully realised by a single mangaka (the anime, for example, never shows how a singer has to struggle to stay in the public eye, and rather sidelines Meroko), but its pace is far more conducive to the kind of atmosphere in which this sort of story thrives – unhurried, detailed, rich in character; the manga, on the other hand, can at times seem like a rushed infodump.

Full Moon o Sagashite may not feature clashes for the fate of the world; it may not have the best, deepest study of how death affects people (though there are some lip-wobbling moments), nor have all its details fully worked out (for an anime all about death and the certainty of an afterlife, it seems strange that people are always insisting on what a loss it is, especially since Izumi tempting Mizuki with a vision of Heaven gives such a great opportunity to discuss the issue). However, it is a light little drama-comedy with some profound moments that at the very least will always stick in the mind, and always bring a smile to the face.

(Originally written 9.7.2007)