ローゼンメイデン トロイメント/ Rozen Maiden Träumend

Twelve episodes simply weren’t enough for this wonderful series. The director has made comments suggesting that there won’t be any more, but given the show’s huge popularity and the fact that the ending left the plot wide open for a new series, possibly going back to the manga storyline, it seems likely there’ll be at least a little more animated, and I for one cannot wait!

Picking up where Rozen Maiden left off, Träumend restores Suigintou (for reasons still not quite lucid) and introduces the remaining dolls created by Rozen, a dollmaker able to bestow apparent life upon his creations. For all his skill, Rozen demands his creations fight until only one is left, each taking something from the last, in order that the last one standing will become ‘Alice’, the perfect girl.

But it is not the Mai-HiME/Battle Royale-style contest that drives this series. Indeed, the majority of the dolls take up a pacifist stance for most of the series, and cohabit with Jun, a human boy chosen as several of the dolls’ 'medium' – the source of their unearthly powers. This is why the somewhat kitsch concept works so well – the dolls all have distinct, amusing personalities, and their living together makes the tone of large parts of the series more akin to a sitcom than a combat-driven action story. Every one of the dolls, except the sociopathic Barasuishou, are extremely likeable, with their own distinct appeal and flaws. It’s the characters that make the story special; you really care what happens to them.

Aesthetically, it’s hard to fault. The dolls are designed in a fantasised Victorian style, with heavy influences from the mostly Japanese craze of Gothic Lolita, and they look can creepy, adorable, stylish and silly as their personalities, or even simply the situation demands. The music is great, from the unforgettable ALI Project opening to the generic but driving guitar rock of the battle scenes. Fight scenes were very over-the-top, but also undeniably cool.

Everything is wound up pretty quickly towards the end, but even if some of the twists are pretty much deus ex machina (one scene coming over as more of a Christian allegory than Narnia ever did!), they’re clever and unexpected enough for the near-reset ending to work well. The fake Barasuishou is destroyed, with one teasing glimpse of her real counterpart from the manga in the final montage again hinting at the possibility of a third series.

There hasn’t been a weak episode in the whole season. It moved at its own pace, with a simple but elegant overlying plot, and has provided more humour and more hard emotional hits than any other current anime. Highly recommended.

My only complaint is that I want more!

(originally written 30.1.06. In the event, there was an OVA released after this, Ouvertüre)

Sola

A large portion of what is wrong with the anime industry today is encapsulated in Sola. A boy one day meets a klutzy girl trying to get a strange drink out of a broken-down vending machine, and is soon drawn into a strange world of supernatural battles and magical abilities, a world which is transpires he has always been a part of.

Sola retreads the ground of Shakugan no Shana, Fate/Stay Night et al, but lacks its own clear and distinctive voice and brings nothing new to the mix. The story is from the writer of Kanon and the characters designed by the woman behind Da Capo, rehashing old tricks. There are a lot of dissonant parts that the creators evidently think are cool and want to include on the strength of that alone, but they don’t hang together well, the reasons for them coming together are flimsy and coincidental. In addition, the characters are all very flat and their relationships formulaic.

Our everyman protagonist is surrounded by the cute lead female, cute childhood friend, cute girls from school and not one but two loli characters thrown in for good measure: the little sister of his childhood friend (actually about the most interesting of any of the characters here) and a random little doll-like blonde girl in gothic Lolita clothes evidently included purely for the fun of the idea and never convincingly incorporated into the main plot.

Over the course of the series, a very simple plot unwinds, there’s a big fight and it ends with much angsting. It’s a factory-line anime, pretty-looking but deeply formulaic, safe, cliché and bland. It’s fairly enjoyable, watching the show go through the motions, but if you’ve seen everything in it before, there’s little point indulging Sola’s rehashing of old ideas. The whole thing felt like sitting through recap episodes.

I didn’t hate it – it’s on safe ground, with pretty, likeable characters – but found myself just utterly ambivalent. Apparently it’s very popular in Japan, which I must say does surprise me a bit - it was even voted top anime of 2007 by a landslide in a Japanese poll of 2,000,000 votes conducted by Yahoo Japan. That put it well ahead of anime that became very well-known to Western fandom such as Lucky Star, Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei and Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni.

(originally written 4.6.09)

ローゼンメイデン / Rozen Maiden (season 1)

It may be slightly surprising, given that it was one of my favourite anime, but all I wrote after the first season of Rozen Maiden was, ‘I tell you this: it may only have been 12 episodes, but Rozen Maiden really was an excellent anime. I’ll have to read the manga. What seemed a childish premise bloomed (forgive the pun!) into a moving, sophisticated coming-of-age story, full of symbols of puberty and based on some great humour.’ But back then I wasn’t writing out full impressions.

Rozen Maiden was the first of Peach-Pit’s series I encountered, and I think it is by far their best – although Shugo Chara is an extremely good complement to this darker and more striking work, showing the duo’s versatility and great skill in balancing humour and drama. Rozen Maiden is iconic and instantly recognisable, and if it’s part of a fad that included the likes of Saint October, it managed to be sincere and affectionate in portraying the idealised tropes of the Lolita fashion subculture and contain some of the most striking characters, designs and magical abilities in all anime. Oh, and great music.

Jun is a ‘hikkikomori’, a shut-in who has become acutely socially withdrawn after problems at school. He amuses himself by ordering things with a trial period and then returning them before having to pay. At one point he finds a mysterious message asking him if he wishes to ‘wind’, and flippantly answers yes. He then receives a beautiful doll in Victorian-style clothing – who soon awakens and treats Jun as a servant. She is one of seven dolls striving to defeat one another to become the perfect daughter, but as apart from one they are all on one level or another very human and sympathetic – for dolls – it is not a simple case of undertaking a series of battles.

The seven sisters’ different personalities and appearances are perhaps the central draw of Rozen Maiden, and it deeply impresses me that the series could have so much character-based humour, and yet each and every one of those characters when serious can be formidable and impressive. Rozen Maiden has beautiful art, amazing performances, hilarious humour, moving drama, a gripping concept, some superb visuals – all it needs is a strong conclusion. Alas, Peach-Pit have yet to provide us with one of those, and their track record for providing one is…not spectacular.

The anime ended up taking its own direction anyway – but there is still the Rozen Maiden II manga to adapt…