D.Gray-Man: Hallow

I have to admit, I did not expect the D.Gray-Man anime to continue. Ten years after the original began, and with the manga first going from weekly to monthly with the switch from Jump to Jump SQ, then going on a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, I just never thought we’d see an animated continuation. Which was a shame, because I’ve always had a real soft spot for Allen Walker and his motley crew of exorcists.

This short, 13-episode season continues where the last season left off, and unfortunately the chapters it covers are a bit haphazard and uneven. It’s good that the show gets to ease in again with the introduction of Timothy, whose blue mullet and cute shorts and amusing powers I’ve always enjoyed, but the problem is that no sooner is he introduced than he becomes an extremely minor background character, where he remains to the current manga chapter.

Then we have fan favourite Kanda getting his emotional backstory, as the mysterious Third Exorcist Project is undermined by the Millennium Earl by revealing Kanda and the mysterious Alma were created in the Second Exorcist Project, and using this knowledge to cause chaos. Allen gets to witness an extended memory sequence of adorable shota versions of Kanda and Alma, blessed with great strength and a healing factor, but doomed to be torn apart by the truth. It’s a nice, self-contained background story, but eats up almost the whole of this season, completely ruining its pacing.

This leaves only the final episodes to tease the story to come – which is extremely convoluted and confusing. The Millennium Earl’s true face is revealed as various new Noah make their appearance, a few of them looking way too similar to one another, and the relationship between Nea and Mana is teased. It’s a very unsatisfying cliffhanger to leave the season on, especially with so little build-up, and if this season could be kicked off by the quick and easy Timothy / Phantom Thief G story, next season would begin with – without spoiling the manga – several episodes of slow, dull, rather confusing chapters from probably the worst period of serialisation. This makes me worry we won’t see any more of the show, but where Hallow left off was a very poor end point, so I hope that’s not the case and they find a way to have the next season start in an interesting fashion, even if it means original material.

For all the small qualms I had, though, the central point is that it was a delight to see the show on the screen again. I didn’t mind all the changes in voice actors at all, though Lavi sounded a bit strange. Allen Walker remains a favourite character and with Timothy and the flashback to Alma and young Kanda, this section of the manga had a huge focus on cute adolescent boy characters. It’s nice to start seeing more depth to the Millennium Earl, and Road gets some good moments, too.

I’m still a manga reader, and that’s not going to change, but the more the manga gets adapted to an anime, the happier I’ll be, and if we get an adaptation right up until the manga’s eventual conclusion, I’ll be very happy indeed.

アキラ / Akira

So what has made Akira probably the most internationally famous piece of Japanese animation of all time? Well, there’s been a tendency to say that all anime before the 1988 landmark has been atrocious, with Akira for the first time taking the leap to smooth, impressive animation, realism and ambition. But that story doesn’t hold up well. Akira looks fantastic and has a challenging storyline, but it was hardly alone in this. By 1988 Ghibli had answers to all those things: their films have animation that stands up at least as well as Akira’s, 1988’s Hotaru no Haka’s level of realism is clearly more advanced, and Topcraft’s Nausicaa, made in 1984 by the team who would largely go on to form Ghibli, while arguably a mess, has plenty of ambition. But Akira demanded to be taken seriously as an adult piece of animation, not by being basely obscene but by being complex, gritty and occasionally gruesome. There is blood and violence here, and nudity too, but balanced by a plot more sophisticated than most sci-fi stories, a brilliantly grim atmosphere and a very interesting central relationship.

At the same time, there is much that is unsatisfying about Akira, not least in that it’s based on a much longer manga, which can go into greater depth about the world and the progression of the story. What for some people is a sophisticated plotline that needs repeated viewings and concentration to understand is for others a garbled, badly-conceived mess.

The story is this: Kaneda and Tetsuo are the leaders of a biker gang in a post-apocalyptic ‘Neo-Tokyo’. During a fight with a rival gang, Tetsuo gets mixed up with a strange government project involving small children with psychic powers and strange, preternaturally aged faces and is abducted by the military. Tetsuo is determined to have impressive potential for psychic powers, ones similar to Akira, the most disastrously powerful experiment yet, now apparently held frozen underground. He escapes from the hospital in which he and the other children are kept using the powers the government scientists have given him, but is recaptured after he meets Kaneda again. Tetsuo escapes again, his powers going out of control, and it falls to Kaneda to rescue him, with the help of a girl from an anti-government resistance movement (who looks oddly like him) – but will simmering resentments from an old rivalry get in the way?

I saw Akira when I was 12 or 13, the old Streamline-dubbed VHS version, which wasn’t as terrible as is often made out (and most of its voice actors are still working today), but was very much lacking in subtlety. I was, naturally, pretty confused, but intrigued enough to spend the time getting explanations for the parts I wasn’t clear on – and there’s really not much in Akira that doesn’t have an explanation within the film: it can be fully understood without the manga, even if it doesn’t live up to it.

The story is good and solid once you get your head around it, the characters are more than one-dimensional (if quite hard to like, especially Kaneda) and the world-building, while not exactly original, is superb. There are some real laughs in Akira as well as moments to make you wince, and the animation deserves all the praise it’s got. Not perhaps as different from all around it as has been claimed, but certainly a standout and a classic of animation. Granted, it’s a favourite because of its slightly lowbrow themes, its bloodiness and its explosions, and yes, I would rather the world thought Gauche the Cellist was the classic of animation rather than this, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Akira is excellent.

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland

The fact is that without the Ghibli connection, I would never even have heard of this rather minor Japanese-American production, intended to be a great landmark in the history of anime, but in fact one of its great disappointments.

There was so much potential here. The source material is great, a whimsical early 20th-century comic strip about a boy who goes off on various adventures when he falls asleep, usually waking up having fallen out of his bed to the sound of his parents telling him he shouldn’t have eaten various things late at night (raw onions with ice cream, for example). It’s a bizarre and beautiful little strip, startlingly modern (especially the way Flip talks to people) and hallucinogenic, with much in common with Alice in Wonderland.

The animated adaptation brought together some phenomenal talent. The big-hitters of Ghibli were involved in pre-production, Takahata and Miyazaki leaving because they wanted to tell a different story than the one that seemed to be developing. Yoshifumi Kondo, who directed Mimi-o Sumaseba, possibly my favourite of Ghibli’s movies, stayed long enough to helm a charming little test film with a very Ghibli secondary character and some stunning flight scenes. Renown Ashita no Joe/Rose of Versailles director Dezaki Osamu made a pilot that really does meld Japanese and Western animation styles in a very interesting way. Ultimately, animation was done by TMS, who produced Akira, Jarinko Chie and now do things like D.Gray-Man, which lends credence to the claim that Nemo should be classified as anime, except that they also worked on cartoons such as Inspector Gadget, Ghostbusters and Futurama.

The fact is that this could have been a superb film, but it became sanitised. It has the fingerprints of American boardrooms all over it. Yes, they got Ray Bradbury in at the beginning, but it was Chris Columbus who got screenplay credits. By the time Dezaki was doing his pilot, there was a comedy animal sidekick. Flip, who was superb in the comic because he was a sardonic, cynical wisecracker who does things like antagonise pirates to the point of execution before letting slip that his parents are powerful enough to vaporise them in an instant, becomes a jolly, grinning Mickey Rooney who may have a dark edge but is far too fun-loving.

Everything just became too safe. The story is simplistic and the animation never bravura. The characters are a bit irritating (though I did warm to the princess after her right straight punch!) and the music is bland. There’s nothing unsettling here, and it’s all sickly and wholesome and has comic relief and cute sidekick characters so dull that it would be much better without them. It’s also a bit overlong.

The designs could have been a bit less goofy. Nemo looks great in his coronation outfit but his face is far too inconsistent and too often off-model. The princess is bland and let’s face it, when she starts flirting with a child she’s just met it’s plain weird, and Flip’s characterisation grates, down to his physicality. Let’s not forget annoying ‘jester’ goblins and squirrels. The designs and colouring is just too simple for a late-80s animation. That said, I’d love to see a Bon Bon cosplayer – one of the designs that made it most intact from the original, even if I don’t think she had a name or any individuality in the strip.

I’m perhaps being a little harsh on the film. It has charming moments, cuteness that works, a functional story and a good pace. Some of the setpieces are amazing. It plays a bit with levels of reality in an effective way and the opening sometimes harks back to the test film in a good way. The acting is by and large very good, though the squirrel and the crow should’ve gone. Disappointing, but not disastrous.

(Originally written 8.8.08)

愛してるぜ ベイベ★★ / Aishiteruze Baby ★★

Katakura Kippei is an ordinary teenaged boy – simple, good-hearted, popular with the girls and carefree. One day, however, he comes home to find that his aunt has disappeared, leaving behind her five-year-old daughter, and he's the only one who can look after her. So begins Kippei’s abrupt introduction to motherhood.

The series is unashamedly reliant on the charm of little Yuzuyu, an adorable little child who is nevertheless still believable – selfish, reliant and prone to the occasional tantrum, but with a strong sense of right and wrong and a touching cheerfulness and generosity.

But cuteness alone is not enough. Fortunately, Kippei is an engaging, thoroughly likeable character who always strives to make others happy. He is adored by most of the girls in his school, including one scary stalker (naturally, the only one who isn’t utterly beautiful), but because he is so simple and so kind-hearted, this doesn’t make him arrogant or vain. His struggles to understand a five-year-old girl, and the strange jealousy between her and his new girlfriend, make him entertaining, engaging but also admirable – Kippei genuinely is a good person, and always treats others with sympathy and generosity.

Aishiteruze Baby is very good, but falls a little short of being a classic. I can cope with the poor animation standards, because the story is conveyed just fine. The trouble comes when the anime veers off into more adult territory: an abusive parent, a child clinging to the things that remind her of her mama, a mother hiding from her own daughter…and while suicidal teenager Miki is actually very well-portrayed in such a short time, her story suffers the same problem as the others I just mentioned: the old anime cliché of everything stemming from one or two significant events earlier in a character’s life (that can be seen in flashbacks), solvable by a main character talking…very… earnestly…until…they…change…their…ways. Rushed side-stories like these brought nothing to the anime, and made everything that little bit more trite. This, and some very slow episodes towards the end mean Aishiteruze Baby is only good, not great. Nevertheless, with some excellent characters, wonderful humour and a good heart, it’s worth seeing.

(originally written 24.8.05)

ルパン三世 カリオストロの城/Lupan Sansei:Kariosutoro no Shiro/Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro

While I may consider Miyazaki one of the very best writer/directors who ever made films, animated or otherwise, that is not to say that I will automatically adore everything he does. Indeed, there are a few of his movies I consider to be good, but not great. This is one of them.

This was Miyazaki’s first movie as a director, and the only one not considered part of the Ghibli canon. True, Nausicaä was made before Ghibli’s foundation, but most of Ghibli's staff was formed from the team that made that film, it’s generally considered part of the studio’s work. Cagliostro takes the Lupin III franchise’s well-known characters (in Japan at least…and perhaps one day internationally if Miyazaki’s fame continues to rise or Spielberg ever does the long-rumoured live-action adaptation) and puts them in a typical perilous situation: tracking down the source of counterfeit bills, Lupin and his nakama find themselves uncovering corruption in the heart of a small country, and of course a beautiful and innocent young damsel to rescue.

Other artists have made Lupin and co look much cooler, but Miyazaki’s design suits the slapstick tone of this far-fetched story well. There’s no magic, but most of the fights and the tricks Lupin manages to pull off are cheerfully unlikely and silly. The story is loose as can be, climaxing in the most slapdash ending of all Miyazaki’s slapdash endings, but there’s a lot of fun to be had with the playful interaction between characters and the inventive setpieces.

It’s not hard to see the huge influence Lupin III had since his manga debut in 1967 (writer Monkey Punch based him on the original Arsene Lupin, of course). The clown that can be very serious when needed is now second only to the innocent young boy on a voyage of discovery as a typical shounen protagonist (and often the two are merged). The cast of Cowboy Bebop are heavily based on these prototypes – replace Ed with Zoro from One Piece and everything would fall together. And this movie is generally regarded as the best Lupin III has to offer.

But it’s really quite slow and predictable, and only sporadically funny. It hasn’t dated too well, shaky framing and washed-out colours reminding me of cartoons like Inspector Gadget – not necessarily a bad thing (oh that the Inspector Gadget movie had been this good) and the animation does hint at glories to come, but watching someone make a good film with what materials they had and watching someone make a genuinely good film is different. Fun as it is to see what will become Miyazaki hallmarks (design, simple and obvious romances, mid-air drama…and this is the first of three Miyazaki movies with ‘Castle’ in the title), that doesn’t make the film itself any better or any worse.

Not a bad movie, by any means. But I would rank it as similar to, say, a middle-tier One Piece movie. A nice addition to a franchise and certainly an entertaining diversion, but no great classic – nothing that I would watch again and again.

(Originally written 26.8.06)

パンダ・コパンダ /Panda Kopanda/Panda・Baby Panda/Panda! Go Panda!

Miyazaki and Takahata have been in the anime business for a very long time. Watching Panda Kopanda, it really feels like going back to the roots of their work, but it’s also important to remember that the two of them had been working in animation for some time before it was made in 1972: Miyazaki for 9 years, Takahata for 13. Panda Kopanda is commonly referred to as a movie, but is actually two short films of about 30 minutes each, and it is very seldom mentioned by Miyazaki fans without reference being made to Totoro.

Yes, as was their custom at the time, Takahata directed the film with Miyazaki having considerable creative input, writing the screenplay, designing the characters and working as a key animator, a collaboration born from Hols in 1968. Panda Kopanda is written for young children, and there’s no escaping its utter tweeness.

The story is simple: a young girl of about five or six called Mimiko is left to live on her own. However, on her first day without her Grandma taking care of her, she finds two pandas – a tiny baby and his enormous father – in the bamboo grove near her house. It transpires that they can speak, and they soon move in with Mimiko to form a kind of surrogate family. The father panda is a gentle giant, taking everything at a slow pace and enjoying the good things in life (especially bamboo) and his little son is hyperactive and curious about everything. Mimiko is a good match for them, being inexhaustibly cheerful and optimistic, with a strange predilection for displaying her panties – often enough that I felt very awkward watching this anime on the bus lest someone should sit next to me and think that rather than a gleeful display of innocence, these endless panty shots were supposed to be titillating. Awwwkward.

Anyway, let’s leave that aside. Mimiko and the pandas get into various scrapes, for example when Pan-chan the baby panda decides he wants to go to school with his new ‘mama’, or when the zookeepers come to find the escaped animals. In the second episode, a circus comes to town and a little tiger who looks very much like what Tigger from the original Pooh illustrations would look like if drawn by Osamu Tezuka, even bouncing on his tail like the Disney version, joins the gang. Everything is brightly-coloured, happy, simple and full of slapstick laughs. No-one comes to any harm, lots of laughing is done, lots of adults are bemused by childish logic, and papa Panda looks a lot like Ou-Totoro when he smiles. It’s interesting to speculate how much closer to Totoro this movie would be if its art were more sophisticated, its dialogue more naturalistic and the pandas mute (thus scenes enacted in mime more prevalent), but so much of its identity is derived from its happy-go-lucky babyishness and the cheerful simplistic conversations Mimiko has with the animals that to change them would be to make a very different movie.

Unfortunately, the subs I have weren’t great. Some lines were just left totally untranslated, and others were nonsensical – at one point a boy says something along the lines of, ‘“Atashi no papa yo!” Baka mitei’ (mimicking Mimiko), approximately, ‘“He’s my papa!” Are you an idiot?’ (or ‘You look like an idiot’), and the subs said, ‘My papa’s an idiot too!’ They also missed a pun about kare-pan (Japanese curry bread – bread filled with curry, like a bun). Goodness knows how many more mistakes were made that my limited Japanese skills couldn’t detect.

Nevertheless, these two episodes are winsome, wholesome, babyish fun. Takahata and Miyazaki were interested in stories for young children at the time (Mimiko’s seiyuu also played Heidi in their adaptation) and this is much more childish than anything they would do now: if not for what the two men would go on to do, it would no doubt have been lost to obscurity. Nonetheless, it is still entertaining, charming and cute. And dammit, when Papa Panda finally shows how strong he really is towards the end, I don’t care what anyone says – that’s damn cool!

(originally written 14.10.06)

じゃりん子チエ/ Jarinko Chie / Chie the Brat

Jarinko Chie is another pre-Ghibli movie directed by Isao Takahata, this one from 1981. This is perhaps his most immediate and light film alongside Houhokekyo! Tonari no Yamada-kun, and is similar in many ways: based on a popular humorous manga with a focus on a slightly dysfunctional family, although the storytelling here is for the most part more conventional.

Jarinko Chie has aged well: the animation is smooth, the acting (though there are some odd choices of obviously adult actors for children) is top-notch and it still hits the right emotional notes. The plot flows quite nicely: Chie lives in a little eatery with her meatheaded father, who is tough enough to beat up yakuza but embarrasses her in school. Her mother - having wed Chie's father for an arranged marriage - is estranged from the family, and lives elsewhere. However, although tough, athletic and forceful little Chie takes after her father the most, she idolises her mother and tries to be more feminine for her. She hides the fact that she sees her mother occasionally from her father, but this secret can’t last forever.

Intertwined with this is the rather bizarre story of some tomcats with visible testicles in the same style as you see in Pom Poko, who speak in human voices (although the humans cannot hear them). It’s a typical Takahata jerk in styles, and while yes, it works okay, it seems odd to use it for the climax of the movie. The slapstick and the warmth of the family, even when the father is a total meathead, are what work here, and the little things that jerk you out of the moment, like anthropomorphised cats or a weird cameo from that hideous Peko girl, I don’t think really enhance the whole, being too unsubtle to just fit in and be noted only by those looking for them. Takahata is at his best when either everything he shows is acceptable as real or there is consistency in the unreal.

The strong, dated Osaka-ben accents here and cultural references make it perhaps not a film for the uninitiated, but the non-idealised portrayal of a family, the slapstick and the way events really have an effect on the characters make this enjoyable for anyone. No Sero-Hiki no Gauche, but fun nonetheless.

(originally written 10.09.08)

D.Gray-Man

Yesterday, I reposted my impressions of D.N.Angel from back in 2006, in which I discoursed about shoujo series that in outline seem like shounen, and made mention of some shounen series written by women. Well, since then a few more important series have appeared, and continue to blur the line at the centre of the two. There has been Reborn!, which has all the attributes I gave to battle shoujo, including hapless and childish yet adored main character, homoerotic love interests and cutesy mascots, yet is published in Jump and is popular with a male demographic. There has been also been Kekkaishi, following Fullmetal Alchemist in having a main character who is both vulnerable and yet capable of great power, and who has a very slow-burning but important romance with a female character who is formidable in her own right. And then there is D.Gray-man, which has managed to become one of the biggest series in Jump and full of inventive characters, action and angst.

Its pilot manga chapter was a little more obviously created by a woman than the anime, if we are to follow the tell-tale tropes that I by no means want to claim are absolutely universal, but which are certainly prevalent. The first incarnation of Allen Walker was extremely effeminized, even being made to cross-dress, and Linalee fell into a damsel in distress pigeonhole.

Thankfully, the final product was rather more mature and idiosyncratic. There are a lot of very familiar elements to D.Gray-man, but it offers a very striking and complete world with a cast of quirky but likeable characters and some fascinating adversaries. Set in a Victorian-era world, principally in Europe but also incorporating Asia, it tells the story of an exorcist called Allen Walker, blessed by God with ‘Innocence’, a substance that transforms into a powerful weapon to fight demons, or ‘akuma’. Along with other innocence-users in a Christian organization called The Black Order, Allen fights against the rather mechanical demons sent forth by the grotesque Millennium Earl.

It’s a neat set-up, complex enough not to be dismissed offhand but simple enough that it can be easily understood and the development of its characters become the focus. Initially, I thought it was a terrible idea to give Allen such an underwhelming power – that of having a big sharp arm – but over the course of the series, his anti-akuma weapon is developed in the most intriguing ways, until final designs are extremely impressive. Every one of Allen’s comrades is interesting and possessed of a well-developed power, and the stakes always seem higher than in most shounen. There are some real tragedies in this series, and everything seems a little more mature than most of the titles that come from Jump.

As with so many manga adaptations, though, it ends before its time. Running two full seasons, the first of 51 episodes and the second of 52, it wraps up a huge arc, then spends ten episodes hanging a final mini-arc on the end that despite showcasing the awesome generals, does not give any sense of closure.

But it has been two years now since it ended. It doesn’t look like there’s going to be any more D.Gray-Man animated. Of course there is still manga to go to, but if I’m honest, of the big Shounen Jump series, I’d honestly rather this was running on and on and on than almost any of the other, far bigger titles.

But perhaps the added layer of complexity was the undoing of this series. A shame, because it has so much to offer.

京極夏彦 巷説百物語/ Kyogoku Natsuhiko Kosetsu Hyaku Monogatari / Kyogoku Natsuhiko’s Hundred Stories

I decided to check out Hundred Stories because I watch very few horror anime, and somebody suggested this was quite similar to Jigoku Shoujo. While there are some thematic similarities, however, this is not even close to the same league as Hell Girl – and I didn’t even like Hell Girl all that much.

Hundred Stories follows a young writer compiling supernatural tales for a book that will truly make his name. On his travels to research supernatural phenomena, he keeps bumping into a strange little man called Mataichi, who with his two equally bizarre cohorts always seems to appear wherever strange events are happening and ends up punishing those who have wronged others. These stories tend to involve grisly murders, and the young writer again and again finds himself in danger, becoming fascinated by the strange world he can glimpse but never be a part of.

It’s all very juvenile. With the possible exception of D.Gray-Man, Tokyo Movie Shinsha’s anime tend to look dated, be it intentionally (The Snow Queen) or because they’re churning out kids’ shows on the cheap (Bakugan), and even though it aired in 2003, Hundred Stories looks and feels like something from the 80s, replete with over-the-top gore, weird and ugly character designs and scenes that are supposed to be sexy but come over as juvenile and awkward. They go for an edgy look with bold black lines and lots of shadows and deep colours, but it’s never very nice to look at and often gets confusing as to who is who. None of the episodes are what I would call memorable, and while there is nothing to dislike about them, I never particularly cared about any of the sympathetic characters.

The sooner this sort of thing stops representing the idea of anime in the general Western mindset, the better. At least things like the original Vampire Hunter D had a certain naïve charm. Things have moved on, thank goodness.