Adventure Time: Season 6

The sixth season of Adventure Time brought a lot of the mysteries that had been building up from the start to the fore, and answered a few of the show’s big questions. Unfortunately, when actually brought into the foreground, some of the answers we were given ended up much less exciting than the open possibilities we had before. Not only that, but a slew of throwaway or dull episodes, a strange release schedule that meant this season aired over the course of more than a year, and severe disappointment over guest animators means that this was where Adventure Time lost me. I still watched the season, at a considerable delay, and I will still at some point watch the next. But I no longer feel particularly excited about new episodes or watch them quickly. I can catch up later. Having watched since Adventure Time was but a silly, random pilot episode where it felt like anything could happen, this is a little sad for me.

Season 6 had some great ideas. The Lich was transformed into a giant baby, and a highlight came when Lumpy Space Princess did a very bad job caring for him. Finn gets an arm cut off and goes through a series of replacement limbs, though nothing much came of them. The latter half of the season constantly foreshadowed significant events coming with the approach of a ‘Catalyst Comet’, with a good sense of continuity and build-up. There was a very interesting flashback episode to long before the start of the series, with Evergreen. And Finn finally met his father, Martin.

But none of these satisfied very much. The Lich turning into Sweet Pea and the backstory introduced in ‘Evergreen’ both held my attention well, but what they set up has yet to develop into anything important, which is also the case for the reappearance of Simon’s wife Betty. The idea of Finn’s dad not being a hero or positive role model but an opportunist with a tendency to abandon those who bond with him is refreshing and quite clever, but makes episodes centred on him a bore. The appearance of the comet was built up well, but especially compared with the Lich in the last season was dealt with far too quickly and the random ways Finn could deal with everything he faced were deeply artificial.

I enjoyed the increased development of minor characters like The Cosmic Owl, Peppermint Butler and Jake’s family (both his kids and his brother), but at this stage I’m a little bored of Lemongrab, the King of Ooo and Magic Man – even if the latter is in a more interesting position now. Susan Strong is a character who probably didn’t need to recur, and the classic characters like The Ice King and Lumpy Space Princess felt under-used towards the end of the season. I really, really hope we never see Chips and Ice Cream or the Ghost Fly again.

Then we come to the guest animation. I was very excited to hear that Yuasa Masaaki was going to do a guest episode. Kaiba remains one of my favourite anime series of all time, and he did such a superb guest episode for Wakfu. But even though it was critically lauded, I thought ‘Food chain’ was a mess. Yes, it was experimental, to a degree, but mostly it felt bereft of new ideas, any actual sense of the established feeling of Adventure Time or any of the emotional sincerity that distinguishes his other work. For me, this was a huge disappointment.

I had no expectations of David Ferguson, but ‘Water Park Prank’ was, for me, the worst episode of Adventure Time yet and I very much doubt it will be topped. The awful ugly art style I could deal with, but the horrible pacing and story of the episode, which again seemed like there was little or no familiarity with what has been established as the Adventure Time world made me feel a faint sense of second-hand embarrassment throughout.

Still, the season was by no means disastrous. I just feel increasingly less intrigued as the show’s mysteries are answered, and feel that there’s a pressing need for the show to establish a kind of end goal for Finn to strive towards, now. Because at this stage it feels like aimless drifting. And we know how stoners can get way too stuck doing that.

ジーニアス・パーティ / Genius Party

I’ve been meaning to get around to watching Genius Party for a long while. Well, today turned out to be a good day for it, because I had set aside some time to marathon Natsume Yuujinchou, only to find I only had series 4 to watch. So as I was in the mood for something new rather than something I’ve been watching for a while, I fixed on Genius Party.

If the title makes you expect a rave with a Tales of Symphonia character, have another think, and forget modesty. This compilation film is rather in the vein of Fuyu no Hi – several respected directors get a chance to show off their stuff. This is somewhat of a lesser project, though, in terms of its inception – it’s not international, every director represented here being Japanese, it’s not linked by a stab at being high-concept like the Basshou theme there, and the animation is done entirely by Studio 4°C. When it was made in 2007, the studio were clearly very keen to put their stamp down as a highly capable, quirky and arty studio, building on their contribution to The Animatrix, the pleasantly oddball Tekkon Kinkreet and the wonderful Mahou Shoujotai Arusu. Of course, over the next few years, they were not exactly highly idiosyncratic, getting bogged down in animating Transformers: Animated and the ill-fated Thundercats revival, with not much else to show for their newly-established place in the anime world but the entertaining but not exactly ground-breaking Detroit Metal City and their game-related animation like the cutscenes for Catherine and one of the Kid Icarus shorts.

Divorced from the studio history, however, all the component parts of Genius Party are interesting in their own rights, though in no way make up a cohesive whole. Essentially they are linked only by being together in this compilation.

The first segment is the eponymous Genius Party, directed by veteran female key animator Fukushima Atsuko. Having contributed to Akira and Kiki’s Delivery Service, she’s worked with the best, though I’d like to see her helm more than this oddball segment. In a very music video-like sequence, a lanky dark-skinned man in a very strange burlap bird outfit hunts the hearts from little living stone faces in the desert. Most hide, but one is caught tripping out with a glowing flower. The bird-man gobbles down its heart and gains glowing wings, flying up to the sky. The flower, too, has floated up high and the bird-man eats it, becoming a shooting start. Whether as a result or by coincidence, clouds form an bright sparks rain down, restoring the soul of the little stone face whose heart was eaten. The shooting star bird-man returns to fly about and the stone faces show their approval with big glowing hearts, which pop suggestively when they’re most excited. One gets so stimulated it projects a giant trippy energy-flower into the night sky, which also becomes a bird. One of the heads becomes a huge, clearly living thing. This is clearly about inspiration and creativity inspiring all those around you...but how exactly is pretty subjective. It’s a bit of trippy vagueness that is very enjoyable visually but ultimately says little of importance.

Next is an offering from Kawamuri Shouji, the man who went from helping design Optimus Prime and other original Diaclone proto-Transformers to creating Escaflowne and designing mechas for Ghost in the Shell and Eureka 7. The length of a typical anime pilot, his Shanghai Dragon features a snot-nosed little Chinese boy who picks up a piece of alien tech that makes what he draws become real. Unfortunately, this draws vast intergalactic forces, and some big CG mechas come to catch him. The overused CG is looks dated now, but the action is incredibly stylish - and very, very silly! Fantastically paced wish fulfilment, it’s a cut above what can be done on TV budgets, and hilarious, but nothing you’d call artistic.

Third is Kimura Shinji’s Deathtic 4, with CG shaded to look like a grim gothic children’s book – with a heavy Burton influence. Kimura is comparatively unknown, but was art director for Steamboy and Tekkon Kinkreet. In a world of zombies who speak a kind of Japanesey Swedish, a boy gets in trouble when he finds a living frog. It’s a good effort and I love the art style, but attempts to inject action and fart jokes fall flat. A slow, meditative, creepy pace would’ve worked better.

Mangaka  Fukuyama Youji’s Doorbell is next, and the nadir of the film. Hideously ugly designs, bad CG and an overdone doppelganger storyline make this one to skip on any repeat viewings.

Futamura Hideki’s Limit Cycle is almost as bad, a faux-intellectual discourse on utilitarianism and existentialism that rambles on and on. Futamura is another key animator, though directed some bits and pieces like some episodes of the old Jojo’s OVAs, and this gets a pass from being a disaster for striking visuals. It’s all so juvenile, though. So 6th-form artwork.

Of course, the main draw here for me was Yuasa Masaaki’s Happy Machine. As a confirmed Yuasa fanboy, this short was everything I hoped his Adventure Time episode would be – and wasn’t. A surreal yet moving story of a baby discovering mortality, it had the odd yet coherent and sometimes stunningly smooth animation of Kemonozume, the freewheeling plot of Mind Game and some of the emotionally affecting qualities of his Wakfu episode. It had pee and poop and farts, yet the infantile qualities suited it, and didn’t seem embarrassing at all. Strange and yet moving, it was everything I hoped for from Yuasa, and makes me happy he could go on to direct Kaiba soon after.

Finally, big hitter Watanabe Shin’ichirou brings us Baby Blue, which is also well worth the hypothetical price of admission. The story of two students escaping ennui with an impromptu trip to the beach with a hand grenade, it succeeds primarily by being very straight, with superb naturalistic dialogue. The fantasy of blowing up an old-fashioned yankii gang helps, too. This is perhaps the most ordinary work here, but also the most mature and most meaningful – and beautiful.  

四畳半神話大系/ Yojōhan Shinwa Taikei / 4 ½ Tatami Mythological Chronicles / The Tatami Galaxy

The artsy Noitamina time slot and arguably anime’s newest auteur, Yuasa Masaaki, suit one another well. Noitamina often offering the more experimental yet popular of today’s anime, it seemed a logical step from Kaiba for the director to work on another series for Madhouse, this time to air in the celebrated programming block. On the other hand, arguably Kemonozume would have been too odd for the context and Kaiba would not have been given nearly enough time to become what it deserved to be in only eleven episodes, so instead comes this, an adaptation of the rather strange novel called in English The Tatami Galaxy – only the second time Madhouse have done a series for Noitamina, the other being Paradise Kiss.

The plot is that a rather ordinary university student – never given a name – lives in a 4 ½-tatami room in Kyoto as he joins the different clubs his university offers, or takes up other extracurricular activities. Each time, usually through the interference of his strange-looking friend Ozu, and more often than not thanks to making bad decisions in his romantic affairs with various women – one of whom doesn’t really exist and another of who is someone else’s love doll – he ends up deeply regretting how he spent his university years, and wishes for the clock to be turned back so that he may do it all again differently. And again and again, he gets his wish, until eventually he begins to discover the myriad parallel lives he has lived from a strange place outside them, and begins trying to have an affect on them – often inadvertently setting into motion different events we say in previous episodes.

Oddly, while perhaps the most bizarre and transcendental of all the anime Yuasa has directed – save perhaps Mind Game – it is also the most immediate and accessible. The protagonist is recognisably just like a very large chunk of the target audience, being lonely, highly intelligent, essentially good-hearted though prone to being easily influenced, and crucially not unable to get feminine attention through some happy chance circumstances. Yet he also ends up in some desperately pitiable situations and there is a certain schadenfreude that comes from watching him be manipulated so easily and so cruelly by the Machiavellian Ozu.

The series was highly lauded – it was the first time a series rather than a feature won the Japan Media Arts Festival animation grand prize, for example. Its simple premise and repetition kept it just on the right side of utterly bizarre, and the now-familiar simplistic yet oddly sophisticated visual style of Yuasa anime again reached a wider audience. Certainly, I found it enjoyable – it was funny, it was clever, it was innovative and it no doubt played a considerable part in getting Yuasa’s 10-minute ‘Kick-Heart’ crowdfunded project for Production I.G. started (though I have no idea why Madhouse haven’t just got him working on another full series). I liked the bold visuals, with their Shaft-like shifts in style, the simplicity of the main characters, the stylisation of the secondary figures and the bizarre use of a cowboy as personification of the narrator’s libido – and genitals.

But…the fact is that what I was holding this up against was Kaiba, and I still have difficulty expressing just how highly I regarded that series. It looked so simplistic and babyish but there was so much under its surface and it was just so stunningly good – it was moving, it was intellectually challenging and it was quite brilliant in the way its visuals made the world so unique as it shifted and ebbed in a Protean mass of primary colours. The Tatami Galaxy, I am quite sure, shut out less of its potential audience at the beginning, with few likely to be put off by the visual style even if it’s relatively bold. But at the same time it just didn’t have the scope, the sincerity or the sheer emotional power. It feels much closer to Kemonozume than to Kaiba. Thus, I live in hope that – wrestler/nun short film aside – the next thing Yuasa works on will be more like Kaiba, and have that level of beauty.  

ケモノヅメ/ Kemonozume /Beast Claws

With its highly idiosyncratic art style, insipid opening and closing episodes and rather impersonal and alienating first episodes, Kemonozume isn’t an easy anime to get into, and I have to say the only reason I got into it was my great admiration for Yuasa Masaaki and the two works that he made on either side of this production – 2004’s Mind Game and 2008’s sublime Kaiba. Honestly, without that factor, I likely wouldn’t have bothered giving a chance to this funny-looking, apparently very serious anime about flesh-eating monsters masquerading as people and the modern-day samurai/gangster types who fight them – and what happens when Romeo and Juliet-style, a couple is formed from one from each side.

And I’m glad I watched. I’m not going to say ‘Where else can you see the bad guy’s head sprouting legs and running along while a comedy monkey deeply kisses a part of the baddie’s flesh that is in the form of a lady monkey?’ because, well, in the big scheme of quirky anime, I’m sure I’ll see things at least as strange again. But though I started watching a pretty long time ago, this hardly took up very much of my time and it was a lot of fun to watch once it got going. There’s one episode about paralysis and a mysterious 20-foot-tall mobster (who becomes a regular character) that is one of the funniest I’ve seen. As with Mind Game, the surrealism, mature themes and seriousness predominate, but once the spotlight is on something funny, Yuasa really comes into his own.

There’s a reason he’s one of the big names of anime direction, and the studios let him do this crazy stuff. There’s a reason that Ankama went to him to give their Nox episode such a distinctive aesthetic. And there’s a real skill to how he juggles his different themes. This is my least favourite of his works – Mind Game was more heartfelt and also crazier, while Kaiba was much more conventional but also wonderfully strange in its peculiar cuteness – but it was still definitely enjoyable.

Next is The Tatami Galaxy. I’m looking forward to it – it certainly seems to be Yuasa’s work that has made the most impact, even if I seriously doubt I’m going to like it nearly as much as I liked Kaiba. 

Wakfu: shorts and extras

Season 1 impressions here: http://adziu.blogspot.com/2011/03/wakfu-season-1.html

Goultard le Barbare
More a Dofus special than one for Wakfu really, this appears to be really where the whole Ankama animation effort begins. There’s next to no information on Goultard le Barbare’s inception online, but it seems to have first been screened at the 2007 Japan Expo in Paris. The animation style also looks like the iffy first previews of the Wakfu cast, especially in the lack of pupils in the eyes of iops, but somewhat to my surprise, there are some animated sequences in this 20-minute short that really show Flash used to its fullest.

Goultard tells the story of a character who features prominently in Dofus and its comic adaptation, and appears (with little explanation) in one episode of Wakfu, where he proves himself incredibly cool and powerful. Here, though, his story is just beginning, at first in Heracles-like scenes from his childhood and then in a big showdown. This early animation effort from Ankama is a little throwaway and ends just as it gets interesting (which makes sense as a tie-in), but ultimately doesn’t have anything of the polish or cuteness of the series it would prove possible. An interesting companion piece.

Wakfu Webisodes
From what I can tell, these showreels and little gags predate the main series’ release. The first two are impressive showcases of what Yugo and Ruel can do, respectively, and last only a minute or two each, while the rest are silly comedy pieces about the tofu birds. They are interesting little nuggets, and show that the remarkably smooth flash animation that sometimes it felt the series had to build up to (forgetting the first Nox/Grougal clash) was in place early on.

Mini Wakfu
Continuing the tradition of the webisodes was the little gag episode accompanying each main serving of Wakfu, in cutesy SD-style. Like Avatar’s similar attempts, the style doesn’t quite look right, the rhythms, fluidity and variable models of anime’s SD not quite captured. And honestly, while some raise a giggle and justify the rest, others are horribly unfunny…

Noximillian special
Now this is the reason I am giving the specials their own impressions. I was overwhelmed with a great sense of ‘wtf’ while I watched this – because the character background special was animated by Madhouse in the style of Kaiba – one of my top two or three anime of the past five years. This was rather mindblowing for me, being so unexpected. Not that many people have seen Kaiba and I’m sure still fewer have seen Wakfu, and I thought them worlds apart, so seeing them together was rather startling. I presume, based on little but a hunch, that the makers of Wakfu were impressed by Yuasa Masaaki’s work and requested he work on the special episode. He provided only character design, but it’s clear that the rest of the team could continue the thematic stylings of Kaiba, especially when the characters give such a strong aesthetic.

As a standalone piece, it’s unoriginal but functions well as the dark past of a primary antagonist, making him more sympathetic and comprehensible, even if it ends too abruptly and it would be better had Nox lived his loss, rather than simply hearing of it from another. But the look of the piece is striking and unsettling, and above all, it’s a clash between French and Japanese animation that has become very dear to me but I never expected to see melded in this way. That stuns me, and kept me in a state of near disbelief throughout. In so many ways, this was a stroke of genius.

Ogrest: La Legende special
Ogrest: La Legende is the second of Wakfu’s special episodes, telling a side-story separate from the main story arc. Ogrest is a major figure in the backstory of the Wakfu game, but thus far has had little impact on the series, until now. The special, framed by some adorable scenes of a sick Yugo being told a story by his father Alibert, tells of Ogrest’s birth and childhood adventure with a group of Ecaflips. It’s a cute and winsome story, and a long way from the tragedy that forms the backstory, although there are hints of darker themes here and there.

Ogrest is the second special animated in Japan, rather than in-house at Ankama. According to the credits, Madhouse were once again the major studio involved, but work was also undertaken by the Korean in-between powerhouse Dr Movie (who do a lot of work with Madhouse), and also by Ghibli. This is likely mostly token background work and perhaps some character animation, but it is nonetheless apt because Miyazaki’s work is here – and I don’t mean in some abstract, this-feels-a-bit-like-Ghibli-so-I’ll-namedrop way: there are character animations here taken more or less directly from Toei’s Doubutsu Takarajima – which Miyazaki worked on as key animator, and which more or less defined his signature chase style back in 1971. The homage is subtle, but they made it explicit in a recent Inside Ankama, juxtaposing the clips. It was a great little nod to an important but much-neglected piece of anime history, and I have to hope more Wakfu fans go and find the original, because it doesn’t seem like many people have ever heard of Animal Treasure Island.

And the plot is all more or less a reference back to that film, too: after his unusual birth story, adorable little Ogrest (une catastrophe ambulance) gets mixed up with three animal pirates looking for treasure. They ultimately find it, but Ogrest doesn’t find what he’s looking for – or does he? We get a happy ending, but with plenty of foreshadowing of what is to come.

Wakfu’s specials are getting more and more interesting. With more to come – as well as feature films – I am only getting more and more excited about what Ankama will come up with next.

マインド・ゲーム/ Mind Game

Before the masterful, childlike Kaiba and the somewhat disturbing Kemonozume, experimental and fast-rising director Yuasa Masaaki made this critically acclaimed but undeniably avant-garde feature.

It is the story of a loser who suffers an extremely humiliating death, only to get a second chance. His rebirth leads to an adventurous escape from the Yakuza with the two girls he just might love, and then in a surrealistic turn and Pinocchio reference, a period of self-contemplation for all three of them with a strange hermit in the belly of a whale. Despite the strangeness of both style and plot, the vast majority of the film flows linearly and makes a kind of internal sense, although the ending is purposely ambiguous, focusing on the idea that tiny changes can bring innumerable possibilities for a person’s life.

There are recognisable stylistic links to Kemonozume, the rather ugly, sketchy drawing style, angular animation and inventive angles in the mise-en-scene. Kaiba is evoked by the pastiche-y clips of a retro anime with the time-turning belt that reinforces the theme of the film, in some of the forms of God and in the strange organic nature of some of the worlds the characters must inhabit, even just for a moment or two, as well as in the often disconcerting editing style. These links are more remarkable given that while Yuasa's later work came from Madhouse, this film was primarily by Studio 4°C – also behind such visually quirky works as Tekkon Kinkreet and Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu – with contributions from Gainax and Production I.G. That the style is similar across studios shows Yuasa’s great influence and command of his productions.

But if anything, Mind Game is weirder than either. Often using photocollage effects, real faces inserted into animated worlds, it constantly draws attention to itself as artistic expression. We see the film changing the media of its art, bursting into a wild and sexualised parody of an animated musical number, slipping between exaggerated parody and heartfelt introspection, and fully utilising the animated medium to express strange things, comedic things, surreal things, always seeming to be aware of Walt Disney’s dictum that animators cannot show the fantastic ‘unless we first know the real.’

But while Disney may have firmly established what is real before using a dream sequence or drunken hallucination to introduce the truly bizarre and formless, Yuasa delights in setting up expectations, and then subverting them, even if those expectations are that there will soon be another shift in style or pace.

What is remarkable, however, is that even though the audience is constantly reminded that the characters are only works of fiction, even though they are presented as shallow, changeable, detached and often duplicitous, even though the situations are weird in the extreme, they are still believable, sympathetic and more human than many in more formulaic and straightforward films. Mind Game’s chief achievement is that while it is incredibly strange, it has heart.

Kaiba

Kaiba was screened by the anime club at uni, on the day I didn’t go, so I decided I would catch up on it as well. And that was one of the better decisions I made, because I really do believe that Kaiba is one of the most important and impressive pieces of Japanese animation I’ve ever seen. I actually put off watching the last episodes for quite some time, partly because I didn’t want the series to end, and partly because I knew it would be difficult to write these impressions and really convey what Kaiba means.

It will be incredibly sad if Kaiba goes unnoticed. Yes, the larger crowd of anime fans will ignore it. It will pass by the older guys who want to watch blushing schoolgirls pining over a clueless everyman, the girls who want angsty homoeroticism and the young guys who want nothing but fireballs shooting out of swords. Mature seinen anime, aimed at older males but with more sophisticated plots, sometimes find huge audiences but generally don’t get close to the mainstream. And Kaiba, in choosing a very simple, almost babyish visual style directly descended from Tezuka, very possibly alienated another chunk of its audience.

But Kaiba is something special. If people don’t give it a chance, that is their loss. I’ve been exposed to more arthouse animation in recent months, and this fits in there.

The story is convoluted, sometimes sloppy, but full of great characters and thought-provoking sci-fi tropes. The world of Kaiba is one where memories can be captured in physical form, whole personalities transplanted into new bodies and memories explored, even manipulated, by others. When a boy awakens with no memory of who he is, narrowly escapes being shot and ends up in a bizarre, ever-changing world where the rich may destroy bodies purely for hedonistic pleasure and the poor may toil their whole lives trying to upgrade themselves or find ways to bring their parents back into the world from a small capsule. The boy is soon adrift in this strange world of metamorphosis and debauchery. He ends up in a female body and abruptly the brutish security guard who had until then been the antagonist becomes infatuated, not only providing some comedy but eventually becoming one of the most sympathetic characters in the piece. It is this first half of the series that is its strongest, uncovering the strangeness of people living in what has become an extremely impersonal world.

The last few episodes are weaker. The climax descends into extreme cliché with the end of Popo’s story, and the final conclusion of Warp’s becomes very contrived and clumsy, concepts so lofty and overwrought that it becomes hard to continue to sympathise, but that detracts very little from the overall beauty, intelligence, daring and uniqueness of the series as a whole. I can only hope the series finds the audience it deserves.

(originally written 14.09.09)