僕だけがいない街 / Boku Dake ga Inai Machi / A Town that Lacks Just Me / Erased

Anime by and large has been lacking ambition lately. Possibly it’s just that I’ve been watching less of it, but there are relatively few titles that people bring up as challenging or sophisticated these days, in a world of fanservice and idol anime. But there’s still noitaminA, the programming slot that usually at least attempts to do something a cut above the average.

And so it was with Boku Dake ga Inai Machi, which takes a more serious seinen tone with its murder-mystery storyline and brings together themes and modes of a variety of recent hits. Directed by Itou Tomohiko, buoyed up by his successes with Sword Art Online but having rather more in common with his breakthrough work with Hosoda Mamoru – in particular TheGirl Who Leapt Through Time, this series was also well-marketed. My own interest was piqued by a large and attractive poster for the show in Shinjuku station. It looked like a cute coming-of-age story and over this Christmas break, I binge-watched the 12 episodes very quickly.

To be honest, it’s not what I hoped it would be. It aims for the cleverness and paranoia of Monster with the mind games of Death Note and the cute, smart kids in peril of Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 and some of the glib, vaguely Murakami-esque detached observations of Bakemonogatari. While there are some superbly-done parts of Boku Dake ga Inai Machi, ultimately I don’t think it hangs together nearly well enough, nor are all the extraneous parts necessary.

In a convoluted time-travelling plot, our hero Fujinuma Satoru has a magical power. When something terrible is going to happen, he inadvertently goes back in time a few minutes so that he can put it right, saving lives and avoiding disasters. This is presented in a very direct echo of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time using film effects. When a far more dramatic crime erupts, he is sent back much further, to his elementary school – where the events that led to the recent crime were set in motion. This is an interesting, if not particularly original, set-up – Satoru is a 29-year-old in a 10-year-old’s body and must investigate a set of child abductions to save himself and his loved ones in the future.  

However, this whole section didn’t ring true at all. Satoru doesn’t have much personality beyond an endearing tendency to speak his thoughts out loud and then get embarrassed, and there’s no exploration whatsoever of the strangeness and hilarity that must come from a 29-year-old, with the mind of a 29-year-old, going back into his 10/11-year-old body. Indeed, the kids around him, with only a couple of exceptions, all speak in the weirdest artificial diction, almost all of them preternaturally smart and basically miniature adults.

The pacing of the series is all off-kilter because the set-up is saving the first child who will be abducted. This not only rings false when the danger to one of Satoru’s closest friends who will be the second victim is barely even raised, but creates an awkward set of overlapping arcs where even if the problem is solved we then lose the sense of triumph and get an uncomfortable jolt of then moving to the next stage of the plan because the murderer hasn’t been dealt with. The romantic undertones are half-baked because the script calls for a cute budding love story but also occasional reminders that this is a 29-year-old mind starting a romance with a 10-year-old girl. And ultimately there’s only so much satisfaction that can be derived from a crime detective story where ‘How can you predict what’s going to happen?’ can only be answered with ‘Because of my magical time-travelling powers.’ The idea of eyes flashing red with fury or malevolence doesn’t work either, and there’s no attempt at sophistication when giving the bad guy motives.

There are things I certainly much admired here. The show does an amazing job of examining mother-child relationships, with some of the warmest moments are simple family affairs. There’s at least an original, if unlikely, ending arc to finish things off and further complicate the timeline. I enjoyed the dynamics of Satoru’s gang of schoolmates and wanted to see them developed more. And I did enjoy how the series was drawn and animated, which was very reminiscent of A1’s big-screen debut, Welcome to the Space Show. But I have to say, I hoped for much more, and feel that the same things have been done much better elsewhere. 

フラクタル/ Fractale

I start watching Fractale. It looks like a pretty normal anime. Nice characters. Looks like a Germanic world. Very classic. And then Clain’s parents appear. One of them seems to have a bowl of water for a head. The other is defined by giant lips protruding from either side of her robotic head. What is this?!

An anime like Fractale occasionally comes along and reminds me why I love anime so much. The kind of anime I instantly fall in love with and must watch through as soon as possible, and will stay with me forever. They’re usually accessible but with an element of high-concept, often with sci-fi elements. I think the last I had such a strong reaction to was Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, but Fractale very directly follows on from two recent anime I’ve adored and aired at more or less the same time: Dennou Coil and Kaiba.

Like Dennou Coil, Fractale explores the interesting concepts that arise from being able to project digital data into the real world, and create avatars as well as whole new landscapes. Like Kaiba, it raises the philosophical question of what humanity will do if given the chance to wholly choose their outward appearance – albeit to much less depth and without nearly so much darkness as that anime, which remains an all-time favourite. Fractale is slightly less ambitious than these, wrapping its ideas in a fairly conventional young-boy-meets-strange-young-girl-who-is-centre-of-a-world-changing-conspiracy-and-joins-a-rebellious-airship-crew-to-protect-her plot exemplified by Eureka 7 but also seen in the likes of Xam’d. At only eleven episodes, that noitaminA hallmark, it perhaps could have been given slightly more room to breathe, but in the time it has, takes us to a whole lot of interesting, thought-provoking places.

Clain is a pretty young adolescent boy who despite living in a world of great technological advancement, loves old-fashioned relics – mostly from our own era, which is cute. Unlike most in the world, he stays in one place – not even his parents live with him, as the possibility of digital avatars (‘Doppels’) means that it’s the norm for people to drift around the world wherever they please and interact with their loved ones only remotely. One day, he rescues a strange girl from some daft Team-Rocket-Meets-The-Blues-Brothers pursuers, falls for her, but wakes up to find her gone, leaving behind only a locket – which contains a very unique doppel, advanced enough to give tactile feedback and look like a real human.

While the world is pretty utopian – under the ‘Fractale’ system, nobody has to work or runs short of food – the fractale system is starting to go wrong and displace large numbers of people, and ‘terrorist’ groups try to espouse the virtues of living free of the system. Those behind Fractale are also pretty sinister, a group of priestesses who demand daily ‘prayers’ and are after our heroine. Clutzy, thoroughly adorable Clain thus ends up on a quest not only to find out the truth behind the young doppel Nessa, but to reunite with the girl Phyrne – and the only way to do that is to join up with the terrorists.

With A-1’s usual high standard of good design  and cuteness (in conjunction with the fledgling Ordet), doing what has rapidly become their hallmark of filling a cast with very cute teenage girls and at least one very cute teenage boy, it succeeds in making its lowbrow elements the comic relief and foregrounding the epic adventure, working rather better than, say, No. 6, which attempted something similar. It was certainly more consistent than Sword Art Online, if not such a big hit. Clain is also probably the most sexualised shota since Ciel Phantomhive, with a girly look reminiscent of Joey Jones.

For an eleven-episode series, Fractale was paced well. The expository episodes did a superb job making us like Clain and Nessa, though they’re both character types I love – well-meaning but goofy, pretty-faced young boy and naive, innocent, energetic, wholly good-natured little girl. When joining up with the airship crew and being made dogsbody, apparently a signature of these series, things did not drag and the simmering rivalry with the captain Sunda actually worked, as well as the comedy and cuteness from tsundere Enri. When there are losses in the ranks, they are actually deeply sad. And the ending, while it was never going to be that profound, is nicely open-ended while giving a sense of bittersweet closure.

If there were things I didn’t like, they would be Phryne’s ‘father’ figure, Barrot, who in his slimy, groping ugliness is a bit too exaggerated for the sake of trying to make Phryne more complex, and the fact that the ‘doppel’ system feels like it needed more exploration. I was also no fan of the opening – indifferent song over kaleidoscope images – or the ending – one shot, still until the end, with an awkward rendition of a Yeats poem. But these were far outweighed by how much I enjoyed Fractale, the world we glimpsed and especially the delightful characters we got to know. 

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.  

東京マグニチュード8.0 / Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

I know I periodically say this about different series – I think the last was Ika Musume – but it’s still rare enough these days to be remarkable: Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 was the first anime in a while that had me deeply emotionally invested, always eager to start the next episode and getting surprised when an episode was over, because it seemed to rush past so soon.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 aired a few years back in the noitaminA slot, taking over from Higashi no Eden. I remember hearing very positive things about it, but I never really gave it a chance, in small part because I somehow thought I’d be annoyed ‘Magnitude 8’ was never going to be connected with a Final Fantasy VI reference. (In very small part, I should stress!) And then the disastrous tsunami hit Japan and watching what is after all entertainment that was based on similar incidences seemed…tasteless. But then a few weeks ago a friend reminded me of it, and the tsunami is not so fresh in the mind, and after all I did watch United 93, so I can understand how entertainment can also be a harrowing, respectful reflection of reality.

The premise is simple – as scientists have predicted there’s a 70% chance of an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude or higher hitting Tokyo within 30 years, this anime follows what happens to two ordinary kids during this sort of natural disaster.

The first episode deftly shows us the two siblings, 11- or 12-year-old Mirai and 8- or 9-year-old Yuuki. Mirai is on the cusp of adulthood, getting disillusioned with the world, especially as annoying little things seem to keep happening to her. Sweet-natured Yuuki treasures the memory of the whole family going to Odaiba, so asks to go and see a robot exhibition there, but his parents are too busy, so falls to Mirai to take him. Numerous small misfortunes befall her, and she gets annoyed at adults being rude or treating her like a child, so she wishes disaster on the world. In an echo of After the Quake (which I wondered if the theme of frogs was also alluding to), that’s when the tremors begin. Buildings collapse and bridges burst into flames. People are trapped and killed. Mirai doesn’t know where Yuuki is – but with the help of a concerned adult called Mari, they set off on the arduous journey back to their homes in Setagaya.

Where Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 really succeeded was in making me care. I cared about Mirai – her brattiness at the start was obviously going to lead to her reforming, but it actually did make me think of her as more of a rounded character. I cared about Yuuki, with his happy-go-lucky fascination for robots and his stoic way of putting on a brave face. I cared about Mari, who reminded me of Balsa from Seirei no Moribito, and wanted her family to be okay when she found them. The art was mostly simple, especially when it came to colouring, but it was effective and fluid and the designs were overall very appealing. The voice acting was excellent, especially when it came to Kobayashi Yumiko, who voiced Yuuki so well I had to check he wasn’t voiced by an actual young boy, and who sounded nothing like she did as Tetsunosuke, Azuma Kazuma or Black☆Star – or, obviously, Excel. Everyone else plays their role superbly, from Mari in every episode to the grieving old man helping out in the shelter at the school whose method of dealing with loss was one of the most touching parts of the show.

Not everything was perfect, though. I had a real problem with the twist at the end: I’d figured out what was going to happen by episode 3 because – of all things – the last episode’s title made it so obvious to me. But the way it was presented – so that it was obvious certain things were only in one character’s head, but you weren’t sure it was meant to be obvious – made me keep wondering if the audience was supposed to know or if the makers were thinking they were subtle but just doing it badly, all of which just made me remember the artificial nature of what I was watching a put a big emotional block in the way. The moralising got a bit heavy-handed, the writers pushing the message of ‘you should appreciate your loved ones, because you never know when something might happen to them’ so much that it started to seem their message was actually that everyone needs to go through a horrifying disaster to make them into decent human beings. Also, very unusually and uniquely for a noitaminA show, I actually felt it would benefit from fewer episodes than its 11. There were some episodes – where Yuuki runs off towards Tokyo Tower, where there has to be a dramatic rescue of a boy trying to rescue a rescue robot – that felt like treading water to put off the inevitable ending a little longer.

In fact, what I’d really like to see would be Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 recut as a feature film, removing some of the extraneous parts, presenting the last episodes a little more carefully so that it’s either twist or tragic inevitability, not somewhere between the two, and moving at a brisk pace. Then I think the piece could get the international recognition it deserves (stressing it was made before the tsunami), and sit alongside what is in many ways a spiritual predecessor, Grave of the Fireflies. 

ブラック★ロックシューター / Black★Rock Shooter

Thoughts on the original OVA: here

Studio Ordet are likely here to stay, for while the full series of Black★Rock Shooter was a little disappointing, it was also extremely memorable, visually striking and really came into its own in its final two episodes. If this is what happens when KyoAni bow to pressure and fire one of their directors (Ordet being founded as a direct result of the backlash against Lucky★Star leading to director Yamamoto Yutaka being sacked), maybe they should do it more often.

Until near the end, I was finding Black★Rock Shooter something of a disappointment, which is why I fell out of the habit of watching each episode as it came out – the series ended back in March. It was, I felt, little more than the OVA stretched out a little and very slightly altered. After all, this series only got 8 episodes of prestigious noitaminA airtime, while the OVA was 50 minutes long – about 2 ½ episodes. And I wasn’t impressed by what was added.

One of the things I liked about the OVA was one of the things that I saw criticised most widely – the contrast between the exaggerated and fantastical world of Black★Rock Shooter and the rather mundane world of two girls, and how the small, rather silly problems of who is best friends with whom seem like the world-shattering battles that the alternate world makes literal. The very first episode of Black★Rock Shooter did all it could to destroy that nice subtle, observation by making the things that lead to the internal battles of the girls’ other selves generally screwed up: new character Kagari is a screwy wheelchair-bound Munchausen’s sufferer and masochist who is openly hostile when she meets young Kuroi Mato, making jibes involving macaroons and having loud screaming fits. This all gets translated to macaroon cannons and a creepy voice repeating ‘Kaere’ in Black★Rock Shooter’s world – it’s all just a bit too exaggerated to work and would have been much better if Kagari were subtly cruel and manipulative.

After the situation with Kagari gets resolved, the plot settles into a slight variation on the OVA’s – there, Mato and Yomi make friends, but Mato also making friends with Yuu causes a lot of tension. Here, Yuu and Mato have been friends a long time, and everyone’s relationships are manipulated by a creepy student counsellor at school – which is the stage at which I became a bit bored. I was also slightly saddened by the treatment of the sporty Kohata, whose story arc was pat and whose counterpart(s) in the other world didn’t impress at all.

However, it was all rather redeemed in the last two episodes where many things were revealed: the manipulative counsellor was hiding a connection with Yuu and had a very interesting relationship with her, told in a rather adorable flashback; Yuu herself was rather unlike what everyone had assumed; Dead Master was unexpectedly not going to have the role expected of her and there was actually going to be more of an explanation of who the characters in the other world were and why they looked like the main girls. While the OVA heavily hinted they existed independently of the girls and could simply enter their hearts – which made the physical resemblances as random as some of those in Kingdom Hearts – here, they were ‘other selves’ who take on the burden of physical pain for the girls, and when they are defeated, all the stored up pain disappears, though seems to take memories with it. This made for some interesting moral questions as to whether or not it was acceptable for the girls to offload their suffering, though some of the passive-suffering-while-another-fights when Mato became aware of the world was as creepy a glorification of suffering as anything in Loveless. Indeed, the series probably could have done without taking every opportunity to get its schoolgirl characters naked. It could be handwaved as showing their vulnerability, that they had been internalised by their counterparts, that they existed outside of any normal plane as something of an essence – but ultimately when it happens that much it just looks like fanservice.

That aside, the story ended up being quite an interesting and thought-provoking one and certainly better than I had expected at the beginning. The characters were likeable and the otherworldly designs were awesome – I had a particular fondness for the giant arms of Strength’s body (no matter who inhabited it). The CG work here was superb, cel shading good enough that most of the time it just looked like extremely dynamic hand-drawn animation, but allowed for great sweeping camera shots and those staples of girls-with-guns fans’ favourites: huge weapons and a rain of glowing bullets.

Perhaps it could have been more, and it got off to a bad start in my view, but its aesthetic was extremely memorable, its story turned out to be surprisingly strong for the limited number of episodes, and it eventually hit the right emotional notes. A near thing, but ultimately a success story.  

No. 6

A few things held No. 6 back from becoming the classic series it could have been. But chief amongst them was the thing I thought would be its greatest boon: being part of the increasingly famous noitaminA time slot on Fuji TV at quarter to one in the morning on Thursdays. (‘noitaminA’ is ‘Animation’ backwards, and sadly pronounced as one word – I had hoped it would be like ‘Vitimin A’!) A series of extremely popular anime have been aired in the slot, including Honey and Clover and Eden of the East, and when Black Rock Shooter takes over in 2012 I expect it to go stellar.

The problem is that it has become traditional for noitaminA anime to have just 11 episodes in a half-season, as opposed to the more usual 13. And 11 episodes quite simply was not enough for No. 6 to breathe. They had two options, with the source novels as they are: to rush the character building to get a convincing overarching storyline, or to flesh the characters out well and have a quick, unsatisfying ending. Neither choice is great, and they plumped for option 2.

Shion was a nice, normal kid in the near-future city No. 6 until a chance encounter with a wild fugitive boy who called himself ‘Nezumi’, which means ‘mouse’ or ‘rat’, changed everything. For giving the suspicious boy shelter and food, Shion and his mother are penalised by the Orwellian authorities in the city and Shion loses his right to a privileged education. Four years later, Shion is working a low-wage job hoping to fund himself into a comfortable middle-class life when he sees a coworker mysteriously die. It is Nezumi who comes to save him from the corrupt investigation, but the only place to run is out of the city, where there is a whole different world for him to discover, and it soon becomes apparent his utopian city is not so perfect after all.

At the heart of No. 6 is the relationship between Shion and Nezumi. The first episode, when they are children, is sweet to the point it is almost romantic. A few episodes later, even before Shion’s hair colour is changed when he almost dies just as his coworker did, it is clear there is going to be a homoerotic theme to this story, and that Shion and Nezumi are going to get very close. Of course, this lost No. 6 some insecure male audience members, but I can’t help thinking that’s not much of a loss. Nor, obviousness aside, is it a first for noitaminA (see Jyu-Oh-Sei). Then again, it took me a while to shake the annoying impression that because Shion and Nezumi were drawn so absurdly like Allen and Kanda, the whole thing was a strange alternate universe D.Gray-Man fanfiction. Still, the romance is quite subtle, very sweet and makes both characters much more sympathetic, so was well-judged, and the image of a kiss meaning farewell becomes perhaps the most powerful of the whole concept.

No. 6 would have been vastly improved were its plot simply that Shion and Nezumi have to rescue Shion’s friend Safu (also his female love interest, rather mistreated by events here and gotten out of the way of the central relationship in an artificial way, but with arguably a fate better than anyone else’s), with Nezumi going ahead with his ulterior agenda when they infiltrate the Correctional Facility. It could have kept the best of the plot and those great character moments in the last episode where Nezumi decides he’ll protect Shion by playing the bad guy and pushing him away, but would have removed the things that didn’t work, which were the bits of supernatural nonsense. We didn’t need daft killer bees to give the message scientists playing god is wrong. We could have seen huge walls torn down without stupid yellow cyclones. We most definitely didn’t need death reversed by a literal deus ex machina, tacked on for an emotional suckerpunch but far more a swing and a miss.

No. 6 was an excellent 9, even 10 episodes of build-up. Interacting with the fun tsundere wildgirl Inukashi; struggling to prove his independence to Nezumi and finding out his side-job; getting messages back to his mother and learning the truth of the city he was raised in – those were the things that made No. 6 great, and Bones did a very nice job with the design and world-building, especially in that everyone’s lives were believably normal and repetitive beyond the action of the series.

This is just an example of supernatural concepts introduced to try and make a series more high-minded. If anything, though, they made it seem lazy and made emotions more hollow. But that doesn’t stop No. 6 being very, very close to greatness.

東のエデン / Higashi no Eden / Eden of the East

Four noteworthy things ran through my head in the first minutes of Eden of the East. The first was, ‘Wow, this has to have the same character designer as Honey and Clover’. The second was, ‘Hey, great, finally anime studios are getting American voice actors to do the English parts – not to mention having a great opening song in English’. The third was, ‘Well, would you look at that, censoring a naked person’s rude bits with a white scribble – that’s new.’ But ultimately, the fourth was, ‘It looks like Production I.G. are finally doing something I’m going to like as much as Seirei no Moribito.’

These were pretty insightful things to have thought, if I may say so myself! Well, apart from the one about the rude bits. The character designs were indeed from Umino Chika, mangaka of HachiKuro, which suited Saki’s character extremely well. That song was actually Oasis’ most recent single, which shows the kind of budget involved here – and was in fact more interesting than anything else I’ve heard from the band in years, with a nice reference to Pope. And the director was Production I.G.’s leading light Kamiyama Kenji, who also helmed Seirei no Moribito.

There are two movies following the series, so it’s a consciously unfinished story, but also a fascinating one. Taking its cues from The Bourne Identity, the story opens with a sweet-natured young girl very confused by the appearance of a young, good-looking, thoroughly naked young man outside the White House. He has nothing but a gun and a phone, but gets her out of a scrape with the police after she decides to try and throw a lucky coin into the White House fountain. They manage to get away, and she gives him her coat – but forgets her passport is in the pocket. Managing to find him again, moments after he gets to an apartment listed on his phone with several passports and takes one on as his identity – the most explicit Bourne homage – she is wrapped up in an intrigue involving an organisation that can seemingly do anything, twelve people with ten billion yen each, and missile attacks on Japan.

With a very near-future setting (towers have been rebuilt on the World Trade Centre site, and programming technology has moved on just a little), the issues explored actually turn out to be closest to those of Welcome to the NHK, with which this shares much thematic ground. Saki is involved with a group of NEETs and hikikomori (shut-ins) who very nearly became successful with their revolutionary augmented reality software. However, somehow the disappearance of several thousand such shut-ins and some mysterious missile attacks on Tokyo that hit only uninhabited areas seem to be related – and have links with a strange, deadly game to save society (with a fun football theme to it). Of course, some of those trying to win such a game take extreme measures, and others end up having to use everything they have to stop them.

Eden of the East looks great, has superb pacing and likeable characters, and is full of good ideas. There are some elements that just don’t satisfy, though, especially towards the end: would anyone really think they could win the game as the antagonists do, and was it not anticipated that the Seleção would just waste money to cancel out one another’s plans? No matter how powerful, how does Juiz pull off some of her feats? Was it really necessary for our loveable seleçinho to erase his memory? Why the shipping to Dubai when the men could easily have dissipated unnoticed? And while much of the series’ humour comes from inappropriate nudity, by the end none of it is really explained. Why was he nude at the start? Why are the men that pour out of the crates unclothed and shaven-headed? But these are either minor quibbles or things that may yet be explained. Eden of the East is definitely one of the better recent anime, and I’m eager to watch the feature films.

獣王星 / Jyu Ou Sei / Planet of the Beast King

Jyu-Ou-Sei got attention for a lot of the wrong reasons. For being forced to be only 11 episodes thanks to Honey and Clover II being higher-priority. For having a famous voice-actor in the lead role for the second arc (he did a good job, especially opposite the guy who plays Zoro in One Piece). For having a very quirky OP that a lot of people detested (I really liked it; I like eccentric things – though I don’t know why the singer pronounces his words like an okama). For being a shounen-themed show that was written for a shoujo audience. But I, as always, took it on face value, as a story. And in that vein…it was frustratingly mediocre.

I like Bones. I like them a lot. Fullmetal Alchemist, Wolf’s Rain, Scrapped Princess, Eureka Seven – they’ve done some truly top-tier anime. Even Ouran I enjoyed quite a bit. But this was certainly not one of their finest moments. Some of the animation was very nice, but most of it was functional, awkward, and in the last episodes Thor’s movements looked bizarre, like a bad thesp severely overacting. Plus I never grew to like the way the noses had been drawn. That style works in black-and-white manga, but not in coloured animation.

And the trouble is that the story is really sub-par. The premise – twins are abandoned on a hostile planet, one is killed but the other survives to adapt to life in the tribal, vicious society – is unimaginative but workable. The young boy’s struggle to survive is fairly interesting, but the later episodes, where a series of insipid, far-fetched and clichéd twists are revealed, people start getting killed off for no reason but for a slightly poignant moment (or for a neater resolution) and you find out that either the rest of the series contained no real danger at all or the conclusions that the string-pullers came to are really based on hugely unscientific trust on one improbable outcome - they really feel messy, uninspired and thoroughly, thoroughly lame. No points for the ending, either.

And why is it that younger teenaged boys presented as sex symbols for teenaged girls in anime are so often dressed in bizarre cycling shorts and flimsy vests? Here, in Gundam Wing…it’s a really odd look!

(originally written 17.9.06)

ハチミツとクローバー / Honey and Clover (season 1)

First impressions - 6.5.05
Today, I watched eps 1 and 2 of Honey & Clover, which I downloaded on a whim and had heard absolutely nothing about. I am already totally hooked. This looks to be the anime of the season for me. I went into it with no expectations, and finished episode 2 longing for more. It’s a simple shoujo at first glance, but brilliantly funny – not just in a zany, insane way, but also warmly and wittily funny. It’s the story of the lives of several students. The two main boys are the sweet and quiet Takemoto, who I’ve taken a real liking to, and his mad sempai (upper-classman) Morita, who is endlessly entertaining!

The first half of the episode is a genuinely hilarious sequence wherein Takemoto tries to wake up a seemingly comatose Morita in order for him to attend a class that will allow him to graduate. Poor Takemoto tries everything, with the help of his friend Mayama, but nothing works. In the end, Mayama takes a photograph of Takemoto with a clock in the background as proof that he TRIED, which will, according to Mayama, ‘fend off at least 30% of his curse’ when he wakes up. Brilliant. At college, the boys are introduced to and immediately fall for the adorable Hagu, a doll-like 18-year-old who looks more like 10. She’s very cute, but the more teenaged-looking Ayumi is the more interesting girl.

But, aside from a very weird claymation opening sequence (reflecting the fact that these are art students) and a rather dull ending one, this anime is stunningly beautiful. People raved about the way AIR looked, but H&C is much more aesthetically pleasing. The characters are beautiful, but not in a saccharine or distorted way (except maybe Hagu’s first scenes), the animation is smooth, the backgrounds look like lush watercolours and the music is superb. Best, though, the characters, while interesting enough to be engaging and very funny, are also real enough for me to care about them, and wonder what is going to happen to them. Best anime of the season so far, without a doubt.

Final Thoughts
Hachimitsu to Kurovaa, or Honey and Clover, is something a little bit different. It’s a romantic shoujo story, but not saccharine, nor full of wish-fulfilment. It is not even told from a predominantly feminine perspective. Like many naturalistic shoujo stories, it could just as easily be live action, and I hear that a live action version is actually in production, though it’s doubtful that the charming prettiness of the show will remain intact.

Takemoto is a somewhat naïve and extremely sweet-hearted boy attending an art college, living with his peers in student accommodation in Tokyo. One day, his teacher introduces a new girl, the cripplingly shy and awkward Hagu, who looks more like a prepubescent child or a doll than the 18-year-old she is. Takemoto sees how vulnerable, how nervous, but how incredibly gifted she is, and falls in love. However, Hagu, in her own quiet way, seems to be more interested in Takemoto’s crazy, unpredictable, but also remarkably gifted roommate Morita. Meanwhile, their classmate Ayu is deeply in love with Mayama, another of Takumi’s housemates, but he is devoted to another, older woman. These two difficult love triangles form the basis for the dramatic structure of the show, with much melancholy yearning, plus plenty of unrequited feelings and embarrassment. However, to balance this angst, there is a liberal amount of quirky humour, lots of warm-hearted scenes of friendship and devotion, and a healthy amount of Japanese culture. In summary, it sounds limited, but the atmosphere of the show sucks you in and the humour is genuinely funny and bizarre.

The only things I found irritating were minor – a propensity to draw Hagu too much with her expression of stylised shock, the somewhat difficult to swallow idea that some of these art school geniuses are already making big changes in the world, the sometimes heavy-handed poeticisms of the character’s inner monologues, but overall this show was utterly charming, elegant and moving, and I find myself wishing for a second season.

(originally written 12.10.2005. The second season has since aired.)