少年メイド / Shounen Maid / Boy Maid

Trash. No denying it.

But I enjoyed every episode. And it’s no more egregious than the OreImos and Love Lives of the world.

The female demographic is clearly becoming more and more lucrative in the anime world. It’s female buying power that is the engine behind the success of the likes of Osomatsu-san, Kuroshitsuji and the various hot-blooded sports series like Kuroke no Basuke, Haikyuu!, Free! and Yowamushi Pedal. And just as the male demographic gets feel-good pandering trash, so too do female audiences get their own flavours. Which are perhaps a little more…surprising to Western tastes?

Before it becomes an elephant in the room, yes, a lot of Japanese women like to watch homoerotic stories involving a little boy and an older man. The older man is usually on the feminine side, but the kind of pretty that makes women around him blush and giggle. The boy is usually innocent and often feminised. Kuroshitsuji is perhaps the most prominent example of this set-up, but by no means the only one. And the idea of putting a young boy in a rich man’s house as a maid has been done before in the explicitly pornographic Shounen Maid Kuro-kun.

So this series already begins in a very, very weird place. Little Chihiro-kun in just an elementary school student, 11 or 12 at most, when his mother dies and he goes to live with his extremely wealthy uncle Madoka. Madoka is a clothing designer who loves frills and when he finds out his nephew loves to clean, he promptly puts him in a frilly apron over his shorts and long socks. Though the writer is careful not to make anything overtly sexual about this relationship, Madoka is a rather infantile man who often decides to come and sleep in the same bed as Chihiro.

This odd couple relationship is fleshed out as Chihiro finds out more about his family, various friends and relatives are introduced and Madoka’s personal life gets whipped into shape just as his professional life is kept in check by his personal assistant Keiichirou. A cute member of an idol group called Ryuuji also befriends the motley crew, and I have to say I’d probably rather watch the spin-off about the group that’s airing on Nico Nico Douga (and thus not getting translated by anybody), which at least is sexualising a 16-year-old rather than a 12-year-old – while pretending to be innocent.

But for all the bad taste in the mouth this series might leave, the fact is that it’s cute and fun, just like shows for men about adorable lolis tend to be cute and fun. That Chihiro is only a kid but far more responsible than the adults around him is cute, the occasional embarrassment of being seen in his apron (and his friends ending up with the same fate) is cute. The dynamic between the Uchouten Boys – the idol group – is clichéd and drawn briefly, but also cute. And yes, Chihiro himself, with his serious exterior but obvious vulnerability, is extremely cute.

There’s no denying that the premise is creepy, there’s glamorised paedophilia running under the surface throughout, the characterisation is lazy and the show doesn’t really go anywhere, but it’s no more creepy than numerous little sister or loli comedy shows, and is still very enjoyable for those of us who like cuteness, whether aimed at guys or girls. 

黒執事・サーカスの書/ Kuroshitsuji: Saakasu no Sho / Black Butler: Book of Circus

Well, at the end of the second season of Kuroshitsuji, which I really didn’t like, I considered the anime finished. There were the strange OVAs, but they were mostly gag side-stories. How could the anime continue? It showed us the inevitable end of the pact between a boy and a demon, and that was the best thing about it.

Meanwhile, the manga continued and got rather better. What a shame, I said, that the anime writers went off on their dreadful tangent about Alois rather than following the manga to its best arc, that revolving around the Noah’s Ark Circus.

Well, the property is still a hot one after all these years. That combination of pretty man/grumpy child paedophilia is still irresistible to the fujoshi and there is after all plenty of manga material yet – though I have to say that apart from Lizzy kicking butt in it, I can’t remember much at all about the arc that follows this one. So A-1 Pictures decided to just shrug off continuity and backstory and plunge into an adaptation of the arc as a stand-alone piece. We can just say that it took place at some point before the end of season 2, right? Honestly, that was probably the best thing they could have done.

I don’t really like Kuroshitsuji, but this arc is as good as it gets. A strong premise, what is effectively Ciel’s backstory finally made plain, and then a morally ambiguous ending where there really aren’t any good guys – this works well. The lack of a strong villain – the antagonist essentially being a crazy, feeble old man – creates a hole filled by the notion that the bad guy is, in fact, Ciel himself. With his demon sidekick, of course.

The set-up is a clever one for the kind of dress-up escapades that this sort of fanbase loves. Ciel, still the ‘Queen’s watchdog’ (despite her having so many incredibly strong people around her who should be able to take care of any business), is sent to investigate the disappearances of children near a circus. To gather information, Ciel and Sebastian pose as performers and thanks to Sebastian’s skills, manage to be accepted. Ciel, meanwhile, is pretty useless, and is very cute taken down a notch or two, teased by the others and striking up a friendship with his kind-hearted roommate. Nicknamed ‘Black’ and ‘Smile’, they get to know the rest of the peculiar cast – including ringmaster Joker, cross-dressing tightrope walker Doll, anachronistically-named trapeze artists Peter and Wendy and my favourite, animal tamer Snake, who has named his numerous serpents after prominent Victorian and pre-Victorian writers: Bronte, Keats, Wordsworth and both Oscar and Wilde. Quite pleasingly, Snake is also not involved in the main conspiracy – and so can appear again later.

‘Black’ strikes up a rivalry with ‘Suit’, a shinigami named William T. Spears who has also infiltrated the circus – indicating to Ciel and co that they’re on the right track – and after a while they find the clues they need to uncover the truth: the circus folk, while good-hearted, are eternally indebted to a rich old man who saved them from street life. However, they do his bidding, kidnapping children for his entertainment. Driven mad by having seen Ciel as a child, as well as his father (whose form Sebastian adopted when he manifested), and realizing he will never be as beautiful as they are, this crazy old man has children put through such suffering their minds break, then has them perform deadly circus tricks, dying horribly while he laughs. Because of his obsession with Ciel, he has also exactly replicated the room where Ciel first made his pact: an old operating theatre-style ritual chamber, with an altar where he was to be sacrificed by mysterious shady occultists, that favourite of Victorian books about demons. Incensed, Godzilla stomps on Bambi, and Ciel is merciless – even with the surviving children, who he considers broken beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the circus members storm the Phantomhive manor, intending to threaten Ciel so he will be easily controlled. However, the staff members are finally able to show how truly formidable – and frightening – they are. This is one of the highlights of the series, and I’d probably rather watch an anime about the exploits of those three than one about Ciel. The shinigami show up to mop up the mess, though their presence is largely extraneous and rather sillier than the rest of the arc, especially with one of them wielding a lawnmower. But I can overlook that, and the comic relief just about works.

As a narrative arc, it has its faults – mainly with the antagonist not really having been much of a threat and very little being at stake to Ciel himself – but overall it’s excellent as part of a larger narrative. It gives Ciel a huge amount more depth, showing him being hapless, being vulnerable, being authoritative and being tyrannical. It shows his dark past and the dark present that has resulted. It fleshes out his staff’s stories and makes them more formidable. But most crucially, it sets up a group of enemies who are very likeable – while they do things they can’t be forgiven for, they have been conditioned from a very young age and have very little choice in their actions. 

The anime will continue – first of all with two OVAs entitled ‘Book of Murder’. If they maintain this quality, I might actually start to like Kuroshitsuji.

少年メイドクーロ君 ～天使の歌～ / Shounen Maid Kuro-kun: Tenshi no Uta/ Boy Maid Kuro: Angel’s Song

Warning: Not only is this anime hentai, but it is shotacon yaoi.Read on only if you accept that rather disturbing premise.

It’s a little sad to admit, but even though my blog gets good traffic these days, the entries that consistently get the most hits are for hentai. Yes, in just about every case I complain about how terrible they are, and no comments get left – but that’s what people are searching for, sometimes to stumble their way into here. And…well, even though I usually only criticise them, I still keep getting curious and watching more. I have a few lolicon OVAs from the 80s to watch, and some of the ‘classics’ of the genre like Bible Black, but one that made me pay attention was this – the spiritual successor to the infamous Boku no Pico. Kuro-Kun was made by 37°C Binetsu, who at least according to EncyclopediaDramatica are the renamed Natural High. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case, but stylistically at least this shares a lot with the Pico animations. Only with a whole lot less attempts to project innocence and cuteness, and much more bondage and fetishism.

The plot, which is very much like the execrable Okane ga Nai and I’m fairly sure was lifted wholesale from a C.J. Mikalski manga down to the disjointed childhood flashback scene, is a cliché of yaoi: a young boy takes on extreme family debts he can never pay off, but is rescued by a fabulously wealthy older male. But of course there are strings attached to the deal, and little Kuro-kun is not free, but rather becomes a sex-slave. The plot thus dealt with, the rest is sex based around various fetishes – first voyeurism as Kuro changes into a maid outfit and humiliating lingerie, then food as Kuro has to serve as a dish for his master’s meal, then finally some outright BDSM, in terms of mental roles as well as whips and chains. There is a distinct post-2010 flavour here that Pico managed to avoid, that further cheapens the already very, very cheap, not just in the fetish trends of having ‘traps’, as the English-speaking fandom has it, but in Kuro being a tsundere type, complete with the violent outbursts and shouts of ‘baka!’ Thus ends the OVA, and though I really felt like I’ve seen too much of that particular cliché, I must say I’ve never seen a flying roundhouse kick delivered by a naked underage boy, thoroughly enjoyed by its recipient. Nor did I think that was a sentence I’d ever be typing.

Yes, not only is Kuro-kun pornographic, it is paedophilic, just like the Pico series. Though there’s a rather alarming opening shot in a bizarre introduction that not only made me think that Kuro was going to die at some point during the episode, but that made it appear for a moment he is going to look about 8, he in fact looks about 13. I can’t say that's much more acceptable, but at least he’s reached puberty. I’m quite glad for the censorship, though everything that is unpleasant about anime porn is here in abundance – horrible squeezed sponge sound effects, thick gunk flying everywhere, and what look like very ugly genitals behind the censors. If anime on TV got toned down after particular laws were passed, it hasn’t reached the specialist DVD markets. Oh, and the animators were nice enough to keep some horrific, inflamed, alien-looking anuses uncensored for you until they are violated. How kind. And I thought the scarily oversized boy-nipples were too much.

For all it’s a new addition to a growing niche genre made by what are seemingly old hands, this wasn’t exactly as nice-looking as Pico to Chico, say. Animation is more limited, colouring is far simpler, and the designs are really not very nice – Kuro is a generic pretty-boy who really might as well be a girl, and his seme, personality-free Miisu, has a very dated face that reminds me of Keith from Psychic Force (from the early 90s), though that may mostly be the way his eyes are on top of his hair in that awkward way some character designers draw big fringes.

The bottom line here is that it’s stupid. But it doesn’t care. It’s meant to be shotacon anime based on fetishes, and that’s what it is, with stupid stock tsundere temper tantrums to transition between scenes. But if you’re looking for anything else here – other than trolling material – I’d have to question why. It’s not really what I’d call erotic, nor cute, and even with its whips and chains doesn’t come close to the dark fetishy mood of Enzai, but if you find it hilarious to send these sorts of things to friends and make them go ‘yoooooooooooo’ (or similar), certain scenes might push this even further. And that scene with the food, incidentally also the part that Kuro looks the most gender-ambiguous, actually manages to be cute. 

黒執事/ Kuroshitsuji: OVAs

 I have to say, I didn’t think that I’d be writing any more impressions about Kuroshitsuji, but as it turned out the franchise has been proving enduringly popular with its target demographic (ie young Japanese women), so there have been a stream of vocal albums, a lengthy ‘Red Valentine’ event for the voice actors and these, an extensive list of OVAs. Had there been two or three bits of extra animation, I probably wouldn’t bother to write anything – I never wrote thoughts on Rozen Maiden Ouvertüre, and I loved that – but this was quite a lot of animation. There was a single OVA for the first season – a godawful mess where the cast butchered Hamlet and the writers had a very odd idea of how audiences will react to dramatics – but the second season had no less than six episodes. That’s more animation than there is in quite a lot of the things I review.

They are a very mixed bag, all trying different things, and none of them simply being episodes that could be slipped into the main series, which is quite a nice idea. Unfortunately, the ideas generally aren’t very good ones, probably the best amongst them being ‘The Tale of Will the Shinigami’, which is a flashback featuring William T. Spears and Grell in their early days, becoming qualified in their jobs as shinigami and learning to be heartless. Unlike, say, the absurd caricature in that Hamlet OVA, Grell is written a little better here, flamboyant but still proud and formidable rather than a mere joke. Other than the absence of the main cast, it could have been one of the stronger episodes in the weak second series.

The rest are on the very odd side. The most prominent, perhaps, are the two ‘Ciel in Wonderland’ OVAs, a lazy concept that is also some of the worst crap associated with the much-reviled series. Clearly an excuse to put Ciel in another dress, there is very little to it – over the course of the two episodes, Ciel meets various cast members based on the characters of Alice in Wonderland, and much is made of him growing and shrinking. In the end, nothing much happens other than that Ciel is shown to be greatly dependent on Sebastian, which seems to be rather the titillating thrill for the series’ audience. The only part I found curious and interesting was the way Ran-Mao was presented – here in a daft skin-tight toadstool outfit, her role as a sort of plaything for Lau becomes warped into a figure of overt female sexuality. She goes for cross-dressing Ciel with her large breasts and her shapely bottom, and it is presented as absurd and repulsive. This is an interesting social phenomenon, for me – here is a very homoerotic anime based on a suggestive pederastic relationship, primarily celebrating the pretty men and boys who are attracted to one another. Left to their own devices and delivering OVAs that are very much based on fanservice, the anime makers present being a provocative woman as rather horrific.

But this is not to say that the female is inherently repulsive, as seen in the odd ‘Welcome to the Phantomhive’s’ episode, which hints that a woman is likely to have a wonderful, slightly thrillingly dangerous time in the company of the cast – as long as she is stately and decorous, in-keeping with the idealised version of Victorian England. The episode makes a direct attempt to place the viewer in the role of a woman visiting the Phantomhive house, which is one of the oddest things I’ve seen attempted. The entire episode takes place from a first-person perspective, in the manner of a visual novel. She is introduced to the various loveable but mysterious characters, and is later shown as having a sinister ulterior motive for being there, though is easily thwarted – yet still treated gently. It’s a peculiar and fascinating piece of wish-fulfilment, as blatant as could be, on the face of it high camp but also a glimpse into giving an audience exactly what it wants.

The other two episodes are a little more straightforward, though one is far stranger than the other. One is just another snippet of life with Alois, who I found intensely annoying so didn’t care very much for, damaged goods or no. The triplets getting to speak their minds was quite amusing, but the butterfly element was painfully trite. The other episode, ‘The Making of Kuroshitsuji II’ was peculiar indeed. I’ve seen mini-episodes before where the premise is that the characters of the series are real but act as themselves to make the show – Naruto has done it more than once in post-episode skits – but never quite on this scale, and never quite so self-congratulatory. The episode takes the tongue-in-cheek viewpoint that Kuroshitsuji was an international smash-hit, and that its characters are huge celebrities now. Quite amusing though the exaggeration was, the more subtle effect is of course that the viewer feels part of something grand and inclusive, which is bound to be encouraging.

These episodes are at once horribly bad and quite cleverly-done. They’re only for fans – but that’s rather the point. They know what they’re making is going to look stupid or even reprehensible to the outsider, but that’s no different from what you get in the OVAs for moé series, or in visual novels. But in terms of going to the extreme, being extremely upfront about pleasing fans and casting out all semblance of subtlety, this is a very interesting little set of animations.

Master of Epic: The Animation Age

With the current anime du jour being the extremely fun Sword Art Online, with a few vocal detractors whinnying about its similarities to .hack, I thought it was time I finally went to revisit Master of Epic, that other anime about life in an online world that was another of the victims of the great 2008 hard drive failure. At least, I think it was 2008.

Anyway, I’m certainly not one of the ones who thinks .hack has some kind of monopoly on fantasy stories set in the world (za warudo) of an MMORPG. Quite apart from .hack, SAO and this, there’s the Taiwanese manhua ½ Prince, which I very much enjoy, and then Ragnarok’s anime and France’s Wakfu, though the latter two simply use the setting with a few oblique references to the origin rather than actively having the game as an explicit part of the narrative. The point is that .hack doesn’t have the monopoly on a setting within an MMORPG, and there’s also Master of Epic.

But Master of Epic is a bit different, because unlike those others, it’s a sketch comedy that pokes fun at MMORPGs in general. Master of Epic – or MoE (get it?) – is an actual MMORPG popular in Japan, with some very Japanese races: humans, elves, big beefy warrior types and of course little tiny cutesy lolis/shotas. The anime basically exists to send up the various silly elements familiar to MMORPG players – sitting down to recover health, setting up shops, forming parties with clueless people. There are also parts based on things that are probably exclusive to the game, like hair getting stinky and having flies circling it if you don’t wash it, but it’s easy for anyone who’s ever played any MMORPG to get the gist of these, and far more of it is universal. I particularly liked the short sequences where people in real life behaved as if in MMORPGs, which was hilarious.

Otherwise, we had things like the terrible beginner who keeps forming plans to beat enemies but rushes headlong into danger and gets destroyed, the big guy who has a crush on a cute little thing only for her to reveal her dark, monster-summoning streak, a little party who endlessly try to help their most useless member only for her to mess everything up, the craftsman who tries hard to impress a girl he likes even if she’s entirely indifferent, and a hilarious member of the big, butch race who had decided to wear a dress and help all other denizens of the MoE world with their fashion sense. Just about every episode is also bookended by a presenter duo who tend to segue into silly news reports that establish the loose theme of the episode, and at the end, a group of five colour-coordinated loli-race characters send up sentai shows in what starts as a quest for fame but ends up a battle against the show’s monstrous producer.

Though the animation is a mixed bag, with some sequences looking atrocious and episode 10 (I think it was) randomly looking better than all the rest, one thing MoE has going for it is the appealing art. The cute child-race, the pretty-boy humans and elves (adorable in SD form), the sexy women and the cuties, they are all drawn in a very attractive way that reminds me of Dog Days, which has just started its second season. Playing on the importance of image, some of the biggest laughs came from characters changing their looks, from masks that weren’t what moé fan Bukottsu expected to forced makeovers where flowing locks turn into Mohawks or a great big cross-dressing hulk picks out a new outfit for you. There’s even one poor female from the muscular race (who look Amazonian) who ends up forced into manba makeup!

Ultimately, MoE is of course throwaway. It’s sketch-based, light comedy with only 12 episodes, and today it’s already more or less forgotten. But if anyone wants a bit of an antidote to the seriousness of Sword Art Online, I won’t hesitate to recommend this bit of fun, for however inconsequential it may be, it is also undeniably funny. 

ネギま!? / Negima!?

First impressions - 11.10.06

This remake, more an Alternate Universe retelling, is called Negima!?, based on the same manga as last year’s Mahou Sensei Negima but in a different style. The manga’s fans insist that the original series, which I thought was a dumb but occasionally charming throwaway comedy with little substance and a lot of brainless fanservice, was a hideous slight to the masterpiece that is the original manga (but I’m doubtful anything based on the premise of a preteen magician teaching a class of risible harem-anime clichés, including ghosts, samurai and technological geniuses, can ever SERIOUSLY be good). The new version wasn’t a hit with me. The jokes, especially the big comedy reactions, were just lame and badly-timed, and the little references to other anime on the blackboard, while amusing, didn’t suit the tone of the scene, dragging the whole episode down. The art style also isn’t as cute as in the badly-animated but nice-looking original version. Ah well. 

Final thoughts - 15.04.12

Given that it was way back in the October of 2006 that I started to watch this, and I can only blame the fact that I lost a lot of episodes when an external hard drive died so far for it taking five and a half years to get through, I have to conclude that though Shaft’s version was more entertaining and far more sophisticated than the Xebec Mahou Sensei Negima, I actually found it quite boring. Not in a good way.

For whatever reason, when Shaft got hold of the Negima property and gave it to their leading light Shinbou Akiyuki, he decided to make it very much like his Pani Poni Dash!, which had ended a few months before. With Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei, it became rather his signature style, though now has reached the point where it has further evolved into something a bit less zany, making something more straightforward like Madoka have a unique aesthetic.

While it took it further from its roots, Negima wasn’t a bad thing to adapt in this way. It’s about one little magical boy and his immense harem of anime clichés – from robots to ghosts to ninja to acrobats to scientist girls who can make large mecha. If ever there were an anime that leant itself to abrupt style changes, exophoric references and pastiches, it’s this. And the parodies are laid on thick – Negima!?’s style happily parodies just about any anime subgenre you can think of, plenty of film ones and even has a South Park scene, which while not especially necessary or insightful at least seems more affectionate than FLCL’s stab at the same. Add in a great opening track (‘1000% Sparkling’) that seemed to be a real hit in Japan (if remixes, stepmania/osu et al maps and Nico Douga medley spots are anything to judge by) and you seem to have great entertainment.

But it just…missed, for me, in a way Pani Poni Dash! just managed to avoid and Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei seemed to have outgrown – not that it didn’t have problems of its own. Here…I think the problem was with the story. With PPD you had plots where there was a problem to be resolved each episode, be it a bus teetering on the edge of a cliff or an alien trying to conquer the world: they were episodic and there were numerous tangents, but it went back to that at the end. Zetsubou-sensei similarly kept things episodic, usually focusing an episode on a particular issue facing society (or blown out of proportion by the media) and exploring it. But Negima!?...well, it tries to have more of a contiguous story, centred at first on the general concept of Negi and his pacts, then moving to a series of antagonists, with Evangeline, a ‘black rose baron’ and some family members providing adversity, but the snatches of plot progression there are largely buried under endless skits, some of which raise a smile, a few of which made me laugh aloud, but most of which just got in the way and failed to amuse – and not just because jokes were going over my head (though I’m sure that happened more than once).

Taken as a whole, I’d say I liked Negima!? and what Shaft did here. I liked the stupid new animal characters. I liked the useless mascot forms some of the girls took, and the cosplay cards. I liked the way the antagonists were by and large relatable and interesting. I liked the odd surrealism, pacing and switching. But I’ve never much liked the premise of 10-year-old-genius-teaches-class-and-makes-magical-pacts-by-kissing-them-and-making-them-transform-into-fanservice-friendly-outfits. I’ve never much cared about the characters beyond liking some of the peripheral ones, especially when they have manzai-like routines. And I will go on to watch the OVAs (eventually). But I would not dream of rewatching Negima!? from the start, and certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t already acquainted with the Shaft/Shinbou way of doing things and certain they liked it watch this. Too much confusion is seldom a good thing. 

今日の5の2 / Kyou no Go no Ni / Today in Class 5-2 (Xebec)

You may notice that the pic is familiar – that’s because I wanted it to directly echo the one for the original Kyou no Go no Ni OVA series (right-click and open the pic in a new tab/window to see it full-sized). When I mentioned this Xebec adaptation there, I expected it to be quite different – much cuter and less full of erotic situations featuring its 11-year-old cast. After all, that series was made by an anime studio that makes hentai – and I described it back in 2006 as ‘ultimate pedo-bait anime’. Xebec mostly make cute stuff like The Third and DNAngel, right? So they’re not going to make it that pervy. Even if they did also make Kanokon…? 

In fact, it was much the same, only without all the gratuitous panty-shots. Sure, not having panty-shots makes for a bit less squirming and eyebrow-raising, but to my surprise, the scripts were still centred on sex jokes, especially for the first half of the episodes. Ryouta is still forever walking in on the girls topless, accidentally falling on top of them and being caught in compromising positions that, for example, make it look like he’s receiving oral sex.

And again, it’s when the series moves away from this that it is at its best. With a full 13 episodes and its own season-based OVA, this version of Kyou no Go no Ni at least gets to develop its characters more. In particular, the boys are given more of a focus – in the old version, they were almost ignored, while here Kouji’s quick-wittedness and Tsubasa’s amusing innocent wisdom get fleshed out properly, and the girls similarly have more time onscreen and get more character development beyond being the archetypes of the tomboy, the childhood friend, the funny spacey one etc.

To my surprise, though, I actually preferred the art style of the original. I’d hoped it was going to look like Minami-Ke, which as I said in my review of the OVA is from the same mangaka, but in trying to move it towards the fad for cute moéblobs it actually ended up looking mostly cheap and clumsy. A lot of the art just looks ugly and off-model and the kids’ body shapes are often weird and malformed in motion. Ryouta looks much better than in the OVA, but other than that it definitely suffers for the comparison, and a more defined and slicker art style would make the characters more distinctive – I more than once mixed up the two short-haired girls Yuuki and Natsumi.

Overall, the series did show the improvements I had hoped for – but only when it had already repeated all the parts of the OVA that were a bit too far. Moéblob art only accentuates that these are 11-year-old kids who don’t suit the sexual-themed humour here – I would have much preferred they were aged up and drawn in a slightly more sophisticated way. I’m not usually one to preach against the sexualization of minors in anime, but this is one of the rare cases in which it seriously detracts from the piece overall, which only gains its charm once the steam goes out of the ecchi humour and more quirky character-based jokes or funny situations –like one with a duck – can come in. 

今日の5の2 / Kyou no Go no Ni / Today in Class 5-2: 2006 OVA series

First Impressions, 22.4.06: New anime: Kyou no go no ni (‘Today in [Class] 5-2’)

Heheheh! Ultimate pedo-bait anime! Perverted humour mostly involving a boy getting inadvertently put into seemingly sexual situations with various girls, then being found in compromising positions, is an old staple of anime humour, especially in the harem genre. But they’re not normally 11!

Funny little show. Could be quite entertaining, could be eye-roll-inducing fanservice for undiscerning lolicons. We’ll see. But I was amused enough to want to watch more. I feel somewhat dirty afterwards, though.

In all honesty, though, they could’ve made exactly the same anime and just SAID they were 18, so I don’t see why anyone should be too disturbed.

Final thoughts: 22.01.12

It was only in the last couple of weeks, when I decided to finally watch the five-minute special that capped off this OVA series, that I found out that Kyou no Go no Ni – or ‘Today in Class 5-2’ – was by Sakuraba Koharu, the mangaka behind Minami-ke. It was something of a surprise, much like when I read the manga of Ichigo Mashimaro and found that rather than a comedy about childish silliness, it was actually quite pervy. For though I had watched the Kyou no Go no Ni episodes more or less as they came out, they struck me as both not very memorable and pretty embarrassing.

You see, Kyou no Go no Ni is about a class of 5^th Graders – mostly 11 years old. They have all sorts of mishaps, almost all of them involving one poor hapless boy innocently blundering into what look like sexual encounters and getting smacked for it. The truth is that it’s quite possible to tell this is from the same source as Minami-ke, really – there, too, a lot of the humour comes from people leaping to the wrong conclusions, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or misinterpreting what someone else is talking about, and indeed, most of my favourite characters there are the same age (and mostly in their own Class 5-2) and have similar – often rather androgynous – designs. Albeit with those strange mouths.

The trouble is that these OVAs were made by Shinkuukan, who are a porn animation production studio. And they produce this little mini-series about 11-year-olds more or less as porn. I don’t know how much of the manga is sexual-themed fanservice, in which the poor protagonist Ryouta is constantly seeing girls near-naked, falling and landing on top of them or even getting a kiss or two, but just about every joke in these OVAs is along these lines or leads in that direction. And the fact is that it’s much better when they’re not. Humour about Valentine’s chocolates or thinking your childhood friend is talking about an old memory of wanting to marry you when actually she’s talking about bedwetting are worth a thousand cheap skirt-flipping gags – and to be honest, those would be far funnier if they were played for the laughs you get from reactions (ie, the shot is arranged behind the girls having their skirts flipped up, showing nothing of what the boys see but their shocked expressions instead) rather than the uncomfortably blatant child erotica of close-ups of crotches.

After this, Xebec made a series of Kyou no Go no Ni in its own right – with its own OVA afterwards – and apparently they are much less squirm-inducing, and honestly the character designs look rather nicer. I expect the animation is less smooth and the colouring much simpler, but it doesn’t matter if it turns out this version looks far nicer: the fact is that so obviously eroticising the children makes them immeasurably less cute rather than making them more desirable, and takes the viewer’s thoughts not to the character but to the animators and their motives. Either make a cute comedy or make loli porn; don’t spoil a comedy about cute 11-year-olds with more awkward erotica than High School Girls and Rosario + Vampire combined. At least Moetan doesn’t feel like it could be something much better.

On the other hand, Kyou no Go no Ni does indeed have another chance – the Xebec series, which I shall watch. I don’t really remember much about the characters beyond the main boy, his childhood friend and the spacey blonde girl, there’s no plot to sink my teeth into and, well, I’ll always be wondering how much fanservice is in the manga (and perhaps I’ll find out at some point), but I’ll give it a chance. After all, I didn’t particularly care for Minami-ke after a few episodes but it grew on me and I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming fourth season.

痴漢物語/ Chikan Monogatari / Public Harassment Story / Legend of the Pervert (hentai)

Another hentai review from me! I’ve never found animated porn much beyond ridiculous and ugly, but this one from 2007 at least manages to be attractively-drawn, decently-acted and with good character designs. It’s also interesting in that it got distribution for the US, so this particular slab of filth can be bought Stateside with mosaic censoring removed – which in all honesty is never much of a positive in hentai, because what you don’t see tends to be much more appealing than what gets revealed. While hentai doujins have in recent years featured smaller and smaller censor bars and better-drawn naughty bits, anime has yet to try its luck in that regard and perhaps because they know nobody in Japan will see the actual drawings, they tend to be…less than impressive.

Plus Legend of the Pervert had an interesting footnote (no pun intended) in that it had an extended scene cut from international distribution because it depicted underage sex. Thus, only a censored version of this part exists; I can’t see it being anything other than funny either way, revolving as it does around an adorable little boy with enormous equipment.

There are two episodes here, and the theme – obvious from the Japanese title but not the English – is sex in public places. The first episode, which contains the cut side-story, is the otherwise conventional story of an office worker who is bullied by his domineering female boss. She is just letting out pent-up sexual frustration, though, and masturbates when she thinks she is alone. Of course, Hakushiki sees her and one thing leads to another. Meanwhile, his little brother is coerced into showing a girl his ‘dekachin’ late at night in school. To avoid discovery, they hide in a toilet cubicle before having their first real sexual experience…which may possibly have been cute if not for all the OH GOD BLOOD EVERYWHERE and screams of ‘itai!’ and ‘muri, muri, zettai muri!’, going way beyond my squick limits.

Part two starts with a very cute boy and girl in a restaurant where the waitress uniform is, of course, a maid outfit. The boy, Akao, embarrasses the girl when she’s trying to order, and then in not-entirely-clear ways, they manage to have public sex there in the booth, without everyone seeing but with the risk still there. Akao goes home but his sisters have heard about him teasing his girlfriend, so teach him some humility by playing with his genitals with their feet, tying him up naked outdoors and having sex. The final scene is back with the girlfriend, largely a fantasy scene where Akao imagines more sex.

For all hentai tends to be incredibly silly and non-sexy, and for all I’ve always found the preference for drawing bodily fluids like cake mixture to be nauseating rather than attractive, this at least looks good. Only one character in Wordsworth looked anything other than terrible, it’s dodgy art as much as nasty non-con that kills Enzai and even the Boku no Pico OVAs, for all their slick production have a tendency to make the faces look stupid once sex scenes start. Legend of the Pervert at least has its art going for it, and to be honest, it’s all the plot and characterisation porn needs.

But I also don’t hesitate to say that, as with Countdown to Delight, the strange thing here – in episode 2 – is how hentai for guys centres on a pretty, girly, very young-looking boy who reminded me of Joey from Heroman. Again, it seems as though the idea is to play into fantasies about being dominated and humiliated, but it all ends up coming over like the one who’s centre of sexual attention is the boy, not the women. Suits me okay, and it’s actually quite nice to see both the boy and the girl being very cute. I actually probably only watched it because of this novelty.

I don’t write many impressions about hentai, partly because there’s not much to say but mostly because I just don’t watch much of it. Legend of the Pervert is probably on the better end of what’s on offer, though – especially as it caters for all sorts, quite possibly more than it actually intended to. That, coupled with the interesting point of what goes too far for a Western audience but is permissible in Japan, make this something quite interesting to watch.

パパとKISS IN THE DARK / Papa to Kiss in the Dark / Kiss in the Dark with Papa

These pervy shotacon anime are not for me, I fear. The closest one has come to working was Boku no Pico, and that was more hilarious than anything else. Actually, Enzai probably worked best, but would have been vastly improved if the shotacon part that was its whole reason for being had been taken out. I can understand the appeal of the concepts behind these, but in execution they’re mostly terrible. I realise I am not the target audience – these are (Pico excepted) written by Japanese women for Japanese women, the so-called fujoshi who cross the cultural divide in the form of yaoi fangirls in the Occident. But at the same time, I’ve found lots of manga on these subject I really enjoy, from short doujin to full anthologies by the likes of CJ Michalski, which take the time to set up a good scenario and care about character development. More mature takes on the general themes, like the current divisive success No. 6, also work far better.

But Papa to Kiss in the Dark is a two-part OVA all about a 15-year-old boy’s love affair with his father. It was rubbish. I really disliked all the characters except the childhood friend. And it wasn't the least bit sexy, or naughty, or in any way enhanced by the element of incest – which was very unpleasant anyway. I also dislike how the weaker of these stories all have a central boy who everyone in the vicinity seems to love and adore for the most superficial reasons – I’m looking at you, Loveless – and the most artificial drama gets injected through cheap storytelling methods revolving around jealousy – bow your head in shame, Gravitation.

Papa to Kiss is just one in a sequence of samey shotacon teasers, only with an additional layer of unpleasant incest overlaid on it – or two layers, really, when you find out more about the actress. It’s only 50 minutes of fluff, so hardly too much to bear, but there’s little to recommend it. Like other Boys’ Love anime, though, it will have its vociferous young female fans who have very little to compare it with, so will find it both fulfilling as a story and erotically satisfying. It is, I suppose, good they can enjoy it and need nothing better-written to please them, but I can’t count myself amongst them.

(expanded from impressions, 6.12.07)

爆発寸前！！ 天使のカウントダウン / Ready to Explode!! Angel’s Countdown / Countdown to Delight

Time to slip impressions of a hentai in between two slightly more respected older anime, albeit possibly not much. From Green Bunny, the great minds behind Wordsworth, and apparently farmed out to be animated in Korea, comes a hilariously plotless pornographic comedic anime that can’t quite decide who its audience is. Like so many ecchi series, Countdown to Delight gets most of its laughs by having a main character who doesn’t want to do anything sexual getting aggressively pursued – only here, the sex actually happens. And it’s remarkable how much less erotically charged things are as a result.

The plot, such as it is, is divided into two parts. In the first, our hero Motoki cannot get his homework done because his sister insists on having loud lesbian sex in the next room. Poor Motoki – not only is he pretty and childlike, with an unbroken voice and almost no body hair despite being in junior high, but his best friend has decided they ought to be gay lovers. On top of that, his sister’s lesbian lover decides that she ought to seduce him. His best friend walks in on this and has a hilarious jealous reaction. The best friend's sister came along, too, wanting a threesome with the two girls, but they decide on a fivesome instead. Motoki doesn’t like this idea, so runs away. While in this state of distress, he is almost hit by a car. In the second, this situation leads to him getting tutored by a beautiful rich girl, who of course turns out to be dominatrix fond of sadism. Poor Motoki is tied up, whipped and otherwise abused, until the three girls come to the rescue in silly magical girl/sentai outfits and prepare to fight – only for the meta humour to kick in as they declare nobody wants to see action scenes in a comedic hentai, so they have an orgy instead. And the poor gay kid gets no action at all.

It’s actually quite refreshing to see a hentai that’s actually meant to be funny. Though the humour is derivative, it makes everything much more pleasant to watch and at least avoids being self-important. On the other hand, playing it for laughs makes me wonder what the point of the existence of this episode is. I’m not one for hentai in general, it never…doing it for me, but I can’t see how anyone finds this erotic.

Plus it seems odd to me to have Motoki at the centre of it all. I guess he’s supposed to be easy to identify with, and it’s the fantasy of having four aggressive girls actively pursuing you (even if one is your big sister) that’s supposed to appeal, but…in the end, because he’s at the centre and always getting subjugated, it ends up seeming like he’s the object of sexual desire, and the whole thing is actually straight shota rather than the intended fantasy for straight boys.

I don’t think it bears overanalysis, though. A hentai to watch for laughs – like just about every other hentai around.

冤罪/ Enzai / Falsely Accused

Well, I thought that having seen Boku no Pico, I was all done with shotacon hentai, but there was one more to see, - one that seemed to be in almost every way the opposite of Boku no Pico. Where Pico tries to be achingly cute, innocent and even wholesome, Enzai is dirty, gritty and disturbing. Pico is plotless fluff that leads to boys having sex. Enzai is a murder mystery with several scenes of prison rape. And while I can say without hesitation that the two-episode OVA would have been far better without the sex scenes, it’s also true that I probably would never have heard of the title without them.

So it goes like this. In a clearly Les Miserables-influenced revolutionary France, a young gamin named Guys is arrested for shoplifting, but is then accused of murder. Convinced by a corrupt official to admit to the crime, he is locked up and brutally raped by inmates and authority figures alike. However, working with the friends he makes behind bars, who happen to have the specialities he needs to link the clues at the murder scene together, he regains hope. In his clever and handsome lawyer, he eventually finds his path to freedom and, just to cheapen everything else, his true gay love.

Although its production values are far less impressive than Pico’s, it is a much more satisfying watch, for while its animation and much of its art is sub-par, actually having a half-decent plot makes it a far more appealing prospect.

But then comes the necessary remembrance that the rape scenes exist only to titillate, not to inspire sympathy for Guys and the others who get violated, but to turn the audience on, that these same rape fantasies recur wherever there are fujoshi (female otaku, literally rotten women), be it in Harry Potter fanfics or FMA doujinshi. I can laugh at the silly, soft-focus, exaggerated childishness of Boku no Pico and its sequel. But I stop short of rape. I definitely stop short of resultant bleeding. ‘Squick’ is the fandom term – it repels me and starts being deeply unpleasant.

Enzai could have been a very good anime if, like the majority of straight H-Game adaptations, the sex had been taken out to be replaced by a focus on the story, lots of sexual tension and suggestiveness. Porn just makes everything cheap and tacky.

I suppose Boku no Pico works better overall, having set out to be nothing more than straightforward plotless porn. Enzai is a much higher concept and made up of far better ingredients, but disappointing in that it could have been so much more.

And frankly, while the idea of anime boys having sex may have some appeal in principle, as does that of anime girls doing the same, in execution it always becomes a vulgar and ugly display, and deeply silly. Hentai, even fringe stuff like shotacon or lolicon, is just not for me.

(originally written 30.8.07. Impressions of the visual novel the animation was based on here)

ぼくのぴこ + ぴことちこ / Boku no Pico & Pico to Chico

Warning: this show is paedophilic gay animated porn. Read on only if you can get past this rather disturbing premise.

I’ve written nearly one hundred of these little reviews, but this is the first time I’m reviewing any hentai. In fact, this is actually the first hentai I’ve seen right through; other than this, I’ve only ever watched clips of Eva porn in an AMV, clips and bits and pieces shown to me for comedy value. People may be sceptical when I say this, but it’s true – hentai really doesn’t do it for me, doesn’t turn me on, and doesn’t stimulate me as a piece of storytelling…but then anyone who’s seen hentai will know that the last assertion is just stating the obvious.

Even well-known hentai like Bible Black, or ones that spark a lot of discussion like Kite, just don’t interest me. Because if hentai isn’t utterly stupid, then it’s really disgusting. And it’s usually both.

Along comes Boku no Pico. A laughably ropey plot allows for lots of gay sex scenes – an adult male meets an adolescent boy who acts like a little girl. They have sex, then have more sex, then have an argument, then have make-up sex. That really is it. To my surprise, unlike most yaoi, especially with this sort of age dynamic and seme/uke pattern, and in spite of its fanbase in the West, Boku no Pico was not made for women to enjoy. It was made by and for men. Although Pico is a horribly blatant caricature, the pretty, extremely submissive teenaged boy as a sexual ideal is intriguing, being such a taboo, and though ‘Mokkun’ treats the kid in a pretty dubious, objectifying way, it’s mostly only so that Pico’s soft personality can come through.

Let’s face it, Pico is an idealised girl with boys’ pixellated genitalia, in the typical moé mould of absolute submissiveness with just a touch of headstrong selfishness than can be resisted later for maximum sweetness.

But oh good lord, the sex scenes are not appealing. Leaving aside the bizarre errors concerning how the male body works (no, you can’t do that with a foreskin, my dears. I can see what he’s doing behind that pixellation, and it’s not possible!) and the effectiveness of spit as lubrication, why on earth is it supposed to be sexy to see an ephebe ejaculating about a litre of spunk that’s stickier than wallpaper paste? They’re good for just one thing, laughter; Boku no Pico can be sexy only until it becomes porn, and even then not very much so.

Then comes the sequel, Pico to Chico. Pico goes on holiday and finds an even younger boy, who looks about seven, and they have sex! Pico, the most submissive character ever conceived, gets an uke of his own! Well, some of the time – he’s so feeble that the seven-year-old can be the dominant partner at times. Pico and Chico have lots of sex, dress up as girls, and Chico’s sister masturbates while she secretly watches. Charming. The animators don’t seem to know that prepubescents don’t ejaculate, because Chico, too, is bursting with yucky wallpaper paste.

This kind of thing is legal in the UK at the moment, though will quite probably cease to enjoy that status within the year, as our beloved politicians know what it’s acceptable for the nation to see, of course, and John Reid has announced that underage cartoon porn will soon be criminalised. (Hundreds of teenaged girls around the country, take note.) No-one’s ever going to believe that Pico is 18, let alone Chico, but I need not fear breaking the law, because there’s nothing that makes Boku no Pico worth re-watching, and it won’t be on my hard drive.

Hentai featuring huge boobs, exaggerated cocks or tentacle rape: delete at once.

Hentai featuring a cute teenaged boy: watch it all the way through, shake head and delete.

Hentai featuring a the boy having sex with a pre-teen: watch shaking head, sneering or laughing, then delete.

On the other hand, it does give me a desire to see other shounen-ai, if not yaoi. It was, after all, the yaoi that ruined the shounen-ai. As long as it’s not crap like Loveless or Gravitation, anyway.

(Originally written 22.8.07. A third in the series has since been released. I have in fact found more uses for the show as it has since become more infamous: it's occasionally very funny to show it to the wrong people at the wrong times)

ラブレス / Loveless

Okay, how’s this for a yaoi fangirl’s dream? 12-year-old Ritsuka’s life has been one long torture of angstiness since his big brother Seimei died. His mother, seeing the change in him, has gone mad and abuses him because she doesn’t recognise her beloved little boy in him. One day, he meets Soubi, an adult with beautiful long hair and a strong, quiet exterior, who knew his brother. Adorably embarrassed to be talking to a grown-up, he goes with the stranger for a talk in the park, and Soubi kisses him.

The bewildered Ritsuka is drawn into the mystery surrounding his brother’s death: it turns out that Seimei was part of a hidden school that trains fighters, who attack one another with the physical manifestation of words. Crucially, these fighters operate in pairs: the ‘fighter’, who attacks, and the ‘sacrifice’, who takes the damage dealt out by the opponent. Seimei and Soubi were the strongest there ever were, and Soubi had been brutally conditioned to be utterly devoted to Seimei. Normally, a fighter cannot live without his sacrifice: why, then, does Soubi seem to be replacing Seimei with his brother? Is it simply because that’s what he was ordered to do? Then does he really love Ritsuka, as he says he does, or is he just carrying out another's commands?

Loveless is pure fanservice. The two main characters are there purely so that shounen-ai fans can squee. The fact that everyone else in the anime seems to find them utterly irresistible doesn’t hurt, either, though all the rest generally get relegated to comic relief. Character development is just about non-existent: Ritsuka’s problems get solved, his character flaws rectified, so abruptly that it’s hard to believe they were ever problems at all. Soubi screws with everyone around him, but in the end admits to his true feelings, and his taciturn exterior of utter coolness yet utter subservience is actually very annoying. Because he got whipped into submission by his teacher (literally), his characterless banality is supposed to be profound? And if you’re going to make all the minor characters totally flat, doing little but lusting over the two protagonists (even the psychologist falls for the 12-year-old!), don’t devote several of only 12 episodes to them!

Another anime where vagueness substitutes for profundity, including the fighting system, which (like that of Yu-Gi-Oh) is so devoid of proper rules or limitations that it’s incoherent. Ritsuka was occasionally cute, but his character just wasn’t believable enough for me to really care about him. Cheap fodder for fangirls. Cat-ears and all.

(Originally written 11.11.05. The manga offers a little more depth, especially in finding out the truth behind Seimei, but also shares most of the anime's flaws)

グラビテーション / Gravitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

(originally written 30.3.06)

桜蘭高校ホスト部/ Ouran Koukou Hosuto Kurabu / Ouran High School Host Club

When I hear that Bones are making a new anime, I sit up and pay attention. However, when I heard that the famous shounen studio (responsible for animating, amongst others, Fullmetal Alchemist and Wolf’s Rain) are trying their hand at a light shoujo comedy, I just had to see how they fared. As a matter of fact, they managed to make one of the biggest shows of the last season, and win the affection of many a young female viewer – and a fair few male ones, too.

Ouran revolves around a girl of average income named Haruhi at a school for the incredibly rich. Some of the prettiest boys in this school have formed a ‘host club’, whose modus operandi is to charm the female contingent of the school and profit from their custom. When Haruhi stumbles across the club and ends up breaking a valuable vase, they coerce her into joining, believing her to be a pretty boy. She soon gets to know the club members, who are well aware that they fit neatly into typical shoujo archetypes (a handsome leader, a quiet bespectacled academic type, a tall silent one, an adorable chibi who looks about 7 and two very close identical twins) and most of them soon become enamoured with her. But beneath the dressing-up games, the whacky adventures and the cheerful quests to help others who have found themselves in predicaments, each of the original host club members has problems of his own.

The show has the comfortable situation of being ostensibly a comedy, so its over-obvious premise can be accepted as a parody of the genre – indeed, it’s quite fun to watch this alongside Meine Lieber, which is a serious shoujo drama with many of the same clichés sent up by Ouran (more on that when I finish ML series 2) – and yet the writers can turn things serious and angsty and still be taken seriously because of the comedy base. Anime creators like even their cutest shows to be bittersweet, so it’s a formula that works well. While Ouran didn’t always hit the mark, and had a fair few boring, pretentious or just plain forgettable episodes focusing on secondary or peripheral characters, it was always a show worth watching, because almost every episode had some great laughs, some cute moments and some pure joyful randomness. The ending, while very open, was both serious and silly enough to work well, and ended with a clever juxtaposition of characters and settings. Will there be a series two? Very possible, since the series was a hit in Japan and there’s more manga source material to go on. Possibly why few series-long loose ends were never really tied up.

Fun, cute, vibrant, well-acted, well-animated and genuinely funny character-driven comedy. Not the funniest show I’ve ever seen, nor the most moving, sweet or clever. But always a joy to watch, and thus recommended.

(originally written 10.2.06)

黒執事/Black Butler / Kuroshitsuji (first season)

(Season 2 impressions here: http://adziu.blogspot.com/2010/11/kuroshitsuji-season-ii.html
OVAS here: http://adziu.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/kuroshitsuji-ovas.html )

It’s taken me some time to get around to finishing Kuroshitsuji, which I started watching over a year ago. I suppose to some extent I lost interest, especially when the anime diverged from the manga, and instead of going to the interesting, dark places the original went in the circus arc, embarked on its own climactic section opposing the demon with an angel.

Kuroshitsuji is the story of a little boy with the unlikely name of Ciel Phantomhive, a young earl in Victorian Britain, although mangaka Yana Toboso apparently never found out an earl needs another name to go with the title. Poor Ciel has had an incredibly sad life, losing his parents and very nearly losing his own life as a human sacrifice. He was saved only by a Faustian pact with a powerful demon, who takes the form of a butler. With this immense power under his control, Ceil becomes a great aid to the Queen, solving lazily-plotted supernatural crimes, tangling with some flamboyant death-gods and introducing finger-food to the Great Exhibition, all with the aid of his inept but super-powered staff members.

I am perhaps describing it unfairly, because while it has healthy doses of silliness, it is an anime that presents itself with a pleasing lack of irony, and aims for elegance and some degree of emotional depth. The heart of its appeal is the homoerotic, pederastic relationship between the 12-year-old boy and his pretty-faced adult demon, and some scenes, such as when Ciel is disguising himself as a girl and needs Sebastian to put a corset on him, are open references to the homosexual implications of the scenario, even if they are jokes. The rather pretty coupling has attracted a huge female fanbase, who like that sort of thing. Personally, perhaps to the surprise of some, I didn’t really find Ciel cute or Sebastian interesting, and thought Finnie was much sweeter. Possibly it’s just an aversion to the tsundere character mould.

That said, the character designs are very nice, with special emphasis placed on the attire, kodona rather than authentically Victorian, and the animation from new studio A-1 Pictures (put together by Sony to be, presumably, a more complete, standalone anime studio than Aniplex, A-1 are working on adaptations of games like Persona and Valkyria Chronicles, but are also one of the studios behind the disappointing Fairy Tail anime) is unspectacular but neat and pretty to look at.

The danger is taking Kuroshitsuji too seriously, for while the manga has managed to take itself to more mature places, the anime is still about demons fighting with silverwear, naked werewolf-men, effete shinigami with stationary chainsaws or paper scissors and elite assassins working in the kitchens and sculleries. There is tragedy at the heart, but Kuroshitsuji is primarily daft and proud of it, and that’s why it was almost always fun to watch. And while the ending went off on a strange tangent about Queen Victoria and ended with a very unimpressive power-up moment, it also impressed in several ways: I rather liked the way lots of clichés about London were used, but transplanted: there was a Great Fire, but with a shot of the Monument to make sure the viewer knew this was no anachronism. There was a London bridge, falling down, but it was Tower Bridge, under construction. And then the very ending…well, with its charged eroticism, sado-masochism and finality, it was something I certainly didn’t expect to see – and it’ll be interesting to see how the second season deals with it.

One minor quibble at the end, though – I really hated the way Shinsen-Subs (and a lot of others following them) decided to translate the show’s catchphrase, ‘あくまで執事です’, ‘akumade shitsuji desu’, which means something like ‘(I am) a butler through and through’ or ‘(I am) a butler to the core’, but also serves as a pun: ‘悪魔で執事です’, or ‘(I am) a demon and a butler’. Seeking to preserve the pun, Shinsen decided to translate it as ‘I am a hell of a butler’, which everyone seemed to love. I thought it was terrible. It’s just horribly anachronistic (especially from a British-biased group like Shinsen) and gives a false impression of confidence rather than humility. I’m sure some suitably infernal reference could have been devised, like ‘I am a butler from very deep down’ or similar. But that is just a translation issue, and nothing to do with the actual series.

I will watch the second season, and continue to read the manga, too. As Kuroshitsujii’s popularity swells, so does antagonism towards it, and it weathers a lot of abuse for being aimed squarely at ‘yaoi fangirls’. But I’ve never abandoned something I like for its reputation, and if it does aim vulgarly for that market, so what? It’s not like it aspires to be great art, and it’s funny!

(Originally written 3.4.10)