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)

Drawn Together (seasons 1+2)

‘Does American animation always have to be funny?’ asked a viewer of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. ‘Of Course it doesn’t,’ came the answer. ‘Just look at Drawn Together.’ A case of rival companies’ cheap jabs, yes, but it has to be said that as a comedy, Drawn Together does fall short.

I thought the premise was a sound one: take the format of a reality TV show, in which a group of people are made to live together and occasionally set challenges for rewards, but base it around various animated clichés. Thus we get a muscle-bound superhero; a Disney-style princess; a rather feminine video game protagonist; a 20s Betty Boop lookalike; a creature with more than a passing resemblance to Pikachu from Pokémon; a black, crime-fighting, ass-whoopin’ detective girl; a crude flash animation pig; and a goofy creature in the vein of Spongebob Squarepants trying to cohabit. Establish the humour as distinctly adult and we have the opportunity for some clever parody and intelligent social commentary.

The writers take a good stab at this, I’ll give them that. Princess Clara and Foxxy Love feud because Clara has been brought up to be a bigot who thinks the black girl must be her servant. Xandir is outed as gay so revels in his stereotype. Ling-Ling speaks mock-Japanese and becomes a send-up of all Asian stereotypes. Toot is soon revealed as the stereotyped past-it bitchy ex-star. You may be able to tell that the humour revolves very much around stereotypes. Not necessarily a bad thing – a lot of Python humour is stereotype-based – but you need to have good jokes to back it up.

Thing is, Drawn Together has an air of desperation to it. One episode revolves around a real-life bad review the show got. Driving through South Park in one of the pastiches, a character remarks, ‘I bet more people would watch us if we lived here.’ The jokes get milked and milked endlessly. Yes, okay, Toot is fat and cuts herself, Xandir is gay enough to wear pink thongs, Captain Hero is a horrible pervert and Foxxy is black. We get it. Now give us some good jokes!

While occasionally the show does hit gold – the musical numbers are all spot-on parodies of such institutions as Disney ballads and 70s band cartoons, Foxxy’s send-up of black stereotypes (‘I’m so mad I’ve been stuck like this for three hours’ was a great line) is well-balanced with her position as ‘the level-headed one’, and the show can be dangerously close to the wire (slave auction scene?) – plus some of the briefer allusions were very funny (He-Man and Panthro from Thundercats shooting up in Popeye’s steroids den), but when there are one or two laughs in half an hour of brain-dead, repetitive, outrageous-for-outrageousness’s-sake guff, it doesn’t work. And having an episode subplot about how fart jokes ARE funny after all doesn’t make them funny.

I was also quite disturbed when they met a fat lesbian who cuts and conforms to many of the other stereotypes mocked in the show and said, ‘You’re not exactly our target audience’. I was laughing at the bigots, at how stupid it was to be so backward, and that made me wonder if I’d got it all wrong. Ah, well.

In two seasons, only one episode was actually really good, the penultimate one in which the housemates enact at great length what might happen when Xandir comes out to them, sending up the usual drama-laden stories of struggling against repression, with most of the cast playing against type. There they hit the nail on the head, because in changing the characters’ personalities for a while, the writers hit on what makes really good satire: rather than having a cast made up of flat and unlikeable characters, make us sympathetic to them first, and THEN horribly abuse them.

There’s apparently more in the works. I’ll watch it, but all the while, I’ll be hoping it’s going to improve.

(originally written 31.7.06)

Persepolis

Persepolis - that strange, comic-book-style, largely black-and-white animation from France that was nominated for an Oscar and in my view deserved it more than the eventual winner Ratatouille, and has met almost universal acclaim. Here are my thoughts from the screening I caught in 2007:

I thought it was excellent, a simple memoir but moving, poignant, pleasingly frank and with some great moments of humour. The simple art was coupled with some wonderful animation and pastiche, and there were some very gripping moments and plenty of likeable characters. If anything, the fundamentalist government is shown in a considerably less threatening way than in, say, Reading Lolita in Tehran. The floggings and murders seem less of a real threat here, where talking back cleverly to authorities seems to go mostly unpunished. Nonetheless, there are some harrowing moments when real political dissidents are caught.

Superb and highly lauded, it is well worth seeing.

鉄拳/ Tekken / Tekken: The Motion Picture

My standards weren’t very high back in 1998, when this film came out courtesy of ADV. I loved the Street Fighter anime, and owned only about 5 anime titles on VHS. As a big fan of 1996’s Tekken 2 (the last time I was really good at a Tekken game), I snapped up the Tekken anime almost as soon as it came out, hoping for another Street Fighter, and even back then, even easily pleased, I was disappointed.

The film opens with a version of the series’ iconic centrepiece: Heihachi Mishima decides that to test the strength and potential of his young son Kazuya, like the lions of Buddhist legend, he will throw him off a cliff. This time, a young Jun is watching, and it is largely from her perspective that the rest of the film unfolds.

Instead of a structured tournament that shows off all the characters, the characters basically have to run through a forest fighting badly-drawn dinosaurs. All the tension is removed from the scenario as a result of the presence of ‘devil powers’, badly tilting the balance of power until the final fight has to be made exciting by very cheesy romantic clichés. The extremely odd art, including eyebrows that stretch well off the face and muscles that make those in Hokuto no Ken look reasonable, and the embarrassing softcore pornography thrown in to excite the young adolescent male fanbase make this very much a sub-par piece of 90s anime.

With none of the camp flair, self-importance or satisfying character clashes of Street Fighter, this was a real disappointment.

ぱにぽにだっしゅ! / Pani Poni Dasshu!

The two animation studios who have really distinguished themselves in the last handful of years have been Kyoto Animation, with their beautiful KEY adaptations, and then Suzumiya Haruhi and Lucky Star, and SHAFT. While SHAFT have been around for quite some time and made several relatively conventional anime series (such as Rec) they have latterly distinguished themselves with utterly insane, disjointed and darkly comic series with large casts, lots of subversions of moé tropes and huge quantities of hidden details and references that it’s almost impossible for a single person to get all of, especially without frequently pausing to examine background details. SHAFT took the Negima franchise and made it far more bewildering and surreal. They stepped up their game with the complex and disillusioned Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei. Hidamari Sketch was softer but retained much of the oddness. They are currently continuing to baffle and daze with the cross-dressing antics of Maria Holic. And, as far as I know at least, it was really with Pani Poni Dash that the studio embraced all-out weirdness and dived with wild abandon into the realms of the surreal.

Pani Poni Dash is the story of a little American girl called Becky who is such a high-flying genius that she becomes the teacher of a Japanese high school before she enters puberty, or very soon after. She has a class of misfit students, both the typical anime archetypes and some outright weirdoes. Over the course of 26 episodes, the class are monitored by aliens, get featured on TV, become sentai rangers, defuse bombs, and Becky’s endlessly victimised pet rabbit Mesousa has several awkward encounters with the cat-god who likes to lurk in vending machines.

The series had a fair bit of charm and the characters were likeable. But because of the abrasive humour and surreal anything-can-happen structure it was impossible to really like them, as I did with, say, the Azumanga Daioh characters. Sometimes the quirky humour was brilliance; at other times it was annoying and unfunny.

As a 13-episode series Pani Poni Dash might have stayed fresh and clever and different. But somehow it just didn’t have the accessibility or humanising factor of Zetsubou-Sensei and as a result, got old very fast and by the end, was outright dull. Interesting, experimental and sometimes very funny, it nonetheless failed to be all it could have been.

(originally written 10.3.09)

ラムネ/ Ramune / Lemonade

For the uninitiated, then: a brief lowdown on harem anime. Harem, as the name suggests, revolves around one boy receiving the romantic attention of several girls. However, in contrast to what the name suggests, the boy rarely becomes romantically involved with these girls until the very end, where he chooses one. The reason that these sorts of anime have become so common that they have their own category is because of the popularity of Gal Games, Erogames and Dating Sims, which in general terms refer to the same thing: a video game about a boy trying to win the heart of a girl, playing through a story (almost always series of static drawings) and making key choices in order to attract or repel the girl of his liking. So picture the plot of this game: there’ll be a central character with little personality, an everyman any gamer can project himself onto, plus half a dozen or more girls who all either already like this boy, or can grow to like him. Other male characters would only complicate things and put the gamer off, so they tend to be comic relief. If you flatter one girl enough (and avoid the writers’ tricks), you’ll quite often get a perverted scene with them, generally pornographic to the point of total tastelessness. Plenty of young men find this sort of build up and reward very appealing (can’t say I share their passion; hentai (anime porn) tends to be more laughable than sexy), so there is often a high demand for an anime adaptation. Those cute girls – moving!

Except imagine trying to adapt one of these games for television. You have to chose one girl to focus on (there’s usually a default story you have to try hard to misdirect, so that’s not too difficult) while wedging in the other stories to some degree, resulting in this ludicrous world where one boy with not much going for him is the centre of attention for a whole gaggle of girls, while other male characters have to be such clowns that they are made asexual. Unless they’re very robust comedies, harem anime tend to annoy me. Yet somehow, despite fitting into the above mould so precisely that it’s laughable, something about the series made me take a liking to it.

There’s little point relating the insipid story: a boy called Kenji has been friends with Nanami, the girl next door, since childhood. There are lots of other girls around him who like him very much, but Kenji and Nanami have more flashbacks than anyone else, so it seems they are fated for one another. You couldn’t stick more closely to a formula if you tried.

And yet…the flashbacks are really cute. We see little habits formed in childhood that continue to the present day. Counting promises, visiting each other during storms, putting crabs on heads…it’s just cute. I have to say that the Japanese fixation with puppy love blossoming into full romance later in life is one that appeals to my sense of romance. The art and animation is functional but cute and the character designs are nice. The seiyuu for Kenji (Taniyama Kishou – Seiji in Midori no Hibi) and Nanami (Goto Yuko – Mikuru in Suzumiya Haruhi) put in strong, likeable performances. There are some moments of real warmth and fun in this series, although the last episode, which even the cheesiest soap opera would reject, really didn’t work. And the tacked-on fanservice added for the DVD, mostly involving more blushing and panty shots, really wasn’t needed.

All in all, this is by no means a great series, and it’s hampered by the clichés of its genre. But it’s a harem anime that works, that knows what it is but chooses to do what it does as well as it can. So I freely admit that here is a harem show that I liked.

地獄少女 / Jigoku Shoujo / Hell Girl (season 1)

When a person has been wronged and is desperate for revenge, they can turn to Enma Ai, also known as Jigoku Shoujo (‘Hell Girl’, but without such cheesy comic-book connotations). Through a mysterious website, accessible only at midnight, they can name the one who wronged them, and have them instantly taken to Hell for all eternity. But two holes appear as you curse a person – you cannot have them damned without being damned yourself, although unlike them, you at least get to live out the rest of your life.

Jigoku Shoujo is an interesting piece. Most of its 26 episodes explore its concept in a way reminiscent of Shinigami no Ballad – we get introduced each episode to a new character with new problems, usually having their lives wrecked by some amoral person, from abusive parents to bullies, see them have a crisis of conscience, and then finally they decide to damn those who wrong them. Although there are some mis-fires, some parts that become daft instead of creepy, by and large the damnation sequences, where Enma Ai and her associates torture the miscreant are effective, and the budget is high enough here to show some really impressive art and animation. The character designs are excellent, and Jigoku Shoujo herself is iconic. The main flaw is that things get quite repetitive, with over 20 episodes generally built upon the same premise.

Only towards the end do important questions get addressed: except perhaps the vet, who was evil but hardly deserved damnation, all the revenges seemed justified, and ia few times delaying only causes more suffering for the innocents. It’s painted as a noble self-sacrifice, bearing damnation in order to rid the world of some horrible person. But what if the person doesn’t deserve to be taken to hell? Does Enma Ai refuse? This is addressed in the final arc, when a little girl with a strange connection to Jigoku Shoujo and her detective father investigate her. Soon, they learn of her past, which is very typical of Japanese horror.

What Jigoku Shoujo has in abundance is elegance. It’s stately, and pretty, and concerns itself with beautiful things and tragedies. It has something of a Poe gothic horror story in its juxtaposition of a refined way of living and the horrors of damnation. It is never rushed, never concerned about keeping its audience’s attention with bangs and crashes. It moves at its own pace, and concentrates on building mood.

As it is well-written, well-acted and well-animated, it achieves this all well. There is a second season to watch yet, and I will certainly be checking it out – at a slow, even pace, no doubt!

(originally written 15.5.08)