Another day, another anime. I don’t mean to make this blog entirely about what Japanese cartoons I’ve been watching but I just keep discovering neat series out there.
This time the show is called Princess Jellyfish, about the friendship between a female geek and a fabulous transvestite university student. The thing that I particularly like about this series is that it’s one of the few comedies I know of that doesn’t make jokes at the expense of the transgender character – you know, of the “ha ha she-male” type. In fact, the show presents the straight cisgender characters as being the maladjusted freaks because, well, they are.
I’ve only seen two episodes but I’m optimistic that the show won’t eventually have some conservative “change your appearance to become a worthwhile person” moral. You know, like in Beauty and the Beast. The ad copy is right, it really is a sweet story about learning to look beyond the surface. And the message doesn’t feel hackneyed and programmatic like it could easily have been.
Also, I like the opening. For the benefit of all and sundry, RehAdventures of Youtube provides a breakdown of each movie being referenced:
0:20 – Sex in the City 0:34 – Star Wars, with a dash of Gundam Wing at 0:44 0:48 – Singing [sic] in the Rain 0:55 – Mary Poppins 1:00 – Emperor of the North 1:03 – God of Gamblers 1:08 – James Bond 1:12 – Game of Death or for the newbies Kill Bill 1:18 – The Graduate 1:27 – Close Encounters of the Third Kind
So, I watched all thirteen episodes of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. It’s rather interesting to see anime taking on the aesthetics of the 90s era Ren & Stimpy/Rocko’s Modern Life weird gross out genre of cartoons, and marrying it with the adult (read: mostly puerile) themes of the grownup cartoons that showed up after. And obviously it resembles Powerpuff Girls the most in its art style.
The show is about a couple of foul-mouthed angels kicked out of heaven for their uncouth manner and licentious ways and having to earn their way back to the top by hunting down rampaging ghosts. From the description, one might think that it’s mostly an action series, and yes there are impressive sequences in that vein, but quite a few episodes are about the angels being too lazy to do their jobs. One episode is nothing but the angels watching TV and doing absolutely nothing of consequence.
The series is funny in a crass and lowest-common denominator sort of way, though the bodily function humour turns me off just like it did on Ren & Stimpy back in the day. There’s not much analysis I care to do on it, though I will note that this is the only anime from Gainax studio that I’ve seen. Admitting that means I’m not very hip since I gather Gainax is rather big with a lot of anime geeks.
Some choice quotes, taken out of context:
“You’d better not get fat again, otherwise you’ll need to be good at blowjobs.”
“Fuck, you’re a ghost? I can’t believe I let you finger me.”
”You both need to stop spending money on bullshit. You’re angels, not hipsters.”
I have just watched forty (40) episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in the space of three days. I went to the laundromat afterward and found it bizarre to hear English being spoken there. It feels rather like the time I almost answered the phone as Ranma Saotome.
The series is by no means perfect – it relies too much on coincidence in telling the story, for one thing – but I can dig what it’s generally shooting for. It’s not everyday a fantasy series has protagonists who are basically in the SS, after all. And the stuff on alchemy shows rather a bit of research was done, which I appreciate.
Okay, I admit that it starts quite slow. I thought it would just be some generic pubescent boy fantasy bildungsroman, i.e. the genre called shounen in Japan. Basically, boy has a quest, he fights some bad guys, he improves his skill and makes friends, and so on tirelessly repeated until every last cent is squeezed out of the formula. But then the fourth episode happened and it showed that actual stakes existed in this fictional universe. And that was it for me, I just kept watching and watching.
So in closing, I must conclude that I am fascinated by magic fascists.
If the history of workers’ rights was an object then it would be a seesaw tipping between capital and labour. Sometimes capital has the upper hand, sometimes labour does. Well, labour is never dominant but sometimes it doesn’t entirely suck to be a worker.
The seesaw of workers’ rights occurred to me as I was watching The Devil is a Part-Timer, which is an anime about Satan being kicked out of his kingdom and exiled to modern Japan, where to survive he has to work part-time at McDonald’s.
The series is hilarious. Watching the Adversary coming home exhausted to his shithole apartment panicking about how he’s going to pay for his new refrigerator is comedy gold. A lot of the stories are in that vein: The Devil gets promoted to shift manager. The Devil goes on a date with a co-worker. The Devil gets scammed by a door to door salesman.
The series is funny, but I couldn’t help feeling put off by the implicit normalization of living on the economic precipice. Lots of people live pay cheque to pay cheque and it’s probably not funny from their point of view. There are moments recognizing that precariousness in the series, such as the utter loneliness one of the otherworldly refugees suffers from or the way something as simple as free noodles is an incredible gift to the working poor characters.
I’m reminded of Welcome to the NHK, which is about what one possible reaction to the modern world: complete and almost total withdrawal. On the one hand, what does retreat do in improving one’s lot? On the other hand, what does struggling do in improving one’s lot as well? Because The Devil sure works his butt off in The Devil is a Part-Timer but he still isn’t even a full-time worker yet. And goodness knows those poor Kentuckians trying to make a living just seem to be digging themselves in deeper. The article is a decade old, but The Onion hit the target dead-on: “Report: Poor People Pretty Much Fucked”.
Is this the new normal, then? Is this life what Thatcher meant when she said There Is No Alternative? Because it seems that in this brave new world even our fantasies participate in our own subjugation.
I don’t mean to criticize the anime for not offering a solution. Comedy can be a site of political awareness, but by its very nature it can never be a site of struggle. It’s always too easy to say that it’s all just a joke. But comedy and art in general can still be a mirror to the society it depicts, and for The Devil is a Part-Timer, that society is trying hard to laugh at its own misery.
So you know what I said about only watching mediocre anime lately? Well, I just saw the first two episodes of the anime Bakemonogatari (Ghost Story). So now what do I say?
I say, “Holy fucking shit.”
Seriously, this show is incredible. I could tell you what it’s about – a high school guy helping female classmates remove curses from themselves – but a story is more than its plot. Bakemonogatari has style oozing out of every pore. The dense symbolism, the quick flashes of meaning which forces me to play quick draw with the remote, the peculiar camera angles: it’s all in the service of a larger aesthetic mission. Bakemonogatari actually has something to say, and I appreciate that fact even more when I think back and realize that it’s been so long since I was able to say that about an anime.
It’s even got fanservice, which normally I would consider a bad thing. I would define fanservice as stuff added to a narrative purely to gratify the audience and with not much regard to how it fits into the larger story in terms of theme, character, and so on. Mostly, fanservice refers to gratuitous depictions of female sexual signifiers, which is to say, tits and ass. Plus all those other female things that heterosexual men are supposed to salivate over, like, I dunno, ankles. However, the show portrays the female form so blatantly (and from such off-kilter perspectives) that it removes the stink of prurience from the act of beholding the feminine.
Normally, the term “shameless” is a pejorative description. To be shameless is to be without a proper sense of what is appropriate behaviour (propriety being a relative concept, of course). Bakemonogatari is not shameless about its frank and upfront display of the female body. It is, instead, unashamed. The show is not afraid of the female body, and because it’s unafraid, it can show exposed female flesh as being the same as exposed male flesh, which is to say, an everyday and unremarkable sight.
Therefore, I was mistaken when I said that this show has fanservice. Fanservice is gratuitous. Bakemonogatari is merely honest.
I’m addicted to mediocre storytelling. Well, not always, but it seems to be a thing with me lately.
Recently I got caught up to the latest issue of Nisekoi, a middling manga full of clichés and lazy stereotypes. It’s got decent art but the story itself has nary an original twist to it.
However, that’s exactly the point. The series is your basic high school romance-comedy full of misunderstandings and secret crushes and ridiculous coincidences. Trust me, series like this one are a dime a dozen.
Because it’s predictable, though, it’s also comfortable to read. There’s not much that needs to be done besides turning the page. Theme? Symbolism? Emotional truth? This is just a story about a boy and a girl pretending to date so that their rival gangster families won’t go to war but which quickly turns into a story about the couple hanging out with their high school friends. Nothing to see here, just move along. And don’t think the too-familiar plot can carry the series on its own, either.
It’s not just this manga, either. I’ve already mentioned that I’m a sucker for flashy yet empty giant robot anime, but I’m also reading Magician’s End, the final book in Raymond Feist’s progressively crappier fantasy book series. Mostly I’m finishing the books out of a weird sense of duty to my younger self.
Meanwhile, the critically acclaimed, though somewhat heavy TV series Orange is the New Black and Les Revenants are waiting for me to finally get back to watching them. But wait, I still haven’t caught up to the latest episode of that TV show where the Headless Horseman runs around killing people with a machine gun.
I’m reminded of what this scientific study claims, that human brains like novel music as long as it’s mostly predictable.
So don’t blame me for my tastes, I’m only a human being.
And in case you were wondering, that Headless Horseman show is called Sleepy Hollow.
As should be obvious, I’ve subscribed to the anime-streaming service Crunchyroll. I hadn’t realized it but having so much anime available the instant you turn on your TV turns you into a complete binge-watcher. Remember my project to count how many books and whatever I watched in a single year? Well, I’ve extended it to the end of 2013. Anyway, from August 2012 to August 2013 I watched 427 episodes of TV. However, in September – the first month of my Crunchyroll subscription – I watched 131 episodes of TV.
The subscription has really changed my consumption patterns. Anyway, right now I’m running through some anime in my back catalogue so I’m watching Durarara, which I really like. Basically it’s about a suburb of Tokyo, the people who live there, and the way that their lives intersect. It’s kind of like the movie Crash except not dumb. At the very least you should give the opening a look, the song is pretty catchy (and why the hell is YouTube not allowing embedding of any videos of the Durarara opening, anyway?).
However, I’ve only seen the first five episodes of Durarara. Contrast this to giant robot anime, which apparently turns me into an undiscerning nine year old. I watched the entire first season of Valvrave the Liberator in one day; some weeks before that, I marathoned Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. That’s twenty-six episodes in total over one weekend.
I completely admit that the stories in both series were insipid and unoriginal. Valvrave has something about space vampires and Gargantia has a crashed mech pilot trying to make a living on Waterworld Earth. The plot for both isn’t really important or distinctive but I still kept sucking down episodes. I suppose they’re deliberately designed so as not to engage higher brain functions – perfect for binge watching, in other words. The need to think while watching is probably the reason I haven’t seen anything but the first episode of Orange is the New Black. I like the show but there’s this psychic weight hanging over it.
Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse would have been another binge watch except it’s of the “pendulous and gratuitous tits” school of anime which is almost unwatchable for me. Dammit, if I wanted porn I’d get porn, I don’t need some Maxim-style softcore shit to get in the way of the story.
But do you know what’s unequivocally good? Squid Girl, a show about a dim-witted anthropomorphic squid who invades the land to punish humanity for polluting the sea but almost immediately gets tricked into working as an underpaid part-time waitress for a beachside restaurant. The narrative structure is very Azumanga Daioh in that it’s short vignettes about the main character’s everyday adventures. Highlights include when Squid Girl discovers umbrellas and when she finds out she’s an idiot savant at math. It’s very much a show about nothing, also like Azumanga Daioh, essentially being Seinfeld if the main character was a teenaged female cephalopod. Also like Azumanga Daioh, Squid Girl is so cute and sugary that I feel like I should brush my teeth after watching. Still, I’m laughing my ass off at every episode so far.
I’ve just finished watching the first season of Attack on Titan. It’s about the last human stronghold in a world overrun by giants. It be awesome. The lunacy of the fans is also awesome. Case in point, a fan video of the characters as the Spice Girls in Wannabe:
I’m currently doing a marathon of Bodacious Space Pirates, a sci-fi anime about a high school girl who becomes a pirate captain in space (the title is fairly self-explanatory). It is glorious. Don’t be put off by the cutesy opening. It reminds me of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in its oddball premise and in the way it firmly grounds its fantastical science fiction elements within an interesting narrative. It’s how science fiction should be done, but too often writers forget the “fiction” part and it becomes a three hundred page exegesis of the workings of blaster pistols.
It’s actually fairly hard sci-fi for something from the visual media (i.e., movies, tv, comics, etc). Not that I care about the consistency of fictional gibberish (one of my favourite science fiction writers is Ursula K. Le Guin), but the little details are still pretty neat, such as how the space suits have an attachment point for helmets on the back and how the bulkheads have to be manually cranked open after the power on a ship comes back on.
I even like the recap at the beginning of each episode. Normally I’d just fast forward through it (for instance, Bleach has freaking five minutes of recap and the opening before you actually get to the episode you want to watch) but this show’s recap usually has some kind of space philosophy being read to you while scenes from the previous episodes remind you of the gist of what happened before. Stuff like,
“In outer space there isn’t an absolute left, right, up, or down. It all depends on your relative position. Understand where you’ve come from and where you’re going, which way you’re facing and you’ll always know your current position. Confronted by the vastness of space, you may be disoriented by how small you are. But overcoming that feeling is your first step in outer space.”
All of this while the protagonist is shown on her training cruise and learning how to space walk. The recap even presents new background info which isn’t absolutely needed but is nice to have.
Anyway, I like this show. Watching it isn’t a bad way to say goodbye to 2012.
Guide to watching Bleach without the pointless filler:
Main Arc 1: Soul Society Arc
Watch episodes 1-32
Skip 33
Pick up at 34-49
Skip 50
Pick up at 51-63
Skip Bount Filler Arc
Main Arc 2: Hueco Mundo Arc
Pick up at 110-127
Skip 128-137
Pick up at 138-167
Skip Captain Shūsuke Amagai Filler Arc
Pick up at 190-203
Skip 204 & 205
Pick at up 206-212
Skip 213 & 214
Main Arc 3: Fake Karakura Town arc
Pick up at 215-225
Skip 226
Skip Zanpakutō: The Alternate Tales Filler Arcs
Pick up at 267-286
Skip 287
Pick up at 288-297
Skip 298-299
Pick up at 300-302
Skip 303-305
Pick up 306-310
Skip 311-341?
Main Arc 4: Substitute Soul Reaper Disappearance
Pick up at 342-354
Skip 355
Pick up at 356
FINISH THE SERIES AT 366
Just the essential anime episodes – no fuss, no muss, no stupid filler. Hooray!
