Okay, this video of basically every anime TV series that came out in 2014 is quite impressive in its breadth and its aesthetic unity. Props go to its obsessive creator. I think I only recognized maybe 2% of the shows that were featured.
Vox dei
I’ve been following the series When Supernatural Battles Were Commonplace. It’s okay. I like the premise of teenagers gaining superpowers for absolutely no purpose – no evil conspiracies to fight, no invading aliens, no villains bent on world domination. So they spend their time doing nothing of worth in their after-school literature club.
The group’s useless everyday conflicts, however, are not as engaging as I’d wish, so I’d say this is one of those nice but inessential anime.
Having said that, I quite like the work that the voice actress has been doing for Hatoko (the ranting girl in the cardigan), so I looked her up and she’s actually voiced a bunch of characters that I’ve liked.
Saori Hayami has done the voices for:
- Tsuruko from Anohana
- Yotsugi Ononoki from Monogatari (the corpse girl who kept saying “I said, with a posed look” after every sentence)
- Yukino Yukinoshita from My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU
- Izumiko Suzuhara from Red Data Girl
The thing of it is that each character Hayami has voiced has sounded distinct from the others. I have to say that she’s quite versatile in her work.
Behind the scenes
I just came across this Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) discussion run by Hiroaki Yura, the producer of Under the Dog. Basically, Reddit users ask questions and the person running the discussion answers. Obviously the person being asked is not obligated to answer all questions, but quite a lot of juicy dirt still manages to come out.
In this case, Yura doesn’t reveal much about the anime production process that should be too surprising for people familiar with how sausages get made in the entertainment industry at large. His description of the committee process for securing funding and approval for creative decisions, for example, sounds rather like the way studios send movies for endless rewrites and focus group testings and recasting. If you think about it, it’s bizarre that a bunch of beancounters should be the arbiters of expression, as if having lots of money is the most important criterion for creating art.
But that criticism of the present system of production is neither here nor there. It’s depressing, but the fact that the rich use their money to perpetuate their biases is not a revelatory observation.
What I did find interesting is the point that under the current production regime, anime with negative or tragic stories tend not to get produced. I hadn’t thought about it, but I haven’t seen a tearjerker anime show in a while. It’s all been happy and fun and affirming, and any sadness experienced are merely temporary setbacks or obstacles that the protagonist overcomes on the road to self-actualization.
Anyway, I’m still not convinced that Under the Dog will be all that, but it’s interesting to see that an insider to the anime industry is also sick of all the shows pandering to otaku.
High school of the dead
I just started watching Angel Beats. So far, I like it.
There are some obvious things to be said about this anime. It’s about immortal high school kids in the afterlife fighting against obliteration by an uncaring angel of God, so you could say that the series is like Battle Royale in being a metaphor for the extreme pressure placed on Japanese kids to excel academically. Or you could also point out that the show is a self-centred teenager’s fantasy about being in a world that revolves around their own person, with no parents around and with constant opportunity to star in rock concerts.
But all I want to say is that I enjoyed the second episode. I mean, the kids are so blasé about their immortality that they didn’t even bother to remember the death traps they set up in their own dungeon. The sight of heavily-armed civilians desperately fighting against a superior force recalls Iraqi resistance fighters, but the kids are too half-assed about their struggle to be taken seriously. Their own leader throws one of her own men down a bottomless pit for accidentally touching her butt, then solemnly intones “His was a noble sacrifice” when asked what happened to the guy.
After watching that scene, how could I not like this show? Hopefully the rest of the series is just as enjoyable.
Our enemy is our lack of funding
You may know that Studio Trigger went to Kickstarter to fund a new installment for their anime, Little Witch Academia. It seems other studios have followed in their wake, with Under the Dog being the next anime to join the crowdfunding ranks.
I’m cautiously optimistic about this turn in the industry but not overly enthused. There’s a chance that studios will end up marketing to ever smaller niches, for example.
Of course, there’s also no guarantee of quality or originality. This Under the Dog thing is apparently about child soldiers drafted by the UN, for instance. I’ll wait until the reviews come in, but I’ll keep an eye out in the meantime.
Tittle at titles
What the hell is up with anime lately, anyway? The titles are basically a descriptive sentence containing a plot synopsis. I realize this isn’t really a trend from within anime, but because a lot of anime are light novel adaptations. The trend is therefore merely carried over from light novels themselves. Sample titles:
- There’s no way my little sister is this cute
- My youth romantic comedy is wrong as I expected
- I couldn’t become a hero, so I reluctantly decided to get a job
- My girlfriend and my childhood friend fight too much
Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. What if Star Wars had used the same naming convention? “I went into space and kissed my long-lost sister”?
It also seems that the crappier series are the ones that try to squeeze the entire premise into the title. The ones that pander to a ready-made audience of otaku, I mean (implied incest, flat female characters, harems, etcetera). In fact, this article states that the inherent crappiness and ephemerality of light novels – which are, quite frankly, a dime a dozen in Japan – necessitates squeezing the premise into the title to catch the eyes of bookstore customers who are confronted by shelves of stories so unoriginal that the customers can barely summon the energy to read the plot synopsis on the back of the book.
Fortunately, an insider states in the article that he believes that the trend will burn out soon. New light novels will need another way to distinguish themselves from the pack. Yay for cyclical trends in fashion?
The week in pictures
Yes, it’s an image of a girl biting the head off a living fish. Chaika: The Coffin Princess wins the Internet for this week.
Trigger warning
Three episodes in and I’ve had to admit that the protagonist of World Trigger really, really annoys the shit out of me.
First, he keeps repeating the exact same thing people tell him: “The difference in Trigger abilities is because of a difference in the Trion gland.” “A difference in the Trion gland?” Yes, Osamu, that’s exactly what he just said, why are you telling him what he told you just now? The main character repeats what others tell him so often that I have to wonder if he’s slow-witted in some way.
It doesn’t help that he keeps entering into monologues where he reasons out things that the audience figured out like two minutes ago. I know that he’s probably thinking all these thoughts instantaneously, but I like to imagine that the protagonist spends several minutes at a time staring off into space, brow furrowed in concentration, while around him people are shifting uncomfortably, too embarrassed to spell things out for him.
Also, the protagonist has this weird idealized version of Japanese society and he keeps throwing hissy fits insisting in the rightness of his perspective, all while he keeps getting reminded that things don’t actually work the way he says they do. Come to think of it, he kind of reminds me of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory in that regard, except that he’s apparently a lot dumber.
Oh well, three episodes is more than fair for evaluating a show. Guess this is goodbye, World Trigger. I’m going to see other anime, you just keep on with what you were doing.
Back in black
A new season of Black Lagoon is coming.
That is all.
EDIT: Aww nuts, the trailer is for a new volume of the manga.
Anime on the go
I don’t have much to say about any specific anime series, but I do have a bit to say about several different shows.
First is Argevollen, a show about two countries locked in a war mostly fought through the use of giant robots. The series just throws you into the middle and then kind of keeps going, like someone continuing a story that got interrupted earlier. There’s no single scene that you can point at as evidence of the show being good, no “fuck yeah” moment where you pump your fist in the air. But when you stick with it, the whole thing just kind of gets at you.
You do have to accept this world as being one where airplanes apparently weren’t invented and all the resources devoted to aerospace were diverted into making something as patently ridiculous as mechs into viable war machines. There’s a reason why the Cold War didn’t see its own version of the Maginot Line being built, after all.
But when you get past that you find a surprisingly realistic war story. Unlike other giant robot anime, which focus almost entirely on the officers and mech pilots, this series shows that every soldier is important. The spear carriers do their bit, like in the episode where the mechanics are hurriedly putting the Argevollen back together while the town is under attack. Also, everyone hates the stereotypical hot blooded male lead for being a stereotypical hot blooded male lead. I don’t foresee any battles being won just because the protagonist shouts into his mic really loud and pulls a laser sword out of his robot’s ass. And the enemy ace is named after the Red Baron, which is a nice reference. I think there were some more military history references but I can’t remember them offhand.
I get why the “bad guys” are dressed like European armies from the classic age of imperialism but dammit, modern armies don’t dress like that anymore for practical reasons. That Grande Armée stuff sticks out like a sore thumb out on the battlefield. Anyway, I’m glad that this season is only half done. The 12-13 episode seasons we mostly see nowadays do tend to feel a bit squished sometimes.
The second series I want to talk about is Log Horizon. I know it sounds like a reprise of Sword Art Online, what with it being about players stuck in a multiplayer fantasy world that’s somehow become real; thankfully, it manages to say something halfway intelligent. The first episodes are very clichéd about the party of adventurers rescuing a damsel in distress from a cartoonish villain. Plus, as someone who’s never played an MMORPG, the premise never spoke much to me. But once the story turned into building a society out of antisocial loners in a fantasy land then it started getting interesting. There were even clever justifications for the tropes of RPG games (respawns, XP, etc).
I also just watched the first episode of World Trigger, a show about superpowered teenagers fighting off interdimensional alien invaders called Neighbors. You might be able to guess that most of the episode takes place in a high school. I swear, the high school series is the equivalent of the procedural drama in anime. The show itself is no great shakes, plus the name of the aliens makes me think that the fights are just stupid arguments over who knocked over the recycling bin and it better not have been your goddamn kid again, Bob. There’s a twist in the end that may make me come back for the next episode, but that one better knock my socks off.
Finally, I am most impressed at the latest instalment of Monogatari. This time the story revolves around one of the supporting characters while the protagonist from earlier parts just makes a brief cameo. I just love the way the series refuses to let its problems be solved by violence. “Teenagers resolve supernatural happenings” sounds very Buffy the Vampire Slayer but this show always fixes problems through everything but punching. Emotional and spiritual maturity is what really stops you from being haunted by the ghosts of your own guilt and regret, and damn if the climax doesn’t externalize this realization in superb fashion. Plus, there’s a one on one basketball match that I watched three times just to admire the artistry of the animators.
So it seems I’ve had three in the “yes” column and one in the “maybe but probably no” column. I’d say these are good results for trying out new anime.