Vampire Knight

May 14, 2008 at 12:51 am | In adventure, anime, could be worse, one episode rule, ridiculous premise, school syndrome, shoujo cliche, spring 2008, yaoibait | Leave a Comment

Summary: slightly better than average vampire bishounen
Based on: 4 eps
Series Info: at Anime News Network

(Image taken from FuanBLOG where you can see ep by ep summaries)

At this school there is the Day Class and the Night Class. The Night Class are all secretly(!) vampires, and all the girls of the Day Class are wildly enamored with them because they are of course all gorgeous and moody and aloof.  Two prefects from the Day Class are adopted children of the headmaster and are the only ones who know the secret, but of course they have mysterious secrets of their own.

Everything about this screams typical – it’s got all your bishounen vampire cliches, it’s at a fabulously stylish high school, and moody sullen pretty boys abound. But I think in this case it actually manages to transcend the cliches with some very nice art, some decent action sequences, passable plot and dialogue considering the setup, and a slowly growing sense of discomfort. The only place where it really falls down is where the headmaster is involved – when he’s in the scene it’s a painful reminder of everything wrong with shows like Trinity Blood and Saiyuki.

So this isn’t exactly a glowing endorsement, but if you need your shoujo fix this season this is probably your best choice.

Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture

May 14, 2008 at 12:22 am | In anime, best, comedy, one episode rule, ridiculous premise | Leave a Comment

Summary: Boy can see microbes, mild comedy, must watch
Based on: 11 Episodes (all of them so far)
Series Info: on Anime News Network

(This great pic is taken from randomc where you can see more pics and more plot.)

This show falls firmly into the ‘ridiculous premise yet still managing to be awesome’ category.  Tadeyasu, seen above, can see microbes like E. Coli, brewer’s yeast, mold spores, as little cartoony characters. But this is really used mostly as a gimmick – the real action is in the relationships of people around him. He himself is just a big hapless straightman who gets swept up in the various dramas and people plotting to use his talent. Since it’s based at a college and not a high school or middle school it’s technically a school anime but completely escapes school syndrome.

It reminds me of Nodame Cantabile more than anything else, so I guess it’s not surprising that there are some small Moyashimon/Nodame crossovers in the manga.

There’s also plenty of fascinating information about the various microbes (especially yeast in the context of fermentation) – make sure you watch the Microbe Theater after the credits at the very end of every episode.

The big downer here is that the anime is only 11 episodes, which covers a small fraction of the story that’s gone by in the manga.  It also severely cuts back the manga microbe scenes.  I’ve resorted to buying and reading the manga even though it’s intensely text-heavy and my kanji skills are weak. Apparently I’m not the only one who feels this way, since the manga has been winning awards left and right, including the prestigious Kodansha Manga and Tezuka Cultural awards.  So maybe they’ll make some more anime (please?).

The only negative thing I can say about it is that it resorts to more cheesecake than it really needs to.  Nothing like the constant panty flashes of your teen anime, but it’s a bit gratuitous and out of context here.

Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni

April 28, 2008 at 4:26 am | In anime, comedy, harem, one episode rule, school syndrome | 3 Comments

Summary: alternately super-cute and hideously disturbing, deep plot
Based on: 51 episodes
Series info: at Anime News Network

This refers to Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni and Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai (season 2). A third season is on the way. It consists of a series of arcs, all of which center on the same time period (June 1983) but act out differently.

Higurashi manages to violate the game anime sucks rule. It’s based on a series of games, manga, and light novels whose story is much deeper than any anime usually manages, so it doesn’t suffer because of it. It also violates the one episode rule and harem rules: based on the first episode you would think this was just a low budget school harem anime. But it slowly starts undermining your certainty, and by episode 8 this was the most intense and disturbing anime I’ve ever seen.

The first three arcs basically leave you hanging, asking questions about what’s going on. What’s with the Groundhog Day thing, and why are these cute school kids going violently insane? After that you start getting some answers. Higurashi Kai gets a significant animation upgrade but is significantly less disturbing and intense as (almost) all your questions are answered.

Be warned: there is intense gore and brutal slayings, and even torture of young children.  For this reason it’s often compared to Elfen Lied, another anime with excessive gore and killing, but they’re only the same if you’re a kid who can’t tell the difference in purpose – they are in service of different goals. Still, if you have a weak stomach you may not be able to get through this. Or maybe the bad animation in season one will turn you off.

There are three things that cause this series to exceed the usual anime tropes:

First, the characters and the series itself are unreliable narrators. This alone makes it a different animal. You have no idea how much confusion this causes on anime message boards, since kids used to being spoon-fed plot don’t even have the concept of not being able to trust the anime. The furthest anime usually goes is hiding secrets from you then suddenly revealing them, or the ’surprise’ revelation that The Church of Foobar which everyone reveres is really an evil organization. This series will outright lie to you. In particular, the ending of season one reveals a ’secret’ that is so stupid that some people give up watching. Rather you should think about it yourself. And the first arc… well I can’t say more without spoiling it to much. Draw your own conclusions.

Second, it will lull you into complacency with your own complicit knowledge of the anime tropes. These exist as a useful shorthand between the author and viewer but are also by definition cliche. This series knows that can be subverted – these cliches go right to your brain, bypassing your defenses. It will tug at your heartstrings and instill sympathy for a character, then slowly ramp up the heinous acts the character commits, all in a somewhat reasonable progression, and ask you if you still sympathize. After a while the impact is lessened because you know this is coming, so the second season is unfortunately much more direct.

Third, it lets you do a lot of the detective work yourself if you want to. There are hints planted from the beginning andyou can figure out yourself what’s going in in a lot of cases before it’s revealed in later arcs, but only if you want to do the work. If you can’t, then eventually it will tell you (which I actually found disappointing).

Yes, there are flaws: the first season animation is shoddy, there is a lot of fanservice and resort to cliches during the ‘cute’ phases, sometimes the ‘power of friendship’ thing is too pat, it eventually tells you too much that should have remained implied, and the penultimate episode of Higurashi Kai exceeds even my believability threshold for the ‘elite military squad’. But this still remains the most disturbing, intense anime I’ve ever seen.

Kure-nai (Spring 2008 anime)

April 28, 2008 at 3:46 am | In adventure, anime, nothing happens (and that's ok), one episode rule, school syndrome, spring 2008 | 1 Comment

Summary: modern adventure, deeper than it appears, recommended
Based on: 12 (all) episodes
Series info: at Anime News Network

This one is about a high schooler (Shinkurō Kurenai) who hires himself out for odd jobs. A young spoiled rich girl who’s never been outside the family home (Murasaki Kuhōin) is kidnapped (or liberated, your choice) and Kurenai is given the job of being her bodyguard.

There’s a lot going on here – the kid is cute, but annoying as you’d expect a very young sheltered rich girl to be, so you’re alternately annoyed with her and sorry for her since it’s obvious not really her fault, and she does feel bad when Kurenai finally gets a basic concept through her thick skull.

The series has school syndrome, but it’s nuanced. Generally what I object to is the tropes that ’school anime’ lets the authors fall back on, but Kure-nai mostly, though not totally, avoids them. In particular the relationships are far beyond the usual subtle as a nuclear bomb triangles you expect from anime aimed at teens (because they don’t know any better). There’s a brilliant theme going on in episode 3 where one of the ‘lecherous women’ who lives at Kurenai’s apartment complex is teaching Murasaki about how to get yourself a ‘reliable man’ (which she can’t seem to find herself). She notes how all you have to do to keep a man happy is compliment him now and then (which is sadly mostly true). Meanwhile Kurenai himeself has a reliable woman, a fellow classmate, Ginko. She obviously likes him, but it’s more nuanced than the usual high school romance: she knows it but hates herself for it, he knows it (and even acknowledges it to her face) but still uses her anyhow, carelessly.

There’s another scene in episode 3 with three rude high school boys bullying an old woman on a train that in almost any other anime would have ended with Kurenai going medieval on their asses (he’s a skilled martial artist), but it confounds that and then rubs it in your face.

Ep 6 is a regrettable bit of padding, but with Ep 7 the plot starts to pick up again. And as of Ep 10 the series starts heading into a climax that is satisfying and yet not quite too cliche.  This was a good series.

define: one episode rule

April 27, 2008 at 8:48 pm | In definition, one episode rule | 2 Comments

This is probably the most important thing you can know about sorting through the morass of anime that arrives every season. When you’re a kid everything is fresh and new – I can remember with some shame now watching and liking everything, including awful crud like Genocyber. The only thing that was so bad that even as a teen I knew it was awful was M.D. Geist.

Well now it’s ‘been there done that’ – how do you know what to watch? Well you could read my Spring 2008 Anime summary and hope my tastes or like yours. Or you could grab the first episode of each series and give it a quick runthrough.

So, the rules:

  1. You can often tell if an anime is awful in the first five minutes. Harem, porn game to anime, kiddy pokemon type shows, are all almost immediately identifiable. If it looks like that, then just fast forward through the show looking at short bits.
  2. 99% of the time if the first ep is bad (or unpromising) then the rest of the series is downhill from that and you can just write it off. Though see below for some exceptions.
  3. To make it easier, anything based on a video game is (almost) guaranteed to suck.
  4. If the first ep is good, then you need to watch the second ep, because 80% of the time the series just goes right down the tube after that. The first ep is usually where the interesting setup comes in, if any, but once they’ve got that out of the way then it just turns into high school and/or formula domestic comedy.

There are some counter-examples to the one episode rule. In particular, Higurashi no Naku Koru Ni’s first ep is deceptively bland, formulaic, and harem-setup. This is a trap. It slowly unravels the normality till by episode 8 it’s the most intense (and bloody) anime I’ve ever seen. Now that still may not be your cup of tea, but the first episode is not representative of the rest of the series.

Real Drive Sennou Chosashitsu (spring 2008 anime)

April 26, 2008 at 12:15 am | In anime, one episode rule, spring 2008, technogibberish | 2 Comments

Summary: pandering technogibberish
Based on: 1 ep
Series Info: on Anime News Network

This is what happens when someone tries to write an adult(ish) series about science and doesn’t know much about it. You get tons of gibberish thrown at you to make things sound impressive, ala Star Trek: The Next Generation, badly forced expositions, and a mixture of hugely futuristic technology with anachronistically primitive tech where it’s convenient for the plot.

Then of course we have the obligatory cyber-matrix second life and pseudomystical hoo-hah.

I think the opening scene pretty much sums it up, where after you have a diver and his boss expositioning at you for a while the diver dives, then the boss goes into the boat where there’s a Death Star command center where apparently they’re monitoring the brain waves of the diver. You can tell this because there’s a big monitor with brain wavey things on it the boss says things like ‘Enable language decoding!’ and the henchman says ‘Enabling language decoding!’ and suddenly you can hear what the diver is thinking, so they’re beaming his brainwaves (and not just brainwaves, but ‘cyberbrainwaves’) up. But they can’t get a working radio or camera and for some reason wouldn’t want the language decoding on all the time.

So to counteract that the characters are mostly middle aged and old men, the Secretary General (of what, the UN?) is a busty ho who dresses to expose flesh and takes her video conference calls from her four poster bed, and they haul in a bevy of young teen girls (with panty shots of course) to take care of the old guys.

Kanokon is probably the worst show this season, but it wasn’t even trying. This is more disappointing because you can tell they wanted to make an adult anime, and they did, but only if you’re a dumb adult.

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