A special Halloween episode of DITB. We talk 2009 CG vampire anime Hipira. Originally a story book by Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) and Shinji Kimura, it got a series of shorts made by Kimura and CG master Kodai Sato.

Then we discuss IMDB’s highest rated animated vampires themed shows/movies. Which briefly turns into an episode of Cash In The Attic.

00:00 Hipira
25:20 IMDB Vampire list

And finally, Anthony appears a guest on episode 127 of Fight Bait’s Whiskey Thursday, so check that out.

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You can find Anthony Askew on the web here, here , on twitter here and on youtube here.

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If you like swearing this episode is for you. We are really earning the explicit tag on iTunes this time round with the final segment of this episode. Otherwise it’s just a casual chat about recent anime. So beware of spoilers (though I think we generally brush over anything too significant outside of the last segment).

And as we cover a lot of stuff, time codes!

00:00 Preamble (Eugene Mirman & Pretty Good Friends, Anthony’s Internet Woes)
03:20 One Piece Episode 517
14:20 Hunter x Hunter remake
25:00 Gundam AGE
37:20 Phi Brain
42:50 Ben-To
46:48 Dramatic readings of internet reaction to Blood-C episode 12

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Theme music by Paul Smith of quiet quiet band.

You can find Anthony Askew on the web here, here , on twitter here and on youtube here.

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In which Japanese limited animation makes a really bad decision with regards to animal character design.

We’re back to the wonderful world of ORPHANTAINMENT. For those keeping count this is the third confirmed orphan protagonist so far, and the second to come from classic literature. In this case it was coming from NHK, rather than a World Masterpiece Theatre production, and while its heart was in the right place, its hands weren’t.

For those not familiar with the novel by Francis Hodgson Burnett, it involves a orphan girl, Mary Lennox, going to England from India, following the deaths of her parents. She is going to stay with her uncle, Archibald Craven. Both Mary and Archibald have to be softened from their individual grieving by the intervention of the chipper and perky lower classes, in the form of maid Martha, her brother Dickon and gardener Ben Weatherstaff, and by nature. Which comes in the form of the eponymous Secret Garden and a robin.

There was a 1975 BBC adaptation that got repeated when I was a kid, and I remember hating it. Even hearing that opening theme today makes me mad. I mainly hated it because it wasn’t a cartoon or funny. Well, this 1991 version tries to solve that by adding funny animals!

These animals that appear to be attempts at classic American-style cartoon animals, but end up looking like the sort of overly rendered cartoon animals you’d find on cheap greetings cards in the Eighties. You know, before Purple Ronnie came along and changed everything. Chief among these animals is Mary’s cat Patty, whose uncharming antics battle to dominate this episode with Mary’s tantrums. I like cats, but this pink, malformed menace irritated me. Chi, she is not.

When you consider it was the replacement for Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, it comes up lacking. Though I do wonder if that series’ heroine was an influence on the design choice of making Martha and Dickon non-white characters (perhaps the single interesting artistic choice in the show). But it’s pretty lacking in a vacuum too really. The lack of competence in the production hamstrings it regardless of what show it was replacing. Which probably explains why no-one is interested in it in 2011 (though it did get a box set release in Japan a few years back).

As forgotten as this series is, its replacement in 1992, Oi! Ryoma, languishes in English language obscurity even further. It doesn’t even have an entry in Anime News Network’s encyclopedia.

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I was going to write about Gundam AGE episode one, but sdshamshel beat me to pretty much all the points I wanted to make. So go read that first and then I shall tell you of the reason why bouncing Haros are so great.

Back?

Good.

One of the things that stood out in the first episode of Gundam AGE was that Haro bounced. And often that involved a lot of stretch and squash. For the life of me I couldn’t recall how much this happened in previous shows with Haros that I had encountered. Not wanting to hook the VHS player up to watch the movies, I went to the salvation of the lazy researcher, Youtube.

Here’s a problem with looking up Haro clips. People like to take videos of their Haro collectibles. So after I fought through video of alarm clocks and cat / Haro interaction, I got to this clip of Haro walking up some stairs. Not much stretch and squash there, but this second clip has some in the section where Fraw Bow gives Haro a kicking.

I found some other clips attached to “comedy” videos that indicated that Gundam Seed had stretch and squash Haros too. I couldn’t find any for other iterations though, the Gundam 00 clips had very rigid Haros, often hovering using their little flaps. Most likely though, I guess it all depended on the animators for any given scene. Maybe those with Gundam more readily at hand can share their favourite Haro bouncing scenes. Back to the point at hand.

Here’s why bouncing Haros are great.

At their core they are essentially what adults use to explain to kids how animation works.

Remember how it felt to learn how it worked, and that more importantly, that you can do it yourself? Haros, when they are used as bouncing balls, rather than dumpy robots or spherical mechanical flies, tap into that feeling. Sure, giant robot samurai with laser guns and swords are cool and everything, but more people can draw a Haro. And they could probably animate it bouncing too.

Haros are the squeaky voiced powerball door into animation. Let’s hear it for the Haros!

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And now for one of those episodes where I make Anthony watch something against his will. In this case it’s the first episodes of a whole load of early 70s Dynamic Productions TV shows. We’re talking Devilman, Mazinger Z, Dororon Enma-kun, Cutie Honey and much, much more. Haunted houses, de-uglification, crushed mice, seedy faces, keyrings, indomitable stupidity, acoustic guitars, banana skins and a dead dog hanging from a tree, it’s all here in another exciting episode of Dynamite In The Brain.

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The best anime of 1991 according to Animage readers.

This Sunrise property is one of those shows I was vaguely aware of, even before I started to properly watch anime. I believe this was likely due to it being mentioned in Super Play, a UK SNES magazine that was probably the most otaku-y of the UK games magazines of the time. Alternatively, it might have been via Japanese games magazines, as classmates were importing them around this time. More recently I’d come across it in the resume of Mitsuo Fukuda, director of Gundam Seed (BOO!) and Gear Fighter Dendoh (YAY!).

Despite the acclaim poured on it by the Animage readers, it was initially a flop. Cancelled early, it only ran 37 episodes. Its success came in tapping into that fanatical base with OAV sequels that moved the action on roughly in real time. According to wikipedia, the fanbase was initially mainly female (80% for the early OAVs). I wish there was more in English about the franchise’s trajectory as it seems on the surface like a precursor to the “kept alive by otaku” franchises that exist today. Particularly those boosted by a fanatical female audience.

So, what about this first episode?

Well it’s a pretty clever set up that gets the main character into the position of being the show’s lead. Our hero, Kazami Hayato, is escorting a new Cyber Formula race car, Asurada, to a race qualifier, when it is set upon by villains trying to steal it. This forces him to drive the car to get away, inadvertantly making him the driver for at least the next seven days due to the genetic fingerprint ignition and its lengthy reset time. Meaning that in the next episode he will have to race, rather than the intended driver.

I probably should have mentioned that Asurada is also the car’s talking AI. You know, like KITT in Knight Rider. Except this AI is a little more realistic. While it can clearly help out with situations a racing car might be expected to deal with, it’s completely useless when faced with, say, a helicopter trying to pick it up with a giant mechanical grabber.

The designs from Takahiro Yoshimatsu scream 1991 more than the other two shows we’ve looked at from that year. Rampant spikey haircuts, glassy eyes and jaws you can cut glass with abound. It’s not the most angular show of the nineties, but combined with the flat colours the character design firmly dates it from there. Yoshimatsu has plenty of other tricks in his arsenal, most recently he directed and designed Nyanpire, but if you want to see a 2011 take on the 90s angular look, check out his designs on the Hunter X Hunter remake that just started.

The other notable name that I see on the ANN credits is Kazuki Akane (Escaflowne, Heat Guy J, Noein, Birdy Decode) as one of the unit directors. By the looks of things he’d been at Sunrise a while at this point, having worked on Ronin Warriors and Jushin Liger. Later on I should take a look at what talents were nutured by which studios in the 90s.

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Do you like orphans? Do you like Nuns? Do you like singing? Well you were in luck in 1991 as House Foods World Masterpiece Theatre adapted Maria von Trapp’s memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.

Now, I’ve never read that book, and don’t think I’ve seen The Sound of Music. Certainly not as an adult at least. It feels like what I know about the story I know only through cultural osmosis. So I’ve not really got much to judge this adaptation against.

Likewise, I don’t think I’ve seen an entire World Masterpiece Theatre series. Certainly, I’ve seen bits here and there, I think the last one I dipped into would have been the Story of Perrine. But not enough to say where this looks to stand in the oeuvre. Someone else will have to be judge of whether this is good or bad WMT.

What I will say is this. Nuns must be fun to animate.

The animation is certainly fine for TV animation early on, with Maria in her Austrian tomboy get up and exploring Salzburg, but once the nuns appear then we start to get some fun movement. The solid black robes allows for interesting clothing movement without getting bogged down in the detail of folds and rumples. Nuns are like living shadow puppets.

With just a face and a shape the animators get across a lot of different personalities with little effort. The faces are of course designed by Shuichi Seki. Seki’s early designs were on shows adapting western properties, Vicky the Viking and Little Lulu. The aforementioned Perrine was his first WMT design work.  From then his open, slightly bean shaped faces became the look of WMT. More recently he did the character design for the Gokyoudai Monogatari TV show.

Unusually for a WMT show, the plucky orphan here is an adult. Actually when I think about it, it’s fairly unusual for pop culture as a whole. The good thing is that because of that, despite annoying all the other nuns, Maria doesn’t come off as too cloying. The ending theme not so much with it’s alternating HAPPY FAMILY SCENE / MISERY approach.

The other thing that struck me was some of the establishing location shots seem to linger unnecessarily long. Then I realised that is animation as travelogue. These background paintings are actually pretty accurate depictions of actual real life locations. Locations that were thousands of miles away from the intended audience. So let them soak it in.

While it’s nicely made for a TV anime, the main thing that is tempting me back is the promise of the opening sequence that the mascot animal of the show is a full grown cow. I am curious as to how they plan to make that work, if indeed they do.

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Not Goldfish Warning, Goldfish Forecast. That’s what Toei call it, so that’s what I’m calling it.

I was originally planning on doing another “What Anime Looked Like In 199X” post for 1991, but I thought I’d actually dip into a few of these shows first. Starting with Goldfish Forecast.

The show’s position in history is that of a precursor to Sailor Moon, in that many of the staff would move onto that show. Notably it shares a director in Junichi Sato, and a composer in Takanori Arisawa. Kunihiko Ikuhara (Utena, Penguin Drum) and Takuya Igarashi (Ouran Host Club, Star Driver) directed some episodes on this show too. But you could have learnt that from wikipedia anyway. 

Based on the shoujo manga by Neko Nekobe, it’s basic plot should be that of a heart warming melodrama. An orphan whose only friend is a goldfish battles evil upper-class schoolgirls and the family lawyer who is trying to steal her inheritance. It could almost be a WMT storyline.

Except into that has been inserted an pink haired chirpy Arale-chan-alike with near super human speed, a kid who dresses like Maverick from Top Gun and a whole load of farm animals with near human intelligence. Then the orphan herself is fairly unlikeable. And everyone over reacts to everything to the point where their eyes are popping out their heads.

The first episode contains two stories, the first introduces us to Chitose Fujinomiya, the poor little rich orphan who’s been booted out of Metropolitan Academy with her valuable lucky goldfish, Gyopi. She is found by the students of impoverished Countryside Junior High, led by pink haired, Super Deformed, hyperactive moppet Wapiko.

They help her get back her inheritance and she buys the school so she can use it to get revenge on her former Metropolitan Academy classmates who turned on her.

The second story sees Chitose’s corrupt lawyer team up with the Metropolitan Academy student council, while the revived Countryside Junior High starts to take in new students, some of which are actually human beings.

It’s not particularly packed with gags, but there’s a degree of humour from the characters and more from the extreme reactions they have to events. There’s not enough use made of big eyes that squish and stretch and explode nowadays. In Goldfish Forecast they are the most energetic part of the human body, except maybe for Wapiko’s super fast legs.

Also there’s a lot of funny looking animals. Animals that are technically about as far away from being anatomically correct as you can get while still being recognisable as cows, chickens, pigs and cats are always pretty funny. This is why I’m excited about Akitaro Daichi’s Poyopoyo show next year. Who doesn’t want a show about a spherical cat?

So, a pleasant enough show that warmed up some creators before they started making a big impact. 

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