Giving the anime industry free rein.

By brokering the slots of anime, and rarely being involved in production beyond standards and practices, TV Tokyo basically have given the producers of anime for those slots free rein.

Later than NTV’s slots, the ratings are rather paltry, and the belief seems to be that there isn’t an audience that want to watch anime at 1:30AM and later. Instead the plan seems to be to rely on a pre-existing audience for the show. An audience that will be fanatical enough to find it wherever it might end up in the schedule. That’s even before you take into account that various parts of production committee will then be relying on them to also be fanatical enough to buy the various offshoots of the content necessary to make the whole exercise financially rewarding for those involved.

In part that’s a necessity of this end of the anime business, but in terms of getting eyes in front of the screen or making TV shows with a broad appeal like NTV’s or Fuji TV’s noitaminA do, it can’t beat the concept of developing a specific spot in the schedule with the broadcaster’s input. It looks like TV Tokyo themselves realised this and so they established an anime department last year, leading to them launching, with Sony’s Aniplex, the Anime no Chikara slot this year.

The kings (pun intended) of late night anime on TV Tokyo are Starchild Records, the anime subsidiary of King Records. Today, we’ll look at the Sunday night 1:30AM slot they’ve dominated since 2004.  Of the following shows – only three shows didn’t have Starchild credited on ANN (Rescue Wings, School Rumble, Nabari no O), most have a Starchild staff member on production or planning (often Atsushi Moriyama) and a lot have their own homepage on Starchild’s website.

Unfortunately the English language licensing website they set up (presumably as part of their ‘04 US visit) hasn’t been updated since 2004, so I’m fumbling in the dark over a lot of these. They frequently handle DVD distribution for these shows too. Basically the series have become much more like infomercials for the CD and DVD releases, not to mention all the ancillary character goods, than a show designed to attract a rating. And while “moe” makes money, that’s what’s going to dominate these slots, because the TV ratings really don’t mean anything. As soon as something else becomes what sells to a niche, fanatical audience, then Starchild’s roster of shows will become full of that (you can see some that happening to a lesser extent with their post-Eva catalogue in the 90s). Though I do wonder with Atsushi Moriyama’s involvement with the Azumanga Daioh production led to their pursuit of similar properties in the slot discussed below, as most have his name attached in some way.

So sci-fi fans, if you are bemoaning the lack of sci-fi anime, it’s your own fault for not buying enough CDs, DVDs and merchandise. Your wallet just didn’t want it enough in comparison to the hug pillow brigade.

Doki Doki School Hours (2004) *
Studio: JC Staff
Director: Yoshiaki Iwasaki

A poor man’s Azumanga Daioh.

Fafner (2004) *
Studio: Xebec
Director: Nobuyoshi Habara

Evangelion for dullards.

Mahoraba ~Heartful days~ (2005) *
Studio: JC Staff
Director: Shinichiro Kimura

Apartment building sitcom teaches us that mental illness is adorable!

Pani Poni Dash! (2005) *
Studio: GANSIS, SHAFT
Director: Akiyuki Shinbo

A poor man’s Doki Doki School Hours.

RESCUE WINGS (2006)
Studio: JC Staff
Director: Katsushi Sakurabi

A reminder that slice of life doesn’t have to be about schoolgirls. It be can about helicopter rescue pilots too.

School Rumble: 2nd Semester (First series aired during the day) (2006)
Studio: Studio Comet
Director: Shinji Takamatsu

There was then a brief break from animated fare while unusual looking costumed hero Lion Maru G (who was also produced by Starchild) took to the air, before cartoons returned with…

Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight! (2007)*
Studio: ufotable
Director: “Team Manabibeya”

A poor man’s Azumanga Daioh. IN THE FUTURE! Where apparently all 17 year-old girls look 10.

Heroic Age (2007) *
Studio: Xebec
Director: Toshimasa Suzuki

Robot show that blew its most interesting idea in the first episode (namely: SPACE TARZAN).

Minami-ke (2007)*
Studio: Dome
Director: Masahiko Ohta

The story of three dull sisters.

Minami-ke: Okawari (2008)*
Studio: asread
Director: Naoto Hosoda

That somehow warranted another series. From a different staff.

Nabari no O (2008)
Studio: JC Staff
Director:Kunihisa Sugishima

Agreeable ninja show.

Today In Class 5-2 (2008) *
Studio: Xebec
Director: Tsuyoshi Nagasawa

A poor man’s Manabi Straight. IN THE PRESENT!

Minami-ke Okaeri (2009) *
Studio: asread
Director: Kei Oikawa

If this dishwater gets three seasons then there must be a lot of Softy Walters out there to make it worthwhile.

Natsu no Arashi! (2009) *
Studio: SHAFT
Director: Shin Oonuma

Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered forties.

Kanamemo (2009) *
Studio: Feel
Director: Shigehito Takayanagi

Newsies, the moe generation.

Natsu no Arashi! Akinai-chu (2009) *
Studio: SHAFT
Director: Shin Oonuma / Kenichi Ishikura

More larks with the time travelling ghosts.

Hanamaru Kindergarten (2010) *
Studio: GAINAX
Director: Seiji Mizushima

Something about a school for weird looking glove puppets.

* Starchild Records involvement

Related posts:

1. PAST MY BEDTIME PART I – Introduction
2. PAST MY BEDTIME PART II – You don’t have to be Madhouse to work here, but it helps.
3. PAST MY BEDTIME PART III – The Legacy of the Naked Elves

As mentioned in part one, TV Tokyo launched their late night anime with Those Who Hunt Elves. It aired on Thursdays at the fictional time of 2515 (0115 to normal people). That slot was fairly consistently given over to anime until 2002, when it got bumped for The Mini-Skirt Police variety show. REPEATS of The Mini-Skirt Police variety show.

I don’t know for sure what killed it, but looking at the ratings, when the cutesy, nothing really happens treacle of Kokoro Library was put in the slot, the ratings for what had mainly been a sci-fi/fantasy action slot halved and didn’t recover. People beat on NOIR for being some sort of harbinger of doom, and I’m not a fan of it myself, but in terms of ratings it was consistent with what had come before. It’s Kokoro Library that needs the finger pointing at it here.

So all you “moe is the cancer killing anime” believers out there, take a note of 12 October 2001, the premiere of Kokoro Library. Then tear it up and throw it away, because in part four we’ll take a look at the real problem.

Those Who Hunt Elves (1996)
Studio: Group TAC
Director: Kazuyoshi Katayama

High concept stupidity from Yu Yagami’s manga. It’s one of the many, many, many transported to another world series that were popular in the 90s. I’d say that the animation hasn’t aged well, but it was hardly state of the art in 1996. When people wax nostalgic for the pre-digital animation era, they probably should take a second look at Those Who Hunt Elves. It frequently makes the first Slayers series look like Akira. I do still like the Keiji Gotoh character designs though.

EAT-MAN (1997)
Studio: Studio Deen
Director: Koichi Mashimo

Loved the manga, but this first series was a huge let down. Completely ignored the interesting visuals and setting of the manga and instead deposited hero Bolt Crank into some terribly clichéd futuristic world. Had I been paying attention to who made what I was watching back then, I’d have never put myself through watching future Koichi Mashimo projects.

Hyper Police (1997)
Studio: Studio Pierrot
Director: Takahiro Omori

Post-Apocalypse fantasy cop show. Reminded me a fair bit of the RIFTS rpg in its hodgepodge of future dystopia, monsters and animal people. Not watched this in over a decade, but remember quite enjoying what I’d seen. Again, that had a fair bit to do with the Keiji Goto designs. Whether I’d enjoy it today, is a whole other question. Forgot that Omori (Baccano!, Durarara!!) had directed it.

Virus Buster Serge (1997)
Studio: JC Staff
Director: Masami Obari

This Masami Obari creation took an eternity between it’s announcement and actual release in the UK. And I’ve still not actually seen any of it. However as it is Obari, I will assume it features bizzare fashions, pneumatic women, periodically fantastic animation, nonsensical writing and the odd Go Nagai homage.

OUTLAW STAR (1998)
Studio: Sunrise
Director: Mitsuru Hongo

This seems to be one of those shows with a fairly large vocal fanbase of folks who are now in their mid-twenties. Never seen it myself. BECAUSE I AM OLD.

SHADOW SKILL – Eigi (1998)
Studio: Studio Deen
Director: Tsukasa Sunaga

Caught a little of this. Story didn’t interest me, but surprised to see some nice looking action animation that looked like I should recognise who animated it.

BETTERMAN (1999)
Studio: Sunrise
Director: Yoshitomo Kometani

The middle work in Yoshitomo Yonetani’s loosely connected trilogy of Sunrise productions.

EXCEL SAGA (1999)
Studio: JC Staff
Director: Shinichi Watanabe

I’m not sure how well this plays to folks who came into anime post-2000. In many ways it feels like a topper to the previous 20-30 years of anime, and I don’t know if its satire works if you aren’t familiar with that era in any way. For 1999 though, it was perfect.

Argento Soma (2000)
Studio: Sunrise
Director:Kazuyoshi Katayama

More Evangelion cloning, with some Frankenstein and ET thrown in for good luck, this time from Big O head honcho Kazuyoshi Katayama. Whatever merits this may have, history is likely to forget it in the mix of similar shows produced. And Katayama is likely to be remembered for the more idiosyncratic Big O than anything else.

Still, it’s much better looking that Katayama’s Those Who Hunt Elves adaptation.

NOIR (2001)
Studio:Bee Train
Director:Koichi Mashimo

Bee Train and Koichi Mashimo set the tone for their 00s output with this show. That tone? UTTER BOREDOM. I managed to make my way through one single episode of this at a Minami Con, and it’s an astounding piece of work in how it manages to animate scenes that should be exciting – like gunfights – in such a way as to drain all the excitement from it and replace it with a ponderous seriousness.

Kokoro Library (2001)
Studio:Studio Deen
Director:Koji Masunari

Moe librarian anime based on moe librarian manga. With horrible character designs.

Aquarian Age (2002)
Studio: Broccoli / Madhouse Studios
Director:Yoshimitsu Ohashi

Trading card game gets a late night animation. This draws on the gameworld of the card game, rather than make an anime about people playing the card game. Because it’s SERIOUS FANTASY and therefore doesn’t want to roll around in bed full of children’s pocket money.

Also stuck amongst these shows was something called SPORTS BEAT and another called face4/4. No idea what that last thing was. Can’t find a description of it on the internet beyond it being on the resumes of a former bandmate of DANCE MAN and some teenage idol of the time. So there you go.

US Success

All but one series has been released in the USA, can you guess which one?

If you guessed Kokoro Library, you would be right!

However, how many are still in print is a whole other question…

ADV Films - Those Who Hunt Elves, Aquarian Age, Excel Saga, Noir and Shadow Skill. These all appear to be limbo following ADV’s demise, but most have stock still available.
Image Entertainment – Hyper Police. This is in a similar position following Image’s bankruptcy
Bandai Entertainment – Eat-Man, Outlaw Star, Betterman and Argento Soma. Eat Man only got a VHS release to my knowledge. Betterman is out of print now. Collections of Outlaw Star and Argento Soma are still available.
Manga Entertainment – Virus Buster Serge. A collection is still available.

Related posts:

1. PAST MY BEDTIME PART I – Introduction
2. PAST MY BEDTIME PART II – You don’t have to be Madhouse to work here, but it helps.
3. PAST MY BEDTIME PART IV – In the midnight hour, she cried moe, moe, moe.

When it comes to anime, Nippon Television have a reputation for being classy, second only to NHK. Daytime shows they air at the present include Detective Conan, Yumeiro Pâtissière and Anpanman. All very pleasant and family friendly.

While not necessarily family friendly, they’ve similarly brought a touch of class and quality to their late night programming. For much of the last 13 years they’ve had just one, sometimes two, late night anime series airing at a time. And what they’ve lacked in quantity they’ve more than made up for in quality.

If I was to pinpoint what ties most of them together, it’s that while they are aimed at much the same demographics as much of the late night shows (initially men in their late teens and early twenties, but eventually women too), they aren’t the part of that demographic who then spends loads of money on associated character goods. No Herr Docter Tenma hugging pillows for this audience. These are shows that are more likely to drive sales of the source material, rather than merchandise.

So why don’t these shows get the attention from some of the people who decry the rise of otaku-pandering shows? Well a lot of those people came into anime through sci-fi, and what they are actually complaining about is that they themselves aren’t being pandered to any longer. What they want are sci-fi shows, and for the most part the series NTV broadcast aren’t sci-fi. Why would they be? Sci-fi as a whole has been in a downturn in the last decade or so, so why should anime have been any different?

Secondly, a lot of these shows aren’t that easy to lay your hands on. Of the ones that came to the USA, a number are out of print and some had poor original releases. Of the ones that remain unlicensed, they haven’t necessarily been the favourites of the fansub community. Even if they have been fansubbed, they don’t necessarily have the vocal fanbase to evangelise about them to the extent that other titles do. At the bottom of the post I’ve provided a summary of the status of the titles that did get US releases.

The following list is how the Japanese wikipedia entries described the flow of the core post-midnight titles on NTV. As the title of the post hints, the majority come from Madhouse Studios and given that a number of their directors make their debuts directing an entire show, I wonder if they use this to nuture and develop talent. On the flipside of that though is the fact that Masayuki Kojima and Yuzo Sato have directed multiple shows in this slot.

Berserk (1997)
Studio: OLM
Director: Naohito Takahashi (Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot & Marple, Steel Angel Kurumi)

In retrospect, this adaptation of Kentaro Miura’s long running manga is somewhat anaemic. Certainly Takahashi and OLM would not be my first choice to be the creative forces behind adapting it. At the time though, it definitely felt like a breath of fresh air from the roleplaying tropes that your average fantasy anime regurgitated.

Master Keaton (1998)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Masayuki Kojima

This episodic adaptation of Naoki Urasawa’s manga about an archaeologist and insurance investigator ran on Monday as opposed to Tuesday, but maintained and arguably raised the quality set by Berserk. Madhouse, Urasawa and Kojima would return to late night NTV to even greater success in the next decade.

Hidamari no Ki (2000)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Gisaburo Sugii

This Tezuka adaptation, while making sense for slot and the channel, seems to have slipped down the back of the sofa of history. Even the scans of DVD covers on Amazon were all blurry and full of artefacts. However someone in Japan has uploaded it all to Youtube, so maybe those few who do like it, love it, but not enough to take clear screenshots. Gisaburo Sugii tends to be hit and miss, so I’m not sure if this is worth your time.

Hajime no Ippo (2000)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Satoshi Nishimura

A prime example of a long running show scuppered in the US by its release format. 15 volumes at $29.98, you’d have dropped around $450 on this buying it as it came out. With Geneon now gone from the US market and no-one in a hurry to re-license it, the volumes are very varied in prices, some under the original price, others rising in price. Looking at Amazon UK, I can see the first box set (volumes 1-8) is now going for £190.85, as opposed to the original price of $79.99.

Tenchi Muyo GXP (2002)
Studio: AIC
Director: Shinichi Watanabe

Now this one seems a little odd compared to what we’ve had so far. A pseudo-sequel to AIC’s 90s phenomenon, directed by one of anime’s more satiric minds. There’s another AIC title further down the list that’s even more out of place, and what I’ve seen of GXP was certainly fun.

Hanada Shonen-shi (2002)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Masayuki Kojima

Masayuki Kojima is back, with this adaptation of Makoto Isshiki’s supernatural comedy about a boy who can see the dead. Another show I’ve not see much of, but certainly wouldn’t mind catching more of it. In terms of production it’s a step up again from Master Keaton, might be my favourite of Kojima’s shows based on my small sampling.

Air Master (2003)
Studio: Toei Animation
Director: Daisuke Nishio

Sitting between Hanada and Harlock, this seems a little trashy, but it’s fantastic trash. And as this whole thread started with Berserk, it kind of made sense they’d look to Young Animal again for more material. In terms of choreography, this is the stepping stone for Nishio between the shonen action shows he’s famous for and the physicality of the first Pretty Cure show.

Space Pirate Captain Harlock The Endless Odyssey (2003)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Rintaro

TV broadcast of the OAV series that was originally meant to be a TV show in the first place. When we get to the second programming stream they started, we’ll see they used other material that wasn’t first run then to begin with.

The Gokusen (2004)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Yuzo Sato

Despite what Anime News Network’s site and the English wiki page claim, I believe this is a Yuzo Sato directed show, which makes sense as there’ll be three more to come. Kozueko Morimoto’s manga about teacher/yakuza heir Kumiko Yamaguchi attempts to balance her two lives was a bigger success in its various live action incarnations, but this anime version was fun too. Though what was up with that dog?

MONSTER (2004)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Masayuki Kojima

Masayuki Kojima returns to Urasawa with this lengthy, overly faithful adaptation of the Fugitive-inspired thriller. If you don’t like reading, then check it out. Otherwise, the manga is a much more enjoyable option.

Akagi (2005)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Yuzo Sato

As good as Gokusen was, this was the show that made people notice Yuzo Sato. The first of two Nobuyuki Fukumoto adaptations that Sato’s been responsible for, and a great example of the gambling genre.

Ouran High School Host Club (2006)
Studio: BONES
Director: Takuya Igarashi

I’ll hazard a guess that this shojo manga adaptation got made due to the success of Honey & Clover on Fuji TV and NANA on NTV itself (see below). It’s a good choice, much like those two hits, it has an appeal that crosses gender boundaries to a degree, and a lot of that can be attributed to Igarashi’s direction and Norifumi Nakamura’s art design. It’s one of those anime that look far better than the manga they came from.

Death Note (2006)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Tetsuro Araki

Obviously this show was going to be made. I’m not convinced the material works in animated form, but Araki does about as well as you can with it and the pre-made fanbase seemed to love it.

Buzzer Beater II (2007)
Studio: TMS Entertainment
Director: Shigeyuki Miya

Odd one this, the original Buzzer Beater series had aired in 2005 on satellite channel WOWOW, but this sequel aired on NTV. Liked what I saw of the first series, loved original the web manga, but haven’t seen this sequel. Same production studio and director, so possibly more of the same.

Kaiji (2007)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Yuzo Sato

This second Fukumoto adaptation from Sato is probably a career best so far, and reportedly due for a sequel in the future.

Real Drive (2008)
Studio: Production IG
Director: Kazuhiro Furuhashi

A rare foray into science fiction for this timeslot. Yet another Production IG/Shirow collaboration, and as such I totally ignored it.

One Outs (2008)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Yuzo Sato

Taking a break from Fukumoto, but not gambling, Sato returns with this adaptation of Shinobu Kaitani’s tale of baseball and unfair wagers. The actual wagers are actually a smokescreen for what the story is actually about – sportsmanship. It’s much more about manipulating the rules of a sport to your advantage than the gambling itself.

Souten Kouro (2009)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Tsuneo Tominaga

A Three Kingdoms period manga adaptation notable for mainly using historical records rather than the Romance of The Three Kingdoms as a source and portraying Cao Cao more favourably. Despite that it still manages to be ludicrously over the top. How over the top? People are throwing horses around in the first episode. I’m not pointing fingers, but let’s note that Fist of The North Star director Toyoo Ashida was in the “Chief Director” chair.

Kimi ni Todoke (2009)
Studio: Production IG
Director: Hiro Kaburaki

The current series in the slot is this well received adaptation of Karuho Shiina’s shojo romance manga.

—

There was a secondary anime stream that started in 2004, to begin with it mainly contained syndicated series rather than first run series.

Ghost In The Shell SAC (Aired 2004)
Otogi Zoshi (2004)
Studio: Production IG
Director: Mizuho Nishikubo

First original show for this slot.

Ghost In The Shell SAC 2nd Gig (Aired 2005)
Angel Heart (Aired 2005)
Sasami Club (Aired 2006)
WAIT… WHAT?

Claymore (2007)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Hiroyuki Tanaka

Norihiro Yagi’s fantasy manga got a brief run on TV. Not a big fan, as it definitely suffers from some of the flaws of the shows that NTV air. For a show about swordswomen there’s an awful lot of walking and talking, rather than fighting.

Neuro -Supernatural Detective- (2007)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Hiroshi Koujina

Suffers similar problems to the Shonen Jump manga it’s based on, namely poor design on the human characters and lame mysteries. Koujina will be directing 50’s reform school drama Rainbow for NTV in April.

Top Secret – The Revelation (2008)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Hiroshi Aoyama

Sci-fi detective show involving reading people’s memories.

Moryo no Hako (2008)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Ryosuke Nakamura

Over-rated adaptation of a Natsuhiko Kyogoku mystery novel. Notable for having CLAMP character designs.

Hajime no Ippo New Challenger (2009)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Jun Shishido

Continuation of Hajime no Ippo.

It then went into repeats of Kaiji

—

There were also a couple of other titles that fell on different days and times on the schedule:

Kaze no Yojimbo (2001)
Studio: Studio Pierrot
Director: Hayato Date

Misjudged cartoon based on Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. In a round about way.

NANA (2006)
Studio: Madhouse Studios
Director: Morio Asaka

Like Death Note, this is one of those shows that was always going to happen. The manga is one of the monster successes of the last decade, and the anime was a huge success too. Arguably I shouldn’t include it as it technically started before midnight (23:55) but it’s worth making note of it.

—

Success in the US?

Its hard to say if this really reflects the strength of titles or the strength of DVD distributors and how they package their releases. But here’s the status of the titles that made it onto DVD in the USA.

Berserk - released by Media Blasters. In Print. Complete collections released 3 times.
Master Keaton - released by Geneon. Out of Print. Never collected.
Hajime no Ippo – released by Geneon. Out of Print. Two boxsets.
Tenchi GXP – released by Funimation. In Print. Complete collections released twice.
Air Master – released by Toei. Out of Print. Never completed.
Gokusen - released by Media Blasters. In Print. Complete collections released 3 times.
Monster - currently airing on Sy-Fy.
Ouran Host Club - released by Funimation. In Print. Complete collection and Blu-Ray due out end of March.
Death Note – released by Viz Media. In Print. Two boxsets.
Otogi Zoshi - released by AnimeWorks. In Print. Complete Collection.
Claymore – released by Funimation. In Print. Complete collection and Blu-Ray.
Kaze no Yojimbo - released by Bandai Entertainment. Available. Never collected.
Space Pirate Captain Harlock The Endless Odyssey - released by Geneon. Out of Print. Collected.

Related posts:

1. PAST MY BEDTIME PART III – The Legacy of the Naked Elves
2. HATE FUN? Autumn Anime Prejudged~! Part 2~!
3. PAST MY BEDTIME PART IV – In the midnight hour, she cried moe, moe, moe.

I’ve decided to break my analysis of the post midnight anime into a series of smaller, more easily digested posts. You will be able to identify these by the prefix and tag “Past My Bedtime”.

There is a single driving factor behind this – TV Tokyo. As best as I can tell TV Tokyo’s approach to scheduling anime is this:

• Put a lot of it on TV.
• Hope someone watches.

While I believe it was they who started the boom in 1996 with Those Who Hunt Elves and have been the most prolific broadcaster of late night anime, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious strategy or particular audience they are going for. It’s going to take a lot of breaking down to try and make sense of anything going on there, and I don’t want that drowning out some of the clearer scheduling ideas other channels have had over the last 13 years.

Related posts:

1. PAST MY BEDTIME PART III – The Legacy of the Naked Elves
2. PAST MY BEDTIME PART IV – In the midnight hour, she cried moe, moe, moe.
3. PAST MY BEDTIME PART II – You don’t have to be Madhouse to work here, but it helps.

Negibōzu no Asatarō, Yatterman, Battle Spirits: Shonen Toppa Bashin
Yes! Precure 5 GoGo!, Fresh Pretty Cure, Net Ghost PIPOPA

Metal Fight Beyblade, GeGeGe no Kitaro, Dragonball Kai
Inazuma Eleven, One Piece, Onegai My Melody Kirara

Jewel Pets, Zettai Karen Children, Cross Game
Live On Cardliver Kakeru, Gundam 00, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood

Chibi Maruko-chan, Sazae-san, Golgo 13 Best Selection
Natsume’s Book of Friends Season 2, Soul Eater, My Three Daughters

BLEACH, Naruto Shippuden, Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s
Gintama, Kaasan – Mom’s Life, Stich!

Pokemon: Diamond & Pearl, Anpanman, Doraemon
Kirarin Revolution, Crayon Shin-chan, Blue Dragon: Tenkai no Shichi Ryuu

MAJOR, Gokujō!! Mecha Mote Iinchō, Shugo Chara
Sgt. Frog, Hitman Reborn, Atashin’chi

Detective Conan, Beast Player Erin, Shin Mazinger
Yumeiro Pâtissière, Battle Spirits: Shōnen Gekiha Dan, Fairy Tail

Tamogotchi, Thriller Restaurant, Gokyoudai Monogatari
Letter Bee, Animal Detective Kuruminzoo

So what is my point?

Well, I wanted to illustrate that if you ignore the shows that air after midnight or on satellite, the sort of content that makes up anime on television hasn’t really changed all that much in the last 30 years. The shows up there are pretty much occupying the same slots that existed for anime before the 1997 late night boom, in some cases literally the same slots (more on that in an upcoming post).

When you are comparing the anime of today to the anime of the past, you’ve got to compare like for like and people often fail to do that. A lot of the shows that get the most fervent defenders and attackers belong to a section of the market that is less than 15 years old, so it’s spurious to compare them to shows that were never aimed at the same hardcore audience. I know I’ve done it plenty of times myself.

So what has changed?

Well there’s one big change if you compared this to a listing from the 80s – the lack of robot shows.

Despite what some writers would have you believe, robot shows haven’t been edged out by the otaku pandering shows that air late at night. Those shows are going out in time slots that were never occupied by the classic robot shows.

Robot shows were edged out by the videogame, toy and card game shows. Though there’s also an argument to be made that they simply evolved into them. The anime industry chases the money, and for over a decade now, rather than in shows that sell toy robots, the money has been in shows that follow the Pokemon formula, be that for the purposes of selling monster fightin’ videogames, collectable card games or rev-em-up vehicular beetles. This means we’re probably due a “mature”, post-modern take on Pokemon at some point in the next decade. Gird your loins for that one.

There’s been a softening of the number of literary adaptations too. In part that’s down to the World Masterpiece Theatre and its copyists hitting a malaise in 90s that ultimately lead to WMT’s demise (probably part of a general TV anime malaise in the late 80s/early 90s that I’ll get around to writing about eventually). WMT returned in 2007, but is now relegated to satellite TV.

It’s not all gloom on the literary front, the adaptation of the Thriller Restaurant books was a success in 2009 and continues to be in 2010. While light novel adaptations enjoy some success in the post-midnight slots, Beast Player Erin is the only one that made my list above. Unlike the 13/26 episode adaptations you see late at night, Erin was a old school WMT-style year long work.

It’s also worth noting the couple of late evening, pre-midnight shows that had some success in ‘09. Golgo 13 Best Selection began while the original run was still airing, but at an earlier time slot. This resulted in better ratings than the first run had received. Following that we had Shin Mazinger in a similar slot, and again it was more successful than similar post-midnight shows had been. There’s clearly a market for anime targeted at men in their 40s and older, and it will be interesting to see what tries to tap that market next.

Finally on the change front – there’s a lot of TV being made. I’ve listed 53 shows up there, and even then I’ve probably missed some. Admittedly, a sizable chunk started way before 2009 and others are sequels, but even taking that into account, when I compare them to my 80s overload posts I see that there’s more shows airing now than during the years Urusei Yatsura was airing. That being said, it has possibly peaked already. Prime time slots have been lost on Sundays and Saturdays over the last decade, damaging the overall ratings for anime, again, more on that in a later post.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same collection of adaptations of popular shonen & shojo manga, some magical girl shows created by studios to shift merchandise (and provide contrast with the tokusatsu shows they are scheduled with) and perennial old favourites the whole family can enjoy.

Last year showed a number of titles and creators that wouldn’t look out of place in schedules decades ago. As well as the returns of Yatterman, GeGeGe no Kitaro and Dragonball, you had Zettai Karen Children (author Takashi Shiina’s Ghost Sweeper Mikami had a successful anime in 1993) and Cross Game (author Mitsuru Adachi has had anime adaptations in every decade since the 80s). Alongside that, you’ve got shows like Shin-chan, Maruko-chan, Sazae-san, Doraemon etc that literally have been in the schedules for decades plus recurring franchises like Gundam and Pokemon.

If you see a malaise in the sort of content output before midnight, then you probably need to look towards the manga industry rather than the anime industry. Even then it may be more down to changes in society and how different demographics are viewed. In the 80s, City Hunter would have been the equivalent of a Naruto or Bleach in terms of being a Shonen Jump manga turned anime, but outstripped them in success. However in the 21st Century, Tsukasa Hojo’s follow up Angel Heart is published in Comic Bunch and the anime adaptation went out in the middle of the night.

In part that’s down to writing for an audience that has grown up with you, but also due to the “me too” approach of how editors develop talent and series. Editors will be wanting the next One Piece now, but telling people to copy One Piece isn’t going to result in that, but that is what they’ll do. Additionally, there’s also the element of toning down that Daryl Surat has mentioned on Anime World Order, where the content in shonen manga is frequently a lot tamer than it was decades ago (as you may have deduced from my Violence Jack posts). That also goes for TV anime too, notoriously there was a clamp down after Evangelion on violence and sexuality that in part led to the late night and satellite anime shows that now dominate fan chatter.

I’m currently working on a couple of other follow ups to the post about what is mainstream anime, this post sprung out of them and seeing the same arguments going back and forth, again and again. In part those arguments come from the fact that much of Anglophone fandom has a view of anime that’s shot through the prisms of DVDs, streaming and fansubs. That removes any idea of how the show was originally marketed, who the audience it is intended for is and most of all having a reliance on a small number of gatekeepers of taste. This post won’t put a stop to those arguments but it’s part of shoring up some critical thinking on my part and how I approach anime criticism. And it might help drive home the point that anime doesn’t end where the internet chatter ends.

The main post I’m working on at the moment is an analysis of the Sunday anime schedules over the last 10 years, but I’ve also just started an overview of late night anime since 97, and seeing if there are discernible trends. The main trend I’ve decided on so far is that a lot of people scheduling anime late at night do so seemingly without rhyme or reason. Just look at what previously aired in the time slot Durarara!! currently occupies:

• Big Windup! Season 2
• Umi Monogatari ~Anata ga Ite Kureta Koto~
• Sengoku Basara
• Linebarrels of Iron
• Itazura na Kiss
• Noramimi
• ULTRASEVEN X
  
• Romeo x Juliet
• The Galaxy Railways: Eternal Divergence
• Witchblade

Are they really expecting the same audience for each of those shows? After looking at this and what works during the Sunday daytime slots, I’m increasingly of the opinion that part of the noitaminA slot’s success is due to the fact the scheduler has a specific audience in mind for that time slot.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough, more on all of that another time!

Related posts:

1. PAST MY BEDTIME PART I – Introduction
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Kuruneko (2009)
3. Best Anime of the 00s: Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z Hen (2009)

Today: Higepiyo Episode 28

Higepiyo is a 2009 anime about a bearded chick. Not just any bearded chick, but the last man in Japan with the heart of a samurai. In this episode, he drunkenly falls into a cake shop’s flour, and the shop’s staff debate whether they can use it. With the help of some very spurious logic, they decide it’s fine to use the flour. Because chicks come from eggs and cakes often contain eggs and alcohol. That’s some gloriously spurious logic right there.

Despite Higepiyo being upfront about the contamination, the cakes sell like they are hot.

There are no depictions of any negative health repurcusions in this anime caused by the sozzled hirsute avian contamination of the raw ingredients. In fact it suggests dipping hairy drunk yellow birds in your flour will increase your business.

It is truly a HORROR OF ANIMATED FOOD HYGIENE.

Related posts:

1. HATE FUN? Last of the Spring Anime (apart from any I missed) – Part 8
2. Higepiyo – Episode 1
3. Lum-A-Day 099 – Fast Food Wars

Kaede, the lady ninja from the spring special makes a belated return, as she once again flees the life of a ninja in search of a new job. She’s afraid that if she keeps up the ninja lifestyle it will make her as ugly as her ninja leader.

Of course she is pursued by her leader and the clan of tiny Bomberman-looking ninjas, and after a brief stint as a drive-thru rollerskating waitress (did/do these actually exist? It seems like a piece of Americana I’ve only ever seen in fiction), she ends up in Tomobiki.

Starving and homeless, she is found by Mendou and taken in. After she saves him from one of Ryoko’s attempts to blow him up, he offers her the job of his bodyguard. Ryoko however demands a test, Kaede must run from the Mendou Estate to the school and launch a rocket by a specific time. Ryoko booby traps the route and tips of the ninja clan in an attempt to prevent it.

This leads to a great second half of the episode where we get two comedic devices that Urusei Yatsura does repeatedly well.

The first is the chase. I’ve discussed before how the use of the chase scene is lacking in modern anime. Admittedly, these later UY episodes have a ridiculous budget for their time, but even the lower budget Oshii episodes frequently made use of the device too. I don’t think it’s just down to animation talent and budget though, the nature of the material being adapted has also changed. A lot of recent comedy manga have a stage-y feel that is absent from Takahashi’s work, likely a reflection of the boom in variety comedy Japan has experienced. Just look at Astro Fighter Sunred, that uses a number of stage comedy troupes in its voice cast.

The second device is the reversal of expectations. This does still get used a lot in anime comedy. Here, we have the ninja leader call on the help of sleeper agents who lead normal lives in Tomobiki, but are secret ninjas. The whole sequence is played totally straight, as a parody of serious ninja fiction. That is until the sleeper ninja’s actually try to do something. The first’s sword has rusted into his sheath, the second’s certain death technique is just the ability to climb trees really well and the final one has the special ability of falling.

Despite Ryoko’s and the ninja’s best efforts, it is Lum who accidentally thwarts Kaede at the last second, when she catches Kaede in a lightning bolt meant for Ataru. And so she must disappear from the show once more, in search of a new job.

A great episode, particularly in terms of animation. It pretty much feels they are showing off how great they are for much of the episode, something else that is all too rare nowadays. And despite that sense of showing off it avoids being too self-indulgent, the showing off is in service of the story, rather than an attempt to do a segment that feels like a completely different show (see Episode 130).

—

Screenplay: Shigeru Yanagawa
Storyboard: Junji Nishimura
Director: Junji Nishimura
Animation Director: Takafumi Hayashi

Related posts:

1. Lum-A-Day B-B-Bonus – “It’s Spring! Take Off!” Urusei Yatsura Special
2. Lum-A-Week 135 – What Do I Care For Talking Flowers
3. Lum-A-Week 137 – Lum’s Courageous Duel! An Ironic Victory

A return to a common theme in Urusei Yatsura and a return to a better class of episode.

Something that comes up a lot in Urusei Yatsura is the idea that any woman who is acting overtly “girly” is doing just that, acting. Ran, the obvious example, being a direct parody of the Burriko girls of the time, but other characters indulge in it too – Shinobu often acts weak to try attract Mendou, even though she’s clearly the toughest character in the series, Ryu hangs onto to a warped, overly romanticised, view of femininity, rather than being herself.

In this episode we meet Katsuragi Anna, a Tomobiki High School student from the year below Lum, Ataru et al. She admits early in the episode that she feels like she’s acting like a girl rather than actually feeling like one. And she appears to be a parody of female manga/anime leads, in that she’s excessively girly and has excessively sparkly eyes.

She gets mugged by Soban and Lum comes to her rescue. She asks if Lum could beat him without her powers, and Lum says yes. This is all done in a way that comes across as a parody of the schoolgirl romantic friendship genre, though not as obvious and all-out as Project A-Ko would do it. However, Anna then goes and challenges Soban to a fight on Lum’s behalf, so that she can see Lum beat him and Anna can become really brave.

Lum, foolishly accepts, only to discover that without her powers she is really weak. There’s an hilarious line at this point from Shinobu who claims that “It’s too much for a girl. We just don’t have the strength” that leads to a fun visual gag.

We then get a training montage, and for once it shows great restraint in not doing a Star of the Giants or Tomorrow’s Joe homage. We do however get an Ultraman homage with Ryu and her dad, and a Rocky homage with Lum. There’s some fun physical comedy in this sequence and some very Eighties keep fit outfits.

Lum realises she can’t get stronger naturally in the three days Anna had given her, so uses some power boosting alien bracelets and strength boosting pills.

We then get the fight and the resolution, and this is probably where it comes undone a little. Soban eats Lums bracelets and she has to rely on the pills which only last 3 minutes and get less effective each time. Eventually everything descends in chaos, but as well the Oshii era episodes did. Could have used one really strong punchline to end everything on.

—

Screenplay: Shigeru Yanagawa
Storyboard: Iku Suzuki
Director: Iku Suzuki
Animation Director: Yuichi Endo

Related posts:

1. Lum-A-Week 138 – Job Hunting! Sneaky Return of the Reject!
2. Lum-A-Day 100 The Great Vault! Courageous Survival!!!
3. Lum-A-Day 065 – Ran-chan’s Great Date Plan

Kidfenris asked on twitter today:

Question for the anime crowd: what’s the worst T&A fan service you’ve seen in an
otherwise mainstream, please-take-this-seriously anime?

Response to this question highlighted a frequently made misconception, that please-take-this-seriously anime is mainstream. On the rare occasion it is, but for the majority of the time it’s as much about otaku decadence as any other late night anime. They aren’t sticking a show full of tired old sci-fi or cyberpunk cliches on TV on Sunday afternoon any time soon. And chances are they won’t break through late at night either. Plus, if you’re a non-sci-fi, non-fantasy serious minded manga, you’ll probably get a live action adaptation before an anime one anyway. And chances are you’ll get higher ratings than a cartoon.

The fact is that the mainstream is mainly made up of shows that don’t want you to take them particularly seriously – namely kids shows and family comedies. Of the shows that broke the Top 10 anime in Japan last year you’ve got just three shows made for primarily adult audiences. Two of them were from the successful noitaminA slot, namely Eden of The East and Dezaki’s The Tale of Genji adaptation. The other was the final episode of Shin Mazinger. I’ll let you argue whether any of them were begging you to take them seriously.

Obviously noitaminA has been a success in finding an elusive adult audience, both in the ratings and that we’ve seen Fuji TV try and recreate the success with Noise and other networks have taken note too (TV Tokyo’s Power of Anime). I do wonder though if the live action Moyashimon due in the slot later this year will prove a death knell should it get better ratings than anime in the same timeslot.

Now, a short diversion to what this post originally started out as. Back in January Tim Maughan was complaining about the number of kid protagonists in anime, and I questioned if that was really the case – producing this list over at one of my 15 or so tumblr accounts.

I then thought that it was perhaps skewed a little by shows people weren’t actually watching in any great numbers, so made another list from all the shows that Anime News Network listed in the weekly top 10 anime charts over the whole of 2009.

It broke down as follows:

ADULTS 29.4%
TEENAGERS 17.6%
CHILDREN 23.5%
ADULT ALIEN FROGS 2.9%
CURIOUS PRIMATES 2.9%
DIGITAL PETS OF INDETERMINATE AGE 2.9%
GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ALIEN BIOWEAPON 2.9%
MICE 2.9%
LIONS 2.9%
RABBITS 2.9%
ROBOT CATS 2.9%
TEENAGER TRAPPED IN CHILD’S BODY 2.9%
YOKAI 2.9%

I only took the main protagonist, had I averaged the age of the main casts it would probably have had more adults due to parents in some shows being in the main cast, and the fact One Piece now has an 88 year old living skeleton as part of the cast. On the flipside, some shows are basically about children, even if their leads are technically not kids.

It’s those same shows that I’m looking at today when I take a look at what the mainstream is. Back to the issue at hand!

So what is the mainstream?

Well, the biggest TV anime hit last year, as it almost always is, was the Lupin III TV special. This time boosted by being a crossover with another mainstream anime show – Detective Conan. It’s light adventure fare, not really asking the viewer to take it any more seriously than an episode of The Avengers or The Saint would. With an aging (and in some cases, increasingly frail) cast, I’m wondering if Lupin III will remain as popular once the inevitable cast changes have to made. While it survived its lead actor changing in the 90s, it definitely took a while to find its feet again. I should really look at how Doraemon was effected when it went through with its wholesale cast change a few years ago.

Here are shows that made up the mainstream for much of 2009:

Sazae-san
Chibi Maruko-chan
Crayon Shin-chan

These three are on a plateau above everyone else in terms of being mainstream. Sazae-san is arguably another step above everyone else too. They’re all family comedies and when you take into account the success of Mainichi Kaasan last year and the occasional charting of ATASHIn’CHI, it suggests that family comedy is the true mainstream TV animation in Japan. Just as it is everywhere else in the world.

Doraemon

Another evergreen title, though one that doesn’t quite fit the family comedy mould of those other three. Given that parents grew up with the character and now have kids of their own, its continued success makes a lot of sense. That, and the fact the character is both a work of genius and a true icon.

Detective Conan
MAJOR

Shonen Sunday still proves a strong source of anime. Conan’s been running for over decade on TV now, and each MAJOR season proves successful with their return. The inevitable Rin-ne adaptation is pretty much guaranteed to be the next big Shonen Sunday anime hit.

One Piece
Dragonball Kai
Naruto Shippuden
Gintama

The Shonen Jump gang. One Piece and Dragonball Kai are the massive successes of the group, the other two dipping in and out of the top 10. While aimed at kids, One Piece and Dragonball Kai have cross over appeal due to being based on two of the biggest manga of all time. Gintama is an odd one, for reasons we’ll get to later. Dragonball Kai also has nostalgia appeal like another recent success…

Yatterman

The revival of Tatsunoko Pro’s classic kids show was a massive success to begin with, but it started to trail off last year. However it was still far more popular than the majority of anime produced last year.

Battle Spirits
Pokemon
Inazuma Eleven
Beyblade
Tamogotchi

Toys and games still put kids in front of the telly. For better or worse, these are pretty much the giant robot anime of modern times. Too often the sci-fi elements are attributed to being the reason for old giant robot shows’ success, rather than their toyetic nature. And modern shows in the Pokemon mould do that toyetic thing far better than modern giant robot shows do. Talking of which…

Mobile Suit Gundam 00
Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood

The various Gundam, Fullmetal Alchemist & Code Geass series have been alternating in and out of a shared time slot for years now. Currently it’s Sunday, 1700 on TBS, which they’ve had since mid-2008 (Geass R2, then Gundam 00 season 2, then FMA Brotherhood). They’re pretty much guaranteed to slip into the low end of the top ten a few times a year with that slot. Before that they had the 1800 slot on Saturday since 2002 (when Gundam SEED took over from Ultraman Cosmos), where they performed much stronger in the ratings. I think some analysts have judged this a sign of them not being as popular, not taking into account the timeslot change from their earlier incarnations.

Shugo Chara!! Doki-
Whatever two Pretty Cure shows aired in 2009

The twin giants of magical girl shows. Well one giant – Pretty Cure – Shugo Chara was sort of bubbling under and snuck in the chart once. That there were only two shows aimed at specifically at girls has less to do with the shows themselves, and more to do with the unisex nature of the other shows. Particularly the toy based shows like Pokemon, where the toys & games they are based on are no longer just for boys as the robot toys of yore were marketed. When you do market them like that, you tend to fail, as the makers of Kabuto Borg VxV are probably all too aware.

GeGeGe no Kitaro
Thriller Restaurant

Supernatural shows for kids! And their parents. And adults who grew up reading/watching the originals. The latest Kitaro revival ended last year after another successful run, and the successful Thriller Restaurant storybook series got an equally successful anime.

Stitch!
Curious George

Stitch is the Madhouse version of the Lilo & Stitch TV series (sans Lilo)for Disney, but Curious George is the US series. Both performed well. In fact shows with cute animals / genetically engineered monsters tend to do well.

Tale of Genji
Eden of the East
Shin Mazinger

Eden of the East is the most consistent performer of these, Dezaki’s Genji show charted early, but later ones didn’t. Personally I think the expectations from the name value of the story and director weren’t really met. Shin Mazinger’s finale was a bizzarely high jump in the ratings. It was doing fine throughout for a late night show, but certainly spiked with that last episode.

There’s a few specials I’ve not mentioned – most of which involved talking animals. Plus Sgt Frog scraped the chart once or twice too, along with Sanrio’s Onegai My Melody Kirara. But that should give you an idea of what the “mainstream” is in terms of eyes in front of TV sets. It’s really not all that different from cartoons elsewhere in the world, save for a few things like that TBS slot for Gundam etc. and noitaminA. There’s just more of them.

But what of DVD & Blu-ray?

What of it, indeed…

It’s clear from the sales figures that in 2009 Blu-ray was the domain of the Otaku. Shows like Bakemonogatari & K-on, which didn’t set ratings on fire on TV, tore it up in the Blu-ray sales chart, but didn’t see those sales matched on DVD. In fact they outstripped sales for similar shows, pre-Blu-ray. It’s like that hardcore otaku niche finally had a medium that matched their obsession with detail. Or that before they were shunning DVD in favour of hanging onto hi-res HDTV rips. Probably a bit of both.

Shows like Gundam 00 and Code Geass, which had enjoyed something akin to mainstream TV success, had similar sales on both media, but couldn’t match the overall sales more niche shows enjoyed.

However, the bulk of niche shows released in 2009, and there were a lot of them, did absolutely nothing of note. If the business plan is that the late night TV acts as an advert for the BD or DVD, then it looks like its failing an awful lot of shows, even if it works great for a handful of shows.

One interesting trend is the success of Gintama. While outperformed by many shows on TV, it’s currently a bigger hit on video than its Shonen Jump peers (well, at least until the latest One Piece movie hits video). I’ve not watched any of it myself, is it tapping into an otaku audience more inclined to drop money on it than the audiences its peers get? I’ve noticed it trends higher in Google than Naruto, despite selling less manga volumes. I suppose I should really watch some and figure it out for myself.

Oh, and I should mention MTV’s Usavich. Always seems to be overlooked when discussing successful, mainstream Japanese animation. Probably because it doesn’t fit people’s expectations of what Japanese animation should look like.

Related posts:

1. What anime actually looked like in 2009
2. #44 – Pokemon
3. This post is just an excuse to post the Daicon IV animation

What better way to celebrate Valentines Day than to look at a 15 year old manga/anime magazine?

Articles on The Legend of the 4 Kings (oddly enough a gateway anime in the UK due to it’s televised broadcast later on), Green Legend Ran (something I totally ignored back then, wouldn’t mind checking out now), Ushio & Tora and a review of the year just gone. The editorials now have become utterly worthless, just talking about the issue’s theme, but there’s still Trish Ledoux’s column. Here she’s talking bishonen, nothing ground breaking now, but it was news you could use back in 1995.

There’s also a column, Manga Watch, not sure if it’s new this issue, or so small I missed it before. Anyway, this issue has a few words on British artists working in Japan at the time. Obviously, the ubiquitous Tony Luke is featured, but so are Manga Mania’s own Woodrow Phoenix, who was working on Inseparable for Morning at the time, Carl Flint on Giant Baby and Chris Webster on Mr Pillow.

UK NEWS

• From Western Connection: Lupin III – The Fuma Conspiracy, Salamander 1, Devil Hunter Yoko 1
• From Kiseki FIlms: MD Geist, Adventure Duo 2, Macross: Do You Remember Love, Return of the Overfiend 4
• From Anime Projects: Bubblegum Crisis 1 (dub), Urusei Yatsura 5
• From Manga Video: Legend of the Four Kings Eps 1 & 2, Wings of Honneamise, The Guyver 11, AD Police File 3, Genocyber 3
• From Pioneer Video: Green Legend Ran 1, Tenchi Muyo 3, Moldiver 3

US NEWS

• Ianus Publishing released the Project A-Ko Roleplaying Game. I have this, but have never played it. Nor have I managed to sell it on eBay.
• No US video releases mentioned this time round.
• Just the one notable new US manga release – They Were 11

JAPAN NEWS

• Magic Knight Rayearth TV and Saturn game.
• Darkside Blues in the theatres.
• Red Baron on the TV.

More fun in the letters pages!

I’m not trying to pick on Paul “Otaking” Johnson, but these teenage fan letters he kept sending are full of value. If you are familiar with him it’s probably either through his rant about fansubs or his Doctor Who “anime”, but he has more strings to his bow than that. He also likes to complain about the lack of shading in anime and how everything new doesn’t compare to Madhouse OAVs of the 90s.

Well, this issue’s letter from the future self styled “Otaking” sheds some light on that viewpoint:

His first anime purchase was Cyber City Oedo, a show he turned into a manifesto! Though, considering the first anime I purchased was Urusei Yatsura, I probably shouldn’t be throwing too many stones from my glass house. There’s one more letter from him to come and it’s a real doozy, but that’s not until issue 26.

Related posts:

1. The downward spiral begins.
2. Toren Smith’s Time Machine.
3. The fifth of those Manga Mania flashbacks.

Boy, Rumiko Takahashi really likes stories where things get attached to peoples bodies.

A space duck is making a delivery, when he is distracted by a lady space duck and bumps into a space sign. This causes him to drop his load of strange green eggs over Earth. One of which flies past Ten and attaches itself to his stomach.

For most the first half of the episode Ten is moping around with this egg, worried it’ll take over a month to hatch. It’s full of the faux melodrama and melancholy you’ve come to expect from the show by now, but not many laughs. Once it does hatch, and out comes a bee with Ten’s face and personality, the episode gets going.

The bee torments Ten, much like Ten torments Ataru, eventually leading Ten to flee to Tomobiki High School to get Lum to help him. Of course all the girls are charmed by the bee in the same way first Ten charmed them, and the boys similarly see through the bee’s personality. The duck finally catches up with his eggs, and is shocked to see one has hatched.

The eggs, it turns out, contained “Mirror Bee” larvae. These take on the personality of the men they attach to, hence the name. This is, of course, the cue for the punchline and we learn that not only Ten has had an egg attach itself to him, but so have Ataru, Mendou, Megane, Onsen-Mark, Ryu’s dad and Cherry.

Cut back to outer space and we see a disgruntled delivery duck now “bee-ing” harassed by bee doppelgängers of the male cast.

Perfectly acceptable episode, though not as good as the same team’s work on episode 125. Definitely could have used more laughs in the first half and coming straight after the talking flower episode didn’t help either.

—

Screenplay: Tokio Tsuchiya
Storyboard: Tomokazu Kougo
Director: Tomokazu Kougo
Animation Director: Kyoko Kato

Related posts:

1. Lum-A-Day 083 – Big Battle! Ten vs. Ataru
2. Lum-A-Day 125 – Pool Spooks! Burning with Forbidden Love
3. Lum-A-Day 002: Mail From Space — Ten Arrives / Mrs Swallow and Mrs Penguin

In addition to the return of Aira Mu from God Mazinger, the main source for this chapter comes from King Bomber (1976). As best as I can tell it involved teen drummer Shingo Hibiki who merges with the golden African statue, King Bomber to defeat his enemies. It’s probably a lot more complicated than that, the villain here seems named after a civilisation that King Bomber had destroyed earlier in history in his own manga.

Really simple to sum up this time, as Jack is barely in it, and that means we don’t get lengthy speeches or random shaming of the Slum King to confuse matters. The androgynous, abused, frequently naked, blonde waif Shingo Hibiki wanders into a jungle full of wild animals that escaped the zoo after the Great Kanto Earthquake.

Meanwhile, we meet the villain of the piece, Kibara. Who is, of course, an evil zoo keeper wearing a crocodile’s head as a hat. He’s trained animals to kill man, and is upset that strangers have arrived in his jungle. Not Shingo, but Aira Mu and her followers. Who, Shingo happens to come across when both decide to bathe at the same time. Aira almost comes a cropper at the hands of a wild tiger, but Shingo’s innate animal empathy saves her.

He returns with her to her settlement, where they have made a wooden statue of their saviour, Violence Jack that they call King Bomber. Kibara meanwhile is tearing through the forest hunting for Aira Mu. Sensing danger, Jack turns into his phoenix form and flies off.

If only his danger sense was a little more prompt…

The village is massacred and the survivors taken to Kibara’s camp to be tortured. Shingo was left behind and plead for the statue of King Bomber to rescue Aira. At which point Jack arrives and the pair merge into the statue, and Jack raises the tiger Shingo befriended from the dead (though it appears he’s just putting part of his essence into it’s body).

And the pair go and rescue Aira in the bloodiest way possible.

Unfortunately, the chapter seems to run out of pages and the final fight between Jack and Kibara happens off panel. All we get is Aira discovering Kibara dead, and Shingo lying in the broken shards of the King Bomber statue. A disappointing ending considering some of the sequences of carnage that other chapters have had.

Thankfully the next chapter is perhaps my favourite and full of some utterly genius moments of (re-)invention

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Black Forest
2. Violence Jack – Hell City Kanto
3. Violence Jack – Golden City

Early web-animation from Oscar winning animator Kunio Katō. This review originally appeared in my livejournal in 2005, when the animation was still available on his website – you can now see it on Crunchyroll.

—

The Diary of Tortov Roddle is a short film divided into shorter, well not even stories, more like tableau, of a traveller. The land in which is he travels is surreal. The way in which he travels is surreal. The things he sees are surreal. Now surrealism is a difficult thing to pull off. You see it often mistaken for Eddie Izzard-style meandering wacky nonsense, invariably ending in “…err…FISH!”.

This is not the route this piece takes.

This is not a comedy, is more a creation of a feeling or mood. Slightly melancholy, yet warm and inviting. It’s not a scary surrealism, its more the feeling of seeing something out of the ordinary and then being able to sit back and feel the glow of being gifted with the opportunity to see that. Be it a cartoon projected onto the side of a bear, or rabbit people commuting to the moon. This is achieved not only by the events depicted but by the techniques used. No dialogue is used, only music and interstitial captions. But more importantly is the art. Apparently using pencil illustrations and 2d computer animation, it has wonderful sense of being to it.

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – Kemonozume (2006)
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Kuruneko (2009)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Mononoke (2007)

We’re now halfway through the Kids In The Hall’s big television comeback, a murder mystery narrative, and it’s one of the best new comedies I’ve seen in a long time. While they’ve freely admitted to the influence of The League of Gentlemen on the format, it actually has more in common with Psychoville. This is at its most obvious in the opening episode where it similarly suffers on the laugh front from having to introduce so many characters and plot elements. Though unlike Psychoville however, KITH aren’t so in love with horror movies that it gets in the way of the funny. I always got the feeling from Psychoville that Pemberton and Sheersmith were actually those “How Many Kills?” teenagers from The League of Gentlemen when they were younger. And possibly hadn’t grown up all that much.

In fact Death Comes To Town is very light and whimsical in its handling of material that could have easily been made spooky and creepy. As grotesque as some of the characters are, there’s a degree of sympathy in their portrayals. While it’s shed the sketch show element of their earlier work, the actual performances of the older Kids are far beyond their old work. This is reflected in the characters who, by and large, are new creations.

Of the main characters, only Bruce McCulloch & Mark McKinney cop characters have been imported from original KITH show intact, though others appear as cameos (The Chicken Lady showed up briefly in episode 4) and other characters are extensions of types they’ve portrayed before. McKinney’s Death character feels like a deadbeat version of his Satan and Kevin McDonald’s public defence lawyer is a variation of the multitude of twitchy neurotics he’s portrayed over the years.

Another big difference is that there are plenty of non-KITH performers showing up too, from original (pre-TV) KITH member Luciano Casimiri as The Prabbi (Half Priest-Half Rabbi) to Colin Mochrie as an exploitative vet who has kept McDonald’s lawyer characters cat alive for 30+ years.

The greatest thing about it though is that as well as having great gags and great performances, it also legitimately works as a mystery. Not only is it slowly revealing more about the murder the show hinges around, there’s also a secondary set of mysteries surrounding Death. Like a lot of the characters he started off one-note, but as we get more and more glimpses of his past, he becomes a lot more complex and more questions are raised.

You’ll have to be Canadian to watch it at the moment, or do a decent impression of one on the internet, and as much as I’d hope we’d get this over in the UK, the fact we only got 13 episodes of KITH in the first place doesn’t exactly bode well. It’ll be a shame as it’s one of two recent comedies (both from creators making comebacks of sorts) that really gave me some confidence about TV comedy again.

Related posts:

1. Detective Conan – Magician Of The Silver Sky
2. Death of Anime Panels missing from Anime Expo 2008’s programme.
3. Durarara!! – Episodes 1, 2 & 3

We’re back, after a long hiatus, to reviewing every episode of Urusei Yatsura. Real life took the sheen off writing about Urusei Yatsura day in day out, plus the reason I started it (sitting at home with a foot injury) eased off. But now it’s back, back, back! Once a week this time, so I don’t burn myself out again.

What a shame that I came back to such an annoying episode.

The animation is fine, continuing the high budget Studio Deen episodes. But good grief, this contains one of the all time annoying vocal performances.

Ran has purchased some flowers that mimic people repeating what they say, but Cherry ends up blowing the blooms all over town after they have recorded Lum and Ran talking.  The blooms then latch onto various members of the cast, repeating fragments of the earlier dialogue. It drives everyone mad, including the viewer, as not only is the dialogue repetitious, it’s in this annoying, demented, effect laden voice. Horrible. I can’t even force myself to re-watch the ending to see how it wrapped up.

Screenplay: Yumi Asano
Storyboard: Junji Nishimura
Director: Junji Nishimura
Animation Director: Takafumi Hayashi

Related posts:

1. Lum-A-Week 138 – Job Hunting! Sneaky Return of the Reject!
2. Lum-A-Day 113 – Great Horrors! Oyuki is Finally Angered!
3. Lum-A-Week 137 – Lum’s Courageous Duel! An Ironic Victory

Finally got this wonderful Johnny Ryan comic for Xmas.

Ryan’s said that Kentaro Miura’s Berserk was a influence on the book, but the thing its relentless black comedy and violence reminded me of was Go Nagai at his prime. If this was 1970s Japan, there’d be a Cannibal Fuckface cartoon for the kids to watch. Next to Scott Pilgrim this felt to me like the western comic that’s got closest to properly understanding the energy of manga, rather than simply aping the surface elements.

The story, such that is, follows our hero Cannibal Fuckface who is thrown in the eponymous prison pit and then commences killing and eating the similarly ultraviolent inhabitants of the pit. The first chapter is named “FUCKED”. The second is named “MEGAFUCKED”. That is probably all you need to know.

It’s the best art I’ve seen Ryan do in his career, more focused and while it mainly maintains a four-panel-a-page rhythm, when he breaks from that to do a splash page or change the panel rhythm, he does to great effect. If you’re going to do a splash page, it might as well be of a monster made of sperm or a barbed penis.

While part of me hopes for Cannibal Fuckface’s adventures to continue, it is “Book One” after all, I’d also really like to see Ryan do more work that expands his horizons from his gag roots.

Prison Pit @ Fantagraphics
Johnny Ryan

Related posts:

1. Golgo 13 – Episode 9 – Sleep In The Prison
2. Ultimates Volume 3.
3. Bland New Day

I’d been crunching some Japanese TV ratings numbers for a different post, and one thing that struck me was, beyond the usual ignored-by-internet-chatter shows that tend to top the ratings (Sazae-san, Chibi Maruko-chan, Doraemon and Shin-chan), there was another show that occasionally squeezed in at the bottom of the top ten, often above the pop culture sensation that is Naruto.

That show was Inazuma Eleven.

Which you had probably guessed from the name of the post.

Based on the hybrid RPG/football game from Level-5, it presents an OTT version of a school football league that resembles Shaolin Soccer more than it does Jossy’s Giants. As best I can tell from the eight episode’s I’ve watched so far, the plot closely follows that of the videogame. And there’s a recurring visual of players running towards goal that I’m guessing is a straight pull from the videogame as it really doesn’t belong in animation otherwise.

Despite that adherence to its videogame parent, there’s plenty to recommend if you’re a fan of OTT exaggeration and of Level-5’s character design (like Professor Layton, Inazuma Eleven benefits from a huge cast of characters who are far from cookie cutter in design). The exaggeration though is where the real fun lies.

For starters you’ve got a team of kids learning special football moves (the goalie summons a giant hand, the striker has a flaming kick) from an secret handbook in an underground training compound built under the school. That’s bigger than the actual school. And then there are the opposing teams.

The “evil” team drives arround in a bizarre looking giant bulldozer type vehicle that they use to destroy the schools of the teams they beat. It looks like something that belongs in a Warhammer 40,000 army. The other teams I’ve seen them play so far include a team of supernatural monster children, children raised by wild animals like Tarzan and cyborg children. Such are the wonders of the Japanese education system. Of course they’ve all got their own special football moves too – for example, the supernatural team cast “spells” on our heroes mid match.

You may note that I’ve mentioned 4 teams there, and indeed they’ve played 4 matches so far in the 8 episodes I’ve watched. No Eyeshield 21-style pacing here, Inazuma Eleven moves ahead at a fair clip, with nothing taking more than two episodes to resolve so far. As kids shows based on handheld RPGs go, this is up there with Pokemon. That might seem like I’m damning it with faint praise, but given the usual success rate with transferring properties from videogames to cartoon, Inazuma Eleven is a resounding win for director Katsuhito Akiyama (Gall Force) and OLM (Pokemon). In fact, if it wasn’t for the United States’ disinterest in the sport, I’d have expected the game and anime to have had an English language release.

One final note. The end credits feature the three female leads singing the ending theme in what I believe is a homage to the daddy of all sports anime with ridiculous training regimes Star of The Giants. Of course, Star of The Giants homages are as regular as clockwork, but I’d not seen that particular aspect, The Aurora 3 (or Three Daughters of Aurora, not sure on the exact translation/name), being referenced so directly before.

Related posts:

1. Lum-A-Day 070 – Dramatic Appearance! Mizunokoji Ton-chan!
2. 30. Captain Tsubasa
3. HATE FUN? More Spring Things – Part 3

From the author of Bacanno! and the folks who turned that book series into a cartoon, comes this tale of strange goings on in the Ikebukuro district of Japan.

Like Bacanno! the first episode flings a whole load of characters, factions and plots at you at once. However it’s a little easier to get to grips with as it’s all taking place in the same time period and locale. Well, ignoring the fact that the lead character has no head. It’s an approach that worked well in Bacanno! and it works here too, though perhaps not quite as well. It’s a little more linear in its approach and the characters doing the introduction are more part of the story than in Bacanno!.

It reminded me of Jonathan Tweet’s RPG, Over The Edge, as you have a locale populated by outsiders, some of whom are somewhat odd, and all sorts of conspiracies, secrets and gangs operating beneath the surface. Like Baccano! there’s a very thin line between normality and the supernatural, and having your lead be an Irish unseelie faerie (Durarara!! is a corruption of Dullahan) calls into question the humanity of some of the other characters who show unnatural abilities and behaviours.

Episodes 2 & 3 begin to put some distance between Durarara!! and Bacanno! in the approach to adaptation. Each Durarara!! episode has a narrator, and focusses on an individual story, even if there are sub-plots ongoing throughout. Gone is the clockwork script and editing of Bacanno! and its time slips, instead we get a slower paced, more deliberate approach. It’s more interested in the characters and, so far, works very well, as different characters see different sides of each other depending on the episode and circumstance. Most notably, the information broker, Izaya Orihara, sinister and manipulative in episode 2, comes across more positively in episode 3.

As to the narrator, it’s not clear who the narrator is in Episode 2, but in Episode 3 it’s the character of Simon (the guy who works at the Russian sushi restaurant with the overly complicated nationality) suggesting that the each episode has a different character narrating, so Episode 2’s could be supposed to be Celty the Dullahan’s voice rather than just Narrator as actress Miyuki Sawashiro is listed as.

In terms of animation, the character design isn’t quite as solid as Bacanno!, but there’s lots and lots of great movement. A lot of it is in the body language and poses, but there’s also a lot of physical comedy, particularly from the supernaturally strong and perpetually angry Shizuo Heiwajima (shades of Bacanno’s Graham Specter). There’s one beautiful gag in episode 3 that had me cackling, and it’s something you could only do in cartoons.

Other bits I liked included, the spot in episode 3 where Mikado and Anri are running away and she ends up dragging him along, Masaomi’s general theatricality in the way he moves and how that disappears when Izaya shows up, and the puckish way Izaya moves throughout. It feels like Masaomi is putting on a show in his movements, whereas Izaya’s feel like the movements of a natural born trouble-causer and shit-stirrer.

It’s the only new show that’s really gripped me in both story and animation, an all round great package. So check it out.

Related posts:

1. Brief thoughts on Baccano! Episodes 14-16
2. Denno Coil – Episodes 1 to 4
3. Gurren Lagann Episodes 2-12

Behold. The Future of the Anime. Today.

Forget moe. Forget light novels. Forget visual novels. They are all red herrings. They are just pop eating itself, and most of those who protest their existance would simply replace them with works equally niche and worthless.

If you want the actual future of anime, look to this show. The future is cheap flash animation done badly.

When you look at Akitaro Daichi’s Flash work on Gag Manga Biyori, it is hard to distinguish from his hand-animated work on 1998’s Sexy Commando. The makers of Kaitou Reinya on the other hand have gone for a look that is much closer to Flash artists like FROGMAN or Weebl. And that’s probably an overly favourable comparison. Lets just say it is very obvious that the show has  been made in Flash or something similar. At its worst, it equates stretching and squashing a static drawing of a figure as animation.

It feels like they’re seeing just how much they can shave the production budget down to before viewers stop tuning in. Similar to when Adult Swim started squeezing animation budgets and we ended up with stuff like 10oz Mouse. Of course there’s a second factor involved here and that’s the fact the show is a vehicle for one of the womanchildren spat out by the Morning Musume machine. In this case, Tanaka Reina who is cast as the lead character thief Kaitou Reinya. So it’s possible most the budget is going to her, or her management, and that’s why this thing looks so cheap.

It’s a shame, as the character design is quite fun and there’s actually some good gags with the mouse that would work so much better they’d put more money/effort into it. Thankfully what little I’ve caught of Ufotable’s Yawarakeme and of the fourth season of GMB suggests there’s still some promise in this growing sector of anime. And as more people turn to it, I think we’ll see innovation in the same way we’ve seen it in western Flash animation over the last decade.

Related posts:

1. So·Ra·No·Wo·To Episode 1
2. RIDEBACK Episode 1
3. Lovely Complex Episode 1

In case I haven’t mentioned it already, the issues of Manga Mania that I’ve been talking about so far are ones my younger brother had bought, and I’d only been reading the Akira strips. He stopped buying them and this issue was the first I actually bought myself, mainly for Akira. I think I’d bought the Boxtree Ranma books just before or around the same time, so I was already on the slippery slope.

Looking at the issue now, it’s not a particularly strong one. Very little authorial voice (most articles are attributed to Manga Mania) and a couple of the articles are just not worth bothering with at all.

ARTICLES:

• An overview of Kosuke Fujishima, particularly Oh My Goddess and You’re Under Arrest. Interview with him, translated from Kappa Magazine.
• A look at Robot Carnival, tying into a Collector’s Card set being released in the UK. Yes, we got the merchandise and not the film.
• An overview of Ryoichi Ikegami’s career.
• An article on the Johnny Mnemonic film!
• Trish Ledoux’s column was about shoujo manga.

JAPAN NEWS:

• Gatchaman OAV
• Ghost Sweeper Mikami: War In Heaven film
• Key The Metal Idol
• Tenchi Muyo TV
• Yamato: The Next Generation
• Suikoden: Demon Century

UK NEWS:

• From Kiseki: Star Blazers #3, Return of the Overfiend III #3, Robotech #3, Ambassador Magma #5, Adventure Duo #1 & #2
• From Manga Video: Guyver #10, Crying Freeman #5/6, AD Police File 2

US NEWS:

• From Viz Video : Fatal Fury

One final note. There’s an advert for a shop selling garage kits and that reminded me there used to be a degree of overlap between modellers and anime fans. I think I encountered imported Gundam model kits years before I encountered the anime. Did that crossover increase in proportion when the boom happened? Or did it stay the same size and is now a much smaller part of the “hobby”?

Related posts:

1. The past is still happening!
2. Fourteen Year Old Anime News
3. 1994: The Year Faye Valentine Was Born

Boy, do I ever hate Visual Novel adaptations.

They’re everything that’s wrong with videogame adaptations, but with added problems of:

• Having emulate the visuals of a medium that has some of the most moribund visuals in the videogame market.
• Adapting something inherently heavy with dialogue and exposition.

The episode with an avant title sequence that exhibits a whole bunch of elements I hate in modern Japanese cartoons:

• Sad doe-eyed girls.
• Excessive use of a colour filter. In this case red.
• Glaringly obvious 3D modelling work.

Then we get an opening sequence full of girls that I can’t tell apart. The discount CLAMP, Peach Pit, did the design work for the game, so that’s another negative against it.

Then we discover that the opening was a flashforward, and we meet the lead and his family (dad and wheelchair bound little sister) driving to their new home in their dreadful-looking 3D model of a car. Then the lead meets the sad, doe-eyed girl of the opening, except here she’s aggressively upbeat.  I should also mention, the wheelchair is also a 3D model much of the time, and it’s possible the sister wears an excessively large hat when going out in it to hide the model of her that’s riding it, rather than shade from the sun.

There’s then a ton of exposition from various people. As it’s based on a visual novel after all and as you can’t read all this in a cartoon we get characters clunkily telling you the information in boring scenes. Then around 10 minutes in I decided this whole exercise was a waste of my time and gave up. Yes, it is worse than Chu Bra, Ladies versus Butlers and Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu. While they might have been either offensive, poorly directed or overly ambitious, none of them ever induced the feelings of utter boredom that the small portion I managed to watch of this show did. Nothing in the story, characters or visuals held my interest at all.

Visual novel adaptations are the dirt worst thing to happen to anime in the last 15 years.

Related posts:

1. HATE FUN? Spring Roundup.
2. Kaitou Reinya – Episode 1
3. Golgo 13 – Episode 1 – AT PIN-HOLE

This week they launched the latest of Shinbo’s works, an adaptation of the manga Dance In The Vampire Bund. Also launched this week was Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu from frequent SHAFT collaborator SILVER LINK, with Shin Oonuma directing. Oonuma worked on many SHAFT shows like Ef, Natsu no Arashi & Pani Poni Dash. In fact looking at the staff list it’s only animation director Miwa Oshima who seems the odd one out, with much the remaining staff coming with Oonuma from Ef. So I’ll be looking at that show as well, as it’s an interesting comparison to Dance In The Vampire Bund. And finally, to get some perspective, I’ll take a look at the first episode of last years Bakemonogatari, the show that cemented Shinbo as an otaku favourite.

Bakemonogatari Episode 1

With a completely different story, or possibly just a different script I’d probably love this. But when you’ve got characters in a show about ghost stories discussing and using otaku jargon, it feels like they are grasping for those otaku wallets a little too hard.

Visually of course, it’s fantastic. While Shinbo’s particular fetishes are all over the show – namely typography, geometrical design and near subliminal editing – he allows Akio Watanabe to bring plenty of himself to the show too in the action and character design. The only real flaw in Shinbo’s approach for me is his love of dialogue, too many long conversations and monologues slow the show down, even with all the visual tricks he pulls to try and keep them interesting. While that could be said to be the fault of the script, the fact is he does it across a lot of his shows, so it’s clearly something he digs himself. To the point where you think rather than a way around bad scripts, Shinbo thinks Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work are the be-all and end-all to visual storytelling.

While it’s not for me, though the ghost story aspect comes really close in making me want more, I can definitely see why so many people really loved it. It’s not just a lazy otaku pandering show, though there’s plenty of that if you are a lazy otaku obsessed with specific character traits and slang, but it has a distinct visual style that will appeal to the aesthetes too.

Dance in the Vampire Bund Episode 1

This time round Shinbo is working with Naoyuki Konno (009-1, Cyborg 009, Kikaider) as animation director and character design, and again, the animation director’s own individuality shines through. Though it’s worth noting that it’s Masahiro Sonoda credited as series director, with Shinbo just listed as director.

Once more the show suffers from its source material. Not only does it feel like someone’s Vampire The Masquerade campaign, but the lead is one of those HONEST GUV THEY’RE OVER EIGHTEEN characters that crop in both anime and vampire fiction far too often. And so was absolutely guaranteed to show up in the new vampire anime from the makers of Moonphase. As clever as the actual set up of this first episode is, it’s not enough to get me to follow the adventures of an underage vampire princess and her lycanthropic bodyguard.

What is clever about this episode, is it takes the artifice of the Shaft/Shinbo aesthetic and finds a way to make it work in a realistic fashion. The entire episode takes place on a variety panel show where celebrities are debating the existence, or not, of vampires. This gives them an opportunity to actually work their fetishes for typography and monologues into the story in a way that feels natural, rather than cutting to subliminal interstitials or unnatural camera angles. Here that’s all part of the fictional TV show within the show.

Watching it again in light of watching Bakemonogatari though, as clever as the device of the TV show is, it doesn’t do as a good a job of hiding the weaknesses of the story. Though they’ve really got their work cut out on hiding the weaknesses in Nozomu Tamaki’s trashy manga, so I can cut them some slack. Won’t be coming back for more though.

Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu Episode 1

And what we have here is SHAFT-lite. Or shite for short.

If it wasn’t for so many SHAFT alumni on the staff, it’d be really easy to accuse this of blatant me-too-ing of their formula of abstract design. Oh what the hell, it’s a blatant attempt at recreating the formula that’s served SHAFT well on a lower budget and with less able hands.

Most egregiously you can see it in the ending credits which hamfistedly tries to do what Shinbo does with typography to  the English translation of the songs lyrics. And fails miserably. But that’s just the topper on a show that clumsily tries for a minimalist “manga on the screen” approach along the likes of Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei. Unlike that show, they haven’t got a decent manga to crib for the design notes, and so they just end up sticking ziptone everywhere willy nilly.

Which is a shame, as the actual concept for the series is fine, even though it feels like a failed pitch for a DS game that someone turned into a light novel. Classes at a bizarre school fight one another in exam battles, involving the summoning of super-deformed versions of themselves. Combined with the visuals of the battles, in particularly the overhead views of characters like pieces in a tactical board game, it leaves you with the impression that someone really wants this made into a videogame at some point.

However videogame aesthetics do not a good cartoon make, particularly when the game doesn’t even exist yet.

Related posts:

1. HATE FUN 2001! The Soul Taker
2. HATE FUN? Destructive Summer – Part 3
3. HATE FUN 2000! Gate Keepers

It’s felt like an eternity between this and Vol. 3, but finally we get the end of Bill Mantlo’s lengthy run on the title and the beginning of Al Milgrom’s continuation of many of Mantlo’s threads.

Much of the book is devoted to the development of Spider-Man’s romance with Black Cat and then it’s slow deconstruction as we see the start of the return of Mary Jane Watson that would eventually lead to the marriage. Unfortunately while much of the construction of the Black Cat relationship happens in these pages, the end of the relationship seems to mainly be happening in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, which are unseen here. The end of the alien symbiote suit gets a similar hasty recap here.

That leaves you with the impression of the work Mantlo did being given short shrift by editorial edict. Not helped by Milgrom trying to keep up Mantlo’s weirdness quotient, but not really having the same knack for it. His creation The Answer is a weird, origin-less, super-villain who seems almost cosmic in his abilities and decisions at times. He’d later be brought down to earth when he returned, but here he seems like a walking, talking plot device. Milgrom would have more success in later issues with cult-favourite The Spot, but that’s for the next volume.

As well as writing the later issues in the book, Milgrom also provides the bulk of the artwork, along with Jim Mooney inks. Unfortunately the earlier volumes had Ed Hannigan, and while Milgrom has his moments (especially during the Dr Octopus vs. Owl war), his Cloak and Dagger are disappointing in comparison to Hannigan’s.

The best issues here, oddly enough, are two of the fillers. First is a J. Jonah Jameson story, told from his point of view, with some great Ditko pastiching from Ron Frenz. Secondly is the Assistant Editor’s Month issue, which features the great Fred Hembeck as artist, drawing a fairly straight story with the Human Fly. There’s a line in there that nails Mantlo’s style where assistant editor Bob DeNatale refers to it as “urban weird”.

Going back the Spider-man / Black Cat relationship, there’s an underdeveloped part to it that could be revisited with a different character later. There’s hints of a love triangle between Spider-Man, Black Cat and police captain Jean DeWolff. What made that unique for Spider-Man was that the two women were love with Spider-Man, rather than Peter Parker. Not to mention that Jean DeWolff is a rare woman in Spidey’s life who behaves like an adult (well apart from the 1930s cosplay) and isn’t an OAP. Ignoring the underdeveloped romantic aspect, she was to Spider-Man, what Robbie was to Peter, a level headed voice of reason. Her key story should be in the next volume, and as much as I have fond memories of that story from its Spider-Man & Zoids UK reprint, now I’ve actually read her earlier appearances, I’ve a clearer idea of why it was shocking and controversial.

Also of interest here is an early outing for Hobgoblin, with a plot assist from Roger Stern, so presumably he was written with the intention here of it being Roderick Kingsley. We also start to get the various false leads (Leeds?) that caused so much confusion when Stern left and they couldn’t make up their minds who the Hobgoblin was… Unfortunately I think I’ll have to wait for either Vol 10 or 11 of the ASM Essentials to pick-up the main Hobgoblin story that I loved from Spider-Man & Zoids.

Related posts:

1. Essential Spectacular Spider-Man Volumes 2 & 3
2. Amazing Spider-Man 547
3. Amazing Spider-Man 548

Here’s that europhile bugle anime you’d been demanding.

As much as I’d want to encourage well produced, original anime, So·Ra·No·Wo·To kind of makes things hard for me. On a purely technical and artistic level it’s head and shoulders over most TV anime. However, there was only about 5 minutes that I was particularly happy with.

The problem is that it feels so safe.

Most obviously that problem lies in Akai Toshifumi’s design of the lead characters. They look like they’ve been spat out by a machine that’s processed what character design elements have shifted DVDs in the last couple of years.

However Hiroyuki Yoshino’s script is where the real problem lies. As respectful as it is to the animators, there’s no bite to it. It was so utterly inoffensive and twee, I found it hard to invest myself in the show. I’ve had similar to problems with other Yoshino shows, most recently Macross Frontier. Even when there are supposedly emotional scenes, they always seem to lack real passion. It’s the sort of show you’d imagine Noah and The Whale fans watching.

Even the biggest strength of the Yoshino’s writing, the world-building of the psuedo-Europe of the story, feels like they didn’t go the whole hog. We’ve a town that’s clearly Spanish, but the characters write in French, have Japanese names and use Yen as a currency. Taking that into account, the world still feels better developed than the characters. They feel like they have character traits that have been chosen by market research, rather than actual personalities. Again, that was a problem I had with Macross Frontier and My-Hime too. So, I suspect if you were fine with those shows, and there are a lot of fans of them, you’ll find a lot to like here too.

And that’s because the show looks fantastic. The backgrounds are impeccably designed and researched. And most of all there’s some really great movement, that’s all the better in some instances due to the fact they’re making life difficult for themselves by having the main characters wear baggy, ill fitting uniforms and writing two short crowd scenes. Thankfully the crowd scenes have individually drawn characters rather than a crowd brush.

So, I’ll be interested in seeing highlight reels of the animation from future episodes, but I can’t be dragging myself through the cloying tweeness of the story and characters each week.

Related posts:

1. Macross Frontier Episode 01
2. Golgo 13 – Episode 2 – ROOM NO. 909
3. Mouryou no Hako – Episode 1

Manga Mania #17 (December 1994) was probably the best issue so far. Mainly because nothing was happening in the UK and so there was a lot more coverage of Japan.

Manga had their “Cyberpunk Collection” out, so Cyber City Oedo 808 got an overview from Peter J Evans, along with a look at the work of Tony Takezaki (whatever happened to him?).

Then, to tie into Boxtree’s release of Ranma 1/2 in the UK, there’s an interview with Rumiko Takahashi by Toren Smith.

Finally with The Cockpit coming out, there’s Trish Ledoux’s column on Leiji Matsumoto, an article reprinted from Kappa on him and an overview of the stories included on the OAV.

UK NEWS

• Mandarin Paperbacks released Akira, Domu, Memories and Gon. These had really nice production quality from what I remember.
• Manga Video were releasing: Appleseed, Guyver Vol. 9, AD Police File 1 and Cyber City Oedo Vol. 3. They also had Wings of Honneamise doing the rounds at the cinema.

US NEWS

• From Viz: Ranma 1/2 TV Vol. 2
• From AnimEigo: Kimagure Orange Road: Whimsical Highways Laser Disc set
• From Streamline: Robotech Vol. 5 and 8 Man After Vol. 3
• From US Manga Corps: Detonator Orgun Vol. 2, Gall Force: Earth Chapter 1, Project A-Ko Final and Godmars.

JAPAN NEWS

• The second episode of the You’re Under Arrest OAV series was out.
• As was the sixth volume of Iria.
• And the first volume of Bounty Dog.
• A Riot drama CD was released.
• Newtype had asked various artists to create their dream Gundams:

Fun in the letters pages!

This is a sketch from what appears to be UK small press comic artist Bob Lynch. Then there’s a fan letter from future shading enthusiast and Doctor Who curmudgeon Paul “Otaking” Johnson.

Related posts:

1. Manga Mania Issue 16 (November 1994)
2. All the news you can use (if you have access to a time machine)!
3. This just in from 1994!

For a show that’s about schoolgirls starting an “underwear club”, this isn’t as bad as you might expect. Assuming you were thinking it was going to be the worst thing in the world.

There’s a kernel of a good idea here – a comedy about a character who is a genius at fitting underwear. There’s plenty of manga and anime about characters with genius ability in something either utterly mundane or bizarre, and that idea could be made to work well too.

The question is though, why would you need to set it in a school?

Turns out the answer is so you can draw schoolgirls in their underwear. Obviously.

From Yumi Nakata’s wikipedia article, it’s mentioned that she’s a friend of Towa Oshima. Oshima’s High School Girls has a lot in common with Chu Bra, in that ostensibly it’s supposed to be a female author showing a male audience a glimpse into what girls are like around each other. Both have been marketed as “shoujo for males”. But all of that comes across simply as an excuse to draw schoolgirls in their undies. Just because a woman created it doesn’t make it any less sleazy. It just means the characterisation is a little better than the usual copying and pasting of it out of Tokimeki Memorial. Or the nth generation erogame clone thereof. The fact of the matter remains you’d be better off just buying shoujo, rather than some creepy version that’s been filtered through the minds of marketing men and editors trying to grasp a niche male audience.

It’s disappointing that Nakata took this approach (presumably because that’s what sells rather than some deep seated artistic need to go in this direction), because there’s also a much cleverer shoujo comedy about puberty trying to escape here. But you’ve got to look really hard for it as it’s buried under the panty shots and some of weird and creepy tangents the story takes. What it amounts to is that the whole “shoujo for males” idea is a godawful one and you invariably end up with the worst of both shoujo and seinen in one creepy mess. The whole basic plot of this first episode could have been presented in more traditional shoujo manner and it would have eliminated 90% of the creepiness hanging over it. Instead, as it plays out, the plot ends up acting as an excuse for the creepiness.

So why isn’t it as bad as you’d expect?

Well, while it’s not as honest in its decadence as Ladies Vs Butlers was, and contains a lot of frustrating missed opportunities to be far cleverer than it is, it is better made. Director Yukina Hiiro is firmly focussed on the gags, and while they aren’t great gags, they are well executed. The dialogue and performances aren’t as trite either, it certainly benefits from Reiko Yoshida (Maria-sama ga Miteru) overseeing the scripts. There’s two segments in the ending sequence that visually knock the rest of the show for six (and in doing so look really out of place). And it has a line in English that doesn’t sound like it’s been learnt phonetically. Yes, I’m scraping for positives now, but given the synopsis I was expecting much, much worse.

However, unless you are the target audience for this, all that probably won’t get you over the fact it’s constantly making in-story excuses for it’s own sleaziness. Or, indeed, over that sleaze in the first place. As well made as it is, let’s face it, it’s not the gag execution or script that’s selling this to it’s audience, it’s the schoolgirls in their undies.

Anyone who claims any different is making worse excuses than the show itself makes.

Related posts:

1. Lum-A-Day 096 – Shine! The Blessed Bra!!
2. Mouryou no Hako – Episode 1
3. DETROIT METAL CITY – Episode 2 – REAL LEGEND/SATAN

The magazine had a big revamp this issue. Now square bound and with more colour, it also saw the return of some features that had been absent during the Dark Horse to Manga Entertainment upheaval (the UK anime charts, Sumo Family). There was also the addition of Jon Courtney-Grimwood’s Cyberdrome column which foresaw all those hi-tech gadgets we take for granted now, like cyber spectacles, cyber vests, and helmet monitors… Paleofuture-style mispredictions aside, there was also mention of an electronic version of Generation X issue 1 that Marvel had put online, which makes you wonder why it took so long for them to embrace it more fully.

Let’s have a look at that chart to give you an idea of how the anime market differed back then.

As much as people liked to bemoan the UK anime market being dominated by “tits and tentacles” material, it’s clear what people were actually interested in. The Guyver. Possibly the smartest anime release ever, 12 OAVs released monthly at £5.99 a pop, it was cheap and cheerful violent sci-fi action with broad appeal. There was a couple of attempts to emulate the success (Giant Robo & Armitage), but they kind of failed due to not have the monthly release schedule Guyver had. Guyver was the nearest we had to a successful “video comic”. Though I see Hachette Partworks are still releasing Manga Force to subscribers, so I guess that’s been similarly successful.

Articles included a translated interview from Kappa Magazine’s Monica Piovan with Kenichi Sonoda. Trish Ledoux was discussing cartoon breasts (namely those found in Tenchi, Ranma, Dirty Pair and Plastic Little). Jim Swallow discussed Wings of Honneamise. Peter J Evans looked at the history of Robotech, while Jeremy Clarke interviewed Carl Macek and his mustache (I always forget Macek was involved with Spumco early on).

UK NEWS

From Manga Video: Cyber City Oedo 808 volumes 2 & 3, AD Police vol. 1, Genocyber vol. 1, Guyver Vol. 8
From Kiseki Films: Return of the Overfiend boxed set, Robotech Vol. 2, Starblazers Vol. 2.
From Boxtree books: Ranma 1/2 Volumes 1 & 2.
From Anime Projects: Bubblegum Crisis pewter miniatures (Knight Sabers and Boomers), Genesis Survivor Gaiarth Vol. 3, Urusei Yatsura Vol. 4.
Crusader Video were reported as having ceased trading in August 1994.

US NEWS

Jan de Bont was the current occupier of the Godzilla director chair.
From AD Vision: Legend of Lyon: Flare
From Streamline: Crying Freeman Vol. 3, Great Conquest: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Robotech Collections
From US Manga Corps: Project A-Ko vs Battle 2: Blue Side Video, Urotsukidoji III, Urotsukidoji CD-ROM collection (what exactly was this? Apart from $79.95).
From Viz: Ranma 1/2: Akane and Her Sisters
Notable manga launches were Dodekain (notable only for appearing in the short lived UK magazine J-Fan) and James Hudnell’s Macross II comic.

JAPAN NEWS

Macross 7 was on it’s way.

Related posts:

1. Manga Mania Issue 15 (October 1994)
2. More Marvellous Manga Mania Memories
3. It’s 1994! Who had been “converted into a massive DP fan”?

Well I’ve done the maths and turns out writing about the first episodes of series, even if I don’t like them, are popular on the site, so I’ve decided to do more of them this year. And that won’t just be limited to anime, still getting a surprising number of people visiting my review of the first episode the College Humor Show too.

Just my luck that the first thing I turn to is Ladies versus Butlers, the latest show from Xebec and their new cash cows Atsushi Ootsuki and Akio Takami (Buso Renkin, Shaman King). The pair were behind Xebec’s Kanokon, a similarly saucy light novel that got an anime adaptation on satellite channel AT-X.

Saucy comedy is a perfectly legitimate genre to delve into, indeed anime used to be really good at it. Shin-chan still is good at it. However late at night, things started to get weird, and in the last 10 years you’ve had this strange breed of near sexless sex comedy for otaku. Xebec and Ootsuki took advantage of the satellite broadcast to put some sex back into the sex comedy with Kanokon, however there was one major problem.

Ootsuki can’t direct comedy for shit.

Instead it felt like some weird piece of erotica that contained things you recognised as technically being jokes even if they weren’t executed as such.

Ladies versus Butlers is similarly problematic, if not more so. Instead of a plot, it just appears to have a variety of fetishes layered on top of one another. All but one joke you will have seen before if you’ve watched any anime comedy in the last 20 years.

There is one clever idea, that the hero is so uncouth his mere presence makes high class women faint in his presence, but it is executed appallingly – the hero is no more uncouth than a dozen other anime heroes and the women no more high class than a dozen other anime heroines. It lacks comedic exaggeration in all areas except one character’s ridiculous hairstyle.

Ootsuki’s timing of gags is dreadful, preferring instead to linger on the anatomy of his female characters, rather than get the rhythm of a joke right. It’s like a cartoon Carry on Emmanuelle. If you wanted to make something erotic, why fill it with terrible jokes? If you wanted something funny, why fill it with terrible erotica?

Too often a gag is instigated just by having someone inexplicably fall over. I’m sorry, the old accidental embarrassing physical contact gag
is not funny unless you put a lot more effort into the set up than just tripping up. And it’s definitely not funny the third time it happens in the same episode.

Clearly though, there is an audience for this stuff, and as bad as Ladies versus Butlers is, it’s hardly the worst of this sort of material out there. Outside of his specific comedy timing Ootsuki is a competent, consistent, director. And at least it’s more honest than a lot of its rivals in what it’s setting out to do, it’s just mediocre at doing it. Unfortunately mediocre is a home run for much of this sort of niche anime.

Related posts:

1. Okami Kakushi – first 10 minutes or so of Episode 1
2. Chu Bra!! Episode 1
3. Brief thoughts on Sgt Frog “Test Episode”

Cover this issue was of Grey, whose anime adaptation Grey: Digital Target was due out from Western Connection. The art was provided by Kev Walker, who I think had made the leap from Games Workshop to regular 2000AD contributor at this point, but hadn’t started to make waves in US comics yet.

Articles included Jim Swallow on Yoshihisa Tagami’s Grey, Peter J Evans on Pioneer’s entrance in the UK video market and finally a “Beat” Takeshi Kitano interview with Jeremy Clarke. This was the beginning of the entrance of live action material entering the magazine, a balance that was tricky to handle and whose influence can still be seen in the make up of NEO magazine today. It’s no coincidence that Manga Video were behind the release of the first of Kitano’s films in the UK.

UK NEWS

• D-CONTanimeT, possibly the worst name of a convention ever, was due to take place in October in Birmingham. It would cost you £20 for the weekend.
• Jonathan Clements reported on a visit to London by Seikima-II. They are pretty much the main influence behind the satire of Detroit Metal City. This band of supposed demons from Hell had been in town to record a Folk album.
• From Kiseki: Star Blazers Vol. 1, Ambassador Magma Vol. 6-7, Urotsukidoji, Return of the Overfiend III (bumped for cuts yet again!)
• From Manga Video: Cyber City Oedo Vol. 1, Guyver Vol. 7,  Devilman Vol. 2
• From Western Connection: Samurai Gold, Grey: Digital Target
• From Anime Projects: Urusei Yatsura Vol. 3, Genesis Survivor Gaiarth Vol. 2
• From Pioneer: Tenchi Muyo Vol 1 & 2, Moldiver Vol 1 & 2.

US NEWS

• RAFM were producing minatures for RTG’s mecha RPG Mekton.
• Trish Ledoux had con reports on:
  • Anime Expo (Guests of Honour were Izumi Matsumoto, Nobuteru Yuuki and Scott Frazier).
  • Anime America (GoH were Akemi Takada and Go Nagai). Hilarious quote given the state of UK anime convention programming since ‘05 – “In a move that remains puzzling, the bulk of AA’s programming included features already available. Something a little more difficult to find might have been more appropriate“
  • San Diego Comic Con (where Rumiko Takahashi and Buichi Terasawa were in attendance)

• From Streamline: Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy, 8th Man After, LILY-CAT
• From US Manga Corps: Genocyber 2 & 3, Rhea Gall Force, Gigantor 30, Project A-Ko 3
• From Central Park Media: Animated Classics of Japanese Literature
• One notable manga launch – Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s Rebel Sword

A couple of other notes from the issue:

In the letters page there is fan art from a Tony Mines. Is this the Tony Mines of Spite Your Face Productions? I know he frequents the AniPages Daily boards, was he a Manga Mania reader as a young ‘un? Here’s the art:

Secondly, the retailer who was promising “Hard to Get” anime in the last issue had a full page advert this time and we got a list of what their “Hard to Get” anime were…

At least two of the videos actually were anime. Namely Star Warrior The Legend Begins and Star Warrior The Adventure Continues. Which were terribly dubbed adaptations of Locke The Superman.

The others though, were Joseph Lai’s Korean anime knock-off shows from IFD films – Captain Cosmos, Cosmos Conqueror,  Saviour of The Earth, Silver Twilight, Solar Adventure, Space Transformers, and Thunder Prince.

There was one other title, Falcon Seven, which I couldn’t find on IFD’s film list. And of course searching for it just brings up Birdman/Harvey Birdman sites (Phil Ken Sebben was called Falcon Seven in the original series). As it’s listed among the IFD titles and the Star Warrior titles are seperate, I’m guessing it may just be another IFD title under a different name. Anyone with experience in the dollar bin VHS market know this title?

Related posts:

1. Manga Mania Issue 16 (November 1994)
2. More Marvellous Manga Mania Memories
3. The fifth of those Manga Mania flashbacks.

Yes, the write ups of old Manga Mania issues are back, and now with pictures.

Issue 14, cover date September 1994, was all about Street Fighter II. But first, the big change in who was actually publishing the magazine now was brought up in the editorial. Manga Entertainment were now the publishers of Manga Mania. I vaguely recall this being a point of contention, but because I didn’t really get into anime until 1995, I never experienced it first hand. By the time I got round to purchasing the magazine myself, I think it was clear the magazine was just as full of puff pieces for all video labels as it had always been. And the rest of the content improved too, at least until the last few desperate issues where it tried and failed to find a new direction.

As well as the SF2 coverage there was an essay on CLAMP and doujin from Peter J. Evans as well as a Guyver article by many hands.

UK NEWS

• Manga Video were releasing Zeguy, more Guyver, Roujin-Z and more Tokyo Babylon on video. Appleseed was doing the rounds at the cinema.
• Pioneer were launching with Tenchi Muyo and Moldiver in October.
• Kiseki had the renamed Adventure Kids coming out as Adventure Duo. Also from them was Black Magic M66 and Urotsukidoji, Return of the Overfiend III.
• Anime Projects had Bubblegum Crisis continuing to be re-released. And the first volume of Genesis Survivor Gaiarth.

US NEWS

• Software Sculptors were releasing a Bubblegum Crisis screensaver. Unfortunately it doesn’t mention a price…
• 20th Century Fox were planning a Gigantor movie.
• There was a fair handed discussion of the Lion King / Jungle Emperor furore.
• Trish Ledoux continued to gnash her teeth over the redesigned Dirty Pair in what was the 90s equivalent of the umpteen “moe is killing anime” posts being written right now.
• From Viz: Ranma 1/2 Movie 2
• From AD Vision: Cutey Honey 1 & 2
• From US Manga Corps: Blue Sonnet 1, Project A-Ko vs Battle 1: Grey Side, Toward The Terra
• From AnimEigo: Urusei Yatsura 15
• From Osiris Communication: Ultraman 5 & 6
• From Streamline: Akira Remaster, Dirty Pair: Project Eden.
• No notable manga releases this month, just the usual chugging along of Viz & DH mainstays, “Amerimanga” and furry comics.

JAPAN NEWS

• That seems to be gone from the magazine now.

There was also a fascinatingly awful advert from someone promising “hard to get” anime. Researching the retailer on the internet, it seems they eventually got out of anime and into pornography instead. Behold the typesetting skills of “Tenseah”:

Related posts:

1. Toren Smith’s Time Machine.
2. The past is still happening!
3. Blogging safety net – Go!

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1. Lum-A-Day 079 – The House of Mendou – Summer Xmas
2. Best thing on TV over Xmas?
3. Happy Xmas!

Remember what I said about Kevin Siembieda’s writing being like a fountain of mad ideas hitting paper? Rifts is that writ large.

Around 1990, an idea emerged in the games industry. It may have been born out of the sheer number of games on the market, or it may have come from the success GURPS enjoyed. That idea was a multi-genre, single setting, role playing game.

There were two main proponents of this approach. There was West End Games’ TORG, which I never played, but always wanted to. And then there was Palladium’s post-TMNT hit, Rifts.

Rifts is pretty much Siembieda’s previous games (Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Heroes Unlimited, Beyond the Supernatural and Robotech) thrown into a blender. You’ve got wizards, super powered aliens, Lovecraftian horrors and giant robots all inhabiting the same world.

Unsurprisingly, this means the game is horribly unbalanced. At least in the early editions. I have heard that the modern iteration of the game is more solid in its design. But back in the day you were dealing with a game system that got so out of control in terms of rules, character classes and settings that they ended up selling a separate index to the game.

That ran to two books.

They also produced a Rifts Colouring Book.

This situation was kind of the endemic of the games market as a whole in the nineties, as games began to choke on their own settings. While bad decisions like Dragon Dice were more the downfall of TSR, the sheer number of setting and settings in those settings didn’t help. Likewise, the World of Darkness line choked on White Wolf’s attempt to maintain some sort of in game continuity.

So you went from a market in the 80s that was distinguished by masses of games which led to the multi-genre games, to a market that was now distinguished by masses of sourcebooks for existing games. Either way you had lots of people buying lots of game books that they never used.

Your typical Rifts book would be full of poorly laid out background material for a geographical location that seemed to only exist to add a ton more character classes, magic and equipment options into an already stuffed to bursting game. Oh, and some new monsters to kill. Or play as Racial Character Classes.

Not all these classes were balanced either in terms of power or material supplied, and you were best not mix and matching between books or you might find yourself playing a wizard or dragon surrounded by ninjas jacked to the gills on cybernetics who spent every session fine tuning their equipment lists.

Despite that imbalance and rules/setting bloat, the fact that there is just so much utter madness slung together makes it a fun game. I had a great time playing a Time Wizard, blowing up evil pyramids in Glastonbury by sending bombs into the future.

Like Mutant Chronicles, Rifts was one of those 90s games that had ambitions of becoming a multimedia franchise. It did eventually make it to videogames. Unfortunately the Nokia N-Gage was the platform.

One last note, back when I first got on the internet at university, there was this DarkWorld RPG that was mentioned on rec.arts.anime. It was basically an anime flavoured rip-off of Rifts, that started off hiding its influence in a thinly veiled fashion like Mayfair’s unlicensed D&D accessories, before giving up with this file that just went ahead and listed Palladium stats for The Dirty Pair, Lum and The Sailor Scouts.

It’s not that surprising that it existed given Palladium’s history with Robotech and Macross II games, but the amount of effort that had gone into it still leaves me gobsmacked today. I’m a lazy gamer and do as little prep as possible, preferring to improvise, so this sort of exercise in cataloguing a world and stats is alien to me.

I’m presuming that the Tony Figueroa who wrote it is the same Tony Figueroa who is now the chair of the Fanime convention. Can anyone confirm that?

Related posts:

1. Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems Part 19 – AD&D 2nd Edition – Part 2
2. CIOASIISAG Part 5: Dungeons & Dragons
3. CIOASIISAG Part 17 – MERP

Andrew WK’s been banging on for weeks about this track he produced for the mysterious Aleister X, and quite rightly too. It’s ace. Haven’t heard something so aggressively sleazy as this since the prime of Earl Brutus. Not mention it’s a song that is driven by a chant rather than a chorus, which is always great. It gives music a more primal feel.

Even when the chant in question is BANGERS AND BEANS / AND TIGHT BLACK JEANS.

Especially when it’s that.

Buy at Amazon.co.uk

Related posts:

1. Bagpuss-style yawn.

Back in June, when I last touched this strand of the site, I hinted that I was going to cover RIFTS next. Well it turned out that I’d forgotten to cover what was actually my first encounter with Palladium Books – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness.

Based on Eastman and Laird’s classic anthropomorphic Frank Miller & Chris Claremont parody, TMNT the rpg tapped into the same upswell in popularity that TMNT the comic had. It was a massively popular game, only suffering a down turn when the cartoon came along and the TMNT started to be seen as a kid’s thing rather than indie comic cool.

While it suffered a little from the Palladium’s somewhat perfunctory typesetting and layouts, it did benefit from being written by the late, great Erick Wujcik. While both Kevin Siembieda and Erick Wujcik’s books used the same rule system at heart, Wujcik’s are a joy to read, and feel like a complete product whose parts gel together. His own interest in martial arts really comes through and it feels like there’s a clear vision to his books. Siembieda’s on the other hand, often seem the work of someone trying to get every mad idea out of his head onto paper and not caring how they tie together. But more on that when we get to Rifts. Hoo boy.

I mainly played this during my teenage years, before selling it during the peak of the general Turtles craze in the UK. I picked another copy up later in ‘96 when it seemed that 50% of Travelling Man’s second hand game stock were copies of this game. I think I’ve played a few sessions of the non-licensed follow up After The Bomb – anthropomorphic animals in a post apocalypse, but they were too brief to get a grip on what that was about.

Related posts:

1. CIOASIISAG Part 17 – MERP
2. CIOASIISAG Part Fourteen – Top Secret/SI
3. CIOASIISAG Part 8: Ghostbusters ~ A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game

I apologise, because you if you like to laugh, you should be watching it. You’ll need to be an American or able to convince the internet you are one to watch it, but it’s a great show that seems to find a happy medium between the three camera and single camera sitcoms.

Technically, it’s a single camera sitcom, but unlike most single camera shows of the last decade, it lacks decadence and is written with the economy of a three camera sitcom.

As great as Arrested Development was, the reason it failed was because it was too expensive per episode. The massive cast, the various locations and numerous outside shoots all added up. Same with My Name Is Earl. Better Off Ted feels like it’s learnt from those mistakes (and not just because Portia Rossi’s in the show too).

It’s a comedy about production development centred around a company called Veridian Dynamic who make anything and everything. Its level of absurdity calls to mind The I.T. Crowd and Dilbert somewhat, though the RPG nerds among you will probably see it as the rightful heir of the R&D gags from Paranoia.

The economy of the writing lies in that they tend to use only a few regular sets per episode (two offices, a meeting room and a lab), few-to-none outside scenes, and there are only 5-6 characters (the daughter doesn’t appear every episode).

Something else I’ve noted is that while they’ll use the 21st century’s favourite gag of “You remember the time…” they’ll tend to let the dialogue do the lifting on the gag, rather than cut away to flashback. And having seen cutaway gags far too often in the last 10-20 years, it’s refreshing to let the dialogue do the work.

Which is not to say it’s all dialogue heavy, there’s plenty of physical and prop gags, but they are in service of episode or character, rather than throwaway stuff put in to pad an unfunny story.

Related posts:

1. Lum-A-Day 118 – Great Achievement! The Film of Lum-chan’s Youth
2. Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
3. Evil Powers Of The Internet, Give Me Strength

DO use a layout that consumes half the screen of the average user. Everyone loves logos, links to other articles that belong in a sidebar, and imagery that’s been cropped and photomanipulated to the point of uselessness. They’re so much more helpful than having less content hidden below the scroll bar.

DO use a site background covered in pictures that makes the posts harder to read. It will weed out the weak from your readership, who might not be able to take your remorseless point of view.

DO force people to link through from your RSS feed, rather than read the article from the comfort of their RSS reader. You put all that effort into making your site as user unfriendly as you could, so why should the cool kids with their RSS readers get off scot free? Make them gaze upon the wonder of your photo manipulation skills and pictures of tiny robots that obscure the text.

Also, it will enable you to keep better track of them. The scum!

DO write in a style more suited to print than the internet. Specifically the print of an early 90s issue of the NME or a copy of VMax. Either is good.

DON’T use a style suitable for the internet. Inverted pyramid? What’s that? Short punchy paragraphs? Forget it! NEVER COMPROMISE!

DO complain as much as you can about everything you can’t stand about other anime fans, other anime blogs, the anime industry and cartoons you don’t watch. Only your uncompromising opinions of other people’s opinions can change the world.

DON’T spend as much effort talking about the cartoons you do like and do watch. I mean sharing your taste with others is what other anime bloggers do. If you are going lower yourself to their level, make sure it’s an OAV, never lower yourself to talking about TeeVee (© Ted Goranson).

Unless it’s complain about it, in which case go right ahead.

DO remember to complain about Evangelion and Gainax AT ALL TIMES. Bees do not leave bonnets without being harangued first!

DO remember that anime is only good at doing science fiction.

DO make sure the window to your glass house is OPEN.

DO remember your rose-tinted glasses.

And finally…

DO remember that you are the internet’s dad. And that you are very disappointed.

—

Inspired by this article on Colony Drop. As mean as I’m being here (their recent posts are much more internet reader friendly than some of their earlier, more colossal paragraphy posts), there are some genuine useful hints and tips contained in their post.

There’s what I’d consider some old media wrongheadedness too, but that’s the work-Brack talking. And he’s been fully indoctrinated in our glorious Web 2.0 publishing future, so pinch of salt and all that.

Personally, I would push people towards Jakob Nielsen’s Website if they wanted a better understanding of the basics on how to write on the internet. Then once they’ve got that right you can sweat the other details.

And finally, to whoever has actually registered wavemotiongun.com, I’m using the name here for satire purposes, not to stake a claim on your URL.

Related posts:

1. Ghosts of UK Anime Fandom Past
2. MADstravaganza Extras
3. Best Anime of the 00s – FLCL (2000)

Children pilot giant robots known as Evangelions Fafners to defeat giant aliens known as Angels Festum. Even at this point in time, Evangelion was still a huge shadow cast over robot shows, and this had the shadows of Evangelion’s imitators over it too (shades of Rahxephon with the living in a bubble aspect). I imagine its selling point was meant to be Hisashi Hirai’s design work post-Gundam SEED, but that’s never done anything for me.

Related posts:

1. HATE FUN 2004! Remakes! Remodels! Part 2
2. HATE FUN 2004! Daphne in the Brilliant Blue
3. HATE FUN 2004! Desert Punk

No related posts.

This is an shortened version of this 2007 post.

It’s a 12 episode series, spinning off from the Bakeneko arc of 2006’s Ayakashi. A viewing of the Bakeneko arc isn’t essential, while there’s a literal callback in one arc and a thematic callback in another, you can follow it without viewing the previous series.

The series deals with five different supernatural creatures encountered by the mysterious Medicine Seller. They are unnatural spirits that have merged with strong emotions, to form a dangerous creature, a mononoke. The Medicine Seller travels the world hunting down and killing these creatures with his sword. However he cannot use his sword until he learns the Form, Truth and Regret of the individual mononoke. This places it in the realm of the occult detective genre, rather than a simple ghost story or folklore tale.

Director Kenji Nakamura brings a unique look to the animation. Colours are vibrant, but gloriously flat. Scenery is highly detailed, but facial designs are simple and expressive. Everything has had a texture applied giving the show the look of rough paper/parchment. There’s an obvious callback to Edo period woodcuts in it’s look (indeed 3/4 of the series is set in that period), but also to art movements inspired by those woodcuts. My art history is extremely ropey, so I’m sure this is something someone else could write far more about. Also there’s little anachronisms in there that are fascinating, the whole thing glorifies in it’s artifice, partly because there’s the sense of what we are seeing as the viewer is also an illusion in the eyes of the characters.

This is a brilliant show, and deserves your attention. 2007 was a very strong year of Japanese animation, and for my money Mononoke is the cream of the crop. In terms of TV animation, it may be the best of the last 10 years. Certainly as a complete product, there’s little to fault it on an episode by episode basis.

Related posts:

1. Mononoke
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Kuruneko (2009)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Paranoia Agent (2004)

I wasn’t sure whether or not include this sixth One Piece film in this run down of the best anime of the 2000s, after all it’s a franchise piece, and there are two clearly better Mamoru Hosoda films in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars. However, when I went back and looked at it again, I felt I couldn’t let it go unrecognised.

It’s a beautiful piece of work.

Hosoda takes a fairly standard One Piece film story about helping kids beat a villain (despite this happening twice in 500+ chapters of the manga, it happens ALL THE TIME in the anime-only stories) and turns it into some strange and at points very bleak (reportedly he threw a lot of the original script out). The Secret Island slowly turns from a hyper colourful playground like the world of Superflat Monogram and Oz in Summer Wars, to a nightmare in black, red and green overseen by the utterly alien creature Lily and the desperate, sad Baron Omatsuri.

And when you factor in that this was made off the back of Hosoda’s aborted, unhappy attempt at making Howl’s Moving Castle and the changes he made to the script allegedly make it an allegory for his time at Ghibli, it adds another level of interest and a longing that Hosoda had made Howl’s Moving Castle.

The visual style of this movie, at the time a severe diversion from the usual look of the One Piece franchise, has since pretty much been adopted for the TV series now, particularly in episodes by Naoki Tate.

If you’re a fan of Hosoda’s work since this film, don’t let the fact it’s a franchise film put you off watching it (nor for that matter his Digimon films), as it has plenty to offer the non-fan too.

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – Gag Manga Biyori (2005)
2. Commercial break
3. Best Anime of the 00s – The Diary of Tortov Roddle (2003)

Well, I couldn’t find the Mind Game review I wrote for Anime England back in 2006 so here’s something new I cooked up.

A yakuza’s stolen World Cup tickets sets off a strange series of events of wannabe comic writer Nishi. First he runs into his childhood crush Myon, then he dies and meets God, before a car chase ends with Nishi, Myon and her sister Yan being swallowed by a whale.

Inside the whale they meet an old man, and the four of them begin to develop their true selves rather than the people life has ground them down into. However they come to realise that such developments are worthless if they can’t share them with the world at large. So they have to attempt the seemingly impossible task of escaping the very large whale in which they are trapped.

Stylistically, Masaaki Yuasa’s feature film often feels like an anthology united by a continuing narrative. This is both in the varying animation techniques used through the duration and in the moods of the individual scenes. I mentioned John K’s What is a Cartoon article in the FLCL post, and while I’m certain the character designs and some techniques would be anathema for him, Mind Game at various points does fulfil all 5 points, including the ultimate in butt stabs.

That’s the great thing about Yuasa, his experience on Shin-chan and Maruko-Chan has left him with a sensibility that knows that one thing cartoons do really well is physical comedy, because they can go beyond what the human body can easily do in real life. Actually that’s probably a little unfair on other Japanese animators, I’m sure they know it too, they’re often prevented from taking advantage by what they’re stuck working on.

Until I rewatched Mind Game today, I was going with FLCL as being my favourite Japanese animation of the last 10 years, but I’m finding that every time I watch Mind Game it gets better, whereas watching FLCL is just a confirmation of its excellence. If you’ve not had the chance to see the film (luckily I caught it on the big screen at the NFT in 2006), I recommend picking up either the Australian or Japanese release (it has English subtitles). Criminally it’s not had a release in the US or UK yet, despite getting strong reviews when it made their festival circuits.

It’s definitely worth the investment of your time and money.

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – FLCL (2000)
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Paranoia Agent (2004)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Re: Cutie Honey (2004)

For a show that sprung from unused ideas leftover from earlier Satoshi Kon and Seishi Minakami projects, Paranoia Agent is a surprisingly cohesive experience. Described as being about that feeling when you’re a child and will yourself sick to avoid going to school, a variety of characters find themselves assaulted by a mysterious roller-blading assailant known only as Shonen Bat. It’s a psychological thriller in the most literal sense.

As interesting as the overlapping narratives of the first seven episodes are, the real fun comes in episodes 8, 9 & 10 were we divert from the characters whose destinies have been interlinked so far and we see how the Shonen Bat story is turning into mass hysteria. The overall highlight is Satoru Utsunomiya’s episode 8 “Happy Family Planning”, which is probably the funniest thing ever made about suicide. Unfortunately in the UK, there is a cut of over a minute in this episode –

Cuts required (on potential harm grounds) to the sight of a child attempting to hang herself, and accompanying subtitles. Cuts in accordance with the Video Recordings Act 1984

– so make sure you get the R1 release rather than the UK release, as that episode really deserves to be seen in it’s complete form. Episode 9 is a number of short pieces from a variety of animators and episode 10 is a satire of the animation production process with storyboards from Tatsuo Sato (Nadesico, Stellvia).

Other familiar Kon collaborators like musician/composer Susumu Hirasawa and character designer/animator Masashi Ando are present here too and their contributions add to the appeal a great deal. Hirasawa’s opening theme is hauntingly demented, and Ando’s character designs are some of the best in the business. He’s never afraid of turning a character into a caricature and their faces are so rich with personality that animators can really cut loose compared to the usual copy/paste manga faces that permeate anime.

Some folks will complain that the ending doesn’t explain everything for them, but it’s a testament to Kon’s powers as a director that it never seems to be that much of a problem for them. All in all it’s pretty much what you’d want from a Kon television project, a chance to both examine ideas in a longer form than film allows, as well as using throwaway ideas that you couldn’t build a film around. Great stuff.

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – Re: Cutie Honey (2004)
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Mind Game (2004)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Gag Manga Biyori (2005)

The most successful of Kid’s Station’s Flash shorts, there’s a great temptation for me to just recite my favourite gags from the episodes. However, it’s not just the fact that I find the show funny that’s led me to declare it one of the best shows of the 00s. I’ve said before that I think Akitaro Daichi is one of the best directors for adapting comedy manga, and GMB is Exhibit A for that argument.

While Kosuke Masuda’s manga switches between a variety of recurring characters and one off stories, Daichi executes each as well as the other. The animation is rudimentary for the most part, but Daichi’s key skill is in timing. I think that’s in part why his catalogue of work is so varied yet remains consistently good. He doesn’t just have one rhythm, but can tune it to the project at hand.

In GMB’s case that is often a machine gun rhythm followed by a slower reaction (possibly an over the top reaction shot/scream or a deadpan silence).

Recurring characters include:

• Usami-chan, a rabbit schoolgirl detective who inevitably ends up arresting her classmate Kumakichi multiple times per episode.
• Prince Shotoku and Ono no Imoko, who have gone insane through travelling too long. Historical figures going insane is a recurring theme in GMB.
• Matsuo Bashō and his apprentice, who are travelling North, and going insane. Of course.
• A manga author whose stories are turned into insane nonsense in a variety of ways by his editors.

There have been three series of it so far, with a fourth due to start soon. Given it’s length and origins as Flash animation, it’s a shame it hasn’t made to streaming sites yet as it’s perfect for the web. So much so that it’s a popular source for nicovideo goofs to use as the basis of their own fan animations, either tracing over existing episodes with characters from other shows or creating their own material from scratch.

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island (2005)
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Kuruneko (2009)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Paranoia Agent (2004)

Masaaki Yuasa’s tale of romance between monster and monster hunter.

Of course, doing a supernatural Romeo & Juliet tale is hardly the most original of premises, though at the moment it is a lucrative premise. Kemonozume breaks from the pack on a number of points, for a start unlike Romeo & Juliet or their hundreds of supernatural imitators, the two leads in Kemonozume, Toshihiko and Yuka, are adults rather than lovestruck teens. More importantly, in a genre where the man tends to be the supernatural creature, here the female lead is the monster. And she’s not a vampire, or a ghost, but a cannibalistic ogre.

It takes this fairy tale premise and weaves a tale that starts out as being about forbidden love, then heads into more interesting areas like disability and ageing, before ending on a surreal, over the top final battle against the villain of the piece.

Of course the main draw for me is that the show is a showcase for some of the best talent working in Japanese animation at the moment (in much the same way Hakkenden was for Yuasa in the 90s). Both Michio Mihara and Osamu Kobayashi produce solo episodes, and the avant-title shorts provide an opportunity for animators to flex their own style free of the narrative of the series. Probably my favourite episodes are Kanji Wakabayashi/Eun Young Choi’s slapstick filled hilarious episode 6 and Soichi Masui/Masakazu Hashimoto/Kayoko Nabeta’s episode 9 with the old couple.

While not as polished and complete as Yuasa’s later Madhouse/WOWOW production Kaiba, I find this series easier to relate to and so it’s my favourite of the two.

Related posts:

1. Kemonozume Episode 1
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Mononoke (2007)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Re: Cutie Honey (2004)

I think I’d already been introduced to Osamu Kobayashi by way of his Studio 4°C shorts End of the World and Table and Fishman at this point, so was quite excited to see him on the Beck adaptation. While it doesn’t quite capture his personal style fully (his Gurren Lagann & Kemonozume episodes are more representative), he was probably the best choice for the project as he has a grasp of pop culture that goes beyond other anime shows or otaku subculture.

In fact, he’s far cooler than Beck author, Harold Sakuishi. Gone are the manga’s references to UK/US bands that come across as cringeworthy rather than cool (Sade???) and in come in a ton of throw away references to indie bands from Japan, the US and UK. And an ending animation that is just a straight up tribute to musical acts Kobayashi digs.

Unfortunately as good as the show is, there’s one horribly clunky problem with the show. A number of characters are supposed to be bilingual in Japanese and English, and others are supposed to have English as their main language, and I’m afraid very few of the performances convince you that is the case. I’m not sure if this is down to the performers or the script, but at the very least Yuuma Ueno is terribly unconvincing as the supposedly fluent Ryuusuke. And there’s a few minor roles who have the opposite problem where they appear to have been cast for their language skills rather than their acting skills.

If you can get past that hurdle, it’s a worthwhile and stylish adaptation of a great manga.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Sgt. Frog
2. #100 – Dokonjo Gaeru
3. HATE FUN 2004! Area 88

Usune Masatoshi’s post apocalyptic gun fetish manga gets a broad adaptation from Gonzo, complete with now statutory terrible ending that deviates from the manga.

The “hero” of the show, Sunabouzu, won’t be to everyone’s taste. He’s like short-tempered Lupin III, but devoid of all of Lupin’s charm, meaning he comes across as a complete git fuelled by greed and lust. Likewise his relationship with Junko is a like a cruder version of the Lupin/Fujiko dynamic.

While I had no real problem with the episodes I saw, my over-riding impression was that I’d rather have read the manga. The whole military hardware & survivalist fetish side of the series is lost a little in the translation to the anime, which seemed happier with parts revolving around gags about Junko’s breasts. Likewise, the manga has a more realistic approach to the character design (though it can feel schizophrenic when it veers from near-Otomo realism to crude approximations of manga-cute to Wile E. Coyote cartoon gags).

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Bleach
2. HATE FUN 2004! Yakitate!! Japan
3. HATE FUN 2004! Maria Watches Over Us

Nerd club sitcom that pitches somewhere above a Dork Tower and below an Eltingville Comic Book Science Fiction Fantasy Horror Role-Playing Game Club.

Like Panda Z, Genshiken is one of those shows where I got to an episode and said to myself “it can’t get any better than this” and stopped watching. In this case it’s Episode 9, where Tsutomu Mizushima (Hale+Guu) draws out every moment of tension in head nerd Madarame’s afternoon spent alone with Kasukabe in the club room.

It’s a social discomfort comedy, like a Meet The Parents or The Office. It crops up in manga a reasonable amount (Detroit Metal City for instance thrives on it), but rarely do you see it converted on the screen as animation so well. It’s all in the timing, and Mizushima is a master at the slow turn of the screw in social torture as much as he is psychological and physical torture.

Related posts:

1. HATE FUN 2004! Bleach
2. HATE FUN 2004! Sgt. Frog
3. HATE FUN 2004! Ninja Nonsense

Another ufotable show with character designs from Jun Shibata (Dokkoida). For my money it’s the last of their projects that gelled as a whole, though the opening episode of their next show has some great action animation.

This is a mightily silly show based on Ryoichi Koga’s manga. It takes the two stories per episode route favoured by many comedy shows wanting to pack in the gags rather than pad a story out to fit an episode. Given the nature of so many of its peers in the pages of Dengeki Daioh (and their anime adaptations), it could so very easily have been a simpering mess. Thankfully though there’s a vulgar edge there in the source material. And a hell of a lot more edge in the performance of Norio Wakamoto as “super-handsome boy” Onsokumaru. If it is possible to chew scenery in a cartoon, then he is doing it here.

Of course as a ufotable show, it has a very tactile, hand crafted ending animation.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Bleach
2. HATE FUN 2004! Doki Doki School Hours
3. HATE FUN 2004! Monster

I know I’ve watched some of this, and yet I recall nothing. Standard fantasy adventure. Another show licensed in the US by the now elusive Illumitoon.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! The Melody of Oblivion
2. HATE FUN 2004! Get Ride! AM Driver
3. HATE FUN 2004! Genshiken

…on television! Mustn’t forget that.

The original poster for The Rocky Horror Picture Show featured the tagline “He’s the hero – that’s right, the hero!“. In much the same way that you could apply that tagline to Imagawa’s Giant Robo OAV series, it applies here to at least two of Shin Mazinger‘s characters (if you switch the gender on the slogan for one of them). Imagawa has cited RHPS a major influence on him, and the work of Go Nagai is a much better fit for that influence than Yokoyama’s work was.

The show can be seen to have two Frank N. Furter surrogates, maybe more. There are a lot scientists messing with things they shouldn’t in the show, after all. Most obviously, you assume the spliced together man-woman, Baron Ashura will be the main place the Frank comparison can be made, and I think to a certain extent it is. Particularly in the latter portion of the series where we delve into Ashura’s background. But Ashura can also be seen as having elements of Rocky Horror about him/her too. For me, it’s Tsubasa Nishikori who is true the Frank stand-in, and her addition to the Mazinger myth marks the biggest influence of RHPS on the project.

Tsubasa is the most significant divergance from previous Mazinger adaptations. Drawn from the Golden City arc of Violence Jack, she at first appears to be the “lady boss” of a small gang of yakuza operating out of a bath house. Here is where I think we get the key element in the comparison to Frank. Instead of operating out of the Photonic Research Laboratory as they would in previous versions, Koji and Shiro, operate out of the Kurogane bath house, living alongside the cyborg gangsters and their initially sinister mistress. In much the same way that the Annual Transylvanian Convention embraces Brad & Janet, the other of the world of the yakuza embraces the Kabutos. There’s other little things in her relationships to other characters like her henchmen and Dr Hell’s generals, but it is the allure of the other that I think she’s primarily there for.

For a show aimed at the forty- & fifty-somethings that watched Mazinger as kids, Imagawa rightly makes the decision to shift focus from Koji, Sayaka and Boss to the adults in the story. Rather than just retelling the story and relying on nostalgia, he actually does something new with it and creates a plot that hinges on parent-child relationships in way that is far more complex than giant robot shows normally manage. Which is saying something as giant robot shows do love that parent-child thing a lot.

And Tsubasa is at the heart of that too. I don’t think I’ve overselling it by saying she’s probably the most fascinating and complex character in anime this year. In part it’s because you just don’t see characters like this very often, but the art, writing and Miyuki Ichijo’s performance all combine to make it work on another level above sheer novelty.

I should make it clear, that while you’ve got clever character work going on, there also this sense of escalation of action and threat that progresses through the show to the extreme levels it reaches in the final episode. And a tremendous glee in the insanity of the Mazinger universe, mainly through the excitable narrator, though there also are 4th wall breaking asides and references to other Go Nagai properties contributing to it.

In short, if you loved Imagawa’s Giant Robo, you’ll love his Mazinger too.

Related posts:

1. Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z-Hen – Episode 1
2. #91 – Mazinger Z
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Kuruneko (2009)

More bosomy space action.

Ghost in the Shell – Stand Alone Complex – The 2nd Gig

More future cyborg police procedurals.

Transformers Superlink

At this point, I’m thinking there is exactly as much as meets the eye. Known as Transformers Energon in the US/UK.

Maria-sama ga miteru Haru

More Catholic schoolgirl romantic friendships.

Kakyuusei 2

Has any good come from subtitles that are quoted in tildes? Sequel to a 1999 dating game anime.

To Heart ~Remember my memories~

The tildes in full effect here too, on a sequel to a 1999 erogame adaptation. Visual Novel nerds, is To Heart the trendsetter in the homeopathic porn market? Was there anything before it that got watered down from computer porn, to de-porned console game, to anime?

Rockman EXE Stream

Megaman nerds – how is the whole EXE side of things looked on by the hardcore?

Yu-Gi-Oh GX

I’ve seen far too many episodes of this half-asleep. Felt a little more subdued compared to some of the craziness of the original, though the dub script seemed more self aware and deliberately goofy. That being said, it does eventually go reassuringly nuts with being the school transported to a fantasy realm and a card that requires human sacrifice to be played.

Gundam Seed Destiny

Hoo boy, did the fans of Gundam Seed turn on this in quite a nasty fashion. Specifically against writer Chiaki Morosawa and her husband, director Mitsuo Fukuda. No doubt some of the criticism was legitimate, but an awful lot seemed aimed at them personally, rather than the work they’d produced.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Remakes! Remodels! Part 1
2. Are You An Anime Expert?
3. HATE FUN 2004! Fafner in the Azure

Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch Pure

More aquatic magical girl shenanigans.

New Getter Robo

OAV series that got a weird TV broadcast schedule (2 eps a month).

Tetsujin 28-go

Yasuhiro Imagawa’s remake (well, re-adaptation) of Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s seminal robot manga.

Ultimate Muscle

BAH GAWD KING! LOADS OF 20 & 30-SOMETHINGS AH BROKEN IN HALF! OUT OF NOWHERE THEY FINALLY FIGURED OUT WHAT THOSE PINK PLASTIC RASSLIN’ TOYS THEY BOUGHT AS KIDS WERE! IT WAS A SET UP ALL ALONG!

Initial D 4th Stage

Takumi Fujiwara continued to like driving in his car. While listening to cheesy dance music.

Saiyuki Reload Gunlock

More pretty boy Monkey King gubbins.

Hanaukyo Maid Team: La Verite

Maid fetish not dead yet.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Remakes! Remodels! Part 2
2. HATE FUN 2004! Pugyuru
3. #39 – Kinnikuman

A lot of shows this decade have made with the self-referential humour about anime and anime fandom. The most popular is probably student film episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya, which seemed almost sharp in the first episode, but was undermined by the rest of the show. Ultimately, like so many of these shows, it was proved to be toothless. Scared of offending the audience it’s mocking, because they are also the audience for the show.

It’s basically the Japanese cartoon equivalent of something like a Dork Tower. It’s all “Ho! Ho! We are like that” humour – designed to comfort, rather than confront, through the identification.

So thank fuck for Shinichi Watanabe, the man they call Nabeshin, and his 2001 OAV series Puni Puni Poemy.

Outside of his later Nerima Daikon Brothers, a musical satire, it’s the purest illustration of his worldview available. Compared to the sort of shows I mentioned above, this is far more abrasive, akin to Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Club in its brutal satire of excess. Or possibly Johnny Ryan’s Comic Book Holocaust is a better comparison, as Watanabe’s trick here, like in the non-TV broadcast Excel Saga episode, is take anime industry standards and turn them into grotesque exaggerations.

Episode one lures you somewhat into a false sense of security, even with trouserless aliens with pendulous giant testicles, a magical girl who is so stupid she refers to herself by her voice actress’ name and a family of sisters, each of whom fulfils some fetish in the most extreme way possible, it’s fairly subdued stuff compared to the second and final episode.

There the show goes full bore in grotesquely parodying pornographic anime and videogame material. We discover that Poemy’s crush and classmate is actually an alien, who believes that Japanese Culture is all rape, maids, tentacles and bondage. And that like him, THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT!

Except in New Zealand of course, where the show is banned.

Of course, it’s kind of bothersome that everything Puni Puni Poemi goes after, just got more pervasive in the 8 years that followed, but never as truly self aware. Now we can look at it as a warning from history, that no one listened to.

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – Hare+Guu (2001)
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Paranoia Agent (2004)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Read Or Die (2001)

If the 00s was the era of visual and light novel adaptations, then the 10s looks like it could be the era of the webcomic adaptation. Buzzer Beater (2005 & 2007), Hyakko (2008), Hetalia: Axis Powers (2008 & 2009) Uchi no 3 Shimai (2008), Nyan Koi! (2009) all started life on the web and Kuruneko marks a significant advance in the production of such material.

Yamato Kuruneko’s cat manga blog is a huge success both online and in printed collections, and her use of the web means she breaks out of the restrictions of the traditional 4 panel gag manga, using as many panels as she feels necessary while maintaining that down the page rhythm. And she doesn’t shy away from some of the more unsavoury aspects of cat ownership (illnesses, vet visits, odd unwanted gifts).

So it’s great that the anime version is overseen by someone who knows how to adapt that sort of material well. Namely, Akitaro Daichi. Is there anyone who knows how to adapt gag manga better?

The animation is handled by Rie Ooshima, who works with Daichi on the long running Ojarumaru. Combined with actress Satomi Kobayashi performing all the roles AND the sound effects, it lends the animation the same handmade feel that Kuruneko’s comic panels have. It’s incredibly refreshing to have a simple little cartoon that doesn’t feel like you’re watching something assembled on a production line.

Disappointingly this didn’t get streamed anywhere this year, despite the similar Chi’s New Address and Kaasan – Mom’s Life getting the streaming treatment. It’s a shame, Kuruneko’s dose of feline ownership reality would go well with Chi’s cat’s eye view of the world.

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – Gag Manga Biyori (2005)
2. Best Anime of the 00s: Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z Hen (2009)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – The Diary of Tortov Roddle (2003)

For a show that is essentially a series based on the opening credits of the live action film based on the anime, Re: Cutie Honey is surprisingly strong.

Well, two episodes of it are.

Ostensibly directed by Hideaki Anno, Tadashi Hiramatsu is the actually the force binding the project together and luckily for us he gives the individual episode directors free reign. That pays off big time with the first and third episodes, though it leads to a merely adequate middle episode.

The first episode comes from Hiroyuki Imaishi (Gurren Lagann), teaming with playwright Kazuki Nakashima (Gurren Lagann) for the first time. The end result is a cartoon that feels like it has been transported from an alternate reality where Yoshinori Kanada had worked at Hanna Barbera making Go Nagai shows. Or that the otaku boom caused by Yamato and Gundam never happened and anime had proceeded along some alternate route. Great comedic animation abounds throughout the episode, and Imaishi proves a master at turning limited animation into greatness through timing and rhythm.

The third episode from Masayuki (Evangelion 1.0, 2.0)  is a tour de force of action animation as Natchan and Seiji attempt to rescue Cutie Honey from Sister Jill. As great as Imaishi is at comedy, Masayuki kills at directing straight ahead action and the sequence where the pair fly a jet to attack Sister Jill is one of my favourites of the last 10 years.

So, the second episode from Toei’s Naoyuki Itou (Toei’s Kanon, Digimon Data Squad) is a little disappointing. There’s nothing terrible about it, but on the other hand there’s nothing there that makes you want to see more from Itou. And in contrast with the other two episodes it looks even worse. Nevermind, as the strength of the other two episodes still make it one of the best shows of the ‘oughts.

Oddly this hasn’t been released in English, despite rumours of it being licensed. Given the Gainax involvement, the involvement of Imaishi, the involvement of Anno, the success of the live-action film (MVM say it does great for them), and for years the old Cutie Honey OAVs being a mainstay of the market, I am curious why it’s gone unreleased this long.

Too expensive? The people who’d buy (well made) Go Nagai material aren’t buying anime any longer? The shift from OAV to TV in the market? I can’t believe it’s this one, as for much of the last 10 years they’ve been trying to sell us TV animation as if it were OAV animation.

Whatever. If someone wanted to release this in English, I’d buy it.

Related posts:

1. #53 – Cutey Honey
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Paranoia Agent (2004)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Hare+Guu (2001)

You know you’re on to something special when people leave a screening midway through the first episode because it was weirding them out.

Hare+Guu director Tsutomu Mizushima loves Sam Raimi. LOVES HIM. What was weirding people out was that a fair portion of the first episode is a homage to Raimi’s Evil Dead. Which, given the look of the show and the fact it’s a comedy, was probably not what people were expecting. And maybe the bizarre fruit/animals called Pokutes didn’t help matters either. They are kind of weird and unnatural looking.

In that first episode, Hale goes into the jungle to fetch his mother some bananas, when he’s pursued by something of PURE EVIL. Something that appears to swallow him whole and spit him out. What’s worse, when he gets home, the EVIL is already there.

Namely, a little girl called Guu.

Guu is Mizushima’s instrument of torture, and Mizushima proceeds to torture Hale psychologically and physically for the 26 episodes of the TV show plus two 6 episodes OAV series. Mizushima tortures his leads very well, another Raimi trait, doing it in xxxHoilc, Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, and to great effect in episode 9 of Genshiken. His best work comes from when he’s working with Michiko Yokote, as he is here. When he’s left to his own devices he does have tendency to hammer home the same gag too often (we start to see this a little with the final OAV series).

Like Raimi, like the League of Gentlemen, he knows there’s a thin line between horror and comedy and Hare+Guu walks that line better than any anime show in the last 10 years.

Adding a great deal to the show’s success are the performances of Naoko Watanabe as Guu and Rikkao Aikawa as Hale. Watanabe has this wonderful sardonic, deadpan delivery, which combined with the sly expressions that Guu is given in animation is marvellous. On the other hand, Aikawa’s often machine gun delivery matches the highs and lows of Hale’s hysterias to great effect.

The TV series and first OAV series is available on DVD in English, but it’s hard to find them at a substantial discount to make them more sensible priced in the DVD market as a whole. If you do see them cheap, pick them up. You’ll love it or be weirded out. No middle ground.

Related posts:

1. HATE FUN 2001! Haré+Guu
2. HATE FUN 2004! Genshiken
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Re: Cutie Honey (2004)

Super-powered clones of history’s greatest men hunt for rare German books, in their way stand the agents of the British Library – The Paper, Miss Deep, Joker and Drake Anderson (American mercenaries don’t get cool codenames).

Hideyuki Kurata’s multimedia project spans anime, manga and light novels, with fairly loose continuity between them all. It posits a secret, eternal struggle between an immortal couple, Mr Gentleman & Grandmother, each in control of the knowledge bases of the United Kingdom and China respectively. That back story is all heavily buried in this OAV series, which plays out like a 1960’s British telefantasy that never was, with plenty of nods to the likes of James Bond, The Avengers, Thunderbirds and The Saint.

The only thing that brings it down a couple of notches is that the animation is occasionally too ambitious for some of the animators. The problem stems from the character design, which to start with is very complicated, and further exacerbated by the decision to frequently animate the movement of each character’s hair and clothing.

Anime heroines are often scantily clad, not just titillate, but because it’s easier to animate naked people than clothed people. Catching the movement of clothing is a tricky thing to do well. So when you’ve got a lead character like Yomiko Readman who’s wearing at least three layers of clothing and has long untidy hair, then you’ve got to raise your game somewhat. Taking that into account it does an admirable job in keeping the number of clumsy looking scenes to a minimum and excelling when it comes to the action set pieces.

Dirt cheap at the moment in the UK, despite a few translation errors on Manga Video’s part (unseen character Nenene gets her name translated when it appears on post-it notes in Yomiko’s flat), it’s definitely worth purchasing.

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – Hare+Guu (2001)
2. Best Anime of the 00s – FLCL (2000)
3. The Title Blurb Read “Mighty Mecha Special!!”

In much the same way that when I saw Pitchfork name Outkast’s Bombs Over Baghdad as the best song of the ‘oughts, I’d find it hard to argue with anyone who wanted to declare FLCL the best anime of the same 10 years.

Without it, I doubt this website would exist, as it came at the exact time when my interest in anime was flagging and it was so energetic, so exactly what cartoons should be, that I even considered ordering the DVDs from Japan despite not owning a DVD player at the time.

So what do I mean when I say it’s exactly what cartoons should be? Well, FLCL is notable for being one of the few modern anime that noted cartoon curmudgeon John K actually had nice things to say about. While I don’t agree with everything he says, since he started his blog he has firmed up some thoughts in my mind about what I like (and dislike) about cartoons. Thoughts probably put there back when I was watching Tony Robinson’s Stay Tooned! as a teenager.

One of the key posts in that process, was his “What Is A Cartoon?” post. It’s no coincidence that FLCL fulfils at least three of those criteria and probably gets the butt stabs in too (certainly every other part of body gets stabbed, whacked and ground at some point or other). Unlike a lot of fans my age who got into anime as an extension of science fiction fandom, my entry point was an extension of a love of cartoons and comedy, namely Urusei Yatsura. So I’m much more disposed to anything that throws some slapstick, funny drawings and crazed movement my way, rather than sci-fi talking heads or politics.

Yes, there is a science fiction-y plot in FLCL and a heap more metaphor about puberty, but that is really just background dressing for silly, violent, sexy animation. And being repeatedly hit in the head with a bass guitar. Even when you’re not luxuriating in frantic action, the still scenes are invariably laid out in a manner that is at least visually pleasing, but more often than not, funny in themselves.

I’ve seen people complain that it’s too weird, too hard to understand or most bizarrely, “not anime”. These are people who’ve had it ground into them to expect narrative, and that every little detail will be described to them. They also have no joy in their hearts. If you can’t find something to love in FLCL, then cartoons probably aren’t for you.

Criminally out of print in the US, despite the massive popularity from its Adult Swim airings, you can still purchase it the UK and Australia.

So there you go. The best anime of the last 10 years.

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – Mind Game (2004)
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Hare+Guu (2001)
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Re: Cutie Honey (2004)

Back to the Jack we go.

I’d been putting off talking about this, as frankly I don’t think I’ve much to talk about. The guest characters this time round are from 1969’s Gakuen Bangaichi, his first professional collaboration with Ken Ishikawa (though Ishikawa had assisted on earlier manga).

So thoroughly neglected is the title, that it doesn’t have a Japanese wikipedia page, let alone much information in English. ebookjapan.jp doesn’t have it either so I can’t get information from there. The best I can tell is it was another tale of school debauchery. Most references in Japanese are either to this chapter of Violence Jack or to auctions of the two 70s editions of the manga. Shame.

If someone who can actually read Japanese wants to explain better, the indespensible Mazingerz.com has a little information. In the meantime here are the meandering thoughts of someone who likes to blunder through and jump to his own conclusions based on the art alone.

Once again VJ avoids formula by focusing for a change on Kid Violence Jack, and to a lesser extent Lady Violence Jack. Kid Violence Jack shows up at a school house in the middle of nowhere, where a bunch of kids and hoodlums are having lessons. He joins the class, but the lessons are disturbed when the Terrence Stamp looking dude from the Dragon Fort arc shows up.

Meanwhile, Lady Violence Jack has troubles of her own as she runs into one of the Slum King’s thugs at the beach while she’s buck naked. She easily disposes of him, but is blind-sided by a second, snorkelling, thug. Who then proceeds to make the worst move a snorkelling thug who has just blind-sided a naked female Violence Jack could make. He decides he’ll try and rape her.

Bad move.

Back at the school, Terrence Stamp has had similar thoughts regarding the one adult female there. Of course, the murder of a child wasn’t enough to get Kid Violence Jack into belated action, but this is, and Terrence Stamp learns you don’t bring a sword to a knife fight.

During all this we’ve been seeing troop movements from the Slum King and the arc ends with yet another huge dust up between Jack and the Slum King’s army. Of course Jack doesn’t kill the Slum King, instead once again humiliating him by removing his mask. Along with plenty of scenes establishing that the three aspects of Jack make a whole, this may be foreshadowing that Slum King is not whole in a way that goes beyond his missing face.

Not a great arc, nothing particularly novel is done with the guest character(s), but at the same time it’s not going anywhere mind blowingly weird like that first Susano-OH related arc. Weird sexual stuff is also low compared to some arcs (like the next arc), but it does end with an odd sequence where the girl who Kid Violence Jack “saved” earlier dances naked in the rain before dressing like a “proper” Japanese school girl rather than the weird sixties gangsters moll she was dressed as before. Strangely puritanical vibe (“don’t dress slutty or you’ll get raped”) which seems oddly out of place given the excesses of the strip in general.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Black Forest
2. Violence Jack – Gekitou! Mondo
3. Violence Jack – Death Police

Another show that couldn’t be more NHK if it tried, unsurprisingly this is a series of adaptations of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries, tied together through the addition of Mabel West and her pet duck. Yes. A pet duck. I have no idea either.

Despite the girl and the duck, they are pretty faithful adaptations. Certainly no less so than Suchet’s Poirot and definitely moreso than ITV’s recent Marple adaptations. Visually though it’s a little plain, unless you are big fan of the look of the humans in Pokemon as Sayuri Ichiishi does the character design here too and OLM are on production.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Madlax
2. HATE FUN 2004! Marshmallow Times
3. HATE FUN 2004! Ninja Nonsense

Another NHK show, which means it’s hard to find viewer ratings, but seeing as there’s been five seasons of it so far, I think we can assume it does more than OK.

Takuya Mitsuda’s manga has been running since 1994, and it follows the life of baseball player Goro Honda from kindergarten through to his professional career.

Director Kenichi Kasai had come off Mirumo and would direct the first three seasons of the show, before the popularity of Honey & Clover and Nodame Cantabile started to push his career in a different direction as the go to guy for romance shows.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Pretty Cure
2. HATE FUN? Autumn Anime Prejudged~! Part 5~!
3. HATE FUN? Destructive Summer – Part 2

Takahiro Omori (Bacanno!) adapts Tachibana Higuchi’s manga about a school for gifted youngsters. Seriously, there was no need for a “shojo manga” X-Men, because this is pretty much it in concept, if not characters. The show itself is a perfectly acceptable entry into the genre, helped by being an NHK show so that unlike a lot of its contemporaries you don’t feel like you’re watching an extended advert for merchandise.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Aishiteruze Baby
2. HATE FUN 2004! Major
3. HATE FUN 2004! Desert Punk

A show that I really should watch more of, or at least read the manga of, as I quite liked what I saw.

The problem? Well I have a degree in Food Science and until I moved into the exciting world of the dotcom boom (& bust) and electronic publishing, a good portion of my life involved telling people off in food factories for poor food hygiene.

So the guy who bakes bread IN A MASK, WITH PEACOCK FEATHERS ON IT, flips a switch in my brain and I get angry at this fictional character. It’s made worse, in that early on, the hero is told off for poor kitchen attire.

Of course this is a series that in later volumes of the manga goes completely barking mad, so maybe I should cut it some slack, quell my Pavlovian food factory manager urges and give it another shot.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Desert Punk
2. HATE FUN 2004! Area 88
3. HATE FUN 2004! Monster

Bleach is a reasonable Shonen Jump property that makes for a reasonable anime. Animation-wise, while it doesn’t reach the highs of Naruto, it also doesn’t plummet to the lows. Noriyuki Abe, directed the thematically similar Yu Yu Hakusho in the 90s and he’s a steady hand for this sort of thing.

The manga suffers at little from the fact that it seems that Tite Kubo wasn’t expecting it to be this popular, and so after going through what now seems to be the pacing of a SJ property (opening that could be a one-off story, then gradual lengthening plot arcs, and slow to introduce main antagonist) it’s fallen into a holding pattern of repetition of story beats. And obviously the anime inherits that, along with the added problem of inserting filler arcs into a story that is now just one interminable drawn out fight.

Unfortunately the one main thing the manga has going for it – the sense of design – doesn’t survive the translation to animation that well. We get some of it in the openings, but the episode animation tends to be meat and potatoes work.

That said, if you like shonen action shows, it’s worth watching the up to the end of the Soul Society arc as the pacing is very strong on those episodes. Those episodes clear through source material at least twice as fast as Naruto or One Piece would.

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1. #42 – Bleach
2. UK Anime Releases For 30/06/08
3. HATE FUN 2002! Naruto

—

Also we’ll learn why this man is about to make the worst life choice of any Go Nagai character.

—

Talking of Go Nagai – this interview with the man himself on Egypt Today is really good. Interesting questions and some lengthy, insightful answers

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1. #23. Yuu Yuu Hakusho
2. Darker Than Black Episode 1
3. Links Ahoy

The second big Tezuka adaptation of year. I hadn’t quite realised just how big this show was. Airing alongside Detective Conan, it debuted with very strong ratings for an anime show at the time, and ones that would kill today. Followed by Black Jack 21 in 2006. I’m interested in checking this out at some point, which I can as Crunchyroll have begun to stream it.

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1. 33. Black Jack
2. Violence Jack – Black Forest
3. HATE FUN 2004! Phoenix

Bones produced sci-fi show I know nothing about beyond its name. Directed by the chap whose in charge of the new FMA series.

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2. HATE FUN 2004! Mars Daybreak
3. THIS PAGE IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF DONNIE MOST’S CAREER

Odd cute animal/Mazinger cross fertilisation. The problem I had was that the second episode was so hilarious, I could not conceive it getting any better so didn’t watch any more of it. I didn’t want the possibility of a bad episode to sully the perfection of the batteries are not food episode. This was not the last show that this happened with.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Yakitate!! Japan
2. HATE FUN 2004! Ninja Nonsense
3. HATE FUN 2004! Sgt. Frog

Definitely on my shopping list, this Studio 4C produced attractive limited animation show puts other low budget shows to shame with it’s originality and distinct designs.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Kyo Kara Maoh!
2. HATE FUN 2004! Maria Watches Over Us
3. HATE FUN 2004! Burst Angel

Korean MMORPG gets the animation it deserves.

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1. HATE FUN 2003! The Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok
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While we’re on the subject of GONZO shows, how does this show hold up? I saw the first couple of episodes of this sci-fi take on the Seven Samurai and recall quite liking it, but didn’t get around watching any more. It’s by Toshifumi Takizawa, whose work I’ve liked on the Studio DEEN episodes of Urusei Yatsura and the TV version of Dirty Pair, but then again a lot of great animators have found themselves undone by GONZO’s production peaks and troughs.

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1. HATE FUN 2002! Samurai Deeper Kyo
2. HATE FUN 2004! Samurai Champloo
3. HATE FUN 2004! Kyo Kara Maoh!

The manga Gantz is terrible on a variety of levels (“mature” in the most juvenile ways possible, overly photo referenced, slow production), but I can’t help enjoying it’s gusto and the biggest weakness – the fact that Hiroya Oku is clearly just making shit up as he goes along – is also its biggest strength once it gets past the Buddhist Temple mission, introduces Shion Izumi and the wheels fall off any semblance of sanity in the story.

So of course we don’t get any of that in the anime, and instead GONZO make up their own ending. That’s not helped any by Ichiro Itano’s leaden direction, meaning what should have been one of the greatest action shows of the decade is a worthless mess.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Pretty Cure
2. HATE FUN 2004! Burst Angel
3. HATE FUN 2004! Bleach

It is hard to think of a more shameless Frankenstein’s Monster of a TV show than Burst Angel. It feels like you are watching a show assembled by ticking things off a check list. Admittedly you probably should expect this from the creator of MD Geist, Koichi Ohata.

When I first watched episode one back in ‘04 I wrote:

“Hi we’re GONZO and we’ve just made a technical demo attached to 15 minutes of the least original anime you’re likely to see”

Bakuretsu Tenshi is one of those shows were if you had never seen an anime show before in your life, you’d think it was great. If you are familiar with any of the popular shows of the last 10 years then there is really nothing new here. Some pretty-ish cel shaded 3D animation maybe, but that’s about it.

I also wrote that I thought GONZO could do better, and had high hopes for the next show I’ll write about. Talk about being wrong on two counts.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Maria Watches Over Us
2. HATE FUN 2004! Samurai 7
3. HATE FUN 2004! Major

JC Staff/GAINAX production that amusingly abbreviates to MOO. I know I’ve seen some of this, yet recall nothing. That says it all I think. Standard catalogue padding.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Beet the Vandel Buster
2. HATE FUN 2004! Marshmallow Times
3. HATE FUN 2004! Samurai 7

It’s Bee Train & Koichi Mashimo once again peddling their rather plain take on the “girls with guns” genre. At this point I was done with Bee Train, making them the first Japanese animation production house whose work I’d go out of my way to avoid.

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1. HATE FUN 2001! Noir
2. HATE FUN 2003! Avenger
3. HATE FUN 2004! Burst Angel

I don’t know what this is. It got an English language release though from the company you forget existed – Illumitoon.

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Another show like Smash Hit that goes for the Adult-Who-Looks-Like-A-Child gimmick, though this isn’t as tawdry as m.o.e.’s output. A more likely origin for it being animated is that JC Staff were looking for similar material as Azumanga Daioh to adapt, and Tamami Momose’s high school comedy fits that bill.

It’s not terrible, and if you like Yoshiaki Iwasaki’s work on shows like Love Hina and Hayate the Combat Butler, then I think you’ll probably like this. Me? I was out after 4 episodes, as despite some fun performances from folks like Kappei Yamaguchi, it just wasn’t funny enough for my tastes.

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1. HATE FUN 2003! Cromartie High School
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High concept manga – girl wishes so hard to be boy’s girlfriend she turns into his right hand – gets a merely OK anime.

Looking at my old livejournal there was clearly something about episode 5 that I didn’t like, as I stopped writing about it after episode 4. I think it was that they were shuffling stuff around from how the manga played out and they may have seemed a little too enamoured with the annoying little girl neighbour. Or everyone may have just seemed more annoying animated than they did on the page. Whatever it was I didn’t bother with it any further, nor with the eventual DVD release.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Alice Academy
2. HATE FUN 2004! Pugyuru
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One of those shows that I had no idea had existed until now. Studio Comet veteran Hiroshi Fukutomi directs, along with much of the same design staff as the early Studio Comet productions. However much of the actual production appears to be from Seoul Movie. Based on a gag manga from
Lun Lun Yamamoto about kid journalists and a sheep. Quite why it appears to take place in 1970s Europe is another question, but certainly it doesn’t really look like anything else.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Kyo Kara Maoh!
2. HATE FUN 2004! Legendz
3. HATE FUN 2004! Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad

Bishounen silliness that goofs around with the whole fantasy genre of Earthlings magically finding themselves in fantasy worlds where they are inexplicably important. Rather that travelling to the magical world in question by magic portal or wardrobe, hero Yuri Shibuya is instead sucked down a school toilet. Junji Nishimura (Urusei Yatsura) does his best, but struggles with a budget that must be comparatively lower that what he had to work with during the peak years of Urusei Yatsura.

Successful enough to produce 2 sequels on TV, it’s another example of how Studio Deen’s approach of low budget shows aimed at niche audiences that are already fanatical about the properties in question (this was a light novel originally) has kept them chugging along. Even though in terms of creativity and production quality, their best years are years behind them.

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1. HATE FUN 2002! Samurai Deeper Kyo
2. HATE FUN 2004! Tweeny Witches
3. HATE FUN 2004! Maria Watches Over Us

Another in the pocket shojo genre of foisted parenthood, unlike UFO Baby (aka Daa! Daa! Daa!) the child here is an actual human. Based on Yoko Maki’s manga, it deals with a teenage boy who has to look after his 5 year old cousin when she is abandoned at his house. Solid TMS style animation under the shojo trappings from TMS veteran Masahru Okuwaki and a crew of Detective Conan folks (though I’m guessing everyone at TMS works on Conan at some point).

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Alice Academy
2. HATE FUN 2004! Madlax
3. HATE FUN 2004! Sgt. Frog

As much as I wanted to like this golf anime, it’s simply ineptly made. Of course, I’d probably still watch it half asleep if it was on the ITV4 morning cartoon slot.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Pretty Cure
2. HATE FUN 2004! Ninja Nonsense
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Remember Ikkitousen? Well this is based on the manga that Ikkitousen so shamefully plagarised, as I first encountered it when people’d post art comparisons between the two on 4chan and rage would commence. The Greg Land threads of manga I’d guess.

As dumb as Oh Great’s writing is, his art is top notch. So it’s something of a problem that the anime adaptation doesn’t capture that greatness, as that was the only thing going for the story in the first place.

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Listless Devilman looking thing from Gainax and Shaft. Nonetheless it has some nice fighting animation that looks great once you detach it from the humdrum storyline. I guess it paid the bills while they were working on the Diebuster OAVs.

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The fun world of sibling incest!

From a lot of the folks who brought you Haibane Renmei and would go onto give you Baccano! and Hell Girl, came this adaptation of Motoi Yoshida’s manga. I’ve only seen clips of it on sakuga MAD reels, and obviously there’s some good animation work on it. But I really don’t want to watch some overwrought drama about a brother and sister trying and failing to resist their incestuous feelings for each other. BECAUSE THAT IS NOT WHAT CARTOONS ARE FOR.

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Videogame adaptation from BONES.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Area 88
2. HATE FUN 2002! Shin Seiki Den Mars
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Visual novel gubbins from, of course, Studio DEEN.

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Post-apocalypse anime (Waterwrld division) infamous for the ridiculous costume design from Kazunori Iwakura (Ai Yori Aoshi). Namely swimsuits that are all thong.

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Belated TV adaptation of Kaoru Shintani’s classic manga. Of course given how I was exposed to anime in the first place I relate it to the early 90s videogame adaptation that was an early import once folks I knew started to import the SNES/Super Famicom.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Koi Kaze
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And now the Return of The King of m.o.e. trilogy of terrible TV shows set around a terrible TV show.

This is apparently a straight up harem show centred on the aforementioned scriptwriter with whom the underage actresses playing the Cos-prayers fall in love with. Thankfully m.o.e. remembered to make him 17 so that while it is still somewhat creepy that he’s being chased after by 14 year olds (and maybe an 11 year old), they can pretend that technically it isn’t.

m.o.e. produced one more TV show in 2005, before Pony Canyon seemingly decided that producing fetish anime for nerds wasn’t on their agenda anymore and closed the doors of m.o.e.

However the director of these three shows, Takeo Takahashi, remains at large. Unsurprisingly he showed up on the staff of Rozen Maiden and is currently most noted for directing the incredibly over-rated Spice & Wolf shows. Also on those shows was m.o.e. co-conspirator screenwriter Naruhisa Arakawa. Miwa Oshima who was responsible for the look of the shows is still active on similarly wretched shows like Koihime†Muso.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Doki Doki School Hours
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3. HATE FUN 2004! Samurai Champloo

The second in the Doom That Came From m.o.e.

Remember Cos-Prayers? Well it turns out that it was just a TV show. Though a live action TV show, not a cartoon. Even though you just watched it and it was a cartoon. Anyway, this is also a cartoon, this time about about the TV executive producing the Cos-Prayers TV show.

Which is a fairly clever and ambitious idea on face value.

Except this is m.o.e. and a clever idea isn’t enough, so they make the TV executive look like a 10 year old BUT IT’S OK SHE’S SAID SHE WAS 25 M’LUD! And they also introduce the actresses “playing” the Cos-prayers, but forget to give some sort of get clause to their general underage-ness. It also introduces the scriptwriter on the show, who turns out to handily be a teenager too, in order for the next show in this trilogy to have its own “get out of jail” card too.

Dreadful “comedy” ensues.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! The Cosmopolitan Prayers
2. HATE FUN 2004! Love Love
3. HATE FUN 2004! Legendz

Cosmopolitan Prayers? Cos-Prayers? Cosplayers? GEDDIT?

Ah yes, it’s m.o.e. back again from wherever they had been hiding in 2004 to launch the first of a trifecta of terrible shows on the general public. This is a bog standard magical girl show aimed at adult males. The episodes are short and there are only 8 of them. So it’s not all bad.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Smash Hit!
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This is one of those shows that exemplifies the direction that anime was going in this decade, and it’s handy to use a show like this to illustrate it, rather than a moe show.

It’s a deceptively popular show because it is targeted at a niche audience that isn’t getting this sort of material anywhere else. The fan chatter around it was huge at the time, and presumably the DVD sales were great because it got multiple sequels and OAVs. However when you look at the TV ratings, they aren’t any better than other late night shows that had less noise made about them. In fact overall, they were kind of on the low side (around 1.0).

So you’ve got this disconnect that’s formed in the industry between what appeals to a mainstream audience & what will shift silly numbers of DVD sales and merchandise. There’s too much chasing after the latter rather than former, which is understandable as it’s a lot easier for find a niche audience and exploit them, than find something everyone likes. With manga sales down it’s harder to find both the niche and the popular within them, so light novels and visual novels seem have become an easier source to find the rich veins of fandom to mine.

And if you’re trying to create completely original anime, you’ve a steep hill to climb without mixed media support (and even with it, you may end up getting a niche audience when you shot for a mainstream one).

A side effect of mining these niches, particularly the light/visual novel niches, is that as long as you get their story right, the fans aren’t that bothered about the visuals. For all its vocal fandom, I don’t think I’ve ever heard fans of this show lavish praise on the animation, which struck me as plain and not particularly inspired.

They just want their Catholic schoolgirl romantic friendship and lesbian undertones, they don’t really want it to entertain as a cartoon. It’s not really anything new, Legend of the Galactic Heroes worked under the same premise, I can’t believe that the folks buying those early episodes of LotGH were getting them for the animation, it was the story that was the selling point.

The problem is that there’s now too much of that sort of approach, and it’s all over TV rather on OAV. This leads to a distorted view of the industry when you just look at a list of available titles like I’m doing now.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Pretty Cure
2. HATE FUN 2004! Kyo Kara Maoh!
3. HATE FUN 2004! Bleach

Namco videogame adapted by Studio Deen.

I bet this is dreadful.

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2. HATE FUN 2004! Samurai 7
3. HATE FUN 2004! Marshmallow Times

Kozueko Morimoto’s manga about teacher/yakuza heir Kumiko Yamaguchi attempts to balance her two lives was a bigger success in its various live action incarnations, but this anime version was fun too. Though what was up with that dog?

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Sgt. Frog
2. HATE FUN 2004! Desert Punk
3. HATE FUN 2004! Legendz

Mitsuo Hashimoto may be an auteur of crappy tie-in anime based on updates of traditional games, being responsible for this, Beyblade and Bakugan Battle Brawlers. Whereas Beyblade was about spinning tops, B-Daman is about marbles. As was Bakugan. Yes, there were TWO marble based franchises this decade.

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1. HATE FUN? More Spring Things – Part 3
2. HATE FUN 2001! Beyblade
3. HATE FUN 2004! Monster

I may write more on this over Xmas, haven’t quite decided yet. I may need to go back and watch some of it again to get my mind made up.

What I’ll mention today is the abiding thought that I had watching it the first time – it’s a failure.

A really good failure that may be one of the best shows of the decade, but a failure nonetheless. Shinichirō Watanabe obviously set out to combine hip hop with chanbara, and that first episode lays down an agenda in how it integrates elements of hip hop not just in the music, but in the visuals themselves. Most notably in the scratch cuts in the editing. Some people really hated those cuts at the time. These people are wrong.

However once he starts handing off episodes to individual directors, the hip hop element ebbs and flows to the point of being completely lost at points. It doesn’t hurt the actual quality of the episodes at all, but few live up to that first episode in terms of expressing the idea that Samurai Champloo was promising.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Samurai 7
2. Best Anime of the 00s – Re: Cutie Honey (2004)
3. HATE FUN 2004! Burst Angel

Another one of Kid’s Station’s zero-budget flash shorts series, this time based on the 4 panel strip Pugyuru. It’s one of those shows that will either tickle your sense of humour or will create intense hatred at the poorly animated nonsense you have just watched.

Me? I thought it was hilarious. Non sequiturs and surrealist flights of fancy will do it every time (I do wonder if manzai comedy is more accessible to the British than Americans…), so this tale of an anonymous girl who is tormented by the arrival of a foot high rubber maid, an octopus wearing a mask, a woman made of ice and a juvenile delinquent was right up my street. The episode where they discover the button in the maid Cheko’s head is probably the highlight.

Given its origins as a cheap flash animation, I’m not sure why this hasn’t been put somewhere online in an official capacity.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Midori Days
2. HATE FUN 2004! Yakitate!! Japan
3. HATE FUN 2004! Sgt. Frog

Coming to this adaptation of Urasawa’s manga after having read some of it, it struck me as being really faithful. However that faithful quality had a downside, it’s also really slow.

It’s one of these shows that works perfectly fine as a television programme, but whose merits as a cartoon are harder to see. Luckily for it and countless other shows, a lot of viewers aren’t really interested whether the medium is being used to its fullest and just want to be told a story. Which Monster does very well, unfortunately Urasawa tells the story much better on the page because he’s in control and can use his medium to the fullest.

Let’s not be silly though, even with its flaws, it is still miles better than most of what I’ve written about in these decade overview posts so far, and certainly one of the 2004’s better shows due to the source material alone.

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1. HATE FUN 2004! Ninja Nonsense
2. HATE FUN 2004! Legendz
3. HATE FUN 2004! Bleach

Surprisingly successful, and long running, comedy show.

And here’s why:

Genius steals.

Urusei Yatsura spawned multitudes of imitators, but few have understood what made that show great. Sgt Frog, however, gets it.

It hits the correct mix of extra-terrestrial home invasion, mad science, parody and thwarted romance perfectly. And while the anime is a toned down version of the manga, that also works to it’s advantage as had it maintained the more ribald nature of the manga it is unlikely to have found the audience it has. If anything the humour is more effective now as it hits on a variety levels, while kids can appreciate the slapstick and cute characters, there’s plenty of parody and satire for the parents, and relationship comedy for the teen audience.

And it has a cracking cast. Chiwa Saito plays the female lead Natsumi Hinata, and makes a great straight woman for the rest of the cast. Kumiko Watanabe turns in a wonderful performance as the titular Keroro. And best of all, it has the legendary Jouji Nakata as the lovelorn, if overly serious, Giroro.

The first 51 episodes are awesome and well worth your time. The second batch is a little below par, picking up until you get probably the best part of the series – the multiple episode arc where Keroro’s troops are to be replaced on Earth. The start of season 2 seems to assume you’ve not seen the previous season, and spends a lot of time reintroducing characters. I’m guessing there was either a gap, or a schedule change that necessitated this, but it’s a little annoying if you have seen the previous episodes.

Getting it released in the west was a long a laborious process. First ADV had big plans for it, before it ended up with Funimation and got a Shin-chan style “versioned” English script. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’m not entirely convinced that Funimation’s script writers are good enough comedy writers or that the talent pool working in anime dubbing in the US are good enough comic performers. The releases do include the original Japanese soundtrack though (and presumably more literal scripts), so it’s still worth getting.

Related posts:

1. #58 – Sgt. Frog
2. Brief thoughts on Sgt Frog “Test Episode”
3. Sgt. Frog Volume 11