I was pretty much done with it before the convention, but the actual con didn’t really deter me from my decision to cut it out of my future convention attending schedules.

The reason why I’m done? Their handling of attendee submitted events/panels prior to the con.

I had no problem running my MADstravaganza event at the con, but getting to that point before the con was like pulling teeth.

For starters, the form to submit them didn’t go up until the end of May. Which is bad, but I think it was still better than previous years. However, it’s then a bit much to not give anyone a human response until four weeks before the convention.

Amecon may not realise it, but attendee submitted events/panels are the last remaining unique selling point of UK residential anime events. Everything else they do you can get elsewhere:

• Anime Industry Guests – you can get the US voice actors at Expo and Japanese industry folk at Expo and film festival events.
• Parties – You’ve regular J-pop events running in London, plus events like the Grand Cosplay Ball and the Cosplay Cruise. And I’m sure similar events elsewhere in the country. Also if you just want to party and don’t require a Japanese or Fancy Dress element, well you do live in “Binge Drinking Britain”.
• Cosplay – Again, Expo has this covered, as do the cosplay based parties I mentioned above. There’s plenty of places to get your cosplay fix that aren’t residential conventions.
• Dealers Room – Expo, of course.
• Anime – Once upon a time we had a sneak preview of Perfect Blue at Minamicon. Nowadays if you want to see the latest anime films before general release, you need to go to film festivals instead.

Rather than treating the attendee run events as an afterthought, conventions should be encouraging them. The final straw was the fact that cosplay events got their own special e-mail sent out to attendees detailing them before the convention and the other events got nothing.

There was a warning sign as to their misplaced priorities early on as they didn’t actually mention anime or manga on their front page for 4-5 months of restarting the site. Combine that with a video programme that you had to hunt down, rather than have given to you in your con bag, and you’re left with the impression of an anime convention that has lost all interest in the reason it existed in the first place. Unless that reason was to import dubbing irritant Monica Rial to the UK every couple of years, in which case JOB WELL DONE!

There is one big downside to fan run events at UK cons, and it was particularly in evidence at this convention. Some people have got it into their heads to treat conventions as some sort of open mic night. So in addition to the open mic abomination that is the “Omake” we also ended up with rip-offs of the BBC radio shows “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” and “Fighting Talk” (luckily missed the first and what I saw of the second made me glad I didn’t see all of it, as at least one person on the panel had seemingly missed the point of the format entirely). I don’t know if it’s an extension of the show-off attitude of cosplayers, or that people see the few talented people who can do this stuff well and think it’s easy.

What we need instead is more panels with the passion and obsession of the folks running things like this year’s Takarzuka panel or Ayacon’s Rocket Scientist’s Guide to Space Anime. I shall be putting my money where my mouth is on this front next year, as Ayacon are accepting submissions for events already. I suggest anime/manga bloggers reading this who are planning on attending Ayacon, Kitacon or any of the other UK cons next year do the same. While the people running conventions might have seemingly lost interest in anime/manga, there will be people attending who haven’t, so you’ll find an audience.

Now, had the Amecon gone swimmingly they might have changed my mind about not attending again, but the lack of signs/internal maps, a Student Union that was grim bordering on squalid (you should not be able to smell urine where food is being served) and buildings that were too far apart did a good job of killing any sort of good vibes the convention might have generated.

So I’m out.

Related posts:

1. Ayacon 09 pocket write up
2. London Expo – This time I actually went inside!
3. Amecon 2008 report

I mean, who wouldn’t want to be interested in something where everyone is sounding the death knell and blaming the fans?

Doesn’t that sound like the fun party you would want to be seen at?

—

One thing that struck me in the wake of Satoshi Kon’s death was the fact that a number of  pro- and amateur-industry commentators have crafted a narrative of The Doom That Came To The Anime Industry that they must add to at all times.

For those people, Kon’s death can’t just be the premature death of a talented individual, it has to be tied into the ongoing narrative of how Japanese cartoons are going to Hell in a handbasket.

I’ll cut them some slack, along the people whose first concern seems to be “is his last film going to be released?”, as they are common responses to death, particularly the deaths of creative people who you only really know through their work.

I’m more curious as to how commentators form their ongoing narratives in their writing, and more importantly, identifying what my own are. Pretty sure I’ve been guilty of selling the anime doomsday scenario into the past, especially in the Hate Fun posts (which are mainly hyperbole and exaggeration, plus incredibly easy to write), though I’ve tried to move away from that somewhat this past year towards getting a better, broader perspective.

Related posts:

1. Death of Anime Panels missing from Anime Expo 2008′s programme.
2. This post is basically the opposite of twitter.
3. Twitter Updates for 2008-08-19

• Durarara Donuts & Coffee Ad
• Golgo 13 Caffeine Pills Ad
• Murphy’s Irish Stout Ad
• Durarara G Fantasy Ad
• Lupin III Esso Ad
• Durarara Pocky Ad
• Giant Robo Fitz Ad
• Masahiro Chono 2012 Blu Ray Ad
• Kabutoborg x 300 Trailer
• Kabutoborg x Evangelion Trailer
• Chargeman Ken 20th Century Fox Opening
• Oishinbo MAD
• Gurren Lagann x Cutey Honey OP
• Neuro x Guu DX OP
• VuVu ChaCha OP
• Cat GONG
• Kawaii Jenny x Jason Statham Ad
• Lupin OP Paint Shop Version
• TV Funhouse George Clooney/Speed Racer
• Takayuki Hamada Animator AMV
• Chargeman Ken Fan Animation
• Ranma x Sexy Commando OP
• Transport for London Music Video
• Broken Wear
• Alpaca Bebop
• Hotchpotch Station Queen Sketch
• Hetalia x Bacanno OP
• Pokemon x Naruto OP
• Backyard version of WWE
• Yu-Gi-Oh MAD
• Evangelion / K-On Crossover
• Stefania Rotolo Live Goldrake Theme
• Durarara x Kyouran Kazoku Nikki OP
• Evangelion vs GI Joe vs Transformers
• Final Fantasy MAD
• Jumbo Tsuruta Mario Sketch
• Golgo 13 vs. MGS
• Golden Eggs x K-On OP
• TV Funhouse – Kobayashi
• Toshiyuki Inoue Animator AMV
• Big Fire Haruhi Dance
• Sengoku Basara x Giant Robo OP
• F1 x Sexy Commando OP
• U900 – Twist and Shout
• My Boyfriend Is The President
• Idolmaster x Ante Up

The biggest walk out was during Ante Up. Anime fans not liking rap music? What a surprise! Of course I’ve often found the opposite to be true in that rap fans will frequently like anime. From my point of view the Transport for London was the best video, as the open mouthed expressions of bewilderment on the audience’s faces was a cruel delight for me.

Related posts:

1. MADstravaganza playlist
2. MADstravaganza 2 playlist
3. MADstravaganza III @ Ayacon 2009

Going to try and resurrect some old post themes this week, to see if I can get some “appointment internet” going while I work on some long form posts in the background.

This particular Animator AMV for Toshiyuki Inoue’s work got a strong reaction from the audience when I played it during my MADstravaganza panel at Amecon this past weekend. The panel in its original form started life as an animator focussed panel 3 years ago, but gradually broadened to include everything I like that doesn’t get covered in other panels at UK conventions. Which at this point also includes anime and manga…

This year I decided to drop a couple of Animator AMVs back into the panel to gauge the response. I’ve already built a decent sized audience now, so I can see what else I can throw at them. I was pleased with the responses they got, and this one in particular got a strong response. I was left with the impression that it’s not so much that people don’t have animators whose work they like, it’s more that they don’t know they do.

One of the big inspirations for that first panel in 2007, was Tony Robinson’s Stay Tooned show for the BBC. It took what was a standard cartoon compilation programme that the BBC would run after Grandstand, and added a layer of education to it. In half an hour you could learn who made the different cartoons and what the different elements were that they brought to it. Without that, I don’t think Tex Avery and Bob Clampett would have clicked with me in the same way, and I think that little bit of information needed to join the dots is what the majority of anime viewers lack.

Related posts:

1. MAD Mondays – Toshiyuki Inoue
2. MAD Mondays – Naoki Tate
3. MAD MONDAYS – Masami Obari

Are you at Amecon? Do you want a break from the rain and walking ridiculous distances between non-descript academic buildings? Then come to MADstravaganza, tonight, at 8pm, in the Dorothy Hodgkin building’s Lecture Theatre 1 (the main theatre opposite the main entrance).

FEATURING:

CHARGEMAN KEN | KABUTO BORG VxV | DURARARA | GURREN LAGANN | NEURO | HETALIA | BUBU CHACHA | FINAL FANTASY | SUPER MARIO BROS | METAL GEAR SOLID | KAWAII JENNY | K-ON | LUPIN III | GIANT ROBO | SEXY COMMANDO | RANMA 1/2 | SPEED RACER | KAIJI | COWBOY BEBOP | BACANNO | POKEMON | NARUTO | EVANGELION | YU-GI-OH | GRENDIZER | IDOL MASTER | GOLGO 13

Seriously, what else are you going to do?

Related posts:

1. MADstravaganza 4 Playlist
2. MADstravaganza III @ Ayacon 2009
3. MADstravaganza 2 playlist

AMECON
Saturday 14th August
8pm in Hodgkin LT1

Related posts:

1. Countdown to MADstravaganza 4!
2. Here is the alternative programming you requested.
3. FINAL REMINDER

This? On a loop for 2 hours?

No! Of course not! There’s only one way to find out what the MADstravaganza holds for YOU and that is to be at AMECON! On Saturday 14th August! At 8pm! In Hodgkin LT1!

Related posts:

1. Countdown to MADstravaganza 4! Five Days To Go!
2. FINAL REMINDER
3. IT’S HERE!

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it”. – EB White.

Like that is going to stop me.

The Seitokai Yakuindomo anime started recently as part of the summer season of anime. It’s based on Tozen Ujiie’s 4-panel gag manga that currently runs in Weekly Shonen Magazine. The gags are hung on the premise of an all-girls high school having to open its doors to male students due to a falling birth rate (Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight! also uses falling birth rate for a springboard). The main characters are three girls on the school council and the boy they press gang onto the council to represent the new gender in the school. So far, so cliched. School councils and press ganging people onto committees seem to be some of the most popular “me-too” ideas in manga and light novels at present.

The manga of Seitokai Yakuindomo stands out from its peers and influences on two main points. First off, it’s very low on fan service. In fact in terms of art it’s less salacious than Azumanga Daioh. Compare these bikini pin ups, Tozen Ujiie uses far less suggestive angles than Kiyohiko Azuma, who seemed to love that “looking up at boobs” angle more and more as Azumanga Daioh progressed.

The second point is in direct contrast to the first, indeed without the first it would not be as effective. Namely, “dirty jokes”. Obviously this is hardly unique, we’ve already had B Type H System adapted this year, another series whose female lead is sex-obsessed. The differences are that Seitokai Yakuindomo isn’t visually explicit, there’s no romantic underpinnings and while the lead does/says stupid things, she isn’t a complete idiot. Just a partial one when the gag demands it.

Most of all though, the series is highly focussed on gags over characterisation. The four main characters are basically there to be shuffled about into various combinations to set up and deliver gags. In fact they are barely characters. You’ve got Takatoshi (male, defacto straight man), Shino (President of the Council, sex-obsessed), Aria (busty, tells dirty jokes) and Suzu (super-intelligent, comically short). They’re basically hooks to hang jokes on.

A typical gag set up will be as follows:

* Character A says something ostensibly serious.
* Character A then says something stupid/incongruous to the setup.
* Character B reacts to it.

Normally it will have the same character deliver the setup as the punchline, rather than break it down to a standard feed/comic distribution of roles. The straight man often only comes into play in the last panel, commenting on the idiocy that happened in panel 3.

This is why I don’t feel it’s setting out to shock by using “dirty jokes”, but rather just using sex as the incongruity. Sure, the toilet talk adds a frisson to the joke, particularly as the comic doesn’t try to be sexy, but the funny is in how it gets from something perfectly clean to something dirty. It’s cleverer than just drawing a cock on a blackboard (which is still admittedly funny). There’s other joke formula they use (and over use) like Suzu being too short to do something and something innocent looking like something rude from a certain angle, but the one above is probably the most common so far. It’s all very music hall, rather than out and out shock humour.

The anime on the other hand is different beast to the manga, and that’s what I really want to talk about here. If you weren’t aware of the manga, then from a distance the anime might just strike you as your typical slightly smutty otaku bait shows. One thing that really adds to that is the colour palette chosen. Seriously fuck this colour palette. Particularly when it saturates the incredibly dull opening sequence of episode one, playing like the opening to some dumb erotic video game being adapted into animated homeopathic porn. You know what palette I’m talking about.

Yeah, that fucking palette. There’s some blue-green in there too, but the backgrounds in that opening are awash with oversaturated pastel blues and pinks. The blues should be complementary to the browns of the school uniform (at least in the RGB spectrum), but they are so oversaturated that they overpower the characters. The pink just makes it so much worse. This sort of thing is what annoys me the most about modern anime, moreso than poor hat animation!

After a couple of minutes of this opening that seems to go on forever, we get an opening animation full of brazen dick jokes and one of those tedious peppy J-pop songs (not to mention some ludicrously ambitious panning animation).

Then we get an even more ludicrous 3D shot to set up the first gag. Which isn’t that great so let’s skip to the second gag, based on the second 4 panel strip. Prepare to have any humour present killed by over analysis.

Panel 1 / Shot 1

The anime flips the characters around, and pulls the focus from them by filling the screen with a busy, garish background that overpowers the layout. Apart from that it’s pretty much adhering to the strip.

Panel 2 / Shot 2

Here we get a complete change in camera position, as the middle two panels are pretty much the same shot it in the original. By changing the shot, the anime can recreate the beat made by the movement from one panel to another.

Panel 3 / Shot 3

Here the shot is much closer to the original layout, however we now get a budget saving move come into play, where the anime hides the mouth of the character talking off screen. Hooray, one less thing to animate!

Panel 4 / Shot 4

And finally, the punchline is delivered with a shot that’s pretty much straight out of the manga. However, the anime has second response shot that it adds…

This is the sort of shot that doesn’t really happen in the comic, if only due to the restraint of the 4 panel half page format. It’s one place where the anime can take advantage of it’s medium.

Now while that’s not the funniest or the most typical gag on the show, it does demonstrate what the show does best – nail the rhythm of a 4 panel gag strip.

Here’s a few other notes on how it takes advantage of the medium:

• Movement. Gags that rely on movement (e.g. the kick with the shoe flying off the foot) are framed to take advantage of actual movement.
• Asides. Not super-keen on this technique, if only because it’s been done to death by Family Guy, but it will throw in extra shots to illustrate something said, rather than keep to the proscenium leaning step ups preferred by the manga.
• Visual gags. Similarly it will sometimes add visual gags to the background that weren’t present originally. The best example is the strip where Aria’s suggesting boys might join the school to start a harem and in the anime we see someone in the background clearly hoping for just that. That strip’s anime version is also a good illustration of the asides the anime uses, as we get asides to both an 80′s style sex comedy and a Maria-sama ga Miteru style show to match what Aria’s suggesting.

However, as good as the anime is adapting individual strips from the manga, there’s a couple of flaws.

Firstly there’s the issue of repetition, both in terms of the structure and the punchlines. The structure of the jokes can be so similar, that over half an hour it can get wearisome. Add in the fact that so many punchlines seem really similar in the first episode and I wouldn’t blame you for tapping out. Personally I found enough to admire in the mechanics of it to push on, particularly as most of these sort of adaptations let the air out of the gags, and this gets the rhythm right. You, on the other hand, might find the amount of times Shino turns the conversation towards periods somewhat sapping.

The big flaw though reveals itself in episode 3. Or rather in the preview to episode 3. It just gets confirmed in episode 3.

One of the anime’s gags is that in the preview the characters mention what pages from the manga they are adapting next week. Episode 1 covers the first 32 pages, episode 2 covers pages 33 to 56, episode 3 on the other hand only covers page 57 to 60.

Four pages. In a half hour anime. Even Naruto manages more pages than that.

What this meant was we were going to get lots of anime “original” material. And by original I mean they turned the show into exactly what you might have thought it was going in. We get a load of fanservice, gags that outstay their welcome and finally, accidental bestiality.

There’s a fine line that the manga walks with its dirty jokes and in episode three the anime takes a running jump over that line. There’s clues that the screenwriter’s sense of humour might not be on the same page as the comic’s in the first two episodes, but by episode three it becomes crystal clear. The big problem with it is they don’t have the character Takatoshi around to act as straight man to Shino and so her digressions into stupidity go unanswered. Without someone to annoy them in the show, idiots are just annoying you the viewer. Plus she seems more idiotic when the anime screenwriters write her without the original manga’s scripts to base the gags on.

In short, it’s a really awful episode.

Episode four promises more manga adaptations so hopefully that will get back on form, though given how bad episode 3 was that’s the only chance I’m giving it.

If you do have an interest in the mechanics of gag anime I’d definitely recommend the first episode at the very least, as to me it felt much closer to the sort of shows we got during the dawn of late night anime than we get nowadays.

Oh, and the ending animation is really well made, to the point where you’ll wish you’d seen whatever show from an alternate reality it really belongs to.

Related posts:

1. B Type H System – Episode 1
2. Ladies versus Butlers! – Episode 1 (preview version)
3. Soul Eater – Episode 3

COME!

Related posts:

1. MADstravaganza @ Ayacon : What to expect.
2. MADstravaganza 2 playlist
3. MADstravaganza playlist

The following thoughts might find themselves in the even longer promised “Science Fiction is the Arthritis Crippling the Anime Industry” post, but then again I may never finish that, so might as well use them here while they’re fresh in my mind.

Going back through titles both pre- and post-1977 it struck me there’s threads of discussion that are perennially under-discussed in Anglophone online fandom outside of a few places like Mike Toole’s new column on Anime News Network or Ben Ettinger’s site.

When you do see discussion of older shows it has a tendency towards the sci-fi end of things. It’s not surprising given that anime otaku-dom as we know it likely has its birthplace in Yamato, both in Japan and the US. Your version of history is coloured by what you were exposed to. In the UK you’d be probably be breaking some kind of law if you failed to mention Dogtanian or Mysterious Cities of Gold in an anime history article. Because of that colouring of formative experience, some historical articles end up feeling like they are writing about the fandom, while ostensibly discussing the product, but that’s hardly unique to anime and manga fandom.

However, there’s a couple of big areas that struck me as being under discussed and they are…

Baseball

Forget giant robots or magical girls, there is one genre that weathers all storms in the audience’s taste. Baseball. There are so many big baseball series, both classic and modern, that I’m certain you could easily run a blog just about baseball anime/manga. In fact I’m surprised there aren’t any already. I tried searching for them, but while I found shows like Major discussed on baseball forums, I couldn’t find any dedicated baseball anime/manga blogs.

Possibly the reason for this is that baseball itself attracts an audience with a certain degree of nerdish obsession, given that it lends itself to the accrual and processing of statistics, and those people are already expending their blogging energies on REAL baseball.

Gags

Now I do write about this occasionally myself. I’ve discussed some recent gag manga adaptations and various shows from Wonderful among others. Not to mention the vast amount of coverage I’ve given to Urusei Yatsura. However I feel there’s some pretty severe gaps in my knowledge, for instance I’d love to see more of the second Tensai Bakabon series. I tend to find myself judging all long form gag anime against prime Oshii/Ito period Urusei Yatsura and all 4 panel gag manga adaptations against Akitaro Daichi’s adaptations, and as good as they are, I’m not sure they’re the real benchmarks.

There’s a vast amount of gag manga and anime that just falls under the radar, even incredibly popular series. And while there’s plenty being written about modern gag strips and anime like Hetalia or K-On, is often without a sense of the genre’s history. It often feels like Azumanga Daioh is year dot for some of the audience. As we’re seeing more and more of a move towards this genre again, particularly as web-anime and web-manga expand, a discussion of the genre in a historical context would be helpful.

Am I right? Are these under-discussed? Or are there people out there writing about these areas and I’m just sleeping on them?

Related posts:

1. Best Anime of the 00s – Read Or Die (2001)
2. The Title Blurb Read “Mighty Mecha Special!!”
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Gag Manga Biyori (2005)

It is the Mazinger Z chapter of Violence Jack.

Mazinger Z is Go Nagai’s seminal giant robot work from 1972 and revisited multiple times since them. We’ve already seen one sequel, Great Mazinger, and one alternate retelling, God Mazinger, referenced in Violence Jack. In turn, Yasuhiro Imagawa’s 2009 anime retelling of the series, Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z Hen, would reference Violence Jack heavily, including this arc specifically.

This arc does not involve giant robots. Oh no. Instead it involves a blind black martial artist, Jim Mazinger, who uses the young Japanese boy Kouji Kabuto as his eyes. By having Kouji sit on his shoulders and pilot him like a robot.

Jim is obviously a mix of Jim Kelly and Mazinger, with a bit of Gorongo from Zuba and Barry Hercules from Starfleet/X-Bomber (maybe Jun Hono’s father too? I don’t think I’ve seen his character design though). While Nagai had used stereotypical “sambo” characters during the sixties in titles like Shameless School, he certainly didn’t persist with it as his career progressed. Which kind of makes the cultural ignorance defence harder to take when people use it to defend manga character designs that persisted with that stereotype into the 80s and 90s. If someone like Go Nagai, who frequently goes out of his way to shock and offend, could make an effort back in the early 70s, then nobody following him really has any excuse.

Jim makes an appearance in Imagawa’s Shin Mazinger as the body that Viscount Pygman uses through much of the series, before eventually shedding that body for something resembling his traditional form. That in turn has echoes of a scene later in this particular arc, albeit with a different Mazinger cast member. I also wonder if the spear and lion we see him with in the opening episode are a reference to Gorongo from Zuba. More on the insanity that is Zuba in a later Violence Jack arc.

We open the arc with Mondo and Ryoma encountering Jim and Kouji destroying some evil karate practitioners. Kouji explains their plight while we see Doctor Hell’s evil karate dojo. Eventually Hell sends Ashura and three burly karate types to attack Kouji and Jim’s dojo. I’m going to guess those three would be analogues for particular Machine Beasts (the enemy mecha in Mazinger), not sure which though.

They attack while Kouji is away from Jim, murdering their students and taking advantage of Jim’s blindness. They are about to win when Violence Jack makes his one appearance this arc (not clear if it’s a vision or something physical), giving Kouji the chance to leap onto Jim’s shoulders. And then remove some heads from other shoulders!

Meanwhile Ryoma and Mondo are spying on some Amazonian looking martial artists dueling in the river. Naked. These are Aphrodite and Diana, based on the female robots from Mazinger. Ryoma and Mondo get spotted and surrounded by the women.

Back at the dojo we get a lengthy training sequence where Jim is training kids in karate. Sayaka, Boss, Mucha & Nuke show up during this sequence.

While Jim and Kouji prepare, Hell makes preparations of his own. Ashura trains more evil martial artists, and Hell recruits a gang of gunmen and assorted other hoodlums under the command of Count Brocken. Yes, he is headless here too…

Things begin to escalate as Brocken’s men arrive at the Kabuto dojo, Ryoma and Mondo are caught peeping by Aphrodite and Diana and Hell has a visitor at his own dojo. Kouji’s presumed dead father, Kenzo Kabuto!

As Jim makes short work of Brocken’s men, while Kenzo challenges Hell to a fight, which Hell accepts. Jim and Kouji then face the other evil karate experts that Ashura has brought with him.

Alas, tragedy awaits Jim as he faces Brocken. Brocken appears to be using a sword, but fells Jim with three gunshots. How you may ask? Well, Brocken is actually a pygmy on stilts wearing a trench coat and fake arms & head! This is why this is the best arc in Violence Jack.

All is not lost though, for back at Hell’s dojo, Kenzo defeats Hell in front of his men, tearing his heart out of his chest.

Aphrodite and Diana mop up the remaining members of Hell’s army, dispatching Brocken with a rock to the head. We then get a brief epilogue showing the grave of Jim Mazinger and the Kabuto dojo move on with their lives.

This is probably the purest remixing of another Nagai property in Violence Jack, mainly down to the fact Jack barely features in it. Instead the focus is just on changing elements of Mazinger into a martial arts movie parody. The flexible supernatural nature of the series means you can buy a headless hoodlum like Brocken, after all we’ve seen giants, demons and psychics already. So the gag of revealing him to be the Pygman stand-in in a ridiculous disguise, is further out there.

That flexible supernatural nature comes back in a big way during the next arc, where we get a prison exploitation movie homage/parody. More on that next time!

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Golden City
2. Violence Jack – Death Police
3. Violence Jack – Gekitou! Mondo

I wrote about the first three episodes and the gist of the show over here.

The first 12 episodes are really great, totally living up to the promise of those opening episodes. Had it stopped there, I’d probably love it as much as I did the same team’s Bacanno!. The problem is they then went straight into another 12 episode story arc.

That second arc unfortunately pales next to the first. It’s more to do with the strengths of the first arc than any specific flaws the second has. Particularly how those strengths aren’t able to be duplicated in the second arc due to the nature of the adaptation.

The big problem is that the first arc does a really great job of introducing characters, and there’s a lot of characters it has to introduce. The second arc has a lot less characters to fill us in on, and some of the new characters don’t get their backgrounds fleshed out.

Where the first arc felt like a series of interlocking origin stories, the second arc has to deal with a fairly linear gang war story. We do get a couple of new origin stories and a couple of fun character introductions in there, but it doesn’t compare with the weirdness of the first arc. Related to this is the second arc’s use of different narrators to relay different points of view of the narrative and characters isn’t as strong as the first arc’s episodes.

The second problem is that the lead of the first arc, Celty, is pushed into a supporting character role in the second arc, with Mikado, Masaomi and particularly Anri taking the lead roles.

Frankly, they aren’t as interesting as the adult characters, plus the plans of Izaya which set them up as the main characters, are revealed as delusions of grandeur by the end. Which is kind of the point, and you can appreciate that when the point is forcibly made by Simon in the final episode, but while you’re getting there you’re expecting a little more than what you get.

That plan of Izaya’s is probably the one weakness that is the arc’s own. The plan relies on that screen-writing cliche of not having characters talk to one another in order to keep the running time up and the story going. If the three had just talked honestly to one another the whole story would have lasted on episode. They give enough reasons to keep the characters emotionally isolated from each other, and that isolation is somewhat the theme of the arc, but I felt there was about one too many episodes of drawing that out. It passed from tension to frustration.

Had they put a gap between arcs, I think I’d have been a bit more accepting of the changes, but in contrast with the opening arc it was a little dissatisfying.

That being said, there’s still plenty to like in the second arc, particularly the various fight scenes with Shizuo and the inventive lengthy chase sequence where Anri is pursued by the Yellow Scarves. And there’s a pay-off between Izaya and Anri (and then Izaya & Simon) at the end that puts Izaya’s self-proclaimed “love” of humanity in a clearer light. Makes me wonder if there’s some subtle word play around that in the original Japanese dialogue that the Crunchyroll subtitles miss?

Certainly there’s nothing in the second half that would put me off wanting more Durarara!!, there’s still mysteries to be explored and it’s full of engaging characters. I just hope that further story arcs don’t rely on three teenagers not talking too one another to power twelve episodes worth of plot.

Related posts:

1. Durarara!! – Episodes 1, 2 & 3
2. Golgo 13 – Episode 2 – ROOM NO. 909
3. UK Anime Releases For 30/06/08

Related posts:

1. Your Go Nagai Live Action Ephemera of The Day
2. It’s 1994! Who had been “converted into a massive DP fan”?
3. Meanwhile… The Loch Ness Monster was proved a hoax.

My neck’s slowly getting back to game strength, so it’s time to return to my journey through my personal gaming history.

While a lot of gamers in the 90s were huge fans of Mark Rein·Hagen’s Vampire the Masquerade, I prefered Jonathan Tweet’s Over The Edge. The pair had created Ars Magica earlier in their careers, and their subsequent individual games are continuations both in gaming mechanisms and story elements.

However, rather than the abiding goth/metal/spiritualist/ecologist overtones of Rein·Hagen’s games, Tweet’s is (as a gamer I ran it with at university once said) Naked Lunch The RPG.

Taking place on the amoral Mediterranean island of Al Amarja, it’s a surreal thriller of game, one whose direction can vary greatly depending on the group of players. In part this is down the mix of influences Tweet brings the background of the game, but more over it is down the incredibly simple ruleset and the infinitely flexible character generation system it supports.

Like Tweet’s rewrite of D&D for the 3rd Edition, OTE is notable for being able to put the rules on a single page. Unlike D&D, it isn’t backing that up with pages of skills, spell lists, character classes, powers and monsters. Each character is described by three stats that are unique to them and a flaw. For anything else they either simply roll 2 dice for or they cannot do it at all. It’s a system that you can easily tear from the background material and use to for any material you want, as long as you’ve got a group who are willing to collaborate rather than play a RPG as some sort of contest between the players and the GM.

A typical Over The Edge game involves the player characters as tourists visiting (or fleeing to) Al Amarja. The why is usually down to the players, they might choose to start as a group or be thrown together by fate and the vagaries of Al Amarja’s immigration controls.

For instance, the last campaign I ran, the players were all recruited by a secret conspiracy who were battling a satanic children’s author in New York prior to being sent to Al Amarja to uncover the conspiracy said children’s author was part of. This being Over The Edge, both conspiracies were actually part of the same larger conspiracy, The Movers, a conspiracy so fractured, large and unwieldy that no one knows who is in charge (one published adventure explores this by having someone just decide that if they act like they are the leader it will have pretty much the same effect as if they were).

Having bought most of the material that was published for the game, I can safely say you can probably just get away with using the core rulebook. A lot of the adventures are fall between two stools, too detailed to improvise around, but not not detailed enough to hold you and your players interests. One of them is even a run around the sewers… Even EVERY Neverwinter Nights level designer figured that out as a setting, you don’t really need to drop money on clichés like that.

You’ll probably be able to put something better together using the vast amount background colour the rulebook provides and the characters your players create. The sourcebooks are stronger, and often have better adventures than the stand alone adventures, but they are not essential. Personally I really liked the Player’s Survival Guide, Weather The Cuckoo Likes and Friend or Foe? Thinking about it, while there’s nothing really essential in terms of supplements for running the game, the Survival Guide is definitely worth picking up. Lots of good ideas in there that go beyond just Over The Edge.

Easily in my top ten RPGs, the setting, rules and highly customisable character generation make it one of the best RPGs of the nineties. Possibly THE best. And if you are loving Durarara and like RPGs then you definitely want to pick Over The Edge up. Their mixes of the mundane, the weird and warring factions are pretty similar. Certainly enough that watching Durarara reminded me I had this post waiting to be finished in my drafts.

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1. CIOASIISAG Part 20 – Call of Cthulhu
2. CIOASIISAG Part 6: Warhammer Fantasy Role Play
3. CIOASIISAG Part 9 – Marvel Super Heroes

This was, of course, a show I had thoroughly PSHAW’D when it first appeared. Anthropomorphised countries? WWII? It sounded like a dreadful idea.

However, while writing the piece on Wonderful, I decided I ought to check out the big modern gag anime that I hadn’t already seen. Namely, Lucky Star, K-On and Hetalia. While Lucky Star and K-On don’t really work for me in the form they are in, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying Hetalia.

Despite what the loudest, most obnoxious parts of its fandom might suggest to you, it works on a variety of levels, not just that of pretty boys in uniforms. In fact, the pandering innuendo is probably the weakest aspect of its humour, which unfortunately becomes more of a crutch for the series than is in evidence during this first batch of episodes.

What the show is strongest on is the historical humour, often delivering jokes that are arguably too clever for their own good, due to their reliance on very specific historical and cultural events (what other anime is making Busby Stoop Chair gags?). I’m a big fan of overly specific humour and parody, but I can see how the need to research the history to get some of the jokes would be off putting. And to it’s credit it doesn’t overuse them, often using them a starting point, spinning the humour off the historical reference by using it’s main comedic weapon.

Namely, national stereotypes.

Now there certainly is the potential to be truly offensive here, and it’s easy to assume it would be by the description. Or indeed the name. However, from my point of view, it’s no more offensive than ‘Allo, ‘Allo and it’s probably about the geopolitics of WW2 to the same extent as that erstwhile British sitcom. Of course people complained about ‘Allo ‘Allo, so it’s not surprising that Hetalia has its critics too.

Where the series mainly confines its use of anthropomorphic geopolitics is in the non-WW2 sections, particularly the Chibitalia segments set during the Holy Roman Empire. The WW2 era is wisely left more for the broadest gags based on national stereotypes. Because some of those gags are very broad, it’s worth avoiding watching too many episodes in a row. There’s only so many jokes about Italy being obsessed with food and surrendering you can watch in one sitting, even if they are interspersed with sketches about historical border changes in Central Europe.

The writing is so all over the place and the animation functional but consistent, that it won’t rank up there with all time classic gag anime, but it’s not as dumb as it looks on the surface. Well, OK, it is that dumb sometimes, but it’s also too clever for its own good at other times. And the timing and editing is very good, light years ahead of the likes of Lucky Star and K-On.

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Luke and Professor Layton find themselves in a puzzle contest promising eternal life.

This film is not going to disappoint fans of the Professor Layton games, and there’s likely enough of those fans that it won’t need any other audience.

That being said, there’s only a couple of instances where familiarity with the games is intended, and frankly if you’ve only played the English language releases, they’ll likely leave you similarly non-plussed as the non-fans. You see, this film takes place after the fourth game in the series, part of a prequel continuity set before the games we’ve had translated so far.

That means there are a handful of characters it assumes you are familiar with, such as Layton’s other assistant, Remi Altava and Inspector Grosky, the ridiculously manly Scotland Yard detective, whose chest hair is always trying to escape his shirt. You won’t have met them yet unless you’ve played Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Flute, but with one exception you can easily grasp their characters within seconds of their introduction.

Otherwise, it’s easy to grasp what’s going on in the story, no matter how preposterous it gets. And it does. It is Professor Layton after all. However, like the writing on the games, it does such a good job of drawing you into Layton’s world, that it is still completely possible for you to guess the final reveal, even though it is completely outside of our reality. It makes complete sense given what you’ll have seen up to that point and it plays fair in giving you clues to that reveal. The Sherlock Holmes influences in the characters and the Lupin III influences in the game’s OTT set pieces, means it all transfers very well to the screen. Even the puzzle sections work well, and they even find a way to fit the games typography organically into the film.

Visually it continues the look of the OLM produced cut scenes and Level 5′s character design. This means you get a cast full of big headed grotesques and weirdos, who move in a very pleasing manner with some strong camera movements. I really, really like some of the running sequences in both the film and the game cutscenes. They are just so full of character.

Layton himself is probably the weak point, the would-be iconic nature of his design and particularly his dot eyes, leaves him rather plain in terms of expression when placed next to plucky Luke, the boisterous Grosky or the ass-kicking Remi. Though that might be just because he’s a British Gentleman as the script continually reminds you to comic effect. Though apparently being a British Gentleman means chatting during an opera performance and blocking the view of the people behind with your big top hat. He does get an action scene of his own near the climax that is quite fun despite the limitations in his character design.

Definitely a must see for fans of the games, but certainly worth a rental or visit to a screening when it becomes available whoever you are.

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1. Welcome To The Space Show
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3. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

Sci-fi take on a traditional children’s adventure yarn, told with humour and an imaginative line in aliens.

Welcome to the Space Show is a project from the “Besame Mucho” team of director Koji Masunari, writer Hideyuki Kurata and producer Tomonori Ochikoshi, along with their Read or Die collaborator, character designer/animation director Masashi Ishihama.

It tells the tale of 5 children who get whisked off into an adventure in space during their annual holiday in the countryside. “Five Go Off To Space” if you like. It definitely adheres to the unsupervised nature of popular children’s adventure fiction. There’s even a dog and evil smugglers!

What weaknesses there are, seem to come from Kurata. The story is too long, caused by there being a few too many elements that needed to be set up to get to the ending. It’s not that it really lags, it’s just that it feels like there’s just a litle too much of it. It really pushes the number of “Chekhov’s gun” moments you can have in a story. On top of that, the villains are sketches rather than fully drawn personalities and lack fleshed out motivations. That’s something that you could see in the team’s Read Or Die projects too, a focus on the mechanics of the plot over clarifying the actual reasons it was all happening.

However, Kurata is also great at writing gags and likeable heroines. The comedy in the film is one of the film’s strongest points, full of genuinely amusing lines and situations. And the central conflict isn’t really the one between the heroes and the villains, but between two cousins who have fallen out over a lost rabbit. That totally human dilemma grounds the sci-fi lunacy that surrounds it, and allows the film to get away with leaving its villains with motives that are only hinted at.

The other overwhelmingly strong aspect of the film is the visual inventiveness, particularly in terms of creating the sense of a universe teeming with diverse life forms. In the Q&A after the screening, Masunari said there were about 400 different alien designs used through the film. Personally it took me back to some of the brief insane crowd scenes you’d get in Urusei Yatsura, where they’d populate a crowd with characters from earlier episodes. Except in Welcome To The Space Show, this was happening for most of the running time of the film. It avoids being a distraction, instead it works more like the little incidental gags you’d get in the What-A-Mess books. I suspect rewatching will pay dividends as extra visual gags reveal themselves.

Of the three films I saw at the BFI Anime Weekend, it was easily my favourite despite its flaws. While not a classic, it’s a good family film. More importantly it’s more talent making the leap from TV/OAVs to movies, and it’s a strong debut feature for Sony’s A-1 Pictures. Would love to see them get Kazuki Akane & Hiroshi Onogi (Noein, Birdy The Mighty Decode) to create an original film too, so hopefully this one is a big enough hit to make them continue on the feature film route (Welcome To The Space Show is yet to be released in Japan, this was the second screening in the world so far).

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2. #12. Space Battleship Yamato
3. Professor Layton & The Eternal Diva

Boy, oh boy, were there ever some nerds in the audience for this one. Possible the most heightened air of nerd excitement I’ve felt in a room. Even the sugar rush costumed kids of the MCM Expos don’t get as excitable and fidgety as a room of Evangelion fans, most of whom had just sat through the first of these “remakes”.

They liked it a lot, giving it the most applause of the three films I saw.

I’m not so sure about it. It felt a lot like Peter Jackson’s Two Towers, in that there’s a lot to admire visually, but in terms of story, it’s all middle and it goes on too long. There are elements, like the new pilot character, that you are going to have to wait until the next film to get some feeling of whether they were worth including in this film. I liked the character, but at the same time, her presence in the film did little but add two fight scenes that were arguably two too many. Even if one of the fights was one of the better sequences in the film, I was getting burnt out on robot action by that point.

The other elephant in the room is the film’s nature as a reworking of material I’m already familiar with. That makes it hard to judge as a piece of work on it’s own in the same way that the film version of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy gets judged against the radio, TV and novel versions. Or the Red Dwarf film would if it ever got made. Or Michael Mann’s Miami Vice film was against Michael Mann’s Miami Vice tv series (or to a lesser extent Heat & LA Takedown). Not to mention the multitude of BBC comedies that leapt from Radio to TV as I was growing up and would disappoint me with either changes in cast or straight recycling of gags. And once you move away from projects where the original creator was involved in some way, then the list gets ever bigger. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Evangelion gets reworked in this way, it’s more surprising that we don’t get more projects like this based on popular anime or manga. Which we probably are. I don’t have the time to plot remakes against time today.

For this particular film, the thing that bugged me was that there are elements in the film that go so far in the opposite direction from original TV series that you wonder if they are doing it because it’s right for the story, or because it’s a surprise for established fans, or because we’re going to get an ending that somehow unifies the whole Evangelion canon.

The way it ends suggests it will only take one more film to retell the remaining portion of the series and/or End of Evangelion, as they had originally indicated. So what is that fourth film with supposedly all new content going to be, and will it add extra meaning to the changes in the same way radio adaptations of later Hitchhiker’s books had to make sense of the conflicting book and radio continuities? The thing that really struck me about the changes was how positive some of the outcomes are to situations that went really badly in the TV series. Is that just a change in mood that the new character also seems to reflect, or is it something else? What about the visual elements cribbed from End of Evangelion rather than the TV series? Is that just because they are neat or are they trying to suggest something else?

Due to the nature of the original series, I’m left with this nagging feeling they are deliberately trying to be tricksy, and that they are going to end up disappointing me by trying too hard. In fact, even if they aren’t being tricksy, the fact that I suspect they are, might mean they’ll end up disappointing me anyway.

The counter-evidence to those continuity swerves is that, like the first film in this remake sequence, they have stripped a lot of the ambiguity of the plot away by putting it into focus more than the original did. You get much more of a sense of the political chicanery in the world and a clearer view of the arms race going on between NERV and SEELE. Where the TV series focused on the people, this series of films focuses more on the events. That may be what they are going for and everything else is just phantoms created in the mind of viewers already familiar with the material.

So, odd film and indifferent review. Which is about how I feel about the original series too. It’ll probably take someone with no Evangelion baggage at all to get a clear view on how well it works as a film, rather than as a pop culture ouroboros.

—

And now a short aside.

I don’t know if I’ve just become hyper aware of it, or simply that I’ve seen UFO on ITV4 in recent years, but in the first half, maybe two thirds, the Gerry Anderson influence seemed even stronger than the TV series. Particularly the fly past the SEELE moonbase, the shots of Tokyo-3, the whole visit to the aquarium sequence, the strobe effects in the Entry Plug and the personality differences in Rei. She really reminded me more of Marina from Stingray here than she ever did in the TV series.

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Cars are raced. Things blow up. Friendship and love.

Animation work by Takeshi Koike is a rare enough occurrence to make it a big deal. Well worth dropping the £30 to go to the Sci-Fi London “Manga All-Nighter” and setting aside two days to recover from sitting in a cinema all night. So it was good to learn that Redline lived up to the hype that my brain had been feeding to itself for the past three years or so.

I could have done without the sound problems we endured for the first ten minutes or so, where they somehow lost one channel on the left hand side. The channel with dialogue and small sound effects in. Nothing important, you know? It was incredibly distracting, making it hard to get into the movie and started the evening on a sour note. Not sure what was responsible for it, the cinema or the digital copy being shown as none of the other films had the same problem. In the end the sound got jiggled around, and while we still appeared to be missing one channel, we didn’t seem to be missing any actual sound.

Amazing how actually being able to hear what is being said and having all the sound effects really helps a film! Particularly one that is charging straight at you, screaming its head off like Redline.

The trailer released last year gives you a good taste of the film, though I don’t believe that, beyond the title animation, any of that footage is actually in the finished film. There are scenes that are similar, possibly even containing some identical key animation, but there’s significant differences in the setting and events portrayed in the trailer and the finished product.

The story that the film hangs its over the top cartoon racing action on is the tale of Sweet JP, a a talented racer fallen on hard times, forced to fix races due to the mafia debts of his best friend. Despite that, due to events in the pre-credits opening race, he accidentally finds himself placed in the top race in the universe, Redline.

Redline is to be run through Roboworld, a planet whose ruler is none too pleased to have the media circus show up on his planet as he doesn’t want his secret violations of peace treaties being shown across the universe. Which will be kind of hard to keep secret as the Redline course is due to go through his secret military compounds.

Finally, JP is falling for “Cherry Boy Hunter” Sonoshee, the racer who beat him in the opening race and who had inspired him to turn pro back when they were younger.

So you’ve got love, friendship, war and really loud cars going really fast – what more can you want from a film?

“We really want non-Japanese to see and appreciate this work”, Koike said in an interview. He doesn’t have too much to worry about there. The character design is varied, expressive and accessible. Just having your characters have lips is often enough to get people over their “I don’t like anime” position. The setting and action calls to mind obvious reference points like Speed Racer, Cannonball Run and obviously Wacky Races. The Wacky Races comparison is worth dwelling on. For starters, Wacky Races is very popular in Japan, so I don’t think appealing to non-Japanese is necessarily going to have negative effect on domestic performance. Secondly, it’s not afraid to go for blatantly Wacky Races style gags amidst all the sci-fi chaos. So fearless is it, that its conclusion is one such gloriously perfect gag.

But there’s other influences there too. You’ve got European sci-fi comics influencing some of the grander sci-fi designs, where Roboworld have apparently designed everything with inspiring awe in mind, rather than practicality. And there’s a Jamie Hewlett influence in there too, most obviously in the Booka-like Trava (returning from Koike and Redline collaborator Katsuhito Ishii’s Trava Fist Planet), but also there was a forgotten Hewlett strip called Fireball that also dealt with a sci-fi take on Cannonball Run / Wacky Races. There’s even some Mike Judge in there with Johnny Boy, the Beavis-looking sidekick to the Batman-styled bounty hunter Lynchman. The breaking down of Koike’s visual influences could easily be a post in itself, needless to say having a frame of reference beyond other anime is a great boon.

Most importantly, it’s a cartoon that’s not afraid to be a cartoon in the loudest, most over the top manner possible. It doesn’t have much more to say than that friendship and love are awesome things, but that’s perfectly OK as it’s saying it in a way that is just as awesome. It’s the first anime since FLCL that’s really clicked with me on a visceral level. If they’d offered me a VHS copy for £100 immediately after the film ended, I’d probably have bought it.

I hope this gets a UK DVD release sooner rather than later, but in the meantime I’d be happy just to see it in the cinema again. So don’t miss out if it you get the chance to see it.

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Superhero comic readers are a bloodthirsty lot. They often call for the death of characters, in the belief it somehow adds “realism” and makes stories “important”. They will then go on to complain that the deaths they get feel empty, because characters are always coming back to life.

These people have got it all wrong.

What causes the deaths to mean nothing is the fact that there are too many of them. A character’s death can’t be treated as an important event, when these “important events” seem timetabled. The reason Gwen Stacey or Captain Mar-Vell’s deaths are treated with such reverence is not because they’ve never been brought back to life, but because they happened at a time when they had a chance to stand out.

X-Force #26 and One Piece Chapter 573 both feature characters getting killed by a punch through the chest. Only one is effective.

Eichiro Oda’s One Piece is notable for how rarely it uses it death to wring out an emotional response from the reader. He doesn’t need to, his got the tools to do that with just having people raise their arms in the air or place a hat on a head. For the most part he’s reserved the death of sympathetic characters for origin stories told in flashback. That, combined with an early interview with Oda and some ludicrous near-death experiences characters went through during the Alabasta arc, gave readers the impression that people wouldn’t die in the ongoing story.

In Chapter 573 he proved them wrong. The past 50 or so chapters had involved the hero of One Piece, Monkey D. Luffy, attempting to rescue his adoptive brother, Portgas D. Ace from execution at the hands of the Marines. He succeeded in this attempt, only for Ace to be killed saving Luffy from Admiral Akainu, a particularly driven Marine with the power to turn into magma. Ace had actually only appeared a few chapters of the manga, but because this was the first death of a sympathetic character in the ongoing timeline of the book, not to mention the emotional investment the reader had with Luffy’s attempt to rescue Ace, it had a genuine impact on the readership. A readership that had been growing over the storyline, due the stakes involved.

X-Force #26 is chapter five of the current X-Men mega crossover event, Second Coming. It’s written by Craig Kyle and Chris Yost, two writers who have the opposite reputation to Eiichiro Oda when it comes to death. In the opening chapter we learn that during the last event they wrote, Necrosha, three X-Men died. By the time X-Force #26 rolls around, another X-Man has already died (Ariel, a little used character from Fallen Angels), a villain has been killed (the frequently dead Cameron Hodge) and so have many un-named goons. It’s a franchise that is up to its ears in death.

So when beloved, long time X-Man, Nightcrawler takes arm through the chest to save the “mutant messiah” Hope, rather than being an emotional moment, it’s just another death in a series that is soaked in it. Though, in the same way that the emotional investment you have in Luffy is also a factor in addition to the novelty of Ace’s death, there’s plenty of other factor’s hurting Nightcrawler’s death scene too.

There’s no emotional investment in either Hope or Nightcrawler, let alone between them. Unless you’ve been reading Cable, Hope is just a MacGuffin in this story. Not even a good MacGuffin, we’re told she’s important, but never actually why she is. And Nightcrawler has barely featured in what is ostensibly his book, Uncanny X-Men, let alone X-Force or Cable. Plus, for long time fans like myself, it’s been ages since he’s been written as the Nightcrawler we actually liked, as writer after writer seemed to just focus on the catholicism aspect of his character, rather than the fun loving guy Claremont wrote, or the most sensible man in the room of Alan Davis and Warren Ellis’ Excalibur. But that’s really beside the point, they’ve spent two years building up to this event and they kill off two characters who had next to nothing to do with the build. It’s fictional collateral damage.

Then there’s the matter of there being no emotional investment in the villains. The villains of Second Coming are the dregs of 90s X-Men comics, losers like Graydon Creed and Bastion. They’re a clumsy metaphor that doesn’t make sense any longer, in the same way the reduction in the number of mutants completely missed the point too.

In One Piece, even Akainu, whose appearances are dwarfed by Second Coming’s band of wastrels, garners more of an emotional response, because he’s terrifyingly easier to understand. He’s the soldier who has abandoned personal choice in order to simply follow the rule of law. He’s not pantomime villain evil, he’s a man so devoted to an implacable set of values that he can’t be argued with. On his own that might be an overly simplistic villain, but he’s set in contrast with the behaviour of the other Admirals, and the other Marines as a whole.

There isn’t the same distinction between Second Coming’s villains, who might as well be chanting “WE HATE MUTANTS AND WE HATE MUTANTS! WE HATE MUTANTS AND WE HATE MUTANTS! WE HATE MUTANTS AND WE HATE MUTANTS! WE ARE THE MUTANT HATERS!” all through the book. Reaction to Ace’s death was anger at the character of Akainu, reaction to Nightcrawler’s death is either indifference or anger at the writers/editorial.

The frequency with which those are the reactions to death in superhero comics is a good sign that there’s something deeply wrong with how death is handled in superhero comics.

To conclude, we need Flex Mentallo back in print so The Hoaxer can tell these superhero writers and readers how it is:

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Algebraic!

It’s not just Japanese cartoons for kids that I watch, I also watch American cartoons for kids. Most of my search traffic over the years has been for the early post I made about Chowder. It’s now roughly half-Chowder, half-Violence Jack. Oh what have I wraught?

I was all over the original Random! Cartoons short for Adventure Time like a hot rash, pointing it at everyone I could. Once it was announced it was getting a full series on Cartoon Network I was super-stoked. Eventually it arrived and it’s probably my favourite cartoon on right now (close race between this and The Tatami Galaxy).

While it’s not quite the same (Finn is now the original Finn voice’s younger brother. AND he has a different coloured shirt), it is still as awesome. Unlike Cartoon Network’s other new PG rated show, the thoroughly obnoxious Generation Rex, Adventure Time is incredibly charming, despite being violent, scatological, horrific and generally a bit odd.

Not to mention, like all great TV shows for children, it’s fairly traumatising on a regular basis.

If you’re an American or can play one on the internet, you can watch episodes on the Cartoon Network website, so check it out.

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Boy has overly romantic view of college life. College life fails to live up to his fantasies and he becomes the enemy of romance, via the “help” of a trouble causing friend. Possible divine intervention occurs.

Let’s get the major issue with The Tatami Galaxy out the way first. It is very wordy. I think the wordiness itself is more of an issue than the rate at which the words are delivered (very fast).

I’m not sure if this wordiness is born from it being an adaptation of a novel, or if it’s a specific creative choice. I’d guess the former, simply because Masaaki Yuasa’s other works aren’t wordy in this way and novel adaptations in anime (and elsewhere) find themselves driven by internal monologue in the same way this episode was. Not having access to the original text though means that’s all guesswork on my part, so take it with a pinch of salt. Another difference between this and previous Yuasa projects is the involvement of playwright Makoto Ueda (Summer Time Machine Blues, Go Find a Psychic!), so that may also have influenced the verbosity of the production.

So, having established that monologues are often par for the course for these sorts of adaptation, how does The Tatami Galaxy deal with it? By going about three times as fast as anyone else would go.

That works well in terms of giving the episode a rhythm to work to, but it presents challenges in watching subtitled animation that don’t necessarily exist with conversational dialogue at the same speed. The rhythm of back and forth dialogue lends itself better to rhythms of reading and watching animation than more complex monologues do. If you want a comparison with an English language cartoon, try to imagine watching Tex Avery’s Symphony in Slang with subtitles. Even then, the narration seems positively sedate compared to The Tatami Galaxy‘s. I wonder if the between narration beats that Avery leaves are also present in Tatami Galaxy, but lost when you have to read as well.

I thought I had coped perfectly well, and never felt I was struggling, but going back and watching again without subtitles, I discovered images and details in the animation I’d completely overlooked. That’s fine however, as it’s a joy to watch again and again (though I didn’t go quite as mad with it as I did Kemonozume‘s opening episode which I’d watched three times before I even had subtitles to go with it).

So don’t let the machine gun monologues put you off, as ultimately it is a very minor quibble for what is likely to be one of the best TV shows of the 21st Century.

Visually it’s a treat. It’s full of fantastic shots, movement and character design. Despite it looking different, once again, from Yuasa and Nobutaka Ito’s previous collaborations, you can still tell it is their vision that is driving the overall look of the show. That has a lot to do with the fact that not many creators working in anime would have created a cast of such diverse body shapes and facial features, something they also did in both Kemonozume and Kaiba.

In this episode you’ve got the relatively normal looking lead and the object of his affection, Akashi (though she too is not above cartoon warping of her form), and on the opposite side of the design spectrum, the devilish looking Akashi and a god of matchmaking who’d give Popeye a chinferiority complex.

Ozu is clearly the character that people are going to have most fun animating, and his voice actor Hiroyuki Yoshino (Kazuma Momota in Kemonozume) seems to be relishing the scenery chewing the role gives him. It’s great to have cartoon characters who act like they are. And the final scene he’s involved in this episode leaves so many questions unanswered that you’ve got see more.

If you are in the US you can watch this via Funimation’s various portals, which is great news for Americans who like awesome animation. The rest of us outside of American or Japan will have to use the Evil Powers of the Internet to get to it. It’s worth it either way, as it is just a joy to see something both this idiosyncratic and this well made.

Related posts:

1. Galaxy Cyclone Braiger – Episode 1
2. HATE FUN 2001! Galaxy Angel
3. #37 – Galaxy Express 999

Fuji TV’s toying with late night anime was somewhat sporadic in the early part of the 00s. With titles like Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, Texhnolyze, Girls Bravo and Samurai Champloo, it felt as hotch-potch as TV Tokyo or TBS’ schedules, albeit in much smaller portions.

In spring 2005, that all changed.

A programming block called noitaminA began on April 14th 2005, opening with an adaptation of Chika Umino’s manga Honey & Clover. The aim was to create anime for an audience outside of the young men who most late night anime was being aimed at. As I noted in Part 2, NTV’s Nana adaptation took off around the same time (April 5th). While that was a success, they didn’t continue to mine the adult female audience in the same way that noitaminA did.

Some people make the mistake in thinking that in the mere act of not alienating women, noitaminA is aimed solely at them. Only five have been adapted from shojo or josei manga (though admittedly two have come back for sequels) and while one was originally intended to be adapted from a shojo manga (Genji Monogatari Sennenki), it ended up as something different.

The remaining shows have either been original material, shonen manga, seinen manga, novel or play adaptations. The real appeal is simply that the shows are being made for non-otaku adults. It’s telling that Honey & Clover, Hataraki Man, Hakaba Kitaro (as GeGeGe no Kitaro), Nodame Cantabile, Antique Bakery and Trapeze have had live action versions, this is material that naturally has a wider appeal than just the “typical” adult watcher of Japanese cartoons. Moyashimon is next to get a live-action show, in the noitaminA slot itself and apparently there are plans for a Paradise Kiss live action film.

I originally thought that the Moyashimon live action could have been a possible death knell. If it gets better ratings, surely it would be better to put live action in that slot more often? However, they’re extending the slot this month to run an hour and we’ll now get two shows in the slot at a time. So I was probably panicking over nothing.

Between NTV’s schedules and noitaminA the discerning, but lazy, adult anime viewer who dislikes the trends of late night anime elsewhere should find something to enjoy. Sci-fi fans might have to search elsewhere mind, as might people like me who want interesting animation above all else. Like NTV’s shows, while the material noitanimA delivers is usually strong, it’s not always guaranteed to match that in the visuals (though their hit rate is probably stronger than most anime slots).

—

Honey & Clover – This is one of those shows, like Genshiken, where I got to an episode and thought “It can’t possibly get any better than this” and stopped watching. In this case I think it was the Twister episode, though it’s been an age since I watched it so I might be wrong. Anyway this is the show where Kenichi Kasai broke out from the pack in terms of being a director whose work was really recognisable, and well worth your time. It’s quite possible that anime would look very different without it.

Paradise Kiss – I believe I first encountered Osamu Kobayashi’s work with his End of the World short and the inclusion of Lolita No. 18 in the opening scene made me an insta-fan. Unlike many other people working in anime, with Kobayashi you have the sense that he has a frame of reference outside of other anime (see his Charles Schulz/Jean-Luc Godard mashup ED for Hanamaru Kindergarten). While this, like his work on BECK, is Kobayashi filtered through the visuals of the manga it’s adapting, it still feels identifiably his work. The sexuality, the ultra realistic backgrounds, and the trademark ED sketches, you aren’t likely to mistake it for somebody else. Even the choice of Franz Ferdinand‘s “Do You Want To” as the ending theme seems a particularly Kobayashi choice given the visual name drops they got in BECK.

Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales - I tried this at the time it was airing, but the first story didn’t do anything for me and so ended up missing the piece de resistance of this horror anthology – Bake Neko. Kenji Nakamura’s tale of a mysterious Medicine Seller made enough impact to warrant the spin-off series Mononoke.

Jyu-Oh-Sei – Shojo manga adaptation I know nothing about. It is dirt cheap on play.com at the moment though – worth getting? I’ve liked some Hiroshi Nishikiori shows, but I find he tends to be as good as his material.

Honey & Clover II – The rest of the manga finished off by the not as good as Kenichi Kasai director, Tatsuyuki Nagai.

Hataraki Man – Competent adaptation of Moyoko Anno’s publishing manga. There’s a tendency to over-praise shows that simply offer a different sort of narrative by dint of the material they are adapting. Hataraki Man is one of those shows. It lacks the visual flair of Honey & Clover or Paradise Kiss, instead favouring slick but forgettable interpretations of Anno’s art.

Nodame Cantabile - Hot off a TV dramatisation, Tomoko Ninomiya’s tale of classical musicians in love came to noitaminA. Honey & Clover’s Kenichi Kasai was in the director’s chair and brought as similar delicate touch to this material. The biggest hit of the noitaminA slot, it’s third and final season just ended this year.

Mononoke – Sequel to Ayakashi’s Bake Neko arc, I wrote about it here.

Moyashimon – Like Hataraki Man, this suffers a little from resting on the laurels of the premise of the manga it’s adapting. Of course, the premise is a doozy – an agriculture student can see and communicate with microorganisms. Add to that the strong design of microbes and it adds up to a successful show. The live action may actually work better by limiting the animation to the microbes. We shall see.

Hakaba Kitaro – The 6th TV adaptation of Shigeru Mizuki’s supernatural manga, this time using the original name rather than the GeGeGe no Kitaro name popularised by the previous five anime series. This is to reflect the darker nature of the show and how it adheres closer to the plot of the original book. As good as the show is, it’s overshadowed by the opening animation by the Mononoke crew.

Library War - Production IG adapted Hiro Arikawa’s light novel series about militias formed by library’s to battle government censorship. It’s a bit like Patlabor crossed with Fahrenheit 451. Despite loving the opening episode I got distracted by Soul Eater and Golgo 13, so never watched any more.

Antique Bakery – In fact so distracted was I, I never noticed this was a noitaminA show. And so I have nothing to declare but my own ill-observation.

Nodame Cantabile: Paris - More classical musicians in love action, but this time in France and directed by Chiaki Kon.

Genji Monogatari Sennenki – Osamu Dezaki does the Tale of Genji via the roundabout route mentioned earlier. Had very little interest in the anglophone fan scene, I caught the first episode, but the wait for more meant my interest had dwindled by the time more were available.

Eden of the East – Another show that I’ve only caught the first episode of and want to see more. Arguably the noitaminA show with the highest expectations on its shoulders. It was original material (at this point Bake Neko/Mononoke was the only other show fitting this bill), had character design by Honey & Clover author Umino Chika, was developed by Production IG and created by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost In The Shell SAC, Guardian of the Sacred Spirit). Furthermore it was developed with spin-off feature films (designed to conclude the story) in mind. It’s an interesting approach, and while it didn’t set the box office on fire, I wonder if low level theatrical releases of material that is essentially OAV episodes of a TV series are more economically worthwhile than a straight to DVD/BD release.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 – Talking of original material, here we have BONES joining the fray with this disaster TV series. While I can see why people like it, for me it sits in the realm of animated series that are only animated because the live action budget would be prohibitive. Plus it suffers from writing that doesn’t seem to take into account what makes effective animation. Crowd scenes for instance are easy to write, notably harder to animate effectively.

Trapeze – Mononoke‘s Kenji Nakamura returns with what is easily the most experimental of all the noitaminA shows. Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game is probably the closest visually in terms of the mixed media collage that Nakamura uses here. It’s not as effective as Mind Game, nor as polished as Mononoke, but the ambition just about pays off in the finished show. The quirky psychiatric drama of Hideo Okuda’s novels is delivered in an episodic format, but they act as individual layers of a larger whole as it dawns on the viewer that all the episodes happen over the same period of time and the stories overlap and intrude on one another.

Related posts:

1. PAST MY BEDTIME PART III – The Legacy of the Naked Elves
2. PAST MY BEDTIME PART II – You don’t have to be Madhouse to work here, but it helps.
3. HATE FUN? Some lunchtime Spring previews – Part 6

I’m going to get around to TBS’ late night anime in general later on, as it is taking a little longer to get a good overview of. Early on there seems to be more of collaboration with non-Tokyo based broadcasters in production of the shows, so I want to see if I can figure all that out first.

Instead, I’ll begin with looking at show that’s part of a lineage of anime that represents both its past and its future – Wonderful.

TBS’ Wonderful slot ran Monday to Thursday, 23：55 – 24：50 from 1997 to 2002. It contained a variety of content, of which anime was but one element. What unites a lot of the series that Wonderful featured is that they were based on gag manga.

Ping Pong Club
Director: Masami Hata
Studio: Grouper Productions

Table tennis themed juvenile delinquency. Brought to the US by CPM. Uniqlo have some Ping Pong Club T-shirts coming out soon. Of course they do.

Sexy Commando Gaiden: Sugoiyo!! Masaru-san
Director: Akitaro Daichi
Studio: Madhouse Studios

Kyosuku Usuta’s first major work got this anime adaptation on its completion. It is near perfect, actually improving on the manga. One of my favourite TV anime of all time.

AIKa
Director: Katsuhiko Nishijima (who else but!)
Studio: Studio Fantasia

TV broadcast for the first 4 episodes of the underwear obsessed action OAV. Nishijima must be the anime industry’s top lingerie fetishist, but he’s also a solid animator.

Futari Kurashi
Director: Futa Morita
Studio: Public & Basic

I remember the video release advertised in Newtype back when I was buying it in the late 90s, but history seems to have completely forgotten it. Here’s the truly awful opening, see if you can figure it out.

Super Radical Gag Family
Director: Akitaro Daichi
Studio: Studio DEEN

Scatological buffoonery. For everything bad I say about Studio DEEN post-Kitty’s demise, they have had a decent track record with minimal budget gag shows.

Momoiro Sisters
Director: Noburo Shirohata – I believe this is the name Bob Shirohata (Hetalia) used to use
Studio: Studio DEEN

Hardly a moe show, but this Young Animal manga turned anime contains a lot of the elements that were popularised in moe shows during the coming decade (or possibly un-popularised, as the Anime Encyclopedia suggests that Wonderful outperformed most standalone late night anime). It’s a gag strip for an audience of young men, about elements of the lives young women that young men may not be privy to, written by a woman, Tamami Momose (Doki Doki School Hours). Unlike the shows that followed in its path, it’s much more bawdy and explicit in its approach, having more in common with Ebichu than Chu Bra.

Let’s Nupu Nupu
Director: Issei Kume, Jouji Shimura, Shigeru Kimiya, Kazuhiro Sasaki
Studio: ????

Another gag manga adaptation, this has elements of absurd comedy, sexual comedy and manzai. With those last two elements oddly tied together in the skits involving a school nurse sexually harassing one of her pupils. They have the manzai style, but with the boke’s idoicy manifesting in the sexually harassment of the tsukkomi. Given that no one over-riding director or studio is listed, I wonder if the material was split up between them, as there’s little to no overlap in the scenes of the perverted nurse, the cat, the hamster and the Melmo parody that make up the show.

Only · You: Viva! Cabaret
Director: Mitsuo Kusakabe

I have no idea about this show. Even the Japanese wikipedia page is distinctly lacking detail, let alone there being much English language information.

If I See You in my Dreams
Director: Takeshi Yamaguchi
Studio: J.C. Staff

This got an release in the US via ADV. Despite that I had never heard of it until writing this post.

Most Spirited Man in Japan
Director: Hiroyoshi Yoshida
Studio: Studio DEEN

According to the Anime Encyclopaedia this got a 9.2% rating. That seems insane compared to what typical late night anime get. Haven’t found any stats for other shows in this slot (annoyingly I used to have them years ago, but threw them out) so I don’t know how accurate that is or how it compares. It’s another show that Bob Shirohata worked on, this time as Animation Director and now using the Bob name.

Iketeru Futari
Director: Hideki Okamoto / Takeshi Yamaguchi
Studio: Geneon Entertainment

Despite the tiny running times, this sex comedy still feels really slack. Avoid.

Petshop of Horrors
Director: Toshio Hirata
Studio: Madhouse

Like AIKA, another OAV on TV

You’re Under Arrest Specials
Director: ????
Studio: Studio DEEN

Shorts of the Kousuke Fujishima light-hearted cop manga. Not seen them, but I’d imagine that the manga is probably best served by this format.

Most Spirited Man in Japan 2
Director: Hiroyoshi Yoshida

Studio: Studio DEEN

More from this hit sex comedy.

SURF SIDE HIGH-SCHOOL
Director: Hiroyoshi Yoshida
Studio: Magic Bus

Ken Sawai’s almost unfinished manga (he finished it off this year in collections) got this brief, and mostly forgotten, adaptation.

Let’s Dance With Papa
Director: Bob Shirohata
Studio: Studio DEEN

Adaptation of Chuya Chikazawa’s long running gag manga.

COLORFUL
Director: Ryutaro Nakamura
Studio: Studio Wombat / Triangle Staff

The most successful in the US/UK of the Wonderful shows, this gag manga compilation from Torajirou Kishi’s original work got a release from ADV and aired on G4.

Ippatsu Kiki Musume
Director: Hiroyoshi Yoshida
Studio: Group TAC

This is great. A rare combination of cerebral and slapstick comedy as the laws of physics are applied to life threatening farce.

Itsumo Kokoro ni Taiyou wo!
Director: Hiroyoshi Yoshida
Studio: Studio DEEN

I have zero idea what this about. Has the same name as the Japanese translation of the Lulu film “To Sir, with Love“. There was also a song by that name used on an earlier anime – and that’s what you get when you do an image search. So no image for this one.

I do note that the mystery person Hiroyoshi Yoshida is involved in many of these final shows. They then appear to have had no career in anime after this. Anime Encyclopaedia lists them as Tokio Yoshida and Nobuyoshi Yoshida, rather than the Hiroyoshi Yoshida that Anime News Network uses. But those names lead nowhere when searching for other works too. Possibly pseudonym?

Di Gi Charat
Director: Hiroaki Sakurai
Studio: Madhouse

It’s somewhat fitting that Di Gi Charat should close Wonderful’s anime programming in 2000, as it feels like the transitional phase in the move from the sharp edged gag manga that many Wonderful shows were based on, to the softer gag manga that many of the modern shows are based on. Plus it has an otaku in-joke element missing from a lot of the Wonderful shows that would be driven into the ground over the next decade. This particular incarnation is still weird and misanthropic, even with the cute designs for the female leads, but it would get cuter and less funny as the years went by. And also they would move to morning slots on the weekend.

—

While we’ve not seen such a concentrated amount of spikey, often outright ribald, gag manga adaptations in subsequent years, in terms of form, you can point at a number of shows that follow in their footsteps. Frequently low budget and with short running times, the Wonderful approach represent the ideal form for animation for the web. It’s no coincidence that the recent big web anime hit, Hetalia Axis Powers, is directed by Wonderful alumnus, Bob Shirohata. Even if you don’t like the material, in terms of its format and direction, it’s definitely one of the better gag anime in recent years.

Akitaro Daichi of course has enjoyed success all over the schedule and in a variety of forms, but his work on Gag Manga Biyori has clear echoes in his Wonderful shows (Sexy Commando, Super Radical Gag Family). Other shows like Astro Fighter Sunred also share the “give a joke the right amount of time” approach that many of these short form anime have.

It’s not all good news on the gag anime front. In the wake of Azumanga Daioh (is there an earlier precedent I’m unaware of?), we’ve also had the rise of the moe gag manga and their anime adaptations. Though once again, the moe-ness (moeosity?) is probably a red herring.

In some cases the flaws in the anime are inherent in the source material. Hidamari Sketch is relatively free of the chuckles because the original strip is just as anaemic as the anime. The anime might be better than the wet lettuce that is the manga simply because it has the usual clever SHAFT shots that cover a multitude of animation sins. Well one really – too much talking, not enough moving.

On the other hand Kyoto Animation’s Lucky Star and K-On anime actually have jokes in them, but it frequently feels like they are sabotaged by being dragged out to fill the allotted time. Considering that many are pretty weak jokes to begin with (especially in Lucky Star‘s case), they just can’t survive this bloated approach. If they animated the same material in half the running time and added less lackadaisical soundtracks, then the series would be much improved and closer to the quality of their manga.

Working with tighter time and budgetary constraints might hone some of the creative forces’ sense of comic timing. It doesn’t have to be at a Daichi-style machine gun pace, I think you can work with a slower pace if you get a rhythm that works – Azumanga Daioh had a more Bill Melendez-esque pacing that was helped by the soundtrack in the same way the Peanuts cartoons were helped by Vince Guaraldi’s music.

Given that gag manga is being increasingly turned to once again, people need to pick their game up and stop relying on the appeal of the character design to soft boys. Comedy is the hardest things to get right, and the big dogs in anime like Sazae-san, Chibi Maruko-chan and Shin-chan relied on delivering laughs for their success not how many Figmas they could sell. Like I said, I think the whole moe-ness of modern gag shows is a red herring. If these shows simply told their jokes better, they’d broaden their appeal further.

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.

It’s a new anime season and that means the race is on to be offended by at least one new show. Go, anime bloggers go!

In the lead at present is B Type H System, based on Yoko Sanri’s manga that runs in Weekly Young Jump. Once again it’s a female author giving young men a glimpse into the lives of young women via the medium of sex comedy. I believe in this case, she’s claimed that lead character is based on her younger self, and that makes some sense of the moustachioed tiny version of the lead who floats on a cloud providing commentary on her inept attempts at losing her virginity. However in the manga that device doesn’t show up until the end of the first volume, and she also turns her eye to the libidos of teenage boys more than is indicated in this first episode.

The plot summary given at the start of the episode is that the lead wants to sleep with 100 boys at high school, but has such a messed up idea of sex and relationships that the chances of her actually managing to do this are non-existent. Having grown up during the success of the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, the fact that anyone thinks she’ll actually manage this, that it will even be the focus of the show or that this sort of teenage sex comedy is so inherently creepy amuses me greatly.

In fact now that I think about, we still have that sort of sex comedy in the mainstream with The Inbetweeners, a show that just like B Type H System has sex-obsessed teenagers played by adults, and is far less satiric than Adrian Mole was. Honestly, so much writing about anime lately seems like a race to be offended that people aren’t properly analysing the shows they are watching. Chu Bra was creepy because it was excusing itself – B Type H System has no excuses, it’s just a comedy about horny teenage idiots.

That’s not to say the show doesn’t have its problems. In fact it’s full of them from head to toe. The real problem with B Type H System is that it’s so shoddily executed.

The original manga, while not the work of a great illustrator, has a lightness of touch completely absent from anime. Yuuko Yahiro (also the Animation Director) just kills all that dead. Even the well chosen colour schemes from the original book covers are turned into the usual palette of digital colours and soft focus crap in the anime.

Most importantly though, the manga is a four panel gag strip. Something you cannot tell at all from anime. The rhythm of the manga’s beats are just laid waste to in the anime. Which is not that surprising when you consider that they’ve actually removed some of the punchlines. Sanri often uses the beat of three panels of a continuing scene, then the four panel acts as a smash cut to the punchline. It’s hardly rocket science, lots of authors use similar beats, but when you remove that final panel, you aren’t left with much in terms of a gag. She’s also a lot more realistic in her portrayal of teenage horniness than the anime which may go some way to explaining why some of those punchlines are just missing in the anime. What I’m saying is this – there’s a lot more jokes about masturbation in the manga.

It’s not a masterpiece by any means, it’s just one of many 4-panel sex comedy strips that have been created, but it’s certainly better than the anime might lead you to believe.

It all boils down to the fact that this is one of those manga that would be much better served as an anime by being 5-10 minutes per episode and in the hands of a director who both understands the rhythm of comedy and would keep it closer to the visuals of the manga like Akitaro Daichi, Hiroaki Sakurai or even Bob Shirohata. Even if you still didn’t like the subject the matter, the gags would work better.

Instead it’s been pushed through the same aesthetic filter that so many anime seem to use nowadays and toned down for an audience that can’t handle jokes about wanking. That’s what you should really be annoyed at rather than the shocking revelation that teenagers think about sex a lot.

Related posts:

1. Ladies versus Butlers! – Episode 1 (preview version)
2. Chu Bra!! Episode 1
3. Dissecting Frogs with Seitokai Yakuindomo

Heroman is a fantastically crafted piece of hokum. As long as you aren’t some sort of po-faced nincompoop who mistakes a lot of writing for “depth”, you’ll likely have a lot of fun with the show. Not all entertainment has to be art, and highly skilled craft is a far more valuable commodity than bad art.

The craft in Heroman lies in two places. The first and most obvious is in the animation. Not only does it have a great set of character designs, full of variety and fun, but the first episode blows most other television animation out the water in terms of actual movement. It may not have the best direction or storyboarding, but what there is on screen is incredibly slick in execution and aesthetically pleasing. Denton, the scientist who accidentally dooms humanity through his well meaning attempts to contact extraterrestrials, is an especially fun design, that is echoed in all the character his movement has. Also look at how fat rich kid Nick and his gang of hangers on move around each other, there’s a character work going on with them in the actual animation, not just what they say. It is those touches that set this apart from other shows that will get taken more seriously, it’s a cartoon that’s a cartoon, not just the cheapest delivery medium for a story.

The second place the craft lies is in how it ties classic Stan Lee ideas and concepts to the ideas and concepts of classic robot manga, namely those originated by Mitsuteru Yokoyama. It’s rare enough nowadays that a manga or anime will channel Yokoyama directly, let alone one that’s got Stan Lee involved at the same time. Not only is the core concept pure Yokoyama – a young boy who controls a robot via a device on his wrist, but Heroman also has this stoic, almost sad face that has echoes of Giant Robo‘s face.

With the various Stan Lee-isms (orphan raised by elderly relative, having to do a part time job, name alliteration, bullied at school, hots for blondes) mixed in, it feels like Peter Parker cast in the role of a Yokoyama hero. While that means that most, if not all, the story elements will be incredibly familiar to most people due to Spider-Man and Tetsujin 28-go/Gigantor being such a part of the global pop culture consciousness, you probably haven’t seen them combined before. And certainly not with such skill.

If you like either classic Stan Lee or Mitsuteru Yokoyama it’s worth your time checking it out. If you like both, like I do, then you’ll probably love it.

Related posts:

1. So·Ra·No·Wo·To Episode 1
2. Kaitou Reinya – Episode 1
3. Yatterman (2008) – Episode 1

—

In part four of Past My Bedtime, I briefly ran down TV Tokyo’s 1:30AM slot for the past six year. In order to have some fairness behind my mean one line synopses, I watched the first episodes a few of the shows I’d not seen before. And in some cases I do have a little more to say beyond what I wrote there.

Minami-ke

Given that this is probably the most successful of the shows airing in this slot, I was shocked how half-arsed it is. It even apologises in the opening for it. I got through the first half of the episode and gave up out of boredom. Limp gags and visually uninteresting, it’s an utterly inoffensive empty space.

Worth noting that this is the first show I will be discussing in this post that involves orphans. I’ve noted before about how the moe fad owes something to the Victorian cult of the child, and the other day I described modern anime as the inbred descendants of Space Battleship Yamato and World Masterpiece Theatre. Orphantainment is alive and well, but without the justification of being classic literature.

Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight!

While not quite as frustrating as ufotable’s Futakoi Alternative, as it doesn’t have such a promising first episode, Manabi Straight is still infuriating.

Ignoring for a moment the elephant in the room that is Manabi Straight’s aesthetics, the problem watching this is it frequently feels like it’s been made by people who desperately want to animate awesome action and comedy, and are stuck animating material whose main aim is to be cute. There’s some really great action in the first episode, and outside of the poor background painting, the animation is exceptional throughout.

But it’s in the service of a story that while it makes vague gestures towards social commentary, is overshadowed by the elephantine house invader that is the character design. And that character design is basically going to be the huge sticking point for most viewers.

The bulk of the characters are in the second year of high school. They are sixteen or seventeen years old. Just like the main characters in Urusei Yatsura.

Unlike the cast of Urusei Yatsura, none of them appear to have gone through puberty.

Given that there are adults in the show too, and they look like they’ve stepped out of another show, it adds to the creepiness in that rather than just being a result of style – drawing them to look like 10 year olds was a deliberate choice. And for me that’s a big distraction from the merits it has in the animation department.

The story has a nugget of a clever idea, in that it’s supposedly a projection on Japan’s aging population and declining birth rates. But beyond exposition, there’s little social commentary in episode one, instead focusing on lead character Manabi’s whirlwind personality arriving at her new school. The entire first episode could work in modern times with a few cosmetic adjustments.

Of course, the lead in this show appears to be an orphan too.

Related posts:

1. #52. Urusei Yatsura
2. Lum-A-Day B-B-Bonus – “It’s Spring! Take Off!” Urusei Yatsura Special
3. Lum-A-Week 137 – Lum’s Courageous Duel! An Ironic Victory

So begins OTAKU PROBE. We at the JUNIOR ANTHROPOLOGY BRIGADE wish to thank Awesome Engine for giving us an outlet for our ambitious research into OTAKU CULTURE. We hope to provide a window into the world of the only interesting part of anime, the OTAKU!

Today we look at the way in which OTAKU decorate their OTAKU ROOMS.

A typical OTAKU furnishing store

A big part of OTAKU CULTURE is making your home resemble the storage room of a novelty gift shop. And the best way to do that is throw soft furnishings emblazoned with cartoon characters everwhere, fill every flat surface with toys, dvds, cds & games and cover every inch of wall with posters. OTAKU want people to question whether a human being could even live in the space.

Living space or warehouse – you decide.

Once this has been achieved the next step is to take photos of said living space and post them to the internet so that all the other OTAKU can admire your handy work and masturbate to it. This is why such photos are called SHELVING PORNOGRAPHY. There are even specialist sites dedicated to it.

OTAKU soft furnishings in full effect.

A common misconception is that OTAKU who decorate in this way have a fetish for a particular character or character type. We at the JUNIOR ANTHROPOLOGY BRIGADE do not jump to such conclusions about OTAKU (or OTAKLUSIONS as they are better known). We do research. We surveyed a representative sample of OTAKU (15 – as determined by the Dairugger formula) and asked them why they live in a box full of toys.

There you have it, OTAKLUSIVE proof – OTAKU WANT TO BE THE PILLOW.

Related posts:

1. Lum-A-Day 001 – I’m Lum The Notorious / It’s Raining Oil In Our Town
2. Bagpuss Car
3. Lum-A-Day 106 – A Fight to the Death! Ataru vs. The Mendo Brigade!

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 V – Wonderful.
3. PAST MY BEDTIME PART II – You don’t have to be Madhouse to work here, but it helps.

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 V – Wonderful.
3. PAST MY BEDTIME PART VI – Animation, backwards.

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. PAST MY BEDTIME PART V – Wonderful.
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 VI – Animation, backwards.

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 137 – Lum’s Courageous Duel! An Ironic Victory
3. Lum-A-Week 135 – What Do I Care For Talking Flowers

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 065 – Ran-chan’s Great Date Plan
3. Lum-A-Day 100 The Great Vault! Courageous Survival!!!

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. This post is just an excuse to post the Daicon IV animation
3. #44 – Pokemon

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 114 – Ten-chan’s Wonderful Love Story
2. Lum-A-Day 083 – Big Battle! Ten vs. Ataru
3. Lum-A-Day 117 – Lum-chan’s Becoming a Cow?

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 – Gakuen Bangaichi
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. Durarara!!
2. Brief thoughts on Baccano! Episodes 14-16
3. Denno Coil – Episodes 1 to 4

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. 1994: The Year Faye Valentine Was Born
3. Fourteen Year Old Anime News

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. Heroman – Episode 1

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. Heroman – 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. DETROIT METAL CITY – Episode 2 – REAL LEGEND/SATAN
3. Mouryou no Hako – Episode 1

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. B Type H System – Episode 1
2. Okami Kakushi – first 10 minutes or so of Episode 1
3. Chu Bra!! Episode 1

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. Blogging safety net – Go!
3. The past is still happening!

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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 Fourteen – Top Secret/SI

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

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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.

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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. Best Anime of the 00s – FLCL (2000)
3. MADstravaganza Extras

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.

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

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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. Mononoke’s Mouths
3. Best Anime of the 00s – Kuruneko (2009)

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.

Related posts:

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).

Related posts:

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

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.

Related posts:

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.

Related posts:

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.

Related posts:

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.

Related posts:

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. Best Anime of the 00s – Paranoia Agent (2004)
2. #53 – Cutey Honey
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. Possibly non-existent specialist anime/manga bloggers I’d like to read.
3. Best Anime of the 00s – FLCL (2000)

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.

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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 – Dragon Wind

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Korean MMORPG gets the animation it deserves.

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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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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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