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.

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.

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.

As I may have mentioned, I have a recurring problem with SHAFT productions and the work of their director Akiyuki Shinbo. That problem is that while I like the art direction & design in their shows, the actual material they are adapting leaves me cold. Mainly it’s the fact they tend to handle otaku pandering material that’ll shift DVD units and merchandise in Japan.

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.

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.