Love Lab

Love Lab:  A

Love Lab is a comedy series about middle school girls who have mostly no idea how romance and dating and boys work.  This sounds like it would be vapid and terrible.  It's actually the most intelligent and clever anime comedy I've seen in a long time.

I could tell you about the five main cast members and how they're all recognizable, but have unique quirks and characterizations that endear them to you, or how the humor isn't afraid to use double-entendres, misunderstandings and genuinely clever situational awkwardness without resorting to predictable bit gags (characters do have their 'bits' but they remain creative about them), or I could even talk about how the series manages to avert a number of major tropes: there are male characters who are important to the plot, there are at least four teachers with distinct names and personalities and we meet multiple characters' parents and families.  But instead I'll say that the main story's plot is actually really heartfelt and well-executed, maintaining a sense of tension while remaining believable and having an adorable but still humorous resolution.

Overall, Love Lab is an extremely well-crafted shojo (I think it's shojo?  It doesn't have the fan service or all-female cast to be seinen) comedy that doesn't fall into the normal slice of life trap of no plot and no progress.  Basically, anyone who wants a laugh and was ever a junior high school student would probably enjoy Love Lab.

Free!

Free!:  B+

Kyoto Animation doing their thing, only this time rather than adorable girls we have lovingly animated young men swimming.  You will rarely see so many muscles animated quite this realistically, and Kyoto Animation's stunning animation is in full force.  They also clearly wanted practice drawing a lot of water.

The story itself doesn't slouch either.  While it isn't truly inspired, it is a solid story about motivation, competition, teamwork and loving what you do, I was actually surprised at how well it comes together.

I feel like I should say more about the series, but there really isn't a lot more to say.  It's gorgeous, full of tasteful manservice, but a good, heartful story about sports, in the way where you don't have to love sports to get into it.

Oh, I guess I could talk about the yaoi.  Which isn't really there.  I mean, you don't really have to stretch to say that there's homoerotic undertones, but it feels unfair to the actual good story there to say that it's a major element.

If you want to watch a show with either a lot of really well-drawn muscular young men or a good story that'll make you want to go for a swim sometime, Free! is a good watch.  It is thoroughly grounded in realism and all the tension is emotional, so you won't get much out of it if you're interested in magic or sci-fi or explosions.

Minami-ke

Seasons 1 and 2 (2007 and 'Okawari'):  C
Seasons 3 and 4 ('Okaeri' and 'Tadaima'):  B

Minami-ke ('the Minami family' or 'the Minami household') is a sitcom anime about three sisters and their friends, it's been around for a while and keeps getting more seasons, which is good, because the first couple were kinda weak.

So we have Haruka, the eldest, who's responsible, beautiful and competent but occasionally snaps and gets furious with her sisters or slips into self-indulgent laziness.  Then there's Kana, the hyperactive, impulsive and thoughtless middle sister, who despite her mountain of faults is friendly, silly, forgiving and likes everybody, so long as they're entertaining.  Finally we have Chiaki, the youngest, intelligent, diligent and serious, though clumsy, and absolutely adoring of Haruka and intolerant of Kana.

The series doesn't bother explaining where the girls' absent parents are, or where they get the money to finance their existence, or why they're time-locked at the ages they're at, which they also don't explain.  Also, every so often characters are able to have conversations about people sitting next to them without them noticing.

There's also a fair amount of gender confusion among the younger members of the cast, with one elementary school boy crossdressing so he can hang out with Haruka and a boyish girl who Chiaki adopts as her 'little brother'.

The first season starts with some kind of poor introductions, and the depth of the characters doesn't reach the fullness of things until well into the second season.  The first two seasons also suffer from poor animation and a bit too much fan service respectively.  The third and fourth seasons (and the OVAs) both very much come into their own, but even then, the series is never uproariously funny, just good for some giggles.

Overall, if you need a sitcom that actually has male characters and don't actually want or need a story, Minami-ke is the closest I've actually found to a true Simpsons-style timelocked family-type comedy (aside from Sazae-san, but that's another topic for another time).  If you want a show with action (beyond snowball fights), anything supernatural (besides tying up your little sister to use her as a talking good-weather charm) or drama (besides panicking that you broke your big sister's jewelry) Minami-ke doesn't have it.

The Japanese School System for Anime Viewers

So, schools in Japan are an extraordinarily common element in anime, and there are enough differences from Western schools and have a number of visual conventions associated with them that I decided to write a short informational essay about them.  Since I just watched Minami-ke (which I will review forthwith), which has multiple characters across most of the main levels of primary school, this is on my mind as something that a viewer should be familiar with to make discussing schools a little easier.

Rebuild of Evangelion: 3.0 - You can (not) redo

You don't get a letter grade on it, because while it is a movie and a coherent unit, it is also part of a greater series and that series is important to its context.  So this is a bit of a different review.

Let's start by talking about Rebuild of Evangelion 1 (You are (not) alone) and 2 (You can (not) advance) real quick.

Rebuild 1 was essentially a retelling of the first six episodes of the anime with dramatically improved animation and a few minor changes.  In all, it was great.  It was what people wanted.

Rebuild 2 moved away from the original anime plotline, introducing a new pilot (Mari) and rearranging events so that certain characters were more and less important and events occurred in different order with different characters.  Relationships progressed faster, and practically every character was much more emotionally open.  Rebuild 2 was beautiful and made a number of intentionally complex and flawed characters relatable, then ended on a point of extreme shock and tension.  The end of Rebuild 2 is a total curveball for viewers of the anime.

In short, Rebuild 2 was excellent and put us in a place where we had no idea what to expect.  Rebuild 3 had a lot to do: these characters we knew very well and this situation that was completely foreign to us, and build a story we could understand out of them.  It's a tall order.  I think it succeeds, but at the cost of its non-metaphorical narrative.

Rebuild 3, for me, felt like, while it wasn't the direct expositional version of Instrumentality that the original anime had, it definitely was encouraging you to think about what each of the characters and situations represented in a symbolic framework.

And honestly, I think a lot of people won't like that, and the actual movie itself doesn't feel quite as awesome as Rebuild 2 was, though the symbolism and metaphor, a necessary part of the Evangelion franchise, were back, and strong.

Finally, Rebuild 3 ends in a very similar way to how Rebuild 2 did: a situation we, the viewers, recognize as parallel to the end of End of Evangelion, which leaves us absolutely no frame of reference for what to expect from the final installment.

I'm quite curious what the critical reception for 3 will be, I enjoyed it, but I really wonder if other people will.

A Certain Scientific Badly Written Story

Caught up on Toaru Kagaku no Railgun S, the second season of Railgun.

Was once again struck at how outstandingly bad the scenario design of this series is, despite how much fun it is to watch.

Made this to try to get across the story in brief:

Martian Successor Nadesico

Martial Successor Nadesico (Including "Prince of Darkness"):  B

This was actually a really hard series to grade, because it's a very up and down series that I have a history with.  I first watched it when it was just hitting the states, back in 99 or 2000, long before I had seen enough anime to understand what it was referencing, only that it was an anime about anime, and that alone was amazing and hilarious to me.  I very much enjoyed it, though I understood then that it wasn't genius.

Nadesico has aged well, but it bears the scars of its time.  It first aired Winter 1996, six months after Neon Genesis Evangelion finished, and before the full effects of the revolution that particular series sparked had come to fruition.  The single greatest problem with Nadesico is that it is both a parody and a drama, and being that it is both of these, it requires that the viewer give it the credit it is asking for.  This will be a challenge, as the series is too silly to be taken seriously, but too serious to be treated completely light-heartedly.

If you can get into its wavelength, though, it's actually a remarkably well-thought out story that resolves its main plots (though fails to resolve many others), discusses a number of complex topics in a very intelligent way (mature relationships vs childlike relationships, the difficulty of being friends with people you love, the conflict of idealism vs interpreted idealism) and ultimately is about coming to accept things you dislike about things you love, especially through the lens of children's perspectives vs adults perspectives.  The line between Children and Adults, and the time of life when they blur, is another major theme, mated as it is within Nadesico with Super Robots vs Real Robots.

The movie, Prince of Darkness, adds to the story, and becomes somewhat darker and more serious, to the story's overall benefit, though I didn't find the ending as satisfying as the series'.

Nadesico is an old series that is often overlooked.  It requires a lot of patience and to be given credit, and a lot of people won't be able to muster the investment in the series to appreciate it for what it really has to offer, which is a lot of discussion of being human.  It lacks the depth and genius of a work of true brilliance, but you could do a hell of a lot worse than Martian Successor Nadesico.

What I'm Up To

So after a break from anime during which I was playing League of Legends for several months, I'm back to watching.

Partially the reason for the lack of updates is that practically nothing that aired during Spring was worth watching or reviewing in my mind.  I've been keeping up with Toaru Kagaku no Railgun S, but it's so far been a different-perspective retelling of one of the arcs of first-season Index, and keeps with that series' general sense of 'if you don't look closely, it's pretty fun.'  I also watch Nyaruko-san W, which doesn't deserve it's own review, it's more of the same.  I reviewed Oreimo 2 (though it's not completely over, it's got 2 more episodes to air) and Red Data Girl, and that's pretty much everything I was actually watching.

None of my favorite studios, Shaft, Gainax and Kyoto Animation did anything last season, is really what I'm saying here.  So it was pretty slow.

This season, though, is looking up, especially with Monogatari Series second season, which is 4 episodes in and already shaping up to be amazingly well-written and crafted, as I've come to expect.  I haven't gotten into Kyoto Animation's new series 'Free' (which looks to be very man-servicey), but I'm also keeping up on the new Rozen Maiden, which I'm enjoying despite its slow build up in the first few episodes and the weirdness of the whole alternate universe plotline, which is being handled much better than I was originally expecting.  I watched the first two episodes of WataMote, but I found them profoundly depressing, so I haven't kept going with it.  Maybe I'll be in the mood later.

There's a second season of Symphogear airing, and I'm not yet willing to say it's a worthy successor to a diamond in the rough first season.  I'm also watching Tamayura season 2, but that's really just slice of life fluffiness.  I think that's everything that I'm actively watching that's airing currently.

Finally, I'm rewatching Martian Successor Nadesico, as an experiment in how well it holds up, I last watched it about fifteen years ago.  First impressions are ambivalent, it's got some great moments and characters, but it's trying very hard to be a serious parody, and it's not quite working out for it.

I'll have some real reviews for you all soon.

Vividred Operation (And a rant about Fan Service)

Vividred Operation: D+

This is official art, by the way

So this series is ostensibly kind of about techno-magical girls, but in truth is really about underaged girl's asses.  And to a lesser extent their breasts.

So there are these girls and for reasons which aren't entirely well explained they wind up wearing jet suits and fighting invading aliens.  The Jet suits are powered by this cool new reactor that we built that runs on extradimensional magic.  Why we didn't give the jet suits to trained military professionals isn't well explained but probably is due to one of the girls' grandfather, who would be creepier if he didn't get brain-swapped with a stuffed animal in the first episode.  Naturally there's hijinks as the full team of four gets together and the mysterious girl who appears to be working with the aliens, and starts out cold and not wanting to be friends but warms up eventually because she's lonely and the main characters are the only ones who have ever tried just being friends with her.

All that's pretty formulaic, but I am not going to say that something that is formulaic is inherently bad.  It can be well-executed, and the fact is that I do kind of like several of the characters and the execution in places.  The show has enjoyable moments and is fun to watch and listen to, but it's flat.  There is no spark, no risks taken.  No great lessons learned, no moving moments of understanding or betrayal.  Even that would still earn it the C, that were all I had to say.

What ruins it for me, and rarely will I say this, is the fan service.  Now, I want to go on record with saying that I enjoy the lovingly animated female form as much as the next creepy nerd on the internet.  Fan service is not inherently bad for me, and can be used to enhance storytelling while ALSO providing titillating content for viewers.  To this end, I categorize fan service occurs into three varieties:
1) Integrated Fan Service.  This is the fan service where we're shown cleavage, jiggling boobs or panty shots for a good reason within the story.  Often it's because it's what a male character present in the scene is focusing on, and it's shown to help us sympathize with his horniness, and the awkwardness that ensues from that.  It might be deliberately sexual to showcase a character's depravity or innocence, based on their reaction.  It's also meant to titillate, but it serves a significant purpose: the fan service is fully integrated and justified by the story and setting.  Bakemonogatari and Haganai are full of this, and Speed Grapher had its fair share as well.
2)  Tongue-in-Cheek Fan Service.  These are the humorous panty shots, the fourth-wall breaking moments where other characters block the camera, or where circumstances contrive to cause the characters to get into situations that result in clothing being lost or undergarments being shown off far too often for it to be taken seriously.  Koihime Musou is full of this, as is Dog Days.  The fan service is not integrated into the story necessarily, and probably could be left out, but it is given a nod from the characters themselves, and so is contextualized, usually as humorous.
3)  Straight-faced Fan Service.  In this form, we get acontextual shots that showcase a character's body purely for the sake of titillation.  Its use has no impact on the story, and nothing to do with any character's portrayal or perception of others, and nobody in the story seems to notice or care, much less comment.  It often seems as though the cameraman just happens to be putting himself somewhere where we get a shot of a girl's magnificent ass, or rack, or whatever.  This type is present only for the audience's benefit.  The lack of integration causes mood whiplash, desensitization to further uses of it and an overall weakening of the audience's ability to engage with the story.

Type 3 is the kind in Vividred, and it's the kind that offends me.  It marks a story as being weak, because if you feel the need to have lovingly animated ass jiggle for no reason other than to show it off, it makes me as a viewer feel like that's all the show has to offer.  And that's why Vividred is probably not worth your time: because pretty much all it has to offer is several barely-teenage girls' butts in short shorts; nothing original or creative, or even particularly noteworthy.

Tamayura ~hitotose~

Tamayura ~hitotose~:  B

I heard about this show because the second season is airing now and I was curious.

Uh, it's a slice of life show, and so, by tradition, it's about four girls, with some extra hangers on.  And by tradition, it's hard to talk about.  The main character, Sawatari Fuu (above), is an amateur photographer, and the show makes use of the camera and photographs as both a symbol and a pursuit.  "Tamayura" means "a fleeting moment," the title is probably plural.  "Hitotose" means "one year," and, indeed, the series takes place over the course of the girls' first year of high school.  So, "A year of fleeting moments."

Compared to the other slice of life series I've reviewed (Hidamari Sketch and K-On) I would say that Tamayura has more heart, but less humor.  It made me tear up in a couple places, but it never really made me laugh.

The cast are unique and characterful and all have their issues (some more than others), and the series is pretty much completely fan-service-less, for you people who can't stand that. However, while it does have some very heartwarming moments, it lacks action, and much in the way of genuine plot or conflict.  But I did say it was slice of life, so that shouldn't be a surprise.

If you're looking for a good calm smiling ride to make you feel like you're among friends, as well as possibly make you want to pick up a camera, Tamayura is cute and completely non-impactful.  If you need action, shock value or development from your anime, this won't quite cut it.