Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko

Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko:  A

The title translates to "The Radio Wave Girl and the Adolescent Boy."  There are a number of other ways to translate "Radio Wave" and "Adolescent," as both are used as kind of symbolic terms, but this way makes as much sense as any.

Yet another show directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, but lacking a lot of his trademark audiovisual weirdness.  And yet, I find, it's still breathtaking to watch and its animation is of the highest caliber.

Dotso (as it abbreviates to) starts out slowly, with our Adolescent Boy, obsessed with cataloging how successfully he is living his young life to the fullest, moving to the city to live with his aunt while his parents work abroad.  From there, he meets our Radio Wave girl, his cousin, an extreme hikkikomori (one who hides from society) who claims to be an alien and wanders around with a futon wrapped around her.

What begins looking like it might be a Haruhi Suzumiya-esque manic pixie dream girl scenario evolves into a story about perseverance, recovering from one's mistakes and the self-imposed hurdle of impossibility, put non-invasively into the context of a fairly non-invasive harem.  The cast remains very small (the main cast is only 6 characters), and while a lot of threads (the romantic aspect and Erio's re-integration into society) are left dangling at the end of the series, the story nevertheless has an ending.

Also, contrary to a lot of other series that I've found myself really liking, Dotso isn't nearly as mean to its characters: the trauma is fairly minor and doesn't happen on screen, no cathartic scenes of screaming or crying or rage.  Which isn't to say that the characters aren't realistic (Ryuushi's jealousy is some of the most honest jealousy I've ever seen), just that the situation doesn't warrant quite the same level of suffering as say, Madoka, Evangelion or Ano Hana.

Don't watch this show if you don't want to have to remember long titles in Japanese, or if you're more interested in action and physical conflict.  But if you like stories about people growing, pushing forward and being rewarded for trying to do something they thought they couldn't do, you'll find Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko to be quietly inspiring.

Macross Plus

Macross Plus:  B

So I'll admit that my grade on Macross Plus is pretty strongly influenced by having watched Macross II only an hour or so earlier, and that Plus blows II out of the water in terms of animation and originality of story, as well as overall being a much more mature piece.  Macross original was a fairly complex and mature story for its time, but Macross Plus really tries to explore some interesting themes.

Macross Plus' story discusses AI, memory, rivalry which turns sour, repentance and, of course, love in all its obsessive, unhealthy emotional force.  The characters have a significant background together that they don't bother explaining to us (and several of them don't remember it) and they manage to make that work out as a storytelling element.

While a couple of faces look particularly weird (especially noses), the animation is overall stunning, decades ahead of its time, and the occasional CG moments are amazingly not particularly invasive; the series was a pioneer of CG animation in anime and one of the first successful uses, far more successful than many later series.

Macross Plus isn't perfect.  Like the others of the franchise, the plot is a little impenetrable in places, and a couple important plot points aren't well explained, but overall Macross Plus is a good and interesting short mecha series that reminds me of both "The Right Stuff" and, "Perfect Blue".  If you're looking for a series with some badass mecha but plenty else besides that, you could spend 3 hours a lot worse than watching Macross Plus.

Macross II: Lovers Again

Macross II: Lovers Again:  D

So, most of a year ago I reviewed the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which wasn't terrible, but hadn't held up well over the intervening 30 years (as well as having 10 episodes more than it needed).  Due to running across a couple images from it on my favorite image board, I decided to download the rest of the Macross saga and watch as many of them as I could stand, starting with Macross II, the first true sequel ("Do You Remember Love?" is a movie retelling of the original series minus the extra 10 episodes).

I have a bit of a historical attachment to Macross II: when I was in my early teens and a budding role-playing game enthusiast, I found a copy of the Macross II role-playing game by Kevin Siembieda in a used bookstore and fell in love with the mecha designs and the scantily clad alien chicks.  Surely nobody would make an RPG out of a bad series, right?  Apparently Kevin Siembieda would.  12-year-old me managed to find the two things about Macross II that are actually worthwhile.

Macross II suffers from a lot of early-90s OVA problems: wildly variable animation quality and style, disjointed plot and characterization and a conclusion which not only stands dramatically at odds with what's actually being said by the characters, but also feels pointless and hollow.  It clearly is attempting to pay homage to the original Macross with its awkward love triangle, transforming mecha, weaponized pop idols, and cultural warfare, but it all winds up seeming hollow and constructed, and so many things go undemonstrated and must be assumed from context.  Also, the animation sucks, even by early 90s standards.

Given that Macross II has been officially removed from the Macross canon, I would say that it's more than safe to skip it unless you're a die-hard fan who absolutely must see everything Macross ever.

Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories:  NA

So, I'm a sub guy.  I've spent about twelve years studying Japanese.  Watching anime with English coming out of the speakers feels fundamentally wrong to me, almost painful.

So, understand how weird it is that I'm recommending a dub.  Don't expect this to ever happen again.

Let me provide some background.  Ghost Stories is an early-2000s anime about a group of late elementary schoolers who go to a school right next door to a haunted school.  Naturally, they are constantly attacked, bothered, assaulted and troubled by ghosts.  The original Japanese is something like anime Goosebumps (whoops, I just dated myself, didn't I?).  It manages to be genuinely creepy at a number of points, but overall  is fairly tepid in its content.  It's also very Japanese, a number of the ghosts are traditional Japanese school ghosts (yes, there are traditional Japanese school ghosts).  It was also cut short at 20 episodes, fairly clearly due to waning ideas and weak plotting.

So, when ADV (one of the leading distributors of anime in America in the early 2000s) picked up the rights to it, they looked at it and said "Nobody in America would be interested in this series as written.  Let's mess with it."  The voice actors were given free rein to ad-lib so long as the story remained more or less coherent, and the result was a reference-laden comedy which strongly resembled Abridged series, though it preceded their development by more than a year.

The dub is both humorous and clever, though as the series goes on it becomes more and more obscene, crude, and fourth-wall-busting, even as the series itself declines in quality and the characters/voice actors openly admit they can't figure out what's going on in the final episodes.  Overall, the result is hilarious but somewhat slow, an excellent thing to have on in the background while you're doing something else.

If you want the opportunity to watch 11-year-olds spouting obscenities, references and other such silliness in the context of an anime (which still manages to maintain a coherent story), the ADV Ghost Stories dub is worth a watch.  If you want series that you'll take seriously and enjoy for their story rather than their clever alteration of the original situations, ignore this post.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Neon Genesis Evangelion:  S

So, Evangelion was for me what Harry Potter was for a lot of kids who are slightly younger than me.  It was formative.  I saw it when I was 14, in 1998, and it was one of the first anime series I ever saw.  I was at a point in my life where I was searching for meaning, for motivation, for purpose, and I found it through the suffering and growth of another 14-year old, the boy named Shinji Ikari.

I could give a summary of Eva, or reasons to watch it, but everything I could say on those topics has already been said elsewhere on the internet.  It's too popular, too embedded in the anime-viewers' collective consciousness, even the ones who have never seen it, because of the effect it had on anime as a medium: Evangelion is almost certainly the single most influential series of all time.

For me, the thing I want to talk about is how difficult it seems to be for viewers to allow themselves to be affected by the emotional content of the story.  Eva is a series where practically all of the characters are varying degrees of unlikeable: Shinji is a passive, self-denying doormat, Rei is incapable of coherent self-expression, Asuka is an egocentric showboat, Misato is self-deceptive hypocrite, Ritsuko is a liar of outstanding proportions and Gendo is utterly lacking in compassion.  However, the power of the series comes from the viewer's ability to sympathize with these characters despite their flaws, indeed, to recognize these flaws as being human and reflected in themselves:  These people are like you, and who they are brings them pain, just like you.

I cannot count the number of times I have heard the series referred to or discussed in terms which ignore its emotional content, instead making jokes about the screen going red and Shinji screaming, dialogueless scenes, frame saving, incomprehensible philosophical pontification, or sexual subtext (or just plain text, in a few cases).  Joking about it allows the viewer to evade sympathy by treating the content as absurd or engaging in schadenfreude at the characters' expense, and that denies the emotional impact which is the core of the series' purpose.

Much like it's younger, more upbeat cousin Gurren Lagann, if Eva doesn't affect you emotionally, you're missing what the series is about.  Not everyone is interested in being affected in the violently cathartic way that Eva attempts to affect you, though, and this is probably the real reason that there are so many jokes at the series' expense: when you're watchin' anime with your friends, you don't want to have your emotional walls torn down and your mortality and purpose in life brought into question, you just want to watch the explosions and the boobs.

This is a reason why I have strongly recommended that the series be watched alone, because when viewed in a group, people are far more likely to try to appear knowledgeable, clever, or funny at the cost of sympathy and connection, without which, Eva becomes what it is most often described as: weirdly-used christian iconography peppered with sparse dialogue, technobabble and scenes of crying, screaming and giant robots fighting giant monsters (often at the same time).

But for me, and many others, that was not what Neon Genesis Evangelion was about, that was simply the context in which an empowering story about personal responsibility, identity, choice and love could occur.