Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and 2nd GiG: A

It's kind of absurd that I would even consider posting this review; like Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell as a franchise is so thoroughly embedded in the collective anime-viewers' consciousness that praising it is less preaching to the choir as it is reading a pre-written sermon to people who not only have already heard it, but have gone on to write their Master's theses on the original sermon.

I first encountered Ghost in the Shell in the 90s, as the first movie, which, notably, started out with a naked robot woman being constructed, an extremely memorable scene for a 12-year-old.  Some years later, in college, I watched the first season of Stand Alone Complex and felt it was kind of impenetrable but had a really engaging combination of action, science fiction and mystery.

I come back to it after over ten years and realize that while the technological direction that the series took was highly inaccurate (nobody predicted wireless, seriously), the thoughtful transhumanist undercurrent is much more readable and due to my greater patience and focus and the plot is more comprehensible as well, though the extra layer of 'do machines have something identifiable as a soul?' remains unanswered and the final episode of the first season was a little unsatisfying after the blazing action of the rest of the series.

I hadn't watched 2nd GiG, the second season of Stand Alone Complex before, but it loyally continues the story of Public Safety Section 9, providing more insight into the characters and what life in the wired and chromed up 21st century of Masamune Shirow's imagination looks like, a place of politics, violence, corruption and techno-evolution.

The plots themselves are well-crafted and engaging, though you cannot get away with half-watching them, too much happens in heavy dialogue and obscure political institutions.  If you do pay attention though it's not particularly hard to follow: the villains and heroes both are recognizable, almost iconic.  Despite now being over a decade old, the animation quality holds up very well, looking smooth and crisp even by modern standards.

In short, while I don't believe Ghost in the Shell is mind-blowingly deep, it is extremely intelligent, and completely deserving of its status as one of the big names in anime.

For you fans who didn't know: there is an in-progress OVA series called Ghost in the Shell: Arise, though it uses completely new character designs and voice actors, being a reimagining instead of a sequel.

Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens

Kannagi:  B

Yeah, I said I'd work on my backlog, but while I was going through it I came across Kannazuki no Miko, and the title of that sounds a bit like Kannagi and Kannagi has 'shrine maidens' in the subtitle (which is what Miko means in Kannazuki no Miko) and so it reminded me of this series that I'd heard the name of but knew nothing else about.

And so I got to watching it and it's actually pretty good. It's a sitcom about a girl who happens to be a goddess and incarnates after her sacred tree is cut down.  She lives with the boy who carved an image of her (who he'd met when he was younger) out of the tree and generally is as sloppy and lazy as you'd expect a teenage girl who thinks she's a goddess to be.

Note I said sitcom not romcom: while there isn't much to speak of in the plot and there are two girls who are kind of interested in our boy, Nagi, the goddess, isn't one of them, in fact, she shows no romantic interest in Jin whatsoever.  There's also a nice colorful background cast: the childhood friend with the crush, the otaku mangaka artist friend, the mischievous senpai who are constantly trying to make things more 'entertaining', the extremely talented but misunderstood gentle giant and our goddess' exorbitantly catty little sister (also a goddess).  The show also has more than it's share of otaku culture references and a couple of hilarious fourth-wall breaks.

Note 'Goddess' here is a translation of 'kami' which is non-gendered, and further note that in Japan 'divinity' is much more broadly defined, something the series brings up occasionally.  Really, this is yet another show (like Sasami-san after it, which I believe took a few tips) about how Japan's gods must really not be very dignified people, if those who they receive worship from are anything to go by.

It doesn't really come to a conclusion, though there is a climax, and a number of plot threads are left hanging, so if you need your stories to all fit nicely into the box, be warned that Kannagi's don't.  There's a couple of weirdly-paced episodes and not a lot of real substance.

But hey, it's funny and cute and clever and it doesn't fall into harem stagnation or try to be anything it's not.  If you're looking for a fun little show that's very Japanese but still pretty comprehensible to westerners, you could do a heck of a lot worse than Kannagi.

So, this Season...

I'm gonna try to work through my like 20-series backlog  (since Narutaru was SUCH a success), but while I pick what to watch next I'll write a quick post about stuff that's presently airing.

First is a series that I was worried about but watched an episode and am presently giving a chance to: Soul Eater Not.  I recently did a post on Soul Eater itself, which is a fine show, but when I read the blurb on Soul Eater Not I at first thought they were in no way related, since Soul Eater was a shonen action series about beating up witches and demons and Not is a seinen slice of life series about going to school.  But it turns out it's a slice of life series taking place in the Soul Eater world, at the Soul Eater school, about three girls who are kohai (underclassmen) to the main cast, and seems to be doing a lot of filling in backgrounds on minor characters that didn't get enough screen time in the main anime.  I was somewhat daunted by the 'ecchi' tag, but in three episodes we've seen cleavage like three times and panties like once, so I guess that got left out, though the animation style is dramatically different and much more 'pretty' compared to the original's sharp lines.  Don't think SEN is going to be genius, but I'll finish it  unless it just completely jumps off a cliff.

Next is Nisekoi, which a couple of different sub groups I follow are doing, so I picked it up, despite everything I could tell saying it was yet another romcom.  And it is, but it's executed really well, I got through the twelve episodes my favorite fansubbers had finished and am actually quite happy with how it's going, relationships had reached points of no return, characters have confessed their affection for each other and progress is being made.  A couple days deciding I liked it, I found out that it's made by Studio Shaft, who also did Madoka, Bakemonogatari, Sasami-san and several other things I like, and in fact has made nothing I haven't at least enjoyed.  It was nice to find myself liking something of theirs not knowing it was theirs, though.

Speaking of Shaft, I also stumbled across another show (the one that actually made me go 'Huh, this feels like Shaft style, I wonder if they made it...' when I also found they were doing Nisekoi) called Mekaku City Actors, which I liked the first episode of but I'm not really clear on anything else about.  So I think I'll be watching that too, it's gotten a couple more episodes out of me, and it's Shaft so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

In downloading a bunch of first episodes to poke through I found a series called Black Bullet, which as titles go is pretty awful.  The animation was good and the execution was competent and it has Horie Yui (<3) in it, though, so I'm willing to give it a couple more episodes.  It's basically directly ripping off Attack on Titan, though, just set in a recognizable near future and with giant insects with some kind of virus rather than horrific man-eating humanoids, and instead of <SPOILERS>, we have little girls with superstrength and healing factor.

I also came across the first episode of the most recent installment of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which definitely lived up to its reputation.  I kind of want to watch it but I'd have to find the original animated versions to really feel justified in doing so.  I really did like the humor of juxtaposition of the super-macho manga-style drawn main cast onto more standard backgrounds and characters, and I can easily see how the series manages to straddle absurdity and seriousness together.

I'm sitting on another first episodes I haven't watched yet, the one that I'm kind of curious about is "Nobunaga the Fool," which, while I can't be certain looks awfully similar to Oda Nobuna no Yabou, at least in the 'history + boobs' conceit, though I have to admit that Nobuna and Koihime Musou are different enough, so I really can't judge.  We'll see if it's any good.

Anyway, I'll probably have another series in a couple of days; I have a lot of work I'm procrastinating on and should be doing instead of rambling here.

Narutaru

Narutaru:  C+

I was going to put a picture with some of the happy lies of the opening

but this one is much more honest.

Sometimes called Shadow Star, Narutaru is kind of a 'what if' on Pokemon: what if kids had these massively dangerous little monsters that obeyed them?  Narutaru then goes "But what if they lived in the real world, where people want things they can't have, and threaten and hurt people who are weaker than them, and are cruel to one another?  What would happen then?"

Narutaru is another series in the same category as Mirai Nikki and Bokurano: a show about humanity at its worst, about cycles of suffering and how evil perpetuates itself.  For the first eight or nine episodes, the series is 'relatively tame,' with only a few deaths, threats of enslavement and awful people.  Then around episode 10, it decides that it isn't horrible enough yet and starts digging deep into the collective horrors of childhood, the final two episodes reaching the darkest examples of children being cruel I've ever seen.

And really tragically, it does a bunch of truly heinous things to elementary school kids and then ends.  We don't get to see what the characters have learned, how the suffering has made them grow, what choices it has caused them to make.  It's just suffering for suffering's sake.

And that's really too bad: suffering this well-orchestrated doesn't come along every day.  The writing's good and well-thought out, this is a very deliberate setup.  There's some really apocalyptic potential to the plot that they've got here, but they don't actually include any of it in the anime.

I actually stole a few glances at the characters' wikipedia entries, looking for voice actors, and learned a bunch of things that are spelld out in the manga that are clearly present in the anime if you know about them, (in particular one girl has been sexually abused by her father and EVERYTHING that happens with her makes more sense knowing that), but the show never gets around to explaining the vast majority of it.  Even the very end makes much more sense if you know what the main character's relationship to her little star-monster is, and the growth that I really wanted to see from the suffering IS present in the manga, but the anime doesn't get any points for that.

I can't honestly recommend Narutaru to anyone.  I watched it because I heard it was nightmarish and it was.  I love me some horrific shit (I've seen a number of series that individually deserve the title of 'Most Truly Soul-Flayingly Horrific': Elfen Lied, Bokurano, Mirai Nikki, Perfect Blue, the Fate/Stay Night Visual Novel, even Hell Girl) but I seriously need to curl into a ball and try to gouge my eyes out after this.  If you want to watch a show that pierces deep into the horrors that we are capable of, then I guess go ahead, but I would recommend Mirai Nikki over Narutaru in a heartbeat, and probably Bokurano too.

Kyousougiga

Kyousougiga: A+

Once upon a time, there was a monk whose drawings came to life, and so he was asked to live in the country, away from the capital where everyone was afraid of him.  He didn't mind so much, but continued drawing things to entertain himself, and one of those things was a black rabbit named Koto, who he created to be the goddess of a city he had created.  And that rabbit fell in love with the monk, and a buddha offered to give her a body so that they could move forward with their relationship.  And in time, they had three children, only one of whom was particularly human, but they were a family and it was good.  Eventually they were given further trouble by the priests and so the monk drew a world for them, and they fled to that world to live.

And then the monk and the woman who had been the rabbit left, and things got weird.

Kyousougiga is a fairy tale with a distinctly Japanese flavor, a very well-paced and well-executed one.  What begins as a story about a strange wonderland becomes very directly about freedom, inheritance, growing up, responsibility, family and love.  The ending is one of the best I've seen in recent memory.

It's short, only 10 episodes (3 more exist, but they're compilations, live action distractions and commentary), so you can get through it in an evening if you're willing to stretch a little bit, and I recommend watching it in one sitting, because a lot is happening all of the time and if you miss things or forget details, you're likely to be missing pieces when it comes to the conclusion.

I'm inclined to draw a parallel to FLCL for a similar sense of mayhem and a similarly-couched narrative, as well as similar pacing, but Kyousougiga doesn't have FLCL's utter zaniness, so the comparison might not work for some people.  Kyousougiga didn't blow my mind quite as brilliantly as FLCL did, but that's not much of an mark against it.

Kyousougiga is beautiful and will make you want to go give your mom or dad or brothers or sisters a hug.  It's elegant and clever and conclusive in a way very few anime ever are.  It's weird, and the animation is definitely... different, and you really do need to pay attention to it for it all to work, but give it a chance to tell its story.  The payoff is worth it.

Chuunibyou Demo Koi ga Shitai! Ren

Chuunibyou Demo Koi ga Shitai! Ren:  B+

So I heard Chuunibyou, my most recent series to get an S grade, was getting a second season midway through last year.  And I dreaded it a little bit.  The first season had a good arc, told a good story.  Did it need more?  I didn't think so.

And really, I still don't think it needed more, but so long as it's getting more, what it got was actually pretty good.

We get a single new character who is actually handled pretty well and becomes extremely sympathetic.  We get more adorable and hilarious eighth-grader syndrome hijinks.  We get some poorly written episodes that fail to commit.  We get some very well-written episodes that don't fail to commit.  For all that it's spurious and lacks the depth and power of the first season, Ren is definitely not bad and there was a little part of me that wanted to give it an A, but it just falls into a few too many traps.

I'm generally anti-sequel, so this is actually a pretty positive review.  If you liked the first season, the second season has more of the good things that the first had: comedy, eye-melting imaginary action scenes, awkward romance, emotional turmoil, embarrassing deliberate melodrama.  If you didn't like the first season, a) what is wrong with you it was really good and b) the second season doesn't change the formula much, though it is definitely about slightly different things, like building on a relationship, unrequited love and what friendship is about.  Definitely doesn't make the first season better through it's existence but it also doesn't retroactively weaken it.

Non Non Biyori

Non Non Biyori: B

From Left to Right: Hotaru, Komari, Natsumi, Renge.

This is fanart, the actual art style is a little different.

Yeah, it's another slice of life show.  I needed something gentle and easy after Attack on Titan to bring my heart rate down.

The title is a pun on the words nonbiri, which means to be lazy or do nothing, and biyori which means weather.  It's yet another slice of life show, this time about elementary school and middle school girls rather than high school girls, and rather than being set in the middle of a big city, it's set in a very rural part of Japan, in fact, the four characters are the only students in their town's combined elementary and middle school, all of different years, a first-grader, Renge, a fifth-grader, Hotaru, a seventh-grader, Natsumi and her older sister, an eigth-grader, Komari.

I found it pretty funny, but really the best part of it for me was the first-grader.  Unlike a lot of other portrayals of very young characters, we are neither shown the world through her eyes (therefore missing much of the grown-up context) nor is her childish ignorance played for laughs, she's simply another member of the cast who's lived in their rural town for her whole life and is continually questioning whether or not they're all hicks.

Despite the framing device of Hotaru being a girl from Tokyo, she is just another cast member as well, with her own idiosyncrasies and confusions and obsessions, it's truly an ensemble show.

And you know, it made me laugh and tear up a little bit in a couple places.  And that's enough for me to give it a B.  Slice of Life shows that aren't boring or contrite usually get that from me and I kind of wish I could say more about it, but that's really all there is.

Non Non Biyori has some good schadenfreude, some good laughs at 'yeah, I remember being like that', some really heartwarming moments and is just a smooth, lazy ride on a day with good weather.  If you don't like slice of life shows, you won't like NNB, but if you do it's well-paced and funny with little to complain about.

Soul Eater

Soul Eater: B

So, in Anime Halloween Town, Death himself runs a school for kids to learn to use weapons like his own very famous scythe.  The weapons are also people.  And there's Witches who Death doesn't like but it's not clear on exactly how evil all of them are (though definitely a couple of them are very evil) and something about a god of madness trapped in a bag made of his own skin somewhere in there as well.

Soul Eater is a shonen anime with all that entails but it's short (only 50 episodes) and has an ending, as well as some of the creepiest supernatural horror I've seen in anime (as opposed to visceral horror like Attack on Titan or personal horror like Higurashi), as well excellent villains, heroes with genuine problems and... actually overall a really fun cast of characters and as well as an evocative and unique setting.  It's well written and well animated and if that's all you need to enjoy something you can get a lot out of it.

Like a lot of B rated series that I like, but acknowledge are not genius, it hasn't got a lot of depth, when I want to talk what it's about, I can basically only talk about the cast and plot elements, which I don't really like talking about in my reviews unless they're funny or engaging in a vacuum, and I don't think Soul Eater functions that way.  Soul Eater should grab you with its unique aesthetic and atmosphere and hold you with good writing and execution, though there's a few episodes in the middle that don't serve to progress the plot much, there's some seriously brilliant villainy going on, some clever humor and the plot is unpredictable in an interesting and good way.

If you want to spend some time in Anime Halloween Town, Soul Eater is a very good way to do that.  If you don't have 50 episodes of time to watch a single show, you can safely miss it, but if the premise appeals to you in any way, I actually pretty heartily recommend it, just don't go in expecting too much.

Attack on Titan

Shingeki no Kyojin: A*

So I was told to watch a show called "Attack on Titan," acontexually by good friends of mine who don't watch a ton of anime, about seven months ago.  Given the name, I assumed it was some kind of sci-fi thing, Titan being the moon of Saturn, and the fact that I hadn't seen the name anywhere else led me to dismiss it.  Completely unrelatedly, the anime blogs I follow were completely abuzz with images and praise for this show "Shingeki no Kyojin," but I didn't pick it up at the time.  Fast forward a month or two and due to clicking a link on Wikipedia about Shingeki no Kyojin, I learn that Attack on Titan is its english title, and that it's being nearly simultaneously released in the US.  Whoopsie me.  I downloaded what I could get of it (most of it had already broadcast at the time) and watched the first episode, which, not to spoil, involves our protagonist watching his mother get eaten alive.

At which point I put it back down and said to myself "Right, I'll watch that when I'm in the mood for something that horrific."  Fast forward seven months to two days ago when I think "You know, I should watch Attack on Titan sometime soon."  At which point I sat down and watched it practically in one sitting.

Attack on Titan is a very even-handed and mature series about fear, war and sacrifice in the face of annihilation.  As such, it actually shares many similarities with other apocalyptic scenarios, I personally saw a lot of parallels to Evangelion and 28 Days Later.  The artwork is a different style than 'standard' anime, one better suited to the dozens and hundreds of haunted, tortured and terrified eyes that populate a world living in fear.  The animation is very smooth, even in the exciting, absurdly high-velocity action sequences and expressive during the periods of intense emotion that I was usually sold on.

The concept is solid and the execution is excellent; the writing, while it has a body count that even George RR Martin might raise an eyebrow at, is overall very good.  I have a few points of criticism, though.  Pacing is good but entire episodes are often spent providing the background for a single decision, more than once an entire 20-minute episode takes place within 2 or 3 minutes of in-world time.  While something important happens every episode there are a couple points where it feels like things have slowed down before we go back to breakneck action.  I personally foresaw most of the twists (though I also called at least one twist which wasn't there), which is a pretty minor criticism, really, because it meant that there was enough complexity to the plot to be worth guessing, it just didn't make guessing very hard.

The big complaint though, and this is the reason for that ugly asterisk after Attack on Titan's otherwise perfect grade, is that it doesn't end.  It ends at a good pausing point, but if I didn't know that there's going to be a second season (sometime in 2015), I would probably give the series a B+, maybe even lower.  The show does an excellent job of engaging us, you really care, maybe not about the characters specifically, but about the very morally ambiguous situation and how it's going to resolve, and the show doesn't have that for you yet.

If you want to watch a show dealing with heavy, emotional and ambiguous themes, imaginatively constructed, laden with action, mystery and visceral horror, a story of a maimed and crippled humanity struggling forward toward the faintest sliver of hope, Attack on Titan is a your mind-blowing, gut-wrenching half-masterpiece.  If skinless people, gore, pointless deaths or haunted eyes bother you, I guess you can skip it.

BlazBlue Alter Memory

BlazBlue Alter Memory:  D++

So, normally when I get a really bad show I'm very excited to take it to task and tell you everything that's wrong with it, but this is a bit more melancholy a review, because it turns out that I love BlazBlue as a franchise.  The fighting games have been exhilarating to play and rewarding to practice with deep mechanics and colorful, interesting characters, both to play as and to view the story modes of.  Speaking of, BlazBlue's story mode goes much, much deeper than any other fighting game I've encountered and is indeed a full Visual Novel within the main game, giving it by far the most engrossing plot of any fighting game you'll ever play, fraught with emotion, sacrifice and tragedy.

What I'm saying is that it's really depressing that so little of what's awesome about BlazBlue made it into this anime.

The writing is functional.  It tells the story of Calamity Trigger (the first game) early and then tells Continuum Shift (the second game), which is fine, the plot of Calamity Trigger focuses on an repeating time loop, and so it doesn't need to be dwelt on extensively, where Continuum Shift is more linear and involving all of the characters.

Characters are fine because they were good in the fighting game, and the plot is told in a relatively coherent fashion, though, like any Visual Novel adaptation, quite a bit of detail is lost in the transition from ~20 hours of story in the VN, including multiple routes and multiple ends for 20ish characters to 12 20 minute episodes following something trying to be a linear plot.  Nevertheless they manage to hit all the touchstones, though judged on its own merits a number of characters appear so little as to be almost completely extraneous.

The part that ruins the entire thing and shoves it down from a C to a D is the animation.  C'mon, guys, this is a fighting game, and a pretty fighting game.  This was their opportunity to take things that we only saw in a controlled 2d sprite-based context and make them melt our eyes out of our skulls.  And the visuals are NEVER amazing.  They barely make "acceptable" half the time, and when you make a series based on a fighting game, your fights have to be awesome, not dry motions with all the impact of a handful of feathers.

The entire series bears the scars of being underfunded: their opening animation isn't finalized until something like episode 6, there is essentially no original music, and while the music from the game is good, that leaves the score somewhat lacking in places.  The pacing of the show could have been improved with better animation being able to make fight scenes impressive in less time.

I can't even recommend it as a primer to the BlazBlue universe and story, which is what I was hoping I'd be able to say: "Oh, well if you can get past the shitty animation it's actually a good introduction to a great game series," but it's just not.  If you want to get in on a good story, play the games.  The anime is not the worst anime I've ever seen, probably not even making my bottom 5, but it has essentially nothing to recommend it to anyone who does not already love BlazBlue, and to them it will be a disappointment.

Kill La Kill

Kill La Kill:  A

Okay apparently it was time for another of my patented 3-month breaks.  Not sure that I'm back to full speed, but I finished this series so here we are.

Kill La Kill is the first full-length series by Studio Trigger, formed by a number of Gainax employees who apparently felt that their former company's direction wasn't awesome enough.  Most notably its writer did Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt and its director did Gurren Lagann.

It's a show about clothes.  It is the most actiony, explosive show about clothes that you could ever possibly imagine.  The title is built off the pun that 'kill' in japanese is pronounced 'kiru', which is homophonic with the verb 'to wear'.

For how good a show it is, I find myself wanting to criticize it a lot, mostly because I reflexively compare it to Gurren Lagann, which I will go ahead and say I feel is the best-crafted anime of all time.  And while Kill La Kill is very good, it has some modest pacing and commitment issues, there are numerous episodes that, while they don't exactly accomplish nothing, don't advance the plot as much as they could, and places in the series where it could have been written for greater impact.  Perhaps my biggest complaint is that the series never delivers on a concise message about what clothing should represent or be used for, a failure to commit to a message.

All that said, it is well-animated, funny and full of over-the-top action while having a varied cast of flavorful, interesting characters.  The use of revealing costuming and nudity is quite deliberate (rather than just kind of being there for the ride), and in my opinion doesn't feel like fan service, especially since characters of both sexes are extensively naked.

If Gurren Lagann's slightly underclothed, slightly confused (but still very clever and fun and exciting) little sister sounds like a show you would like, Kill La Kill delivers that same kind of 'what the really' action and laughter, with music that makes you feel like you should go out and cut a truck in half.  If seeing a girl wear something that would wedge the hell out of any person with nerves on their lower body will break your suspension of disbelief, or if you really want a show that uses animation to discuss the difficult topics that it might bring to mind in a mature audience, Kill La Kill will feel inappropriate.