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.

Melody of Oblivion

Melody of Oblivion:  N/A

Hoo, boy.  This series is really something.  One of these days I'll go back and review Revolutionary Girl Utena so I can finally have my opinions about Melody of Oblivion (Bokyaku no Senritsu, in Japanese), Star Driver and Utena all down in the same place, which is relevant, because they're all very similar series.

I want to give Melody of Oblivion a B and a C, and I kind of want to give it an A as well.  I really can't manage to pick between these three, so it gets an NA.  It gets a C because it's freaking bizarre and if you're not paying much attention to it and trying to reconstruct some kind of pattern out of the symbolism it will just drive you crazy.  It gets a B because it's fun to watch and conceptually very interesting.  It gets an A because the symbolism of it is fascinating and the story is ultimately good.

I'll spare you a short version of the plot, because you can just read my Star Driver 5-13 review (here).  Melody of Oblivion, even more so than Utena and Star Driver, has strong sexual overtones (which become rather hilariously no-longer-tones in the later parts of the series), and viewing it as an exercise in symbolic innuendo results in an intelligent story very much about some difficult-to-approach subjects.

This is also the series where I mention that there are dudes who are also motorcycles and also unicorns.  So it goes both ways.

Definitely a series for those of you who like weird stuff, I do consider Melody of Oblivion the weakest of the three series, but that is due more to Star Driver and Utena's excellence than Melody's lack.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt:  N/A

Okay, I promise I won't make a habit of failing to rate shows, but this one stands out as existing outside of my letter grading system.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is a series made in late 2010 by Studio Gainax (of Evangelion and Gurren Lagann fame) which I can only begin to describe as "A x-rated love letter to Jhonen Vasquez by way of the Powerpuff Girls."

The series notably is very western in its sensibilities: its heavily episodic nature, animation style and being set in something which resembles America more than Japan.  The series also uses an inordinate amount of Engrish obscenity, in fact, obscenity, innuendo and toilet humor are the order of the day for this highly toxic 13-episode joyride through a series of themed episodes, some referential, some bizarre and some downright gross.

It is not for everyone, but if you are the sort of person with a truly depraved sense of humor who appreciates the humor for the sake of crossing lines that maybe shouldn't be crossed, such as a magical girl transformation sequence which is a pole-dancing striptease, a character who has sex almost every episode, usually loudly just offscreen and a mascot sidekick who is brutally murdered by his masters on a regular basis and spends much of his 'idle' time apparently masturbating a zipper.

PSG is genuinely funny in its dirty, going-too-far sort of way, but the fact is that it is SO much not for everyone that saying it's good or it's bad is very difficult.  I loved it, but felt the need to inflict it (not share, inflict) on my friends.  Some of my friends I knew would like it, because it's their kind of messed up.  Some of my friends I don't mention it to, because it's really not.