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.

Yuru Yuri

Yuru Yuri:  B+

Yuru:  A term or sound implying laziness or an easygoing manner.  Yuri:  Girls love, romance or sexuality between women.   So, Yuru Yuri is easygoing girlish romance.  It's a slice of life show about a relatively small (a main cast of 8) group of middle school girls who form an awkward web of romantic entanglements, many of which are obvious and many of which are vehemently denied by those involved in them.  Nearly all of them are one-sided or are in that odd stage where neither one has recognized the relationship as being affection yet.

It's difficult to describe what makes me enjoy it as a series so much.  One thing is the relative awareness of the girls of each others' feelings: with only a handful of exceptions, all the girls are pretty much aware of the various crushes that are going on, even the ones who are the targets of those crushes.  Another is the series' mix of schadenfreude (a staple of any comedy) with sweetness, as much as the series is mean to its characters, we have long moments of getting to see them being nice to each other, we get to see why they're friends in the first place.

If you're into girls being awkward and silly and also sometimes just being children, Yuru Yuri will give you plenty to laugh at.  If you need men in your stories to enjoy them, or if you expect fan service or resolution to extended romantic silliness, move on.

Rozen Maiden

Rozen Maiden:  B

I've been referring to this show to my friends as "Gothloli Highlander," because that is the main thrust of the plot.  There are magical, animate dolls (the eponymous Rozen Maidens) who were created to play the "Alice Game," a battle where each of the seven sister-dolls fights to take each others "Rosa Mystica," which is their animating magical soul, and after having taken all of them, the winner will become Alice, the ultimate girl, beloved by their Father and their creator.

The series actually focuses more on the relationships between the Rozen Maiden dolls, who are, despite their centuries-old existences, still children, and each has a different outlook on their creation, their sisters, and the Alice Game.  The series attempts to reasonably discuss the effects of this particular goal of existence on a group, especially a group that has become familiar with one another over an extended period of centuries.

I enjoyed the series for its emotional content and the weird childishness of the dolls, even the more mature ones have a number of childish quirks that stand out as making them interesting characters, more than just a collection of well-written traits.  If I were to criticize the series, I would say that the characters' elaborate costumes draw too much of the animation budget, the combat scenes are distinctly lacking in dynamism or animation quality.

The series is two seasons and an OVA, but the series, both in its manga and anime forms, has suffered from executive changes and sudden cancellations, the second season of the anime is a divergent plot from the manga, and the original manga cut off after a sudden deus ex machina before beginning again in an alternate universe.  Overall, the anime manages to be a coherent story that is functional, though unresolved.

If the idea of watching dolls that might as well be human bicker, laugh, love, fight and learn appeals to you, you'll probably enjoy Rozen Maiden.  If you need action or find emotional subplots tiring, you probably won't.

Ao no Exorcist

Ao no Exorcist:  C

The antichrist reaches puberty and joins a school which trains exorcists for the Catholic church so that he can kick Satan's ass.

Ao no Exorcist (The Blue Exorcist) is a shonen series that has a similar concept to many other series like it, and that makes it difficult to criticize or praise.  I was fairly certain of what I was getting into with the first episode (Naruto with Christian demonology instead of ninjas) and I was neither impressed nor disappointed. It's competently written, the characters are effective and the series overall holds itself together, but it doesn't really do any more than that.

I feel a little bad for being completely unsurprised by this series.  I said after the third episode, "Huh, I think this is getting a C," and my opinion of it didn't change for twenty-two more episodes.  I don't think I gave it that grade because I want to be right, despite the fact that there were good, even awesome moments in the series, it just wasn't as brilliantly crafted or well-written as I've come to expect from my grading system, and the awesome moments were far outnumbered by predictable (but not bad) story and action.  But I feel kind of bad about it.

If you're into shonen and like to see the Japanese perspective on the 'fun' parts of Christian mythology and demonology, you can have some fun with Ao no Exorcist.  I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who hadn't expressed a vested interest in either shonen anime as a genre or silly Japanese takes on Christianity as a theme.

Anime News

The two series I'm really enjoying watching (Dog Days' and Yuru Yuri ♪♪) are both mid-season, so giving a report on them would be inappropriate.  Instead I figured I'd just talk about what Japan's coming out with in the next few months.

First of all, disappointing to me personally is the news that Kizumonogatari (the prequel movie to Bakemonogatari) has been delayed by Shaft.  However, instead, over the course of October we're going to be treated to a couple of Madoka Magica movies, so I guess it's okay in the end.   Of course, there's the problem that we won't actually be able to WATCH those except as illegal and poor-quality camrips until around spring or summer next year, but that's how movies go.

Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0 is coming out soon too, but has the exact same problem as the new Madoka movies; we won't actually be able to watch it for quite a while.  I'm looking forward to it, though.

I have confirmed that a second season of Medaka Box will be airing.  So that's great.

Shaft, in addition to the Madoka Movies (which are probably in post by now) is also working on a new season of Hidamari Sketch.

It seems as though we'll be getting YET ANOTHER season of  Hayate no Gotoku, which I can't deny a bit of childish glee for.

There's a Toaru Majutsu no Index movie coming up late in the year (maybe early next year).

News I didn't expect to hear: Production IG is making a Mass Effect anime movie slated for Winter 2012 with the subtitle "Paragon Lost. "  I suspect that'll make the jump to the US fairly quickly, since the franchise is quite popular over here.

There are a lot of other series coming out that I haven't done the research on to know if they're worth watching, and I'm sure some of them will be showing up on THIS VERY BLOG in the future.

Utawarerumono

Utawarerumono:  D+

I first heard of this series when I was shown the DVD special... it must have been 4 years ago.  It was amusing and kind of silly, but given that the title (which translates to "The One Being Sung") is a rather complex mishmash of japanese syllables, it didn't stick in my head and I lost it until a friend reminded me of the name a few weeks ago.  So I decided I'd watch it.

And I really really wanted to like it.  The characters held my attention and the fantasy world felt fantastic and mysterious.  The protagonist clearly had some powerful magical dark secret (and amnesia, which worked out well, actually) and I was looking forward to learning more about it.

One of my first complaints were the pointlessly evil villains.  These guys were moustache-twirling, dog-kicking, incredibly-skilled-but-good-hearted-subordinate-who-refused-to-massacre-a-village-full-of-innocent-people-firing idiot villains.  And they don't stop showing up, either.  Maybe I've just been spoiled by other anime that have provided justifications for why people are bastards, but that was my first disappointment.  But whatever, right?  We beat up some bad guys and save the world.  It's cool.

More characters keep getting rolled as the series progresses on, especially female characters.  This isn't really surprising, originally, Utawarerumono was a turn-based strategy hentai game, but very few elements of the original fan service or naughty bits are left over (in TVTropes terms, the underwear has been very well bleached).  I think we don't even see cleavage until episode 3?  Anyway, that combined with the fact that the girls' reasons for being attracted to the protagonist are either well-justified or just left out led me to enjoy the first half of the series.

Now, I'm going to spoil the ending, because it's the part of the series that ruins it.

Then, around episode 18 or so, things just start going downhill, and they start going downhill fast.  A character who was made sympathetic begins making outstandingly bad decisions.  We suddenly have invincible mecha in our fantasy setting (which isn't that bad, it's anime, right?).  And then the invincible mecha aren't invincible any more, and our protagonist can turn into a kaiju.  That's his dark secret.  He turns into godzilla.  And then evil godzilla shows up and they fight.  And the protagonist has to be sealed beneath the earth for the safety of the world.  The end.

Even that could have been made a credible story except for the fact that so many of the characters wind up not mattering at all to the ongoing story, they were only put in there because they were in the original game and taking them out would have displeased their fans.

It reminded me more than anything of the Fate Stay Night anime: they clearly have way more story and characterization and plot than they can ever fit into 26 episodes, so they tried to make a cohesive and expansive story out of everything, but they wind up not giving enough focus to the things that would have made that story make sense because they're trying to give screen time to everything else in it.  Which is really too bad, because there are some nice ideas and some genuinely lovable characters in this series, and it's really disappointing that they series they're in sucks so bad.

I should mention in regard to Fate Stay Night's anime: I also played/read the Visual Novel, and it was mind-blowingly good, a truly brilliant example of what can be done with a voiced and partially animated choose-your-own-adventure story that takes full advantage of its multiple endings and branching plot trees to deepen characterization and plot.  So I think it's very likely that the Utawarerumono GAME is actually really good, worth making into an anime, certainly.

But unless you have a disturbing fetish for animal ears, tails and disappointment, I recommend against watching the series.