There’s not much to this one: just a short and funny OVA.
At first glance it looks like a standard kodomo (children’s) anime, with simple, brightly colored artwork, bouncy inane music, and relentlessly upbeat characters. On closer examination there’s clearly something wrong with it. In fact it’s a parody, and a particularly hilarious one if you have a sufficiently twisted sense of humor.
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One of the main advantages of watching anime in Japanese with subtitles is that even if you don’t understand Japanese you can pick up a lot of information that will be lost in the English dub. A little effort spent in learning a few words can pay off in a wealth of information about the culture and the relationships between the characters.
I’ve collected a lot of notes on the subject and I’m going to try to organize them into posts. If you have been watching anime for years you will probably find this stuff very elementary, but newer viewers may find this useful.
The first thing to master are the honorifics. There are only 5 to learn, but there are many subtleties in how they are used.
Photos of cosplayers at Connecticon 08.
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I initially had mixed feelings about this show, but it’s definitely interesting, if a bit unsettling. I find that it grows on me as I rewatch it.
The show has some offputting elements. It has a grim vision in which the bright, safe world of everyday life is a thin veneer over a dark reality of lawless violence. Also the hero can be annoyingly stupid.
Good points: Firstly, Murasaki, a bossy 7-year-old girl who is an absolutely wonderful character. I think it’s worth watching the show just to see her. Murasaki is played by 11-year-old Aoi Yuuki, and it should be interesting to watch her future career. This show actually has several great characters, but Murasaki outshines all the others.
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Three announcements in quick succession:
1) ADV Films is in deep financial trouble and has once again lost the rights to several of their current anime series (including, frustratingly, Kanon just days before they were scheduled to release the final DVD.)
2) FUNimation Entertainment has acquired the rights to all the series orphaned by Geneon when it abandoned the North American market last fall. I predicted something like this, but this seems to have worked out even better than I expected. They plan to finish the incomplete series like When They Cry, the second season of Rozen Maiden, and The Story of Saiunkoku.
3) FUNimation Entertainment has acquired the rights to the series lost by ADV.
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Rumiko Takahashi is best known for sprawling epics that go on and on seemingly forever, but this series suggests that her greatest talent is writing short stories. Each of the 13 episodes is an independent short story. The stories are clever and whimsical, though sometimes with dark elements. All are set in modern Japan. The only connection between them is that sometimes you can catch glimpses of characters from other stories.
Many manga artists and anime writers prefer to work with fantastic characters or exotic foreign locations. Here however the characters are fairly realistic, even though some of the stories have fantasy elements. The milieu seems very Japanese; an American could probably learn a lot about Japanese society just from watching this series.
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Well, it seems to be official. Rumiko Takahashi will finally bring the InuYasha manga to an end with the next issue. That’s 558 chapters in 56 volumes over a period of almost 12 years. Will the ending be worth it? Come on. There’s no story in the world that justifies 56 volumes. I suspect most fans feel more exhausted than thrilled at this point.
But what about the anime series that ended 4 years ago, having caught up to the manga and run out of material? Will some animation studio pick up the series and finish it, now that it has an ending? Or will fans who slogged through the first 167 episodes be left without ever knowing whether Naraku got his just deserts, and whether Inuyasha and Kagome ever got off the dime and admitted their feelings for each other?
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This recent anime hasn’t received much attention and I think it deserves more. It’s short and amusing; rather dark but witty and cute.
This is a set of traveler’s tales, where the characters arrive at a new town in each episode and get involved in some local story. It’s tempting to compare it to Kino’s Journey–except that if Kino’s Journey were a shoujo series and the protagonist were a cute but bratty little sorceress, and the stories were more spooky than satirical, it wouldn’t be Kino’s Journey at all.
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Rumiko Takahashi is surely the most successful living manga artist, and the most influential since Osamu Tezuka. Just about every anime fan is familiar with at least some of her work, including popular series like Inuyasha and Ranma 1/2. This one is less well-known. It is much shorter than most of her other works, and also much darker. (Inuyasha has some dark moments, but it alternates them with much lighter material.)
Takahashi’s success is largely due to the fact that she is a good storyteller (though she tends to have trouble bringing a long series to a conclusion in a reasonable amount of time.) This is evident here: the stories are unsettling but compelling.
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Chinese President Hu Jintao has just completed a rare state visit to Japan, supposedly establishing an “everlasting warm spring” in the relationship between the two countries.
Meanwhile the writers of Nijuu Mensou no Musume (The Daughter of Twenty Faces) seem to be busy trying to set Sino-Japanese relations back several decades. Consider the following elements from Episode 2:
I predict that this is one anime that will not be popular in China, and it probably won’t be licensed for Region 1 either. It’s no great loss. I’ve rarely seen a story so riddled with logical holes.
Even if you didn’t already know it, the title of this series should tip you off that the team of manga artists known as CLAMP has a weird sense of humor. In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, I generally like their stuff. I’ve spent many enjoyable hours watching anime series based on their work. That’s what makes this particular series such a disappointment.
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This show has a special meaning for me because it reminds me of the science fiction stories that I loved as a boy, stories by people like Heinlein and Clarke and del Rey, many of which dealt with the early days of space exploration and settlement. These stories featured brave, self-reliant pioneers who navigated their way around the solar system using slide rules. They had little patience with bureaucratic rules; they got themselves into trouble by taking one chance too many; and they got themselves out by means of their wits and their engineering skills. I can see in retrospect that many of them were flawed characters, but they were always interesting.
Planetes represents the same sort of hard-SF. It is actually better written than many of the stories that I remember, but it has the same sense of wonder and hope and excitement.
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Jeff Lawson reports that two years after watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumia he finally figured out that Kyon is a jerk.
Which of course is true, but necessary. Haruhi wouldn’t fall for a nice guy. She wants a partner in crime. These guys are funny to watch, but I really wouldn’t want to get too close to them.
What would you get if you gave Makoto Shinkai, who created Voices of a Distant Star on his personal computer, enough money to hire a professional staff and make a theatrical feature? Apparently the answer is this movie, a gentle, wistful tale of young love and loneliness. Maybe this is the story that he was really trying to tell with VODS, now stripped of its science fiction elements and reduced to its bare essentials.
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This anime is best thought of as a series of clever, spooky short stories with some continuing characters. Viewed that way it is quite entertaining.
There’s another way to look at it that’s a bit less satisfactory. We have here the story of a young man who is irritatingly immature, yet it is strongly hinted that he will someday become a person of consequence. So this could be the story of how he overcomes his youthful immaturity and becomes a true hero–except in the end a year has passed and he still has a long way to go.
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Jeet Heer in Slate revisits the story of Fredric Wertham, an American psychiatrist who started a campaign against comic books in the 1940’s and 50’s, arguing that they promote juvenile delinquency and homosexuality. The campaign was a great success, culminating in mass book burnings and Congressional hearings. Many publishers went out of business and the rest were forced to accept a draconian censorship regime.
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This is mostly interesting as a proof of concept: a demonstration that if you were sufficiently talented and fanatically dedicated you could create a professional-quality anime all by yourself, or perhaps with the help of a few friends.
In 2001 Makoto Shinkai quit his job as a video game developer and spent about seven months working head-down full-time to create this 25-minute anime on his computer. A friend handled the music and sound effects; Makoto and his fiancée did the voice acting. (It was later redubbed using professional seiyuu.)
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This story is a bit too melancholy for my taste, but it is interesting and original and has a small but devoted following.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is an anti-war story, and such stories usually do not have cheerful endings. It would tend to defeat the purpose.
In any case it is a thoughtful story with a unique premise. Considering that it is from Studio DEEN, the artwork is surprisingly adequate, with attractive backgrounds and impossible, beautiful flying machines. I found the character designs a bit disconcerting at first, but quickly got used to them. The music is haunting (I’ve had “Hikari ni tsusumare musuu no hana-tachi wa…” stuck in my head for days.)
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I’m going to risk making a fool of myself and try to guess the ending of the second season. (If you have read the books and know the right answer, please keep quiet.)
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In cast anyone’s wondering why certain pictures in the Air (TV) review were replaced by equivalent pictures from the movie, it has to do with the fact that the WordPress makes it easy to overwrite existing image files with the same name. Anyway it’s fixed now.
I’ve had my doubts about this sequel, but at this point, all I have to say is this: Episode 21 rocks!
According to an announcement on RightStuf, ADV Films has announced an updated release schedule, indicating that they have worked out at least some of their licensing problems.
We will know more when ADV gets around to updating their own web site.
In any case its good news. This debacle was bad not only for ADV, but for everyone involved in publishing anime DVDs in North America. Stopping a lot of series in mid-release hurts the entire market.
Update: ADV comments on ANN. (via.)
At about the same time that the Air television series was released, an alternate version of the story, made by another studio, appeared in movie theaters. After renting the TV series I decided to rent the movie version as well to see how they compared.
After watching both, I definitely prefer the television series.
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I decided to rent this series because it was made by most of the same people who were responsible for Kanon (2006), which I liked a lot. As it turns out, it looks a lot like Kanon, particularly in the character designs, and the music sounds similar, but the story itself is sadder and darker. This is saying a lot given that Kanon has some pretty dark moments.
I have to give this series high marks for artistic quality and there certainly are a lot of people who love it. The series was very popular in Japan. (It may appeal more to Japanese than American sensibilities.) However I suspect that many Americans will hate it.
I described Kanon as a “fairy tale” because the universe of Kanon is harsh but not entirely unfair. No matter how bad things look, you can, if you are sufficiently brave and virtuous, earn a happy ending (though you may need to be very brave indeed). Tragic events occur, but life at other times seems pretty good, filled with happy moments and the companionship of good friends.
Air has a darker vision. Most of the people we meet are sad, and happy endings seem to be in short supply. Malicious acts reverberate down the centuries, causing suffering for innocent children. For some characters the only way to win is to face life’s hardships with courage and integrity and hope for a better deal in one’s next life.
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Earlier I made some disparaging remarks about the anime series ef–A Tale of Memories. I actually have a lot of respect for the show, but there are some things about it, particularly the ending, which really bother me.
For the benefit of the few people who may be interested I have put together some notes describing my objections. These are necessarily loaded with spoilers, so you should not read them if you have not seen the series and have any interest in watching it.
It’s not unusual for me to change my mind while watching an anime series. Sometimes a series starts well but falls apart at the end. Sometimes it takes me a while to understand what’s going on. However I don’t think I’ve ever changed changed my mind as often as I did while watching this one.
Partly it’s a matter of expectations. The early episodes look like a light-hearted comedy. Indeed, the distributor is explicitly marketing it as a comedy. But it is not really a comedy at all, and parts of it are emotionally wrenching to watch. Nor is it a realistic drama. I prefer to think of it as a modern fairy tale; a story whose characters wander down strange paths and end up trapped in an abyss of dispair, but are ultimately saved by the purity of their hearts and a bit of supernatural assistance.
Ultimately it’s the ending that makes all the difference. I think it’s a wonderful ending that justifies the whole series (though I had to think about it for a while before I was sure of that.)
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This is the time of year when anime bloggers are busy posting their “Top 10 Lists” or other listings of the year’s best and worst. I’m not really in a position to do a top 10 list. I don’t watch nearly enough anime to make a meaningful judgment about which of the 120-odd shows broadcast last year were the 10 best or worst. I’ve seen only a minuscule sample, and from that I’d have to exclude any shows that haven’t ended yet, since the ending often makes all the difference.
What I will do is list some shows that made a significant impression on me (not always in a good way.) If your favorite show isn’t listed below and it ended in 2007, it’s quite possible that’s because I haven’t seen it.
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I have posted my notes on The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya on a separate page here. The notes are full of spoilers, so don’t read them if you haven’t seen the series.
(Broadcast order)(DVD order)A strong-willed girl wants to meet aliens, time-travelers or espers…but she never does…or does she?
Of the hundred or so anime series broadcast in 2006, this was by far the biggest hit. The quirky story, clever writing, hilarious characters and first-rate animation caught the attention of millions of viewers. It catapulted the small animation studio to the front ranks, and made a cult idol out of Aya Hirano.
Now it is available on DVD, but unfortunately in a degraded form.
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Since I really enjoyed the Shakugan no Shana television series I was eager to see the movie. Unfortunately it was a bit of a letdown.
The movie turns out to be a retelling of the first story arc of the TV series (the Friagne arc.) I’m OK with that in principle. That arc is a powerful story; some people consider it the best part of the series. I’m willing to judge the movie on its own terms without comparing it to the series–if they’ll let me.
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I am sorry to hear that Geneon has decided to stop publishing Region 1 DVDs (via Don). Of all the North American anime publishers, Geneon probably has the best taste. This means that some of the best anime series are going to become hard to obtain, at least for a while.
Geneon’s licenses and master recordings are valuable properties. Barring unexpected legal problems somebody will probably pick them up, so we may hope that completed series like Shakugan no Shana, Haibane Renmei, Chobits and Kamichu will be available before too long under another label.
Things look worse for series that are not yet complete. For example only one disc of The Story of Saiunkoku has been released so far; most of the remaining episodes are probably not translated yet, let alone dubbed. This is a worthy story but since it lacks fan service or constant violence, yet is over the heads of most children, its mass appeal is probably limited. It is quite possible that the rest will never be released.
Superficially this series resembles Kino’s Journey. Both are collections of short stories tied together by a similar device: a lone traveler who moves from place to place, each week meeting new people who have a different story to tell. Also in both cases the story-telling is first-rate.
Yet the two series are very different in tone. Kino’s Journey is darkly satirical and focuses more on the follies of nations than the fate of individuals. Mushi-Shi is more humane and more personal. Most of the stories are poignant rather than tragic.
Another thing that distinguishes this series from most others is the superb artwork. The backgrounds in particular are amazingly beautiful.
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Steven Den Beste comments on the logical problems raised by the fuuzetsu (”time-stop seals”) in Shakugan no Shana. When time stops inside the seal, does it also stop outside? Either way seems to create impossible paradoxes. Either way no one should be able to enter or leave the sealed area.
Of course these problems also occur with any of the other anime and manga series that use a variation of this concept. It’s a convenient notion. Seal off an area where the good guys and bad guys can fight it out, then clean up the mess before anyone notices. The idea dates back at least to X, and also appears in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Pretear, Kyoshiro to Towa no Sora, and who knows how many others. They all are subject to similar critiques.
However I think that in the case of Shakugan no Shana all of the paradoxes can be resolved rather simply by applying the rules of that fantasy universe. Entering full-geek mode, I will attempt to do so. NOTE: This is going to require some spoilers, so those who haven’t seen the series should read no further.
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The worst thing about this series is trying to explain what it is about without sounding ridiculous. A story about a boy who plays with dolls? A story about dolls that fight each other to win the chance to become the perfect girl? A commentary on the emotional pathologies of Japanese adolescents?
Nevertheless it is a fascinating and charming story with a positive ending and some very nice artwork.
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Some people are fanatically devoted to this series. A few strongly dislike it. I fall somewhere in between. It’s not the greatest anime ever made, but I think it is pretty good; indeed the best example of its genre.
(The genre in question is “Seinen or Shounen Comedies about High School Girls Based on 4-koma Manga.” This is a larger category than you might expect.)
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ANI-NOUTO has some comments on Figure 17. Some of them are fair but I am going to take issue with the following:
if Hikaru is made out of liquid metal, a-la T-1000, why does she eat, and how does she digest the food?
The answer, I think, is that she isn’t made of liquid metal. The alien technology is much more advanced than that, crossing into Clarke’s Law territory. A Ribers can assume multiple forms; when she is in human form she is indistinguishable from a flesh-and-blood human.
(Conversely, when they merge Tsubasa is no longer flesh and blood. That’s the main reason why she finds the process so frightening.)
For centuries there have been rumors about a mysterious group of white-haired children, sometimes called “The Children of Béfort.” At age 5 they leave their homes and find each other. They search the world for something or someone, pursued by shadowy enemies. At age 12 they die–only to reappear again shortly thereafter.
Someone had a really great idea for a story here. Unfortunately in this case a great story idea did not result in a great anime, due to flawed execution.
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If you have watched much anime you probably have a pretty good idea of what will happen if some Japanese high school students are suddenly transported to a strange and dangerous new world. They will quickly bond with each other even if they didn’t know each other previously. They may be frightened, but they will face the unfamiliar threats and challenges with courage and integrity. They will stick together, fiercely resisting any attempts to turn them against each other. They will never, ever let each other down.
It is easy to poke fun at the gambatte spirit, but it is a standard part of the genre, and one that gives it a great deal of its charm. To find it missing would be disconcerting.
But what if it does appear to be missing? What if the characters, placed in a frightening situation that they could not have anticipated, behaved less like the people that we wish we were, and more like the people that we fear that we actually are? Could this still be a good story? Actually the answer is “Yes.”
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In a study that has been getting a lot of attention recently, American and Japanese college students were required to judge the facial expressions of digitally altered photos. The American students looked primarily at the mouths, while the Japanese students looked primarily at the eyes. (via Ars Technica.)
This is supposed to explain why Japanese on-line writers prefer emoticons like these:
*_* ;_; ^_^
while Americans prefer things like
:-) :-(
all of which can lead to cultural misunderstandings.
But it is obviously is relevant to the “big eyes” question. To Japanese artists and fans the eyes are much more important for conveying expressions.
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