Month: January 2020

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

765 Days Later: Late Night Idolm@ster Ramble

Finally, some actual original anime writing for my anime blog, eh? It’s nice to get into the swing of things of getting my ideas sorted without worrying too much about the formal aspect. So let’s cut to the chase.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been intermittently taking in turn-of-the-decade classic The Idolmaster in 2-4 episode chunks. I’m still only halfway through the series (I have episode 12, “Last Stop On A One-Way Road”, on pause as I write this, and will be finishing it before I write much of this post) but now felt like as good a time as any to jot down some thoughts on it.

For one thing, despite premiering only a year after Angel Beats! (a show that is on my mind solely because I recently watched it for the first time too), I’m struck by how sharply different they look. When I reviewed it in the waning days of last year, I was interested in how un-2010s AB! looked, and I remain convinced that, stylistically, it’s something of a capstone to the Haruhi Era. IM@S, by contrast, looks so 2010s that it seems like it could’ve come from almost any year of the decade. The main telltale sign that it’s an earlier, rather than later, period idol series is that the dance sequences are still hand-drawn, as opposed to defaulting to the CGI-aided approach that’d later become the norm. It does also occasionally suffer from spotty drawing quality, but, not everything can be perfect.

Idolmaster kind of gets sold by its diehards as “the one idol anime you have to see”, even if you don’t really like the genre (and speaking personally it’s kind of in the lower half for me, as far as anime genres that tend to have all- or mostly-female casts). I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I started it. I was confident it would at least be well-made, but that doesn’t of course guarantee that it’d vibe with me specifically. Especially since I’m not huge on the genre in general (though with Zombie Land Saga a few years ago and 22/7 this season I suppose that’s changing).

What genuinely surprised me, first and foremost, was how committed the show is to selling itself as an underdog story. 765 are not perfect queens who can do no wrong. There is no Beyonce and this is not Destiny’s Child. Both in the actual plot, and, to my surprise, the character writing especially, the series takes great pains to demonstrate that these are people. People who have their own hopes, dreams, and fears. And that “getting to the top”, glamorous as the idea might be, is both hard and sometimes kind of banal. One of the first episodes of this thing has our girls guest on a kind-of-demeaning local TV spot that is a cooking-themed gameshow hosted by a frog puppet. It’s not exactly glitzy.

I haven’t counted, but I’m reasonably certain that at least at the point of the show that I’m at, there are more scenes of our characters at practices and rehearsals than there are of them actually performing.

None of this is new ground for idol shows now, of course. I’m not sure how innovative the idea was in 2011, either. But it’s really the character writing aspect that makes all of this connect so well. Even the characters that at first seem like goofy one-note moe` archetypes eventually come into their own. Miki is the big example that comes to mind here. She’s introduced to us with no particular fanfare and for a while basically all we know about her is that she likes taking naps. If you’re the deep-reading type you might (correctly) intuit that she’s rather fickle, but not anything beyond that.

Episode 12 is mostly about Miki, after a misunderstanding where she mistakenly thought she’d be able to join sub-unit Ryuuguu Komachi, she skips out on practice for an upcoming concert and goes MIA. We learn more about Miki here than we have in the prior 11 episodes, and it’s a really strong example of how to do a lot of character-building in a very short time. We see what she does when she’s upset, things like spending time wandering around the city and ducking into and out of all sorts of shops.

Let she who has not stared longingly into a fish tank, wishing for the simple life of a betta, cast the first stone.

We see her reveling in attention she gets from what appears to be a group of model scouts, who she then briefly sings for.

Without explicitly spelling anything out, these sequences (which last maybe 15 minutes in total), convey that she’s a sort of “free spirit longing for an anchor” type. The show does cheat exactly once by explicitly giving us the cause of all this (parents who encourage her to do whatever she wants), but it’s still an impressively detailed character study to squeeze into a single half-hour episode. All the while, her fellow idols have to, in another case of the show being unexpectedly down to earth, seriously contemplate what might happen if she simply doesn’t return.

The Producer (who is himself surprisingly well-written given his role in the cast) does manage to convince her to come back, and the episode ends with a neat little bow of dialogue here:

Miki realizing what she really wants and acting on it is great, but it’d be meaningless without the buildup earlier in the episode. It’s quite a lot of heavy lifting done in just a short amount of time.

And all this is just for Miki, mind you. The show has slowly been building up similar stories with almost every other member of the cast.

I’ve found myself drawn to several different characters, honestly. Which is a great sign for something with this many. Some I expected to like–Takane’s weird sideways charisma and Chihaya’s stoicism, incredible singing voice (not to knock any of our other girls, but both in fiction and out, you do not really have to have an amazing voice to be a pop singer, you just have to know your instrument) and obvious, though so far largely unexplored, troubled past make them easy favorites. I also love Makoto despite her “cool girl who desperately wants to be seen as cute” card being a bit rote. Others, I was quite surprised by. I’ve really come to appreciate Haruka, who the OP seems to frame as the “main character” even if that’s kind of a silly concept with a cast this large. She has what is probably the simplest personality–she’s hardworking, kindhearted, and has always wanted to be an idol–but it’s just sold so well! Any time she’s upset or struggling I find it impossible not to root for her, I hope the show explores her character a bit more in its latter half.

There’s some other random details I really like too. On the obvious end, the fact that there’s so much music in each episode is just great. It’s not all entirely my thing (I like J-pop well enough but some of the songs in this series specifically lean a little too over on the twee side) but it does really make it feel at times like you’re watching some kind of narrative documentary about the group. On the more minor side, there’s lots of stuff big and small that goes in to making 765 feel like a bit of a ragtag operation, especially near the start of the show. Everything from long blocks of no gigs to the idols’ ages ranging pretty widely (the youngest two are 13, the oldest, 21). It’s not quite the indie idol anime I would love to watch some day–I find that particular subculture endlessly fascinating–but it feels earnest.

So yeah, that’s where I’m at with Idolmaster right now. I’m liking the show so far, I’m not sure if I’ll write about it again before I do my proper review, but either way, I hope you enjoyed this little ramble.

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Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

Scrapped Maken-Ki Review

So, one kind of content I’m going to be trucking in here is stuff that I never actually finished for other places. There isn’t a ton of this, but it’s out there, and this pretty-much-finished review of shitty 2011 ecchi anime Maken-Ki is certainly one example of it!

The reason I never put this up on Anilist (where most of my full-length reviews go) is that I didn’t feel good reviewing something I had technically not finished. I dropped the series about halfway through the second season because, while the first one was bad in a kind-of-entertaining way, the second was just basically unwatchable. I was especially annoyed by it because it is possible to do this kind of show decently well (I’ve recently seen Senran Kagura Ninja Flash which I’d argue is much better than this by virtue of having a cast that are actually likable. Related point, I actually reviewed that one). This just ain’t that.

So here’s that original review, un-cut and un-censored! (Why would it be censored? I make no sense sometimes) For your reading uh….pleasure? Major NSFW warning here, by the way.

Maken-ki is no one’s idea of an artistic tour-de-force. One of the few solo productions from studio-within-a-studio Spirits of AiC before being handed off to Xebec a few years later, the harem/ecchi/action/comedy/drama/whatever dropped in 2011 (the followup, 2014) to the excitement of people who watch anime for gratuitous butt shots and not many other folks. Time has not exactly raised its profile, and while it was popular enough in its day to get that second season, and the manga it’s based on is, impressively, still running, Maken-Ki in general is the kind of thing that the layman is unlikely to have heard much about. They are even less likely to have strong opinions on it.

So why review it? Well, to paraphrase another critic, any art made honestly is worth engaging with on some level. To that end, I did go into Maken-Ki intending to give it a fair shake, and the question we have to start out asking is, for what it’s trying to do, does Maken-Ki succeed?

The good news first; the show does at least understand that it’s not going to make a grand statement about anything. Most of the series is content with being pretty low-stakes and you could, being charitable, call it unpretentious–this is not Darling in the FranXX.

But….well, it’s a harem series. Takeru, our protagonist, has some degree of character, which puts him a cut above the worst offenders in the “boring audience stand-in” category, but it’s not much of a character. Mostly, he swings wildly between trying (and usually failing) to play knight in shining armor for every woman he sees, and being brainlessly perverted. If those seem at odds with each other, they’re twice as jarring in the show itself as they may sound on paper. The less said about Usui, the only other male character of note, the better.

The girls by contrast are a bit better off. While they’re still definitely mostly pretty cliche character archetypes, they’re more colorful and likable ones. While there is a definite overtone of “pick your favorite and pre-order the figure, Otaku-san” to the proceedings, there is still a good amount of variety here. The female lead, Haruko, is the doting sisterly childhood friend type. There’s the enthusiastically lovestruck Inaho, a twintailed tsundere (Himegami), a redheaded tomboy (Azuki), and on and on. The sheer size of the cast means you’re going to find someone you at least like seeing on-screen. Personally, I enjoyed Inaho’s particular combination of “extremely sincere” and “dumb enough to be fooled into thinking a stuffed doll is the object of her affections”.

Their character designs are distinctive and colorful too, if definitely indicative of their origins in a manga from 2007.

Tonally, Maken-Ki is definitely at its best when it’s operating in dolty comedy mode. The laughs here are hardly fresh jokes, but they’re mostly the sort of low-stakes fun a show like this can specialize in without ever feeling too stale. The main misfires here are when the series fails to respect the conventions of its own genre–there’s a little Slapstick Karma going on here; a character can act like an ass to another if they’re immediately punished, but sometimes the show will just have the victim break down crying instead, which is no fun for either the character or the audience.

You may imagine this is me, speaking to the series.

There’s also the show making the mistake of thinking that pointing out its own use of cliches constitutes doing something interesting with them, which simply isn’t true, partially neutering even this relatively modest strength.

Its greatest asset though is probably actually its action scenes. As a rule; they’re fun, flashy, well-animated, and competently-directed. It’s a shame then that they don’t constitute much of the series.

When Maken-Ki is not at its best, it sometimes has the arrogance to assume it can pull off any sort of seriousness, which it absolutely can’t. Attempts at the sort of dramatic gravitas that defines other action shows come across as comical because of their close proximity to the gags. Attempts at relationship drama; be it bittersweet longing or direct heart-to-heart-ness are downright offputting. Maken-Ki just does not have those sorts of chops. Likewise, when it tries to establish some broader lore and history for its setting, it’s hard to care and very easy to just tune out. These elements aren’t things that inherently can’t work together, it’s just that Maken-Ki is not well-written enough to let them.

Some episodes, especially in the second season, abandon all of this pretense entirely, basically reducing the show to softcore porn with a comedic or action-y backdrop tone. This development makes the show feel more honest, certainly, but it’s not really any better for it. Some episodes later in the show’s run truly seem like little more than an effort to see how many harem cliches you can cram in a single 12-episode cour. 

At what point is something “beyond parody”?

The show, depressingly, seems to actually understand that something is off about all this, but not what. Several minor villains are grody, gropey otaku stereotypes who use their powers to inflict perverted situations on the female cast. It’s not clear if Maken-Ki thinks this framing is somehow clever or if it excuses what it’s doing fanservice-wise, but it’s largely just dull and gross all around.

Yeah, why?

These all belie a bigger problem, which is that Maken-Ki does not seem to have a good grasp on who, other than maybe its original author, any of this is actually for. Its limited strengths actively work against each other. If you’re here for lighthearted fun, the plot gets in the way. If you actually care about the stabs at deeper storytelling going on, the Plot gets in the way. If you’re just here for the cheesecake, everything else gets in the way. The series has one of the archetypal problems of a mediocre anime–it tries to have something for everyone, and, consequently, pleases nobody.

At the end of the day there really just isn’t much to this series. If all you need to get you through twelve hours is female nudity and the occasional bit of nice animation, you’ll be fully satisfied. Otherwise? There wasn’t a ton of reason to watch Maken-Ki when it was new, and there certainly isn’t much of one nowadays.

Posted on in Other Posts

and now, this.

Making a WordPress blog in 2020 feels so incongruous that it’s almost funny. Yet, here I am, adding a third Writing Thing to my plate.

If you’re reading this, you already know who I am (if you don’t, how on Earth did you find this place? No seriously, tell me, it’ll be great for my SEO) and what I’m about. But just to reiterate: I talk too much about anime. Sometimes, I even get paid for it. Right here on WordPress though I’m mostly going to be posting stray thoughts and stuff I never quite finished from elsewhere. I do plan to liveblog the new Pretty Cure when it launches in a week though, that’ll be chill, right? Regardless, this is going to be more relaxed and casual than most of my writing. I like thinking of my anime-related writing as documenting a personal journey, and I think returning to my roots a little bit will help in that regard.

Hope y’all choose to stick around. Don’t be afraid to subscribe if you like what you see ✌