Posted on February 9, 2023 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Heavy Metal in Hot Pursuit in PATLABOR: THE MOVIE

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Josh. Thank you for your support.

This one’s tough, folks.

Surveying Patlabor: The Movie, now that I’ve finished it—and doing so in isolation, watching the slightly older Patlabor OVAs was not part of this commission, and I’m assured that they’re not necessarily to properly appreciate this film—feels like taking in a kingdom divided. On the one hand; I really do get why people love this movie. It is absolutely gorgeous, and when a certain kind of anime fan talks about the unimpeachable visual panache of 80s anime, how nothing looks “like that” anymore, it is stuff like this that they’re referring to. Watercolor-and-smoke sunsets, gleaming white structures that look like bleached Rubik’s cubes, piles of twisted metal and gunsmoke. Tokyo itself a dreamlike industrial purgatory. It feels so real you can practically smell the asphalt of the roads.

On the other hand…well, the property is called Mobile Police Patlabor. There is a bit of an elephant in this particular room, isn’t there? I put this one into what’s now a small pile of classic anime movies next to Paprika and the like. I love the visuals, I wish the thematics were better. There is no polite way to say this; this film is pretty brazen police apologia. I will avoid the question of whether it qualifies for the neologism “copaganda”, as that term greatly postdates the film and some would argue it’s a uniquely American phenomenon. But there is no getting around that Patlabor: The Movie follows a sci-fi twist on a fairly conventional “rogue hero cop (or in this case, a few of them) busts open a coverup” plot. It is a genuinely interesting and even enjoyable take on that format, and I would not accuse it of completely uncritical lionization, but we need to call this what it is. We are dealing with a piece of media about cops, and future or no, and that comes with some baggage.

But, let’s set that aside for now. It is fair to argue that not every piece of media ever made is obliged to be didactic, so let’s at least attempt to take Patlabor on its own terms.

The plot is thus; it is the then-future, now an alternate present, and mecha called Labors permeate everyday life. They are used as tools of the workforce, the military, and of course, illegally by the criminal element. It follows logically—at least, given a society broadly similar to our own—that they are, then, employed by law enforcement as well. Excepting a mysterious, alluring hallucination that forms the pre-credits act of the film where a man leaps off of an iron girder into the sea, we open on a land reclamation plot. Tokyo Bay itself is being drained away and dotted with artificial islands. (Shockingly, stopping whoever’s responsible from draining Tokyo Bay is not the plot of the movie.) The largest of these, a facility called the Ark, is the aforementioned bleached Rubik’s cube, a latticework of metal and computerstuff that maintains, repairs, and upgrades Labors. It is also home to a branch of the Tokyo Police Department, who serve as our protagonists. Over the film’s opening act it becomes clear that someone has slipped something sinister into a recent operating system upgrade for the Labors—everybody’s, not just the Tokyo PD’s—and it becomes the job of these cops (SV2, as the division is called), mostly but not exclusively our main protagonist Asuma Shinohara (Toshio Furukawa), to figure out what, precisely, is going on, and how to stop it.

As a combination near-future story of computer technology gone awry / police procedural, Patlabor: The Movie is pretty damn compelling. Asuma doesn’t have to carry the entire thing himself, as he’s backed up by a phalanx of strong supporting characters, my favorite of whom is the division captain Kiichi Gotou (Ryuusuke Oobayashi), who gets invested enough in the investigation that he threatens to lose himself in it. (One gets the sense that he appreciates the challenge. The disappointment is nearly audible in his voice when it turns out that Hoba E’ichi, the mastermind behind the entire plot, is already dead.)

The actual plotting is solid throughout as well. Hoba is a mysterious villain, largely absent from the actual narrative who nonetheless provides a compelling and sinister foil for our protagonists. Even earlier on, before the Hoba narrative entirely forms, there are interesting moments and setpieces, and the film never drags by any means. There are a number of large and small details throughout which provide a bit of extra gristle to chew on, as well. For example: the man in charge of Labor repairs aboard the Ark is a well-meaning but compromised sort who began his career as a truck repairman for the occupying Allied forces in the wake of WWII. We should also mention the detectives who hunt Hoba throughout the film, often engaging dialogue that stacks up into a dense membrane of allusions and concepts, including heaps of Biblical allusion, as these portions of Patlabor provide an almost dreamlike thread that weaves some of the otherwise disparate parts of the film together.

By the film’s climactic act, where Asuma and co. have heroically figured out the exact mechanism for Hoba’s nefarious system upgrade scheme, we move into a full-on assault for the action-packed finale. SV2 defeat the Labors, which go autonomously rogue as part of Hoba’s plans, and the already-dead programmer’s evil plot is foiled. It’s entertaining stuff.

Enough so that I feel like a bit of a killjoy that I can’t get over the fact that this thing is about cops heroically triumphing against all odds in the face of a coverup, plus general incompetence from other civil agencies.

In fact, Patlabor seems to say that cops don’t have enough leeway. In spite of an early scene where pigheaded bumbler Isao Oota (Michihiro Ikemizu) causes a ton of collateral damage by recklessly shooting off a freeze ray, there’s really not much in the way of even token criticism of the methods here, implicit or explicit. (And, it should be said, the fact that here-minor character Kanuka Clancy [You Inoue] is on loan from the NYPD feels weirdly prescient.) I have heard Patlabor previously described as a satire, and maybe that is true for the TV series or some other incarnation of the franchise, but it’s certainly not the case here. SV2 are presented in a fairly straightforward manner as, perhaps, flawed human beings, but still ones with the public’s best interests at heart.

Now, one might argue that the film really has no obligation to examine problems in policing. Maybe that is, in some abstract sense, true, and I cannot claim to have the full social context surrounding the film’s original release in late-80s Japan. But I do know that today, in 2023, it mostly just leaves me mildly disappointed. Even at the original time and place, it is difficult to imagine a different way to read what Patlabor puts down here. Maybe that is a failure of imagination on my part, but sitting here several days after I’ve finished the film and make some final touches on this review, I can’t come up with a more charitable read on the film, sans maybe as a goldmine for some truly haunting screencaps.

So don’t get me wrong, the Patlabor movie is not a bad film by any means, especially when taken as a film. But its thematic core leaves a lot to be desired, and while its craftsmanship and technical artistic value are undeniable, sometimes one does expect a little more than that.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on February 5, 2023February 5, 2023 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Wild Blue Yonder of SOARING SKY! PRETTY CURE

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Sometimes, my job is a bit hard. Not because writing about anime is physically difficult or anything, but because sometimes it’s hard to articulate when something manages to tap into a pure, raw, and very basic emotion. I can hardly contain my kiddish giddiness. On the one hand, what is there to say? New year, new Precure season. This makes Jane happy; we’ve been here before. On the other, this is possibly the strongest Pretty Cure premiere I’ve ever personally been here for. 24 minutes of high-flying, rollicking action, a white-hot streak cut through the blazing blue sky.

Soaring Sky! Pretty Cure, the first entry in the series to use the full “Pretty Cure” title instead of the shorter “Precure” in English since the original Pretty Cure, opens with our heroine, Sora Harewataaru (Akira Sekine) atop a giant, talking bird, arriving in a floating sky city for some reason or another just as—wouldn’t you know it?—an evil pig man shows up to kidnap the local king’s daughter.

Sora, as we very quickly find out, is not the sort of person to simply sit idly by and let that happen without comment. She rushes headlong into trouble, pulling off a pretty damn impressive little bit of parkour a full 15 show-minutes before she ever gets her powers.

She tries to part this villain from his ill-gotten gain and, whoops, falls into the portals he uses to teleport around. Soon, she finds herself falling out of the sky over a strange city that is wholly unfamiliar to her, the infant princess Ellee (Aoi Koga, yes, they got Kaguya to voice the baby) in hand, a literal bolt from the blue.

That city would be pretty familiar to anyone reading this. Because where she ends up is Earth. Yes, the latest Pretty Cure series is a reverse isekai. And it slaps.

You know the drill if you’re even passingly familiar with this franchise, but how this all goes down might surprise some. Sora joins the rarefied tier of Pretty Cure protagonists who have done a fair bit of heroism even before getting their magic, and the sheer determination on display here, even through Sora’s obvious jitters at facing down an opponent who is, with her not yet powered, way above her level. When she actually gets those powers, via Ellee (the baby princess is this season’s fairy, you see), she stomps the monster that our pig friend summons flat in only a few minutes. To top it off, her transformation sequence is one of the most elaborate that the franchise has ever produced, complete with an image stage—an imaginary ‘platform’ on which the transformation takes place—that itself shifts and changes as she does.

All of this serves to make Sora seem incredibly cool, on a very elemental, hard-to-quantify level. Her personality has layers even this early on, and the little pocket diary she keeps on her, and the motivational doodles within, imply a level of deliberate building of her own confidence. This is someone who is earning her reputation as a hero, from episode 1, minute 1. She has a cape. What else could I possibly tell you? Of course this character is the first blue lead Pretty Cure. How could she not be? There’s no way someone with this big of a personality was ever going to settle for second banana.

Per the end of the episode, Sora, now Cure Sky, is trapped on Earth with no way to return herself or Ellee home, providing an obvious (and promising!) driver for the series’ first main storyline. Time will tell precisely how co-lead Mashiro Nijigaoka (Ai Kakuma) factors in, although even this early on she’s already an effective foil for Sora. The future is bright for this one, there’s nothing more to say.

Posted on February 2, 2023February 2, 2023 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: The Fancy Footwork of IPPON! AGAIN

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

In general, this season has been full of quiet surprises. Ippon! Again, a series about a girls’ judo team, is among the quietest. Aside from the trivium that it is the first TV anime from relatively new studio Bakken Record, almost no one seems to be talking about this thing. Which is a shame, because I think it’s quite good overall, and it’s powering through the woes of being produced by a minor studio in the midst of possibly the worst phase yet of the production bubble very well. That is to say; it looks good most of the time, too.

But I wanted to zone in on just one aspect of that for this small article, because it’s not something I’ve seen discussed much, and I think it really helps establish Ippon‘s visual identity; the judo itself.

It seems obvious enough that an anime even vaguely adjacent to real-world sport would try to depict that sport in the best light possible, but while Ippon! Again mostly looks good, it is very much a production with limits. In the most recent episode, there are several places where those limits are visibly being hit; somewhat wonky character art being the most obvious giveaway. One would thus perhaps think that the actual judo matches themselves would be only passable, but they’d be wrong. Instead, these are easily the strongest moments of the series.

Ippon is, it should be said, more grounded than is usual for an anime production in the 2020s. There are occasional embellishments, such as chibi heads and whatnot, but for the most part this is a series that is decidedly trying to remain in the realm of the plausible. Something that could happen in reality, even if it hasn’t exactly. Working in this mode—where most of the traditional action anime tricks present an unacceptable compromise to the show’s artistic vision and are therefore off-limits—presents the challenge of rendering something as intense as a judo match in “strictly” realistic terms.

The match in question, between the characters Towa Hiura (Chiyuki Miura) and Erika Amane (Aoi Koga), succeeds here with flying colors. The entire fight channels a genuine, raw intensity with technical fighting that seems to me, as an admitted layman, surprisingly realistic. Much of the combat focuses on extremely minute motions; grabbing, counter-grabbing, pulls and steps. It’s deeply compelling stuff on a moment-to-moment basis, as much as any flashier and more “out-there” action moments to come out of this season so far. For added support, the episode at several points flips back and forth between the present match and a flashback, imbuing the present round with a real sense of urgency and stakes. Not always an easy thing to do for something like this.

We don’t actually see the conclusion of Towa and Erika’s match in this week’s episode, as it ends on a cliffhanger. Still, if Ippon! Again can continue channeling its strengths into areas like this, where it really matters, it will remain worth watching.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on January 29, 2023 in Other Posts

A Short, Rather Silly (REVIEW) of The SONIC UNLEASHED Opening Cutscene

During the few years I’ve been operating this blog and offering commissions, I’ve gotten a couple that sit well outside my usual strike zone, the one indicated by my actual commission sheet itself. Of these, I’ve only ever taken three; the bizarre Toei/Marvel co-production Dracula, Sovereign of The Damned, the American cartoon Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart (which I’m actually happy I did write about, now that the cartoon itself seems to have been zapped out of existence), and this one, which, in some ways, might be the most unconventional of the three.

Sonic the motherfucking Hedgehog. The Blue Blur. 90s Attitude Personified. Central idol of perhaps the most devoted, and most polarizing, cult fandom of any video game franchise ever made, who has proven resistant to the changing tides of the industry, more than one notably bad game, numerous critical attempts to declare his franchise “dead” in some way or another, and of course, the internet’s over-developed cringe reflex which attempts to unfairly paint the aforementioned cult fandom as a bunch of depraved weirdos. (I’m a Transformers fan. I sympathize.) The guy has been through a lot. It doesn’t really seem to matter; the franchise has chugged along basically uninterrupted since 1991.

As for myself? I’ve been in and out. I played the original Sonic Adventure a lot as a kid, my family were early Dreamcast adopters and it was one of my favorite titles for the system. (I have played it more recently and don’t think it holds up super well, but if pressed, I’d still put it below only a few other Dreamcast games in a personal ranking. Mostly Panzer Dragoon Orta, which I played on the Xbox anyway, and Hydro Thunder.) I missed out on Sonic Adventure 2, when that came along, mostly because my middle school grades were slipping and my mom thought more video games would discourage me from improving them. By the time Sonic Heroes came out, I played it and liked it well enough, but it wasn’t a primary interest of mine anymore, and my record with the franchise has been spotty since then. (If you’re curious, my two favorite games in the franchise are Sonic Colors and Sonic Pocket Adventure.)

I have never played Sonic Unleashed, which I will confess, I had to actually remind myself was the one with the Were-Hedgehog gimmick as I was preparing to write this review. The fact that I’ve not played it doesn’t matter, given my assignment here, you see. I’m not reviewing the game, I’m reviewing the opening cutscene. A cutscene that I am assured is one of the strongest—if not the strongest—realizations of Sonic, both as a character and as an IP, in an animated format. Having now seen it, if that’s not true, I would certainly like to know what the actual candidates are, because the cutscene serves as a perfectly great little short film. It can’t rightly be called standalone, for obvious reasons, but the amount of style and polish here is admirable.

I’ll admit that I’m a little rusty on my Sonic lore, but I don’t immediately recognize the all-gunmetal space station that Sonic sets foot on in the short’s opening moments. But it’s clear from first blush that this is Eggman Territory. Dr. Robotnik likes painting superstructures red and stuffing them full of guns and robots. Both make their presence known in abundance the second our heroic ‘hog arrives. All of this, bluntly, looks pretty amazing. At just six minutes, the short is low on details like plot or characterization. But still, you get all you need to know out of Sonic zooming through hordes of Badniks and popping them to metallic smithereens with his homing attack. It can often be challenging to make action animation that consists mostly of zipping around actually look compelling, but it’s pulled off very well here. Inevitably, Sonic and Eggman confront each other directly, and Robotnik’s swarms of explosive weaponry are put to more personal use as he fights Sonic one-on-one in a mecha. It doesn’t really help; Sonic invokes the Chaos Emeralds and goes super, blowing most of it up.

Eggman flees, as he does, to a different space station. There, Sonic seems to have him cornered, and he grovels on the floor for forgiveness. Except, surprise! The second Sonic relents, Eggman traps him in some kind of restraint, and points a massive beam at the planet below. This beam both unleashes some kind of Elden Ring-ass purple monster with something called the “Gaia Manuscripts” and turns Sonic into the Werehog from the game itself. Smash to logo!

All told, this is a decidedly compact endeavor, but it does make me wonder why they never pursued this particular look for Sonic cinematics further. (Hell, if you made a series that looked like this people would be over the moon.) Budget issues, perhaps? Some other factor?

We may never know. But for its six-minute runtime, the Sonic Unleashed opening is an admirably stylish piece of 3D animation. That’s all it needs to be.

Posted on January 28, 2023January 28, 2023 in Other Posts

The Future of Magic Planet Anime [1/28/23]

Hello again, folks.

As always, when we reach this point, I get nervous. You could pin why on a lot of things, but at the end of the day I think it’s just good old fashioned impostor syndrome. Whenever I write one of these “here is what the site will be like” from now on reports, I feel like I’m going to accidentally reveal some kind of crack in a facade, and the entire enterprise will come crumbling down.

I am, among many other things, trying to learn to be nicer to myself about this kind of thing. So, I am sitting here, convincing myself that you won’t all run screaming at a site status update. Progress! Probably.

Here is the very short version if all you care about is the “what:” frustratingly, I do not know precisely how Magic Planet Anime is going to move forward, but it is going to move forward. The site is not going anywhere. I’m not going to make a lot of strong claims in this article, but, barring something truly unexpected and catastrophic, I will say, firmly, that I intend to continue writing for you all. That’s the most important bit. Related to that; my only current ongoing project, the Darling in the FranXX mini-podcast, should finish through to completion just fine. The other project I need to get started on, the batch of commissions I’ve now had on the back-burner for months, I intend to start on today, and you should see the first of those within the next few days. Fingers crossed. (Honestly, if all you care about is what’s going to be on this site specifically, you can stop reading now. Things are about to get very personal, and I understand if you don’t want to hear about that.)

Unfortunately we must now get to the “why.” In all likelihood, most of you probably haven’t actually been shaking your fist in frustration at me to update the site every day for the past two weeks (which is how long it’s been since I posted an actual article. Even then, it was very brief). But, I struggle with anxiety, and that is how I often feel like people must be reacting. It’s such a simple thing that I feel ridiculous typing it out, but, yes, I often have to actively remind myself that, no, my regular readers are not going to hunt me down with pitchforks because I haven’t written an Anime Orbit article this week, despite my best intentions.

Nonetheless, I think it is worth explaining what’s been up with me personally. Because I’m aware I’ve been sending some mixed signals lately on social media and similar, so I wanted to actually illustrate what’s going on. I’ve usually maintained that the specific millieu of mental problems I have aren’t really anyone’s business but my own, and maybe that’s true, but I’m foolishly hoping that maybe by explaining why this happens to me, I can at least maybe make some of you feel less alone if you’re going through similar things. At the very least, it helps my paranoiac streak to have something to point to if anyone ever actually does demand an explanation from me as to why I haven’t been writing as much in a given period.

Firstly, it is the dead of winter, and I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Basically, I get sad when it’s wintertime. Nothing terribly complicated, there. At least conceptually. (I’m sure the actual neurological reasons behind SAD are incredibly complicated, but that is not my department.) Making things worse is that I normally take Vitamin D supplements for this, but I’m out of them these past few weeks and can’t really afford to get more. SAD conveys all the usual depressive symptoms; lack of energy, focus, and so on. Not to mention feelings of guilt, which, hey, I have been absolutely crushed under the weight of these past few weeks. Definitely feeling that one.

Secondly, my hands are kind of busted right now. Clearly, I can type, or you wouldn’t be reading this, but I have to pace myself a lot more than I’m used to and even as I’m doing so, I can feel the strain in my wrists, palms, and (in particular, for some reason) my left pinky finger. I am hoping to be able to get a brace or a heating pad or something for this soon, but money is a perpetual issue. (You may think that this is where I will once again shamelessly plug my Ko-Fi. You’d be correct.) In a more general sense, I get constant aches and pains all over the place. This is not the issue it would be if I had a physically demanding job—and I know that, because I used to have one. Shout out to Wegman’s—but it still does actively interfere with my ability to keep a consistent schedule. Even in times over the past few weeks where I have felt well enough to read manga or watch anime, I haven’t been able to actually write at length about it, even in the case of media I really like (eg. the riotous otaku action-comedy Ghostbuster Osamu or the surreal, titanic Make the Exorcist Fall in Love in the former case, or seasonal highlight the flashy, ludicrous High Card in the latter. Not to mention Jujutsu Kaisen, which I finally started getting around to.)

Finally, there are all of my other mental problems. A combination of general anxiety issues, my plurality—itself not a problem by any means, but certainly capable of exacerbating others, under the right circumstances. (I am now realizing, I have essentially never spoken about it on this blog before, so there’s a fun anxiety spike that comes along with bringing that up), and just me generally being kind of a mess. I really have to beg you to believe me that I have been trying to get all of this in order. I’ve been trying for years, really. But at the moment, I’m caught in a specific crossroads of this particular mental crucible, and finding my way to where I need to be has proven very difficult. As of a few days ago, I have been given some information that might help me finally get my health insurance in order—that’s been a whole other kettle of fish—which will hopefully help, once I can actually scrape together enough time and energy to act on it.

So! Yes! It’s been a time! I’ve been very stressed! Maybe none of you actually needed to know any of this and I’m way oversharing by posting this. That is a very real possibility! But, increasingly, I feel that making my specific disabilities (and they are disabilities) visible to others is part of my responsibility, not as a critic specifically but simply as a writer, and even just a fellow human being, in general. If any of you suffer from similar problems, you’re not alone. Maybe thinking I can even offer that much comfort is pretentious in of itself, but I certainly hope I can.

As for calling myself a “critic” in the first place; this is another, albeit secondary issue I wanted to address, more for myself than anyone else. I sometimes get self-conscious that, simply by virtue of having a blog, people will assign to me more weight or authority than I really want. Again, perhaps that’s pretentious, but it is a real anxiety I have.

Just to be very clear, going forward, even more than before, Magic Planet Anime is strictly my own thoughts, feelings, and conclusions, at the moment of writing them. I do not hold myself remotely to scholarly standards, and you should not take anything on this blog as the final word on anything of importance. (And art, even—perhaps especially—popular art, is important, make no mistake.) My hope, as always, remains that I can elevate what I truly love about this medium, and when faced with things I do not, at least express my thoughts coherently and earnestly. That really is all.

Thank you for reading all this. I hope to see you all in a few days with the first of this batch of commissions I’m working on. It’s a doozy.

Posted on January 25, 2023January 25, 2023 in anime, KeyFramesForgotten

Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later, Part 2 – Episodes 6-10

Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later is a podcast mini-series where I and Julian M. of THEM Anime Reviews discuss the rise and fall of the infamous TRIGGER/CloverWorks mecha series.

Due to the nature of this series, some of the material discussed is Not Safe For Work. Listen with discretion.

In the second episode of our Darling in the FranXX retrospective, we cover several of the show’s best episodes, but also more than one that emphasizes the cracks in the facade, which are already beginning to show as we approach the end of the first cour.

Listen below on Youtube, or via the Anchor service, either here directly, or on your podcasting platform of choice.

You can follow Jane on Twitter here and Julian on Twitter here.

Posted on January 12, 2023January 12, 2023 in anime, Games, Magic Planet Arcade

MAGIC PLANET ARCADE: 2023’s Game of The Year (So Far) is a BOCCHI THE ROCK! Web Toy

Magic Planet Arcade is an occasional column where I peek into the world of gaming, and report on what has meant something to me personally over the past while.

I’m not a games critic. I am, I would say, unreasonably cranky about the state of that particular industry. Every once in a while a game comes along that I do genuinely really like; last year there was Signalis, which to be honest I probably could’ve wrung an article out of were I not in the throes of depression and already busy with a year-end list at the time. Back in late 2020, there was OMORI, the subject of, before today, the only Magic Planet Arcade column I’ve ever done.

What prompted me to bring back the label? A ludicrously simple webtoy made by the developer/artist duo of Tamani Damani and nako775, called Nijika, whose ahoge can grow infinitely. It is based on 2022 anime BOCCHI THE ROCK!, my sixth-favorite anime of last year. There is nothing even remotely complicated about this thing; you click on Nijika’s ahoge (for those of you who are perhaps new to otakudom, that’s the little fringe of hair sticking to the top of her head. Generally seen as the sign of a foolish or dim-witted character, although not necessarily always). Clicking causes the ahoge to duplicate. You can drag the detached ahoge around the screen, shoving them into a (previously empty?) Doritos bag, for example. Do this enough, and the bag will fill up and you can feed it to a hungry Ryou. Bocchi herself appears only in her “small, depressed octopus creature” form and can be bounced around the screen by colliding her with another object, should you wish to abuse poor Bocchi and increase her already-significant suffering. All the while, Nijika herself looks around the surreal void she and the others find themselves in. Sometimes she looks at you. At no point is she impressed.

There are a few other things you can do with various combinations of the game’s elements, but honestly, not terribly many. That’s fine, this is a dumb web toy that a couple of friends knocked out in, I imagine, a course of only a few weeks at most. It’s not that deep.

But that’s precisely what makes it a fun little diversion. I am of the belief that anything that can get your mind off your troubles for a few minutes is worth something, and there is a kind of dead-simple brilliance to the whole thing. It reminds me pretty strongly of Cartoon Network’s mid-2000s run of web games, and those could honestly be pretty brilliant too. (The Courage the Cowardly Dog pyramid game is both shockingly solid and an early example of the whole “trapformer” genre.) So, for that small joy, and as a nostalgic throwback to simpler times, I am just happy Nijika’s Ahoge exists. Hopefully you are, too.

Posted on January 12, 2023 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Hitting the Jackpot with HIGH CARD

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

It was, in a shameless embracing of cliche, a dark and stormy night.

Somewhere on an island, a girl with the power to conjure explosives out of thin air breaks into a fortress in a bid to steal a suitcase full of playing cards. She accidentally opens the briefcase, and the cards—themselves, imbued with a strange power—scatter to the winds. A man makes a phonecall; ‘Assemble High Card’ is the order.

This is how HIGH CARD begins, and incredibly, that opening few minutes of notably taut worldbuilding are just one of several such runs throughout the episode. A month later, in a non-specific North American city (it’s basically New York), a blonde huckster named Finn (Gen Satou) cons a rich man out of his watch with a complicated confidence trick involving an escaped dog and a hot dog stand. Don’t worry; he’s doing it to help keep an orphanage open. Actually selling it—or any of the other bits and bobs he’s conned off of various suckers—is another story, and the one thing he has that isn’t stolen and is genuinely worth a lot isn’t something he’s willing to part with: a 2 of Spades playing card, with a bullet hole design through the top pip.

Inspired by the card, he hits “Bell Land”, a not-Las Vegas of similarly ill repute, and hits up a casino. An initial lucky run hits a brick wall when Finn encounters an apparent fellow swindler, a middle aged man with the rather silly name of Lucky Lunchman (Shigeru Chiba). Lunchman’s own luck runs out when the casino becomes suspicious of his winning streak, but an attempted shakedown in a false “VIP room” takes a turn for the decidedly surreal, and it is here that HIGH CARD reveals its hand in full.

It’s obvious throughout much of what precedes that there is something going on with these, essentially, magic playing cards. Finn and Lunchman both have them, but it’s not until we meet a third card user (“Player” in the show’s own parlance) in the VIP room that things really get gnarly.

It rapidly becomes clear that the story that Finn and Lunchman have stumbled into is not, as is the case with writer Homura Kawamoto‘s previous best-known work Kakegurui, a series focused on gambling. Instead, it is a straight-ahead action anime that ticks two of the three blood, money, and romance boxes pretty damn hard this early on. The VIP room turns into a bloodbath as the third Player reveals himself; the man can turn anything to marbles. Including people. You can see where this is going, and things quickly dissolve into a horrific bloodbath that Finn and Lunchman are caught in the middle of. Lunchman does not make it out of all of this alive, Finn does, through the indirect help of a fourth Player, Chris Redgrave (Toshiki Masuda), who distracts the man with the marble card long enough for Finn to A) swipe Lunchman’s card off of him after the former stole it and B) make his escape, a mad dash out the casino doors that concludes with him hijacking an expensive sports car. If you suspect that all of this concludes with a chase sequence, a tense standoff where the marble card Player bites it after seemingly killing Chris, who is himself, shocker, actually still alive, you’re totally correct. Also! We find out what Finn’s card does; it gives him a magic gun.

At the conclusion of these 22 or so minutes, you are left with possibly the single most unhinged stretch of anime of the young year thus far. Whether or not it’s “any good” is going to depend on how strongly you prioritize a sense of sheer fun; I think this thing is fantastic, and it easily stands alongside other strong premieres from this season like Buddy Daddies, and I suspect it, that anime, and the Trigun reboot will form a sort of trifecta of fun, colorful action anime to round out the Winter ’23 season. Where all of this will go is of course an open question this early on, but it’s hard to go too wrong with a colorful cast of prettyboys with superpowers.

Posted on January 10, 2023January 11, 2023 in anime, Other Posts

(PODCAST) Revisiting Darling in The FranXX 5 Years Later, Part 1 – Episodes 1-5

Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later is a podcast mini-series where I and Julian M. of THEM Anime Reviews discuss the rise and fall of the infamous TRIGGER/CloverWorks mecha series.

Due to the nature of this series, some of the material discussed is Not Safe For Work. Listen with discretion.

The DarliFra retrospective gets off to a rocky start through some technical difficulties. Along the way, Julian and I discuss the comparative merits of the opening episodes of the series, and talk about easily the worst thing about DarliFra: the fact that a decent chunk of it is actually pretty good. Listen below on Youtube, or via the Anchor service on your podcasting platform of choice.

You may listen to the Anchor upload directly, here, or on any service fed by the Anchor platform, such as Spotify.

You can follow Jane on Twitter here and Julian on Twitter here.

Posted on January 6, 2023 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: It’s Midnight in Nagasaki in REVENGER

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Somewhere in Nagasaki, many years ago, a samurai is tricked into killing his father-in-law. He doesn’t know what to do with himself now, as he’s pursued by both his father-in-law’s men and his own guilty conscience. It is on this note, and with a flurry of katana slashes, that Revenger, the latest from the pen of Gen Urobuchi, opens. You know, just in case you were laboring under the misunderstanding that something called Revenger was going to be a happy story.

The samurai, we eventually learn, is Kurima Raizo (Jun Kasama), a retainer of the Satsuma daimyo. His father-in-law was, or at least, Kurima thought he was, involved in illegal opium trade with English merchants. In fact, the daimyo was innocent, and it was Satsuma’s chief financial officer, a man named Matsumine, who’s orchestrated the whole thing. The man who brings all this trickery to light for Kurima? A mysterious fellow with a dashing hair style and a Virgin Mary back tattoo (Usui Yuen, not directly named here, voiced by Yuuichirou Umehara) who claims to handle “odd jobs.” One of those very ‘odd jobs’ is—wouldn’t you know it?—killing Matsumine.

Thus begins a sudden, deep, and dark plunge into the Nagasaki underworld. Don’t mistake Revenger‘s grittiness for realism, per se; there’s a guy here who’s basically Gambit from the X-Men (Souji, Shouta Hayama) and another (Nio, Hisako Kanemoto) who garrots people with razor wire kite strings.

Instead, Revenger‘s first episode is, true to title, a classic revenge tale. Kurima does eventually corner and kill Matsumine, but he certainly doesn’t feel any relief from doing so. His fiancé, Yui, has already killed herself by the time Kurima and the rest of the misfits intent on avenging the original Satsuma daimyo’s death arrive. Kurmia’s foolish attempt to repent for wrongly killing a man by killing another was doomed from the start. No life springs from death, and all that.

It’s not really a surprise that no one gets out for the better here. But it is a slight surprise that Revenger manages to take something this straightforward and classic—few tales have been iterated as often as that of a samurai gone rogue—and twist it up into such interesting shapes without even really trying. This is setting aside even the more basic, visceral thrills that Revenger offers; the plot to infiltrate Matsumine’s estate and kill him is very tactical and immediate, and everyone seems to have their own little offensive gimmick for taking down the estate’s guards. (In addition to those already mentioned, Usui has a bizarre, glittering cloth that seems to freeze on a man’s face, suffocating him instantly. Nasty stuff, really!)

The show’s larger mysteries loom in the background throughout all of this, just establishing themselves to give you a reason to tune in next week. Usui’s group seem to be Christian, or at least, something Christian-adjacent, given the Virgin Mary tattoo and a few other clues (one mentions ringing a bell in a chapel to indicate that their work is done), and it’s anyone’s guess why all of Usui’s assassins have a theme loosely based around some craft (for Usui himself, it’s maki-e, a kind of gold lacquering). It’s very hard to say, so early on, where any of this might go, but that it’s so easy to get invested speaks to the show’s obvious quality. If you’re into any of this kind of thing, you’ve got no good reason to not check this out.