Category: Reviews

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Miracle of Being: EARTH MAIDEN ARJUNA, Saving The Planet, and You

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

We aren’t meant to live like this.

At least, that is part of the driving thesis of Earth Maiden Arjuna. The mood is spiritual, and the tools used to explore that spirituality are myriad. It is here where we find maybe the fullest-ever realization of the magical girl as shaman; moonless, stormy nights in the wilderness, a return to the Earth that shakes you to your bones and shocks every single neuron in your brain, a bolt of lightning illuminating what every single aspect of the phrase “save the world” truly means. Pure hippie shit, in a good way. Gaia Theory‘s strongest soldier in this medium; the big wheel keeps on turning, and Arjuna‘s greatest strength is its ability to illuminate the spokes thereof; the fight for our planet rendered as a profound spiritual struggle. It’s brilliant, absurd, and more than a little frustrating.

Because at its worst, Arjuna instead gives off the familiar, stale whiff of thumbing through the more dubious sections of a New Age book store; screeds against genetic engineering, half-true claims about the value of growing your own food, needling jabs about everything from selectively-bred microbes to video games to aspirin, and, perhaps most damningly, the stink of the anti-abortion movement. Pure hippie shit, in a bad way. The kind of “ecological consciousness” that can be co-opted by the self-impressed, the hucksters, and much worse alarmingly easily. The kind you have to be pretty careful with.

Arjuna is largely not careful. And for that reason, it’s a tangled thing; as twisting, knotty, and gnarled as the roots and tree branches it so dearly loves. A lot of it will feel familiar, for good and bad, to anyone who’s ever had an older relative that went through a spiritual phase. This is essential oils and nights on a magic mountain, the dim glow of fireflies and the stale paper of inflammatory pamphlets. This is Earth Maiden Arjuna; for better or worse, it’s a lot. But while I’m going to say a lot about Arjuna and its various strengths and weaknesses here, two things are absolutely true; Arjuna knows something is wrong, and it has at least one pretty solid idea of how to fix that wrongness. In evaluating it as a piece of art, rather than as some kind of instructional text, those points count for a lot.

Arjuna is the story of Juna [Mami Higashiyama ,in what is, incredibly, apparently her only major anime role], an ordinary high school girl whose life is thrown into disarray in the aftermath of a motorcycle crash along with her boyfriend Tokio [Tomokazu Seki], who enters the series as the driver of said motorcycle. Juna, in a coma, is saved from the brink of death by the mysterious Chris [Yuuji Ueda]. The price for her resurrection? She must fulfill her role as the chosen defender of Earth itself, primarily in the form of dealing with ethereal, worm-like monsters called the Raaja.

In a sense, none of this would be that out of place in any other magical girl series. The term is an uneasy fit for Earth Maiden Arjuna for reasons we’ll get into shortly, but it does apply. If you take an extremely reductive approach, you can boil most of the rest of the series down to the essentials as mapped out by, say, Sailor Moon. A magical warrior is granted incredible powers that rely on her sense of empathy and compassion does battle against monsters that manifest from humanity’s evils, along the way her own sense of responsibility develops with the help of both her own experiences and a mysterious mentor. The thing is, while it’d be a mistake to try to force too much distance between Arjuna and its genre-fellows, the presentation of all of this makes it feel very different from most of its peers. Juna’s role is intricately connected to her understanding of the Earth as a singular, living organism. It takes her most of the series to truly understand the full implications of that, and she really only has her final revelation in the very last episode.

Thus, most of the show is about how she deepens that understanding. Early on, she’s abandoned on a mountain with no equipment or supplies of any kind, and must learn how to survive on her own. And if you’re expecting the series to hammer this into some kind of tourist ad for the beauty of nature, you’re not watching the right series. Juna very nearly dies, and the only way she’s able to survive is by a quite literal miracle. Stripped of the trappings of modern life, Juna is forced to treat the Earth itself as her only means of survival, and through this lesson—and many others like it over the course of the series—she deepens her bond with the planet, little by little. Surviving the mountain gives her the ability to see the auras of living things. Which, sure, it’s the instrument that propels several of the series’ subsequent plotlines, but more important to what Arjuna is trying to actually do is that it lets her literally see how much of the planet is alive. Everything from the swarm of ants that picks her over in an early, frightening portent of what the series later has in store, to the glimmer of a nutritious leaf, to the very blood flowing through her own veins is laid bare to her.

In a lesser series, Juna’s character development would stop here. Possessed of the sacred knowledge of how life and planet are intertwined, she would spend the remaining 10 episodes of the show being insufferable about everything and the remainder of the series would be about other characters—and consequently, we the audience—learning from Juna in a direct and very talking-down kind of way. There is, admittedly, some of this, and one particularly bad example, as we’ll get to, but for the most part Juna comes out of this ordeal and many others like it with only incremental experience. Life is hard, giving up the life you’ve lived up until this point is significantly harder, and Juna subsequently spends most of the series as the student, not the master, and there are a number of times throughout where she fails to learn an important lesson, all the way up through to the end of the series.

The whole mountain storyline is one of the show’s most successful. Conversely, it feels pertinent to here mention that not every one of these necessarily lands, and some of the show’s weaker material does, as mentioned, drift into pure New Age book shop hokum. On the other hand, it’d be a mistake to say that Arjuna, if it has a problem, suffers from the fact that it’s about the environment in the first place. The show would not work on a very fundamental level if it wasn’t about these things, and if it misses about as often as it hits, maybe that’s just the inevitable consequence of being such a pure emotional trip of thoughts and feelings. Art of a certain caliber is due a certain amount of grace, and if one takes Arjuna as the scrambled thoughts of someone trying to work out their place in the world rather than as someone necessarily telling you how to live your life, it makes significantly more sense.

….But admittedly, the series itself sometimes makes that hard. It’s true that art should not be judged solely through the lens of how applicable it is as advice to one’s own life, and Arjuna is mostly good enough that I’d be inclined to dismiss such readings out of hand. But it’s not entirely good enough, and it’s probably here that we should talk about the show’s flaws, which are few in number but significant in impact.

So, the food thing. Arjuna really, really loves the idea of all-natural, organic food. “Organic” here meaning “devoid of those nasty chemicals and GMOs.” This is one of a couple places where the show’s point of view becomes all too easy to wave off. Because the sorts of people who complain about GMOs and non-specific “chemicals” in things are, rightly, often thought of as kooks. For the most part, Arjuna‘s treatment of this subject matter skews too goofy to really be read as harmful. The recurring problem of Juna being unable to eat processed food once she returns to civilization, for example, is definitely framed as though it’s a serious thing, but it’s hard to imagine anyone taking it on those terms. Especially when the show’s alternative is portrayed in such a trippy, Healthy Eating PSA-on-acid manner.

Juna decides to take “you are what you eat” more literally than most.

And, frankly, for all its haranguing on about chemicals in foods (seriously, some of the episodes of the show that are worse about this made me feel like I was in the car with my health nut aunt), Arjuna does at least know that spiffy capitalistic solutions won’t actually work. At one point, Tokio tries to compromise with Juna by offering her a ‘vitamin drink’ (think V8 or some such), and Juna has to explain to him that it’s not really much better than the cola that he’s drinking. Also, in a rare show of self-deprecation, Arjuna stages a fake commercial for this drink in episode 7’s halfway break that really must be seen to be believed. (It’s the first of several of these, in fact, including an extra-long one that was apparently a DVD bonus. Arjuna‘s skewering of commercials is probably its easiest point to relate to.)

This is the case for most of the show’s flaws, at any rate. These are sticking points that can be either laughed off as absurd or safely chalked up to the passage of time between the series’ original release and now. It’s not the case for all of them, though. We do have to talk about the show’s one big sticking point, the anti-abortion episode. Folks, it’s a rough one.

Juna spends most of this episode, the show’s ninth, learning to hear the voices of the unborn with the help of Cindy [Mayumi Shintani], Chris’s sort-of assistant. Cindy is a great character, possibly my second favorite after Juna herself, she’s funny, has a deep affection for Chris since he saved her as a child, and is responsible for both some of the show’s best one-liners and some of its most emotional moments. This episode, though, largely doesn’t do her justice. For the most part, the episode is a parade of nonsense to a much greater extent than even the others that present dubious ideas. It reads like a checklist of weird anti-abortion stuff; the notion that babies can “choose” when they’re born, the stereotype of all women who get (or even consider) abortions as abnormally sexually promiscuous, etc. The target for the latter in this case being Juna’s otherwise-unseen sister Kaine.

The whole thing climaxes with this, the dumbest single line in the whole show.

Married with that visual—of Juna just standing there all po-faced and pissed off—it basically becomes the world’s worst reaction image, something that is both riotously funny and deeply uncomfortable. A T-shirt reading “magical girls don’t do drugs” would be less on the nose.

That the series has to tie itself into knots to get there just makes it worse. With most of the other points Arjuna makes you can at least understand where it’s coming from, but most of what’s brought up here is just flat-out wrong, and worse still is that in doing this it squanders a powerful symbol it could’ve used to explore the issue with much more sympathy.

That’d be the fact that Cindy can physically feel everything that will ever happen to her—including, as she makes very clear in a very uncomfortable scene, sex—a disturbing and deft metaphor for the way that society hammers women into shape from the literal moment they are born; how it is demanded that a girl be aware of and take steps to address how she might appear to men, and how if anything happens to her because she fails to consider this, that she will be blamed. That this metaphor is then squandered on making her a mouthpiece for some really ugly bio-essentialism and the most tone-deaf anti-abortion plot this side of a Christian direct-to-streaming movie just sucks. Easily the worst part coming when we’re informed that Chris was water birthed from two loving parents, and that this is the reason he’s so gentle, because he “knows what real love is.” The unspoken other side of that claim, presented as fact, is pretty fucked up, and you would have to be a real piece of work to seriously think that the circumstances of a baby’s birth are solely dictated by how much their parents love them. The whole thing is just bad. Easily the worst idea the series has, and just wildly unpleasant to boot.

Ultimately, pockmarks like this are why I can’t give Arjuna the outright glowing review I’d love to. And we get into a fiddly and subjective realm, here, of just how much this is going to bother an individual viewer. Admittedly, while I am a woman, I am a trans woman, and thus am somewhat distanced from the issue of childbirth in particular. That might be why I find this episode, easily the show’s nadir, to mostly just be deeply unfortunate rather than an out-and-out show-wrecker. Nonetheless, if someone, especially someone who has more closely been impacted by this subject said that this just fully ruined the show for them, I don’t think I could really blame them.

Ultimately, Arjuna is holistic enough that not taking to it to ask for this would actually be the bigger insult than doing so is. It is better to acknowledge what the show is doing than try to pretend it isn’t doing it. (This is to say nothing of the viewer who would actually agree with the points being made here. But many are objectively untrue, and several are based on old debunked myths about childbirth. So I would advise anyone in that position to reconsider.)

A more briefly touched-on idea regarding an intersex character also hits a strange note. I will cop to not knowing if what she offers as an explanation for her condition (something about side effects from medicine her mother was taking) is true, but even if it is, the way it’s brought up doesn’t gel with the rest of the scene very well. It’s a strange mark on an otherwise pretty good bit of character writing, where we learn that she had a loving boyfriend and was part of the climate activism movement when she was younger, and it’s worth noting that the character is very well-handled otherwise, especially given that this show came out in 2001.

What makes flaws like this all the more noticeable is how well it gets it at other times. Arjuna excels at both very small-scale person to person drama and extreme big-picture thinking, and it’s pretty good at tying the two together, too. (This technique, which is not at all unique to this show, was the basis for the “world story” term back in the early days of Anglophone anime blogging, and if the term’s ever applied to anything, Arjuna must surely be it.) It only really hits a sour spot in discussing certain kinds of systemic problems, which it inevitably simplifies and tries to suggest easy fixes for. This makes it frustrating that the show spends as much time talking about all that as it does, but it makes the areas it excels at stand out all the more.

Take episode 8, for example. Juna, having just come off of a period of being depressed and doubting if Tokio truly loves her, finds she can literally astral project to spend some time with him, flitting around his room as an intangible half-ghost while Tokio, put-upon everyman that he is, remains unaware of her semi-physical presence, but loves talking to her nonetheless. Elsewhere, parental bonds are reforged after enduring immense stress with the help of Juna’s ability to literally see emotions, and a down on his luck math teacher expounds about the beauty of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

There’s even a pretty great moment in what is otherwise the show’s worst episode. Juna re-commits to her relationship with Tokio after the whole abortion plotline mercifully ends, and while they spend time together under the stars on a beach, they realize that their feelings for each other are more important than anything physical. The love is what counts.

Sequences like these contrast the depressing mundanity of modern life with the inner strength and character of the people who endure it, and it is this compassionate interpretation of a majority of its characters that inclines me to read Arjuna favorably. In a lesser series, characters like Tokio’s father, a biochemist whose work ends up indirectly causing the apocalypse (more on that in a second) or the aforementioned math teacher would be written as flat caricatures. That they have such interiority makes the show breathe and feel alive, which is really important in a series whose core thesis is that we’re all part of a greater being.

And, indeed, that’s how it ties that small-scale drama to the big-picture stuff. More or less the entirety of the show’s finale, which fields an impressive amount of spectacle to truly take the kids’ gloves off, sees Arjuna kick into overdrive as petroleum-eating bacteria merge with the Raaja to create a new type of Raaja that destroys plastic and, it seems, most artificial products in general, on a massive scale, leaving Japan completely devastated and the entire world threatened. An American official with ties to an oil company advocates for just letting the whole country die, probably the closest Arjuna ever gets to an out-and-out evil villain.

Arjuna has some pretty harsh things to say about civilization in general, and for a while, it does genuinely look like the series might torch the whole planet and walk away, which would be a disappointing ending that lets all involved off the hook and burns the series to the ground for a false sense of catharsis. Pointedly, it is only Juna’s near last-minute realization that the world is intricately interconnected that saves Earth, and everyone she cares about, from destruction at the hands of the Raaja. The final scene, where she fully comprehends the realization that she’s been given, and loses her voice in the process, is absolutely stunning.

It all clicks into place; when you harm the planet you harm yourself. When you harm yourself, you harm your neighbor. When you harm your neighbor, the whole world suffers. You get it. In the show’s opening shots, we learn that Juna is an archer, and recites a mantra to herself to help her shoot straight. Most of that mantra, in this final episode, turns out to be literally true; “the body permeates throughout the universe.” “It’s not to shoot the target, but to become one with the target.” Juna realizes that the Raaja and her mentor Chris—and thus, all beings everywhere—are one in the same. It is a humble, joyous, and life-affirming ending to an astounding series. This is why I like Arjuna, and why I can forgive it for most of its missteps. For the faults it does definitely have, it understands its own core extremely well, and its ability to articulate those central ideas is admirable.

Earth Maiden Arjuna‘s legacy is….difficult to pin down. In contemporary English-language anime discourse, it might actually be most famous as Kevin Penkin’s favorite anime. Which is fair enough; the series’ music, by the legendary and inimitable Youko Kanno, plays a huge role in establishing Arjuna‘s atmosphere of mysticism. The show’s production is absolutely wonderful in general, actually. It looks positively great; decidedly of its era in the best way possible. And well, doesn’t this tell you something about the state of anime discourse in English? All that time spent talking about what the show means and one whole paragraph about its sound and visuals. I haven’t even mentioned that this thing was the brainchild of Shouji Kawamori! (Probably best known as “the Macross guy” but honestly of such prolific work that pinning any particular thing to him and having it be definitive is impossible.) I also haven’t mentioned how absolutely cool Juna’s “Arjuna” form is. Dig the glowy hair!

There are, I’ll concede, also elements I’m not qualified to comment on. The fact that Juna can summon a massive mecha-like creature that’s called Ashura and seems to symbolize the more wrathful and headstrong aspect of her personality certainly means something, but beyond basics like this I’m over my head in discussing the series’ use of Hindu symbolism, and a few other things besides.

But I don’t think Arjuna, of all anime, would be mad to have itself reduced to its themes. The series’ ending demonstrates a deep appreciation of the fact that the universe is a web of connected nodes. The show’s display of this fact is on the simple side, but it is true that there are no discrete actors. In a very real way, we are each other, and we are the world itself. Left implicit by Arjuna is the fact that this is also true of ideas, thoughts, feelings, and yes, stories. So, if Arjuna fails the spot test on any particular issue, at the end of the day it understands compassion. It’s a lot like Juna itself, in fact; ever the student, forever learning, right up until the very end.

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Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Exorcising THE DEVIL LADY

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Sometimes, random chance just brings something to your doorstep.

I didn’t intend The Devil Lady to be my introduction to the Devilman series (or Go Nagai‘s work in general, for that matter). I simply happened to stumble upon a few episodes airing on one of PlutoTV‘s live channels, thought it looked interesting, and dived into it without much further thought. In all honesty, this is less of a review in the usual sense and more an attempt to just straighten out my own thoughts. (Although, re-reading this again a day after I first wrote it, aren’t they all?) I don’t regret watching the series, that much is certain, but it definitely steps on some pretty hot issues, likely without entirely intending to, and during the course of writing this I’ve learned some things that have recontextualized my already pretty-jumbled thoughts on even those elements. This is a complicated one, for better and worse in equal measure.

Part of all that is simply a consequence of its tone; Devil Lady is a bleak anime, presenting a kind of largely lightless action-horror that doesn’t really exist in this medium anymore. Moments of peace are a rarity, any kind of levity even more so, and while it has the general shape and structure of a transforming hero series, our heroine is a flawed one, indeed, a person thrust into an inescapable position of responsibility she never wanted and trapped under the glass to be prodded at by various sinister agents.

The plot itself goes something like this; Jun [Junko Iwao], a fashion model, has her life turned upside-down after she encounters a raving mad half-man half-monster, known as a Devil Beast. She herself carries a latent “Devil Gene”, the biological marker that turns ordinary humans into these dangerous mutants, but instead of becoming a full-on Beast herself, she becomes a hybrid, a Devil-man if you will, still in control of her senses and strong enough to give the full Beasts a run for their money. Consequently, she is drafted by a secretive government agency to fight against the Beasts and keep the streets of Tokyo safe, at the beck and call of her handler Asuka [Kaoru Shimamura], who is clearly not on the level.

This starts as rather typical—if notably dark—superhero fare. Jun’s identity as the Devil Lady is a secret, and her life starts falling apart as she tries to juggle her modeling work with her nighttime battles with Beasts, and she finds it incredibly hard to accept her very literal inner demon for what it is. She also takes in Kazumi [Kazusa Murai], a teen model who, early on, loses her parents to a Beast attack and moves in with Jun, becoming her half-problematic love interest/half-surrogate little sister—a combination of dynamics exactly as complicated and fraught as it sounds—who serves as Jun’s main lifeline to her own humanity as the war against the Beasts continues to escalate. Before long, it becomes obvious that different parts of the government, a sinister faction of other Devilmen, and Asuka’s own interests, are all working against each other for the fate of Tokyo, and it increasingly becomes obvious, mankind itself.

As things progress, it becomes impossible to hide the existence of the Devil Gene and first Tokyo and then Japan in general fall under martial law (complete with a mandatory vaccination against the Devil Gene which, boy, that is a scene that would hit very differently and much worse if it were written today). By its narrative endgame, Devil Lady has progressed into full-on biblical fare with God’s plans for the future of the human race and the physical location of Hell itself serving important roles. In terms of simple narrative progression, this is all pretty campy, but it works well enough.

Really, the upsides here are obvious in general. If all you’re really looking for is to see a hot lady clock some truly grotesque-looking monsters, you’re in the right place. Jun in her Devil Lady form is drop-dead gorgeous, and I doubt I’ll be the last lesbian to swoon over her toned physique and the half-feral demeanor she carries with her into battle. (Also; she fights in the nude and her clothes rip to shreds in lovingly-animated detail every time she transforms. So yes, this is very much an intentional draw of the series.)

Jun here seen crushing the head of an insect monster that I wish was me.

Excellent fight choreography throughout makes sure that watching her slug it out with wolfmen, two-headed dinosaur monsters, busty harpy-dragons, and all manner of other Devil Beasts never gets old, and she even sometimes assumes a skyscraper-sized kaiju form known as the “Giga Effect”, where she gains a blue-and-black color scheme and some cool lightning powers. There’s some stuff in here that really tries to earn the “horror” part of its “action-horror” genre tag, too. One particular moment early on where Kazumi’s mother is killed by having her eyes and mouth filled with writhing centipedes is going to weed out anyone with a weak stomach pretty quick. All of this is drawn up with a dark, moody color palette that sets the show’s timbre perfectly, and it usually looks pretty good, too. (A few iffier-looking episodes are clearly outsourced to another studio. Some things never change.) If you’re just wondering if Devil Lady is entertaining and don’t particularly care if it’s schlocky or not, there’s really nothing else to be said; with a literally hot-as-hell protagonist and a sharp visual style, it passes that particular test with flying colors.

The writing however, is a lot more spotty. Jun herself is a very solid protagonist; widely admired but unable to accept either the circumstances under which she comes into her powers nor the responsibilities placed on her by them, she is a deeply conflicted, moody woman. (Which of course, sometimes turns into white-hot rage as Devil Lady.) Her real main flaws are a lack of willpower and an inability to come to terms with her situation, a somewhat unusual basis for the lead in something like this, but not an unwelcome one, as it gives her an immediately legible emotional depth that’s easy for even those in very different situations to relate to. She suffers a lot over the course of Devil Lady, and the show gets much of its emotional strength from the sheer depth of the loss she endures.

Which is great in terms of writing Jun herself, and indeed, every other character in the show is defined by their relationship to her, and for some of these characters those connections are perfectly believable, but for others they are very much not. We’ve already mentioned Kazumi, who probably comes out the strongest-written member of the cast overall. But other characters, like Jun’s modeling manager Tatsuya [Naoya Uchida], who eventually falls for her in a pretty hard-to-buy love subplot, just don’t add much at all, and mostly just serve to clutter things up or to tick expected boxes. Probably the worst of the small group of important male characters is Jason Bates [Ryuusei Nakao] another Devilman who repeatedly tries to get with Jun in a just generally unpleasant manner. He’s just flatly unlikable and doesn’t really add anything to the show.

Important side note: His Devil form is ugly as hell. Look at that hair. Eugh.

And then there’s Asuka, initially Jun’s handler in the early part of the series when she’s a Beast hunter, and eventually the main antagonist. Asuka is….a lot. You can think of her, in very broad terms, as a cold, calculating strategist who sets the show’s overarching plot in motion from the word “go” and remains in command of it until the closing minutes of the last episode. If you think of her as sort of an ancestor of, say, Makima from Chainsaw Man, you’re in at least the right ballpark. Asuka’s motives remain elusive throughout much of the story, and by the time we finally learn what they are, the series has taken a hard left turn into some Angels & Demons nonsense. More relevant to discussing the issues with her as-written though is one little detail; she’s not cis.

The story is a bit unclear on specifics, but it appears that Asuka is an intersex person who was raised as a man and then transitioned to identifying as a woman. Lumping different sorts of non-cis people together was common in Devil Lady‘s day, so perhaps we cannot fault the show for a lack of specificity, but we absolutely can fault it for falling back on the old, repulsive “transgender rapist” cliché. As in the series’ penultimate episode, Asuka forces herself on Jun, given a very loose plot “justification” with hokey “an angel and a devil fucking ends the world” crap. This is the series’ one big misstep, and god, how I wish it were not in here.

Look; I love a toxic female villain, you can make a woman do the most horrible shit imaginable and I will squeal and clap and post on tumblr about how I support women’s wrongs. But that is the one line that you really cannot cross without it causing some serious issues for your story. It’s also just totally unnecessary! Asuka already had a personal interest in Jun that clearly ran deeper than just her plans for her. There was actual tension there, and in the ambiguous space of tension you leave a lot of fertile room for interpretation; a sort of Schrodinger’s Yuri where two characters might be genuinely mutually attracted to each other or it might just all be illusory, manipulation on the part of one character or the other. Making her cross that line shatters all of that in the worst possible way, making the dynamic itself much weaker as a result and retroactively collapsing any interpretive space into “well, she was just a creep all along,” making Asuka herself a weaker character with a worse motive. Some will of course argue that Asuka, as a villain, should be expected to act villainously, but narratively, the problem is not that this act makes her evil, it’s that it makes her less interesting. All told, there are different kinds of transgression, and this is one of the worse and more exploitative ones. (That is without even getting into how these stereotypes harm actual trans and intersex people, an entire other topic I could fill whole other articles with.)

Am I a fool for expecting more from something like this, which is clearly trying to aim for a primarily male audience with anyone else as an afterthought? Maybe, but it did genuinely sour me on the series, particularly its last few episodes, pretty notably. I don’t think it ruins the show, but it definitely makes it worse.

Which sucks! Because, as mentioned, there’s a lot to like here on a pure entertainment level and, again as said, some of the writing is actually pretty strong. It’s just that this takes the show firmly into “it’s complicated” territory, which is not somewhere it really needs to have been confined to.

On the other hand, does that make the show worthless? Well, no. I can say all I’ve said, and I can even point to additional, pretty obvious, problems with writing women—not one but two villains of the week are lesbians who are “obsessed” with Jun, which I guess really should’ve clued me in as to where they were going with Asuka, and a third is a serial killer who feeds her victims to her Devil Beast brother as part of a Weird Sex Thing™—but even all of these issues in mind, the show does also write Jun and Kazumi’s relationship pretty warmly. That relationship has its own problems, Jun is a fair bit older than Kazumi, and Kazumi spends much of the show emotionally traumatized, but there is a sincerity and grace that the two are depicted with that wouldn’t be there if this was a show that was actively, intentionally hateful. I am inclined, in spite of everything, to chalk the bad ideas up to being just that. Hurtful bad ideas, don’t get me wrong, but ‘just’ bad ideas nonetheless.

So, are Devil Lady‘s fairly serious flaws forgivable in light of what it does right? Well, that’s going to depend on the person. For me, I’d say the series is absolutely still a worthy entry in the dark end of the urban fantasy space in anime, but it is unfortunately the sort of thing I’m reluctant to recommend to others. Still, that kind of judgment isn’t everything, and at the end of the long night, this whole “gun to your head, is the show Good or Bad?” criticism has never been my preferred mode of things anyway, and I’m always a little disappointed in myself whenever I lapse into it. What you have here is a show that promises a lot, delivers on much but not all of it, hurts you in ways both good and bad, and leaves you with a lot to think about. There are much, much worse things for a show to be than that.

Devil Lady doesn’t seem to have ever garnered even a notable fraction of the fandom of its parent series has, and various incarnations of Jun have been limited to very minor roles in other Devilman fiction (she was the co-lead of a crossover oneshot in 2013; Devil Lady vs. Cutie Honey, and a character based on her appeared in Devilman Grimoire. Of course, these both seem to derive from the manga version of Jun, who is a very different character starring in a very different story).

I’d be unwilling to say that Devil Lady has left no legacy, though. I’d be very surprised if the creators of the Witchblade anime—another dark urban fantasy action anime with an attractive female lead that was a spinoff of a better-known parent franchise—weren’t at least aware of it. And I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if some tiny sliver of Asuka’s cold, manipulative characterization, especially from the forehalf of the show, has wound up in a few characters from the darker end of modern battle shonen. (Such as, as previously alluded to, Makima.) This is guesswork, but the timetables line up and given how widely influential Devilman on the whole is in anime and manga, it doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to me.

A postscript; with one last thing about Asuka. While writing this piece, I discovered that the character was one of just a handful of major roles that her voice actress, Kaoru Shimamura, ever had. Before Devil Lady, she seems to have been limited to supporting roles. And after Devil Lady, she doesn’t seem to have been in much else before sadly passing away in 2013 due to breast cancer.

Despite any problems I may have with how the character is written, Shimamura plays Asuka excellently, giving the character a cold, matter-of-fact menace and charisma that perfectly suits her. It’s easy to lament what could’ve been, but it should be remembered that the entertainment industry is fickle, and even very marginal fame is often fleeting. If all Devil Lady did for me personally was to highlight this woman’s career, no matter how short it may have been, then maybe that’s all it really needed to do.

“Random chance” is a hell of a thing.

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 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) MAGICAL DESTROYERS Flames Out Forever

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

“If I round up, I’m basically 30.”

Well folks, I’ll admit it. I’ve basically been had.

That’s dramatic, but it was legitimately my first thought upon sitting down to write this piece. Where to begin? I’ve gone to bat for Magical Destroyers, even as I’ve gone back and forth over whether or not I thought the show was actually, you know, any good. Now that it’s over, we can settle the question with a definitive “no.” It’s not even the high-speed trainwreck some might’ve been hoping for. Taken on the whole, it is simply bad in a broadly disappointing way that feels all too familiar in the present anime landscape. Embarrassingly, this series—not the rightly polarizing but unquestionably effective Heavenly Delusion, not the relentlessly dramatic second season of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, not even the low-stakes fun of Dead Mount Death Play, but this series—is what I’ve written about most of the Spring 2023 anime crop. (Other than Oshi no Ko, at least.) This is embarrassing not because the show is bad, but because I let myself be taken in enough by its occasional moments of brilliance—moments that are real, and genuine, but do not do enough to justify the mediocrity around them—that I was convinced it would pull everything together in the finale somehow. That didn’t happen. Spoiler alert.

I won’t flagellate myself over this mistake, if it can be called one. Sometimes anime just aren’t any good, and if you go into every anime expecting it to eventually become the best version of itself—and I generally do—you’re going to sometimes be disappointed. That’s just how the game goes. I might feel worse if I had a larger audience and had inspired legions of people to watch this, but I didn’t. To be honest, I don’t think much of anybody, inside Japan or out, watched Magical Destroyers. Nonetheless, because I was so convinced I’d eventually be vindicated, I feel something of an obligation to try and take the show apart and see why, specifically, it doesn’t work. Because I do think that much of what little criticism of Magical Destroyers there has been has been misaimed, in that it assumes that this is an idea that could never create a good or even great TV show. I don’t agree with that, I think Magical Destroyers had many opportunities to be brilliant, and more than one chance to salvage things once they started going off the rails. It blew almost all of those opportunities, which is, in my mind, worse.

But we’re starting with the conclusion, here. It’s probably best to lay out what Magical Destroyers actually is, for those of you just joining us. Here’s the very short version; Magical Destroyers is an admittedly novel fusion of magical girl trappings and some stylish red-and-black anarchist chic paint with what I’ve taken over the past few years to calling the otaku action anime subgenre. It ends up doing rather little with this fusion, but that’s the general idea.

About the otaku action anime microgenre. These shows, of which there are only a small handful, are all broadly similar; they combine the general highs and the structure of action anime with a premise that asks what would happen if society’s general dislike of the weird and socially awkward—specifically in the form of otaku themselves—were actively persecuted, like a dissident political movement. It’s an indulgent thought experiment, to be sure, but as I said back when this show premiered, it’s not a wholly irrelevant question. In the US alone, bans on artistic expression designed to catch minorities in their net are a real thing, and have been an ongoing issue especially this year specifically. Extrapolating from stuff like that into a full-on nerdocide is still pretty out-there, but it’s not entirely crazy. Especially if the show in question actually does something with that connection. Magical Destroyers really doesn’t, but other anime in this subgenre occasionally have, most notably 2021’s Rumble Garanndoll and its direct line-drawing between hatred of “undesirable” subcultures and out-and-out fascism, an observation that is actually pretty on point. (The other entry in the genre that sticks closest to this model is Akiba’s Trip. Not as good as Rumble Garanndoll but still decent, certainly. Slightly farther out, dealing in different specifics, are the second half of Anime-Gataris, undersung metafiction clusterfuck Re:Creators, and emotional fireworks display The Rolling Girls. All of these are better than Magical Destroyers, some significantly so.)

Magical Destroyers’ twist on the formula is that the otaku are being persecuted by a dictatorial being named Shobon, a man with a TV displaying a (•ω•) face for a head, and his army of similarly-decorated troops. They round up otaku and put them in reeducation camps and confiscate their stuff. It’s all a big to-do. But of course, there is a rebel army, led by our protagonist Otaku Hero [Makoto Furukawa], and aided by his three weed-smoking girlfriends1, the magical girls Anarchy Red, Blue, and Pink [Fairouz Ai, Aimi, and Tomoyo Kurosawa]. I’m being glib because the specifics really aren’t important here. The first half of the series follows a broad threat-of-the-week format that it mostly (but not entirely) manages to make work. The first three episodes are legitimately pretty great, especially the second with its Pepto Bismol-pink psychedelia, and if that were all there was of the show I would think fairly highly of it.

Unfortunately we hit our first major obstacle soon after, with a truly tasteless fanservice-focused episode. Things pick up somewhat again after that, but the show becomes markedly spotty from there on out.2 Throughout, it often threatens to make a greater point beyond its core slogan—and slogan really is the only appropriate term for the constant repetition and variations on the phrase “people should be able to like what they like”—but always backs away when that would jostle the show’s status quo. This is an absolutely bizarre approach for an anime about a group of rebels fighting against an oppressive government to take. Forget any specifics here, this is just bad writing in the broadest sense possible.

Sometimes, it gets by on audacity, style, or weirdness. The show’s visual quality is inconsistent, but the episodes that look good can stand up to anything else from this season. The aforementioned episode 2, along with a few other highlights, namely episodes 9 and 11, are full-on standouts. In addition, the show’s stylish, post-modern take on the whole “bank system” idea, where certain elaborate sequences are made to be reused many times throughout the course of a show’s run, is pretty great. All three magical girls have really great henshin sequences that we get to see a few times, and they have similarly fun attacks that really pop, despite the fact that we only get to see a majority of them once or twice each.

The character writing is similarly of variable quality, but Anarchy, who serves as a secondary protagonist, is great when given proper opportunity to shine. She’s a loud-mouthed hothead with a showoffy streak and a sensitive side that she reserves for (of course) Otaku Hero himself. It’s nothing revolutionary, despite the show’s posturing, but it’s decently compelling stuff. (Blue is also fairly entertaining, if one-note. I could imagine being offput by her, but to me the idea of gender-flipping the “moron pervert who is unfortunately a protagonist” character archetype is actually pretty funny. Pink, a druggie who can only speak in the phrase “gobo gobo”, is much less compelling.) Even Otaku Hero himself isn’t a bad character per se. Despite the vibes that the show’s 1 guy 3 girls setup might give off, he doesn’t really feel like a harem series protagonist, and doesn’t much feel like a self-insert or otherwise generic either. He can even almost spit some decent rhetoric in the show’s better episodes. But again, any time the show has to get more specific than “people should be able to do what they want,” it backs off, and this kneecaps everything about the series, top to bottom. For much the same reason, the crowd of nerds who make up the Otaku Revolutionary Army is pretty narrow, too. They’re uniformly—and specifically—Somewhat Unattractive™ Dudes From Japan, with the only exceptions being Pink’s band of nightclub warriors and literally two (count ’em, 2) indie idols we see join the ORA’s ranks later on. Even the show’s visual style isn’t all-upsides. There are episodes that look outright bad, and even the good ones are often extremely homage-heavy, which can be a good or at least fun thing, but we aren’t talking about Kill la Kill here. Magical Destroyers does have style, but it doesn’t have enough to make that approach work.

Really, the fact that I’m having to get so specific and caveat-heavy with the show’s positives says a lot on its own, doesn’t it? You could say things like this for any anime that’s not truly terrible. And that’s really the issue, Magical Destroyers isn’t truly terrible, and I’ll probably never actually dislike it. I like too much about what it could’ve been for that, and what the show actually is feels too slight to warrant hatred. But that doesn’t put it above the level of, say, The Detective is Already Dead, another anime I’ve fostered a somewhat inexplicable even to myself attachment to despite it being fairly mediocre.

So to round us out, the question must be asked; what was Magical Destroyers actually trying to do, if anything? Be a real rallying point for otaku counterculture? Establish a lasting multimedia series that would persist well after the anime itself is over? Just simply be a good action anime with more highs than lows? It accomplishes none of this. Which is a shame, because there’s some real love in this thing if you know where to look. Certain individual animators and episode directors clearly cared a lot about the show’s visual angle, and most of the voice talent turn in good to great performances, especially Ai Fairouz, who, when she gets the chance to truly chew scenery as Anarchy, is just as unstoppable here as she was as Power in Chainsaw Man last year. Unsurprisingly, this combined with the fact that Anarchy is actually decently-written makes her the show’s best character by far. Looking back on the first two episodes I’m left to wonder if the show wouldn’t be more coherent if they focused on her a little more. It’s hard to go wrong with such a delightful little firecracker.

But again, none of this ever comes together to present any kind of coherent theme. The fact that I’ve seen all twelve episodes and couldn’t really tell you what the show is about on any level except the most literal is kind of a problem! “People should be able to like what they like” is a reddit comment, not a core thesis you can hitch your whole show on! This is to say nothing of the whole kerfuffle involving Origin in the show’s final arc, the goddess who it seems to present as sort of an ur-anime viewer. This idea is simply not around long enough to ever be developed in a really coherent way, and it ends up being just another extraneous idea that the show briefly plays with but doesn’t actually engage with in any meaningful way.

But perhaps the most telling problem with Magical Destroyers is not anything obvious. It’s how the show treats youth as a concept. One of the very, very few coherent thematic lines through the series comes from Otaku Hero getting older. This article’s lead-in quote is from him, reflecting on his life in his last moments as he’s killed by the now-evil magical girls in the final episode, the climax of a conclusion so pointless as to feel deliberately insulting. On the one hand; same, buddy, I’m 29 myself. But there is something genuinely dark and offputting about this alluded-to notion that it’s better to die as a young otaku than to live to be an old one. It’s also complete bullshit! I personally know more than one person still active in the fandom who is over 60, and those people have stories! Stories that matter and are interesting! The only positive gesture in this direction are the characters of the Kanda River Squad. Their big character moment is to engage in a pissing contest with the young’ns about whether or not they’re “real” otaku all the way back in the loathsome fourth episode of this show. It’s pretty dire that all this is the only coherent theme to be pulled out of this series, other than it’s incredibly weak sloganeering.

In another lifetime, Magical Destroyers could have been something truly special. Maybe there, its talk of revolution isn’t all only just that and it actually has some bite to it. Maybe there it’s more even, maybe it has stronger writing, maybe it has the self-awareness to call out problems within the otaku subculture too, and not just pretend everything is a black-and-white us vs. them scenario. But of course, this thing we’re constructing, an anime about four real revolutionaries whose adoption of anarchist rhetoric is more than costume-deep, is not actually Magical Destroyers; it’s a dream on a cloud. It’s easy to say how things might have been different. And as I always say, you review the anime you watch, not the one you wish existed.

Magical Destroyers, as it exists, is a sign of an anime industry in a fairly dire place. Sure, it’s still better than the lukewarm backwash of the isekai boom, and it’s too ridiculous to be in any real way morally repugnant, but, really don’t you want more out of your anime?

Maybe I’m just getting old—as I said, Otaku Hero and I seem to be about the same age—but at some point, watching things like this just becomes depressing. It’s not the worst anime of all time or anything, and it’s not even the worst I’ve seen this year, but it is one of the most pointless. There’s something to be said for being memorably weird, and Destroyers definitely at least clears that bar, but maybe that’s not always enough to make a show worth watching on its own. In the end, there’s not really anything for anybody here. Other than the lingering suspicion that these girls deserved better.

1: This is a joke, of course. There is no actual weed usage in the show, since that would require actually pushing the envelope. God forbid an anime with a loose “anarchy” theme be on the same level of transgression as A Woman Called Fujiko Mine, an anime from 11 years ago.

2: I feel the need to point out that I briefly consulted Wikipedia to check my episode order was correct here. In doing so, I noticed that no one has uploaded titles or descriptions for the last two episodes, proving that even the diligent Anime Wikipedia community is having trouble staying invested with this one.

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 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) What Actually is The LOVE LIVE! SUNSHINE!! LIVE-ACTION FILM SPECIAL 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 @Yousorojisan. Thank you for your support.

“I guess if you have the full power of an anime studio behind you, you can shitpost as hard as you want.”

-Julian M., KeyFrames Forgotten cohost and personal friend.

What is it with short-form idol fiction, man? Last year, I briefly reviewed Idolmaster Spin-Off, which, like the subject of today’s review, is a completely incomprehensible piece of brain-zapping surrealism. Just yesterday I happened to read the deeply fucked up weird sci-fi high concept shock fiction body horror idol novella The Last & First Idol. Given the competition, the Love Live! Sunshine!! Special Movie is only the third or so craziest idol thing I’ve ever mentioned on this site, but it’s still pretty goddamn weird in a way that’s only really explicable by its origin as an April Fools’ prank.

What little premise there is goes like this; our sort-of protagonist Riko (Rikako Aida) falls asleep, and there, she dreams of herself and the rest of Love Live! Sunshine!! group Aquors as cute little puppets. They mime through a sequence of fairytales, beginning with The Three Little Pigs, the one among these that will be most recognizable to Anglophone audiences. The plot, such as it is, progresses in an economical but chaotic fashion. But of course, the actual narrative (itself fairly scant) is not the point here, this whole ordeal has more in common with [adult swim] shorts than it does anything else related to the Love Live! franchise, which is why we get things like a recurring antagonist in the form of a coelacanth puppet.

Things like this are, essentially, novelties. As such, it’s hard to grade them on a scale as is usually expected when writing some sort of review. I can tell you that the visuals are charmingly lo-fi even if the puppetry itself is rather amateurish, but that doesn’t really tell you much about the Special Movie itself, does it? Instead, I’d argue there are two angles to approach this short from.

The obvious tack is the aforementioned, where we view Special Movie as a piece of nonsense comedy. As far as such things go, it’s a solid execution of the idea, and you can find fellows for Special Movie among a particular strain of absurd, mostly half-length anime that have been a recurring fixture in TV anime for the better part of two decades (if you ever want to truly question your life I highly recommend the cranium-destroyingly insane Ai Mai Mi). It’s pretty fun in its own way, so full marks there.

The second and arguably more interesting angle, however, is to view this not as a primarily comedic endeavor but as one that performs a crucial function for an idol group. It conveys the personalities of its involved members extremely well; enough so that, despite not having seen the original Love Live! Sunshine!! (it wasn’t part of this commission, and as is often the case, I was assured I did not need to see it to understand this), I immediately clocked the personalities of all of this short’s major players. Granted, idol anime characters tend to be written in archetype, but this kind of thing, where characters get one or at most two short scenes to establish their personality before the plot moves on, are harder to pull off than one might think. With almost no prior knowledge of this particular part of the Love Live franchise, I nonetheless gleaned right away that Riko is the self-conscious straightman of the group, that Chika (Anju Inami) is the lovable goofball protagonist, and so on, and so forth. If we pretend for a moment that the Love Live characters are real people—and there is little reason not to when engaging in this sort of thought exercise—the short makes a lot of sense as an act of brand extension. You, if you’re reading this, presumably love these characters already. Why not watch them do something stupid for 15 minutes? What do you have to lose?

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, 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.

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(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 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) To Die Amidst the Azalea Bloom – VAMPIRE IN THE GARDEN and the Modern Queer Tragedy

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

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 Wynne. Thank you for your support.

“There must be a paradise waiting for us somewhere.”

The image of a vampire in a garden is a pleasant one. Consider it for a moment; the bloodsucking creature of folklore allowed to sit in peace, the Sun gently lighting her face in the way it does for the rest of us. Throughout Vampire in The Garden, we examine this visual metaphor, jewel-like as it is, from several angles. Some of these are surprisingly literal, others symbolic, but it’s clear from the outset, and throughout the miniseries, that the primary meaning is not that of a greenhouse or anything of the sort. It is of a garden of Eden. An imagined, perfect paradise beyond this world, in which there is no strife, violence, or hatred. In which two people who love each other can be together, even if they are from vastly different circumstances.

Even if the whole world is arrayed against them; arrows aimed at the throat.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Vampire in The Garden is yet another anime this year to focus on vampires and romance, following after the second part of The Case Study of Vanitas, but presaging summer seasonal hit Call of The Night. It has a bit in common with both of those, but its real roots lie much deeper; back in the era of 90-120 minute OVAs. Vampire is a little longer, the five-episode mini-series clocks in at about 2 hours, but it is very much a single, self-contained story. And what a story; this is easily one of the year’s best anime, no mean feat in 2022, which has been absolutely swamped with great shows. As for the production-side of things; it’s a Wit Studio project, helmed by director and series compositor Ryoutarou Makihara, his first time at the helm since the obscure Empire of Corpses.

There are two main things one must understand about Vampire in The Garden in order to properly appreciate it. 1: it is an intensely queer story. While it is true that the themes found within it could be generalized out to apply to other situations, there is a reason that both of its leads are women, and the story simply makes far less sense if you try to rationalize your way into believing that our protagonists, Fine (Yuu Kobayashi), and Momo (Megumi Han), aren’t in love. 2: it is a tragedy. Gay romances that end in heartbreak get a bad rep these days for understandable reasons, but such a thing should only truly be objectionable if it doesn’t have something to say, and Vampire in The Garden has plenty to say. Throughout, it demonstrates a keen eye for imagery and paints a very emotionally honest portrait of life as a queer person in a society that is not very accepting of those.

Consider our protagonists. On the one hand, we have

Momo; a hardworking factory girl with a talent for tinkering, who lives in a massive compound called the Tower, run by her authoritarian, abusive mother. She longs for an escape, and a flight of fancy—fixing a broken music box, forbidden, as all music and art are, in the Tower—spirals into a tragic adventure. Her close “friend” Milana is shot during a raid on the Tower by vampires, the eternal enemy of mankind in the bleak, frozen, post-apocalyptic world that Vampire takes place in. But, of course, if things were as simple as “humans vs. vampires”, we wouldn’t be here. In a combination of panic, confusion, and the urge to seize the chance to escape, she meets–

Fine; queen of the vampires. Flighty, constantly neglecting her duties by choice. She too longs for escape, and it’s a chance encounter with Momo that sets them off, together, on an adventure far from the Tower and far from Fine’s own ostensible demesne, ruled as it really is by her consort/vizier Allegro (Chiaki Kobayashi). Together, Momo and Fine are star-crossed lovers in the most classic mold possible; a Romeo & Juliet of the modern age. You already know how this story ends; amid a field of moon azaleas, somewhere deep within a cradle of earth, all graves, shed petals, and teardrops. But that doesn’t make it a journey not worth going on.

That journey sees Fine and Momo searching for that mythical paradise. Initially, they seek such a thing solely to escape the shackles of the human/vampire war itself, but before long, they’ve grown close enough that it’s clear that the promise of somewhere where humans and vampires can live together in peace, and thus where Fine and Momo can live together in peace, becomes their primary motivator. At the start of this story, Momo loses Milana, who she is clearly quite close to. We learn much later on that Fine lost someone she was quite close to, Aria, a long time ago. Momo and Fine’s relationship, as deeply upsetting as the circumstances it was born in are, is one that springs from mutual loss. They find comfort in each other in a way that feels truly human.

Their first stop is the catacomb-esque opulence of Fine’s manor, where Fine helps a wounded Momo recover. It’s here where they first start to trust each other and their relationship goes from something uncertain and tenuous to something very real and immediate. The good times are fleeting, of course, but they have meaning.

At one point, Momo stumbles into a cinema, and is so rattled by the film idly left playing—probably the first she’s ever seen, mind you—that Vampire itself dissolves into a nightmarish patchwork of loss and traumatic imagery, and it is Fine who must calm her down. For not the last time in the series, Vampire is astoundingly lyrical, a tapestry of images both in the forefront and background that imbue the world with tactility and meaning;

a bath,
a record player,
an opera singer
whose voice, spilling
out of the player
laments the loss of those
she loved

There’s a garden – a beautiful, green, lush, literal garden – where Fine grows all manner of plants, in defiance of the Sun itself. She teaches Momo to sing, to appreciate art and music. For this, she is rewarded by the pursuing humans of the Tower, and then, separately, the vampires, raiding her mansion. Both of our protagonists are pursued–

Momo by her mother’s forces.

Fine by her own subjects.

–and the mansion ends up in flames as they flee, starting a pattern that will repeat several times over the course of Vampire‘s five episodes. Momo and Fine arrive somewhere, settle there for a short time, and then are driven away by these twin forces independently pursuing them. It is worth noting that they never directly do anything we’d understand as wrong, it is simply that the very act of a human and a vampire living together is unconscionable to the people of this world.

Throughout, as these entwined swathes of fire pursue its protagonists, Vampire is able to capture a gripping, rare feeling. On the one hand, you can appreciate much of these more action-oriented scenes for what they are on a technical level, and say that Vampire, especially its first half, is a kickass action-post apoc-sci-fi-fantasy adventure. This is true, but on the other hand, it is also a near-hallucinatory torrent of love and loss; trauma, laughter, music, snow, iron, blood – mixed together, and adjoined end to uncomfortable end, a feeling evocative of memory itself. Much like the music box that serves as a leitmotif throughout the series.

Everywhere Fine and Momo go is a false promise, in a way. The manor, of stability. The segregated two-island vampire / human town they visit in episode three, of unity. The too-good-to-be-true village in the far north in episode four, of community. And finally, the blasted-out ruin of some long-forgotten metropolis in the final episode, an already-broken promise of civilization itself.

This extends somewhat to the supporting cast as well. Momo’s mother is portrayed as disturbingly, realistically abusive, swinging wildly from backhanding and berating her daughter and pleading for her forgiveness and asking for a hug. When Momo finally turns her away near the very end of the show, it’s hugely cathartic. Later in the story, we meet Elisha, the representative of the idyllic / winter horror village in episode four.

In addition to enabling the false promise of community and hospitality that the village itself represents, she’s also quick to attack Momo as a hypocrite when things go south. This is, of course, nonsense. There is a vast gulf between harming people accidentally, or in self-defense, and doing so as part of a convoluted scheme to live a life of privilege, which is what Elisha’s village is doing.

There’s also Momo’s uncle, who leads the human forces that seek to recapture her, and in the final episode it’s revealed that he too once fled from home with a vampire he loved in tow, only for that story to end on a harsh, bitter note. This recontextualizes his earlier actions; like Momo, he longed for an escape from the drudgery of a world defined by petty, pointless conflict. Unlike Momo, when that escape was ultimately denied to him, he turned his anger outward.

Which leads us to Vampire’s conclusion.

Just based on what kind of story this is, it will not surprise you that only one of our protagonists is fortunate enough to live through the ending. Fine’s death is a long, torturously slow process. At first, she seems to die rampaging amidst muzzle flash and rubble, but the truth of things isn’t that simple. A serum that turns vampires into berserk beasts—a plot point back from back in the first episode, and one which I should point out, basically causes them to transform into what humans think they are—can’t be countered so easily. She does save Momo, and her final confrontation with Momo’s uncle actually ends when she stops attacking him. What truly rattles the man is not the notion of vampires attacking him, it’s of them not doing so, because it means that there isn’t anything inherently stopping vampires and humans from living in harmony, it really is just all circumstance; grudges, old wounds, and unsolved problems.

Momo’s own last confrontation is the aforementioned rebuke of her mother, as she carries the still-dying Fine to her final resting place; a warm cave below the cold surface, where the queen of vampires finally dies, amidst a bed of porcelain-white flowers. The very last shot of the main body of the series is –

Momo,
kneeling in front of Fine’s body,
taking a sharp, deep breath;
preparing to sing.

She herself lives on, and Fine is gone, but not forgotten.

The main reason that Fine and Momo don’t both survive is that, unfortunately, that is rarely the case for real queer couples in these kinds of situations either. But we shouldn’t take this to mean that Fine and Momo’s entire journey was pointless. Instead, it is the very fact that Fine and Momo did journey, and journeyed together, that is, itself, the true paradise they sought, however fleeting it may have been. There is a real, resonant beauty in that notion, even if it is a very sad and tragic sort. Something like;

“If we don’t have each other forever, at least we had each other today.”

The series offers a single post-credits scene; a sunlit garden, where Momo cradles a young vampire child in her arms. This scene’s nature—real or metaphysical, future or afterlife—is left ambiguous. A ray of uncertain hope that pierces the gray skies of an even less certain present.

I have to confess, Vampire in The Garden has proven very challenging to “review”, in as much as this even is a “review” of anything. This is a work of uncommon grace and elegance, as even its ideas which sound, on paper, inadequate, or like they’re trying too hard, are executed absolutely perfectly in the miniseries itself. There are several other axes I’ve barely even touched on; the visual beauty of most of the show’s backgrounds, for example. Part of me does feel that I haven’t entirely done Vampire justice, but perhaps that is simply a limitation of my medium. Some things must be seen to be felt.

And of course, all criticism is, in the end, but a reflective prism of the original. Here, for the first time in a long time, I have felt honored to be that reflection; I am but a mirror to moonlight.

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.

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 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Warming Up to NARUTO THE MOVIE: CLASH IN THE LAND OF SNOW

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

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 Roko Da Silva. Thank you for your support.

Of ’00s shonen fandom’s “Big Three”, I have to confess that Naruto is probably the one I have the least investment in. I don’t dislike the franchise by any means—I did watch it, though not nearly as religiously as some of my friends when I was younger—but most of my memories of Naruto are hazy and nonspecific. Single cool scenes, general feelings, vague memories of liking one character or another.

For this reason, I was a little wary when I was commissioned to watch Clash in the Land of Snow, worried I wouldn’t entirely know enough to properly evaluate the film. Thankfully, Clash is a very straightforward movie, an unchallenging but fun piece of genre fare of a sort that’s never really gone away, even as it underlines a handful of very meta points about the act of acting itself.

No complicated schemes or lore drops here; our plot is simply that Naruto (Junko Takeuchi), Sasuke (Noriaki Sugiyama), Sakura (Chie Nakamura), and their mentor Kakashi (Kazuhiko Inoue) must escort an actress, Yukie Fujikaze (Yuuko Kaida), on a trip as preparations are made for her next film.

She is very hot and very disinterested. 10/10 character.

There are several little twists here; Fujikaze doesn’t really want to keep acting, and in fact one of her first scenes of note involves her getting drunk out of her mind while complaining that all she does is act out “lies.” There’s the fact that all three of our ninja buddies here are big fans of her most well-known role, Princess Gale (Yukie Fujikaze) in a series of films of the same name. Oh yeah, there’s also the detail that she’s secretly the exiled princess of the titular Land of Snow, and that her evil older brother is trying to hunt her down so he can retrieve a magic crystal she keeps around her neck that is the key to an ancestral treasure he really, really wants to get his hands on.

More than its plot, Clash in the Land of Snow is a series of exercises in unfettered shonen movie goodness. There are excellent fight scenes with characters who almost certainly never showed up again after this, metaphors of mixed effect about determination and duty, the protagonist gritting his teeth to pull through and save the day, a lot of quite pretty background art, and a few jokes of dubious actual humor. The version I watched also had slightly-busted subtitles, for that authentic 2006 fansub experience.

It’s no surprise that the real highlights here are things that aim to deliver a pure head-rush of fun and not much of anything else. Perhaps the movie’s most famous scene is one where Naruto, carrying Yukie (by now, revealed to be an alias, her real name is Koyuki Kazahana) has to outrun a train on-foot when they encounter one in a tunnel. Not just notable for the fandom trivium that it’s the only train in the entire original series (this leads to Naruto rather hilariously asking what a train is), but for the sheer action of the scene; as swift and powerful as the train itself. Naruto and Koyuki escape just fine, but when a band of loyalist swordsmen rally to Koyuki’s reluctant cause, the train’s cars open up, revealing a battery of kunai-launching flak cannons; a scaled up, ninjafied, and very messy take on the Korean hwach’a, perhaps. Of course, they promptly shred the loyalists to pieces. Shrapnel is shrapnel, after all.

It’s worth honing in on that scene for another reason. Koyuki, despite in many ways serving a damsel in distress role for chunks of the film, is actually quite the well-done character. Her reluctance to accept the responsibilities placed on her head feels realistic and sympathetic (enough so that I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the film’s presentation of her eventual yielding to those responsibilities as a good thing). The death of her loyal assistant in the aforementioned scene hits particularly hard; she’s burned out enough by a life of running away that she can’t even cry, prompting a brilliant callback to an earlier (there, comedic) scene where she’s an incredible actor but can’t cry without tearing drops. Other highlight scenes include a chakra-sealed Naruto busting out of prison by filing away at his handcuffs with a file between his teeth (a fun trope in almost anything), and him laying a rainbow-colored rasengan down on the bad guy in the finale, only for the Land of Snow’s actual snow to start melting away as it turns out that the “secret treasure” that he was pursuing all along was, essentially, a magic weather machine that can warm the local climate.

The movie never gets as subtle as Koyuki’s lack of crying over her assistant’s death again, but it probably doesn’t really need to. This is pure popcorn stuff, and to a point I almost think that trying to be more ambitious would’ve actually hurt the film. There are obvious snags in its premise—the friend I was watching the film with pointed out that the Hidden Leaf Village are, by returning Koyuki to her homeland mostly against her own will, basically engaging in a proxy war—that are, of course, never addressed. But if these are problems at all, they’re minor ones. (I’ve actually heard that much later in the series, long after I stopped watching as a kid, Naruto does try to delve into some more political overtones, apparently to mixed results. But that’s a secondhand opinion, so take it with even more salt than you normally do when reading my site!) The film succeeds admirably at its main aim; to be, basically, a long episode of Naruto, and to be a good one.

All told, if it doesn’t seem like there’s much to Clash in the Land of Snow, that’s only because it doesn’t need to be much. Two hours of pure action movie anime entertainment is more than enough to make a film worthwhile. Fun is its own reward.

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.

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 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Clock Strikes Twelve for CALL OF THE NIGHT

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Remember 2022 as a banner year for the anime vampire. Between the second part of The Case Study of Vanitas, 5-episode wonder (and future Magic Planet Anime review subject) Vampire in The Garden, and of course, this very anime, Call of The Night, it’s been a solid year for the fanged and fearsome among us. Of course, vampires—more specifically vampires and romance—are not new additions to anime as a medium. Not by a longshot, as I discussed when I first blogged about this series back in July, they’ve been common bedfellows for a long time.

Since then, in my intermittent coverage of the series, I’ve made mention more than once that vampires, traditionally, are symbols of the other. Of outsiders. The thing about symbols of course is that they eventually acquire a life all their own, separate from any single author’s intent. They become entities of their own; concepts that lurk in the collective human subconscious, to be interpreted a myriad of different ways as any individual artist sees fit, certainly, but always retaining a core identity that, if it changes, only does so slowly, over time, and through repeated effort by many individual interpreters.

So, when we look at Call of The Night, a series primarily centered on the 14-year-old Ko Yamori (Gen Satou) and his quest to fall in love with, and thus be turned by, decades-old vampire Nazuna Nanakusa (Sora Amamiya), we must ask ourselves what it is using that symbol to say, and how these things align with its broader storytelling goals.

In a general sense, there’s not really anything complicated about Call of the Night at all; it’s a story about Ko, an antisocial shut-in who starts taking long, lonesome night walks because he’s stopped going to school, coming of age and becoming his own person. Thought about this way, it could be lumped in with any number of other anime.

What lessens those commonalities that Ko and Nazuna’s relationship is somewhat fuzzy for much of the series; are they actually in love? Just friends? Something else entirely? It takes almost the entire 13-episode run for a definitive answer to that question to actually emerge, and that very uncertainty is largely what “vampirism” means within the context of Call of The Night. If we take “vampires” to be anyone who lives outside of normal society, the show’s theming clicks into place perfectly.

Indeed, it is very easy to read Ko, Nazuna, and their relationship in any number of ways. I’ve previously mostly looked at it through the lens of Ko, a fairly strongly neurodivergent-coded character, and quite possibly an aromantic, trying to figure out the foreign field of romance. Far on the other end of the field, I’ve also seen Nazuna called a sexual predator preying on Ko’s insecurities (I think you have to get pretty far into a countertextual reading to argue that, but I definitely get why people might get that vibe at first glance). In hindsight, I’d say neither of these, really, fit the show particularly well, which is a little unfortunate in the former case and a massive relief in the latter.

Instead, Call of the Night effectively presents a world much like our own, where human relationships are complicated, thorny things, full of accidents and insecurity, and in which you can never truly entirely know where you stand. This becomes clearer during the show’s last arc, with its introduction of the detective / vampire hunter Anko Uguisu (Miyuki Sawashiro), who makes it very clear that she does not see human and vampire lives as equally worthwhile. (It’s also worth noting that she guns for Ko more directly than Nazuna ever does.) Her killing a blood-starved vampire kicks off the final quarter of the series, which casts much of what comes before in a different light.

But, crucially, not all of it. At series’ end, Nazuna and Ko redouble their commitment to each other. Call of the Night ends on the line “we’re in this together.” Perhaps, then, what is crucial is not so much what Nazuna and Ko are to each other, but simply that they are something to each other. The very last scene is a kiss; so clearly this is a romantic relationship, but what is almost more important than the establishment of a definitive romance is that this clears out any uncertainty. “You and me against the world” is pretty easy to get your head around, even for the most romantically disinterested among us.

In that final arc, Call of The Night seems to pose Ko a choice; to become human and return to the world of ‘living’ (read: ordinary) people, or to take a gamble on the unknowable dangers of the vampire world. But interestingly, it does not present either humanity or vampirism as “the right choice.” Vampirism is neither a curse nor an automatic liberation. What is more important than making the choice at all is making it honestly, definitively, and with purpose. By the series’ end, Ko makes his.

None of this is to say that the show is flawless. For instance, its only real depiction of a genuinely GNC character, the otokonoko vampire Hatsuka Suzushiro (Azumi Waki) leaves quite a lot to be desired, and, for better or worse, there are many open questions by the time it ends. (Less a flaw, admittedly, and more just a consequence of adapting a still-ongoing manga.) It also probably spends a little too much time leering at various characters’ bodies; some of it makes sense, some of it just feels a little much.

But indeed, even in terms of positive qualities there’s a fair bit I haven’t talked about, such as the show’s absolutely phenomenal directing courtesy of Tomoyuki Itamura, whose pedigree includes not only fellow 2022 vampire series The Case Study of Vanitas, but also work on most of the Monogatari series, and, remarkably, episode 7 of ever-underrated SHAFT comedy And Yet The Town Moves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that episode’s second half is entirely about the wonders of liminality, centering on a story about a young boy who watches midnight tick over into a new day for the first time. Call of The Night, despite many other differences from that series, inherits some of that spirit, a certain sense of midnight-black magic that no amount of cynicism and adult world-weariness can truly erase.

Back when Call of The Night first began, I made the remark that if it could keep up that feeling of nocturnal wonder from its first episode’s closing moments, it had nothing to worry about. Thirteen weeks later, that thought remains unchanged. Nazuna and Ko definitely have, but not the night itself. It’s as young as it’s ever been.

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.

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 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Giving the Cold Shoulder to RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.

For a while, it looked like things might improve.

I’ve covered RWBY: Ice Queendom on and off here on Magic Planet Anime since it premiered, and I was not shy about the fact that I did not really care for its opening arc. Then, unexpectedly, episode four happened and for a while, it seemed like things were picking up. I had hoped it would stay that way, but suffice it to say, this didn’t happen. I just haven’t felt very motivated to cover Ice Queendom here on MPA in a long while. And because of that, this is, in a sense, less of a proper review and more of a conclusion of my coverage of the series. It’s been a long and rough road, and I am mostly unhappy with how the show has turned out, but I do feel obligated to write something.

But to back up a bit, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with what Ice Queendom is trying to do. As a reboot / side story / whatever of the larger RWBY series, it succeeds in that it doesn’t actually require you to have seen any prior material to get an idea of what the series’ whole deal is. (A good thing, too, since, as I mention in the First Impressions writeup linked up there, I am a neophyte to the franchise.) As a Studio SHAFT anime made during what is at this point undeniably their twilight years, it succeeds in looking intermittently cool when it’s not busy being extremely janky. In that sense, it’s not terribly different from, say, Assault Lily Bouquet, another “girls with cool weapons” anime from SHAFT from just a few years back. And indeed, Ice Queendom‘s greatest strength is the visual oomph brought by that SHAFT pedigree. The Studio SHAFT of 2022 are not the Studio SHAFT of 2011, but they can still deliver some real knockouts when things come together. For the most part, even from this angle, Ice Queendom really does feel like there’s no one “at the wheel” so to speak. These flashes of excellence; mostly in the form of fight scenes or other visual setpieces, seem to be largely the work of individual animators or occasionally episode directors, rather than there being any sort of unifying hand throughout the production. Still, it’s something.

In practice, you’re more likely to notice the show’s flaws, which stem from its one major difference from the bulk of mainstream TV anime. Any number of other battle girl anime are, generally, either original IPs or they’re based on existing Japanese series. Ice Queendom is, of course, based on the extremely weeb-y, but very much American, original RWBY. This matters, because, I am told, the original series is the original sin for what ends up being this show’s most glaring, central writing problem. The root of all evil; The Over-wrought Furry Racism Allegory.

Very briefly, RWBY takes place in a fairly standard urban fantasy world. There are monsters, there are people who hunt the monsters with cool weapons, and an academy where they learn how to properly engage in monster hunting. Very well-trod stuff, but not necessarily bad. Here is the problem; in addition to the humans and the monsters (called Grimms), we also have kemonomimi called the Faunus. For reasons I can only guess at, Ice Queendom is very fixated on the Faunus, specifically as a vehicle for the aforementioned Over-wrought Furry Racism Allegory. This is a somewhat infamous stock plot, and it’s pretty much impossible to do well unless you’re the guy who wrote Maus. Personally, I’ve been over it since about when the first surly Skyrim guard threatened to turn my Khajit into a rug. And I cannot even imagine how utterly sick actual POC must be of the continued prevalence of this particular trope.

Ice Queendom‘s take, unfortunately, is particularly bad. A majority of the show takes place not in the series’ own real world, but inside the mind of one of its main characters, the snooty heiress Weiss Schnee (Youko Hikasa), who, along with her friends Ruby (the cheerful red one, Saori Hayami), Yang (the big sister-ish yellow one, Ami Koshimizu), and Blake (the cool and aloof Faunus, Yuu Shimamura), is one of the four members of the titular Team RWBY. Early in the series, she’s possessed by something called a Nightmare Grimm which locks her in a dream world inside of her own head. With the help of extremely cool original-to-Ice Queendom character Shion Zaiden (Hiroki Nanami), the remaining Team RWBY girls dive into this nightmare prison and attempt to rescue Weiss. This takes up the remainder of the show, and along the way they fight a fairly wide variety of dream baddies and, at least ostensibly, help Weiss grapple with the trauma that comes from being raised by a bunch of rich assholes who probably don’t care very much about her.

You may ask, what does all of this have to do with kemonomimi? Well, you see, one of the things that the show repeatedly hammers home over the course of its run is that Weiss does not like or trust Blake. Specifically, she doesn’t like or trust Blake because she’s a Faunus. Because, you see, some Faunus are part of a, ahem, “terrorist organization” called the White Fang, which attacks trains and such owned by Weiss’ family’s company. Blake actually was part of the White Fang at one point, having left some time ago for only vaguely specified reasons. Thus begins Ice Queendom‘s utter fixation on both this dumb-as-bricks plot and, on top of that, trying to falsely equate Weiss and Blake’s struggles.

Let us be very clear here, based on the information that Ice Queendom itself gives us, Weiss is a troubled but still very privileged heiress from a wealthy background. Blake is from a, by all appearances, widely discriminated-against ethnic minority, enough so that she feels the need to wear a ribbon to hide her wolf ears, and may have done some arguably-bad things in the past. I am not embellishing here; those are the facts laid out by the series itself. Somehow, Ice Queendom insists that both of these characters are equally sympathetic, utterly emptying the pantry of basic dream symbolism in service to the idea that somehow, Weiss Schnee, deeply unlikable rich girl who spends much of the series as her subconscious “nightmare self” trotting around in a militaristic overcoat, and Blake Belladonna, a girl who has by all accounts had a very rough life, are equally at fault for the rift that emerges between them.

If I ended up inside someone’s mind, and I found out that they thought things like this, I would probably have a hard time trusting them, too. Just saying.

Make no mistake; what actually happens, repeatedly, throughout Ice Queendom, is that Blake will say something that the show frames as her being hurt, but which is actually, obviously, completely correct. Weiss will then say something racist. We are supposed to believe that both of these people are doing something wrong here, despite the fact that it its trumpetingly obvious that only one is.

I’ve said this before, but I feel like a total idiot for complaining about this kind of thing. Not because I’m wrong—I know I’m not—but because it just seems obvious. I have said a fair few positive things about Ice Queendom in my earlier columns on the show, and I stand by most of those. I do genuinely think it’s pretty visually interesting, and, even if the dream symbolism leans toward the obvious, it is the closest we ever get to actually seeing a full inner picture of Weiss that doesn’t just make her seem like an entitled snot. But none of that really fixes the fact that overall Ice Queendom fails at some very basic things.

The whole Blake / Weiss feud plotline would, itself, be just the source of a complaint—a major one, but not necessarily one that would wreck the whole series—were Ice Queendom not so obsessed with circling back to it. The show’s entire final stretch, from episode 8 to episode 12, is almost entirely about it. Other narrative threads like Ruby’s personal development as a leader of her team are reduced to perfunctory side stories; this is clearly what Ice Queendom wants to be about, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why, because it is both its worst and its least interesting plot by an order of magnitude, and it rots the show at the root right up until the very end.

Naturally, the series ends with wishy-washy handwaving bullshit about how the power of friendship has helped Team RWBY overcome their differences. Except, of course, that a huge chunk of the very last episode—what is supposed to be the triumphant postscript, mind you—is spent by people still casting aspersions on Blake for her being a Faunus. One of those people is still Weiss, who really does not seem to have grown as a person at all over the course of the story. Another one is the school’s headmaster, who both assures her that the academy is totally egalitarian and then also grills her about her possible connections to the White Fang within the space of a single conversation. It is a truly breathtaking display of double standard, and if it were at all intentional it’d be almost brilliant, but I’m not convinced it is. Instead, it’s just the last of a very long series of nails in Ice Queendom‘s coffin. And then the proverbial spit on the grave is Weiss using the threat of calling the police as a bit of bargaining leverage against a different Faunus character not ten minutes later.

There is one further bright spot, and it also comes in at the show’s end. And I do mean the very end; as in, the last scene of the whole series. Inexplicably, we end on a scene of Ice Queendom‘s cast getting into a massive foodfight. It’s lavishly animated and a pretty slick little tune pumps in the background as it happens. It’s also completely baffling. I’m told it’s an homage to the opening of the second season of the original RWBY.

On its own, this is great. In a meta sort of way, it even loops back around to what RWBY as a series was originally about; flashy fight scenes, with any greater narrative context a secondary concern at most. (Even I know about the famous color trailers. I’m not totally out of the loop.) But taken in the greater context of Ice Queendom on the whole, it really raises the question; why could they have not just done this the entire time? There is no real reason that all of the writing problems that so badly hamstring the show should be present, and I really doubt anyone would’ve blamed the scriptwriters for sidelining or even outright ignoring some of the original’s more questionable plot lines. No one likes RWBY for its writing. Again, even I know that much.

At the end of the day, what we have with Ice Queendom is a deeply frustrating piece of media. Intermittently good, occasionally brilliant, but willing and ready to repeat the mistakes of not just its source material but an entire generation of pop media, usually in the most basic fashion imaginable. Often enough that doing so completely ruins it. This is a case where a show’s positive aspects don’t balance out the negative ones so much as they make them seem even worse by comparison.

If we are to remember Ice Queendom in any kind of positive light, it should be for those rare few moments of visual brilliance. But, of course, when it’s possible to experience all of a show’s highlights just by scrolling through sakugabooru, there’s already been a greater failure of imagination.

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.

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 in anime, Reviews

(Review) .hack//ROOTS Needs to Touch Grass

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

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 Rakhshi. Thank you for your support.

Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.

Maybe I just don’t quite get it.

.hack//Roots, the second entry of the storied .hack franchise, is a kind of anime that doesn’t really get made anymore, on several fronts. It’s an adaption of (and sort of a prequel to) the video game .hack//G.U. It’s also a fairly low-key and unflashy speculative fiction series. There used to be a lot of these; stuffed to the brim with a lot of place-names, people-names, and thing-names, where the central plot is the main fixture but is, at least in theory, supported by a whole lot of worldbuilding and Lore™. The slow pace is a key part of it too, enough so that my pet neologism “Proper Noun Machine Gun” doesn’t quite feel appropriate. (Proper Noun Composite Bow, maybe?) Usually, the plot is about finding a McGuffin of some kind. Or several McGuffins. Often, there are competing factions who want the McGuffin(s). At a glance, you’d usually guess they were mid-budget productions. You were usually correct. All of this is true in Roots, to at least some extent, and I have to admit that it made getting invested in the series hard for me. That in mind, I did not really care for it at all, we’ll circle back around to why.

In the past decade, anime like this have had their niche crowded out by light novel adaptions and the like, which have a more uptempo pace and are generally a lot campier. So, I must admit that for the second .hack franchise entry in a row, I went into Roots with the mentality of a pop cultural archeologist. .hack//SIGN was so of-its-era that the very net culture it was loosely based on is basically a foreign country nowadays. Roots is much the same, despite being a bit more recent (it hails from 2006) as signposted by its tangle of now-ancient MMO slang, some of which was never common in the anglosphere to begin with.

But enough about that, what’s it actually about?

Hint: not this.

For the first half of its show, there’s a straightforward answer to that question. Our main character is Haseo (Takahiro Sakurai), a surly noob who finds himself getting ganked on his very first day playing hit MMO The World. As the series’ plot revs up, he gets caught between the machinations of two guilds; the Twilight Brigade, led by the mysterious Ovan (Hiroki Touchi) searching for the Key of the Twilight—you may remember it from SIGN—and the enigmatic TaN Guild, who oppose the former for initially nebulous reasons. Haseo joins the Brigade at about the show’s quarter mark, and consequently they form the bulk of our remaining main cast. The main other members of note are Shino (Kaori Nazuka), who Haseo quickly forms a close bond with, and Tabby (Megumi Toyoguchi), who is another new player in search of friends in the digital fields and cities of The World.

Our McGuffins this time around are glowing crystals called Virus Cores, things of obscure provenance found in glitched-out locations within The World called Lost Grounds. The show opens before these things start to actually turn up, but they’re the main plot-drivers for the earlier parts of the series.

But detailing the plot from this point on becomes, or at least I feel it becomes, rote. Eventually the Brigade dissolves and things crumble into a syrupy morass, and the show never really recovers.

Before we discuss why, though, let’s consider the overall positives.

What I will give the series is that its soundtrack and background visuals are consistently excellent. As a production, and keeping in mind its origins, it is generally just a solid affair all-around. (There are some rough spots toward the end, but they’re relatively few in number.) The fight choreography is engaging on the occasion that fights actually pop up. In general, the show looks and sounds good. Unfortunately, that is about the sum of my unambiguously positive thoughts on .hack//ROOTS.

After the opening third or so of the series, these strengths clash with an increasingly sluggish central plot, and the series slows to a crawl. There is a lot of utterly leaden exposition—some of it handed out by decent characters, in spite of that, like the wise cat-man sage Phyllo (Junpei Takiguchi)—that is probably interesting if you have much more prior investment in this franchise than I do, but without that existing experience it mostly just comes across as boring.

There are, though, writing-side positives, too. Haseo’s character arc is terrible, as we’ll get to, but some of the other character writing is fairly strong.

For instance, a bit under halfway through, there’s an excellent bit of character work where Shino professes that she likes being in the Brigade because she feels that she can truly be herself there. There is something to this idea of Ovan (or really, Shino herself, given that she does just as much to make the Twilight Brigade what it is, while it exists) as a great creator-of-spaces. Areas where people can just be without having to worry about the pressures of the outside world. In the modern, mundane internet, there are plenty of such spaces, although not as many as there used to be, many of them on services like Discord. And there is also something to Roots’ depiction of one of these spaces falling apart; about halfway through the series, most especially in episodes 12 and 13, where the Twilight Brigade all quit after Ovan’s sudden disappearance, and Shino dies outright at the hands of the mysterious digital executioner Tri-Edge (Sayaka Aida). The collapse of a place like this is genuinely a sad thing and trying to convey that through the story is one of .hack//Roots‘ better ideas. Unfortunately, having good ideas and telling good stories are different things, and just because Roots can do the former does not imply it can necessarily do the latter.

From here, the plot again greatly slows down, and most of the remainder of the show is spent on Haseo’s deeply tedious quest for vengeance against Tri-Edge. On paper, you can see how this would work. Sacrificing almost every positive attribute you have in order to “get stronger” so you can avenge the death of a loved one is a tried-and-true narrative, one that’s been done many times in anime, and sometimes to great effect. But two things sink Roots’ attempt to tap into this bit of the collective human psyche. For one, the very fact that the series takes place within an MMO makes the whole thing feel slightly ridiculous, even with Shino being literally dead. For two, and much more importantly, Haseo is just not an interesting character. He begins the series as a whiny dweeb, and the series’ attempts to sell him as a genuine menace when he decides to go full raging avenger just don’t work.

Shino is gone, Haseo has given up a lot, so all of this, again, should work, but none of this changes the fact that what he’s mostly doing is mopily level grinding in an MMO. It’s silly, which would itself be excusable if there was any sense of drama to any of this, but there isn’t. Instead, Haseo mostly looks like a scrawny teenager cosplaying Cu Chulainn Alter for the back half of the show, something that really does not help its stabs at gravitas land.

….

Elsewhere, things are better. More grounded characters like Tabby, whose struggles still consist mostly of her wanting friends and not knowing how to deal with her first friend group breaking up, is the one who’s best and easiest to relate to, among the main cast. She carries that torch through the whole show, and she might be my favorite character over all. At show’s end, she quits The World, and plans to become a nurse, so she can help people in the real world.

Other minor characters like Pi (Sanae Kobayashi), who is effectively a combination minion of the obligate mysterious conspiracy / put-upon secretary, and Saburou (Shizuka Itou), a hacker with a talent for longwinded, clunky metaphors, brighten things up when they’re onscreen. But we here again return to the central problem of these characters just not being on-screen all that often.

And even when they are, they’re usually talking about Haseo. I’m reminded of that Simpsons episode about Poochie the Dog, except in this case Poochie is the show’s main character. We’re supposed to buy him as an avenging badass, but on a simple vibe level, it just doesn’t work.

This disconnect renders most of the show’s entire second cour tedious, but there are bright spots even here.

Episode 19, for example, treats the annoying but relatively mundane practice of Real Money Trading (RMT’ing, as the show frequently abbreviates it) with all the deadly seriousness of an episode of The Wire. Here, former TaN member Tawaraya reappears under a new account, using the name Tohta (Kenta Miyake), and busts up a ring of RMT’ers exploiting the playerbase for money. It’s a surprisingly interesting plot, with a fair amount of intrigue and actual mystery that is sorely lacking from much of the preceding material. It’s the one time the show’s self-seriousness actually works in its favor. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last, as the series returns to its ongoing main plot in the following episode and almost immediately loses that edge.

Finally, in the last few episodes, we learn that Phyllo has passed away, and has spent the last eight months of his life with a terminal cancer diagnosis, logging in to The World every day, just to chat up players. It’s a sincere, resonant ode to the quiet life, and the idea that some people find a deep joy in just communicating with others at all. It is maybe the single most affecting moment in the entire series….and then the entire rest of the last episode is just about Haseo again. Even when .hack//Roots has a good idea—and it has a fair few of them!—it can’t stay focused for long enough.

The problem with these sorts of anime is that they live and die by their central plot, which is usually driven by some kind of mystery. Here, at least in Roots‘ second half, the mystery is what precisely happened to Shino, why Tri-Edge attacked her in the first place, and where he is now. But there’s no compelling sense of discovery to it, everything just feels far too slow for something like this, and many of the plot points raised here do not actually get resolved by show’s end. (For actual conclusions you’d have to play G.U. itself, or perhaps watch one of its film adaptions.) So, the show drags and drags, all buildup and no payoff. Despite having only 26 episodes, it is mostly a series of intermittent highlights surrounded by doldrum. The bright spots make the experience more tolerable, but they don’t make it good. The disparate strengths never form a whole.

I don’t want to make it seem like I hate .hack//Roots. I certainly don’t. But I do find it frustrating, there are few things moreso than an anime with decent ideas that it just can’t figure out how to fit them together. Roots was actually fairly popular, once upon a time, but I think there’s a reason that the .hack series on the whole has largely faded from view. Its sprawling, inaccessible nature certainly has never helped, but if this is more indicative of the average tone and tempo of the franchise than Sign was, I can understand why people are not super interested anymore. Certainly, my personal journey with .hack ends here; I’m logging out.

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.

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.