Hi folks! If you only follow me here on MPA you’ve probably not seen much of me lately. Iv’e been doing quite a lot of writing, but most of it not on here. From now on, I’m going to be trying to do a roundup of everything I’ve done in the past week related to my anime writing. Mostly, these will be on Sunday, but this week’s is the day after. It’s just that way, sometimes!
Twitter
The Rolling Girls livewatch for #AniTwitWatches – Livewatch of 2017 Wit Studio series The Rolling Girls. This is actually my second time seeing the show and I highly recommend it.
Revolutionary Girl Utena livewatch – Livewatch of the classic shoujo series. Aiming to update at least once a week, probably more than that much of the time.
Review: Akiba’s Trip The Animation – I didn’t end up totally loving this show, and it has some serious issues, but I liked it overall and it has a really strong finish. Obviously, I go into more depth in the review itself, but it’s an interesting little series.
The Geek Girl Authority
THE GOD OF HIGH SCHOOL Recap (S01E04): marriage/bonds– Recap of the most recent GHS episode. I have to confess to struggling a little bit with GHS in general, it’s a very archetypal shonen and consequently I sometimes find it difficult to find things to say about it. However, this most recent episode is definitely interesting if nothing else, even if I’m not sure it’s really going to move the needle for those still undecided on the series.
DECA-DENCE Recap (S01E03): Steering – By contrast, I think basically anyone with an interest in TV anime should be checking out Deca-Dence. It’s a fascinating series even only three episodes in, and I have absolutely no idea where it’s going to go from here. I’m thrilled to be keeping up with it and I hope everyone else who checks it out loves it as much as I do.
Other Random Stray Thoughts:
It’s really good to have Healin’ Good Precure back. That said, I won’t be resuming my liveblog of it on here, it was kinda just too much work and not very many people read those posts.
I hope everyone’s having an alright summer. It’s rough out there with the pandemic and the heat, try to stay as safe and cool as you can!
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Sound the alarm, after a solid two years of bankrolling wet cement, Netflix has finally thrown their bullion behind something that people will actually want to watch again. But don’t take that to mean that The Great Pretender is a retread. Pretender is a live-wire technicolor battle-of-wits-slash-action-series that takes place in the streets of LA (and perhaps abroad? Who can say this early on). Not many anime open with a shot of their protagonist hanging by his feet from the Hollywood sign. There’s only one episode of Pretender available (fansubbed) in English right now, but it’s well worth a look.
Despite my high praise for it (note: that will continue) the appeal of The Great Pretender is dead simple. Do you like shows with loud, fluid visuals? Do you like shows about conmen and attractive people? How about shows with great soundtracks? Character writing and design so snappy you can pick up on a character’s whole “vibe” in ten seconds flat? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you should give this one a watch, no need to read further.
This is a Wit Studio production, they of Attack on Titan. But if you’re not a fan of that series you shouldn’t worry. The vibrant backgrounds and colorful character animation of Pretender actually remind me a bit more of The Rolling Girls. Truth be told though, coloring like this, which is so tactile that it looks like it might drip off the screen if it lingers on any one frame for too long, is exceedingly rare in general. This pure visual muscle extends even to the title card for the episode, which looks more like a cocktail jazz album cover than anything out of an anime.
And we’ve come this whole way without even really mentioning the plot. To greatly oversimplify, The Great Pretender feels like if Black Lagoon was made by a group of people who like vibrant colors and prefer their crimes on the marginally less violent side. (Admittedly what I mean there is mostly that as of episode one, no one’s straight-up died yet.)
If your reaction to that description is that this sounds fun, you’re absolutely right. It’s impossible to say this early on where this freewheeling conman / drug dealer narrative will go. Our protagonists: Japanese con artist Masato Edamura and French(?)-American “confidence man” Laurent Thierry. This show is a blast, I found myself grinning ear to ear from the moment the episode proper began with a silly scam to sell overpriced water filters, right through to the end, where Edamura is caught up in a drug sale gone awry. Along the way, wallets are snatched, knives are snuck into luggage at airports, gratuitous English is hot-swapped for Japanese mid-scene, and more.
Yes, this is a real screenshot.
Going further into specifics honestly feels superfluous. There’s a scene where Edamura and Thierry go suit shopping while preparing to rip off a Hollywood mogul / crime kingpin.
There’s Edamura’s weird fixation on gachapon toys.
There is the entire introductory character line of Abigail Jones, who is introduced as a beauty with a bad attitude, is used to demonstrate Thierry’s drugs, which she promptly fries her brain on (in a sequence that I’m sure someone had an absolute delight drawing), and then lays Edamura flat near the tail-end of the episode for trying to bail.
I could go on, but The Great Pretender is clearly a series whose greatest strengths are craft and passion. Every inch of it absolutely bleeds a good time. Will it get into more dour territory as it goes on? I don’t know, it’s possible. It might even be great at doing that, but trust me, for sheer spectacle alone, this one is worth it. If you have any interest in anime measured in “holy shit”s-per-minute as a metric, you need to watch Great Pretender‘s first episode. It’s nothing short of a marvel. (The only reason this isn’t a Twenty Perfect Minutes column is because I don’t do those for shows that are currently airing.) Will this hold up for a full season’s worth of episodes? Who knows, but for now, The Great Pretender is one to keep your eyes on, with gusto.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
I see the question asked, sometimes, you know? And I’ve thought about the answer at great length. I have, at this point, stumbled ass-backwards into a kind of, sort of, if you squint, successful-ish career as a person who Writes About Japanese Cartoons For A Living. (It’s only able to be such because of additional support from my beloved girlfriend and our mutual flatmate, but, a living-of-sorts it remains.) So I’ve thought a fair bit about the question of, you know, why this?
The cast of Azumanga Daioh are here to break up the visual monotony of these opening paragraphs.
The practical answer is that I like doing it and am good at it, but that’s unsatisfactory. Not the least of which because it applies too specifically to just me. No, I think a better approach is to zoom out a bit. Why do I like anime anyway? No no, farther. Why does anyone like any art? Well, now we’ve got a big question on our hands. People have written about this subject at length, of course, and my response is just one part of what we must imagine is in truth a larger answer that we as a species are still figuring out.
but all that said
I think the simplest answer is that we like things that resonate with us somehow. And that’s kind of a funny word, resonate. But I think it’s apt. People don’t look to art for any one specific feeling or theme or aesthetic, what they look to it for in the broadest sense possible is something that speaks to them in some way. Things they can relate to, or they see themselves in, or things that inspire them. In some fashion, even if it’s not that straightforward a lot of the time.
And I think in my case, I have a tendency to hunt for resonance in places where many people in my position would not think to look for it. Let’s put anime aside for a second. My first love, as an artform, was actually hip-hop music. That’s kind of silly on the surface. A deeply closeted white transgirl from a rapidly-collapsing old-money Pennsylvania Dutch family has no business finding anything to relate to in, say, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).
….and yet I did. Not to the specifics of a rough upbringing in New York, of course, but to the broadest, most general sentiments. To again use 36 Chambers specifically as an example, to the deep melancholy of the Wendy Rene sample on “Tearz”, to the “put it on if you need to feel invincible” vibes of “Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit'”, the basics-of-capitalism breakdown of “C.R.E.A.M.” I was also entranced with the actual text of the record–the style, if you will. The wordplay, the way the rhymes were actually constructed, the timbre of each member’s voice, Rza’s dusty, gritty production. I risk spending too much time on an example, but you get the idea. Even in a piece of art that had, essentially, nothing at all to do with my life experience, I found something that connected with me.
I don’t know if the specific experience of listening to 36 Chambers had anything to do with it directly, but as I got older I found myself seeking that kind of experience out more and more. Being interested in the broadest, most universal and elemental building blocks of the human experience. I would never deign to call myself someone with truly eclectic tastes–I’ve well fallen in to personal habits by now–but I think a big part of why I connected with anime specifically is that despite the cultural differences and a very obvious language barrier, I still find that I get that very simple joy of knowing other people out there experience the same feelings I do even if our experiences, upbringings, and so on are vastly different.
I couldn’t put a name to the feeling at the time, but Serial Experiments Lain, one of my first anime where I really “knew” it was an anime, felt like it was speaking to me–a young girl who, like Lain, was largely growing up on the internet instead of in the physical world, with all the up- and downsides that that entails.
I can draw from dozens more specific examples. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya spoke to the adventure-filled high school life I wished I was having while Azumanga Daioh reminded me of my interactions with the real friends I did have. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann was the first time I felt like I was on the same wavelength as older anime fans who loved pure, hot-blooded action. Code Geass and Death Note, well, had smart protagonists and made me feel smart for liking them. Listen, I never said all of these reasons I resonated with things were good reasons.
On the style side I was starting to feel myself out too: sci-fi, giant robots, “high school” settings where it feels like anything can happen, roguish protagonists who aren’t quite necessarily “good guys”, etc. Some of these tastes have changed over time and some have stayed the same, but I find the process of thinking about why I like these things to, itself, be incredibly interesting. I think many people enjoy, maybe even need, this kind of self-reflection even if they aren’t necessarily cognizant of it.
Over the years, I’ve enjoyed expanding my horizons and finding when I have similar feelings as other anime fans and when I don’t. Straight-ahead mainstream action-shonen? Still kind of frosty on that most of the time (although Tower of God is perhaps changing that). Dark magical girl-adjacent fantasy stuff? Madoka Magica has rapidly become one of my favorite anime of all time both because of its aesthetics and its surges of deep, black emotions, and it’s taken me all of about three months to become a hardcore Rebellion apologist, so, yeah, I think there’s some real merit in that (now rapidly waning) subgenre.
Homura is the coolest character ever and none of you will ever take that from me.
But those are still all just examples. The point I am attempting to make is that I love seeing art, and, specifically, anime, push those emotional buttons. I’m not yet an experienced enough critic to say I have a concrete philosophy on what makes art “good or bad” (to be frank I sort of consider the question uninteresting), but I think what makes art important is what it reflects of us. Of who made it, of who engages with it, all of us.
Perhaps that’s a cheesy answer. Perhaps in ten years I will look back on this post and find myself wondering how I ever thought it was that simple. What I do not think will change is that when I make myself strip away the extraneous things people associate with critics: The idea of being a voice of authority, of having some kind of “sway” over public opinion, of having “the most” knowledge about your chosen medium, all things I think most critics on some level at least aspire to a little bit (it’s the inherent mild pretense required to even become a critic in the first place).
I find myself thinking that what I write for is ultimately for the joy of watching. Through all the possible barriers, any time I can imagine the sheer strength of feeling from every director, animator, storyboarder, voice actor, script-writer, et cetera, reaching certainly not just me, but any viewer, I remember that that, right there, is what I am writing for. That connection.
How oh how did we get here? If you had asked me a year ago, I’d have told you that Lucky Star seemed like one of those shows whose cultural footprint was not destined to outlive the 2010s. That’s not a knock, plenty of great shows aren’t widely remembered a year after they come out, much less thirteen in the case of the seminal school life comedy. It wouldn’t have been that weird either, a lot of Lucky Star‘s humor is reference-heavy and was deliberately “dated” even when it was new. I can tell you with certainty that the series is the only reason I or any other otaku of my general age knows what the hell Timotei shampoo is.
So it seemed like plenty of great shows from the late 2000s and early 2010s, that Lucky Star would be a victim of the changing tides of the English-speaking anime fandom.
Then, at the start of this deeply unlucky year, something weird happened.
This video, an absolutely inexplicable but oddly inspired remix of the show’s frantic opening sequence, started making the rounds on tumblr. The clip makes a few edits to the OP–the footage is slightly slowed down and a transition is doctored out, but other than that, it’s downright bizarre how well the song chosen–“Out of Touch” by Hall & Oates–fits. Especially given that it has almost the polar opposite energy of the show’s actual opening theme, a goofy ode to school uniforms called “Motekke! Sailor Fuku!”
I am not a music critic (thank God), but the particular song choice strikes me as interesting. “Out of Touch” dates from 1984, 23 years prior to the Lucky Star anime’s premiere. Yet, in what is part of a fascinating ongoing deliberate cultural back-collapse, nowadays 1984 and 2007 feel like they might as well be equally long ago in the present moment. This is the same spirit of deliberate anachronism that inspired the vaporwave movement at the start of the decade.
But you may notice that the video itself was actually made a full two years ago, in 2018. So why has it blown up and become a full-fledged meme now? Well, the answer is likely multifaceted. Youtube’s algorithms increasingly like to put oddball things in peoples’ recommendations, for one thing, but I think the real heart of the matter might speak to a particular zeitgeist. For one, that the term “Out of Touch Thursdays” can be taken (by total coincidence) as an entendre about social distancing has been lost on precisely no one. (Do give @sampapaste here a follow.)
In a more general sense, in an era of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, “timekeeping memes” have become a popular daily pastime. Both as a way to wring some humor out of the current situation and literally as a way to help keep the days of the week straight in a time when it can be kind of hard to do that. “Out of Touch Thursday” is probably the most popular of these, but there are many others.
Indeed, the meme’s popularity is such that it’s begun to take on something of a life of it’s own. There’s a dedicated twitter account, which has created something of a community unto itself around the meme.
And a personal favorite, this frankly inexplicable edit that features the core Generation 1 Decepticons from Transformers and is a full-on redraw. (Perhaps an attempt to get a cartoon that’s actually from the 80s involved? Who can say.)
I think what all this speaks to is that “Out of Touch Thursday” happens to hit a rare sweet spot. It’s an instant nostalgia (or fauxstalgia) hit, and it is completely innocuous–anyone who’s not a complete stick in the mud can enjoy the video at least occasionally. I mentioned vaporwave earlier, but the sort of forceful reclamation of “disposable” pop culture like synthpop and late aughts anime does really remind me of the subgenre. A declaration that the past belongs to us as much as the present that goes beyond just simple nostalgia. As we watch a lost spring tick on by, four anime girls doing a dance routine might be contributing more than we think to keeping us–funnily enough–in touch with each other, and ourselves.
Let it be said that if nothing else, Gleipnir is far better than it has any right to be. To strip away all the extraneous guff (and my own biases at least for the moment) what Gleipnir essentially is, at least right now, is a battle shonen with a much darker outlook than most. I would also argue that because of said darker outlook it thinks it’s about a hundred times more clever and insightful than it actually is in a way that is sort of insufferable, but a lot of people like this kind of thing so it’s not a huge surprise that Gleipnir is proving to be one of the season’s bigger shows.
Now, to be frank, I think the show is flat-out ugly both in its thematic core and occasionally visually. PINE JAM largely do their damnedest to bring this material to life, and, god help them, make Shuichi’s ridiculous fursuit look seem intimidating, but it only intermittently works and occasionally the production values slip, depriving the show of its biggest asset. When the visuals don’t connect what you have is a fundamentally wrongheaded show that is constantly working against itself in an effort to wring some kind of pathos out of its setting and characters in a way that frankly gives me secondhand embarrassment. Yet, that said, the most frustrating thing about Gleipnir is actually that it’s occasionally kind of stupidly cool.
Much of episode 5 centers around Shunichi and Clair fighting a huge skeleton dude with blade arms who kinda looks like Summoned Skull from Yu-Gi-Oh! I love everything about this character design. He looks like he just walked off a DeviantArt page. And holy hooray, he actually survives to the end of the episode, so we’ll probably get to see him in action a bit more. (The show is swiftly approaching the point where I dropped the manga, so who knows, maybe it becomes Actually Good at some point going forward. Honestly my recollection of Skeleton Boy here is pretty fuzzy, which makes me wonder if he doesn’t die in short order or something. I guess we’ll find out).
On another note entirely: I wish the show had the good sense to let Shuichi and Clair’s relationship breathe a little more. You can do a lot with the idea of two fundamentally broken people finding solace in each other, but the series’ approach to writing this is so clumsy that it actively gets in the way of the surprising amount of genuine chemistry they have. But, of course, if it had good sense it just wouldn’t be Gleipnir. Lastly, because I feel compelled to mention it somewhere. What is it with this show and a commitment to just being stepped-on-a-slug gross about once per episode? A few episodes ago we got some bafflingly grody empty visual metaphors. Last episode we were treated to the sight of the alien slurping down one of Clair’s hairs like a spaghetti noodle. This week we get This Fucking Thing.
Sigh, why did I pick this up instead of My Next Life As A Villainess again?
Sing “Yesterday” For Me
I have never been so purely flummoxed by enjoying an anime as I am with this one. You don’t really watch Yesterday it more just kind of….happens to you. It’s an odd show. Despite its very grounded premise (Serial Experiments Lain this is not), its portraits of lives gone sideways feels weird and surreal; like a Mountain Goats song or a Youtube video on a little-visited channel.
The most recent episode introduces a photographer character with a tendency to perhaps unwelcomely subject others to his strong opinions on the artform and a fondness for circular metaphors. Yet, I find Yesterday‘s literal plot to be kind of hazy and hard to recount, it’s almost the least interesting thing about the show. (It helps that the gist of it is simply a complicated love triangle.) Instead, I was struck by, how, when taking screencaps for this very column, I ended up (by pure happenstance) grabbing a picture of Haru in the exact same manner that said character photographed her at episode’s end, just facing the opposite direction. It is not often that an anime gets one’s head all a-tizzy about their role as a critic, but here I am.
Wave, Listen To Me!
Now this is a show with a few screws loose. Some four or five weeks ago I called it the most promising premiere of the entire season. That of course does not mean that it would actually live up to that promise. So far, of Wave‘s five episodes I’d say only the most recent (the fifth, at the time of this writing) really lives up to that first episode, which is a little disappointing but maybe a good sign that the show is finally starting to get somewhere.
The issue with Wave is that when it’s focusing on what it does best: being a vehicle for voice actress Riho Sugiyama‘s portrait of Minare, its protagonist, it’s great. This is a woman whose life is in shambles and maybe always has been, saved (well, “saved”. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves) from both existential despair and the setting-in realities of poverty by the magic of early-AM radio. Minare’s a very three-dimensional character, which is great, but does leave much of the rest of the cast feeling a mite flat by comparison and branches of the story that revolve around characters that aren’t Minare tend to feel kind of underdeveloped. In particular, the gaggle of men that exist as supporting characters (some of whom the show is trying to build as potential romance partners for Minare) are slight, and the chemistry between any of these pairings is pretty minimal.
By contrast, Mizuho, the other woman in the show with a large role, really seems to be hitting it off with our heroine. Especially given that the two are now rooming together. It’s probably too early to hope for a gay conclusion to this particular part of the story, but Minare’s cracks about the chef who owns the curry restaurant she works on and off at being gay do kind of come across as jokes from within the closet. Time will tell.
But the romance outlook being kind of dicey would be less of a problem if the show spent more time elsewhere. When Minare finally gets another chance to cut loose in episode 5 like she did in the premiere it instantly ratchets the show back up to a real contender. Sugiyama’s performance, giving Minare a convincing, blown-out, rambly bluster is something you just don’t see that often in anime, especially for women. This is without mentioning the bizarre radio drama she manages to adlib about half of on her own, involving a woman who murders her boyfriend and then gets abducted by aliens.
More of this, please.
Even here though the show tries to tie things back to relationships. The character of Matou, Minare’s greasy boss at the radio station, essentially openly fetishizes her voice, which makes Sugiyama’s performance a bit harder to appreciate, adding a totally unnecessary sleaze to the proceedings. The entire thing comes across as a bizarre attempt to make the audience complicit in a creeping “man vs. woman” streak within the show’s writing. One that it’s not difficult to interpret as simple misogyny if you’re feeling uncharitable. Of course, we do need to be open to the possibility that this is all being set up to be knocked down later, and indeed at the end of episode 5 Minare explicitly rejects romance at least for the time being.
On yet another hand, this episode introduces an actual murder subplot which, who knows if we’re ever going to actually follow up on that. This show is certainly going somewhere, but it’s still an open question as to where, exactly, that is.
The first few weeks of an anime season are always the most exciting to me. You get to see how the short little clips and promo art pieces of preview materials translate into actual, full-length episodes. So to share that joy, I’ve decided I’m going to pen short little thoughtpieces (or maybe not-so-short in some cases, who knows) on each show I’m checking out this season. I’ll be doing these at basically arbitrary points, whenever I have enough shows under my belt to make a post of decent length.
BRAND NEW ANIMAL
This is the one, if you’re curious. Technically, I’ve been following BNA for two weeks now. The first six episodes were unceremoniously dump-trucked onto Netflix some time back and Little Witch Academia standbys Asenshi.moe have been subbing them at a roughly weekly pace, so I’ve only seen two of those episodes thusfar, but what I’ve seen puts it at the top as far as promising shows for this season.
I’ve loved TRIGGER basically since the original LWA movie dropped so this will probably surprise nobody, but among their big ticket directors I’ve always felt that Yoh Yoshinari was among the most underrated. His style’s in full force here, but the story being told has much higher stakes than the relatively school life genre-indebted LWA. Michiru (our protagonist) has already questionably-legally immigrated to a city full of beastmen, had her wallet stolen on her first day there, and been inadvertently involved in busting up organized crime. God knows what else is in store for the poor tanuki.
The show’s gearing up to tackle some pretty big ideas, and it’s entirely possible that it’ll fumble the ball there, but the visual chops can’t be denied, and given some surprisingly subtle character design decisions (making our Big Badass Cop archetype a social worker instead, for instance) it might have a more nuanced approach than some might assume. This is some great stuff, folks. Keep your eye on Asenshi’s uploads.
First impression rating: 9/10
TAMAYOMI: The Baseball Girls
On a totally different note, we have this. Tamayomi is, at least so far, a nearly perfectly archetypal slice of school life-meets-sports anime. It’s almost comically orthodox for this particular genre intersection, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s bad, necessarily. In what I assume is a strength inherited from the manga it’s adapted from, the show has a warm inner glow that goes beyond mere cuteness (although there’s that, too). Add a little dollop of some pretty on-the-nose lesbian subtext–a pair of twins are fawning over protagonist Yomi’s pitcher hand before the ten minute mark–and you’ve got a perfectly good little anime.
I will say, the visual work is shaky at the best of times, and in some cuts the characters are downright badly-drawn, with inking errors like mismatched eyeshadow thickness and such, which does undercut some portion of its charm. My hope is that this is the result of either the current global unpleasantness, the fact that the first episode had to be done a month ahead of schedule for a preview screening, or both. Otherwise, while it’s certainly the least essential of the four shows here, it’s perfectly good and worth watching if you like this kind of thing.
First Impression Rating: 6/10
Kakushigoto
From the mind of Zetsubou-sensei creator Kouji Kumeta comes an oddball comedy about a dad who draws a dirty comedy manga and his quest to keep his beloved young daughter from ever learning that fact. This one took me slightly by surprise, as I wasn’t originally aware of Kumeta’s involvement and was expecting more of a heartstring-tugging father/daughter bonding type of story. What it actually is is great too, though, and as someone who mostly passed over Zetsubou-sensei in its popular heyday I was a bit surprised to find myself grokking the sense of humor here as quickly as I did. They don’t quite operate on the exact same wavelength, but this is one fans of stuff like Nichijou and Daily Lives of High School Boys should keep an eye on. Even if it’s not quite that frantic. This is definitely the best comedy of the season so far, with a gag late in the episode about how Starbucks orders sound like magic spells being my favorite.
If I do have a complaint it’s about the odd coding of Mario, the extremely campy owner of a fashion boutique the main character works near, but he’s not onscreen enough for it to be a major strike against the series yet.
First Impression Rating: 8/10
Tower of God
Roughly once a season, some huge shonen series drops that seemingly everyone and his grandmother watches. I’m only rarely interested in these shows (by and large, despite being a known fan of gaudy fight scenes and overdesigned characters, it isn’t my genre) and have a bad habit of thinking “oh this is the one” about once a year and then dropping it four episodes in. It’s too early to say if Tower of God will be the thing that breaks that trend, but it just might be. This one’s got an interesting IP history, too, being an adaptation of a South Korean web-manhua that’s been running since the beginning of the last decade. The original comic was among the first such properties to ever get an official English translation, and Crunchyroll of all folks are partly bankrolling the anime.
As for the show itself? Dirt-simple story (“girl leaves boy, boy goes on epic adventure to find girl”) meets lavish fantasy worldbuilding. There’s not a lot out there that’s like this, in spite of its simple building blocks, and it tickled a part of my brain that I don’t think has been buzzed since I watched MÄR on Toonami as a kid. Despite the stock protagonist archetype that male lead 25th Bam (yes, that is his name) falls into, the first episode was quite engaging, involving our hero having to figure out how to crack open a black orb in a giant water tank while being hounded by a sea monster. Also introduced here is Ha Yuri Jahad (seen up there in the header picture) who I took an immediate liking to. There’s just something charming about seeing the “rebellious princess” archetype played perfectly straight in 2020 and with a character with such a great design, too. I was also interested by the mysterious, rabbit-like Headon, who seems to be the titular Tower’s caretaker.
I don’t need to tell anyone to watch ToG–you’ll know pretty much right away if it’s your bag or not–but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. If every episode is this interesting this might be the first shonen series in some time that I actually finish.
First Impression Rating: 7/10
So that’s it for Round 1 of the Spring Anime Season impressions. Everything I’ve seen so far this season is at least solid, and I think all four of these shows have the potential to get even better. This is the most excited I’ve been going into a fresh season in some time, and we haven’t even gotten to some of the real heavy hitters yet (in particular, a certain beloved romcom from last year returns next Friday), so I’m thrilled. What about you? How’s your season looking so far?
22/7 started this anime season promisingly. It presented us with a pretty simple premise. An idol series turned sideways–the members of the idol troupe brought together not by happenstance, but by the government, working on the orders of a mysterious artefact called The Wall.
A literal plot device in many ways, The Wall was the main draw of the show for a certain segment of people (myself included) who were curious to see how the thing factored into what seemed like it was willingly aiming for being a weird and subversive series. Instead, 7 episodes into its 12-episode run, 22/7 seems hellbent on ignoring its own central premise in favor of what it’s becoming apparent are some major writing problems. Barring some kind of huge twist, I feel confident in calling them such.
Some of this seems like it was inevitable. For whatever it may be trying to do artistically, 22/7 has the problem of needing to promote the actual 22/7. The Yasushi Akimoto-backed idol group after whom the project is named. This isn’t the first time he’s dipped his hand into this kind of multimedia hydra. Those who’ve seen bizarre “well, Symphogear did well” idol anime-in-space AKB0048 should be familiar with some of this. But AKB had the benefit of trying to be fun, not subversive. With 22/7‘s more ambitious focus, its problems are more apparent.
The most recent episode (the 7th) focuses on Jun. As is now the show’s formula, the episode takes Jun–a character we’ve hitherto learned little about–and cuts between expositing her backstory and her doing some Wall-mandated task. The idea, in theory, seems to be that this interpolation draws parallels between where the idol started out and what they’re doing as part of the group. This episode, in fact, in a vacuum, is actually very good at that. I think this makes it all the more interesting to examine this episode as opposed to a more obviously-mediocre one (last week’s episode was downright lame and featured an apparent message that was somewhere between noncommittal and cowardly) because it shows how all the great directing in the world can’t entirely salvage poorly-thought-out writing.
Jun has to fill in for her groupmates–all of them–due to them coming down with food poisoning. What this means is that a day crammed full of various idol minutiae is now the sole responsibility of a single person. The show’s writers decide to play this comedically. While we could sit here and ruminate on the idea of playing an idol overworking herself to the point of exhaustion as a joke and how that might not be a particularly great idea for various reasons, we’ll let that one slide. It’s honestly the least of this episode’s issues.
One of this episode’s good points is the abundance of Very Good Jun Faces.
Jun, we learn, had what is either very severe asthma or something similar to it as a child. She was often hospitalized and could rarely attend school. A major underpinning of this series’ structure is that to a one, every girl whose past has been explored so far has a tragic one. In a pretty specific way, too, but we’ll get to that.
During one particular hospital stay, she meets Yuu. Yuu is everything that Jun, disillusioned with the world and deeply depressed by her isolation from her illness, is not. Eternally happy and optimistic, the two apparent opposites soon become friends as Jun is taken by Yuu’s philosophy that life is like an amusement park and that one should live every day to the fullest.
Do keep in mind that this is not told in a single contiguous chunk. We cut back and forth between this narrative and the comedic scenes of Jun running hither and tither filling in for her groupmates several times. Including some scenes of her pulling off spot-on impressions of the rest of the group. These are actually pretty damn clever, and to the episode’s credit, they do a great job of building Jun’s character. As said, our girls really seem to only get one episode apiece to really take the center stage, so economy of character is important.
Back in the past, Jun and Yuu become close friends. The subtextual framing is vague, but things like sneaking to karaoke and singing a love song together, listening to music together via the ol’ “you get one earbud and I get the other” trick, and exchanging paper hearts, seem to at least broadly imply that that relationship may have even moved beyond that, or at least was starting to. Especially given that much of this is shown in an honestly beautiful montage set to a wonderfully twee slice of idol pop balladry called “Fortune Cookie of Love”.
This all seems well and good, right? She clearly made, at the most conservative interpretation, a very close friend, and she’s doing alright nowadays, what with being in an idol group and all.
Well, no points for guessing how this all ends.
Yuu eventually gets sicker. She does not make it. Jun miraculously gets better. A life for a life, is the framing.
The depressing part is that through this plot twist, the directing remains great. The animation, too, is probably the highest-quality seen in the series so far. Character acting well beyond the series’ standard is present here, and it’s clear that whoever wrote this envisioned it as a huge emotional climax, where we learn “the real reason” why Jun is the way she is. How it’s so beautifully tragic, etc. etc. etc. etc. It’s all nonsense, of course. There is nothing beautiful about two young girls having their bond with each other severed by sudden death, no matter how the survivor copes.
Yuu’s death happens first, and Jun is depressed for a while. As she has every right to be.
Then she gets the news that her asthma–or whatever it is, because being specific with your life-impairing anime illnesses risks making your characters too relatable I suppose–is in recession. She tries to find a sort of solace in this development, but while the show tries to frame this as valid reasoning, were Jun a real person it would be clear to me that she is lying to herself as a coping mechanism.
This is kind of fucked up. Not that I blame the character (that’d be nonsensical) but seriously, who writes this and thinks it’s deep?
In a vacuum, this entire plot line is at most, mildly unpleasant. Tragedy can happen to anyone and there is value in examining that tragedy, and I’m on record as being a fan of melodrama if it’s employed to productive ends. However, 22/7‘s bad habit is the repetition and specificity of its victims of tragedy and what form that tragedy takes, and what that reveals about the people who made it.
To lay it on the table; of the four 22/7 members whose backstories we’ve been told so far, 3 have another woman that was important to them who has since died. In Sakura’s case it was her grandmother. In Reika’s, it was her mother, who died shortly after she was born. Of course, we’ve already relayed Jun’s story. And even Miu, the series’ ostensible protagonist, became an idol in part to support her own sickly mother. I would be wholly unsurprised if said mother passes away sometime during the series.
To say that all of this taken together is “problematic” seems like flattening the issue. This is a very specific kind of ugly writing, one that tries to conflate “women’s stories” with “women suffering”. It’s insidious and unpleasant.
Yet, in the interest of fairness, I don’t think this episode is devoid of merit. Or indeed, bad at all. Its directorial element makes it go down a lot easier than it otherwise would, and the episode director deserves credit there.
To be even fairer, it is possible this is all building up to a grand reveal. There are, in fact, enough vague outlines of what you could call hints to imply, if you squint, that somehow this is all The Wall’s doing. That would be a twist for the ages, and would go some way to redeeming this whole saga, depending on how it was handled.
Yet, somehow, this feels like wishful thinking. Even this episode’s ED animation ,which shows Yuu and Jun happy together in some pastel dreamscape, feels like a cruel joke. It’s probably not meant as one, but one gets the impression that in a general sense, no one writing for 22/7 quite knows what they’re doing.
If I am wrong, and this all turns out to be a gigantic fakeout, I will be more than happy to eat my words. I suppose the weeks to come, alone, will tell.
Finally, some actual original anime writing for my anime blog, eh? It’s nice to get into the swing of things of getting my ideas sorted without worrying too much about the formal aspect. So let’s cut to the chase.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been intermittently taking in turn-of-the-decade classic The Idolmaster in 2-4 episode chunks. I’m still only halfway through the series (I have episode 12, “Last Stop On A One-Way Road”, on pause as I write this, and will be finishing it before I write much of this post) but now felt like as good a time as any to jot down some thoughts on it.
For one thing, despite premiering only a year after Angel Beats! (a show that is on my mind solely because I recently watched it for the first time too), I’m struck by how sharply different they look. When I reviewed it in the waning days of last year, I was interested in how un-2010s AB! looked, and I remain convinced that, stylistically, it’s something of a capstone to the Haruhi Era. IM@S, by contrast, looks so 2010s that it seems like it could’ve come from almost any year of the decade. The main telltale sign that it’s an earlier, rather than later, period idol series is that the dance sequences are still hand-drawn, as opposed to defaulting to the CGI-aided approach that’d later become the norm. It does also occasionally suffer from spotty drawing quality, but, not everything can be perfect.
Idolmaster kind of gets sold by its diehards as “the one idol anime you have to see”, even if you don’t really like the genre (and speaking personally it’s kind of in the lower half for me, as far as anime genres that tend to have all- or mostly-female casts). I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I started it. I was confident it would at least be well-made, but that doesn’t of course guarantee that it’d vibe with me specifically. Especially since I’m not huge on the genre in general (though with Zombie Land Saga a few years ago and 22/7 this season I suppose that’s changing).
What genuinely surprised me, first and foremost, was how committed the show is to selling itself as an underdog story. 765 are not perfect queens who can do no wrong. There is no Beyonce and this is not Destiny’s Child. Both in the actual plot, and, to my surprise, the character writing especially, the series takes great pains to demonstrate that these are people. People who have their own hopes, dreams, and fears. And that “getting to the top”, glamorous as the idea might be, is both hard and sometimes kind of banal. One of the first episodes of this thing has our girls guest on a kind-of-demeaning local TV spot that is a cooking-themed gameshow hosted by a frog puppet. It’s not exactly glitzy.
I haven’t counted, but I’m reasonably certain that at least at the point of the show that I’m at, there are more scenes of our characters at practices and rehearsals than there are of them actually performing.
None of this is new ground for idol shows now, of course. I’m not sure how innovative the idea was in 2011, either. But it’s really the character writing aspect that makes all of this connect so well. Even the characters that at first seem like goofy one-note moe` archetypes eventually come into their own. Miki is the big example that comes to mind here. She’s introduced to us with no particular fanfare and for a while basically all we know about her is that she likes taking naps. If you’re the deep-reading type you might (correctly) intuit that she’s rather fickle, but not anything beyond that.
Episode 12 is mostly about Miki, after a misunderstanding where she mistakenly thought she’d be able to join sub-unit Ryuuguu Komachi, she skips out on practice for an upcoming concert and goes MIA. We learn more about Miki here than we have in the prior 11 episodes, and it’s a really strong example of how to do a lot of character-building in a very short time. We see what she does when she’s upset, things like spending time wandering around the city and ducking into and out of all sorts of shops.
Let she who has not stared longingly into a fish tank, wishing for the simple life of a betta, cast the first stone.
We see her reveling in attention she gets from what appears to be a group of model scouts, who she then briefly sings for.
Without explicitly spelling anything out, these sequences (which last maybe 15 minutes in total), convey that she’s a sort of “free spirit longing for an anchor” type. The show does cheat exactly once by explicitly giving us the cause of all this (parents who encourage her to do whatever she wants), but it’s still an impressively detailed character study to squeeze into a single half-hour episode. All the while, her fellow idols have to, in another case of the show being unexpectedly down to earth, seriously contemplate what might happen if she simply doesn’t return.
The Producer (who is himself surprisingly well-written given his role in the cast) does manage to convince her to come back, and the episode ends with a neat little bow of dialogue here:
Miki realizing what she really wants and acting on it is great, but it’d be meaningless without the buildup earlier in the episode. It’s quite a lot of heavy lifting done in just a short amount of time.
And all this is just for Miki, mind you. The show has slowly been building up similar stories with almost every other member of the cast.
I’ve found myself drawn to several different characters, honestly. Which is a great sign for something with this many. Some I expected to like–Takane’s weird sideways charisma and Chihaya’s stoicism, incredible singing voice (not to knock any of our other girls, but both in fiction and out, you do not really have to have an amazing voice to be a pop singer, you just have to know your instrument) and obvious, though so far largely unexplored, troubled past make them easy favorites. I also love Makoto despite her “cool girl who desperately wants to be seen as cute” card being a bit rote. Others, I was quite surprised by. I’ve really come to appreciate Haruka, who the OP seems to frame as the “main character” even if that’s kind of a silly concept with a cast this large. She has what is probably the simplest personality–she’s hardworking, kindhearted, and has always wanted to be an idol–but it’s just sold so well! Any time she’s upset or struggling I find it impossible not to root for her, I hope the show explores her character a bit more in its latter half.
There’s some other random details I really like too. On the obvious end, the fact that there’s so much music in each episode is just great. It’s not all entirely my thing (I like J-pop well enough but some of the songs in this series specifically lean a little too over on the twee side) but it does really make it feel at times like you’re watching some kind of narrative documentary about the group. On the more minor side, there’s lots of stuff big and small that goes in to making 765 feel like a bit of a ragtag operation, especially near the start of the show. Everything from long blocks of no gigs to the idols’ ages ranging pretty widely (the youngest two are 13, the oldest, 21). It’s not quite the indie idol anime I would love to watch some day–I find that particular subculture endlessly fascinating–but it feels earnest.
So yeah, that’s where I’m at with Idolmaster right now. I’m liking the show so far, I’m not sure if I’ll write about it again before I do my proper review, but either way, I hope you enjoyed this little ramble.
So, one kind of content I’m going to be trucking in here is stuff that I never actually finished for other places. There isn’t a ton of this, but it’s out there, and this pretty-much-finished review of shitty 2011 ecchi anime Maken-Ki is certainly one example of it!
The reason I never put this up on Anilist (where most of my full-length reviews go) is that I didn’t feel good reviewing something I had technically not finished. I dropped the series about halfway through the second season because, while the first one was bad in a kind-of-entertaining way, the second was just basically unwatchable. I was especially annoyed by it because it is possible to do this kind of show decently well (I’ve recently seen Senran Kagura Ninja Flash which I’d argue is much better than this by virtue of having a cast that are actually likable. Related point, I actually reviewed that one). This just ain’t that.
So here’s that original review, un-cut and un-censored! (Why would it be censored? I make no sense sometimes) For your reading uh….pleasure? Major NSFW warning here, by the way.
Maken-ki is no one’s idea of an artistic tour-de-force. One of the few solo productions from studio-within-a-studio Spirits of AiC before being handed off to Xebec a few years later, the harem/ecchi/action/comedy/drama/whatever dropped in 2011 (the followup, 2014) to the excitement of people who watch anime for gratuitous butt shots and not many other folks. Time has not exactly raised its profile, and while it was popular enough in its day to get that second season, and the manga it’s based on is, impressively, still running, Maken-Ki in general is the kind of thing that the layman is unlikely to have heard much about. They are even less likely to have strong opinions on it.
So why review it? Well, to paraphrase another critic, any art made honestly is worth engaging with on some level. To that end, I did go into Maken-Ki intending to give it a fair shake, and the question we have to start out asking is, for what it’s trying to do, does Maken-Ki succeed?
The good news first; the show does at least understand that it’s not going to make a grand statement about anything. Most of the series is content with being pretty low-stakes and you could, being charitable, call it unpretentious–this is not Darling in the FranXX.
But….well, it’s a harem series. Takeru, our protagonist, has some degree of character, which puts him a cut above the worst offenders in the “boring audience stand-in” category, but it’s not much of a character. Mostly, he swings wildly between trying (and usually failing) to play knight in shining armor for every woman he sees, and being brainlessly perverted. If those seem at odds with each other, they’re twice as jarring in the show itself as they may sound on paper. The less said about Usui, the only other male character of note, the better.
The girls by contrast are a bit better off. While they’re still definitely mostly pretty cliche character archetypes, they’re more colorful and likable ones. While there is a definite overtone of “pick your favorite and pre-order the figure, Otaku-san” to the proceedings, there is still a good amount of variety here. The female lead, Haruko, is the doting sisterly childhood friend type. There’s the enthusiastically lovestruck Inaho, a twintailed tsundere (Himegami), a redheaded tomboy (Azuki), and on and on. The sheer size of the cast means you’re going to find someone you at least like seeing on-screen. Personally, I enjoyed Inaho’s particular combination of “extremely sincere” and “dumb enough to be fooled into thinking a stuffed doll is the object of her affections”.
Their character designs are distinctive and colorful too, if definitely indicative of their origins in a manga from 2007.
Tonally, Maken-Ki is definitely at its best when it’s operating in dolty comedy mode. The laughs here are hardly fresh jokes, but they’re mostly the sort of low-stakes fun a show like this can specialize in without ever feeling too stale. The main misfires here are when the series fails to respect the conventions of its own genre–there’s a little Slapstick Karma going on here; a character can act like an ass to another if they’re immediately punished, but sometimes the show will just have the victim break down crying instead, which is no fun for either the character or the audience.
You may imagine this is me, speaking to the series.
There’s also the show making the mistake of thinking that pointing out its own use of cliches constitutes doing something interesting with them, which simply isn’t true, partially neutering even this relatively modest strength.
Its greatest asset though is probably actually its action scenes. As a rule; they’re fun, flashy, well-animated, and competently-directed. It’s a shame then that they don’t constitute much of the series.
When Maken-Ki is not at its best, it sometimes has the arrogance to assume it can pull off any sort of seriousness, which it absolutely can’t. Attempts at the sort of dramatic gravitas that defines other action shows come across as comical because of their close proximity to the gags. Attempts at relationship drama; be it bittersweet longing or direct heart-to-heart-ness are downright offputting. Maken-Ki just does not have those sorts of chops. Likewise, when it tries to establish some broader lore and history for its setting, it’s hard to care and very easy to just tune out. These elements aren’t things that inherently can’t work together, it’s just that Maken-Ki is not well-written enough to let them.
Some episodes, especially in the second season, abandon all of this pretense entirely, basically reducing the show to softcore porn with a comedic or action-y backdrop tone. This development makes the show feel more honest, certainly, but it’s not really any better for it. Some episodes later in the show’s run truly seem like little more than an effort to see how many harem cliches you can cram in a single 12-episode cour.
At what point is something “beyond parody”?
The show, depressingly, seems to actually understand that something is off about all this, but not what. Several minor villains are grody, gropey otaku stereotypes who use their powers to inflict perverted situations on the female cast. It’s not clear if Maken-Ki thinks this framing is somehow clever or if it excuses what it’s doing fanservice-wise, but it’s largely just dull and gross all around.
Yeah, why?
These all belie a bigger problem, which is that Maken-Ki does not seem to have a good grasp on who, other than maybe its original author, any of this is actually for. Its limited strengths actively work against each other. If you’re here for lighthearted fun, the plot gets in the way. If you actually care about the stabs at deeper storytelling going on, the Plot gets in the way. If you’re just here for the cheesecake, everything else gets in the way. The series has one of the archetypal problems of a mediocre anime–it tries to have something for everyone, and, consequently, pleases nobody.
At the end of the day there really just isn’t much to this series. If all you need to get you through twelve hours is female nudity and the occasional bit of nice animation, you’ll be fully satisfied. Otherwise? There wasn’t a ton of reason to watch Maken-Ki when it was new, and there certainly isn’t much of one nowadays.
The Magic Planet 