Often times you’ll see fans trying to recreate a certain scene from an anime, but it’s humorous to think that the art designers are trying to recreate a certain scene from the real world!
Curious what I mean? Read more to find out!

Recently, ANN posted up an article about Hyogo Kenritsu Nishinomiya Kita High School (The school that was the inspiration for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya’s high school) posting up a notice that trespassing will soon lead to police involvement. This article also linked to another article that posted many comparison shots of the school. Below you’ll find some of these. The article can be found here, for full size photos. The fact that many fans are dedicated to a series enough to not only search out, but take photos of the area as well should speak volumes about a story. Personally, as a fan of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, seeing these photos makes me imagine the entire story playing out in real life, something that only Haruhi herself could make happen! A group of fans has a constantly updated google map that gives locations shown in anime/inspiring scenes in an anime, if you are interested, this can be found here.

What was in the package? Read more to find out!

I recently got a package from our new friends at Bandai Entertainment, and imagine my surprise when not only do I get the Haruhi Gekisou record I was expecting, but also get 2 Gundam Wing stickers, a Haruhi armband, and a Lucky Star shirt (A size too small, but gives me a reason to lose weight!) Overall a great package, and I hope that I can get more from Bandai soon. I’ll have a review of the record up as soon as I can get my hands on a record player!

First up, the salty. The Pringles (Rich Salt variety) taste much like their American counterpart, but with a slightly different taste. I’m not sure if the salt is distributed in a different method than here in the US, but they feel more smooth, less rigid, and overall tastier.

Now for something a little more sweet, Kompeito (As seen in Spirited Away) are small, starburst (not to be confused with the American candy, starburst in this sense means the exploding-out variety). Trying to describe my interest with these particular candy would be somewhat difficult.  Besides from being in Spirited Away, Kompeito also greatly resemble Super Mario Galaxy’s starbits, which the hungry Luma eat. The taste is very similar to rock candy, the candy slowly melting in your mouth over time. The small handful of colors make up a great and colorful treat that I love the taste of, and will likely order more of in the future.

Sakuma Drops are a classic candy enjoyed since before World War II, which were later made famous in Grave of the Fireflies (which happens to have been one of my first Anime Movies) These small hard candies (Which I got the Strawberry and Cherry Boy flavors) both are full of flavor, and last quite  a while, tasting amazing while they do so. So far a single piece of each has lasted me about 20 minutes at the time this is written, and the taste continues to stay just as strong. I highly recommend these small but tasty snacks. If for some reason however, I was asked which I liked more, I’d have to go with the Cherry Boy flavor. While I’m a huge fan of anything strawberry, the Cherry Boy tastes amazing.

Sigh. Here we go again.
A hilarious new comedy is being trashed by people who don’t seem to get the humor of the absurd.

It happened last fall with Seitokai no Ichizon, which opened to a chorus of abuse and only gradually found the large audience it deserved.

Now it’s happening again with Working!!, a new show set in a “family restaurant” in Hokkaido. It will start its run in April, but the first episode was streamed as a preview a few days ago.

Personally, I found the first episode extremely funny, as I did the bit I read of the comic strip it is based on. But various bloggers and forum posters have described it as boring, cliched, just “cute girls doing cute things” — the same things people said about SeiZon.

Certainly cute girls are part of the appeal — and highly appealing they are, too — but in fact this is classic Monty Python-style absurd comedy, with physical comedy and moe thrown in. Like SeiZon and Ichigo Mashimaro, I found it not only hilarious but humane and potentially enlightening, as well. It may not equal them, but it is playing in the same fields.

Humor is notoriously impossible to explain, but I am going to try anyway. Absurd humor depends on setting up an apparently normal situation and then unrolling events that violate one’s expectations in a way that is ridiculous but not ultimately disastrous.

For instance in Working!!, a diner complains to the restaurant’s manageress that the restaurant is too warm. Instead of doing the normal thing and either saying she will turn the heat down or explaining why she can’t, the manageress tells the plump middle-aged woman that she should go outside and run around to burn off some ugly fat. A young waiter and waitress hustle the manageress off and then come back and smooth things over with the customer in a charming little scene.

Laughter has been explained as expressing relief at the passing of danger. An absurd situation is felt as an existential danger, and laughter is our instinctive joyous declaration that the danger isn’t real.

I call the kind of humor seen in SeiZon and Ichigo Mashimaro “humane absurdity.” It seems to me to overstate our normal human weakness and selfishness in absurd ways, converting them from dangerous faults to ridiculous foibles. That is not an encouragement of immorality, in my view, but a way of revealing human weakness in a context devoid of pressure. In fact it may help us become able to see our own weaknesses, rather than concealing them even from ourselves. It certainly helps us to forgive ourselves, thereby contributing to our mental health.

At one point in this episode, two young men are hassling the little waitress who is the lead girl in this show. The manageress, who has previously been established as a fairly sympathetic character, comes over to stop them. Instead of talking them out of it, as one might expect, she immediately boots one of them to the ground. They call her a “damn bitch” and leave without paying. She then takes her cell-phone and calls some local toughs she knows, telling them to stop the two guys and take all their money. Absurd.

When the girl who was hassled says this is going too far, the manageress replies that she has to protect her cute staff. But then she adds quietly that they called her a “damn bitch,” so we realize that her own pride was the real reason she had them attacked. The situation is absurd, then we see the manageress’s weakness (pride). But this is just comedy, not real life, and we are basically on her side, so we accept it as understandable humanity, more like a cute human foible than some great sin. And we laugh.

This perception of human cuteness works beautifully with moe. In fact, in this show I think it is not just the short, genki, optimistic lead girl who is moe in this way, but other characters as well. There is some well-animated physical humor as the girl struggles unsuccessfully first to put a cup back on a high shelf, then to pick up a big tray of dishes, and has to ask for help in both cases — so that we realize she, who is supposedly showing the new-guy protagonist how to do the job, actually can’t do parts of it herself. Cute human incapacity.

The rather obtuse 16-year-old male protagonist is also fairly moe. He once happens to ask the manageress how old she is, and when she says 28, comments absently that that is quite old. Then he can’t figure out why she starts harassing him by giving him too many shifts too close together and saying he should be able to manage because he is so young. When the genki girl explains the situation to him, he agrees to apologize, then comments under his breath that that’s what he hates about old people. Clearly, he doesn’t really get it at all. We are all this dense about some things, but that doesn’t make us bad people, just people.

The characters in this show are mostly set up with contradictory characteristics, giving all of them a fundamental bit of irony: the straight-seeming 16-year-old protagonist is a lolicon; the genki little waitress, who looks about 12, is actually older than he is; the mature-seeming manageress is lazy and violent; the pretty and gentle-seeming crew chief carries a sword as she waits on tables; another waitress is very shy around men, but reacts to her shyness by launching sudden violent physical attacks. When she meets the protagonist for the first time, and he greets her in a friendly way, she screams in shock and suddenly punches him in the face, and her panicked screams of “a man! a man!” echo through the restaurant. Totally absurd, with slapstick added.

Although I think absurdity is one of the fullest and funniest kinds of humor, it’s okay if others don’t happen to appreciate it. There are other kinds of humor that I don’t appreciate. But just because we don’t get something doesn’t mean there isn’t something there to be got. And just because a show is moe doesn’t mean that’s all it is. In any case, I regret that some people are denied the pleasures of this kind of humor.

For a show like this, it’s the how, not the what that counts. Sure, we have seen similar archetypes before. But this show re-envisages them in a vivid and entertaining way, and uses them to deliver a style of humor that I love.

This show may end up just repeating its little memes over and over again ad nauseam and become uninteresting. Or it may not. This first episode introduced the characters in amusing ways. I have hopes that the same level of intelligence and inventiveness will continue.

The voice-acting here is good all round. Fukuyama Jun is terrific as the protagonist, with subtle shifts of tone to sell the humor. Asumi Kana, a favorite among Japanese otaku, is more entertaining here as the genki girl than I have ever found her.

Watanabe Kumiko, a veteran star who plays Keroro in Keroro Gunso and Shippo in Inuyasha, and who was Fran Doll in Turn A Gundam, is note-perfect as the manageress, subtle and dry.

The show is based on a four-panel comic strip that runs in Young Gangan magazine and is popular enough to have published twelve volumes.

The animation by A-1 (Sora no Oto, Fairy Tail, Kannagi) is detailed and smooth (at least in episode one), with a bright look and a nice range of character designs. Director Hiraike Yoshimasa has directed shows as different as Solty Rei and Sketchbook. He himself is doing the adaptation of the manga. Can he make it work? We shall see.

Top sound director Tsuruoka Yota (Turn A Gundam, Keroro Gunsou, Suzumiya Haruhi, Requiem for the Phantom, Bakemonogatari, etc., etc.) is there to get the most out of the seiyuus, who also include Itou Shizuka, Kitamura Eri, Fujita Saki, Hikasa Youko (Mio in K-On), Saitou Momoko, and Shiraishi Ryouko.

The past two winners of the top male seiyuu award, Kamiya Hiroshi and Ono Daisuke, play two cooks who act as the show’s Greek chorus, observing and commenting drily on the weird happenings around them. Fukuyama Jun was a previous winner of the award. Asumi Kana won one of last year’s “new seiyuu” awards.

All credit for this article goes to Hashi, please check out Hashihime!

]]> http://basementotaku.com/2010/03/working-absolutely-hilarious/feed/ 0 http://basementotaku.com/2010/03/working-absolutely-hilarious/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasementOtaku/~3/04TE5KOIgXI/ http://basementotaku.com/2010/02/mega-man-2/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:22:26 +0000 mattmagician http://basementotaku.com/?p=282

Mega Man II, why is it the most memorable? Is it the characters or stages? No. This time, it’s all about the music.

This is an abnormally video-heavy post, so I’m going to ahead and move this after the jump,
please click below to view the article!

While I said it was not the characters, that doesn’t mean certain ones don’t create…well, a name for themselves.

While I myself had little difficulty with Air Man I can understand the pain many could have, and feel the suffering deep down in my heart. Where as in Japan, Air Man has his own song and fan art, American YouTuber Brentalfloss (one of my personal favorites) has also covered Mega Man II, twice actually It’s somewhat funny actually, as before I listened to this song I didn’t know the pattern to beat the robot masters.

Honestly, at this point I just want to go ahead and point out the next video has nothing to do with megaman besides using the melody from the Wily 1-2 stage, but again it has proven to become a favorite on NicoNicoDouga creating many viewers even in the US via YouTube.

However, that doesn’t mean that American YouTuber duo ‘The Adventures of Duane and BrandO’ wouldn’t follow up with what I consider their best song, making me sad at their split.

I realize that this is more of a music/video post than anything else, but I occasionally like to give you guys something to listen to, and if you have any other insane or just cool Mega Man tracks, feel free to leave a comment below! So, would you agree that Mega Man II has the most memorable music from all of Mega Man’s games, or do you think something else deserves this title?

Check out ‘Brentalfloss’ here, and ‘The Adventures of Duane and BrandO’ here!

If you had asked me three months ago if I’d enjoy a series about a group of kids in kindergarten and a desperate-for-love teacher, well…I’d probably have said yes. Many people were suspicious about this series though, especially due to the fact it comes from Gainax (of Evangelion, Gurren Lagann, and FLCL fame) and is nothing like any of their past works. At least that’s what we thought.

Hanamaru Kindergarten (shortened as simply Hanamaru from here on) follows the story of young Anzu, the main heroine who is smitten with her new male teacher and her mother’s high school love, Tsuchida. Of course no story would do well without friends, Anzu quickly makes friends with the shy Koume and the eccentric, yet slightly emotionless Hiiragi (more on her later). The story continues as Tsuchida falls for his coworker, the beautiful Yamamoto, a fact that Anzu simply will not accept. This all seems very foreign from the company that created Evangelion and Gurren Lagann, but there’s a reason it works so well. Deep down, Hanamaru is analyzing many of us.

How common does this scene seem?

The latest episode (Episode 5) has made many fans notice how similar Tsuchida is to ourselves. As I myself have recently started working, days off are an amazing thing. After this episode however, I had to stop and think. My ‘days off’ are days where I simply sit around and do nothing special. When I was younger and would think about adults having days off, I always imagined fun parties, or adventures. It’s shocking how much a single episode can make you realize this.

This leads to the point of the anime. What in concept is a story of a group of young kids having fun has become a series about the innocence of youth, and showing just how much many viewers could miss their childhood, and at least personally lets me relive that childhood through jokes at culture. Tsuchida talking with a group of young boys about the latest Dragon Quest game is a good example of this, as I’ve found myself having discussions on various classic series (Pokémon to name one). It’s always important to keep your childhood present in your every day life, no matter how old you are. I’m curious though, is the series having the same effect on others as it is me? What’s the general opinion? Feel free to leave a comment below!

Also, without Gainax, this crossover would never be possible!

]]> http://basementotaku.com/2010/02/why-only-gainax-could-pull-off-hanamaru-kindergarten-and-why-youcare/feed/ 0 http://basementotaku.com/2010/02/why-only-gainax-could-pull-off-hanamaru-kindergarten-and-why-youcare/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasementOtaku/~3/EWK4euTsB2Q/ http://basementotaku.com/2009/12/basementotakus-best-of-2009-collection/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:14:59 +0000 admin http://basementotaku.com/?p=262 No fancy images this time, we’re getting right to the content! 2009 is quickly coming to an end so thus, lists must be made! But here at BasementOtaku we thought we’d do something a little different…
Introducing, the “BasementOtaku’s Best of 2009 Collection”

Compiling the staff’s selections of best openings, endings, and insert songs from 2009 anime, the collection is very easy to find…if you know where to look! We do hope you like it, and please leave any suggestions for future projects in the comments! For a complete track listing, hit the jump!

If you’re seeing this post, you can now see our brand new layout! This is not the final version, but as the site needed a facelift, the one year anniversary of the site felt like a good reason to go through with it! A few things you can look forward to now:

- More posts! I’ve been greatly neglecting the site due to personal issues, but the site will now get a bit more active, hopefully to a normal rate soon.

- Brand New Features! I’m hoping to get a few new writers soon (Know someone who might be interested? Let me know in the comments!)

- More site changes! Thanks to Kevinoid and Xaquseg for their help with the site layout and backend changes, without you guys I would still be lost!

Please continue to use the site!

With the winter anime season slowly coming to a close, many news outlets recently covered the announcement of the Code Geass: Shikkoku no Renya (Code Geass: Jet-Black Renya or Code Geass: Renya of the Blackness) manga. Like many other Geass fans, I quickly read up the info we received and then promptly started hoping for an anime adaptation. Why should this be any different from the other manga releases, Nightmare of Nunnally, and Suzaku of the Counterattack? Well, the interesting tidbit is that Goro Taniguchi, the director and story co-creator of the original Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion is the man behind the story in this offshoot. Fans are lit with questions.

The above art is the scan containing any information that we know, as well as showing more of the new characters. Although C.C. returns as “Reif? C.C.” this series is set eras before the anime, introducing Renya; a mechanical arm weilding, shuriken throwing 17 year old boy who makes a pact with Reif? C.C. Around this same time, a mysterious man that looks strangely like a long haired Lelouch. It is worth noting that in the art shown, he does not seem to have any Geass powers, but this may change or be hidden.

With all of this new information, many are curious if Goro Taniguchi being behind the story will cause this to become an anime as well, perhaps an OVA or a movie release. Time will tell, and you can be sure that you’ll hear much more as more info is found. My only question is this;

What will become of Kallen?

Click Here to take survey

Testing out a new in-post image, this will probably change. However, we’re undergoing MANY changes. Please click the above link to take a survey. By submitting a response, you will be entered to win a DeathNote R: Relight: Visions of a God DVD. This will be shipped to the winner sometime in the coming months. This post will be removed when the survey time is over. Thank you!