At the moment, I’m probably more satisfied with the anime I’m following than I have been for a long time. Whenever a new season begins there’s always the temptation to try to see as much as possible, particularly as an anime blogger with the self-inflicted responsibility to talk about this stuff ad nauseum, but for the autumn at least, I resolved to take things at a slightly slower pace.

The truth is that I’m not good at following anime week-in, week-out anyway, and quite frankly, I’d much rather enjoy the anime I’m watching than to make some token effort just to keep up with everyone else. There’s definitely some new series that I’m really itching to see, but it can all wait until it’s finished.

Well, there is but one exception. I mentioned before that I’m watching Trapeze (also known as Kūchū Buranko.)

Totally the opposite of the above, this is a series I’ll watch every week without fail. It is episodic and set-up just like Bartender, but with a psychiatrist instead; each new episode brings with it a new patient and their mental illness, yet where Bartender was all about smoky, dark rooms and healing knackered office-workers, Trapeze is… different.

A quick glace may suggest that someone barfed a pack or two of M&Ms all over the screen (and that’s a good thing by the way) but better still is the integration of live action into the animation; each new patient has a stop-frame ‘real face’ (contorted, weird-looking and just plain funny) glued atop his animated body, while the pinku-esqe nurse Mayumi appears on screen as either a straight up live-action actress (played by Yumi Sugimoto) or as a blocky video-game CG mannequin circa 2004!

The aesthetic is simply outstanding in a thrift-store, punky kind of way, as if spliced together in someone’s bedroom in a matter of hours. I love how eccentric it is, how down-right funny it looks, but one should not ignore Trapeze’s emotional qualities either. All of its absurdity is rooted within an episodic parade of very human (and occasionally, very embarrassing) disorders like obsessive–compulsiveness and… priapism!

In episode 5, a man is constantly fighting his ever-growing urge to do something embarrassing and extreme in-front of Japan’s legions of Serious Adults and uptight co-workers. It’s not often that I’ll heartily laugh at anime comedy, but this episode especially had me in stitches, and while I realise comedy is a very subjective thing, I’m sure I can’t be the only one laughing at this show, right?

Trapeze works for me every week because it is episodic; each further installment ends with a certain, dramatic finality. There are no ‘to be continued’ cliff-hangers or frustrating plot mysteries to be solved many moons later, it’s just a short, sharp injection of colour and fun, best administered in small, managable doses (The nurse Mayumi has fun with her injections, too!)

Writing this now is probably a bit old hat, but I finally got around to watching Sword of the Stranger at the weekend!

Why the delay? I’ve developed a strained relationship with anime movies; having become so used to watching anime in the 20-min TV format, the mere suggestion of watching anything even slightly longer than normal isn’t attractive at all! I might have been institutionalized by TV!

As such, I’ve avoided many of the most important releases of recent years. I still haven’t seen Mind Game, The Sky Crawlers and Howl’s Moving Castle, and I’m embarrassed to admit I still haven’t seen Paprika, either.

The irony is that I’m often frustrated by the lack of creativity in TV anime, yet there are still so many highly-rated, recent films I need to check out.

After all, film is the anime auteur’s truest medium. Every now and then, there will be a TV series (like the currently airing Trapeze) that can provide relief from the down-pour of tried and tested, but if one truly wants to experience anime in the broader sense, culturally and artistically, there’s simply no avoiding the fact that films (and, to an extent, OVAs) are still where it’s at.

Fans are more likely to be familiar with Hayao Miyazaki than with the director of their favourite TV series, simply because Miyazaki’s work is that much more personal and stylised. Other popular directors include Makoto Shinkai, Satoshi Kon and Mamoru Hosada; their work is distinctive, unmistakably their own, and markedly more refined than the typical TV series.

That refinement is really what I’m trying to get at here. I’d forgotten just how lively and exciting anime can be; Sword of the Stranger is one hell of an action movie, but more than that, it’s visually so evocative. Reading subtitled anime can tend towards an over-emphasis on plot and dialogue, yet for this I could hardly pull my eyeballs from the animation.

I’ve read so much praise for Sword of the Stranger’s action choreography, yet every word of it was true. It’s as cool as Samurai Champloo, but that’s a bad comparison; a better one would be the violent Rurouni Kenshin OVA, Trust & Betrayal. Remember how, towards the end of Betrayal, Kenshin is forced to come out from hiding and follow into the forest after his beloved Tomoe, knowing full well that many deadly traps lay in wait? That those traps are ultra-specialist, blood-thirsty ninja with iron claws and face masks? Sword of the Stranger has scenes just like that! It’s serious stuff; there are poisoned knives, spear fights and shooting arrows! (And the day I grow bored of watching spear fights and shooting arrows is the day this blog closes!)

In the four weeks since this blog was last updated, I’ve seen at least 80 episodes of anime! Not bad, eh? But to write anything of decent length, more than ever, I need to feel like what I’m writing about is really worth your time.

That isn’t to say everything airing right now is poor, but how much of it is good enough to be remembered in years to come, particularly outside of their respective genres?

For example, I love every minute of Cross Game, while the recently finished Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z-Hen was fun and exciting, but what else is there that’s left to say about them? The former is sports anime, the latter is super-robot/mecha; there is literally nothing left to add that hasn’t already been written a million times over. If you’ve seen Touch, you’ve basically seen Cross Game.

Anime sticks so rigidly to its genre tropes that after a few years of watching, it feels ever so slightly repetitive; not that these series aren’t fun to watch, because they are, but to think about? To write about? Not so much. Not after 3 years of blogging.

Yet the impetus for this post was Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG, which, particularly in the context above, is a series worth writing about.

It aired back in 2004 and I’m not convinced the anime community understood just how good it had it with this show; Yoko Kanno’s wonderful score, Production I.G’s cinematic animation and Kenji Kamiyama’s ambitious direction. What a combination! The story is intellectual, exciting and emotional. Basically, it’s one of the finest series I’ve seen, and my only disappointment is that it took me this long to sit down and watch it!

I held back precisely because I knew how serious and wordy any given episode of Stand Alone Complex can be. The dialogue flows thick and fast, loaded with technical terms and philosophical discussions; every moment requires your full, undivided attention, something I wasn’t willing to give it, for shame.

Yet for all its high-mindedness, its characters are so empathetic. Thinking back on it, I immediately flashback to Section 9. Batou’s devotion to Kusanagi; her nostalgic connection to Kuze; his many shades of grey; the paper cranes; Batou refusing to leave Kusanagi to die; their mission in Berlin. I won’t forget it.

Over at AWESOME ENGINE, Brack is heroically sifting through a decades worth of anime, one series at a time. He began in 2000 and is gradually approaching the present day.

It makes for fascinating reading, if just because it highlights the sheer bulk of anime that simply retreats into the shadows after a short-lived moment in the sun. Fandom can be so fickle! Mushishi was airing on Japanese TV at the same time as Mai-Otome; the latter seemed so popular at the time, but I would suggest that it’s now as good as forgotten, while Mushishi endures, consistently finding newer generations of anime fans.

Likewise, yesterday, I finally began watching Revolutionary Girl Utena. I know, “What the hell took you so long?”

When I think about Boogiepop Phantom, I’m also reminded of other recent Madhouse anime, like Shigurui and Casshern Sins. Each has a strange aesthetic; seductive yet tinged by an under-lying sense of sadness and desolation.

It would be easy to categorise them as dark and depressing, but they are more complex than that. It’s not horror merely for the sake of mindless chills; it’s horror to serve a purpose, to weave a spell. Boogiepop Phantom is disorientating, Shigurui is grotesque and Casshern Sins is desolate, but each conjures an atmosphere potent enough to provoke difficult questions.

Their respective characters are often serious and handsome, but lacking in something desperately important; a purpose or a place; sometimes the purpose is twisted and weird, other times the place is empty and lost, but whatever the scenario, it’s always lurking beneath the beautiful veneer; a clash of superficial beauty with something darker and altogether more human, and as a result, a real sense of depth is achieved.

“My pregnancy has taught me that, unlike men, woman have two faces. Her face as a woman and her face as a mother. Like with plants, there are flowers and there are leaves. A leaf tries to absorb as much sun and nutrition as it can, while a flower simply tries to look as beautiful as it can. The flower is a women’s face, while the leaf is a mother’s.”

The above is from episode 6 of Boogiepop Phantom. It’s such a lovely little analogy I had to transcribe it straight after watching. That is so typical of the feeling I get from these so-called “horror” anime, where the eloquence of the prose itself is intertwined with a beautiful piece of symbolism.

The scene in-question has a pregnant woman trying to express how she copes with living as a single mother. She’s explaining all this to a girl who hates her own mother for falling in love with another man, despite her father having passed away years previous. I think it’s just a delightfully abstract way of expressing how a mother will always be there for her children.

The coolest thing about Boogiepop Phantom is that it’s just really fucked up. Too often in anime are teenagers romanticised. Everything’s so sweet, so melodramatic; no permanent damage. It’s just easier to watch something like Toradora, where everyone’s so cheerful, ready to communicate and fix their problems.

Nothing festers in your typical anime high-school; feelings, conflicts are all out in the open, ready to be tended. It’s false bullshit, but we watch it because it’s happy and safe, because there’s always an answer, and the characters will always turn out okay, smiling in the end. We know it’s coming and that’s fine, but it lacks an edge; seems to be more like a dream than reality.

And you wouldn’t willingly escape into a nightmare, right?

Boogiepop Phantom is from the other side, twisted enough to admit that not everyone is going to be alright, teenagers especially. Love can turn bad, things can go wrong, people can be depressed and weird and without hope. Everything can go off the rails. That’s just life.

Anime doesn’t always have to be easy to watch, and this certainly isn’t. The names and faces are hard to follow, camera angles disorientating and lack focus, the soundtrack inconsistent and artificial. Boogiepop’s mysteries are disturbing.

A huge pillar of light strikes down in the middle of an unnamed city, the light, reaching as high as the eye can see, is illuminated against the night sky. There’s no explanation, it just happens and then people get on with their lives; going to work, catching the train to school; gray skies, packed carriages and the pulse of electricity. Modern life.

This is an odd series, a dark, ambiguous diamond in a sea of good vibes and happy endings. I’m really enjoying it.

After all these years, I still love watching Naruto. I’ll place it on hiatus every now and then, but it still is, and always will be, one of my biggest favourites. This past weekend marked the end of my latest break from Shippuuden, but already, here I am again; writing away. I couldn’t let this feeling pass without trying to convey it, this sense of being an anime fan and seeing something so great it can’t be contained by just me alone; I have to share it with you.

Naruto always does this to me. For every multi-episode, slow fight, there are these special moments for when they bring out the big guns. It’s usually only for one episode, but it’s obvious when it’s going to happen because the characters take on more stylised look and the animation becomes fluid and expressive, more akin to watching a Studio Ghibli feature. It happens for episode 82, but for once, and delightfully so, it’s not about the action. This is probably the quietest episode of Naruto I’ve ever seen, but also, probably the best.

The plot is basic (and contains a big spoiler, for those worried about such things). Shikamaru is trying to cope with the death of his dear teacher, Asuma. All the colour is drained from Konoha’s usually lively hustle and bustle, dialogue is sparse and strained. The death of a friend isn’t something that one takes lightly. Shikamaru just wants to be alone.

Most of what’s so great about this episode simply has to be seen. It’s beautifully animated, but it’s real impact is emotional. I have to mention this one scene in particular: seeing his son sitting alone, Shikamaru’s father challenges him to a game of shogi. For around five minutes, they just sit and play in a room surrounded by beautiful paintings, for a while barely even uttering a word to each other. The camera angle never changes, the room is lit only by moon light, but their body language, every subtle movement, portrays so much; it ends with Shikamaru collapsing in tears.

I would suggest that more than just fans of Naruto should make an effort to see this episode. It can be, and should be, adored without context; rarely is a feeling so powerful captured in film, let alone in a series like Naruto.

Bee Train doesn’t exactly have the best of reputations, be it their bias for girls with guns or their notoriously poor production values, fact is their work polarises opinion and attracts its fair share of detractors.

I’ve seen neither Noir nor Madlax, was horrified by the low budget vibe I got from Blade of the Immortal and nearly quit watching anime altogether after sitting through the first episode of El Cazador de la Bruja. I know many others share these same ‘concerns’, so I’m going to write something now that may shock and appall many:

Bee Train’s latest series, Phantom, is really good.

There, I said it.

When Phantom began earlier this year, it attracted poor reviews. I realise that people are sick of Bee Train’s shtick by now; that emphasis on style over logic, where posing with guns and defying death at every turn takes precedence over everything else. Unfortunately, it’s all there in Phantom, too.

This is supposed to be a serious story with organised crime and murder, but it’s still a Bee Train anime; the characters are unbelievably strong in some scenes and then unbelievably naive in others. If you think about the plot too much, it won’t make sense, but I keep coming back to it anyway, which is why I’m writing this now.

The two main characters are the female Ein and the male Zwei. They work as assassins for the mafia group Inferno because their only other alternative is to die. They were dragged off the streets, thrown into captivity and told to start killing others if they wanted to survive. They choose to live, and so, almost straight away, our main characters, our moral beacons, have blood on their hands.

Morality, guilt and the will to live, what’s so fascinating about Phantom is watching how Ein and Zwei try to repress their innate goodness. Neither is a bad person, but doing what they do takes a heavy toll. Ein is borderline suicidal and resigned to never escaping the clutches of Inferno, while Zwei is rapidly heading in the same direction.

They make for a interesting pair of characters, deeply conflicted, almost paralysed by the guilt of the dead, but trudge on regardless. It’s worth watching for their moments of introspection, to see how far into darkness they are willing to tread before losing touch of any remaining light and goodness. In reality, all they have left is each other, and so remains their faltering grip on life, hanging by the same thread that binds them together.

And there-in lies the quality of Phantom. It won’t win many end-of-year awards, but it is a surprisingly solid and interesting watch, particularly if, like me, you’re easily seduced by bullet-ballets like Gungrave and Black Lagoon. For all it lacks in plot nous and production values, it more than makes up for with its pair of star-crossed killers.

Something that ‘outsiders’ probably don’t realise about Fullmetal Alchemist is just how grotesque and disturbing it can be for mainstream shonen; it has never been a story that shys away from death, even when the victims are cute little girls and their pet dogs!

This lurched back into focus during episode 20 of Brotherhood, when Ed, in-between bouts of throwing up, exhumes the remains of what was supposed to be his half-transmuted mother. While the act of digging up a long-buried grave is, in itself, a stomach-turning thing to do, after Ed looks at the remains, a plot twist even more disturbing is revealed, that the body they pulled back from ‘the other side’ wasn’t their mother’s at all!

Who’s body was it? And why did it appear in place of his mother’s? The story continues to raise these dark questions, and with no comforting, morally-sound answer in sight, I really think that FMA is overlooked as horror. Scenes like these, as well as the twisted fate of characters like Martel, are as cruel and disturbing as anything I’ve seen in anime.

When writing about Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, I noted that I think it’s great because it has moments of exciting, fluid animation. I realise that’s a fairly superficial thing to say, but I think it’s true, too, and now, as if to immediately contradict myself, I’m going to write about Cross Game.

This doesn’t have great animation, but it’s probably going to be one of my favourite series of 2009, because a delightful story is always delightful, regardless of medium, and because I’m really into these characters. This has nothing to do with being swept up by some soapy drama or romance or whatever, rather, I like it because it’s understated.

Cross Game is a quiet series, so quiet you can hear the wind breezing through fallen leaves and hear the snow crunching underfoot. At its centre is Kou and Aoba; there is no blurting out of their feelings or forced confessions of love, everything remains unsaid, unrealised, with just a moment of hesitation here and a shy glance there.

Their feelings are protected, hidden even from themselves. They have a determination about them, yet seem introspective; they remember things, tiny, stupid, important, vital things, like we all do, before clamming up again. It’s sweet to watch them blunder through uncomfortable situations, but reassuring, too. I think we’ve all been there, spent a lot of time observing people and watched as the days draw into night. Life can be so understated, and such is Cross Game, it’s so quiet.

I still read my fair share of blogs and forums, so I had something of an inkling that this episode of Brotherhood was going to be quite special, but even still, I loved it to pieces, and once the credits were finally rolling, all I could think is that this was the exact moment that Brotherhood finally stepped out from its predecessor’s shadow and became great anime in it’s own right.

Ah, it’s been a long road. Between the die-hard fans of the manga and lovers of the first series, Brotherhood was always going to face a long and hard battle to win over new admirers, but now there is absolutely no excuse to not be watching this series. I won’t accept it. Episode 19 was perfect.

Shounen anime always works best when the plot pairs itself down to the most basic of premises. This episode can be easily described as just a straight up fight between the homunculus Lust and the Flame Alchemist Roy Mustang; it’s that straight forward, everything else rests on how much the anime staff are willing to sacrifice to bring the action to life, and since this is Studio Bones, it was always going to be good. Waves of flame flow like the ocean, bright sparks and the clang of steel claws, the sheer weirdness of what we’re seeing, someone being burnt to a crisp and regenerating time and time again.

I say it’s great anime for those reasons. The movement, the music and the action were so good, and because, by and large, I don’t watch anime for plots or characters. For those things, I read books. What I love about anime is watching something like this spark into life. The movement itself is a joy, the use of music and sound, that is anime. If for every dozen of cheap, generic series we can have something like this, it will always be worth being a fan.