They did that by taking a very roundabout approach. No one expected a school-life story, completely separate from the abstract checkerboard world of huke’s imagination, with only a tangential (or at least only metaphorical) relationship to it. And with a sub-60-minute runtime, as a bonus packaged with a toy, they didn’t have to do more than that. Intrigue the folks, whet the whistle, stay true to the atmosphere.

The problem with mysterious and intriguing things is that the more we think about them, and the more we explore them, the less mysterious they’re going to be. That’s what mystery is: the unknown. Duh. So what happens when you take that roundabout approach and try to expand it into an eight-episode TV anime? You’re probably going to destroy some of what makes your source material appealing.

As Yoji Enokido could probably tell you, keeping a healthy amount of content relatively unexplored will make the viewer fill in the gaps, and often with a great deal more profundity than the writer could dream up himself. The OVA wasn’t exactly masterful at that, but it was certainly capable. Mari “In the future, every anime will be written by me” Okada has her work cut out for her in somehow expanding that into a watchable plot while maintaining some form of atmosphere.

Already there’s an apparent change in philosophy: Mato and Yomi’s huke-world battle scenes were only marginally connected, and mostly in feeling, to their real-world scenarios. Here in the TV series, we’ve already seen a great deal of correlation in the titular character’s one primary scene. Kagari and her macaroons make an appearance, and her steamrolling attack parallels the real world in both its surprise (tell me you didn’t jump at that scene!) and its helpless, defeated feeling.

So what we’ve seen so far at this early point is a more literal approach to the huke-world vs. real-world parallel. Rather than a voiceless enemy whose motives are probably based in a discomfort over affectionate feelings (the OVA Yomi) it appears that we have someone who’s been made a prisoner of another character, perhaps even forced to fight Mato (the TV Yomi). There also appears to be an effort to wedge more characters into the story, and with them some corresponding colors, which I find a little silly. But probably infinitely more sustainable.

You get a plus and a minus from the sustainability. On the upside, any mundane events and people in the real world — which, let’s face it, are not entirely mundane, just look at Kagari — are able to be translated into dramatically surreal battle scenes in the huke-world. That lets the plot keep going for a while. Even the scenery seems to be a part of this, and I look forward to those intriguing connections. The downside is the death of all those little unexplored gaps in our imagination.

And with a franchise like Black Rock Shooter, I think that isn’t something to just discount. Like Touhou, a more complete world about which I know pretty much nothing, the gaps allow fan-generated interpretation and inspiration, which will disappear and leave BRS as a mundane and standard anime franchise. So… I guess this shit better be good.

Bonus: lol butts

Wizard Howl of Howl’s Moving Castle was so distressed and depressed when he lost the blonde color of his hair that he almost gave up living. Is it that bad? Well, here are some of the archetypes he could have played to, had he kept his gloriously flaxen mane.

The delinquent badass. Take, for instance, Shizuo (Durararararararara!!1!). He’s got a Japanese name, and he resides in a supernatural but mostly realistic-ish world, so chances are he’s dyed. And that’d make sense, as he’s not one to conform to norms of society like “You shouldn’t throw vending machines in densely populated urban areas.”

Too cool for school. November 11 is so cool, he doesn’t even need clothes. If blonde characters are there to be visual man-meat, then a nude one probably fits the bill perfectly, no?

I’d follow him anywhere. How many tall blonde guys are the leader or senpai? That probably fits more than most. You’ve got Allen Schezar, who everyone seems to think is amazing and who spreads his seed farther than the average impotent anime doormat. Then there’s Guilty Crown‘s Gai Tsutsugami, the character everyone seems to wish the anime was about. And of course, the ultimate senpai, the guy you want to be, the pineapple king, Roy Fokker. Skull Leader. Has there ever been anyone cooler? (Maybe Coach…)

The brat. While these might be admirable characters, sometimes something about being blonde seems to evoke a brattiness or privileged nature that a character must either live with (if it’s a side character a la Utena‘s Nanami) or outgrow by gaining the respect of others. Edward Elric had to do that in the typical shounen-manga way, and Reinhard Von Lohengramm was often called a brat despite proving himself worthy, you know, numerous times.

The villain. Even in anime that don’t take place in Japan, the villain character will often play off that “otherness” of blonde hair to evoke a scarier feeling. I mean, look at Gai, he’s the hero and he’s still pretty intimidating. Of course I’m thinking of Monster‘s Johan Liebert here, one of the world’s scariest Aryans. While he was truly disturbed, he was much more calm and sociopathic than the typically unhinged blonde villain — say Guilty Crown‘s Kill ‘Em All Daryl (who falls into ”brat” with no problem either, just don’t forget the guy’s birthday) or Full Metal Panic: TSR‘s kitten-fapping Gates.

Honorary badass who could’ve been blonde: Straight Cougar.

Honorary senpai who isn’t quite a dude: Marjorie Daw.

Mirai Nikki.

God, it’s dumb. It really is. A little bit of everything we once thought anime was, with a little bit of Death Note/Geass style human chess, and a little bit of 21st century cuteness. It all adds up to something that consistently insults your intelligence but manages to rope you back in with a nice “OH NO SHE DI’INT!!” kind of fun.

Key appeal: Murder Moe

Guilty Crown.

Still maligned, I think it’s going to drop off a lot more people’s radars as the new season rolls along, which is sad for my Sea Slugs blogging but whatever — I’m still enjoying this thing. Say what you will about Shu (somewhat more likable than a lot of people give him credit for, and infinitely better-written), or about the truck-sized logic holes (which are nothing compared to some of Mirai Nikki’s), but it’s never a snoozefest and it always looks good.

Key appeal: Battle outfits

Nisemonogatari.

Nisioisin, Captain Cleverpants of the Clever Brigade, writes up some clever dialog and has two “characters” at a time speak it to each other while they lean against metaphorical settings; meanwhile, Wackiyuki Shinbo eats it up because everything can be simultaneously symbolic, surreal, and cheaply animated. Well, maybe there’s a little more money to throw around here. Certainly all the characters are loaded, did you see Ararararagi’s house? This is otakubait of the highest caliber, and of course it works. There are a couple panty shots and a lot of talk about panty shots, and some dialog that’s actually so meta it involves the gang making fun of themselves for participating in the act of meta comedy. Breaking the 5th wall, if you will. Some will find that deliciously sharp and witty, but if it’s just a little too painfully clever for you, I wouldn’t blame you. Production values are good so far; I interpret that as either “Bakemonogatari and Madoka made us enough money to do this right” or “expect a lot of black screens by episode 11.”

Key appeal: Word Pong
Squick factor: potentially high

Poyopoyo.

Eventually if people yell about something enough, and that thing is only 3 minutes long, you’ll watch it. And it was cute, I suppose. It also has Kenshiro. The titular cat is completely spherical, which makes it the ideal shape for lots of tasks that can’t be accomplished using conventional cats, but it remains to be seen whether that will elevate Poyopoyo beyond the usual (very low) level of usefulness you see from cats.

Key appeal: Uniform geometry

Recorder and Randsell.

Another short one, I expected to hate it based on the silly premise, but rather than trying to eke some kind of story or otakubait fetish out of this one, it’s purely a contrivance set up to make a joke. And you know what? I laughed. Pacing and joke-timing was solid, and it ended at just the right time. Second episode? Well, it already tried for something a little more heartwarming. Would prefer some more decent jokes first.

Key appeal: Child molester jokes, ha ha!
Squick factor: legal pedophilia 

Another.

I see a lot of complaints that the first episode broadcasted its intended spooky factor far too strongly, but until I start seeing the quick cuts, soundtrack stabs, and gratuitous zooms on dilating eyes (yes I know there was one) that are the hallmarks of anime’s least-properly-executed genre, I’m going to hang for a while. I’ve watched a lot of horror, I’ve worked on horror films, I’ve seen a zillion crappy midnight shows, and the side effects are contradictory: I know something about what constitutes good and bad horror, and I like shitty horror anyway. At any rate, it’s very good-looking, as with most PA Works productions, but of course that hasn’t saved them all (insert your own reference here because everyone hates a different PA Works series). Someone proposed on Sea Slugs, what if the girl is actually alive and the kids are all just really mean to her? I like this.

Key appeal: Eyepatch moe, backgrounds, crows

Rinne No Lagrange.

If I can only keep one of Tatsuo Sato’s shows this season, it’s probably gonna be Pirates, but it should be noted that Viz is streaming this thing in HD on Hulu, and aside from the Hulu app having a penchant for crashing my Roku, it’s a really nice trend that I look forward to Crunchyroll finally managing to get right. I mean, the clarity with which you can see the skirts come off is… well, it’s astounding, really. As a robot anime, I’m not sure I’m sold but I don’t have a robot anime this season unless you count Guilty Crown‘s sometimes-incidental Endlave content. So we’ll see. For a vapid fanservice-heavy romp, it was charming.

Key appeal: Sweatpants moe

Shana.

I’m having a really hard time keeping up. I just… I just don’t care that much.

Key appeal: Marjorie gets some

Bodacious Space Pirates.

Maybe it helps that I was watching on Saturday morning, the time when you watch cartoons, but it worked for me. It seems like an unlikely recipe all around. Imagine the drunken scenario planning: “Two words guys… Moe Harlock!” Kawamori’s Satelight, who always seem to lean toward “colorful but terribly flat” in their animation, do a fine job of making some very cute character designs come to life in a less-flat fashion, even if the thing still suffers from their trademark HEY GUYS THIS CG BLENDS IN FINE RIGHT? RIGHT?

Other thoughts:

• Check out animekritik’s blog for some Japanese reactions, mostly summed up as “old-fashioned.” Personally, an old-fashioned retro style adventure with a modern moe edge seems like a better idea for sustainable anime than any of Yamakan’s highfalutin notions about saving it.
• The Harlock theme song.
• Schneider mentioned a 2ch line re: the novel, something to the effect of “there is no sexual fanservice, only long descriptions about the ships.” And suddenly the boners transfer from one crowd to another.
• Digiboy seemed to hate it, which has to count for something too.

Bonus: Escaflowne.

Never finished it. Not sure why. About halfway through, and so far so good. It’s pretty much the ideal combination of classic shoujo, fantasy, unique mecha, intrigue, and level-up action. More on Escaflowne later, but short story is I’m enjoying it quite a bit.

Anything I’m missing? I’ll probably ignore it, whatever it is, since I can’t even sustain this many shows as it is and I’ll probably want to watch Black Rock Shooter (sue me). If I don’t conscript my wife into watching at least one more thing with me (currently Mirai Nikki and Guilty Crown) I’ll never make it. But I’m always interested in hearing what everyone else likes.

You can see the seams where the plot stitches the heroines’ stories together, and hear the clanking machinery as it maneuvers Tomoya into their lives.

make me scratch my chin and nod slowly in that approving way. He calls into question notions that I might call “reality” and “believability” but without opening the door for Clannad‘s defenders to set up a straw man wherein you’re attacking the “magical realism” of Key works, which is not the same thing. But as much as I liked the gist of this review, it’s also started to make me think in different directions.

On well-rounded characters (see what I did there)

Now, Kimlinger goes on to criticize the internal logic of the lead character putting aside his supposedly cynical and lazy nature to constantly do nice interventional things for random girls, but it’s always a tough call criticizing the Insert-kun because of his blank-faced origin. And then my head started to spin, because the functional question here is: To what length do you step back and say, ok, we have to allow a certain level of contrivance in order for the whole thing to work? You have to have a guy who interacts with these girls, or there’s no story; you have to have a guy who’s reasonably cool or they wouldn’t talk to him (although I enjoy the idea of a dirtbag like Tenchi in one of these Key thingies); and you need some individual tragedies or it’s just a bunch of people hanging out.

But toe-chan, you say, I wouldn’t mind watching people hang out if they were fleshed-out three-dimensional characters instead of collections of tragedies and speech patterns with the same face and different hair! In fact, there are vast amounts of anime consisting of just that and we find some of those quite charming.

Getting results

Well… that’s cool, but that’s not what Clannad or any of the Key properties I’m familiar with are about. A lot of decent works will gladly let their narrative and character elements suffer in service of some other artistic goal that their creators are trying to achieve — even in anime. You have something like an Ikuhara work where the story is a partially-real, partially-symbolic representation of a concept more than it is a sequence of plausible events; or there’s Nisioisin’s characters, really just Pong machines with voices made to spar with one another to achieve some possibly relevant outcome or humorous truth.

In the Maeda/Key tradition, situations are set up to achieve a specific reaction; usually, that reaction is to get wicked sad, but we can simplify and just say that the ultimate goal is a feeling rather than a story. The characters, plot lines, and routes of interaction all exist in service of that final reaction. Can Maeda and co. connect all those threads with a related theme at the end of the day? Sure, of course, and that’s what would elevate a work to a level above a simple cranking tool. That theme, beyond “something something about families” is as vague and gauzy as the atmosphere of Clannad, and probably serves a primary purpose of keeping the whole thing undersexed, but… points for trying?

At any rate, that endgame is the thing, and perhaps the reason to why Kilminger’s review doesn’t read like a bad one, despite the scathing attacks on Clannad’s artificiality, lies in this:

The second thing to know about Clannad is that it is highly effective. There’s a reason it feels calculated: because it is. Every character, interaction, and happening is calculated for maximum emotional impact. And impacted we are. […] Cry, the show may as well be shouting, cry like a little girl.

Which of course speaks to my mental image of Jun Maeda as some sort of twisted scoundrel who requires the tears of virgins to survive and has as such designed superior technology for extracting them. He sits in his Bond-villain underground volcano base, rubbing his hands together and going “yessss… YESSSSS! CRY!” as the fox-spirit in Kanon slowly dies off and dozens of otaku lower lips start to quaver. Nearby is Kyoto Animation’s Tatsuya Ishihara, who just wants to go do more Haruhi, but instead remains chained to the wall of the Maedaplex, drained of tears and forced to adapt the next Key work (which I predict is named after Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains The Same” but with a tilde~) for wider consumption.

oh, the villainy residing inside such a beautiful man

But, I digress. So, where did I end up here? I guess the end evaluation is, maybe — possibly — Clannad doesn’t “suck,” per se (as if that was ever something you should take as a Serious Evaluation, don’t worry I’ll still shout it with vigor), but it has its own goals that didn’t speak to me. Key fans have to be willing to put up a slightly different kind of suspension of disbelief than what is required of most fiction readers and anime viewers. It’s a different animal. And I’ve more or less made my peace with it.

Just don’t make me fucking watch it again.

Hope I stuck the landing...

Like every comedy ever, Kill Me Baby will only appeal to some, and I’m one of them, which is unexpected. Spastic boke-tsukkomi acts are my least favorite brand of anime comedy—but this isn’t really that. It’s more like boke-boke(-boke), since Oribe is an idiot and Sonya is an assassin. (The ninja girls is obviously boke-tacular as well.) Regardless of what it’s called, I laughed quite a bit throughout this episode (which felt very god damn long) and enjoyed it all the way.

I think the show’s strong suit is the art/animation direction (I honestly don’t know how to credit this). Not the animation itself—the show has very little movement, and several times when movement couldn’t be avoided, it was done at an Astro Boy framerate. However, basically following that “moving manga” principal, a lot of attention is given to what each individual shot looks like. I felt the show had constant visual comedy going on in the facial expressions and other happenings, which is what garnered most of my laughs. The character designs lend easily to all sorts of fun morphing, which also helps.

I would've killed myself on the spot, had I a gun on me like she does.

Its cast is mostly n00b seiyuu, with mixed results. Sonya’s voice was excellent, Oribe’s bordered heavily on grating (and she never shuts the fuck up), and Goshiki’s is funny but overdone. It would be nice if the acting simply improves throughout the show, since Oribe’s voice is currently my biggest complaint going into it. That might be totally made up for soon, though, since the only other character listed on MAL is played by Kugimiya Rie.

The ending song is addicting, too.

But early on, as everyone knows, it’s a tough road. You have to fight for the few readers that do become your core (and trust me, I appreciate you guys in a big way), you haven’t found your voice, and at the time there was a new aniblog popping onto Nano every three seconds. Early support is key, and though they may not have thought they were doing a lot, just commenting on posts was huge for me so I still remember two guys enough to thank them: one was CCY-Senpai (aka Canon these days), and because of that I’m still doing this goofy Christmas post series. The other was Kabitzin, who ran my favorite episodic blog dedicated to Shakugan no Shana.

So when I was finally selected to write for the venerable Sea Slugs! Anime Blog, I was pretty stoked. It was my first favorite place in the anihedron, and it remains the only purely-episodic blog I follow with any regularity. The “blogosphere’s water cooler,” as ghostlightning called it, is a fun place to write. It’s a challenge to maintain an entertaining style, and with greater popularity can come some really goofy comments, but it’s a good kind of challenge.

I was technically recruited last year, but my first official post, on the somewhat lackluster belly-service anime Yumekui Merry, was published on January 8th of this year; hands down, hitting that publish button was my top anime moment of 2011.

Thanks for reading all this self-indulgent slop, Merry Christmas to all of you and may your blogs not retire in 2012.

Yasuhiro Imagawa does not seem like a guy who’s interested in the small. Individual stories can be quite moving, and even the largest stories can be told through the mirror of a single character and the impact on his life. But that’s not the story Imagawa wants to tell. A large scale battle? Not so much. The fate of Japan? Getting closer. The modern master of the Super Robot revivalist genre only gets a tight feeling in his pants when the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance, and 90% of everyone is at risk of dying. And he tells this huge-scale story using only superlatives. The biggest robots, the scariest enemies, the hugest number of super-powered characters, even the longest legs.

I’ve written about this before on ghostlightning’s blog briefly, but I think Imagawa and the Gainax crew behind Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann are the creators in anime right now who have the most solid idea of not only what it was like to be a kid and watching Super Robot shows on TV, but how to translate that to their current overgrown-kid audience.

And the main way that they can pull that off is the scale. It’s hard to ramp up the scale when the original Giant Robo (or Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot for you American tokusatsu fans) was always saving the world from Big Fire anyway. But you know, you tell a kid that’s what’s going on, and they love the excitement — but they can’t really grasp that. You make it work for adults by making them feel it. Show the world more, amp up the destruction caused by the villains, and don’t let the inability of kids’ TV to show violence get in your way. And while you’re at it, stay true to that core principle: violation of the laws of physics.

Ordinary people are few and far between; in fact, the only character without a superpower is Daisaku. And as the main character whose job it is to find his destiny and his own truth, it’s pretty important that he’s just like us, the kids who are watching. This might be the ultimate coup for large-scale immersion in the kid-like feeling. Imagawa transports us to ordinary young Daisaku’s life amidst all the chaos surrounded him. Even if his crisis of faith is more simplistic than Amuro Ray’s or Shinji Ikari’s, yet it’s more huge and fist-pumping when he resolves it.

There’s only one real problem for me in the way that Imagawa sculpted the huge rock that is Giant Robo‘s story: There’s a peak-and-valley structure, where each low gets progressively lower and each triumph gets more hugely fist-pumping to match. I think it’s the OVA’s biggest fault, though it’s inextricable and probably one of the story’s strengths as well. The constant pummeling alternation from SHIT IS JUST SO BAD RIGHT NOW to WE WILL RECOVER, I BELIEVE EVEN MORE NOW has a way of normalizing after a while. All these peaks and valleys try their best to get bigger and more dramatic each time, but they eventually level out into a straight line that actually lacks the impact of a more traditional narrative arc.

Does that mean I felt Giant Robo: The Day The Earth Stood Still was boring, or unenjoyable? Of course not. Every few seconds there’s a new and exciting wild hyper-foreshortened manga-esque angle, even in flashbacks or scenes that would normally be static in most anime. Fight scenes are powered by fluid motion that continues for minutes at a time, without resorting to speed lines or other shortcuts. It’s jaw-dropping, and even more so because of its retro style, an idealized version of grown fans’ memories of what this was like when they were kids.

So in the end, Imagawa and Giant Robo are pretty damn successful of reminding you why you love Super Robots, and really, anime as a whole. I couldn’t ask for a better anime from my Secret Santa, because that’s a great present.

We Still Don’t Know The Name of That Flower We Saw That Day, or AnalHana for short, started as a decent-looking, sort of understated, tasteful look at what a tragedy could do to a group of friends. Sure, it was hard to really feel their separation when we were kind of just told “this is how it is,” but the execution was fairly tight.

Then, the wheels just started to fall off. The moment I can point to where I realized, “there is no subtlety left here at all” was probably the back room of the video store. And from there, I couldn’t not notice the ridiculosity of the shouting and crying. It all culminated in the final episode, for me one long moment of agape wonder. Menma the Friendly Ghost and her friends devolved into simple crying machines guaranteed to eke a reaction out of sensitive otaku, and boy did it. Just the wrong one. My tears flowed freely, alright, but I don’t think in the way that was intended.

It was also called confusing at the end, but honestly was it? It was actually about child molestation all along, which is really fucking disturbing but ultimately almost rescued it.

Was Fractale, in the end, supposed to be a musing on Azuma’s theories of “animal” attribute consumption, the replacement of character with chara-moe, and the loss of the “grand narrative” — just a failed attempt at it? Did Mari Okada finally drop the ball? Should Yamakan give it up? Who the hell knows. But that bizarre twist at the end actually made things feel a little more tied-together and conceptually smart than most people will ever give Fractale credit for. And they probably shouldn’t give it too much credit, but it proves to me that there’s sometimes a lot to think about even in the anime we laugh off because of other things that it does clumsily (which was, you know, pretty much everything in Fractale’s case).

Anime can’t hurt me with its melodrama the way it used to, so it takes something especially well-done — or maybe it’s just something specific? — to make it work. Whatever the case, Saori’s painful emotional self-torture delivered the goods, and sealed in Wandering Son’s solid ability to use really broken characters to illustrate some very common adolescent feelings that a lot of us can identify with. Here’s the post.

And that was only one of its many strengths. Wandering Son was easily one of the best anime of this year.

Now let’s get this thing licensed for physical release over here, shall we?