A Grade

Nothing this month.

B Grade

B+ Aquarion EVOL

Episodes 18–22

I’m also a bit torn on the direction they’ve taken with this series. It’s all gotten a little bit too serious, far more so than the same Aquarion EVOL I fell in love with. That said, even if it’s taking itself more seriously than usual, I’ve been enjoying these latest episodes immensely anyway. Particularly the invasion into Vega and the Death of the Big Bangs. It’s not so much that I care about the plot (I don’t) as it is that the characters have grown on me to the point that I enjoy watching them do pretty much anything. And hey, even at its most serious, Aquarion EVOL is still a pile of big dumb fun.

B+ Un-Go: Inga-ron

Exactly what Un-Go needed. A proper introduction to the characters with an engaging self-contained story that highlights all of the positives the TV series had. It was still as difficult to follow as Un-Go has always been. More than once I had to rewind to catch the meaning of what characters were saying. But it also had those same gut-wrenching, agenda-beating moments, such as the reveals by each of the hippies as to why they went into the battlefield. Hopefully if new people who watch Un-Go check out this first, there won’t be the same level of complaints about the mysteries being lame when that was never supposed to be the main appeal.

B+ Kids on the Slope

Episodes 3–7

Funny how my complaint last month was that it was all a little bit too happy in Kids on the Slope. My only real complaint this month was the devolving into melodramatic shoujo territory got very tiresome very quickly. Asides from maybe episode 7 though, the series has handled this big love dodecahedron quite well, since shit actually moves in their relationships and they are always able to tie it all back to the music again. It really is a fantastically put together anime. Also Brother Jun is mai waifu. Do not steal.

B Jormungand

Episodes 3–7

I love the character interactions in Jormungand, particularly the crew’s relationship with Jonah. I love how they each act as a sort of cool uncle to him, teaching him little tricks and joking about bottoms and stuff like that. Also Koko is fantastic, a perfect character to carry this show. Admittedly I’m still struggling to figure out where any of this is supposed to be going. Not even just some sort of cohesive plot, although there’s been no sign of that either. I don’t know if this show has any themes or messages or anything, beyond maybe that arms dealers are all psychopaths. Still though, it’s always fun to watch Koko make people angry.

B– Sankarea

Episodes 4–8

The totally inevitable happened. The stink from the original manga has dragged the show into the most blatant piece of wish-fulfillment bullshit. It’s ironic how taking Rea away from her father actually removed her personality and turned her into nothing more than a Perfect Girlfriend. And yet I still enjoy this show way more than it deserves because it’s just too well made. Episode 8 was perfect at this. The way the jokes are played out, and how different things are shot. Even when it’s conforming to the original brainlessness of the manga (insert zombie brain joke here), it’s still really well done. Shame this director had to work on Sankarea, but I’m keeping my eye on him from now on.

B– Space Bros

Episodes 5–9

Space Bros has the opposite problem to Jormungand in that its themes are so overplayed that it gets repetitive and tiring. Which is a shame because on the occasions when it does try to tackle things from a different angle, it’s really enjoyable. The last two episodes were great in that regard. One about taking advantage of luck to get achieve your dreams, and the other about the sacrifices people make to reach those dreams. It’s still all about dreams dreams dreams, but at least it’s tackling it from a different angle. More of that please Space Bros.

B– Eureka Seven Ao

Episodes 3–7

Eureka Seven Ao is kinda dumb. I mean, I like some good dumb giant robot fun, as the high score for Aquarion EVOL should show, but I don’t remember the original Eureka Seven ever being quite this dumb. Maybe it’s just because I’m older and more cynical than when I watched the original, but the whole Truth invasion part was so stupidly dramatic with so much grandstanding and stupid lines of dialogue that I found myself scoffing the entire way through it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just requires some re-adjusting of expectations on my part.

B– Patema Inverted: Beginning of the Day

Episodes 1–2

Patema Inverted is a movie by the guy who made Time of Eve and Pale Cocoon. The movie is supposed to be coming out sometime this year. As a form of hype building, they’ve been releasing these prologue episodes about the series. I thought they were just the first few minutes of the actual movie, but they seem to be genuine prologue episodes of its own content. Hard to know until the actual movie itself comes out. There’s not a whole lot you can get from these prologue episodes. He still has his hand-cam style of directing, the backgrounds look beautiful, and I liked the little twist at the end. Looks promising, but again, there’s not a whole lot to take from them.

B– Wasurenagumo

The second of the 2012 Young Animator Training Projects, Wasurenagumo is about a moe moe spider. This one again is competently produced, tells a neat little contained story, is well animated, and all the other things that I’ve come to expect from the Young Animator Training Project pieces, including that it was sorta forgettable. Well, at least, that’s what I was thinking about 15 minutes through this one. “It just needs something to make it stand out” I thought. And then came the ending. Yup, that sure was an ending I won’t forget in a hurry.

C Grade

C+ Tsuritama

Episodes 3–7

If you were to ask me to list the things I like about Tsuritama, I’d be at a bit of a loss. I find the characters all very simple-minded and irritating. From the main character to Haru to angtsy glasses guy, they’re all very boring people. I also can’t say I’m particularly fond of the fact that 10 minutes of each episode are basically fishing commercials. By all means I’m cool with a story about fishing, but almost all of this fishing babble has nothing to do with the story. What I do like, I guess, is how whimsical and joyous and sometimes plain weird it is. On the few occasions it actually goes a bit crazy it finally becomes entertaining.

C+ Fate/Zero

Episodes 17–22

This show has horrible directing. There was this one shot of Waver talking to Rider that was literally 2 minutes of Waver’s face inside a sleeping bag. It’s the walking-round-in-circles all over again! Who the fuck thinks a 2 minute non changing shot of Saber going bla bla honour honour bla bla is interesting? Nothing is said once that can be said 10 times in several different self-important ways. I genuinely like the story and (some of) the characters, and on the times when it does try to do something a bit more with the directing it’s pretty damn great, such as basically the entirety of episode 22. I just wish it did that all the time and not just when they get bored with lying on stashes on money and decide to fucking animate stuff for a change.

C– Kuroko’s Basketball

Episodes 4–5

When I came back from my self-inforced hiatus to complete my university degree, I had a massive backlog of anime to catch up with. Somewhere, in amongst all those anime, I forgot to keep watching Kuroko no Basuke. It’s not that bad, apart from the animation quality being embarrassing. It’s just forgettable shounen fluff. It has no other draws beyond it being all shouneny and stuff. A story can’t survive on shounen ‘I wanna be the best’ alone.

D Grade

D+ Medaka Box

Episode 4

I hear you manga fans. The manga changes genres twice. Starts at this school life fixing problems thing. Turns into a shounen battle manga. And then finally turns into a parody of shounen battle manga. The presence of Medaka being basically Jesus with Tits might have been enough to keep me vaguely interested until then. But then I heard it was only going to be 12 episodes long. Considering it’s pre-orders are selling like cold rotting cakes at the moment, the chances of more being made are pretty damn low. So I’m done. I’ve got enough other stuff to watch anyway.

D Mysterious Girlfriend X

Episodes 4

I came to a very quick realisation watching episode 4: Mysterious Girlfriend X has nothing else to offer. It has this little relationship between Urabe and Yuji Everylead that deliberately tries not to do what standard relationships are meant to. That’s neat, but that also happens to be all it has. Its story is not going to go anywhere from here. So I bailed. Not because it was bad, but because I felt I had gotten everything from this series I needed. No point sucking from the straw if the drink in there has all been drunk.

D Lupin III: Fujiko Mine

Episodes 4–8

I do not like this new take on Lupin III. Its attempts to be all Mature and Sexy come off as silly, desperate, and sleazy in an uncomfortable way. It also seems to lack a sense of humour, taking itself way too seriously and having deadly serious conversations about the world when it simply doesn’t have the brains to say anything worthwhile. The Fidel Castro episode was particularly embarrassing in this regard. I also hate what they’ve done to Zenigata’s character, turning an honourable goofball into a reprehensible slimeball. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be against a new interpretation of Lupin III, but not a version that sucks all the fun out of it.

E Grade

No dreadful OVAs to mock this month.

F Grade

I’m jealous of Landon’s ‘Best Anime of the Decade’ lists. So much so that I’m going to do what any good blogger does and totally rip it off. Back when the new decade rolled in, I never made a ‘Best of the 00s’ list because I felt like I hadn’t seen enough to properly judge. But now I am, going through year by year, starting at 2000, and listing my favourite anime of the decade. This task will involve going back to some of my old favourites for re-evaluation, as well as some old classics I missed. That’s the ‘Favourite’ part in this Favourite and Forgotten post series. The Forgotten part is for those anime that aren’t revered, praised or even remembered by many people at all.

For the Forgotten series, I’ll be asking you lot for some recommendations in the comment section on what to pick up. Take a look at Anime Planet’s handy dandy list of 2000 anime and recommend what I should watch before compiling my favourites of that year. 3 rules for this. First, it can’t be stupidly obvious and really popular (so no FLCL). Second, it has to have started airing in 2000 (so no Excel Saga). And lastly, it has to be less than 30 episodes long (so no Hajime no Ippo).

Miami Guns

2000 really wasn’t a good year for anime you know. I had seen a grand total of 4 anime from the year that I even remotely liked, and picking fan favourites from that year gives you a wide selection of one. FLCL is the only anime that still seems to resonate amongst anime fans today. While later ‘Forgotten Anime’ to watch in this post series will be easier to decide because I’ll just leave you lot to do it, for this post I just picked a total random selection of anime with cool titles and/or giant robots and watched the first episodes of them. I stuck with Miami Guns because it had a scene in which the police force in Miami were all told they couldn’t shoot their guns just yet and they all started shivering and fondling their various firearms with bloodshot eyes like they were all drug addicts. What a Totally Accurate Representation of Americans!

The story concerns Yin and Yao, two cops in the Miami Police Force, who cause a nuisance for their boss. They’re a lot like Panty and Stocking, with Yao being loud, irritating and generally a horrible person, while Yin doesn’t have much personality at all. The set ups for each episode are meant to involve teamwork to take down the baddies, but it usually involves Yao charging in and making the situation worse while Yin clears up the actual problem behind the scenes. There’s a few inspired scenes in it, such as the episode where Yao regains her humanity after regressing to neaderthal status by smashing open a vending machine in quite possibly the greatest 2001 Space Odyssey parody I’ve ever seen (and given how many times that movie has been parodied, that’s saying a lot), but most of it is just dumb buddy cop stuff taken to illogical extremes.

The animation quality is TERRIBLE! Someone who is more knowledgable about animation will have to clue me in on this, but nearly all the TV anime made in 2000 looks dreadful compared to the anime that came from even several years before. Maybe I’m just blinded by the fact I’ve been cherry-picking the best looking stuff from the years before it, but so many of the anime made that year have awkward movement, incorrect perspective, bland character designs, weird shading, everything. My theory is that it has something to do with the switch to fully digital animated stuff. Love Hina was the first fully digitally animated TV anime, so maybe at the time the animators hadn’t quite gotten used to the new format yet. I wouldn’t have thought bad animation would put me off so much, but its end result was a lot like panty flashes. It might be telling a wonderful story or a hilarious joke, but I keep getting distracted away from the main attraction by having bad animation/striped panties clog the screen.

Speaking of panty flashes, there’s a worryingly amount of ‘Imma gonna raep you’ fanservice involving the two girls, where their kidnappers tear their clothes off with knives or whatever. Now this could be a parody of the voyeuristic nature of kidnapping scenes in these kinds of shows. In the first episode, Yin wears her swimsuit under her clothes when she gives herself up as a hostage because she knew she was going to have to take off her clothes, and then proceeds to wave to the police force from the balcony of her kidnappers apartment window so the media can see her fancy new bikini. However following episodes have similar strip down scenes with no sense of irony to them at all.

This is a small example of the wider problem Miami Guns has (beyond the atrocious animation). It forgets it’s supposed to be a parody and starts playing things straight. They keep trying to play up the relationship between Yin and Yao like it’s really touching and friendship helps them solve crimes and all the other stuff Barney the Dinosaur used to sing about when he wasn’t singing about how much he fucking loved peanut butter, but it doesn’t work because Yao is a horrible person. There is no reason for Yin to like her. Being a terrible person is fine if you’re making a big joke out of the whole thing. We weren’t ever supposed to take the relationship between Panty and Stocking seriously, as the final episode wonderfully proved. But the show kept devolving into sappy territory and it became painful to sit through at times. Especially with Yao’s voice. I gravitated towards the English dub because I always do when the option exists, but when Yao’s screechy voice became too much to bear I swapped over to the Japanese, only to discover that the English voice actor had simply copied what her Japanese counterpart had done.

A review of an anime you’ve never heard of that isn’t quite bad enough to make the review funny but not good enough to make you interested in the anime. What a useless post. Oh well, this is what I’ll probably get if I try to pick up obscure forgotten titles from the last decade.

Welcome to The Cart Driver’s World Famous Anime Season Preview, summer 2012 edition. And since it’s a summer edition, cue thousands of people saying the season looks crap while totally forgetting that summer seasons are always low on quality. If you can find more than 3 anime that interest you, than you’ve done well. Besides, your opinion on this season is invalid unless you’ve seen Moyashimon. In fact, stop what you’re doing now and go watch it. Go on, it’s only 11 episodes. I’ll still be here when you’re done.

TV series

Muv Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse

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The history of this anime starts with an eroge with the incredibly stupid name Muv Luv. It was a traditional fuck-all-the-heroines dating sim, but had the unusual addition of endgame content with the same characters in an alternate universe. An action mecha futuristic humanity on the brink of extinction from aliens alternate universe, a little bit different from your standard eroge setting. This endgame content, or ‘Muv Luv Unlimited’ as it’s called, was way more popular than the shitty dating sim. So much so that the creators made a sequel game called Muv Muv Alternative set in this same universe. This then also got a spin-off novel, which is what this anime is an adaption of. Muv Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse.

Right, so will it be any good? Muv Luv Alternative is the highest rated visual novel on vndb. It does say a lot about visual novel fans when the highest rated game is one where you first have to get through an entire shitty eroge and then its endgame content before you can finally get to the Good Part. That said, even if Muv Luv Alternative was the greatest story ever told, that’s not much use for Total Eclipse as it’s written by a different author with different characters that just so happens to take place in the same universe. This may have worked for Fate/Zero, but that had an acclaimed author writing the spin-off, while Alternative is written by some nobody. The anime adaptation is being done by Satelight, who I generally like for their devotion to over the top dumb mecha action, but the director has only previously done shite like Rosario to Vampire. As much as I’d like this to be good, I’d say that’s wishful thinking on my part.

Tari Tari

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The spiritual successor to Hanasaku Iroha, at least until the real sequel Home Sweet Home comes out. It’s by PA Works, with largely the same crew, making a show where teenage girls with shiny faces and no noses go through some kind of teen angst and come out the other side with more maturity and less clothes. Actually I tell a lie, this doesn’t quite have the same staff. While it’s true all the animation and art team are the same, it doesn’t have the same director. Far more importantly, the person writing the script is not Mari Okada! Raise the flags and down your tankards! Ding dong the witch is dead! No more of her robotic approach to drawing out emotional drama. The new director worked on parts of Hanasaku Iroha, but he hasn’t done an awful lot of his own. The only directorial job to his name is a Professor Layton movie. But who the fuck cares when there’s no Mari Okada. She’s too busy trapped in Shoji Kawamori’s basement as he takes her scripts and milks them for unintentional comedy in Aquarion EVOL and AKB0048.

Moyashimon Returns

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I had honestly given up hope. When the Moyashimon live action premiered in Noitamina 2 years ago, I thought that was the last chance we had to see Moyashimon again. It was very popular in Japan when it first ran, but 5 years had passed. The chance for my most-wanted sequel (that isn’t animated by Brains Base) appeared to have been lost. But here we are. Somehow, Moyashimon has gotten a sequel. I’m not sure what brought this on, or which of those virgins I sacrificed at the crossroads got us to this point, but we’ve got more Moyashimon. Same staff and everything. I’m in heaven.

Natsuyuki Rendezvous

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The other Noitamina title of the season. It’s about a middle age dude falling in love with girl at flower shop but she’s haunted by her dead husband, and so begins the happy adventures of pensive 20-something ghost bishies. The studio is Dogakobo, who only ever do utter shite like Kohime Musou, Myself;Yourself, Yuru Yuri and so on, but this isn’t unusual for Noitamina. Often these no-name studios hitch up their trousers and try to prove they can do more than animate male otaku-bait moe stuff. Director they’ve brought on board directed Kurenai and Red Garden, so he’s a fairly talented bloke.

So why am I so unenthused by this? Maybe it pales next to more Moyashimon in the other Noitamina slot, but that hasn’t stopped me from being enthusiastic about a few of the other shows this season I’ll get to later. Maybe it’s because, after all these years, I’m finally getting bored of josei? Both the trailer and the part of the manga I read had this awful Kimi to Boku vibe of uninterested dues lazing about being unlikeable people. The original mangaka doesn’t have a string of awards to her name that often authors of Noitamina adapted material often have. It just feels like a stop-gap series. Some random decent josei title they shoved in because they had to fill the slot with something.

Sword Art Online

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“Oh man” I hear you say. “This is by the same guy who did Accel World, that’s so cool”. “You mean that dreadful piece of loser teenage male wish fulfilment where you have no worth other than your talent at a random video game and this means the hottest girl in school will start fondling your leg” I retort grumpily. “But no, this one is totally different” you exclaim, gesturing your hands wildly. “It’s set in an online RPG that people get stuck in and if they die, they die in the real world”. “You mean just like .hack” I say, “except without the claim that it predicted the sort of obsessive culture surrounding MMOs before World of Warcraft”.

“This director is good though” you say, getting increasingly frustrated. “He worked on Monster, Death Note and Madoka”. “He also worked AnoHana, Guilty Crown and Fractale” I say dismissively, “and his one head directorial role was on Occult Academy”. “Yes but the music is by everyone’s favourite Yuki Kaijura” you say. “Ah yes” I say, my face brightening up with pure cynicism. “I know how to differentiate our new anime from .hack. Let’s hire the exact same person who did the music for that series”. By this stage you’ve given up, saying “well your taste sucks, the novels it’s adapted from are the 11th highest rated on MAL”. “It’s going to be the same generic noseless loser teenage wish fulfillment shite we’ve all seen a bajillion times before” I say, before deciding to move on from this confusing preview format and onto the next show.

Campione!

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I could probably take a wild guess at the eventual quality of this anime from the trailer alone, but for the sake of clarification let’s go through the facts. It’s based off a light novel about a regular highschool boy who has magical powers fall into his lap in the form of a pretty girl. The animation studio is Diomedea, whose greatest claim to fame is they did the Squid Girl series, but also did Nogizaku Haruka and Lotte’s Toy. Director did the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha sequels, which some people seem to like, but has gradually gone downhill since directing Sekirei, Asura Cryin’ and his latest masterpiece Ro Kyu Bu. In short, it’s the same light novel Shana clone trash that we’ve seen a bazillion times before and will be just as engaging as it ever was.

Love, Election, & Chocolate

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Hurrah for self-serious visual novel fuck-all-the-heroines adaptations. I can’t wait for the scene where the one of the girls gets complimented as being a potential great wife and her life is made because that’s all girls should aspire to be. Staff are interesting for this one. Well, at least, they’re more interesting than the usual crop of visual novel adaptation folks in that at least they never worked on Akane Iro Ni Somaru Saka. It’s largely the same staff and animation studio who worked on OreImo and Haganai. I suppose if it’s by those guys, we’ll have to come up with some shortened Japanese alias, like ShagChoc or something.

One of Them Is My Younger Sister!

From the light novel naming conventions that brought you “Because I Don’t Like My Big Brother At All–!!”, the animation studio that brought you Koi de Oshigoto, and the director of Kiss X Sis comes the latest incest craze that’s sweeping the nation! Could end this preview here, but I’ve got to squeeze something else interesting to say out of this. The script writer has the name Go Zappa, which is awesome, albeit slightly diminished by the fact his lineup of titles he’s worked on consist of Myself;Yourself, Kohime Musou and A Bridge to the Starry Skies.

Estetica of a Rogue Hero

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This is one of those anime where you might have been interested by it because of its synopsis if it happened to be made by a different studio. It’s about international organisations fighting demons coming into our world and a wayward hero bringing back the demon princess or something along those lines. Not instantly grabbing but sounds decent enough and doesn’t include the words “ordinary highschool boy” or “is not blood related”, which is sometimes all I need to give an anime a chance these days. Problem is, it’s by studio Arms. The same guys who made Queens Blade, Slave Nurses and Body Transfer. The director is a veteran having directed Love Doll and A Heat For All Seasons and even a few episodes of Naruto. Now it’s true that sometimes a studio can hitch up their trousers and try to produce something a bit more ambitious when given the source material, but unfortunately that already happened with Arms 8 years ago when they adapted Elfen Lied. Then again, Elfen Lied had about as much titties as Body Transfer so maybe they still have this one decent series in them.

Humanity Has Declined

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Seiji Kishi has one big problem as a director: He has absolutely no friggen idea how to do tone. See Angel Beats, Persona 4 and Kamisama Dolls. This means that the shows he does that are serious, or at least the serious elements of the anime he works on, tend not to work because they’re jarring and feel false. On the other hand, shows like Seto no Hanayome and Sunred, along with the comedy parts of Angel Beats and Persona 4, prove the guy has a knack for comedy. Or at least, the wild hyperactive and sightly surreal style of comedy, which I happen to like. So we’ve got that clear? Seiji Kishi doing serious drama is bad. Seiji Kishi doing weird comedy is good.

Right, now watch the trailer.

I’m so fucking pumped for this show.

Dakara Boku wa, H ga Dekinai

The title roughly means “So You Mean I Can’t Be a Pervert”. It tells the tale of the guy who spends his entire existence thinking about boobies, but then has a magical girl fall into his lap with a pair of the aforementioned jugs, only to discover that if he thinks pervy thoughts his brain explodes or something along those lines. The show is just an excuse to shove T&A everywhere, so I have no idea why you would watch this while it’s airing and not wait for the uncensored DVD/BD releases. Maybe anime has trained you to be turned on by blinding beams of light and you now get uncomfortable around torches.

Joshiraku

This one is sort of interesting. It’s a manga by the same guy who wrote Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei (the artwork is by the Toradora artist, in case you were wondering why they look similar). The ‘story’ is about a bunch of girls who sit in a room and talk about shit. That’s literally it. They’re just mouthpieces for this nutjob authors’ ramblings about society. From what I could tell from the small section of the manga I read, it really does not have any sort of continuing narrative or sense of place or characters or anything. If anyone watched that Flash short Gakkatsu, it’s very similar to that.

Director is Tsutomu Mizushima, who has finally stopped pretending he can direct horror after Another and Blood-C and has gone back to what he’s actually good at, comedy. JC Staff are animating it though, who have gotten to the stage that their presence on a show marks it down as an automatic skip, but maybe the style of the material they’re adapting will force them to try something different. They have to, animating this as just talking heads would be excruciatingly dull. There is another problem with this in that the manga…err, isn’t that funny. At least, not the parts I read. The Japanese word puns were totally lost on a Johnny Foreigner like myself, and it doesn’t have the claim to social satire that Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei has. I can also see it getting very repetitive very fast, unless they try mix things up a bit, or at the very least cut the episode lengths down to 10 minutes.

Chouyaku Hyakunin Isshu: Uta Koi

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You know the way in Chihayafuru the game Karuta involved people reading out poems? Well, this is an anime based on the stories of those poems. A super liberal interpretation, but I doubt that there will be too many people declaring they’ve ruined the original. Manga fans could learn something from historical haiku fans. The stories are generally historical romance stuff involving women in flowery kimonos, men wearing silly hats and, since this is historical fiction, will probably involve more paedophilia and incest than every single other anime this season combined. But it’s OK because it’s not smut, it’s Literature.

This anime is actually based off a manga that interpreted these poems, and the manga is super popular in Japan. Director is Kasai Kenichi, director of the first seasons of Honey and Clover and Nodame Cantabile. Apparently he’s decided to stop sucking by doing shite like Miracle Train and totally ruining Bakuman and is returning to the josei stuff he’s actually good at. In fact, the staff in general are very talented. It’s the kind of thing you’d normally expect to show up in Noitamina. Admittedly I’m not overly keen on historical Japanese stuff, what with everyone being overly polite and ending their sentences with –dono and everything, but if you like this kind of stuff then this is about as high a quality one as you’re going to get.

Binbou-gami ga!

Telling you an anime is being done by the animation studio Sunrise is a pretty vague term. Unlike studios like Shaft, KyoAni, Arms etc., there’s no solid creative vision behind the name. Sunrise are so big they have various sub-divisions who are working on various anime at any one time. I’ll give you a short and totally factually incorrect briefing behind each sub-division at Sunrise. First there’s the Gundam division, whose job it is to remake the same anime they’ve been making since 1979. Then there’s the Under the Direct Influence of the Sunrise Executive Boardroom of Evil (UDISED) division, who are thrown a collection of marketable traits and told to make them into an anime. Then there’s the Mai Hime team, who do largely the same thing as the UDISED division, except with less bishies and more buxom girls with multicoloured hair. Then there’s the Animate Light Novel Trash division, who operate in the basement so none of them can hurl themselves out of their windows. There’s the Insanely Profitable Kiddy Anime division, who animate stuff like Battle Spirits in between rolling in huge piles of money and cocaine.

Then there’s the Gintama division. After honing their craft having to produce a new episode every week for the past 5 years for that sometimes-satirical-but-normally-played-totally-straight shounen giant, they’re now floundering about a bit, wondering where they can unleash their branch of shouty yet brilliant but also penniless comedic directing next. First there was Daily Lives of Highschool Boys, the merciless lampooning of girls doing cute shit genre, and now we have this. Binbou-gami ga, about a lucky girl having the god of bad luck come down and try suck the luck out of her. It’s not the same director as Nichibros unfortunately. They got the Other Gintama Director, the guy who directed from episode 100 onwards, but that’s still 150 bloody episodes of honing his craft. I read one chapter of the manga and it was great, the only manga I checked out from this season I genuinely enjoyed. Just don’t expect good animation from this. The Insanely Profitable Kiddy Anime division wouldn’t share any of their budget. They spent it all on holographic trading cards AKB48 members.

La storia della Arcana Famiglia

Based off a visual novel dating sim aimed at teenage girls. It’s a bit like Inu X Boku from earlier this year, a rich teenage girl feels all alone and boo hoo first world problems being the one percent is suffering etc. Her dad has ordered the local bishie brigade to fight each other and the winner gets her hand in marriage, something every single one of the boys is dying for. Literally. Anyway, director is Chiaki Kon, person who adapted those awful BL rape = love stories Junjou and Sekai-Ichi. Studio is JC Staff, who suck whether they’re doing light novel Shana Clones or teenage girl wish fulfilment. It’s mildly depressing that the manliest looking TV anime of this season is this. An otome game adaptation. Every show I’m even mildly interested in this season are either bizarro comedies or young adult female targeted romance stuff. I mean, I appreciate that anime isn’t as macho-obsessed as western culture is, but would it hurt to have a few more anime that are at least a bit darker in tone? And before anyone starts saying Muv Luv, darker in tone that doesn’t include tit-tastic body suits.

Kokoro Connect

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First reaction upon seeing the promo art for this was “oh god not another one of these pieces of shit the anime industry is dying get me a strong whiskey and a shotgun”. However further investigation led me to believe that this will be different from what my original reaction thought it would be. Not necessarily ‘good’, but at least not about a group of girls being insufferably nice to each other. The premise is a body swap one, where a group of girls get their bodies swapped with a group of guys. OK it’s been done before, but it’s ripe for comedy. Silver Link are animating it, who generally just do comedies like Baka to Test or Dusk Maiden of Amnesia. Not exactly masterpieces, but maybe this will be the time they finally produce something worthwhile.

Well, at least, I thought it would be comedy, until that bizarrely depressing trailer aired. Turns out that, while it’s being animated by Silver Link, their usual director Shin Oonuma is just the ‘head director’, which means he dashes into the room every now and then, tells everyone they need more polka dots in the background, then runs out again. The actual director is a dude who used to work for Bee Train, guys who made Phantom, Noir, Madlax, .hack and so on. So now we know why the trailer has this weirdly melancholic depressing vibe to it. Not sure if that will be a good thing. To be honest, it will probably just result in horrifically forced melodrama. But hey, at least it’s something different.

Aruvu Rezuru: Mechanized Fairies

About a year ago, the publishing giant Kodansha ran a competition in which new authors would submit works and the winner would be ‘considered’ to be adapted into an anime. Apparently they considered long enough to allow Mechanized Fairies be made into an anime. The name makes it sound like it’s an adaptation of Artemis Fowl, but it’s not quite as cool as that. It’s about a Dennou Coil-esque future where cyberspace is over real space but some dudes sister gets sucked into cyberspace and he has to go rescue her. It’s a mildly interesting concept that I’d be more excited by if they didn’t get some total newbie director to handle it with ZEXCS doing the adaptation, the studio whose sole purpose in life is to take interesting concepts and turn them into bland uninspired anime.

Oda Nobuna’s Ambition

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The idea for this is genuinely neat. Take the famous blood-thirsty samurai wartime general, possibly the manliest person in the entirety of Japanese history, and turn him into a cutesy moe girl but with the same warmongering traits the original had. And yet Japan have somehow managed to turn this idea into something so dull and repetitive. I’ve lost count of the amount of anime that have decided to genderswap Oda Nobunaga, but it has to be in double figures by this point. I don’t get it! I don’t even see whose success they’re trying to capitalise on. To make matters worse, it’s a joint project between two animation studios. Madhouse, the animators of Death Note, Casshern Sins, Kaiba, Tatami Galaxy, Redline, Summer Wars, Nana, Satoshi Kon films etc. and Studio Gokumi, the creators of A Channel. Madhouse, you have truly sunk to new depths.

Kingdom

More Era of the Warring States stuff. The animation studio is shounen powerhouse Pierrot and the staff are all a bunch of folks who worked on kids shows and nothing else. So expect a kids show. Actually, more accurately, expect it to never get subbed, because Era of the Warring States stuff never gets subbed. It does air a month before everything else, so maybe by the time the new season rolls around, the first episode will have finally been subbed.

Chitose Get You!!

It’s a 4-koma adaptation about a 11 year old girl who is in love with her teacher. I’m sure there’s a way you could make me less interested in this anime, but for the life of me I can’t think of one.

Ebiten

Arrrgggh get it away from meee!!!

Yuru Yuri ♪♪

It’s that time in the season preview where I reach the segment full of sequels to anime I don’t like so have nothing constructive or interesting to say about them and are pointless to preview anyway because if you’ve seen the first season you’ll watch this one.

Hakuouki: Reimei-roku

Out of all the bishie shows to continue getting sequels, this one in particular leaves me flabbergasted. I’ve never heard anyone have anything good to say about this. Well, beyond that the guys looked hot, but is that seriously it? I thought girls cared about whether their husbandos have nice personalities more than men do? They’re not even that attractive compared to the men in something like, say, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

Rinne no Lagrange Second Season

This barely even counts as a second season. It’s just the new case of an unusually long gap between episodes 13 and 14.

Dog Days 2

I had never put down Dog Days as the kind of show that would get a second season, but apparently Japanese anime fans want more of possibly the blandest and most inoffensive anime of all time.

Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere II

I wonder if the first season has gotten through the 1000-page prologue the novels have yet.

Movies

The movies covered here are ones that are getting their BD release over the next 3 months, not movies that are having their theatrical releases. This is because us foreigners won’t get to see movies until they get their BD release, unless you catch it at a film festival or something.

From Up On Poppy Hill

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Ghibli’s latest flick. Not by Hayao Miyazaki. Not by Isao Takahata. Not even by that new guy who directed Arrietty. This is by Goro Miyazki, Hayao’s son. The guy has directed a movie before, but it was the near universally disliked Tales of Earthsea. His father reportedly refused to talk to his son as he made the movie because he thought he didn’t have the experience to direct a feature length film. Anyway, they appear to have made up since then because Dad helped his son on From Up On Poppy Hill. It’s based off a shojo manga set in the unspecified past in a seafaring town. Comes out on the 20th of June. I’d normally say it’s worth waiting for Disney to dub it and see it in the cinema, but Disney doesn’t appear to have touched this one yet.

Reviews of the movie have been generally positive while not being raving. It was the third highest grossing movie in 2011 in Japan, behind two Hollywood blockbusters, so Japan still liked it. As much as I liked Ghibli’s last flick Arrietty, I’m struggling to work up too much enthusiasm for this one for some reason. It’s probably because I’ve never been overly keen on non-magical Ghibli stuff. I dozed off several times during the hopelessly dull Only Yesterday. It is still a Ghibli film though, and I’m contractually obligated as an anime fan to watch new Ghibli films.

Berserk: The Golden Age Arc

The Egg of the King

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Earlier in this monster post I mentioned that the otome game was the manliest looking TV anime of the season. I had to be very careful and specify that it was manliest TV anime, due to the small matter that the manliest anime ever was getting a movie remake. So manly it can have naked water fights between two muscled men and still be manly about it. I’ve seen the original Berserk TV series and, to be absolutely clear on this, I consider it to be the greatest story ever told, and not just for naked water fights. I know it stopped only part of the way through the manga, but I don’t care. I consider that the greatest possible way they could have closed that story off, giving it this perfect cyclical nature to the narrative. In many ways, I didn’t want any more, especially since all I seemed to hear about the manga after that point was demon rape and more demon rape. Also new volumes of Berserk take forever to come out because Miura gets all the time he wants to make it perfect (which he instead spends his time on playing Idolm@ster, but whatever), so catching up would eventually just be an exercise in frustration.

But then these movies were announced. 15 years after the original TV series, we got movies retelling the story of Berserk. Weird thing is this trilogy retells exactly the same material covered by the original anime rather than any of the new material. Don’t really get the logic behind that. Studio 4°C decided the best way to handle this anime was to make it fully CG. Judging by the trailer, they’ve actually done a damn fine job of making the character models work, which is usually the thing CG struggles with, although early reviews of the movie said the animation in the large battle scenes look dodgy. We’ll find out soon enough anyway, since the BD has been released in Japan already.

Hells

In the very first season preview I did, so long ago that I was on an entirely different blog and collaborated on the preview with two folks who don’t even exist on the internet anymore, I wrote a preview piece for a little movie by the name of Hells Angels. This was before I knew how to do season previews properly. For example, I didn’t know about having to wait for movies to get DVD releases before I get to see them. Hells Angels looked seriously fucking cool though. It was an experimental movie by Madhouse that only got screened at arthouse theatres. Remember this was back in 2008, when Madhouse was at the absolute height of their game. That was the season they made Casshern Sins, One Outs and Mouyou no Hako (also Chaos;Head but shut up they were allowed one flop). Earlier that year they had also animated Maasaki Yuasa’s piece of genius Kaiba, so I was ready to lap up absolutely anything they made, and the weirder it looked, the better.

But it never came out. It became a routine of mine to check torrent sites and various internet hideouts to find any sign of this movie, but no luck. It got screened at a bunch of movie festivals and then was never seen of again. I had sort of given up hope. That is, until April 2012. Three and a half years later, a little announcement of ANN came up. Hells Angels (or Hells as it was now simply known as) was getting a BD release on the 3rd of August. Better yet, it was going to have English subtitles, so I wouldn’t have to wait for some fansubber to work up the enthusiasm to subtitle an obscure artsy and fairly long anime movie. Now I’ve just got to hope someone rips the blasted thing. I should probably import it myself, except for the problems of no BluRay player to watch it on even if I did get it. Also I’m not even sure if it will be any good. The director of this later went on to make Kill Me Baby. But it’s been so long. I really have to see it, just to close this chapter in my anime fandom.

Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker

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Oh my god, I cant believe they made it look like a goddamn ANIME. I loved DA for it’s style and ‘realism’ not it’s fucking panty shots. DA was a western game for cryin out loud.

Highest rated comment on the Dragon Age anime trailer. A nice little insight into what your average gamer thinks of anime. I remember seeing similar comments back when they were making Halo Legends. In fact, it’s something I’ve seen an awful lot across the internet. Gamers look down on anime. Anime fans never seem to be bothered fighting back much either, partly because most anime fans are heavy gamer nerds in their own rights, but mostly because gamers control the internet like big bullying jocks. Anyway, the Dragon Age anime. It’s a co-production with Bioware, Funimation and some Japanese animation studio. CG looks pretty terrible, to the point that it makes you appreciate how good the Berserk CG looks. The Funimation guys on the latest ANNCast said pre-airings of it at anime cons were largely positive, but they’d hardly say it was terrible and everyone should ignore it when they’re helping fund it. It’s out 25th May so we can all fap over its numerous panty shots then.

Yamato 2199

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The original Space Battleship Yamato is one of the most important anime ever created. Made back in 1974, and specifically the more popular movie retelling in 1977, it’s credited for evolving anime beyond kids shows, creating the very first anime otaku, and inspiring later anime behemoths like Gundam and Macross. Almost 40 years later they’ve decided it was due another remake. Not sure if it will stand the test of time (in fact, I’m almost certain it won’t), but it’s a neat piece of history.

The airing order of this is complicated. The first ‘movie’, that got aired in cinemas in Japan in April and the BD of which is coming out 25th May, is the first two episodes of the Yamato 2199 TV series spliced together. However the TV series that hasn’t aired yet. It’s supposed to air sometime in 2013. Then there’s another ‘movie’ coming out on the 27th July, although I think that’s just episodes 3–6 of this TV series that isn’t airing on TV? I don’t know, it’s all rather confusing.

K-ON Movie

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Yup, it’s the K-ON movie, where the girls go to London. Apparently the coffee shop the girls in the poster pictures are outside of has become a tourist destination for crazy Japanese K-ON fans. They must have confused the people running the coffee shop when suddenly a bunch of Asians carrying pillows with anime girls on walked in. The coffee shop included a picture of the K-ON girls in it shop window, which I think is rather neat. I even know some English folk on twitter who went there. Anyway, early reviews of the movie said it was exactly what you’d expect from a K-ON movie. I’m no fan of the franchise, but I’ve made my peace with it long ago. Good for you guys who like it, it comes out 18th July. Just so long as they don’t make anymore…

.Hack//The Movie

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Part of the humongous .hack franchise. It appears that you can jump into this movie without having seen any of the previous .hack stuff. However judging by the trailer, I wouldn’t recommend it. If the Dragon Age trailer was a step down from the CG on display in the Berserk trailer, then this is 50 million steps down again from that. It’s awful! Comes out June 28th if you’re a .hack completist. Do .hack completists even exist? Someone has to be propping this franchise up after all these years.

There’s also a few of your regularly scheduled franchise movies. There’s yet another Precure All Stars film right on schedule, as well as another Inazuma Eleven film.

OVAs

I won’t be covering all the anime that are getting DVD specials, since these are normally silly fanservice side stories that add very little to the actual story.

Code Geass

Nunnally in Wonderland

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The interesting new Code Geass project is Akito the Exiled, a 4-part OVA each of which is 50 minutes long, directed by the same guy who did Escaflowne, Noein and Birdy Decode. The first episode of that is out this August…in cinemas. Not on BD/DVD, so we stinky gaijin won’t see it anytime soon. Instead we’ve got to do with this thing. Alice in Wonderland with Code Geass characters. I guess, for all the things you could level against Code Geass, you can’t say it ever took itself too seriously. Very confused as to how this is supposed to fit into the continuity though. I mean, Nunnallys’ eyes are open, but Lelouch is there too. Does this mean that Lelouch was the Cart Driver all along!?!?!?!?!

Persona 4: True End

Apparently that ending we got for the Persona 4 TV series was a horrible lie. What we have here is the True End, a final episode to replace the fake final episode we all saw. The only other anime I’ve seen do this was Ore no Imouto, and all that did was tease us with an anime that possibly didn’t have Kirino in it at all but then restored the status quo by the end. The true end that is.

Otoboku: Futari no Elder

A sequel to Otoboku: Maidens Falling For Me, which is one of those yuri anime for men who wish they were in a lesbian relationship. You know the kind. It involves a dude cross dressing to get into an all girl academy and then all the girls fall in love with him because all girls are lesbians except for the time they want to sleep with you.

Nogizaka Haruka’s Secret: Finale

Did you know that I was blogging even further back beyond what this blog says? Not even from my Bokutachi no Blog days, even further back than that. I tried to mix my two interests at the time, anime and footba-sorry, I mean anime and saaawwwcur. It didn’t go particularly well. Anyway, I wrote a season preview back then too. It only covered about 4–5 shows, but I distinctly remember one of them being the original Nogizaku Haruka. I remember because I thought it would be great. It wasn’t. Just goes to show I’ve been ballsing up my predictions in season previews longer than you realise. Oh right, this new Nogizaku Haruka. It’s a 4-part sequel to the last season that closes out the story, covering the final batch of the novels. I was under the impression they got married in the last one, so I guess this OVA will involve, in true moe marriage tradition, the death of all their children due to bad weather.

Corpse Party: Missing Footage

Corpse Party is an adventure video game about a haunted school or something. Corpse Party anthology is a spin off from that made by 5pb, the co-creators of the Steins;Gate game along with Nitroplus. Missing Footage is a bundled anime with that game. There, now you know what this is.

Asa made Jugyō Chu

Closing out the season preview with the token terribad looking OVA. By the creative staff that brought you Princess Lover! Actually Princess Lover was sorta witty at times due to some genius who wrote the dialogue, propelling what should have been a horrid experience into something not quite watchable but at least not painful. Then they made a hentai out of it, which they really should have done in the first place and not bothered with the TV series. I seriously considered doing a hentai section for this season preview, because I felt it was disingenuous to call out pandering softcore porn while not giving people a reasonable alternative if they stopped being pussies and watched some real cartoon porn. But then I looked at the upcoming hentai and realised that posting pictures of them would have my website taken off the internet and the police around to my house barely 30 minutes after I hit the publish button. If you want a nice list of the upcoming hentai though, MAL is surprisingly good in this regard. For the record, it was the one called Suki de Suki de that caused me to rethink my hentai preview options.

Seems only fitting to follow-up an Aquarion EVOL post with Shoji Kawamori’s latest nonsense fest, AKB0048. In the world of AKB0048, jpop idol music is wonderful and amazing and everyone loves listening to it. That’s fine by me, but I do have a bit of a problem with idol music being the bastion of the free world.

There’s a post on Shameful Otaku Secret about the irony of how entertainment is one of the most effective methods to subjugate the masses. But that’s a rather bleak view of entertainment. If you’ll allow me to get a bit arts studenty here for a second, that the view many early Marxist writers had of entertainment. The main power it had was to distract people away from fighting for real issues, a delopoliticising effect. I’m not going to fight for my civil rights because I’m too busy cheering for idols.

However that’s a fairly backward view, and most people nowadays recognise that entertainment has a power to challenge society. Taking music on its own, the birth of pop music and Elvis and all that was a form of sexual expression that had been pushed out of mainstream culture. Punk was a way for young people to express their frustration at their role in society. The entire goth rock thing is mainly a form of teenage rebellion. You can make all forms of entertainment represent something. Stand up comedy is mocking social norms and people in power. Burlesque dancing is a form of sexual expression. Even something as utterly dopey and inoffensive as Morris dancing could be viewed as a form of nationalism as the dancers try to keep a part of English culture alive.

In AKB0048, the resistance decided a great way to fight this injustice is through idol jpop. Why? Why idols? The lyrics are about love and stuff, so are they banning dangerous messages about how loving people is nice? Nope, because the main character has parents who call each other ‘dear’, and even her friend has a boyfriend who seems quite partial to following the rules of society. So it’s not the lyrics. Maybe it’s the very nature of fun or artistic expression they’re trying to ban, and idol jpop is just the purest version of that? Well no because, as the post on Shameful Otaku Secret points out, there’s still fashion. The main character’s room is filled with stuffed animals and even a mobile above her bed. The only thing her dad had a problem with was the AKB0048 poster.

What’s left then? Well, analysing the concert scene, we have a bunch of young women dressed up as schoolgirls performing to an audience consisting largely of older men, along with a few young girls in the crowd who want to become those idols. There was that one shot of one of the AKB0048 members blowing a kiss to a selection of the men, who all blush and swoon. The powerful message the AKB0048 concert had was one of older men sexualising young girls and for younger girls to aspire to become one of these sexualised pop stars in their teenage years.

Row row fight the power I guess.

I can understand why you may have decided not to watch Aquarion EVOL. It’s a sequel to a show made in the early 00’s that wasn’t particularly well received. Even if the sequel is set 12,000 years into the future, it probably wasn’t worth checking out. Let me tell you now, as a person who never watched the original Aquarion, that EVOL is glorious. Gloriously stupid, gloriously cheesy, gloriously insane, full of the dumbest metaphors and overblown characters with fantastic speeches. Instead of trying to convince you to watch it with a review trying to talk about its positives in a vague fashion, I will instead list out a number of the things that occur during the series. Keep in mind that Aquarion EVOL does (almost) all of these things with a totally straight face. You may stop reading when you have been convinced.

1: When piloting the giant robots, the characters discover they can detect incoming missiles better the more skin they have exposed, so each pilot starts enthusiastically tearing off their plugsuits.

2: When the robots combine, the characters go into a sparkly otherworld where they fly through space naked while exclaiming how exhilarating the feeling of ‘combining’ is.

3: There is a character called Andy W. Hole. Because he’s an artist like Andy Warhol, except he uses holes to make his art.

4: A villain infiltrates their school to find information, but gets won over to the good guys side by the power of moe.

5: Each character gets buried underground as a form of intensive training, where they each go through an existential crisis.

6: One of the female’s boobs are routinely referred to as her “Big Bangs”.

7: When the lead male character gets really…into piloting the giant robot, he can unleash a special move called “Infinity Punch”, which is essentially a metaphorical erection.

8: There’s a scene where the adults are all in the Evangelion NERV style control room where each character tries to form a meaningful metaphor out of the doughnut they are holding.

9: It includes the line “I would rather have my body broken than my heart”.

10: The wall separating the male school and the female school is called the “Berlin”, which gets knocked down by the aforementioned “Infinity Punch” so the girls and boys can finally mix.

11: In the above mentioned sequence where the characters start tearing off their clothes to detect missiles better, the glasses-wearing piano-playing blonde-haired bishie, who is nowhere near the fight scene at the time, gets so into their overflowing energy that he too starts to button down his shirt.

12: The fujioshi character has a special power of ‘decaying’, which causes metal to rust when she’s in the giant robot.

13: A villain character, whose power is reversing other people’s’ powers back at them, constantly tells a girl that she stinks horribly and that he hates her and wants to kill her, but it turns out that this is because he talks in reverse and is actually hopelessly in love with her.

14: Andy W. Hol tries to chat up the girl whose power is to fill up holes by saying “let my dirt be the dirt to fill your hole”.

15: When the main character gets turned on, his ankles grow wings and he starts to fly. When one female character squeezes her boobs against him and he starts floating, the girl he was supposed to be hitting on sulks and says “so you’ll fly for anyone”.

16: This is called a cat.

17: So is this.

18: When the boss is away, instead of giving them simple orders in a letter or on the phone, he sends them a box with a doughnut and ants inside and forces them to work out what metaphor he’s saying today.

19: There’s an episode where the characters take a hot spring in the giant robots and the water is filled with bananas.

20: That moment where you discover the title of the show is Aquarion LOVE BACKWARDS.

Upon returning from my self-imposed hiatus, the first anime I caught up on was Space Bros. The intent was to do a quick post summing up my thoughts on the latest batch of episodes so I could get back into the groove of episodic blogging. I figured this might be difficult though. Trying to cram in 3 episodes worth of content into one post? Impossible! Well, not really, as it turns out, because Space Bros beats the same gong over and over again.

Let’s talk about episodic blogging for a second, because I feel many people get the wrong impression of what it is. It’s not a summary of what happened in the episode. Nor is it a review of episode. At least, that’s not the approach I take. It’s using the events of the episode as a springboard for further discussion, whether it is relating to this specific anime, the world of anime in general, or larger societal issues. A good story should do this naturally, although often it requires a bit more brainpower on your part to get the most out of it. This is where discussion and episodic blogging helps. It challenges you to think about the episode, and reading someone else’s posts can increase your enjoyment of the anime as well.

The issue comes in trying to come up with something new to say about every episode. A naturally episodic anime means there is always something new with each episode to talk about, but continuous stories often tread the same points over and over again. There’s a reason why my Steins;Gate posts were half the length of my Durarara posts. Steins;Gate was the building up of the same general ideas gradually. It made for absorbing viewing, but difficult to come up with new things to say each week. Meanwhile Durarara’s naturally episodic nature, notably more in the first half than the second, meant there was always a new perspective to see the series through.

And then there’s series like Space Bros. Space Bros has one message it has been beating ours heads with over and over again with. Follow your dreams. Believe in yourself. Try your hardest and you will make it. The American Dream! Except we’re in Japan, but whatever. That’s a lovely story and all, but it’s repetitive and gets dull quickly. It’s also not evolving as it goes on. Now a lot of stories often have one core message going through them that drives the show. Let’s take Infinite Ryvius and say it’s about how teenagers buckle under responsibility (a rather reductionist way of looking at the series, but bear with me). In Ryvius, the characters evolve to reflect this message. In Space Bros, it hasn’t felt like the message has evolved, nor have the characters, to reflect the passing of time. It’s like listening to song that repeats the same few bars over and over again with the same lyrics repeated each time.

…huh, I think I just described the majority of dance music.

This post is an attempt to collate this information into one place to help fans discover where the best place is and what best order to watch these franchises is. I’ve written up a list here on the franchises I’m familiar with, but for a full list I need your help. Leave comments and I’ll update the list with your additions, crediting the person who left the advice as well. You can also disagree and re-write what’s already on the list, because invariably people will have different takes on what’s the best order to watch these things in. I’m also looking for people who read manga to tell people what chapter an anime ends on, so they can carry on the story from where the anime left off.

Aria

Anim­a­tion -> Nat­ural -> OVA -> Origination. Des­pite its name, Ori­gin­a­tion is not a pre­quel or any­thing like that. The ori­gin­a­tion special, or ‘epis­ode 5.5′ as it is known, comes after ep 5 (well, gee).

Credit to Adamar

Birdy

Tet­suwan Birdy and DECODE are two takes on the same story, the lat­ter with a bet­ter exe­cu­tion and was made several years later so has much better animation. DECODE -> The Cypher OVA -> DECODE 02 -> Tetsuwan’s OVAs if you’ve come to enjoy the fran­chise should be the optimal way.

Credit to Yuyucow

Black Rock Shooter

The TV series is based on a single episode OVA that was based on a music video that was based on a song that was based on a bit of character artwork. The OVA and the TV series have the same basic set up. The OVA doesn’t really go anywhere though, so if you want a story you might be better off with just watching the TV series.

Blood

The three different anime versions of Blood have no plot-related connections to each other, so it doesn’t matter what order you watch them in.

Boku no Pico

This is very import­ant and I wouldn’t want any­one to be fooled by the titles. Boku no Pico -> Pico to Chico -> Pico x CoCo x Chico. Now enjoy.

Credit to Yuyucow

Clamp

Clamps’ various stories have a lot of crossover characters and storylines. Often the anime are made to be open to newcomers, but if you want to try follow the crossover plots, here’s a stupidly long and complicated guide of the chronological order:

Card­captor Sak­ura (1−35 -> movie -> rest of the series -> The Sealed Card -> Spe­cials): this a good entry point, but besides that it is abso­lutely neces­sary for both Holic and Tsub­asa. Both assume you’ve read it and are famil­iar with the char­ac­ters, par­tic­u­larly Clow Reed. Then RG Veda manga -> OVA. This sets the mood for what many con­sider to be ‘typ­ical CLAMP’. Then CLAMP School Detect­ives; it occurs at the same time as the manga Man of Many Faces and Dunklyon: CLAMP School Defend­ers, although see­ing as they are not anim­ated I con­sider the two optional. Dunklyon ties into RG Veda and has char­ac­ters appear­ing in Tsub­asa.

Right, now Tokyo Babylon OVA -> X TV -> X movie -> Tokyo Babylon manga -> epis­ode 0 -> X manga: if you’d rather just read the manga and skip watch­ing the vari­ous adapt­a­tions, Tokyo Babylon > X as they are dir­ect sequels. It takes place in the same world as CLAMP School Detect­ives, and the char­ac­ters have a rather import­ant role here. Next is Magic Knight Rayearth (S1 -> S2 -> OVA) -> Angelic Layer -> Chob­its (-> Chib­its); MKR and AL aren’t sequels and take place in dif­fer­ent worlds. MKR is in the same world as CLAMP School Detect­ives. Clover and Wish only have music video adapt­a­tions. Wish needs ought to be read before Kobato, but isn’t strictly neces­sary. Miyuki-chan in Won­der­land is ref­er­enced often, but not in any import­ant way. The Legend of Chun-Hyang has never been anim­ated, and isn’t strictly neces­sary to under­stand the arc of Tsub­asa it plays a large role in.

Okay, now: xxxHOLiC TV and movie -> Tsub­asa Chron­icles (see entry); xxxHOLiC Kei should be last. Then Kobato., Blood-C and Gohou Drug. Kobato. should only be watched after TRC, as it spoils the end­ing. Blood-C ref­er­ences xxxHOLiC, but can be watched whenever, prefer­ably after RG Veda and X as their storytelling relies on you know­ing they are incred­ibly sad­istic. Gohou Drug can be star­ted dur­ing xxxHOLiC, but should be left until after as the recently released chapters take place dur­ing Kei. Gate 7 is still pub­lish­ing, so it would be prudent to leave it last.

Credit to Anca

Clannad

Start with the Clannad TV series. Then it might be best to jump into the two alternate world spin offs after that, the Kyou Chapter and the Tomoyo Chapter. After Story is the sequel to the original TV series. If you loved Clannad, just watch all of it. However, if you got sick of Clannad, or weren’t huge on it anyway, it is perfectly reasonable to skip the entire first 8 episodes. They’re just a bunch of filler. The part of After Story that is so revered in certain corners of the internet only starts on episode 9. In fact, I’d also hazard to say that if you don’t like the Clannad TV series but still want to see what the fuss about After Story is, it’s easy to jump into After Story at episode 9. As for the alternate world Clannad movie, it’s some­what of a for­got­ten child com­pared to the rest of the fran­chise. It’s gen­er­ally cri­ti­cized for its shoddy char­ac­ter design, anim­a­tion, and diver­gence from cer­tain ele­ments of the ori­ginal story. How­ever, the diver­gence is con­sidered to be a good and a bad thing, so the movie comes out as a decent work as long as it’s not too closely com­pared to the TV series.

Credit to Appropriant

Code-E/Mission-E

Code-E and Mission-E, sea­sons one and two respect­ively. No OVAs, no movies, no fluff. Just sea­sons one and two in order chro­no­lo­gic­ally, and they just hap­pen to have dif­fer­ent names.

Credit to blazingdead

Cowboy Bebop

The Bebop movie occurs between episodes 22 and 23. Most people just wait until they’ve finished the TV series to watch it.

Crest/Banner of the Stars

Start with Crest of the Stars. Then there’s Crest of the Stars: Birth, which is a prequel to Crest of the Stars, which I’d recommend slotting it in here. Then watch in straight chronological order, Banner of the Stars I, then Banner II, then Banner III.

Darker than Black

Start with the original TV series. Then watch the side story special episode. Then move onto the Gaiden OVA and finally onto the second season. The second season originally aired before the Gaiden OVA, but the OVA comes first chronologically and clears up a lot of the confusion that arose from the second TV series, particularly the change in Hei’s character.

Detective Conan

If you don’t mind being spoiled for something very small, you can jump right into the movies, they make a good start­ing point. I recom­mend movie 12. Otherwise, or afterwards, watch the TV series. Lupin III. vs Detect­ive Conan is as friendly to new­comers as any other part of Lupin fran­chise, so that could also be a good starting point if you already like Lupin III.

Watch the movies at least after these epis­odes. Movie 1 — ep 10; Movie 2 — ep 32; Movie 3 — ep 129; Movie 4–12 — ep 147; Movie 13 — ep 345; Movie 14 and 15 — ep 365. About the OVAs, all except num­ber 1, 9 and 11 are sup­posed to be seen after ep 147. First OVA should be watched after epis­ode 50. It has some minor spoil­ers about epis­ode 129, but those only con­sist of one char­ac­ter appereance. Ninth OVA includes great spoil­ers for epis­odes up to 200. Elev­enth OVA takes place in Japan dur­ing the Lon­don arc (616−621), when most of the char­ac­ters are (sur­pris­ingly) in Lon­don. A cer­tain char­ac­ter from epis­ode 509 appears there, but almost noth­ing is revealed about him. Since movie 11, movie spe­cials called Magic Files were sold on DVDs as well. For movies 11, 12 and 13, they provide a sort of back­story that has very little to do with plots of the cor­res­pond­ing movies. How­ever, Magic Files for movies 14 and 15 have minor spoil­ers, so they should be watched after their movies. Magic Kaito is a series of DC spe­cials based on a dif­fer­ent manga by the same author. They have noth­ing to do with DC and only provide a back­story for pop­u­lar Kaitou Kid char­ac­ter. There are also sev­eral cameos by DC char­ac­ters.

If you really want a stupid level of detail, see here.

Credit to Meonlyme1845, Anca

Dominion Tank Police

Watch the original OVA and then stop. Do not watch New Dominion Tank Police and do not, under any circumstance, watch the TANK S.W.A.T. CGI thing.

Durarara!!

Watch the first 12 episodes of the TV series, then jump into the first episode of the special. Then go onto the rest of the TV series, and finally back onto the second special episode. Then watch the second season WHICH WILL BE MADE! Also it would be wise to watch Baccano before watching Durarara, as some Baccano characters make cameo appearances in Durarara.

Evangelion

Evan­gelion TV series -> End of Eva. The movies are retell­ings and should be watched after the ori­ginal series and movie. Altern­at­ively if while watch­ing the TV series you get com­pletely sick of Shinji’s whin­ing, it might be best to cut your losses and jump straight to the altern­ate retell­ing movies as they make his character less of a hopeless whinger there.

Fate/whatever franchise

This one’s awkward. The ideal starting point would be the Fate/Stay Night visual novel, but the level of wordiness in the VN would be incredibly intimidating to anyone who has never played visual novels before. There’s the anime adaptation Fate/Stay Night, which isn’t a particularly good adaptation. Then there’s the prequel Fate/Zero which, despite not being written by the original author, is widely considered to be the best part of the Fate/whatever franchise. MAL splits Fate/Zero into two seasons, but that’s because MAL is retarded. The so-called second season was just an unusually long break between episodes 13 and 14. Thing is, both Fate/Zero and Fate/Stay Night spoil stuff for each other, so it’s difficult to say which to start with. If you can handle visual novel word-vomits, start with that. If you can handle mediocre anime, try the Fate/Stay Night anime. If you just want a quick fix for a good anime, watch Fate/Zero.

There’s also Unlimited Blade Works, which is an alternate version of the TV series. There’s Fate/Prototype, which is just a short window into what nasu originally planned Fate/Stay Night to be. Finally, there’s Carnival Phantasm, a piece of goofy fanservice for fans of Type Moon’s work. It  has characters from places other than the Fate/whatever franchise, but if you’ve liked all that you’ve seen so far, by all means track down everything by Type Moon. They did make a Tsukihime anime, but it differs wildly from the game to the point that many Type Moon fans claim there is no Tsukihime anime.

Fireball

First watch the original TV series. Then watch the Fireball Special. Then go onto Fireball Charming. Charming is technically a prequel, but it was made after the original and it makes more narrative sense to watch Charming last.

Fist of the North Star

Possibly the definitive example of “it gets better I swear!”. The first story arc of the TV series has some filler and time wast­ing. I’d recom­mend watch­ing epis­odes 1–5, then you can safely skip right to epis­odes 18–22, which fin­ishes the first arc. Everything between is largely unne­ces­sary and gets extremely repetitive.

Credit to Antz

Full Metal Panic

Chronological order would be the easiest way around this. Full Metal Panic followed by Fumoffu followed by The Second Raid followed by The Second Raid OVA. The only weird case here is Fumoffu. It’s a comedy spin-off from the original series with a completely different tone. I’d argue that you will find Fumoffu funnier once you’ve seen the original TV series, but plenty of people watch Fumoffu before the rest of the franchise and love it. So if you’re not feeling the TV series, or just want a very solid comedy anime, you can start with Fumoffu.

Fullmetal Alchemist

The two TV series, the original and Brotherhood, start off the same way but then veer in completely different directions. What happened was the original anime was made before the manga had finished, so the creators took a completely different direction with their adaptation. Several years later they then made Brotherhood, which followed the manga right the way through. The original has a stronger character focus and deeper messages and themes, but Brotherhood constructs a much more coherent story that actually ends properly. I believe popular opinion swings towards Brotherhood being the better of the two, but they are both fantastic series. I personally think that it’s better to start with the original TV series though. My reasoning is that Brotherhood assumes you have seen the original and barrages through its early content to get to the New Stuff, diminishing the effect of some considerably important plot events. If you watch the original TV series, make sure to follow it up straight away with the Conqueror of Shamballa movie. If you’re watching Brotherhood, you should watch the special spin off episodes whenever, either once you’re done with the TV series or about 40–50 episodes into the TV series. They tell neat little side stories. Just do not watch the Sacred Star of Milos movie, unless you want Full Metal Alchemist degenerate into generic shounen pap.

Futakoi

Ignore the first series and just watch Futakoi Alternative. They have barely any relation to each other and Futakoi is total rubbish.

Credit to Yuyucow

Genshiken

Easy chronological order. Original TV series -> OVA -> second season. There’s spin-off material, Kujibiki Unbalance or Ramen Tenshi Pretty Memna, which are animated versions of the anime the characters in Genshiken watch. However they add almost nothing to the TV series and are routinely regarded as being terrible.

Ghost in the Shell

The original Ghost in the Shell Movie and Stand Alone Complex do not have any connecting plot threads, so you can watch whichever first. It’s probably best to start with the movie, as it’s the least intimidating place to start. The second movie, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, is a direct sequel to the first movie, but isn’t generally considered to be that good, so you can skip that if you want and jump straight into the TV series, Stand Alone Complex. Stand Alone Complex has a whole load of different spin offs, but they are mostly just re-tellings of the same story with re-used footage. Simplest order is go Stand Alone Complex, then Stand Alone Complex Second Gig, then the movie Solid State Society.

Gintama

The first few episodes of the Gintama TV series are fairly poor and do not give a good account of the rest of the show. I haven’t seen anyone else suggest this before, but I think the ideal starting place for Gintama is the Jump Festa OVA. It’s a microcosm of the sense of humour you will find in the TV series. If you liked that, then go wild because you’ll probably love the TV series too. If you didn’t, then don’t bother. As for the Benizakura movie, it’s a retelling of episodes 58–61, but does have some new scenes at the start and end.

Gundam

The first thing you must understand about Gundam is there’s a main timeline, the Universal Century (UC) timeline, and then there’s Alternate Universe (AU) series that don’t connect to the main timeline at all. If you aren’t averse to old school animation, you can start with the UC timeline as outlined below. However a better starting spot may be one of the more recent AU Gundam series. The most recent ones are Seed, 00 and Age. Gundam fans will never agree which ones are worth watching, So I’m just going to go out on a limb and say I think 00 is the best of them.

UC Timeline

Start with the 0079 Gundam trilogy. These are recap movies of the original TV series and generally considered better than the actual TV series. From there it’s 0080 war in the pocket (also a favor­ite for christ­mas watch­ing) -> 08^th MS team -> 0083 Star­dust Memory -> Zeta Gun­dam (the actual direct sequel to the original trilogy, as the others are more spin-off OVAs) -> ZZ gun­dam (can be a bit jarring as the tone shifts from the super dark Zeta to light and goofy ZZ) -> Char’s coun­ter­at­tack movie -> Gun­dam Uni­corn -> Gun­dam F91 movie -> Vic­tory Gun­dam. Then there’s Turn A Gun­dam, which was sup­posed to be the last UC is thing but feels more like a spinoff and could even be called an AU Gundam.

Credit to R1CK_D0M, Fadeway

Gundam 00

Straight release order. Season 1 -> Season 2. The sequel movie Wakening of the Trailblazer is widely considered to be a total mess and probably not worth watching, lest it spoils your opinion of the TV series.

Gun­dam Wing

OVA/Movie sequel: You should be fine watch­ing either ver­sion since the movie only includes a few extra scenes which aren’t ter­ribly neces­sary to the plot. Don’t read the pre­quel manga until after watch­ing the TV series and movie sequel since the pre­quel does have a lot of tie-ins to events that hap­pen dur­ing the TV series/movie sequel. There are a couple manga that try to explain the year gap between the series and the sequel, and you can read either of those before/after watch­ing the movie sequel, but the gen­eral con­sensus (even though the char­ac­ter relationships/dynamics are por­trayed VERY dif­fer­ently in both stor­ies) is that Blind Tar­get occurred before Bat­tle­field of Paci­fists. the glor­i­fied doujin “Ground Zero” is said to occur right before the sequel.

Credit to gw_kimmy

Hellsing

I am probably the only person on the planet who thinks the TV series is far better than Hellsing Ultimate, so I’ll have to bow to popular opinion on this one. Go straight into Hellsing Ultimate and ignore the original botched TV series.

Hidamari Sketch

It’s straight order of when they were released, but since the naming conventions for the franchise are a bit all over the place: S1 -> S1 Spe­cials -> x365 -> x365 Spe­cials -> x Hoshim­itsu (☆☆☆) -> ☆☆☆ spe­cials -> SP (spe­cials) -> x Hon­ey­comb (upcoming).

Credit to Adamar

Higurashi

The chronological order is as follows: Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (26 episodes) -> Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Spe­cial: Nekogoroshi-hen (1 episode) -> Higur­ashi no Naku Koro ni Kai (24 episodes) -> Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Rei (5 episodes) -> Higur­ashi no Naku Koro ni Kira no (4 episodes). Only Koro ni (1) & Kai (3) are the vital story arcs. Both the Neko­goroshi ova (2) & the 5-part Rei ova con­tain a mix­ture of fan-service & new story ele­ments, but are not vital to the main plot. Kira (5) is pretty much noth­ing but tacky fanser­vice, & should be avoided!

Credit to fathomlessblue

Kino’s Journey

The spin-off movies should be watched only after you’ve completed the TV series. While Life Goes On is technically a prequel, it would spoil important reveals for the TV series.

Kara no Kyokai

The movies aired out of chronological order. If you were to watch them chronologically, it’s 2–4–3–1–5–6–7-OVA. However it’s advisable to stick to the order the original creators intended them to be watched in.

Credit to Chipp

Kurenai

What happened with Kurenai is Brains Base took a rather different interpretation of the source material when they made the TV series. Later they came back and made a short spin-off OVA more in the spirit of the original material. Popular opinion sides with the TV series being better, but they’re both worth watching so long as you remember they have very different feels to them.

Last Exile

While you can watch Last Exile Fam without having seen the original (different characters, different setting, only loosely connected to the original), you’re better off watching the original first. For one, it’s a better series, and there’s a recap episode during Fam that will spoil all the events of the original in the sequel.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes

The movie My Con­quest is the Sea of Stars is gen­er­ally con­sidered the best start­ing place, just before jump­ing into the 110 OVA that make up the main series. Over­ture to a New War is a retell­ing of the first epis­odes you can either watch right after ~5 OVA or just leave until you feel like revis­it­ing the fran­chise. Once you’ve fin­ished the series, watch the two remain­ing movies (Golden Wings and A Hun­dred Bil­lion Stars; A Hun­dred Bil­lion Lights) and the pre­quel by the name of Spiral Labyrinth.

Credit to Yuyucow

Lupin III

The great thing about Lupin III is that every new thing they produce is made to be open to newcomers. The only struggle is knowing which ones are actually good. Popular opinion sides with Castle of Cagliostro, the movie directed by Miyazaki himself. Its more whimsical depiction of Lupin isn’t a very good representation of the rest of the franchise, but it’s still a damn fine movie whether you care about Lupin or not. From there, you can really go anywhere. First Contact has a good reputation amongst Lupin fans. I think Alcatraz Connection is a good movie. The new TV series A Woman Called Fujiko Mine is interesting if you want a really artsy take on Lupin. Finally, if you aren’t put off by old ass animation, you can always jump right back in time to the original TV series.

Macross

Start with the original TV series, Macross SDF. From there you can sorta go anywhere. Macross Zero is a prequel but works better with knowledge of the original. Do You Remember Love is a retelling of the original TV series, but in a rather unique way. Macross Plus is the sequel to the original TV series. Then comes Macross 7, which is a deliberate mockery of the entire Macross franchise. Might work for you, might not, so no worries if you dump it. Finally, there’s Macross Frontier. So in short: Ori­ginal series -> Do you remem­ber love movie/Macross Zero/Macross Plus -> Macross 7 -> Macross Frontier.

However, if you are adverse to the old-school animation of the original SDF Macross (we’re talking very old school here), both Plus and Frontier are accessible as stand-alones, even if you don’t get the full appreciation.

Credit to Shinmaru, Adamar, R1CK_D0M

Macross Frontier

The movies, The False Song­stress and The Wings of Farewell, retell the Macross Fron­tier TV series but are dif­fer­ent enough to be worth­while and are awe­some visual spectacles

Munto

Munto was first released as two movies (Munto and Munto 2) and then a TV series with the very long name of “Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai” was released later. How it pretty much works is, you can com­pletely ignore the two movies that were released first as the first 6 epis­odes of the TV series are as good as com­pletely identical. From 7–9 you have an in-series art style update and new story where it con­cludes (yes, at the odd num­ber of 9).

Credit to Sarukah

Negima

As it is, there’s no stan­dalone anime if you want to enjoy Negima. Xebec first adapt­a­tion loosely cov­ers the first volumes of the manga and then jumps off a cliff for a laugh­able ori­ginal end­ing. It’s a really cheap show and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who’s fond of the fran­chise recom­mend­ing it. SHAFT’s Negima?! (and its Haru/Natsu OVA) took the char­ac­ters and threw them into a dif­fer­ent set­ting where abso­lutely dif­fer­ent stuff happened. The res­ult is a PPD Lite — not that bad, but def­in­itely not Negima. Might be some­thing to look at if you’re already a fan and like the char­ac­ters, but noth­ing else. The Ala Alba OVAs (and its sequel, Mou hitotsu no sekai), on the other hand, are faith­ful depic­tions of the manga… start­ing from ch176. You can’t exactly skip 20 volumes and watch those, so it’s quite tricky. And to make it worse, the Anime Final movie that was sup­posed to give clos­ure to those was so bad even the mangaka said it was ter­rible and should be avoided.

tl;dr: Avoid Mahou Sen­sei Negima, read the first 20 volumes of the manga, watch Ala Alba and Mou hitotsu no Sekai, avoid Anime Final. Watch Negima?! if you like the girls and Shinbo.

Credit to Yuyucow

One Piece

Kind of a com­mit­ment to make with about 450 epis­odes and 650 chapters at this moment and still ongo­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, it starts of kind of slow and not very inter­est­ing. Gen­eral con­sensus is that it really starts pick­ing up dur­ing the Arlong arc, start­ing from epis­ode 31 and chapter 69, and only gets bet­ter from there. The only prob­lem is that the earlier epis­odes intro­duce a lot of the major char­ac­ters. So I can’t really recom­mend to skip them. You could read the manga, since that is usu­ally quicker.

Like most long run­ning anime, it has a bunch of fillers, but not nearly as much as say Bleach or Naruto. I could write them all down here or just give you this link: http://onepiece.wikia.com/wiki/Episode_Guide. It includes the fillers, OVAs, movies and TV spe­cials and between which epis­odes they fit. Epis­ode 55, although part of a (not so good) filler includes some import­ant canon inform­a­tion. You might want to watch that epis­ode or read chapter 101. Also the G8 filler arc ( epis­ode 196 — 206) is actu­ally very good. Def­in­itely watch that one. You can skip all the other filler arcs. They aren’t that bad, but they don’t add much to the story.

Most of the movies are okay. They pre­sume you know the char­ac­ters, so you can’t really jump in without know­ing any­thing about the series. The only ones I def­in­itely recom­mend are the 6^th and the 10^th. The 6^th one is directed by Hosada (Summer Wars) and has a dif­fer­ent anim­a­tion style and a much darker story that the rest of the series. The 10^th was actu­ally writ­ten by the mangaka and fits into canon. Movies 8 and 9 are recaps of the Ara­basta arc and the Drum island arc, but they try to fit too much into too little time. The 8^th one is also more of a ‘what if’ story and includes some heavy spoil­ers for the rest of the series. So don’t watch them as a sub­si­tute for the series.

All the TV spe­cials are for­get­table. Also, the first OVA was done by a dif­fer­ent anim­a­tion stu­dio and before the anime. It also has com­pletely dif­fer­ent voice act­ors. I don’t recom­mend to watch this an intro­duc­tion to the series. It’s not very good. Watch the other two OVAs though.

Onegai Teacher/Twins

Onegai Twins is a spin-off series from Onegai Teacher. Some characters from Teacher appear in twins, but it’s not necessary to watch them in order. There’s also Ano Natsu, which is a spiritual successor to the Onegai series, but again doesn’t require knowledge of the previous two.

Cheers to blazingdead

Patlabor

First timeline: Mobile Police Pat­labor OVA (7 episodes) -> Pat­labor 1: The Movie -> WXIII Pat­blabor 3: The Movie -> Pat­labor 2: The movie. The TV Series and New Files are an alternate story with the same characters. It’s -> Pat­labor TV series (47 episodes) -> Pat­labor ova 2/New Files (16 episodes). Best place to start is probably the first Patlabor OVAs.

Credit to fathomlessblue

Please Save My Earth

The last OVA epis­ode (6) tries to wrap up a story only half-done. There’s no need to skip it, but it won’t make much sense. Instead, start the manga at volume around volume 9.

Credit to Dan

Precure

Only two Pre­cure series are actual sequels (Futari wa -> Max Heart, YPC5 -> YPC GoGo) so you can jump in pretty much any­where. Dozens of magical girls meet every year in the All Stars movies, so you can use that simply to pick whichever cast you prefer. Heartcatch is widely considered to be The Best, so that’s probably the best starting point. However, if you know you’re going to watch a lot of the fran­chise you prob­ably want to go Splash Star -> Fresh -> Heart­catch -> Suite -> Smile, then return­ing to watch Futari Wa/Max Heart if you really want and Yes 5/GoGo if it’s fin­ished being subbed by the time you get there. Main point is that Splash Star is a fairly dir­ect remake of Futari Wa, so you don’t want to watch them one after the other, and Splash Star is prob­ably a bet­ter start­ing point.

Credit to Yuyucow, lmm

Raildex

A Certain Scientific Railgun relies on your knowledge of A Certain Magical Index, so it’s advisable to get that done first. Index S1 -> Index S2 -> Rail­gun. Alternatively Index S1 -> Rail­gun -> Index S2, the broad­cast­ing order. Both work fine.

Credit to Yuyucow

Redline

This is actu­ally pretty simple but a lot of Redline fans haven’t watched its spinoff by the name of Trava like they very well should.

Credit to Yuyucow

Revolutionary Girl Utena

The movie, Adolescence Apocalypse, is an alternative version of the TV series. You’re better off watching the TV series first. Not because it has any important plot details, but because it will at least prepare you somewhat for the sheer weirdness of that movie.

School Rumble

Start with the original TV series. Then jump onto the OVA. Then onto Ni Gakki. Do NOT watch San Gakki. It is complete bullshit.

Slayers

Here’s a handy graphic to understand Slayers with.

Spice and Wolf

Straight chronological order. I’m just reminding you here to make sure after you’ve watched the first season to watch the first Spice and Wolf OVA before you start watching the second season.

Super Robot Wars OG

First off is that the SRW anime are all based off the OG line of video games and con­tain no licensed series(no Gun­dam or Macross etc..) — everything is original. As of writ­ing there are 3 shows to chose from: Super Robot Wars OG The Anim­a­tion — A 3 epis­ode OVA released in 2005. Super Robot Wars OG Divine Wars — A 26 epis­ode TV series released ’06-’07. Super Robot Wars OG The I.nspector — A 26 epis­ode TV series released ’10-’11 In terms of chro­no­logy the order goes — SRWOG:DW > SRWOG:TI > SRW TA OVA. A word of note is that the OVA has been sup­planted by the events of one of the video games(SRW OG Gaiden [2008]) which took story ele­ments from the OVA and made them no longer canon. So while you can watch the OVA, when you play the video game or if there is another sequel, the events of the OVA will most likely be ignored or supplanted.

Cheers to Kraker2k

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

The order of Haruhi is all over the place. They aired the first season out of chronological order. Later they aired it in in chronological order, but threw a second season in the middle, then finally the movie Disappearence of Haruhi Suzumiya. The Wikipedia page lists the broadcast order and the chronological order. Taking the first season by itself, it’s better in the original broadcast order. Take it from someone who watched  it first in chronological order, it completely messes up the pacing and narrative the creators were going for. However taking the franchise as a whole, it perhaps works better with Disappearence as a finale to the entire thing. Depends on your personal preferences, whether deliberately confusing stuff gets on your nerves or not.

The second season gets doubly confusing with the whole Endless Eight fiasco, where they made 8 episodes of basically the exact same content. While there may be a special pride for those who can sit through all of Endless Eight, I wouldn’t recommend it. For the same narrative structure they were attempting to achieve, watch the first, second and eighth episodes of Endless Eight (so technically episodes 2,3 and 9 of the season). Trust me, you’ll already start to get frustrated by the time you watch the third episode. There’s also the dumb flash animation spin-off stuff, which you can watch if you’re a super fan.

Tenchi Muyo

The Tenchiverse is way bigger than you probably realise. In sorta chronological order: Ten­chi Muyo: Ryo-Ohki OVA 1 -> The Night Before the Car­ni­val OVA -> Ten­chi Muyo: Ryo-Ohki OVA 2 -> Ten­chi Muyo: Ryo-Ohki OVA 3 -> Mihoshi Spe­cial -> Man­atsu no Eve (Ten­chi Muyo Movie 2) –> Tenchi Muyo Dual (really for those determ­ined to watch everything in the Tenchi­verse, as its rela­tion is slight and it just isn’t that great of a show) -> Ten­chi Muyo GXP –> Ten­chi Muyo TV/“Tenchi Uni­verse“ –> Ten­chi Muyo in Love (“Ten­chi Muyo the Movie”) –> Ten­chi Muyo in Love 2: Dis­tant Memor­ies (“Ten­chi Forever! The Movie”) –> Magical Girl Pretty Sammy OVA –> Magical Girl Pretty Sammy TV/“Magical Pro­ject S“ –> Sasami: Magical Girls’ Club –> Shin Ten­chi Muyo/“Tenchi in Tokyo”.

Isekai no Seikishi no Monogatari/St. Knight’s Tale falls somewhere within the timeline encom­passing the OVAs, The Night Before the Car­ni­val, Mihoshi Spe­cial, and GXP. Just pop it in there wherever.

Credit to A Day Without Me

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Start with the TV series. From there, you can jump into some of the side stuff. The Parrallel Works are cool little music videos with alternate takes on the TV Series. Then there’s the retelling movies. Now normally I’d say ignore retelling movies as they’re lame, cut down versions of the original. This is certainly the case with Gurren-hen. But Lagann-hen is fantastic, so much so that I’d call it better than the TV version. Skip Gurren-hen and watch Lagann-hen. It starts at the midway point of the TV series, so you will have to have watched the TV series originally to understand what’s going on.

To Heart

Weirdly, To Heart and To Heart 2 have the same settings but different characters. To Heart and its sequel My Memor­ies are much more decent pieces of anim­a­tion, if any­thing because they set many galge tropes that would be ter­ribly executed by count­less shows and games after­ward. Both have some spe­cials that are meant to be watched after their cor­res­pond­ing seasons. For To Heart 2, chro­no­lo­gical release order, which would be To Heart 2 -> To Heart 2 OVA -> To Heart 2 AD -> To Heart 2 AD Plus -> To Heart 2 ADnext.

Credit to Yuyucow

Touka Get­tan

Aired in reverse chronological order, but as always with these cases, it’s better to watch it in the order the original creators intended it to be watched in.

Credit to A Day Without Me

Tsubasa Chronicle

It’s gen­er­ally agreed upon to watch the series in chro­no­lo­gical order (sea­son one, sea­son two, ovas), but upon get­ting into sea­son two, unless you like filler, skip epis­odes 18–26. Instead, go straight to the Tokyo Rev­el­a­tions OVA (which is way darker than the TV series, but faith­ful to the manga). Then read manga volumes 18 — 21 before watch­ing the Shun­raiki OVA. If you skip the manga, you will be com­pletely lost. Actu­ally, even with the manga, you might be com­pletely lost… Also, some­time before the Tokyo Rev­el­a­tions, you can squish in “The Prin­cess in the Bird­cage King­dom” movie, though skip­ping it won’t hinder the story at all. After watch­ing the Shun­raiki OVA, start read­ing the com­ics at volume 24. If you’re reading the manga for Tsubasa Chronicle, try read it alternatively with XXXHolic as they will spoil each other.

Credit to Dan

Votoms

The chronological order is as follows: Red shoulder doc­u­ment: Roots of Ambi­tion OVA > Pailsen Files OVA > (Mel­lowlink is a spinoff ova. It’s pretty good, but it’s per­fectly skip­pable. It’s just a guy being really angry at everything and killing people for revenge) > TV series ep’s 1–13 (First arc in Uoodo) > Last Red Shoulder OVA > TV series ep’s 14–52 (2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th arcs in Kum­men, Sunsa, and Quent respect­ively) > Big Battle OVA > (this is tech­nic­ally where the second half of 52, the last ep, goes, but I wouldn’t recom­mend stop­ping the ep halfway through just for big battle) > Shin­ing Heresy OVA > Alone Again OVA > Phantom Chapter OVA. Just watch it in that order.

Credit to R1CK_D0M

X

Start with the Tokyo Babylon OVA, then move onto the X TV series. The manga and TV series are faith­ful to each other until the last five or so epis­odes. From there, if you want more angst and lack of an end­ing, start read­ing the manga at volume 16 or so. The TV series has a con­clus­ive, and much more hope­ful end­ing. The movie is to be avoided at all costs, unless you like beau­ti­ful anim­a­tion with no plot (or are a fan of terribad anime). For hard­core fans, there’s also a set of music videos. Also, do not watch “Epis­ode 0″ first. Watch it at least 3/4 through the TV series. Oth­er­wise, you’ll be spoiled on pretty much everything. When you’ve done all that, you can go back to the Tokyo Babylon manga, which is a prequel to X. It starts really slow though, so you’re better off going to it after you’re done with X.

Credit to Dan, Anca

XXXHolic

Watch the “A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream” movie after the the first half (or so) of the first sea­son. While the movie was made before the TV series (and thus the art is a bit dif­fer­ent), it does require know­ledge of the main char­ac­ters and dynam­ics before being watched. Note that mix­ing the manga and the TV series+Movie is dif­fi­cult due to whole plot­lines that aren’t trans­ferred through adap­tions, but if you feel up to it, after sea­son 2 of the TV series, being read­ing about volume 14 on. After volume 15, you can watch the Ro OVA. Some­where between (or after) volume 19, watch the Ro: Aday­ume OVA. There’s also an OVA called “Shun­muki” that can be fit in any­where around sea­son 2 of the TV series. If you’re reading the manga for Tsubasa Chronicle, try reading it alternatively with Tsubasa Chronicle as they will spoil each other.

Credit to Dan

Yu-Gi-Oh

Sea­son 0 -> Sea­son 0 movie (rather ter­rible, can be skipped) -> Duel Mon­sters (skip the arcs between the end of Battle Tower and epis­ode 199) -> (manga) Yu-Gi-Oh R (if you want, this one is gen­er­ally for­got­ten, and it takes place between Battle City and Ancient Egypt) -> Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series. The dubbed version is a 4kids dub, so liberal changes everywhere. Pyr­amid of Light can be safely ignored, but if you do want to sub­ject your­self to it hunt down the Japan­ese dub, as they changed the plot and rearranged some scenes, because it was just that stupid. GX takes place after Duel Mon­sters, but barely ref­er­ences it. 5D and Zexal are entirely altern­ate uni­verses. Cap­sule Mon­sters does not exist. Bond Bey­ond Time belongs after GX and 5D.

Credit to Anca

Simple release order

These are the series that follow a straight, no-nonsense chronological format with no confusion. Just watch these in the order they were released. Leave comments if there’s any franchises that fit this list too.

Arakawa Under the Bridge, Baccano, Baka to Test, Big Windup, Black Lagoon, Break Blade, Candy Boy, Eden of the East, GaoGaiGar, Honey and Clover, Hare Guu, Ichigo Marshmallow, Initial D, Invasion Squid Girl, Kaiji, Maria-sama ga Miteru, Minami-ke, Natsu no Arashi, Natsume Yuujinchou, Rozen Maiden, Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei, Shakugan no Shana, To-Love-Ru, Vandread

For the record, I haven’t watched anime in over a week, so I’m at least one episode behind on everything.

A Grade

A– Sankarea

Episodes 1–3

The fact that this rather standard romcom with a morbid twist was any good came as a surprise to me. That it was this good blew my mind. It’s all down to the directing. What could have been a bland Yuji-Everylead comes off as relatable and human with flaws and dreams. Rea could have come off as a demeaning and voyeuristic handling of child abuse, but instead appears as a real person who is naive yet sympathetic. I never thought I’d say this, but bravo Studio Deen. You’ve elevated average source material with your excellent adaptation.

B Grade

B+ Minori Scramble

Thank god something good came out of Ufotable’s attempts at OVAs. Minori Scramble is a fantastically goofy slapstick comedy, one I haven’t seen done as well as this since Hare+Guu, and that was over 10 years ago. What I have to praise more than anything is that, while it’s cute, the cuteness is used as a means to create comedy, rather than relying on the cuteness itself to be the only draw. Genuinely charming and laugh out loud funny, I thoroughly recommend this. I also hope they make more, because it seems a shame to let this die at one short OVA.

B+ Aquarion EVOL

Episodes 13–17

I did not think Aquarion EVOL had taken the right direction at the start of this month. The show revels in its goofy cheesiness, and having something that downer happen didn’t mesh with the aim of the show. And yet Aquarion EVOL defied me. It both handled the drama incredibly well, all while keeping within the same goofy cheesy constructs that makes it so entertaining. It came out the other side a stronger show in which I cared about the characters even more. The banana robot mixed hot springs episode also proved that it hasn’t lost its craziest side either.

B+ Kids on the Slope

Episodes 1–2

Kids on the Slope is basically perfect. All the directorial cues hit their mark. The characters are well-defined and likable yet with proper flaws. The animation is amazing and meshes perfectly with the music. It’s pretty much bang on the mark. My only problem at the moment is that it’s all a bit too nice. I’m waiting for some sort of real drama to occur that makes me eager to tune into new episodes, because as of now I’m just not getting as excited as I probably should be for it. But apart from that, it’s perfect.

B+ Tsuritama

Episodes 1–2

I love Tsuritama’s approach to telling its story. It’s got this loopy, happy-go-lucky nature that makes it infectious. The directing is a little bit all over the place, leaving some stretches of episodes having remarkably little happen in them, leading to some rather dull stretches. But the wilder segments easily make up for that. I’m now waiting to see how all these seemingly disparate elements tie together to form some kind of overall narrative, but I’m certainly enjoying the ride it’s taking me on.

B Jormungand

Episodes 1–2

Jormungand’s plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at the moment, mainly because it’s non-existent. A whole load of people selling weapons and shooting and so on. But I don’t really care because the characters (well, mainly just Koko) make this show inherently enjoyable. I originally compared it to Baccano/Durarara style of introduction, but a closer comparison is Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. These guys are just doing their jobs, you’ll pick up what they’re like along the way. Which is great, because this show has Koko. She is rather mentally imbalanced if I do say so myself. Oh no, is what I said.

B– Future Diary

Episodes 24–26

Barmy, loopy, crazy, nuts, tossing logic out the window and barreling towards some sort of psychotic conclusion. These are all ways I thought I would be describing the final episode, but instead it was an oddly low-key affair. OK this is still low-key by Future Diary standards, so there was still a re-writing of the entire universe, but it left me feeling oddly underwhelmed. Still, it was a fitting end to the series, and this month also included the fantastic episode 25. Totally batty anime, and I loved it for that.

B– Space Bros

Episodes 1–4

Space Bros has a bit of a problem with banging on and on with the same subject. Chasing my dream blah de blah we get it. The show will probably always be inherently enjoyable because Mutta is fun to watch. He’s like Kotetsu from Tiger and Bunny except cleverer and therefore less irritating.

B– Fate/Zero

Episodes 14–16

For a show that’s supposed to be about Rider and Waver, they’ve gotten rather little screentime these past few episodes. I mean, these side characters are all right. They’re rather too in love with their own voice, saying nothing in one sentence than can be said with 5, but isn’t that par for the course for this show. At least their stories are pretty interesting. Still though, I’d rather like to see the main attraction take centre stage again.

B– Lupin III: Fujiko Mine

Episodes 1–3

The quality of this new Lupin III series has been a bit all over the place. I loved episode 3 with Goemon. It’s story was well told and endearing. On the other hand, episode 2 was a mess. Trying to fit the larger-than-life Lupin characters into a noir style story simply doesn’t work. You need more subtlety, which this show simply doesn’t have. Also there’s Fujiko’s tits, which just get silly with them flying all over the place. When it hits the mark, it’s a pretty damn great show. I just hope it realises how silly it is and sticks to doing that.

B– Mysterious Girlfriend X

Episodes 1–3

I genuinely like the story Mysterious Girlfriend X is telling. This alternatives take on teenage romance, challenging the social norms of what you should do in a relationship, is something I appreciate. But the drool. Oh god the drool. After the first episode, I thought the drool fascination would slowly die down, and my reaction to it would become increasingly tepid until I barely noticed it was there at all. Instead, the reverse has happened. It’s gotten to the point where I actively push my screen away, shut my eyes and cover my ears when the drool appears again. I probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as bothered by it if they didn’t revel in it so much.

C Grade

C+ Eureka Seven Ao

Episodes 1–2

Eureka Seven Ao hasn’t quite clicked with me yet. I haven’t found a character to latch onto yet, so all I’ve gotten from the show is a whole load of technobabble I can’t make sense of. The scub coral has arrived, quick unload the MXP-Fighter Unit 01 to unleash the seventh swell with the aliens swearing off the Japanese from unleashing the defence force from invading the potato fields on the last christmas on Tuesday. It’s all dramatic and beautifully animated, but I just haven’t found any reason to care yet.

C+ Buta

Buta is part of the Young Animator Training Project, which they decided to have another round of in 2012. Buta was just like any of the four from last time round. Decent story that doesn’t have a whole lot to it. Some pig helps little fox dude save his map or something. It had a pretty clear Porco Rosso influence, what with the old warrior pig who acts indifferent towards people but actually has a heart of gold. I guess it’s worth watching for that if nothing else.

C Kuroko’s Basketball

Episodes 1–3

I’ll probably get bored with this show eventually, but for now at least I’m engaged. The characters  have distinguishing personalities and the lead two play off each other quite well, as they do with the female manager. Shame the animation quality is probably the shittest all season, which makes the basketball matches turn into be a bunch of still frames and speed lines, but I like the show’s over-exuberant shounen energy. The part where they stood on top of the building and yelled out to the school was entertaining.

C Medaka Box

Episodes 1–3

There is one thing about Medaka Box that keeps me coming back. Even though it has terrible animation, dull set-ups, an atrocious opening song, a measly attempt at a Kyon-ripoff, constant obsession with Medaka’s tits…well, OK there’s a lot of problems. But I keep coming back because of Medaka herself. She’s basically Jesus with tits. There’s something fascinating about watching the entire world warp around her presence, and how each character is defined by how they act around her. The show is trying to depict her as a force of nature, and certainly achieves that. It doesn’t really achieve anything else, but Medaka alone is somehow enough to keep me watching.

D Grade

D+ Gakkatsu

Episodes 1–3

I suppose in the field of shitty 5 minute comedy flash shorts, Gakkatsu is probably the best I’ve seen. That’s obviously not saying much, but hey, baby steps. It’s about a class sitting around and discussing some aspect of life. It’s set up is similar to Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei, except without the imaginative artstyle, the satirical characters, the social satire…well, maybe there’s a bit of social satire, but not enough to keep my interest. It is only 5 minutes per episode though, so at least it avoids the Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei problem of running its single set up into the ground. Yeah I had to get in my dig at that show in here somehow.

D Saint Seiya Omega

Episodes 1–2

It’s weird how something so colourful and so extravagant could be so bland and forgettable.. From what I can tell, most of it is fighting for fighting’s sake. The characters aren’t interesting. I don’t think I’m a fan of super sentai stuff. Not that I’ve seen much, but I was never into Power Rangers as a kid. Nor Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who I think might count as a weird form of super sentai. Or any western superhero comic book stuff. Or even the entire Precure franchise. I dunno, but dressing up in a silly costume and fighting dumb bad guys never appealed to me as a kid, and that doesn’t appear to have changed.

D– Dusk Maiden of Amnesia

Episodes 1–2

The completely obvious and inevitable happened. The gimmick of the first episode was just a flimsy shield hiding what was a thoroughly generic romcom. The main character is a Yuji Everylead. The female lead’s ghostyness doesn’t appear to have any interesting commentary on something or other. You know,  the way the irregularities of the female leads in Sankarea and Mysterious Girlfriend X are commentaries on something, I saw nothing of the sort in Dusk Maiden. That’s the kind of thing that gets me interested, because I happen to be a pretentious prick like that.

E Grade

E+ Polar Bear Cafe

Episodes 1–2

Your characters are animals. Har har har. Now what? Is that it? Do you expect to carry the entire show on that? That’s one joke! You can’t carry an entire show on that. Polar Bear Cafe fails because it hasn’t got a clue how to tell jokes. Its comedic timing is pot anyway, so it’s not like the jokes would have any impact even if they were funny. I’ve heard people describe it has one of those ♥~healing~♥ anime, which I’ve always read as ♥~nothing interesting ever fucking happens~♥, so that probably explains why I’m so down on it. OP is still awesome though.

F Grade

I’ve been too busy composing my final year university dissertation, which is focusing on British TV news comedy shows. The main driving force behind the dissertation is that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has gotten massive commercial success, along with huge critical and academic acclaim. It’s brought a welcome critical voice to the compliant media using a satirical format that has brought in the previously political apathetic youth and so on and so forth blah de blah de blah. Does Britain have a Daily Show equivalent in news comedy? The rather blunt answer is yes. It’s called Have I Got News For You and it even predates The Daily Show. But I wanted to use a similar critical eye that academics used when praising The Daily Show to British news comedy programmes and see if they stack up.

This is not the dissertation. What I’m writing here is some sort of attempt to collect my thoughts on the 4 shows I covered, before I write up my findings in a proper academic way. It’s got nothing to do with anime, but I wanted to try collecting my thoughts on what I’ve researched in writing somewhere before I wrote it up properly, and at least putting it here will allow me to see what others think.

Warning: It is a very long post.

A show that I think rather fails at any form of news satire is Mock the Week. Headlines are removed from full context with the mocking of appearance in photographs of politicians. The news segment they’re supposed to be covering is stated blankly by centre man Dara with no real conversation of the topic in question. Having 7 bloody people on the panels is part of the problem, particularly when the gruffer laddish humour charges in to make a dumb joke about jerking off.

However I’m inclined not to be overly critical of it not delivering any sort of proper news satire, because its main aim is clearly to just be a comedy. The fact they have an entire segment devoted to a random topic coming up and the comedians rifling through their stand up routines a picking out a part that remotely connects to that subject should be enough of a sign that actual news satire isn’t their priority. They aren’t too bad at being a comedy show. Dara Ó Briain is a genuinely funny man when given the chance, but is too nice to ever really give any political satire. Also he’s the presenter, so can’t really do much anyway. Hugh Dennis is pretty funny too. In fact, Hugh Dennis appears to be the one guy who tries to actually comment on the news items in question, but the sheer amount of people there means someone usually gets in after he’s finished a grand total of one line.

Can’t say much about the rest though. Andy Parsons simply isn’t funny. Frankie Boyle is shock humour for shock’s sake. Their regular guests are pretty shit too. I don’t think there are very many people in Ireland who think much of their ‘national treasure’ that is Ed Byrne. Milton Jones is funny, but his humour is surreal and mainly based off puns, which offers nothing to the discussion. And then there’s Russell Howard…

One of the other shows I covered was Russell Howard’s Good News, and god bless the guy because his heart is in the right place. You can tell what his intention is. He’s sick of fear mongering and brainless coverage in the news and he wants to counteract that. And occasionally he gets it right, such as mocking News of the World’s incessant fear-mongering saying that everything gives you cancer. OK, easy target and low lying fruit, but still worth saying. When you consider we’re comparing these all to The Daily Show, where the political landscape and state of the news networks in America means that you have to stoop just to reach the low lying fruit, this is still worthwhile.

But christ above he can’t cover news properly. Let me run you through a typical Russell Howard piece. Bring up news story. Make joke about the person on screen’s appearance. Explain the news story further. Rubbish the entire story for no apparent reason bar his own scepticism. Instead of explaining why he’s sceptical, show a youtube video of a cat. Make joke about masturbation. Move onto next segment. Instead of satirically tearing apart the logic behind the news story, as Ian Hislop off HIGNFY would do, he discredits it by using a personal anecdote. This leads to a huge amount of his pieces starting with “this one time, right, one of my mates, right”. On Mock the Week, where he has even less time to impose his personality, nearly every single time he opens his mouth is with the dreaded “one of my mates, right”.

Oh right, I mentioned Have I Got News For You, henceforth just the ridiculous acronym HIGNFY. Running for over 20 years, it’s rather set in its ways, which isn’t strictly a bad thing at all. It’s a direct descendent of That Was The Week That Was, which The Daily Show is also inspired by. Well, since it was the first news satire television programme, technically all these shows are descended from TW3, but HIGNFY was set up deliberately to capture the original take of TW3. The show does have clear political influence, particularly since politicians appear on the show. Mind you, the clearest way it has influenced politics is, arguably, getting Boris Johnson elected as Mayor of London. Since I don’t live in London, I’ve never had to care about what his abilities as a mayor are, but he’s funnier than most of the actual professional comedians on Mock the Week. I think he hams up his doddering posh boy persona, which makes him oddly lovable and hilarious as a result.

The easiest way to show how HIGNFY is good is to compare it to Mock the Week and Russell Howard. As I explained before, the people on the show are genuinely interested in taking apart a news story and actually talking about it. Obviously Ian Hislop is the chief at this, but any gaps he misses are invariably filled up by Paul Merton, who is far cleverer than his goofy persona would have you believe. Sitting in on those panels for 20 years would mean he’d eventually absorb enough ability to tackle news satirically. Also for the guests they do bring on, christ is Ian Hislop good at tearing them apart. One of the episodes I covered for my research that was particularly memorable was when a minister for foreign affairs was on. Before the show he had apparently gone on twitter asking for advice, and people told him the “little shit on the end would tear him a new one”, which seemed to cheer Hislop up and do exactly as advertised.

Ian Hislop is indeed a little shit, obviously revelling in political scandals so he can tear them apart, but the show needs him to do so, particularly when you compare to the overly nice Dara from Mock the Week. He makes no concessions for that either, something Paul Merton likes to mock him for himself. What’s odd is Hislop isn’t actually that funny a lot of the time. The jokes often erupt after he has satirically examined the news story in question. It’s not just him obviously, even the folks in charge of putting up words on the teleprompter for the host to read out are really good at what they do. OK their jokes are pretty obvious a lot of the time. I’m convinced they are contractually obligated to make at least one joke per episode about Eric Pickles being fat. But hey, it’s a running gag.

HIGNFY is also more ‘dignified’, shall we say. The humour on Mock the Week and Russell Howard could be described as ‘laddish’. And by laddish and mean blatantly sexist. Russell Howard in particular can’t make a single reference to any woman without commenting on her shaggibility. Mock the Week normally has a full male cast. On the occasion they’ve had the one girl, she rarely gets a word in edgeways. Meanwhile on HIGNFY, there was a particularly memorable segment once where the host asked one of the female panel members what she thought of the royal wedding bride’s dress, and she responded with “could you ask that again, except this time more condescending”. OK, it’s calling out sexism on its own show, but it shows that the one time it could creep in, it was shot out by the panel members themselves.

On the episodes of Mock the Week I covered, there was one girl who appeared twice, who was so forgettable I can’t even remember her name. But the jokes she did do help me segue into my next area: racism. The girl in question was Nigerian, and on both occasions she was called up to do a stand up segment, she did one about her race. Meanwhile HIGNFY had the black American comedian Reginald D Hunter. The only reference he made to being black was when there was a news segment about a Cadbury advert that was perceived as racist. When the host asked if Reg accepted the apology Cadbury gave, he said “let me ask the Black committee board and see what they say”. Again, it’s calling out the own show for a touch of racism, but the fact they called out the one time it happened speaks for it all.

Both the issues of sex and race are rather interesting in comedy as a whole. My kingdom for a black comic who does not base half of their fucking routine off them being black, you’re even less original than the comics who base their routine off air travel. The total lack of female comics is a rather touchy issue, particularly since there isn’t an immediately apparent explanation for it. It doesn’t appear to be institutionalised sexism so much as its society not valuing women with a strong comic ability as much as they do for men, which speaks to a much wider sexism problem that gets into a big auld feminism debate. But my point is that HIGNFY both comments on these and rises above them

And now 10 O’ Clock Live. The newest kid on the block. The one with the big talent behind it. The one that claims itself to be trying to bring a satirical look at the news, exactly like that present on The Daily Show. Does it succeed? Short answer is not quite, but a damn good effort regardless. The show received a lot of critical damning on many fronts while it was airing, which may be partly because of the hype that surrounded it. Particularly comparisons to The Daily Show seem to be damning, although I’d argue people put The Daily Show up on a pedestal, and is hardly perfect all the time itself. Maybe I’m being kinder because I came off watching several seasons of Mock the Week and Russell Howard, but 10 O’ Clock Live was a breath of fresh air next to those shows.

Easiest way to cover the show is cycle through the 4 presenters, starting with Jimmy Carr. His quick coverage of the news segment that each show starts off with is similar to that HIGNFY does with its witty quips after each news item, except Carr is even more direct about its satire of the story. He has made quite a name for himself being a shock comic. Now I do think there is a place in comedy for shock comics. Even though I dismissed Frankie Boyle earlier, he was at least more interesting than the other panellists on Mock the Week. However Carr’s barbs are often more barbed and less nasty for the sake of it, which makes them easier to laugh at without feeling like a horrible person. You are actually laughing at the joke rather than the intent of the joke. Well, most of the time anyway.

His sketch segments don’t work quite as well though. I feel rather harsh criticising individual ones, as the nature of sketch comedy like these is that they don’t always work. Every sketch comedy, from Monty Python to Daily Lives of Highschool Boys, has had sketches that simply don’t work. Heck, even a lot of Jon Stewart’s segments don’t quite work. He does sometimes brute force his way through them by being an inherently funny comic, as does Jon Stewart. Also I’m easy to please and Jimmy Carr in a dress is sometimes enough to make me laugh. But enough of them don’t work for me to sometimes feel just a bit silly to be watching them at all.

Charlie Brooker is the kind of guy who attracts rabid fans of his style of ranty satire, but I think his ability is limited. For example, he’s a complete failure at talking about anything that requires nuanced coverage. But in full rant mode against something that’s clearly wrong, such as Gaddafi or media coverage of the Japan Earthquake, he’s the star of the entire show. Thankfully the show seems to realise this, even going so far as to reference his cynical nature about everything when the cast go into their round-table discussions. Just so long as the show remembers that, I think he’s great.

David Mitchell is the one who is clearly the most emotionally invested in the news coverage, and the one who has done the most research of the cast, which is clear when they go into round table discussion. He’s the one that usually brings up the best points. The show realises that, which is why he tackles the interviews and topics that require slightly more nuanced coverage than Brooker can do. But he’s just not very good at these interviews. Jon Stewart feels more earnest when interviewing, and is capable enough an interviewer to force proper discussion from the interviewees. Mitchell just doesn’t have that. He feels genuine and earnest, but interviewing skills means he neither asks probing enough questions, nor is able to control the large debates. When a politician goes onto HIGNFY, they are playing by the rules of the show itself, which is why Ian Hislop always gets one over on them. Mitchell can’t beat politicians at their own interviewing game.

He isn’t helped by the liveness of the show. Frequently a discussion will have to be cut off before the discussion can really get to the heart of everyone’s problems and some sort of agreement, with them having to cut off to an ad break. Also the live studio audience doesn’t bloody help, what with even the guests trying to play up the audience by suggesting they hang bankers. Mitchell even chastises the audience more than once, telling them it’s not a bloody pantomime. I think a lot of this is simply down to practice, because he definitely has the right intentions and is going about it the right way. Also since I’m mentioning some other problems with the show, christ is this show ever the most left leaning thing on television. This is coming from someone who had the Guardian website as their homepage for a few years. Yes the Tories are in power and satire should be largely directed at those in power, but christ above is it ever overly liberal.

Then there’s Lauren Laverne, who simply does not belong on the programme. I get her roll. She’s supposed to be the presenter to get the other guys talking, but she just doesn’t fit next to 3 professional comedians. She simply isn’t funny. Her comedy segment feels forced. As much as I talked about the lack of women in comedy earlier and how terrible that is, I can’t shake the feeling watching her that she’s simply here because she’s The Girl. She’s a good presenter, but she doesn’t fit with the show’s format. I mainly covered the first season for my dissertation, but I did see the final 2 episodes of season 2. They cut out a bunch of the content to fix the problems of having ads cut halfway into segments. No more of Mitchell’s rants, which is a shame but it made sense when Brooker is better at them anyway. Plus they cut down Brooker’s rants to one per episode, which works because it means they focus on one thing Brooker to cover per episode. But Laverne seems to have gotten even more comedy content to do. Either focus on being a presenter or get an actual comedian in.

Honestly speaking, I think the show is pretty great. I think it’s often more daring and cutting than HIGNFY is, and often even more so than The Daily Show is, although Daily Show is operating in a different environment. It produces some brilliant satire at times, and I hope it doesn’t get cancelled because they appear to be ironing out the kinks. What’s oddly one of my biggest criticisms is I don’t really see why it has to be Live. The one time watching it where they got breaking news in was the No Fly Zone instated over Libya, and all they did was go “ooh boy is there going to be a war”. The sketch nature of it means they’re better pre-recorded anyway. The only other signs of it being live were the cast occasionally fluffing their lines and Jimmy Carr improving occasionally, along with an irritating audience. Ditch the liveness, and change the name to 10 O’ Clock Late or something.

So umm yeah, good job reaching this far, you crazy person who read all this. This is a layman’s version of my dissertation. I’d be really interested in hearing opinions on what people think of the shows in question.

You may have noticed my blog hasn’t been in the healthiest state lately. I exceeded my monthly bandwidth limit, which in my initial panic meant “oh shit oh god oh golly I’ve been DDoS’d”. Turns out I was just too popular for my own good. I contacted my hosts asking what it would take to get my website back online for the month. They promptly replied with $115. For the rest of this month. So thanks wpwebhost (visit now if you want to be horribly ripped off but at least have decent customer service!) for all your hard work, but I hiked my blog off to another hosting service. Fucking arduous process if there ever was one, but everything seems to be back working again.

Now allow me to make this the shortest return back to blogging since Epic Win Anime Blog and announce a hiatus. I’m on the final stretch of my final year at university, with my dissertation due in on the 10th May. So don’t expect any posts between now and then. I might do a monthly roundup, if only because I haven’t missed the past 21 monthly roundups and I’d hate to break the tradition, but don’t bank on it. I’ll catch up swiftly with Space Bros episodics when I come back. Hopefully. Cheers to more than one person who offered their blog as a platform for me to write when mine was down. It’s nice to know I have all these digital couches I can crash on in the blogosphere.

In the meantime, I was on some of the latest Bakacasts over at Project Haruhi, so you can go give them a listen. You can also visit the Aniblog Tourney for other anime blogs that aren’t quite as good as mine, with the possible exception of Ogiue Maniax for whom I have a raging stiffy for.…errr, don’ tell him I said that.