Spring Anime: First Impressions
I may not do much these days except blabber about anime, but I can at least do that.
So the Spring season is starting up; going in I was like “enh, maybe a couple things,” but watching first episodes, before I knew it it had snuck up on me with a lot of neat stuff, to the point that I might get overstretched and have to cut back. I’ve now seen the first episode of almost everything I plan to sample (still plan to catch ep. 1 of Valvrave but it’s not out until Friday and I don’t wanna wait), so I thought I’d make my report. As always, these things could take off in whole new directions, but how I see the lay of the land now...
So far I haven’t watched anything I would really call “bad,” either because I’m getting better at pre-filtering or it’s a good field this time. Even the ones I saw that I plan not to continue aren’t bad, they’re just innocuous fluff that I could maybe see myself watching if I didn’t have anything better to do, except the one that’s artsy and just not my thing.
The first of the fluffy ones, Majestic Prince, is basically a mecha/sentai kind of thing. The alien enemies get onscreen just long enough to be boringly-complete baddies, none of the heroes really make an impact, and perhaps my biggest headscratch (which might tell you how little I cared about the story one way or the other) was that the mecha seemed to have been modeled with a lot of love, but were then filmed so frenetically that I could hardly see them or understand the action at all; I was literally watching it thinking “this would be a great way to film lousy models you didn’t want anyone to get a good look at.” That said, it is kind of fun and mostly inoffensive, a light-hearted space mecha adventure whose straight-up comic-book heroism is nicely seasoned with a bit of self-aware snark.
The other fluffy one I actually did watch out of a combination of “vaguely curious” and “nothing better to do,” Zettai Bouei Leviatan. This one is like a magical girl show crossed with a really cute and low-key fantasy RPG. Nothing wrong with that, just nothing compelling about it either.
Artsy and not-my-thing is Flowers of Evil, which I was curious to see the first episode of but don’t want to invest in further. It’s too early for me to comment on the story, and I’ve never read the manga; the synopses I’ve seen make it sound really unappealing, but appealing seems to be the last thing this show wants to be. The animation is rotoscoped and to state my frank impression, it’s ugly and choppy and awkwardly flat when paired with the richly-rendered backgrounds. The writing seems equally determined to capture ugly reality, particularly in the protagonist’s exchanges with his friends where everyone involved is uncomfortable to watch for one reason or another. For the most part, I get the sense that this is exactly what they’re going for, and I actually do respect that (and think it's a wonderful thing about anime that you see an artsy project like this), I’m just not personally willing to go along with it at this point.
Now there are a couple where I’m at “guardedly interested” --- really enjoyed the first episodes but uncertain about the future.
The first of these, The Severing Crime Edge, could have easily gone very wrong, with a concept involving the hero’s hair fetish and serial killers, but it turned out I really enjoyed episode one. For me it hit the right balance of twisted and innocent, earnest and self-consciously silly --- like it ought to be a Tim Burton movie or something. The trouble is, the pilot was largely self-contained and the elements that form the basis to go forward on were perhaps the shakiest; it sold me on having Tim Burton make a movie out of the pilot more than it sold me on this thing going to series. I’m willing to give it the chance, but I honestly don’t know how it’ll go.
Then there’s Hataraku Maou-sama! (“The Devil is a Part-Timer!”). Between Maoyu and this, apparently anime creators are just playing with the high-fantasy Hero vs. Demon King bit like a child on Christmas afternoon with the box his most expensive present came in, and I for one am completely okay with this. This one transports the nearly-defeated Demon King to present-day Tokyo, where his magic is nearly gone and he has to do things like learn the language, obtain ID, rent a one-room apartment, and get a job at McDonalds. The problems are amusingly raised but not tiresomely belabored, and although the effect for me was more charming than laugh-out-loud funny, the charm was definitely enough. Judging by the preview, though, ep. 2 is going to be a big test for this one as we bring on a major female character and it could easily go very wrong.
Now we’re down to the more, how should I say, standard-bearing type shows? Some of which are brilliant, and some of which I have mixed feelings about.
I’ve already talked some about RDG: Red Data Girl (EDIT: Now streaming at Funimation)and won’t rehash it here. I still like it and find it promising, and in fact I’d say it’s my second favorite show so far this season (I’ll get to my very favorite later).
For new ones, I’ll start with Devil Survivor 2: The Animation. I haven’t played the game (or any of the Shin Megami Tensei series, although I’ve always heard good things about them), but the first episode of the anime has me hooked, at least for now. More than some of the series I’ll talk about below, this one does feel kind of typical, like it’s close to my stereotype of what a fantasy action anime with a modern setting is like, but it’s so well-executed that I don’t mind that a bit. The characters are sketched in just deftly enough to care when the creepy pathos of the situation hits them, and their reactions to it are just down-to-earth enough to ground the action that ensues; somehow even the devil-summoning phone app didn’t come off as ridiculous, and I actually caught myself getting goosebumps during the big action scene. Also, poking around the ANN forum, some people who had played the game claimed that our hero is clearly on a New Game +, which is an interesting thought even without game-specific knowledge. Again, episode 2 might be the test of this one as exposition from the MIBs seems to be on the menu, but so far it looks good.
From a typical-but-cool thing I didn’t expect to one I did: Karneval. I was kind of excited about this one going in, and it doesn’t quite live up to that, but it is fun, with a pretty-boy-heavy cast who do cool semi-fantastical kind of super-spy-ish stuff, with enough teasing of “This character has this problem and this other character knows something about it” that I want to see it play out. However, it’s not really deeply felt yet. My sense is that it hasn’t shown very many of its cards in the first episode; I want to learn more, but for now it just comes across as really average.
Then there’s Attack on Titan (EDIT: now streaming at Funimation AND Crunchyroll), which doesn’t come across as average at all (perhaps rant-worthy actually, so brace yourself). There was a lot of buzz around this one, but when I saw the trailer everyone said was so awesome, I learned only that it was EXTREEEEEME. And that’s basically what I got out of episode one. In terms of bold visuals, intensity, and horror show, I couldn’t help being impressed; in terms of storytelling I was not so impressed. The comic-book-like, bold, variable-line drawing style is fun to look at (although cutting actual manga pages into the OP was a bit anti-immersive), and we see things that are certainly exciting and impressive, like the sort of steampunk Spidey webslinging devices they use to fight the titans (although they seem more like an excuse to draw something EXTREEEEEME than a half-sensible way to fight giant vicious bipeds), and the titans themselves and the destruction they cause; the supertitan is just a horror all around, and even the somewhat goofy appearance of the smaller titans works, as they’re like something out of Night of the Living Dead --- shambling, dead-eyed, unstoppable predators, except huge (okay, so catching one with an oddly 9-to-5-worthy haircut is awkward, but mostly...); on intensity and horror, the show delivers. However, the story is at once overdone and underdone in various aspects. The characters’ emotions especially achieve a worst of both worlds --- watching everyone bug their eyes out and yell gets old (and/or unintentionally funny) pretty quick, while at one point a character is entirely too level-headed about their legs having been crushed. With things amped up that far, it’s easy to understand where the characters are at but not easy to connect with them. Watching the tragedy that ends the episode unfold, I felt the horror of the situation, but didn’t really feel anything for these people. Overall, the mother was handled in a particularly annoying way, although I do like sort-of sister Mikasa (perhaps not coincidentally the most understated person in the whole thing, and please please let her be as badass as was promised here). The world-building also is interesting, but it’s gracelessly delivered and comes off as half-baked. This entire society lives within its huge anti-titan walls and people even worship the walls, to the point that it’s a crime and a heresy to be interested in the world outside --- and yet the Recon Corps who go outside aren’t treated as outlaws or even greeted by hecklers when they come home (the worst they face is doubts about their heroism, and comrades’ newly-bereaved relatives who stream tears while bugging their eyes out and yelling). In fact, the layout of this place is so unclear that you could come away thinking people go outside all the time, just not very far; where are Eren and Mikasa right at the start and where’s that gate they went through? Details that can let that much air out of your key concepts are important. Speaking of, putting your whole society within walls for a hundred years creates some pretty serious logistical problems around resource base and such, and maybe these will be addressed, but for now... Well, I’m in, because its EXTREEEEEME-ness is interesting and fun to look at, but the more I try thinking about this thing, the more it falls apart.
And finally, the other show that was getting a lot of buzz beforehand, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet --- and I’ll just say it, this is the one that has pulled ahead as my favorite of the season. I liked it so much that after watching the first episode I turned right around and watched most of it again. The first half is a space-mecha war story which is hard not to compare favorably to Majestic Prince; the models again look awesome, and while the action is again chaotic, it does let us get a good look at things when we need to --- the awesome mecha formations, the enemies that are both more frightening and more interesting because we know absolutely nothing about them, human craft going down --- and also the chaos is really in service to the story, showing us what a hellish shooter game our hero Ledo’s life is. Indeed, even more awesome than the action is the storytelling. The worldbuilding is delivered right up front in a way that’s succinct, natural, and disturbing, and when Ledo’s (rather likable) talking mech, Chamber, informs him that he’s logged his 145K hours and earned its reward, there’s so much packed into that moment that I’m just gonna sit here and dwell on it for awhile. First, we get another disturbing look into the world Ledo comes from as he’s worked such a long time and gets only limited citizenship rights and four weeks of shore leave. Just how long has he been at this? I did the math (in fact, later in the show we get a minutes-months conversion so I could confirm that Earth time units applied; yes, that’s how much thought this show invites and rewards); 145K hours is about 17 years, which if Ledo’s people age like real world humans implies that he has been in the military from birth, or else a disturbingly young age. (I’d also like to point out that if you treat people as fighting machines for 17 years and then give them four weeks of shore leave to “reproduce freely,” odds are someone’s having a shitty life on the other end of this deal, too.) And then there’s the rub: Ledo gets the news of this reward and he feels nothing; this is at once incredibly sad, as we find that he literally cannot imagine a future for himself beyond this hellish shooter game and that the most minimal freedom is beyond his horizon and he knows it, and at the same time actually marks him as a bit of a free spirit --- we just saw him have propaganda about The Homeland piped into his brain where sleep-dreams ought to be, and he responds with only abstract curiosity. Then, straggling along as a mere asterisk, we have a brush with the “retirement at 5 o’clock today” trope, because yeah, this is all going pear-shaped. As the battle progresses, we find that Ledo is not so far gone that he’s beyond sympathy and humanity, and then, when his unit is forced to retreat, he gets lost on the way through the warp gate and wakes up six months later surrounded by “primitive” sea-faring treasure hunters trying and failing to take his mech apart with screwdrivers, on a planet that turns out to be... verdurous (if you haven’t guessed, I won’t say). The second half of the episode is pretty much spent on everyone’s initial reactions to this fish-out-of-water scenario, and it’s very well-played (the universal translator rendering swearing literally isn’t a brand-new joke, but it gets funnier when Ledo reads it as straight information). Unfortunately the planetside cast hasn’t gotten to do much yet (or had the kind of characterizing moments I could blabber about for 300 words), but they’ve already been established as a spunky, freewheeling bunch, so perfectly mismatched to everything we’ve learned about Ledo that throwing him in with them just brims with interest and hope. So yeah, I guess it is mainly Ledo and his messed-up life that have drawn me in at this point and I’m waiting for the rest to pan out, but I’m totally excited --- like I already want/ponder fanfic for this thing, because (unlike with Titan, whether the difference is in the construction or in where my eye is drawn) the more I think about this one, the more excited I get. ‡ original post at Dreamwidth ‡
So the Spring season is starting up; going in I was like “enh, maybe a couple things,” but watching first episodes, before I knew it it had snuck up on me with a lot of neat stuff, to the point that I might get overstretched and have to cut back. I’ve now seen the first episode of almost everything I plan to sample (still plan to catch ep. 1 of Valvrave but it’s not out until Friday and I don’t wanna wait), so I thought I’d make my report. As always, these things could take off in whole new directions, but how I see the lay of the land now...
So far I haven’t watched anything I would really call “bad,” either because I’m getting better at pre-filtering or it’s a good field this time. Even the ones I saw that I plan not to continue aren’t bad, they’re just innocuous fluff that I could maybe see myself watching if I didn’t have anything better to do, except the one that’s artsy and just not my thing.
The first of the fluffy ones, Majestic Prince, is basically a mecha/sentai kind of thing. The alien enemies get onscreen just long enough to be boringly-complete baddies, none of the heroes really make an impact, and perhaps my biggest headscratch (which might tell you how little I cared about the story one way or the other) was that the mecha seemed to have been modeled with a lot of love, but were then filmed so frenetically that I could hardly see them or understand the action at all; I was literally watching it thinking “this would be a great way to film lousy models you didn’t want anyone to get a good look at.” That said, it is kind of fun and mostly inoffensive, a light-hearted space mecha adventure whose straight-up comic-book heroism is nicely seasoned with a bit of self-aware snark.
The other fluffy one I actually did watch out of a combination of “vaguely curious” and “nothing better to do,” Zettai Bouei Leviatan. This one is like a magical girl show crossed with a really cute and low-key fantasy RPG. Nothing wrong with that, just nothing compelling about it either.
Artsy and not-my-thing is Flowers of Evil, which I was curious to see the first episode of but don’t want to invest in further. It’s too early for me to comment on the story, and I’ve never read the manga; the synopses I’ve seen make it sound really unappealing, but appealing seems to be the last thing this show wants to be. The animation is rotoscoped and to state my frank impression, it’s ugly and choppy and awkwardly flat when paired with the richly-rendered backgrounds. The writing seems equally determined to capture ugly reality, particularly in the protagonist’s exchanges with his friends where everyone involved is uncomfortable to watch for one reason or another. For the most part, I get the sense that this is exactly what they’re going for, and I actually do respect that (and think it's a wonderful thing about anime that you see an artsy project like this), I’m just not personally willing to go along with it at this point.
Now there are a couple where I’m at “guardedly interested” --- really enjoyed the first episodes but uncertain about the future.
The first of these, The Severing Crime Edge, could have easily gone very wrong, with a concept involving the hero’s hair fetish and serial killers, but it turned out I really enjoyed episode one. For me it hit the right balance of twisted and innocent, earnest and self-consciously silly --- like it ought to be a Tim Burton movie or something. The trouble is, the pilot was largely self-contained and the elements that form the basis to go forward on were perhaps the shakiest; it sold me on having Tim Burton make a movie out of the pilot more than it sold me on this thing going to series. I’m willing to give it the chance, but I honestly don’t know how it’ll go.
Then there’s Hataraku Maou-sama! (“The Devil is a Part-Timer!”). Between Maoyu and this, apparently anime creators are just playing with the high-fantasy Hero vs. Demon King bit like a child on Christmas afternoon with the box his most expensive present came in, and I for one am completely okay with this. This one transports the nearly-defeated Demon King to present-day Tokyo, where his magic is nearly gone and he has to do things like learn the language, obtain ID, rent a one-room apartment, and get a job at McDonalds. The problems are amusingly raised but not tiresomely belabored, and although the effect for me was more charming than laugh-out-loud funny, the charm was definitely enough. Judging by the preview, though, ep. 2 is going to be a big test for this one as we bring on a major female character and it could easily go very wrong.
Now we’re down to the more, how should I say, standard-bearing type shows? Some of which are brilliant, and some of which I have mixed feelings about.
I’ve already talked some about RDG: Red Data Girl (EDIT: Now streaming at Funimation)and won’t rehash it here. I still like it and find it promising, and in fact I’d say it’s my second favorite show so far this season (I’ll get to my very favorite later).
For new ones, I’ll start with Devil Survivor 2: The Animation. I haven’t played the game (or any of the Shin Megami Tensei series, although I’ve always heard good things about them), but the first episode of the anime has me hooked, at least for now. More than some of the series I’ll talk about below, this one does feel kind of typical, like it’s close to my stereotype of what a fantasy action anime with a modern setting is like, but it’s so well-executed that I don’t mind that a bit. The characters are sketched in just deftly enough to care when the creepy pathos of the situation hits them, and their reactions to it are just down-to-earth enough to ground the action that ensues; somehow even the devil-summoning phone app didn’t come off as ridiculous, and I actually caught myself getting goosebumps during the big action scene. Also, poking around the ANN forum, some people who had played the game claimed that our hero is clearly on a New Game +, which is an interesting thought even without game-specific knowledge. Again, episode 2 might be the test of this one as exposition from the MIBs seems to be on the menu, but so far it looks good.
From a typical-but-cool thing I didn’t expect to one I did: Karneval. I was kind of excited about this one going in, and it doesn’t quite live up to that, but it is fun, with a pretty-boy-heavy cast who do cool semi-fantastical kind of super-spy-ish stuff, with enough teasing of “This character has this problem and this other character knows something about it” that I want to see it play out. However, it’s not really deeply felt yet. My sense is that it hasn’t shown very many of its cards in the first episode; I want to learn more, but for now it just comes across as really average.
Then there’s Attack on Titan (EDIT: now streaming at Funimation AND Crunchyroll), which doesn’t come across as average at all (perhaps rant-worthy actually, so brace yourself). There was a lot of buzz around this one, but when I saw the trailer everyone said was so awesome, I learned only that it was EXTREEEEEME. And that’s basically what I got out of episode one. In terms of bold visuals, intensity, and horror show, I couldn’t help being impressed; in terms of storytelling I was not so impressed. The comic-book-like, bold, variable-line drawing style is fun to look at (although cutting actual manga pages into the OP was a bit anti-immersive), and we see things that are certainly exciting and impressive, like the sort of steampunk Spidey webslinging devices they use to fight the titans (although they seem more like an excuse to draw something EXTREEEEEME than a half-sensible way to fight giant vicious bipeds), and the titans themselves and the destruction they cause; the supertitan is just a horror all around, and even the somewhat goofy appearance of the smaller titans works, as they’re like something out of Night of the Living Dead --- shambling, dead-eyed, unstoppable predators, except huge (okay, so catching one with an oddly 9-to-5-worthy haircut is awkward, but mostly...); on intensity and horror, the show delivers. However, the story is at once overdone and underdone in various aspects. The characters’ emotions especially achieve a worst of both worlds --- watching everyone bug their eyes out and yell gets old (and/or unintentionally funny) pretty quick, while at one point a character is entirely too level-headed about their legs having been crushed. With things amped up that far, it’s easy to understand where the characters are at but not easy to connect with them. Watching the tragedy that ends the episode unfold, I felt the horror of the situation, but didn’t really feel anything for these people. Overall, the mother was handled in a particularly annoying way, although I do like sort-of sister Mikasa (perhaps not coincidentally the most understated person in the whole thing, and please please let her be as badass as was promised here). The world-building also is interesting, but it’s gracelessly delivered and comes off as half-baked. This entire society lives within its huge anti-titan walls and people even worship the walls, to the point that it’s a crime and a heresy to be interested in the world outside --- and yet the Recon Corps who go outside aren’t treated as outlaws or even greeted by hecklers when they come home (the worst they face is doubts about their heroism, and comrades’ newly-bereaved relatives who stream tears while bugging their eyes out and yelling). In fact, the layout of this place is so unclear that you could come away thinking people go outside all the time, just not very far; where are Eren and Mikasa right at the start and where’s that gate they went through? Details that can let that much air out of your key concepts are important. Speaking of, putting your whole society within walls for a hundred years creates some pretty serious logistical problems around resource base and such, and maybe these will be addressed, but for now... Well, I’m in, because its EXTREEEEEME-ness is interesting and fun to look at, but the more I try thinking about this thing, the more it falls apart.
And finally, the other show that was getting a lot of buzz beforehand, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet --- and I’ll just say it, this is the one that has pulled ahead as my favorite of the season. I liked it so much that after watching the first episode I turned right around and watched most of it again. The first half is a space-mecha war story which is hard not to compare favorably to Majestic Prince; the models again look awesome, and while the action is again chaotic, it does let us get a good look at things when we need to --- the awesome mecha formations, the enemies that are both more frightening and more interesting because we know absolutely nothing about them, human craft going down --- and also the chaos is really in service to the story, showing us what a hellish shooter game our hero Ledo’s life is. Indeed, even more awesome than the action is the storytelling. The worldbuilding is delivered right up front in a way that’s succinct, natural, and disturbing, and when Ledo’s (rather likable) talking mech, Chamber, informs him that he’s logged his 145K hours and earned its reward, there’s so much packed into that moment that I’m just gonna sit here and dwell on it for awhile. First, we get another disturbing look into the world Ledo comes from as he’s worked such a long time and gets only limited citizenship rights and four weeks of shore leave. Just how long has he been at this? I did the math (in fact, later in the show we get a minutes-months conversion so I could confirm that Earth time units applied; yes, that’s how much thought this show invites and rewards); 145K hours is about 17 years, which if Ledo’s people age like real world humans implies that he has been in the military from birth, or else a disturbingly young age. (I’d also like to point out that if you treat people as fighting machines for 17 years and then give them four weeks of shore leave to “reproduce freely,” odds are someone’s having a shitty life on the other end of this deal, too.) And then there’s the rub: Ledo gets the news of this reward and he feels nothing; this is at once incredibly sad, as we find that he literally cannot imagine a future for himself beyond this hellish shooter game and that the most minimal freedom is beyond his horizon and he knows it, and at the same time actually marks him as a bit of a free spirit --- we just saw him have propaganda about The Homeland piped into his brain where sleep-dreams ought to be, and he responds with only abstract curiosity. Then, straggling along as a mere asterisk, we have a brush with the “retirement at 5 o’clock today” trope, because yeah, this is all going pear-shaped. As the battle progresses, we find that Ledo is not so far gone that he’s beyond sympathy and humanity, and then, when his unit is forced to retreat, he gets lost on the way through the warp gate and wakes up six months later surrounded by “primitive” sea-faring treasure hunters trying and failing to take his mech apart with screwdrivers, on a planet that turns out to be... verdurous (if you haven’t guessed, I won’t say). The second half of the episode is pretty much spent on everyone’s initial reactions to this fish-out-of-water scenario, and it’s very well-played (the universal translator rendering swearing literally isn’t a brand-new joke, but it gets funnier when Ledo reads it as straight information). Unfortunately the planetside cast hasn’t gotten to do much yet (or had the kind of characterizing moments I could blabber about for 300 words), but they’ve already been established as a spunky, freewheeling bunch, so perfectly mismatched to everything we’ve learned about Ledo that throwing him in with them just brims with interest and hope. So yeah, I guess it is mainly Ledo and his messed-up life that have drawn me in at this point and I’m waiting for the rest to pan out, but I’m totally excited --- like I already want/ponder fanfic for this thing, because (unlike with Titan, whether the difference is in the construction or in where my eye is drawn) the more I think about this one, the more excited I get. ‡ original post at Dreamwidth ‡