recent anime
Jun. 13th, 2014 02:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI went through a couple of years of not watching very much anime, and I couldn't figure out what was up with that. There just didn't seem to be anything I wanted to watch. Fortunately, that's recently improved dramatically, so much so that I don't think it was just me, I think there were some bad years in there. So, some mini-reviews of stuff I have watched and am watching lately, in order of how much I like them:
Akuma no Riddle (ongoing, has aired through ep. 10). SO. TRASHY. This is an anime about teenage girl assassins with torrid lesbian romance and Yun Kouga (Loveless) character designs, and it is even more ridiculous than it sounds. They've put their entire animation budget into having a different character song as an ending for every episode, the protagonist is a cipher who spends most of her time grunting and looking angst-ridden, random people keep turning out to be, like, cyborgs, and I am reasonably certain the ending is going to disintegrate in a puff of logic. I am enjoying the basically entirely female cast, the fact that the Damsel in Distress/Designated Target has saved herself repeatedly at this point and is the most competent person in the show by a huge margin, the ludicrously convoluted nature of the rules of the whole setup, and the queerness. Also if I was hearing correctly (the translation wasn't great, so I've been doing dialogue by ear) somebody was literally an Immortal from Highlander at one point, which was pretty hilarious. Available widely in fansub; if it's legally streaming they've titled it something different in English and I haven't found out what.
Samurai Flamenco (finished, 22 episodes). Neither samurai nor flamenco are involved in this anime. It is actually good, but almost everything interesting about it is a major, major spoiler. It starts off as a parody of heroes-in-colored-suits shows such as Power Rangers, although you don't need to be familiar with those as a genre to get the humor. The protagonist, Masayoshi, is a young man who grew up on those shows and who is trying to become a superhero despite not having any superpowers and the general limits imposed on him by realism. He made his own outfit! He goes around on a bicycle lecturing people for littering! Then-- well, this show turns out to be a really interesting meditation on several topics, including The State Of Anime Today, the concept of superheroes and heroism in general, a comparison of the way the U.S. and Japan look at superheroes and their jobs, and, most controversially, a look at in what ways you can bend a genre's implied contract with its audience before said audience simply leaves. (A LOT of people walked away from Samurai Flamenco. It's worth staying! They know what they're doing!) I do wish it knew what to do with its female characters. Like, at all. In any way. Ever. Legally streamable.
Hunter x Hunter (2011) (ongoing, has aired through episode 130-something, I am on episode 97). If they were going to take one thing from Shonen Jump magazine which had already had an anime and remake it with a bigger budget and more manga source material available, I am so very, very glad it was Hunter x Hunter. I loved the 2003 anime profoundly, despite the fact that they clearly had no idea where the story was going so they kept changing tone wildly, and then they got canceled in the middle of a major story arc and finished animating that arc as a direct-to-video with, basically, Sharpie and a couple of copy machines. Now they have enough manga to do foreshadowing correctly, and enough money to do actual shadows. Hunter x Hunter is one of the smarter shonen action titles, having sufficient worldbuilding that the mangaka made up his own alphabet for the series, and it has a different moral code than most action shows, in that the need to win at all costs is clearly demonstrated by the narrative to be pathological. It is one of the fandoms I have been in longest and I love it to pieces, even though the arc I am currently watching is in the process of breaking me. I have a devastating insect phobia and this arc can be summarized as 'the mangaka read George R. R. Martin's short story 'Sandkings' and then sat down and tried to figure out how to make it even more disturbing to people who hate bugs, with unfortunate success'. I am hoping it will be helpful in a desensitization way. Legally streamable.
Kill la Kill (finished, 24 episodes). Clothes are literally evil! We must fight them! I hope whoever came up with this idea for an anime was given some kind of award by the founders of Gainax. Honestly, I expected the show to be unwatchable, but it takes its ludicrous premise and runs so hard with it that the sheer lunatic daring is hypnotic. It helps that, of course, a lot of the cast is female, on both the good and evil sides, but all of them are way more interesting and nuanced than they had to be; that the substantial male portion of the cast is just as ridiculously oversexualized as the female portion; and that it is never only the attractive people who are running around mostly naked. I think there may also have been an intellectual argument somewhere it wanted to push about conformity and fascism and the Japanese national character, but honestly nobody cares. Clothes! Evil! Except the talking school uniform which is the protagonist's armor/friend! Either you can go with it, or you can't, and if you can, it's a great deal of fun. Legally streamable.
Kyousogiga (finished, 10 episodes). Honestly, I mostly started writing this entry because I wanted to burble about Kyousogiga. For the first few episodes, I was intrigued, but extremely confused. For a couple of episodes after that, I was delighted, but had no idea what was going on. And then I realized: there are many, many, many ways in which this is the closest thing I have ever seen in anime to a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, except made very, very, very Japanese. And then I spent the rest of the show smiling until my face hurt.
It begins with a priest, who is one of those priests who is so good at drawing that the things he draws can come to life, and in fact one of his paintings, a painting of a little black rabbit, does come to life and falls in love with him. She is lent a body by the Buddha of the Future, and in various ways the two of them have several children. But this is a scandal to the entire surrounding neighborhood, so the whole family picks up and moves to the Land Beyond The Looking Glass... and that is where we start. The narrative is extremely nonlinear, focusing on characters rather than on chronology, and this was very frustrating for a while, because I couldn't figure out why they were doing it that way; when I realized just how much information the writers managed to cram into very little space, I understood. It has gentle humor, and aching sadness, and a scene where I said to myself 'huh, I always wondered where the train in Spirited Away went to, isn't that nice to know', and one of those DWJ-ish plots where even if you are looking for the catch and the twist, and even if you think you spotted it, it was right there under your nose the whole time and makes perfect sense and is a genuine outright surprise. Oh, and there's a thread of it that is Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. After so many Wonderland adaptations, it's nice to see a Looking Glass. Oh, and the priest is based on a real priest, who was an important figure in Shingon Buddhism and the founder of an important temple near Kyoto, though I don't know what the real one would have thought about marrying a rabbit. Also, the art is very pretty. Legally streamable.
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Akuma no Riddle (ongoing, has aired through ep. 10). SO. TRASHY. This is an anime about teenage girl assassins with torrid lesbian romance and Yun Kouga (Loveless) character designs, and it is even more ridiculous than it sounds. They've put their entire animation budget into having a different character song as an ending for every episode, the protagonist is a cipher who spends most of her time grunting and looking angst-ridden, random people keep turning out to be, like, cyborgs, and I am reasonably certain the ending is going to disintegrate in a puff of logic. I am enjoying the basically entirely female cast, the fact that the Damsel in Distress/Designated Target has saved herself repeatedly at this point and is the most competent person in the show by a huge margin, the ludicrously convoluted nature of the rules of the whole setup, and the queerness. Also if I was hearing correctly (the translation wasn't great, so I've been doing dialogue by ear) somebody was literally an Immortal from Highlander at one point, which was pretty hilarious. Available widely in fansub; if it's legally streaming they've titled it something different in English and I haven't found out what.
Samurai Flamenco (finished, 22 episodes). Neither samurai nor flamenco are involved in this anime. It is actually good, but almost everything interesting about it is a major, major spoiler. It starts off as a parody of heroes-in-colored-suits shows such as Power Rangers, although you don't need to be familiar with those as a genre to get the humor. The protagonist, Masayoshi, is a young man who grew up on those shows and who is trying to become a superhero despite not having any superpowers and the general limits imposed on him by realism. He made his own outfit! He goes around on a bicycle lecturing people for littering! Then-- well, this show turns out to be a really interesting meditation on several topics, including The State Of Anime Today, the concept of superheroes and heroism in general, a comparison of the way the U.S. and Japan look at superheroes and their jobs, and, most controversially, a look at in what ways you can bend a genre's implied contract with its audience before said audience simply leaves. (A LOT of people walked away from Samurai Flamenco. It's worth staying! They know what they're doing!) I do wish it knew what to do with its female characters. Like, at all. In any way. Ever. Legally streamable.
Hunter x Hunter (2011) (ongoing, has aired through episode 130-something, I am on episode 97). If they were going to take one thing from Shonen Jump magazine which had already had an anime and remake it with a bigger budget and more manga source material available, I am so very, very glad it was Hunter x Hunter. I loved the 2003 anime profoundly, despite the fact that they clearly had no idea where the story was going so they kept changing tone wildly, and then they got canceled in the middle of a major story arc and finished animating that arc as a direct-to-video with, basically, Sharpie and a couple of copy machines. Now they have enough manga to do foreshadowing correctly, and enough money to do actual shadows. Hunter x Hunter is one of the smarter shonen action titles, having sufficient worldbuilding that the mangaka made up his own alphabet for the series, and it has a different moral code than most action shows, in that the need to win at all costs is clearly demonstrated by the narrative to be pathological. It is one of the fandoms I have been in longest and I love it to pieces, even though the arc I am currently watching is in the process of breaking me. I have a devastating insect phobia and this arc can be summarized as 'the mangaka read George R. R. Martin's short story 'Sandkings' and then sat down and tried to figure out how to make it even more disturbing to people who hate bugs, with unfortunate success'. I am hoping it will be helpful in a desensitization way. Legally streamable.
Kill la Kill (finished, 24 episodes). Clothes are literally evil! We must fight them! I hope whoever came up with this idea for an anime was given some kind of award by the founders of Gainax. Honestly, I expected the show to be unwatchable, but it takes its ludicrous premise and runs so hard with it that the sheer lunatic daring is hypnotic. It helps that, of course, a lot of the cast is female, on both the good and evil sides, but all of them are way more interesting and nuanced than they had to be; that the substantial male portion of the cast is just as ridiculously oversexualized as the female portion; and that it is never only the attractive people who are running around mostly naked. I think there may also have been an intellectual argument somewhere it wanted to push about conformity and fascism and the Japanese national character, but honestly nobody cares. Clothes! Evil! Except the talking school uniform which is the protagonist's armor/friend! Either you can go with it, or you can't, and if you can, it's a great deal of fun. Legally streamable.
Kyousogiga (finished, 10 episodes). Honestly, I mostly started writing this entry because I wanted to burble about Kyousogiga. For the first few episodes, I was intrigued, but extremely confused. For a couple of episodes after that, I was delighted, but had no idea what was going on. And then I realized: there are many, many, many ways in which this is the closest thing I have ever seen in anime to a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, except made very, very, very Japanese. And then I spent the rest of the show smiling until my face hurt.
It begins with a priest, who is one of those priests who is so good at drawing that the things he draws can come to life, and in fact one of his paintings, a painting of a little black rabbit, does come to life and falls in love with him. She is lent a body by the Buddha of the Future, and in various ways the two of them have several children. But this is a scandal to the entire surrounding neighborhood, so the whole family picks up and moves to the Land Beyond The Looking Glass... and that is where we start. The narrative is extremely nonlinear, focusing on characters rather than on chronology, and this was very frustrating for a while, because I couldn't figure out why they were doing it that way; when I realized just how much information the writers managed to cram into very little space, I understood. It has gentle humor, and aching sadness, and a scene where I said to myself 'huh, I always wondered where the train in Spirited Away went to, isn't that nice to know', and one of those DWJ-ish plots where even if you are looking for the catch and the twist, and even if you think you spotted it, it was right there under your nose the whole time and makes perfect sense and is a genuine outright surprise. Oh, and there's a thread of it that is Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. After so many Wonderland adaptations, it's nice to see a Looking Glass. Oh, and the priest is based on a real priest, who was an important figure in Shingon Buddhism and the founder of an important temple near Kyoto, though I don't know what the real one would have thought about marrying a rabbit. Also, the art is very pretty. Legally streamable.
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