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recent anime
Apr. 10th, 2018 01:19 amEverything has been very stressful and busy lately. The amount of anime I watch always increases exponentially when that happens. I have been writing it all up slowly and incrementally over weeks. Some things I've watched recently, in ascending order of how much I have to say about them:
How to Keep a Mummy / Miira no Kaikata
12 eps, on Crunchyroll, winter 2018 season so simulcasting finished like two weeks ago.
If you need an extremely cute, fluffy, quiet show in which nothing really bad ever happens to anyone and four very nice Japanese teenagers have adorable friendly adventures with chibi magical monsters, here you go. Cute but IMO does not tip over into sticky, can do a little numinous if it feels like it, reasonable characterization, literally no discernible plot. The mummy of the title, Mii-kun, is about three inches tall and behaves rather like a three or four-year-old. I don't know why I find a show essentially about parenting soothing, given that parenting is tiring-- possibly it is because unlike Mukumuku, the show's resident baku, my offspring has not yet learned to move faster than the speed of sound and use this power solely for appearing on my head. Restful. This show is very restful.
Hakata Tonkatsu Ramens
12 eps, on Crunchyroll, winter 2018 season so simulcasting finished like two weeks ago.
There's a genre of anime that's been a thing over the last few years, in which the show has an extremely large cast and part of the viewing process is figuring out what they are all doing in the show and how they are connected to one another. The work of genius in this category is Baccano!, which has a plot that leaves me, as a writer, envious, and the other major show that got really popular is Durarara! (which I did not like). The people who make this kind of show have noticed that having a compelling and satisfying plot which really needs a giant cast is rather difficult, so we get innovations such as Bungou Stray Dogs, which is something of a travelog of its setting and has endless random literary references in place of having a plot, and it kind of works.
Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens is also something of a travelog, this time of Hakata, and has split the difference between having a plot and not, and it entirely works-- at least, I like it better than anything in this genre but Baccano!, though I do have id reasons for that also.
The premise is that, for no apparent reason, Hakata is the headquarters of violent crime in Japan, and three percent of its population are hitmen. Private detective and baseball enthusiast Banba Zenji picks up and takes in, rather like a stray kitten, a teenage hitman he finds bleeding on his doorstep, as you do. Said hitman, Lin Xianming, of course brings his own complicated beef with the Mafia, as you do. Together, they...
... I wouldn't say fight crime. I mean, there's definitely less crime when they're through with it. The really surprising thing is that the show's actual genre is, of all things, workplace comedy, a genuinely funny one, because people keep on doing things like double-booking their hits, and what do you as a boss do when your senior hitman declares he 'needs a challenge' anyway?
But the reason I love this show is Lin. I have never seen anyone like Lin in an anime before. Lin is probably fifteen or sixteen, came up hard, is originally from China and definitely out of place in Hakata, and is a devoted, fulltime crossdresser. He passes, sometimes, but his actual gender presentation is 'I am a man in a dress and fuck you', and his friends roll with it. And he's just really well done. I thought for a while that he has the body language of someone who didn't grow up wearing skirts (there's a certain amount of trained-in keeping one's knees together), and then he actually went undercover and his demeanor completely changed; I realized then that he doesn't give a fuck most of the time, because he's dangerous enough that anyone who tries to harass him is going to have a bad day. He doesn't ping my radar about the whole murderous transvestite stereotype, because basically everyone in the show has a body count, and he's no more or less murderous than anyone else in the cast (which is pretty murder-y, mind you). He's complex and three-dimensional and the show takes his gender presentation for granted as a good thing and I could watch that forever. LIN ♥.
The show has basically no female cast, but it does have two separate out gay male characters who have things going on in their lives as well as being gay, survive the show with happy endings, and are also complex, multi-dimensional people with goals and arcs of their own. Neither of them being Lin. I am cheerful about this, too, as I just don't think we used to get people being out in anime this way. Mind you, if you speak no Japanese at all, you are going to have trouble figuring out what is going on with those characters from the official subtitles. (Sigh.)
I don't recommend this show unreservedly to everyone, because the plot could be stronger, and the violence level is high and graphic, and seriously, could we have had at least one female character onscreen for more than 2.5 minutes? And less violence against women who only turn up to be victims? But if you want an offbeat comedy with characters that grab you and several laugh-out-loud moments, this is a good call.
Houseki no Kuni / Land of the Lustrous
12 eps, no legal streaming that I can find, 2017.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a bunch of sentient, genderless rock people, named after the gems of which they are composed, are fighting a complicated and confusing battle with people invading the Earth from space. The long-standing worldbuilding reasons behind this are slowly doled out over a long period of time in the background of a show that mostly plays as a coming-of-age comedy, with a streak of action movie, a bigger streak of melancholy, and a surprising amount of body horror.
If one looks at when the manga started coming out, mind you, Houseki no Kuni predates Steven Universe, and, honestly, given that the entire preceding paragraph applies equally to both of them, the two shows are astonishingly different from one another. The main thing they have in common is being very, very good.
Oh, and being very pretty and well-animated, albeit in two completely different styles. There are some characters who share names, and I need to go looking for fanart of the same-name characters from each show standing together, because in almost every circumstance it would be hilarious.
Phosphophyllite, Houseki's protagonist, is the youngest of the gems and also the softest. They have a very low-pressure shattering point, which means they cannot fight against the Lunarians, who frequently attack from the moon to try to carry the gems off to use as jewelry. Phos desperately wants a useful place in the world, but doesn't have the inherent martial gifts of gems such as Diamond, or an absorbing other interest like the medical technician Rhodonite. There are thirty or forty gems, and they live on an island in the middle of an ocean on what seems to be, otherwise, an uninhabited Earth. Phos's quest is both to successfully fight with the Lunarians and to get some idea of why their world works the way it does, and both ambitions are really impressive and satisfying to watch.
The way the show handles having an almost completely nonbinary cast is androgynous character designs, an entirely female voice cast, and, to counterbalance that, every pronoun and referent is masculine. The gems use male pronouns such as 'ore' and 'wasshi', and call each other brothers. This worked pretty well for me, but again, I don't think the translation really does it justice, and I have had to avoid the fandom like the plague because it is full of bros who insist that one character or another just has to be female. Annoying, but not the show's fault; they really did try.
It's hard for me to explain how good this show is. It is the best anime I have watched in the last couple of years. I sat down to watch the first episode at 11 p.m. one night, and staggered off to bed at 5 a.m. having finished it-- and I don't binge things. It works on every level, and I really, really hope they make more. It was one of the major critical darlings of last year, and the manga is ongoing, so they might. Seriously, if you enjoy anime, this is at the top of the form.
Although, I should mention that for a while Ruth and I referred to Steven Universe, while it was going through a particularly melancholy streak, as the show about ROCKS AND CRYING, and when I tried to explain Houseki no Kuni to Ruth they said "Wait, did you find another show about ROCKS AND CRYING?" Yes. Yes, I did. This show will probably cause you emotions, because the things that happen in it have consequences, which is of course another reason it's so good.
Made in Abyss
12 eps, no legal streaming that I can find, 2017.
Okay, so I'm going to spend a while here waxing melodic about everything that's good about this show, and I just need you all to remember, throughout, that this is a highly qualified recommendation. I am not actually certain I can recommend this show at all, and I certainly can't rec it without reservations. Even though I watched all of it, enjoyed it, think it is objectively good, and am going to watch season two as it airs. Highly. Qualified. Rec. I'll get into why in a bit.
Made in Abyss has an amazing premise: there's an island, somewhere in the Pacific, which has a hole in the middle of it. And the hole goes down, and down, and down. No one has ever been to the bottom of the Abyss and returned, or even sent word back. Odd bits of incomprehensible technology are occasionally excavated from the sides, but no one can piece together anything about what they are or who made them. An entire city has sprung up around the rim of the Abyss, with an economy based on selling those pieces of tech, rare plants, animals, and minerals. Because there are entire ecosystems down there-- not just one, myriads. The Abyss is the most valuable place in the world, and also, without doubt, the most dangerous. Not only are the predators intelligent and voracious, but there's the Curse of the Abyss. If you go down far enough, when you start to head up again you become ill. In the upper reaches, it's just nosebleeds and nausea, but there is a point of no return, after which ascent will kill you... and it's nowhere near the bottom.
Rico, the twelve-year-old protagonist, has been raised in an orphanage, training as an Abyss raider, because her mother, one of the most legendary Abyss raiders of all time, vanished when she was very small. One day, she gets a letter from her mother: "I am at the bottom. I am waiting for you." She and her friend Reg, an Abyss artifact who's partly human, moderately amnesiac about the other parts, and mostly a twelve-year-old boy, decide they can't wait around to grow up before they dive.
The worldbuilding of this show is so good I can't even. The background scenery is awe-inspiring, at Ghibli levels of beauty and terror; the different ecosystems are enthralling, and every single one has more invention in it than most entire shows. Than many entire novels. The soundtrack is incredible, some of the best music from anime in this decade. Rico and Reg are wonderful kids who care about each other deeply and balance each other's flaws well, and the overarching plot is extremely well done and not afraid to get really dark. There's a major nonbinary character who's portrayed even better than the ones in Houseki no Kuni, and all of the character writing, whether for major or minor characters, is amazing. The action scenes are dramatic, and the animation is visceral and physical in a way few other shows can match. Things like food supplies, weapons, and the availability of only what two kids can pack in are always accounted for, and you really feel that each foot of downward motion is the result of a dedicated battle.
So why is this a qualified rec?
Made in Abyss is based on a webcomic, and the reason it's a webcomic is because no conventional manga publisher would touch it. You see, the mangaka is heavily into loli/shotacon. What that means for those of you who don't know anime jargon: Riku and Reg are twelve, but they're drawn as though they're eight or nine, because the manga artist fetishizes underage children. I heard before watching the anime that this aspect was heavily toned down in the adaptation, and all I have to say about that is, if this is toned down, it may not be legal to read the webcomic in several major countries.
It's not that anything sexually inappropriate happens; if that were the case, I'd have stopped watching. When sexuality comes up in the plot and story, it's age-appropriate, realistic, and quite sweet. None of the characters are creepy in any way-- I wouldn't have been able to handle that, either. The gaze of the camera itself is fetishizing. The way the shots are framed. The way the characters are drawn. The POV we get of this show, the way we the audience are seeing it, is, unmistakably, pedophilic. Thoroughly enough that it feels pretty icky to watch.
Now, personally, where I come down philosophically is that there is no indication that the mangaka has ever harmed any real children. I would rather people who are into this sort of thing go off and make drawings about it instead of doing anything else, especially if that helps them keep it out of their actual lives, so I'm not morally against this material. It's not my kink, and as a survivor I find it creepy as fuck to sit through, and I wish it weren't in this show, because it would otherwise be one of the great anime classics. I see why it was made anyway, even if they couldn't filter out the entire problematic perspective. There's a lot of great stuff in there.
But you should only watch it if you are prepared to cope with this perspective, and I totally understand and sympathize with anybody who doesn't want to watch it at all or who decides to bail in the middle. If you can cope with it, I think it's possible to find a lot of value in this series. I certainly do.
And I await season two eagerly, because I want to know more of what happens, and did I mention I am not going near the webcomic ever?
Seriously. Ever. Brrrr.
How to Keep a Mummy / Miira no Kaikata
12 eps, on Crunchyroll, winter 2018 season so simulcasting finished like two weeks ago.
If you need an extremely cute, fluffy, quiet show in which nothing really bad ever happens to anyone and four very nice Japanese teenagers have adorable friendly adventures with chibi magical monsters, here you go. Cute but IMO does not tip over into sticky, can do a little numinous if it feels like it, reasonable characterization, literally no discernible plot. The mummy of the title, Mii-kun, is about three inches tall and behaves rather like a three or four-year-old. I don't know why I find a show essentially about parenting soothing, given that parenting is tiring-- possibly it is because unlike Mukumuku, the show's resident baku, my offspring has not yet learned to move faster than the speed of sound and use this power solely for appearing on my head. Restful. This show is very restful.
Hakata Tonkatsu Ramens
12 eps, on Crunchyroll, winter 2018 season so simulcasting finished like two weeks ago.
There's a genre of anime that's been a thing over the last few years, in which the show has an extremely large cast and part of the viewing process is figuring out what they are all doing in the show and how they are connected to one another. The work of genius in this category is Baccano!, which has a plot that leaves me, as a writer, envious, and the other major show that got really popular is Durarara! (which I did not like). The people who make this kind of show have noticed that having a compelling and satisfying plot which really needs a giant cast is rather difficult, so we get innovations such as Bungou Stray Dogs, which is something of a travelog of its setting and has endless random literary references in place of having a plot, and it kind of works.
Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens is also something of a travelog, this time of Hakata, and has split the difference between having a plot and not, and it entirely works-- at least, I like it better than anything in this genre but Baccano!, though I do have id reasons for that also.
The premise is that, for no apparent reason, Hakata is the headquarters of violent crime in Japan, and three percent of its population are hitmen. Private detective and baseball enthusiast Banba Zenji picks up and takes in, rather like a stray kitten, a teenage hitman he finds bleeding on his doorstep, as you do. Said hitman, Lin Xianming, of course brings his own complicated beef with the Mafia, as you do. Together, they...
... I wouldn't say fight crime. I mean, there's definitely less crime when they're through with it. The really surprising thing is that the show's actual genre is, of all things, workplace comedy, a genuinely funny one, because people keep on doing things like double-booking their hits, and what do you as a boss do when your senior hitman declares he 'needs a challenge' anyway?
But the reason I love this show is Lin. I have never seen anyone like Lin in an anime before. Lin is probably fifteen or sixteen, came up hard, is originally from China and definitely out of place in Hakata, and is a devoted, fulltime crossdresser. He passes, sometimes, but his actual gender presentation is 'I am a man in a dress and fuck you', and his friends roll with it. And he's just really well done. I thought for a while that he has the body language of someone who didn't grow up wearing skirts (there's a certain amount of trained-in keeping one's knees together), and then he actually went undercover and his demeanor completely changed; I realized then that he doesn't give a fuck most of the time, because he's dangerous enough that anyone who tries to harass him is going to have a bad day. He doesn't ping my radar about the whole murderous transvestite stereotype, because basically everyone in the show has a body count, and he's no more or less murderous than anyone else in the cast (which is pretty murder-y, mind you). He's complex and three-dimensional and the show takes his gender presentation for granted as a good thing and I could watch that forever. LIN ♥.
The show has basically no female cast, but it does have two separate out gay male characters who have things going on in their lives as well as being gay, survive the show with happy endings, and are also complex, multi-dimensional people with goals and arcs of their own. Neither of them being Lin. I am cheerful about this, too, as I just don't think we used to get people being out in anime this way. Mind you, if you speak no Japanese at all, you are going to have trouble figuring out what is going on with those characters from the official subtitles. (Sigh.)
I don't recommend this show unreservedly to everyone, because the plot could be stronger, and the violence level is high and graphic, and seriously, could we have had at least one female character onscreen for more than 2.5 minutes? And less violence against women who only turn up to be victims? But if you want an offbeat comedy with characters that grab you and several laugh-out-loud moments, this is a good call.
Houseki no Kuni / Land of the Lustrous
12 eps, no legal streaming that I can find, 2017.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a bunch of sentient, genderless rock people, named after the gems of which they are composed, are fighting a complicated and confusing battle with people invading the Earth from space. The long-standing worldbuilding reasons behind this are slowly doled out over a long period of time in the background of a show that mostly plays as a coming-of-age comedy, with a streak of action movie, a bigger streak of melancholy, and a surprising amount of body horror.
If one looks at when the manga started coming out, mind you, Houseki no Kuni predates Steven Universe, and, honestly, given that the entire preceding paragraph applies equally to both of them, the two shows are astonishingly different from one another. The main thing they have in common is being very, very good.
Oh, and being very pretty and well-animated, albeit in two completely different styles. There are some characters who share names, and I need to go looking for fanart of the same-name characters from each show standing together, because in almost every circumstance it would be hilarious.
Phosphophyllite, Houseki's protagonist, is the youngest of the gems and also the softest. They have a very low-pressure shattering point, which means they cannot fight against the Lunarians, who frequently attack from the moon to try to carry the gems off to use as jewelry. Phos desperately wants a useful place in the world, but doesn't have the inherent martial gifts of gems such as Diamond, or an absorbing other interest like the medical technician Rhodonite. There are thirty or forty gems, and they live on an island in the middle of an ocean on what seems to be, otherwise, an uninhabited Earth. Phos's quest is both to successfully fight with the Lunarians and to get some idea of why their world works the way it does, and both ambitions are really impressive and satisfying to watch.
The way the show handles having an almost completely nonbinary cast is androgynous character designs, an entirely female voice cast, and, to counterbalance that, every pronoun and referent is masculine. The gems use male pronouns such as 'ore' and 'wasshi', and call each other brothers. This worked pretty well for me, but again, I don't think the translation really does it justice, and I have had to avoid the fandom like the plague because it is full of bros who insist that one character or another just has to be female. Annoying, but not the show's fault; they really did try.
It's hard for me to explain how good this show is. It is the best anime I have watched in the last couple of years. I sat down to watch the first episode at 11 p.m. one night, and staggered off to bed at 5 a.m. having finished it-- and I don't binge things. It works on every level, and I really, really hope they make more. It was one of the major critical darlings of last year, and the manga is ongoing, so they might. Seriously, if you enjoy anime, this is at the top of the form.
Although, I should mention that for a while Ruth and I referred to Steven Universe, while it was going through a particularly melancholy streak, as the show about ROCKS AND CRYING, and when I tried to explain Houseki no Kuni to Ruth they said "Wait, did you find another show about ROCKS AND CRYING?" Yes. Yes, I did. This show will probably cause you emotions, because the things that happen in it have consequences, which is of course another reason it's so good.
Made in Abyss
12 eps, no legal streaming that I can find, 2017.
Okay, so I'm going to spend a while here waxing melodic about everything that's good about this show, and I just need you all to remember, throughout, that this is a highly qualified recommendation. I am not actually certain I can recommend this show at all, and I certainly can't rec it without reservations. Even though I watched all of it, enjoyed it, think it is objectively good, and am going to watch season two as it airs. Highly. Qualified. Rec. I'll get into why in a bit.
Made in Abyss has an amazing premise: there's an island, somewhere in the Pacific, which has a hole in the middle of it. And the hole goes down, and down, and down. No one has ever been to the bottom of the Abyss and returned, or even sent word back. Odd bits of incomprehensible technology are occasionally excavated from the sides, but no one can piece together anything about what they are or who made them. An entire city has sprung up around the rim of the Abyss, with an economy based on selling those pieces of tech, rare plants, animals, and minerals. Because there are entire ecosystems down there-- not just one, myriads. The Abyss is the most valuable place in the world, and also, without doubt, the most dangerous. Not only are the predators intelligent and voracious, but there's the Curse of the Abyss. If you go down far enough, when you start to head up again you become ill. In the upper reaches, it's just nosebleeds and nausea, but there is a point of no return, after which ascent will kill you... and it's nowhere near the bottom.
Rico, the twelve-year-old protagonist, has been raised in an orphanage, training as an Abyss raider, because her mother, one of the most legendary Abyss raiders of all time, vanished when she was very small. One day, she gets a letter from her mother: "I am at the bottom. I am waiting for you." She and her friend Reg, an Abyss artifact who's partly human, moderately amnesiac about the other parts, and mostly a twelve-year-old boy, decide they can't wait around to grow up before they dive.
The worldbuilding of this show is so good I can't even. The background scenery is awe-inspiring, at Ghibli levels of beauty and terror; the different ecosystems are enthralling, and every single one has more invention in it than most entire shows. Than many entire novels. The soundtrack is incredible, some of the best music from anime in this decade. Rico and Reg are wonderful kids who care about each other deeply and balance each other's flaws well, and the overarching plot is extremely well done and not afraid to get really dark. There's a major nonbinary character who's portrayed even better than the ones in Houseki no Kuni, and all of the character writing, whether for major or minor characters, is amazing. The action scenes are dramatic, and the animation is visceral and physical in a way few other shows can match. Things like food supplies, weapons, and the availability of only what two kids can pack in are always accounted for, and you really feel that each foot of downward motion is the result of a dedicated battle.
So why is this a qualified rec?
Made in Abyss is based on a webcomic, and the reason it's a webcomic is because no conventional manga publisher would touch it. You see, the mangaka is heavily into loli/shotacon. What that means for those of you who don't know anime jargon: Riku and Reg are twelve, but they're drawn as though they're eight or nine, because the manga artist fetishizes underage children. I heard before watching the anime that this aspect was heavily toned down in the adaptation, and all I have to say about that is, if this is toned down, it may not be legal to read the webcomic in several major countries.
It's not that anything sexually inappropriate happens; if that were the case, I'd have stopped watching. When sexuality comes up in the plot and story, it's age-appropriate, realistic, and quite sweet. None of the characters are creepy in any way-- I wouldn't have been able to handle that, either. The gaze of the camera itself is fetishizing. The way the shots are framed. The way the characters are drawn. The POV we get of this show, the way we the audience are seeing it, is, unmistakably, pedophilic. Thoroughly enough that it feels pretty icky to watch.
Now, personally, where I come down philosophically is that there is no indication that the mangaka has ever harmed any real children. I would rather people who are into this sort of thing go off and make drawings about it instead of doing anything else, especially if that helps them keep it out of their actual lives, so I'm not morally against this material. It's not my kink, and as a survivor I find it creepy as fuck to sit through, and I wish it weren't in this show, because it would otherwise be one of the great anime classics. I see why it was made anyway, even if they couldn't filter out the entire problematic perspective. There's a lot of great stuff in there.
But you should only watch it if you are prepared to cope with this perspective, and I totally understand and sympathize with anybody who doesn't want to watch it at all or who decides to bail in the middle. If you can cope with it, I think it's possible to find a lot of value in this series. I certainly do.
And I await season two eagerly, because I want to know more of what happens, and did I mention I am not going near the webcomic ever?
Seriously. Ever. Brrrr.
