Anime

Scooby Doo without Scooby Doo is just pointless.

Published on January 13, 2023Leave a comment

With all the shows HBO cancelled without ever airing just for tax purposes, why couldn’t this be one of them?

I first learned about this show three months ago when Polygon previewed it and it sounded so horrible already:

The show introduces Velma in her high school years as a bespectacled loser. If two cockroaches copulating in the opening scene doesn’t establish Velma’s tone, the next scene should do the trick: nude teenage girls partaking in physical violence in the gym showers (all while debating the ethical appropriateness and exploitation of blatant nudity in media). Later, the corpse of a teenager is found in Velma’s locker, making her the prime suspect in the eyes of two cops (Wanda Sykes and Jane Lynch). Of course, she has to solve the mystery to clear her name. One problem: Velma hasn’t really solved a mystery in a while, not since her mystery novelist mother vanished from her life. And whenever Velma tries to solve a mystery, she gets harassed by ghastly zombielike spirits.

Taking a kids show and making it all adult by upping the blood, tits and rampant cynicism is the oldest and most boring trick in the book. Going for an origin show is also a bit, ehh, unnecessary. Scooby Doo of all things does not need an origin. Four kids and their dogs traveling America in their own groovy van, in search of the supernatural and only ever finding fakes trying to cheat the local town out of its cash reserves is a formula that just works. You don’t need to dress it up. In this context making the cast somewhat less sixties whitebread is good, but even this seems suspect when everything else in the show is so damn cynical and it’s leaning hard into rightwing memes for its ‘jokes’. But the worst insult is this:

Grandy addressed the brown-spotted Great Dane (not) in the room by explaining that the team thought hard about what it could do to distinguish Velma as an adult show. “What made Scooby-Doo a kid show is Scooby-Doo,” Grandy said. “We couldn’t have a take on it, like how can we do this in a fun and modern way. [Our efforts] coincided with Warner Bros. Animation saying we can’t use the dog!” For Grandy, the omission of the iconic Great Dane accentuates the adult tone of Velma — though who knows what will happen along the show’s serialized journey.

Yeah, that makes sense, to remove the most iconic and recognisable element of the original because it’s nOt AdUlT eNoUgH. It does feel like somebody came up with an idea for an orginal show and the Scooby Doo brand (ugh) was forced upon it.

Executive producer Mindy Kaling meanwhile is if not an outright transphobe herself, certainly a tad too sympathetic to them, so that’s another reason not to waste your time on this show.

Tracking with Close-Ups: Anime

Published on January 12, 2023Leave a comment

Let’s nick another nifty post title from John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar for this round-up of anime focused links. Considering the time of year we end with two best of twentytwo lists, but first there’s a look back at the 2000s cult classic Vandread, a review of Godzilla Singular Point, an indepth look at how the 86 series uses letterboxing and a neat little Spotify playlist for o.g. IdolM@ster tracks.

Vandread
Vandread was an anime that came out in the year 2000 and it’s a bit tricky to introduce because everything it is it’s also not quite. It’s a harem anime, but not quite. It’s a space giant robot anime, but not quite. It’s a science fiction anthology anime, but not quite. It’s about genders, but not quite, about relationships, but not quite, and about identity, but not quite. In a lot of ways, Vandread is a really confused piece, a gem of its time.
The Jet Jaguar Show
Godzilla Singular Point is a gorgeously designed, beautifully animated sci-fi show that often feels like arriving mid-lecture to a physics class. This, somehow, is part of the appeal. The 13-episode anime series is weird and dense if not weird because it is so dense, cramming a prodigious amount of information into a franchise that historically just kind of waves its hands around whenever the science comes up. Stories about stopping some rampaging giant monsters tend not to foreground this much math. But to summarize exactly how granular the series gets about concepts like the passage of time would require me to dive into ideas that I only half-understand myself, so to give a quicker and more digestible impression for just how odd, how left-field/galaxy-brain out there the first Godzilla TV anime is, we need to talk about Jet Jaguar.
Bringing Letterboxes To Life: Toshimasa Ishii, Tomohiko Ito & Eighty-Six Episode Twenty-Two’s Use Of The 21:9 Aspect Ratio
Episode Twenty-Two is predominantly shot in the 21:9 aspect ratio or what some may call a 21:9 ‘letterbox’ since there are two horizontal bars that clasp the animation from above and below. 86 has opened up the door to experimenting with aspect ratios before. Fido’s flashback in 4:3 within Hirotaka Mori and Satsuki Takahashi’s episode (Episode Ten), as well as Ken Yamamoto’s use of 21:9 in the second cour’s opening, are examples of how they can be mobilised to add to the anime’s ongoing discussion on the multiple perspectives that are present during times of conflict. Shifting to a different aspect ratio represents a shift in worldview and provides viewers with an alternative lens to interpret what is going on in front of them. So what exactly makes Ishii’s experiment in ‘Shin’ different from the ones that preceded it? In my view, the use of 21:9 helps to express the pent-up emotions felt by the characters. The director breathes life into the bars and makes them responsive to the feelings of the subjects.
Million Live — Essenti@ls
music from the idolmaster million live (アイドルマスターミリオンライブ) sorted in categorical, then chronological order! all songs are included except solo/unit mixes & off vocal. playlists will be updated frequently as new albums get released. WELCOME to 765PRO’s theater! | missing: VARIETY 02
Top Anime of 2022 (and Year in Review)
“Alright, great, I can always count on you for cynicism about art and culture, but didn’t you say something about being invigorated in your anime viewing?” Sorry, yes, I got away from myself a bit there. I include all this doomsaying preamble merely to say that while I understand the industry’s situation isn’t great, my own year in anime has been littered with reasons to hope. I’ve leapt backwards across anime history, and discovered that the early shows of Miyazaki and Takahata are just as enchanting as their film work (to say nothing of the fantastic early Toei Doga films). I’ve rediscovered the unique joy of group watching, and have munched through hundreds of episodes with my housemates cheering beside me. Hell, I’ve even watched some currently airing anime; this year lacked a “this is what I watch anime for” production on the level of Heike Monogatari, but it’s made up for that with an altogether wider spread of commendable shows, alongside One Piece’s preposterously consistent adaptation of its most ambitious arc so far.
The Backlog, Year… 5? And a half?? A Hiatus in Review
Counting everything together, I do only come to a mere 48 new shows to run down, barely more than half of my busier years, even though we’re counting almost six more months in here than I usually would. I can’t even bother to put the usual “watched in rotation”, “watched off rotation” brackets in, because there’s really only four rotation shows here, and I finished none of them! Yet. But you know what? I’m still gonna put my all into it. If there’s one thing this girl here cares about, it’s lists, right?

Mundane beauty — Mou Ippon!

Published on January 11, 2023Leave a comment

One overlooked strength of anime is how it can make the mundane beautiful, how it can set a scene or mood by just a serious of establishing shots and the right music:

Yes, this could be done in live action as well, but it could never be as beautiful.

It sets the stage for the story Mou Ippon! wants to tell perfectly. We start with the sun high in the sky, a hot Summer’s day, the noise of cicadas in the background reinforcing it. Pan down to your typical anime high school, slowly focusing on a cicada on a tree. A loud thud scares it and it flies off. The thuds repeat as we come to the martial arts dojo. Coming inside we still don’t know what’s causing the thuds as the camera focuses on the details of the hall: the half open blinds, a fan, a water bottle, the tatami mats covering the floor. Then, a hand pushes off the mats and we zoom out to see a girl in judo gear doing rolling exercises, causing the sound that lured us here. When she finishes them, we get our first look at her face and follow her line of sight to the doors, where her three friends just came in. The scene continues for a while, showing how comfortable and content the four are practising with each other. Three of them spar for a while, while the fourth does stretches; she’s slightly different from the others. It ends with them in a circle on the tatami mats, hot, sweaty but happy. Then cue title drop and the actual start of the story.

The four main characters lying in a circle on the tatami mats in judo and sports gear

It all starts with Michi, the girl practising on her own, and Sanae going to her final judo competition in middle school. They’re the last two left of their school’s judo club and have little hope of making it far. And indeed, after Sanae is eliminated so is Michi, when her opponent gets her in a headlock and she loses consciousness. To make matters worse somebody videoed it and put it on social media. Michi isn’t too heartbroken as she wants to quit judo anyways in high school. When they do get into high school some time later, their other friend Anna tries to convince Michi to join the kendo team. She lures the both of them to the dojo where they stumble upon the same girl who defeated Michi holding off the entire kendo team while trying to lay out the tatami mats needed for judo. Turns out the judo club no longer has members so the kendo team will take over the entire hall. Towa counters that they only need three members to revive the club and then starts fighting with Anna over Michi. Then, through some clever foot work by Sanae, Michi gets in a judo grapple with Towa and defeats her with an ippon. End result: they’ll join the judo club.

Towa and Anna in a literal tug of war using Michi as rope

If you watch this and notice a little bit of a lesbian tone to the proceedings, you’re not wrong. It’s clear that Sanae only started judo to be with Michi, while Anna is as obviously infatuated with her sporting prowess — and maybe more — as well. Even Towa seems to be strangely attracted to her, stalking her as she left that judo competition trying to get her attention, but failing to do so through Anna turning up at the wrong moment. And then she engages in a literal tug of war about her with Anna, which couldn’t be more obvious. Now all of this may just be simple friendship but I’d like it to be a bit more if possible. In any case this already looks a really fun series. The fights so far have been excellent, selling the physicality of the sport really well. This looks to be more of a series about the camaraderie of doing a sport together than about winning the Interhigh, which I can only approve of.

I was a Teenage Spy Girl — Spy Kyoushitsu

Published on January 8, 20231 Comment

After the horrors of the Great War, the nations of the world resolved to from now on fight through espionage instead, with each nation creating entire schools for them. In the Din Republic, seven failed almost dropouts from these schools have been assembled to be trained under the world’s greatest spy — and wworst teacher — to become a team capable of completing Impossible Missions.

The seven spies looking like they stepped out a Key visual novel

The team certainly looks good, even though I got the feeling I’ve seen some of them before in some Key visual novel. This first episode was very much the setup for the rest of the series, following Lily, the girl in the middle. She’s the optimistic, air headed type and the one to get the group settled as they get used to their new situation. Things come to a head the next morning, as it turns out their teacher Klaus is one of those geniuses who thinks everybody can understand him if he tells them that to pick a look you need to use your lock picking tools the correct way. It sinks in for Lily and the others that their’s is indeed an impossible mission, but Lily refuses to give up. It’s in the second half of the episode that she shows off both her resourcefulness and her cynicism as she attempts to blackmail their teacher into returning them to their schools, only to inadvertently give Klaus an idea on how to train them properly…

As a piece of entertainment this was fun. I hope the focus stays on the training and our various spy girls attempting to defeat their teacher and we don’t get too much into the actual spy missions though, our that it loses its light hearted tone. Animation wise this is also one of the better shows so far this season, with crowd scenes in which we had actual movement! But. I’m always a bit worried when an anime series has a Taisho-era inspired setting, as that seems to be pretty much the time period of choice for people nostalgic for Imperial Japan before WWII spoiled things. Combine that with the pseudorealist but strangely apolitical idea that war has grown too terrible but nations still need to fight each other, but now through espionage and alarm bells start ringing.

With this setup, it’s naive to think that this will ever offer “a robust look at humanity”, as the Anime Feminist review hoped for. That’s not what this show is interested in. Lily’s backstory confirmed that. Her motivation to become a spy because a spy saved her as the only survivor of a horrible tragedy is again, an apolitical motivation. It’s idealistic but with no ideology behind it. In real life, you had people like the Cambridge Five who become spies out of solid communist convictions and regardless of what you think of it, that makes sense. But Lily doesn’t even become a spy out of patriotism, but from some generic belief that by doing so she can prevent further tragedies, without much regard for whom she will serve or which cause she’s spying for. This is a rightwing anime, a series that presents its status quo as right and just, that accept that nations will always be in conflict, with no intent to examine this worldview other than perhaps some cliched clash between idealism and realism.

Which doesn’t stop it from being a fun little spy action series, but I don’t expect anything more from it.

Let’s Get It Over With — The Rest of — Anime 2022 #48 – 75

Published on December 29, 2022Leave a comment

There are various reasons why this project of catalogueing my anime watching this year ends the way it does here, but the biggest contributing factor must be my day job. We had a bit of a death march at the end of the year as we struggled to bring a project live, but even before that it swallowed up a lot of my time and energy. Which meant I barely was able to focus on watching anime, let alone reviewing anything. so instead I’ll just make a list of everything else I watched after the Spring season here. For some anime I may write proper posts later; if so I’ll link to them here as well. Ultimately this is of course purely for my own self indulgence, so why struggle eh?

Holiday viewing

Most years I go on suimmer holiday with my parents and younger brother; this time we went to Bergerac, home town of a certain Cyrano you might’ve heard of. It was a bit of a disaster to be honest. I travelled there by train and the delays started at Amsterdam, which means I missed my connection in Paris even after crossing through town on the back of an (likely illegal) motor scooter taxi. Then my brother had to go back home because of a medical emergency with my parents bringing him back by car, which meant me being on my own for two days in the middle of the first week. Combine that with temperatures that easily reached forty degrees celsius each afternoon and it was a recipe for disaster. Afternoons therefore were mostly spent indoors, in air conditioned coolness, watching anime and Netflix series.

Tensei shitara Slime Datta Ken 2nd Season Part 2: second part of the second season has more politics and more fights agains the Demon Lords behind the events of the first part. On the whole, the second season wasn’t as good or interesting as the first. It all blurred a bit together for me.
Sweat Punch: five short movies created by Studio 4°C that experiment and play around with various animation techniques. Interesting and occassionally even brilliant. If you’re interested in animation for animation sake, this is for you.
BanG Dream! Garupa Pico: Fever!: short gag comedies starring the BanG Dream! characters. Available on the official BanG Dream! Youtube channel.
Komi-san wa, Komyushou Desu. (Season 1 & 2): I love the manga but the anime was a bit of a disappointment at first, mainly due to the bad subtitling choices. Not so much the translation itself, but the decisions in what to translate in a series that at times depends a lot on written text rather than spoken dialogue. Komi-san being too shy to speak much and who instead relies on writing her questions and such in a notebook. Once I got over that however
Gekijouban Seitokai Yakuindomo: most comedy anime series that get a movie take the opportunity to tell a proper story. Not Seitokai Yakuindomo. This is just like an extra long regular episode, which means it’s full of the usual quick fire sex jokes and if you like that sort of thing, it’s incredibly funny.
Gekijouban Bang Dream! Poppin’ Dream!: a sequel to the third season of BanG Dream! in which Popping Party and several other bands get to travel overseas for a concert. Comfort viewing for me.

Summer 2022

Not as good as the Spring season; I planned to watch 13 series and ended up finishing twelve. There were two outstanding shows, Lycoris Recoil and Yofukashi no Uta. The rest was decent but not spectacular.

Tensei Kenja no Isekai Life: Daini no Shokugyou o Ete, Sekai Saikyou ni Narimashita: salary man working for a black company dies of overwork, reincarnates in the usual fantasy world and quickly gets really overpowered, fights evil. The source of this was slightly more tongue in cheek than the anime. Decent enough if you like Isekai series.
Lycoris Recoil: a special elite of school girls keep the peace in Japan by murdering everybody who is a threat to it. Come for the edgy concept, stay for the slowly developing love story between Takina and Chisato. Loved this more for its quiet moments and the cast than for its plot and action scenes, good as the latter were. In my top ten of 2022 anime.
Soredemo Ayumu wa Yosetekuru: the protagonist is in love with his undersized senpai, but refuses to confess until he can beat her in shogi. She suspects this and tries to trick him into confessing prematurely, only for it to backfire on her. A nice little romcom.
Kumichou Musume to Sewagakari: violent yakuza dude is tasked with body guarding / baby sitting his boss’ young daughter. Hijinks ensue. The yakuza in this are not very gangster like, but this was a bittersweet sort of comedy about growing up, grief and becoming a family.
Isekai Yakkyoku: after losing his sister to a rare disease, our hero has spent his life dedicated to pharmacy to prevent this from happening to other people. Naturally he dies of overwork and reincarnates in a sort of 18th century level fantasy world marked with the signs of the god of medicine after his host body was hit by lightning. Now he has a chance to revolutionise this world’s understanding of medicine. One of the rare isekai series that has the protagonist taking over an existing person’s body with the acknowledgment that this means the original person is dead.
Yofukashi no Uta: model student gets bored with school, starts going and instead starts exploring the city at night. He runs into a vampire girl and decides he wants to be one as well. But to do so he has to fall in love with her so she can turn him. Really really good at depicting the appeal of exploring a city at night. Great music too. Also a top ten anime for this year.
Hanabi-chan wa Okure-gachi: one of those short promotional anime, this time for pachinko gambling parlours. Fun though.
Extreme Hearts: a sports series concieved by one of the writers of the Nanoha series and just as matter of factly bizarre as that one. A setting that has seemingly sentient humanoid androids walking around and the only thing that’s done with them is have them play extreme versions of games like baseball and volleyball with the protagonist as she slowly builds a team to take on a competition so she can become an idol.
Renmei Kuugun Koukuu Mahou Ongakutai Luminous Witches: set in the Strike Witches world but this time the characters are not based on famous WWII fighter aces, but rather on famous WWII singers. A diverse band of witches not good enough to actually fight is brought together for another purpose: to inspire morale at the home front by giving concerts.
Love Live! Superstar!! (2022): seond season of this version of Love Live. Excellent quality like always, with some fun new character introduced and also the biggest, worst chickening out of all time as the last minute of the last episode undos what the rest of the season was working towards.
Warau Arsnotoria Sun!: a slice of moe show about cute magical girls training at magic school, interspersed with edgy scenes that showed witches being hunted and heretics being murdered in a fantasy version of puritan England? I kept waiting for the two to be connected, but except for some hints it never happened.
Durarara!!: one of those shows that when I got back into anime in 2014/15 was supposed to be known to every serious anime fan. Over the years I’ve had three-four false starts trying to watch this, but this year I finally succeeded in finishing it. There are obvious reasons why it became such a highly rated show, but on the whole I found it good rather than great.

Autumn 2022

Seventeen shows on my watch list for this season. It’s no finished yet of course but I doubt I will have finished everything on that list once Winter 2023 rolls around. Some excellent shows this season though, with three contenders of Anime of the Year for me: Do It Yourself!!, Bocchi the Rock and Yama no Susume: Next Summit

Bang Dream! Film Live 2nd Stage: A live concert by all the bands of the BanG Dream! franchise (except Glitter Green), each getting three songs. CG animated and one of the best examples of how to do CG animation well. For fictional bands the music is rather good. All somewhat idol adjecent of course, but with some variety nonetheless.
Tensei Shitara Ken Deshita: a guy is reincarnated as a magic sword and rescues a cat girl from slavers. Most of the fun in this series is because of Fran, the cat girl and her responses as her sword dad raises her as an adventurer.
Prima Doll: a left over from the Summer season. Turns out this was a Key visual novel adaptation. The Black Cat cafe’s employees are all humanoid steampunk android, decommissioned after the war trying to adapt to a new life. Their latest recruut has lost her memories due to having had to undergo extensive repairs. Now she too is trying to create a new life for herself. But is the past as buried as it seems to be? Of course not and this does the usual Key swerve into angsty melodrama.
Yama no Susume: Next Summit: this fourth season of one of the best slice of moe series ever is great for newcomers as the first four episodes retell what happened in the first three seasons. (Made possible because the first season had three minute episodes and the other two were still only half length.) The rest of the series picks up from there as Aoi tries to get over her disappointment at failing to reach the summit of Mount Fuji and prepares herself for a new attempt.
Do It Yourself!!: the second great slice of moe show this season, about Yua Serufu, a clumsy girl who joins the DIY club at her school to get back with her childhood friend, who goes to a nearby school. This was such a sweet, lovely series, especially in how it showed that relationship between Yua Serufu and her childhood friend Purin, a classic tsundere. It takes a long time for the latter to admit she too wants to be in the DIY club with Yua Serufu and I love the series for its patience in getting her to that point.
Bocchi the Rock: introvert middle school girl wanting to make friends sees a television programme in which a popular musician says he was introverted in high school and that playing the guitar made him popular. So she gets obsessed with playing the guitar but is still bad at communicating and reaching out to people so now in high school she’s still alone. Until somebody in a band sees her in the park carrying her guitar and invites her to join. A classic case of a four panel comedy manga being adapted into something bigger, with the obligatory references to K-On taken for granted. I loved this series, the third excellent slice of moe series coming out this season. Because it tries to break out of the gag manga format it occassionally stumbles, especially with episode seven, which is just mean spirited.
Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon S: Nippon no Omotenashi – Attend wa Dragon desu: cute little OVA about Kanna’s friend from America coming to visit Japan.
Akiba Meido Sensou: let’s make a classic, melodramatic yakuza movie but let’s do it as an anime series and with maids instead of gangsters. The contrast is hilarious, the pastiching of the genre is on point and the series has a heart that makes it more than just a fun high concept romp.
Yuusha Party o Tsuihou Sareta Beast Tamer, Saikyoushu no Nekomimi Shoujo to Deau: guy gots kicked out of the Hero’s party because he’s too weak to help them fight the Demon Lord, makes contracts with various overpowered women from various non-human species, starting with a cat girl. Of course it turns out he himself is incredibly overpowered as well but just didn’t realise it. Very much a wishfulfilment fantasy, but not as creepy as most.