Anime

Carole & Tuesday: beautiful like a rainbow — First Impressions

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To talk about Carole and Tuesday we first need to talk about Cyndi Lauper, and this song which the first episode is named after in particular:



(And judging by a certain prominent anituber’s ignorance on display during his preview, it is sorely needed to talk about her.)

So Cyndi Lauper. Started out in the eighties as a bit of a Madonna clone, broke through with this annoyingly cheerful ditty about girls wanting to have fun. She got three more top five US hits of her first album, released in 1983 and in 1986 got a number one hit with the song this episode is named after: True Colors. A slow ballad, this became a bit special when it was adopted as a gay anthem and if you look at the lyrics of the chorus it’s easy to see why that happened:

So don’t be afraid to let them show
Your true colors
True colors are beautiful
I see your true colors
Shining through (true colors)
I see your true colors
And that’s why I love you
So don’t be afraid to let them show
Your true colors
True colors are beautiful (they’re beautiful)
Like a rainbow
Oh oh oh oh oh like a rainbow

If this sounds a bit oblique in 2019, let’s not forget the context in which this was released: the eighties was not a good decade for LGBT people. The AIDS pandemic killed thousands upon millions of (mostly) LGBT people and few people seemed to care. Televison evangelists saw it as a judgement from god striking down the sinful, Reagan administration officials joked about the “gay disease” and Thatcher’s government was seriously proposing concentration camps for HIV positive people. Cyndi Lauper herself had lost a close friend to the disease and he was in her mind when she recorded this song, original an ode to the original song writer’s mother. She therefore fully embraced its status as a gay anthem, to the point where she would later name her charity to combat LGBT teen homelessness after it.

Carole and Tuesday: your true colors are beautiful like a rainbow

And in the first episode of Carole and Tuesday, Tuesday reveals it was hearing this song on the radio that made her want to become a musician, which ultimately led to her meeting Carole when she runs away to the big city from her middle class home to become a musician. We follow her as she runs away, gets her luggage stolen, wanders the city until she hears Carole playing her keyboard, just when she’s at her lowest. Carole meanwhile is shown as she goes through her day, working as a waitress at a fast food joint, getting lip from customers, taking revenge and getting fired, before she comes to the bridge she’ll meet Tuesday on. There she plays without much hope anybody will be moved by it, until she looks up to see Tuesday there, tears streaming down her face.

It’s a meet cute if there ever was one in anime, the two immediately bonding over music while having to run from the cops for busking. Carole takes Tuesday home, where they exchange stories about why they wanted to become musicians. When Carole confesses to having music but no lyrics, Tuesday reveals how much she inspired her, having come up with lyrics on the spot, leading to a very good sounding jam session. In English too, though that took me a few seconds to realise. The animation quality in the scene matches that of the music, as you’d expect from a series that revolves around it. The first episode really sets up the idea that these two have a special bond through their music. The second episode only reinforces that, as they sneak into a concert hall to play the piano there and their performance gets captured and uploaded to the ‘net. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a romantic bond, but it does feel like one.

In general, everything in Carole and Tuesday is a cut above what you’d expect from a good series. The animation is on point throughout the first episode and stays the same high quality in the second. The character designs look great too, each distinct without going into the usual anime short hands of outrageous hair colours. The only thing a little bit lackluster is perhaps the setting. The city of Alba looks vaguely futuristic but doesn’t feel like it’s on Mars in any significant way. Instagram is still around and cultural references are mostly to modern day artists like Daft Punk.

With episode two we get the opening, which is excellent throughout but off which I like the ending segment here the best. In a future where apparantly 99 percent of music is AI generated, cloning previous hits, here we have two young women who have the audacity to play live music. It’s a very ‘rock’ sort of story. Not unexpected, coming from Watanabe Shinichirō, the man behind Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. I don’t think the story will be as simplistic as human vs AI music, but so far the series has been setting us up to expect something revolutionary to come from Carole and Tuesday, as the opening narration outright tells us. The first two episodes had them as their main focus, but they had spent time setting up other characters, potential rivals perhaps, as well. It will be very interesting to see how this will work out.

Fluffy kitsune grandma — First Impressions

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Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san is a deeply dystopian anime, in which the only way to even alleviate the stress and worries build up by Japan’s horrifying work culture is to have a cute little fox goddess willing to serve as your house wife:

Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san: Kitsune house wife

Yes, this is a feel good series about an ordinary, overworked salary man coming home to find out a friendly kitsune fox goddess has adopted him to pamper like an indulgent grandmother would. The first episode is basically him adjusting to this, after first worrying she was a cosplaying neighbourhood kid who snuck in his apartment. Doga Koba, the studio responsible, has made its niche by adapting this sort of cute, fluffy slice of life manga and this was done with their usual quality. I do think though that the manga’s art style doesn’t translate to anime well, it falls a bit flat at times. The pacing is a bit off too. What are quick one/two panel sequences in the original here are dragged out a bit too long, receiving undue emphasis. What in the manga was a one panel gag about him panicking finding a cosplay wearing little girl in his house in the anime becomes a scene where he imagines himself being led away by police as a pedophile, complete with responses by his co-worker and family. It kills the joke and undermines its own premise to fill up screen time.

Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san: Nakano and his grandmother

Because unlike the worries Vrai Kaiser put in their review over at Anime Feminist, I don’t think Senko the fox goddess is meant as a girlfriend to our overworked protagonist. Rather, she comes across to me as an indulgent granny wanting to spoil a favourite grandson. The episode isn’t particularly subtle about this either, what with several flashbacks to Nakano’s actual grandmother. Senko is there to comfort Nakano, not sexually gratify him, but the scenes Vrai Kaiser complains about, do reinforce the idea that this is one of those series.

Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san: cozy

But despite these missteps, the fantasy that Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san wants to indulge in isn’t sexual. Rather, it’s the fantasy of going back to childhood, to simpler times without the responsibilities and stress of an adult in a job that overworks you. To have somebody waiting for you, cook you dinner, pamper you. To not have to face life alone when you’re only living to work, rather than working to live. Somebody there to selflessly love you without expecting anything in return. That fits a grandmother more than it fits a lover. It’s still a very male fantasy of course, to have this no questions asked love and devotion magically appear in your life.

It’s a fitting fantasy for those salary men who have no option but to overwork themselves, trapped in the exploitative, dead end work culture of Japan. Only the interference of a benevolent fox goddes can bring them any relief and even then only temporary because tomorrow they still have to go back to work.

Short but shite — First Impressions

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Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai: daddy wants titty pudding

Sometimes you read a manga and it doesn’t work for you, then it gets an anime adaptation and it all clicks? Well, Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai isn’t one of those. The first episode was less than 13 minutes long, but I didn’t even make it half way. Horie Ao, our protagonist is a very serious high school student convinced all the boys are sex crazed monsters, because she was raised by her porn writing father and he is a sex crazed monster. And that’s the joke. It’s deeply unpleasant as well as not very funny, nor is thhe idea of “ha ha she’s actually horny all the time behind her serious student facade”. Dropped.

Nobunaga-sensei no Osanazuma: she is going to be my wife

The one joke in Nobunaga-sensei no Osanazuma is that the wife to be of famous Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga is displaced in time and mistakes his far distant descendant also called Oda Nobunaga for the real thing. She’s fourteen so of marriagable age and therefore immediately attempts to sleep with our protagonist, who at least has the grace to refuse. Nevertheless his first reaction to finding her in his arms is that it’s like one of those anime where a girl falls from the sky so she’s going to be his wife. He’s a teacher by the way and in the very first scene one of his students tells him she’ll marry him after she graduates if he remains single, which he is actually happy about and just no.

Yu-No is a no go? — First Impressions

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I think I was right about this one:

This was very much what you expect from a belated adaptation of an nineties visual novel. A lot of setup, as we follow our protagonist around school talking to the various girls he knows before the plot kicks in about a quarter to the end. Quite a lot of the shots actually resemble those you’d see in a visual novel, overly rendered static backgrounds with the characters talking in front of them. To be honest, it’s not a very visually interesting series, so-so character designs matched with sub par animation and boring backgrounds. And when it does try to be interesting you get shit like this:

Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO: panty shot as introduction

That’s the obligatory sexy school nurse, who has heard of the notion to dress professionally but didn’t think it applied to her, waking up the protagonist by standing over him and giving him a good look at her panties. Dude himself starts propositioning her immediately in a way that’s clearly a routine between the two of them. Again, it’s all visual novel stuff we’ve all seen a million times before and you have to wonder why anybody would create this particular adaptation now. Even if the original was ground breaking in its time, that’s almost twentyfive years ago and we’ve seen a lot better since than what this first episode promises. The rampant sexism of the protagonist doesn’t help either.

Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO: no a glowing naked girl is not your father in disguise

If the plot is interesting a lot of this can be forgiven, but so far the story has barely kicked in. There’s a mysterious controversial scientific project going on which the protagonist’s step mother is involved with, there’s a mysterious shrine and an archeaology club at school investigating it, led by an obviously evil professor and finally there’s the strange object protag-kun’s dad — who disappeared a few months before — sent him. And finally there’s the mysterious naked glowing girl, who is not his father in disguise. All of which comes together at the end of the episode, when Something Happens and our hero wakes up again in his own bed, with nobody having noticed anything strange…

Again, all stuff I’ve seen before but for the moment just about enough to give this a second episode. I don’t think this will be a good series, but I’ll settle for mildly interesting. I need something to play in the background while doing the dishes after all.

Anime that means something — Introduction

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The first anime series I can remember watching I don’t actually remember watching, I just remember playing it in kindergarten afterwards, in what must’ve been 1980. The series was the original Gatchaman, or rather the Dutch dub of the American reworking Battle of the Planets, Strijd der Planeten, with the heroic adventures of the Giefors team. I think I mostly played either the princess or that one fat dude, setting up some expectations for later life.



That’s obviously long before I ever heard of anime, or even Japanimation as it would still be called once I did learn about it, sometime in the later half of the eighties. Before that it was all just cartoons, mostly dubbed into Dutch and often edited for a children’s audience, not that different from all the French or English or Canadian co-productions that we would watch back then. That was in a time when we only had two national channels in the Netherlands, no cable and if you’re lucky and lived close enough to the border, perhaps you’d get a Belgian or German channel too. I remember one glorious Spring afternoon when conditions were clear enough to receive BBC one for five minutes. It was cricket.

For the better part of two decades now I’ve been following Andrew Weiss, first for his comics blogging, then for the mix of insightful commentary on pop culture and autobiographical examination of same. One of the things I envy in his blogging is his dedication to long series of posts on a single subject and ability to see them through even if they take years to complete. One of those series was about albums that mean something, looking at the circumstances in which some of his favourites albums were purchased. When I started thinking about doing a series about the anime that influenced me it was this that came to mind as a template. I’m not sure yet how regular this feature will appear or how many installments it will take, but I’ll try and do it in a rough sort of chronological order.