Anime – Page 53 – Wis[s]e Words

Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san — First Impressions

Published on January 5, 2018Leave a comment

Because she’s cute, Ohsawa Yuu stalks her standoffish classmate Koizumi-san and discovers she’s really, really into ramen.

Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san: Koizumi-san really, really loves ramen

I’ve been reading the manga of this and liking it, so I was looking forward of how it would be adapted. To be honest I expected this would’ve been a short, rather than a full length series, because the manga chapters are rather short as well and mostly standalone, so perfect for a five or eight minute short. What they’ve done instead is adapt 3-4 chapters per episode, if the first episode is an indication. I’m not sure how that would work long time. This time we got three stories about Koizumi going to eat ramen and Yuu stalking, then joining her. It could get a bit dull. Luckily I know the manga starts to mix things up quickly, introducing more characters for Koizumi to play off.

Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san: ramen eating girls are cute

So far the characters are a bit one note. Koizumi-san is your archetypical cool beauty loner, with little to no interest in anything other than ramen, only coming alive if she’s eating it or explaining about what’s she’s eating. Yuu is a bit better, a cheerful, optimistic girl with a thing for cute girls that’s more than a little bit gay. Every story in this episode has Yuu attempting to talk to/chat up Koizumi-san, her rebuffing Yuu’s approach, then going to eat ramen, at which Yuu joins her and gets her to open up just a little bit by getting her to talk about ramen.

Compared to Sora yori mo Tooi Basho, Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san is a much more conventional slice of moe anime, competently done but not yet with much to distinguish itself from any other slice of moe anime. The character designs are cute, the animation is all right without anything special and Koizumi-san’s blissgams are nowhere near as interesting as those in e.g. Food Wars. At the moment Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san is more comfort food than haute cuisine: great if you like this sort of thing, skippable otherwise.

School girls go to the South Pole — First Impressions

Published on January 2, 2018Leave a comment

Sora yori mo Tooi Basho: high school girls go on a visit to the South Pole.

Sora yori mo Tooi Basho: school girls in Antarctica

Tamaki Mari is a very ordinary second year high school girl who one day suddenly realises that she’s a very ordinary second year high school girl. Which puts her in the mood to go on some big adventure, so she decides to skip school and travel to Tokyo. But then it rains so she doesn’t. She talks to her friend about her frustration of always failing to take that first step and always chickening out. Then, as she goes home, she notices the girl running past her to get her train drops an envelope. Tamaki picks it up and runs after her, but the girl’s gone. So she looks into the envelope to see what’s in it and finds:

Sora yori mo Tooi Basho: one million yen

One million yen!

That’s her first encounter with Kobuchizawa “Antarctica” Shirase, whose mother wrote a book about visiting the South Pole, but disappeared when Shirase was in middle school. Ever since she’s been working and saving up to make enough money to pay for a trip to Antarctica. For Tamaki Shirase’s dream is exactly what she wanted for herself, but never found or had the courage to go look for. But this time it’s different.

The ordinary school girl frustrated with her own ordinariness is not a new character type of course, often seen as the protagonist in school club series like K-on or Amanchu!, their frustrations driving them to try something, anything new to not be ordinary, overcoming their own fears in the process. They tend to be either enthusiastic go-getters (like Mikan from Love Live Sunshine) or shy fraidycats dragged into something almost against their will (Ami Kurata from Long Riders). Tamaki Mari is a mix of both, afraid to try new things and knowing this about herself, frustrated with it, but pushy and enthusiastic once she has made up her mind.

Sora yori mo Tooi Basho: Kobuchizawa Shirase is grateful

Kobuchizawa Shirase meanwhile looks like the typical well put together long black haired school princess, serious and driven. Having set herself a life goal, she’s dilligently working towards it while most of her peers are satisfied with just playing around. But she isn’t stoic or emotionally withdrawn; rather she wears her heart on her sleeve, most noticably when Tamaki hands her back the million yen she had lost. I like how aware she is how her dream of traveling to Antarctica to find her lost mother comes over to other people, that she isn’t deluded to how hard it would be to realise it, but accepts it and moves on.

Both Maki and Shirase than are archetypes I’ve seen in dozens of anime before, but with enough originality and character to come across as actual people you’d want to spend time with. There’s a good sense of humour, that doesn’t come at the expense of either of them and I like the pacing of this episode. All we saw was Maki coming to grips with her normalcry and wanting to do something about it, getting to know Shirase and the both of them deciding to go on a trip to Hiroshima where a polar exploration ship was holding an open house. There’s a sparkle to the animation, which is just that bit better than it needs to be, sharing some of its style and realism with last year’s Tsuki ga Kirei and Just Because.

Very much a recommendation. If this level of quality keeps up, this may be the sleeper hit of the season.

(01) the ultimate anime Christmas movie

Published on December 25, 2017Leave a comment

This was supposed to be a post about what I wanted to see in anime in 2018 — in short, Crunchyroll to get its thumb out and actually sub openings and endings — but fuck it, this is about Tokyo Godfathers because damn this is a movie everybody really needs to see.

Tokyo Godfathers: the moment of discovery

Like most people, the first Satoshi Kon movie I watched was Paprika. Tokyo Godfathers had been on my wish list for several years to watch at Christmas, but I never got round to it. Until today, when I had a three hour train journey to fill and a laptop loaded with anime. What would be more fitting on Christmas Day than this movie?

Tokyo Godfathers starts on Christmas Eve as three homeless people: Gin, an alcoholic, Hana, a trans woman and Miyuki, a teenage runaway, find a baby in a garbage dump. Instead of doing the obvious thing and handing her over to the nearest police post, the three take her “home”, mainly on the insistence of Hana, who always wanted to be a mother. After a night getting Kiyoko — as Hana has named her — to eat and sleep, the next morning Hana persuades the other two to look for Kiyoko’s mother.

What follows is a series of misadventures that are connected together by a series of coincidences and accidents, as in the fragment above. The ultimate coincidence is of course the homeless trio finding the baby in the first place. Normally such a string of incidents and coincidences would’ve bothered me, but the movie sets them up early and cleverly enough that this wasn’t a problem. As Hana puts it, Kiyoko is a child gifted by god, while the explicitly Christian opening to the movie, when the homeless trio attend a Christmas service to get free food, already telegraphs that there will be miracles here. And of course, a good Christmas movie always depend on a little bit of magic to get things going.

Tokyo Godfathers is a horribly sentimental movie, but the sentimentality fits. Everything works out, everybody gets some sort of happy ending, a reconciliation with their past and where it not for me watching this in the train, it would’ve had me ugly crying most of the way through. This never felt cheap or theatrical, as it was earned, through the Gin, Hana & Miyuki themselves, their backstories as well as their actions. Each time they let their better side guide them, they get rewarded for it.

Tokyo Godfathers is also incredibly funny, like when that ambulance out of nowhere crashes into the chemist, but also in the character acting. Just look at the way Gin and Hana run in the clip above and how it fits their characters and is funny in its own right. The exaggerated reactions and movements of the characters keep things funny even in the most melodramatic scenes, yet are grounded in their character. So Hana at all times is overly correct in her feminine way of moving and her mannerisms, which are exaggerated in a dramatic chase scene like the above.

This is such a clever, intelligent movie that I feel I’ve only scratched the surface having seen it once. It has enormous heart as well, which is why it’s such a good Christmas movie.

This is the twelfth and final post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge.

(02) Unexpected gems

Published on December 24, 2017Leave a comment

Yes, that title is indeed a pretty obvious reference to Houseki no Kuni: who knew that a CGI anime about genderless almost immortal gem people could be so good?

Houseki no Kuni: more Cinnebar blushes please

But that’s only one of several surprisingly good anime series that came out this year. Kemono Friends was the first and perhaps most surprising of these, a wonky looking CGI anime about cute animal girls that turned out to have not just excellent writing, but heart enough to melt the most cynical anime fan. A very pleasant surprise at a time when heart was something sorely needed in the real world. A heart warming experience right during the coldests, dreariest months of the year.

Two more series I had no expectations for whatsoever were Tsuki ga Kirei and Just Because, romance series which went for realism in their romance. Both had strong characters who weren’t tied to the usual romcom stereotypes, while the writing had the courage to go slow on the development of the romance. It made for a very different sort of anime romance story.

18if: Wizard of Oz

18 If was a series that was easy to overlook, but for me was one of the best series of the Summer season. The biggest problem with it was that the overall storyline, of a guy stuck in dreamland having to rescue girls from Sleeping Beauty syndrome, where they’re stuck in their own private dream worlds The strongest episodes were those where the nominal protagonist was barely present or only as observer, when the focus was on the girl’s own story. The series wasn’t afraid to change its anime style frequently to suit each story, so it’s easy to think of it as an anthology and not pay too much attention to the overall plot.

gamers: love polygon

Gamers was great because it looked like it would be a typical school club series, where the geeky loner protagonist is invited to the gaming club by the school’s beautiful idol, only for him to politely reject the offer. It then turns into one of the best cringe comedies I’ve seen in anime, as everybody misunderstands everybody and everybody thinks everybody else is in a relation with somebody other than they’re actually are. It gets so bad you have the characters themselves drawing up love diagrams to keep everything straight. It’s rare that a comedy anime makes me laugh each episode, but Gamers! did it.

Animegataris: hating on itself

Animegataris also started out as a seemingly ordinary school club series, this time based around the love of anime and for about nine episodes we got that, before it all became one giant glorious meta mess as things became a bit too anime. Even before that transformation it was already delightful, in how positive a vision it had of anime, going beyond the usual consumerism of otaku baiting series and not neglecting international fandom either, by both introducing a Chinese fan as well as showing how the shared love for magical girls shows had made another character friends in the American high school she went to.

So while you think that it couldn’t happen anymore, what with online news and fansites dissecting all info coming out of Japan and simulcasting delivering shows as they’re aired there, but there were still plenty of shows that came out of the blue this year, not just for me, but for most anime fans. It can only be good if anime creators can still surprise us like that.

This is the eleventh post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: looking forward to 2018.

(03) Disappointing sequels

Published on December 23, 2017Leave a comment

This year saw a lot of even better sequels to already excellent series. KonoSuba 2 was even funnier than the original, Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu moved back to the present and put everything we learned in the first into doubt again while Sangatso No Lion‘s new season is killing at the moment. But we won’t talk about those here. This is for the disappointing sequels.

Seiren: depravity in my pants

And I don’t mean something like Rewrite S02: if the first season was a shit storm, why get disappointed in the second? Nor do I mean slightly under par follow-ups to classics like the latest Symphogear, which was decent enough but didn’t live up to the insanity factor of previous series. Since I’m probably the only person that hated the tournament arc in Boku no Hero Academia I won’t even mention that. Even Seiren, spiritual successor to Amagami, though disappointing, is not something I want to talk much about. Other than to note that put too much emphasis on reproducing the latter’s weird fetishes and not enough on the romances.

Kino killing fighting sheep in the final episode

No, what I mean with disappointing sequels is a series like Kino no Tabi, though technically a remake of the original 2003 series rather than a sequel. For this series they got the fans of the light novels to chose their favourite stories to adapt, which didn’t help with the coherence of the series and then adapted them in the blandest way possible. Most of the charm of Kino’s adventures was lost this way, while there were whole episodes without Kino even showing up other than in cameo. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t what I wanted or expected from a new Kino series.

Virgin Soul: Nina blushing was cute though

Worse though was Shingeki no Bahamut: Virgin Soul. The original Shingeki no Bahamut: Genesis was a cheerful fantasy adventure, which, because it was adapted from a mobile game, had low expectations hung on it when it first came out, but which turned out to be something special. It wasn’t perfect, as every time the series returned to its nominal plot rather than focus on the misadaventures of Favaro and Kaisar it became a bore. The new series, by focusing on a new protagonist just living her life in the capital, at first seemed to avoid that particular pitfall, but that only lasted four episodes, if that. From then on it’s all about the struggle against Lord Charioce, who plans to destroy both demons and angels to create a new world for humanity.

Both the plot as the villain I found boring and obnoxious, especially because the latter always won whatever his opponents threw at him. At every turn, he turned out to be one or two steps ahead, effortlessly dealing with the latest plan the heroes came up with. I got so bad I stopped watching from episode eighteen: I still got the last seven episodes to watch. The worst part of it is that Nina, our protagonist, has a crush on him, which doesn’t change once she knows of all his loathsome deeds and plans for genocide. I got the feeling the series was working towards his redemption, and I couldn’t deal with that.

This is the tenth post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: unexpected gems.