A boy sets out to prove that old margaret Atwood quote:
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid that men will kill them.
Also, men are such fragile creatures that one rejection as a child drives them to a decade long quest to become the perfect man in order for the girl who rejected them to fall in love with them, so they can reject her in turn and have their revenge.
Girl gets introduced to the wonders of biking, starts doing it for fun. Like Long Riders, only with high school girls rather than college students. Sounds promising, a nicely relaxed show about cute girls riding bikes together.
Okay, everything about this first scene annoyed me. First, if you haven’t biked since you were little, why would you make your first bike ride to school, on the first school day even? Why not practise first? Especially if you’re going to a new school? Second, how tiny are you that you can still use the same bike as when you were little? And how the hell did it stay this nice if you’ve never used it since? Especially since you just moved halfway through the country and still brought it with you.
Nevermind having to learn how to brake; this girl doesn’t even know how to pedal. She’s very lucky to run into (literally) the glasses girl on the left, who is infinitely patient in helping her learn to bike when she has to go to school herself.
Almost eleven minutes in we actually get our first competent woman bicyclist. Who turns out to be looking for the same school as the two girls, depending on a crude map drawn by her friend, rather than something like Google Maps that people in 2017 would actually use. But at least we’ve now met our three protagonists, all of which are flaky one way or another. Hiromi is just plain stupid, glasses girl Tomoe too nice for her own good and unnamed adult cyclist is a somewhat unreliable teacher at their school and will in all likelihood be the advisor to the biking club, when that finally makes its appearance.
So basically this first episode was all about the struggle to get to school on time if you’re not very bright and attempting to bike it for the first time, but at least we got an educational segment about how you can get a man to choose your bike parts for you.
The best anime of the year for me was a series in which I watched men in Shouwa Era Japan sitting on stage in a theatre telling stories in which they portray every character using nothing but a small fan or a small cloth as a prop, as animated by a studio that had become synonymous with hack work. Yet with Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu Studio Deen managed to do the impossible, to have complete rakugo performances and keep my interest for the full performance, though all you see is a man sitting on stage. I went in blind watching the first episode and only realised it was fortyeight minutes long when it was already over.
That first episode, in which a young man just out of prison becomes the apprentice of a famous rakugo performer, gets obsessed with the rakugo of said performer’s late partner through the influence of the late partner’s daughter and has to prove the value of rakugo to his old gang boss, is actually a bit of a red herring. The rest of the series actually flashes back to the early days of his master and his late partner, in order to answer the accusation that he actually killed him. I didn’t realise this would be the case when I watched the series, so the first couple of episodes I kept expecting to pop out of the flashback; instead we’ll get a new series next season.
The series therefore only starts from episode two, in which Bon, the young son of a geisha who had become crippled in an accident, is apprenticed to Yakumo Yurakutei VII, the Seventh Generation rakugo performer to use that name — with Bon ultimately having become the Eight Generation as he is in episode one. Bon is given the name of Kikuhiko by his new master and likewise another boy who’s also apprenticed on the same day is christened Sukeroku. Whereas Kikuhiko is stiff and uptight and only coming to rakugo because he has to, Sukeroku is brash and easygoing and already loves it. They become friends and fellow performers and the series follows them until that faithful day that Sukeroku died. All of which happened some thirty-forty years before the present of episode one, which is the early seventies, starting before the war, with Sukeroku’s death some twenty years before episode one.
At the heart of the second episode are the first performances of Kihuhiko and Sukeroku: the former is stiff and has memorised his performance, but brings no live to it, while the latter is funny and full of character. Much of the tension between the two friends revolves around this, about Kihuhiko’s perfectionism against Sukeroku’s much more lax but more interesting performance, with Kihuhiko at first chasing Sukeroku, groping towards finding his own style of rakugo to be able to get a similar response from the crowd as he does. Most of this is shown from Kihuhiko’s point of view, as he’s the one telling this story. It’s clear that he both envies Sukeroku and loves his rakugo.
Performance is at the heart of Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu and the series is never afraid to show complete performances. There’s little of the trickery that can be done to keep an audience’s attention when you’re afraid what’s on stage isn’t that interesting. Instead it makes full use of the capabilities of anime to show exactly the right gestures, eye movements and other subtle cues to keep you on your toes; this is not a series that could be easily reproduced as live action, even if it doesn’t start giant robots. If you want to judge for yourself, the series is available at Crunchyroll.
This was day twelve, the last day of the Twelve Days of Anime.
Perhaps it’s not entirely accurate to call Hai to Gensou no Grimgar overlooked, but it did sort of get snowed under by first KonoSuba and then Re:Zero in the Trapped in Fantasyland genre. I’ve talked about Grimgar before. For me it was one of the best series this year for its treatment of grief, fanservice and what it would actually be like to be transported to a fantasy world. It helps that the animation itself is gorgeous, the background scenery especially, but also the fight choreography as shown above.
Grimgar‘s plot is fairly simple: a group of people is transported to a magical world, losing most of their memories in the process and are immediately drafted to fight in a low level race war against goblins and other fantasy monster races. Most of the competent people go off on their own, leaving our group of six losers to band together to try and survive, having to kill monsters to earn money to pay the rent. And this not a sterile exercise of monster slayers: the goblins they encounter are clearly thinking, feeling creatures fully capable of feeling fear or pain when they’re chased down, as above. This theme is mostly prevelant in the first four or so episodes, before the story moves on to other matters
The reason the story moves on is the death of one of the original crew: Manato, the defacto leader who kept the team together. His death hits the team hard, as you might expect and the rest of the series, but especially episode four and five explore his death and the grief felt by his team mates. At first there’s anger and denial, a refusal to believe he really is dead and it is only after they were forced to cremate him that anger makes way for a dull acceptance. The party is splintered, robbed off its heart, each of them alone and lonely and only capable of thinking of their own grief, something the opening scenes of episode five make painfully clear. What makes Manato’s death especially hard to deal with is that it was avoidable: the party got caught up in its own hubris, became careless, took one too many risks. And thanks to pre-existing tensions in the team, they find it hard to overcome their grief and come back together.
The reasons for the tensions can mostly be summed up in one word: Ranta. The redhaired, impulsive sword fighter of the team, from episode one Ranta has been sexually harassing the girls in the team, with the three other boys neither joining in but at first not stopping him either. Because these are strangers needing each other to survive rather than friends, there is this tension between wanting to shut him up and not wanting to risk his temper because they need him. That this takes its toll on the two girls is less recognised, at least at first. It needs Manato’s death to be resolved. Grimgar makes it clear that the usual anime light sexual harassment antics are actually pretty disgusting and upsetting to the people on the receiving end. Unfortunately the camera hasn’t gotten the message and the focus on the female characters far too often rests on their butts, breasts or legs, undermining its own message.
This was day eleven of the Twelve Days of Anime. Next: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju.
It’s a shame that one of the best series this year has had so little opportunity to finds its audience. As you know Bob, earlier this year Amazon signed a deal to get the exclusive rights to the Noitamina block of anime. At first this worked out great for them as the first series under the deal was Koutetsujou no Kabaneri, made by the studio behind Attack on Titan with a similar concept, which got a lot of attention. But then the next series was Battery, ostensibly a baseball series but actually about coming out as gay in small town Japan, which for some reason was much less popular. And the series after that, Fume Wo Amu was even less designed to get a mass audience: who’d want to watch a series about creating a dictionary? Especially if you have to get a subscription with yet another streaming service for it?
Which is a pity, because Fune Wo Amu is indeed one of the best series this year, a thoroughly mature workplace drama that is subtle in a way that anime often isn’t in depicting conversations and relationships. And the main relationship is the one between the two dictionary bros, the protagonist Mitsuya Majime and the man who recruited him for the dictionary editorial team when he saw he was a lousy salesman but had an unique way with words, Masashi Nishioka. The former has some form of mild social anxiety, finding it hard to talk to people, but being very precise with words while the latter is cocky and confident, if a bit unhappy to work in such an unpopular publishing department. You can see their personalities in everything, from how they sit to how they walk and talk. And though both change and find common ground in their work on the dictionary, the series never presents either one as wrong. Their personality is what it is and that’s alright.
The other important relationship is the budding romance between Majime and the granddaughter of his landlord –who ships the two outrageously– Kaguya Hayashi. Hayashi is a Japanese chef in training when she first meets Majime and throughout the series she keeps her career going, eventually getting her own restaurant. I really like the way she and Majime interact, once they are in a proper relationship together: it feels natural, mature. With the usual anime romances being between high school students taking thirteen episodes to decide to hold hands, it’s nice to get a more adult version. Even if Majime still ends up writing her a love letter to confess. Which actually is so dense and literary written that it takes Hayashi an entire day to figure out it is a love letter.
With episode eight, the series makes a thirteen year time leap. It’s an interesting decision and not one you expect in an eleven episodes series. It means skipping over all of the plot developments that were set up in the previous seven episodes, going straight to their resolution. Which means we missed most of the sweet romance building between Majime and Hayashi, going straight to them having been married for several years already, with both Hayashi’s grandmother and her cat having died in the meantime (we also don’t find out what happened with Nishioka and his girlfriend until the last episode). Disappointing as this is, it does pull the focus back on what the series is really about: the work on the dictionary. Having skipped the years of hard slog through the Japanese language collecting the words for inclusion, it means the series can now concentrate on the end spurt.
Which means that in the series we get to witness the entire birth process of a dictionary and find out why it is important, why the people working on it find it important. For any book nerd like me this is something that hits close to home, even if I’m not particulary interested in dictionaries myself. Fune Wo Amu for the most part manages to do this without preaching, just through showing the various people working on it go on about their business, dealing with minor crisises. This is one anime which truly believes in show, don’t tell, isn’t afraid to let viewers draw their own conclusions. That’s why it’s in my top five shows for this year.
This was day ten of the Twelve Days of Anime. Next: Hai to Gensou no Grimgar.