Anime

If you like the opening, you will like the rest of Dandadan:

Nothing much to say about this one because it sells itself. Nerdy UFO obsessed otoko clashes with heartbroken gyaru who believes in ghosts. They each set out to proof the other wrong by going to the respective UFO/ghost activity hotspots. He gets his dick stolen by a creepy grandma ghost, she gets almost raped by aliens with metal drills for penises. In the end they save each other. Science Saru is doing the adaptation and it looks good.

The one caveat is that sexual assault. It’s deeply creepy and uncomfortable as it should be, but you still have a high school girl getting her legs spread open clad only in her underwear. I don’t think it’s intended as fanservice but honestly, the whole alien attack could’ve been done differently. It was unpleasant in the original manga and it’s not improved in anime. This is the sort of thing that could’ve been changed for the adaptation.

Another season of anime has come to a close. Light on shounen crap but like last year strong on romcoms, this was a fairly decent season even if there were no truly outstanding series.

Elf-san wa Yaserarenai. Fantasy creatures trying to diet and exercise after being exposed to the temptations of our world. This ended as it started, with no real plot but the introduction of a new character every second episode or so. Animation got progressively worse over the course of the series. Lots of nudity but a lot of it was on a level of a documentary on obsesity — vulgar, juggling bellies and such — rather than anything actually sexy. The manga is better. 5/10

Giji Harem. Two theatre kids fall in love. She’s an aspiring actress who uses her talents to provide him, her decor building senpai, with his own pseudo harem. The manga on which this was based came to a satisfying conclusion, moving beyond the usual high school romcom setup and the anime version was able to do so to in 12 episodes. I liked the way their actual confessions were not shown until the very last episode even though it was clear they had become a proper couple some episodes earlier. 8/10

Gimai Seikatsu. A high school boy suddenly acquires a step sister when their parents remarry to each other. The foundation of many an ‘edgy’ romcom where it’s all about the taste of forbidden love, here handled extremely maturely. By the end of the series their mutual attraction to each other has not so much been resolved, as acknowledged. Taking place over just a couple of months, Gimai Seikatsu has them first grappling with having become family, before each in their own way realises that they are in love with the other. What helps is that the animation, lightning and character acting is so strong. 8/10

Katsute Mahou Shoujo to Aku wa Tekitai shiteita. The lack of progress in this romantic comedy between a magical girl and the lieutenant of the evil organisation she fights as well as the magical girl’s passivity was disappointing. It didn’t help that the mascot characters were so annoying. The animation reminded of a consistently high quality throughout the series. 6/10

Madougushi Dahlia wa Utsumukanai. Like her father Dahlia is a magical engineer creating various magical tools, but she draws inspiration from memories of her past life living in Japan. This started out as being about how Dahlia was slowly ground down under the insecurities of her fiancee, losing her independence and self worth, but this was burned through and resolved in the first four episodes. The rest of the series was spent just hanging out with her as she went about her daily life with no real conflict left to drive the story. This is a failing you see a lot in these wishfulfilment fantasy series, that the actual conflict setting up the series is resolved quickly and then it has no idea what to do afterwards. 5/10

The setup for this series is that Ohara and Honjoji, two low ranked staff members at a travel agency, decide to fake a marriage so they won’t be sent to the new branch in Anchourage, but I’m more impressed by the huge number of people their one branch employs.

A dozen or so employees for one branch? Talk about over staffing. The whole setting is strange to me to be honest. I think the last time I personally used a travel agency, as in went physically to one of their offices to get advice, was around the turn of the millennium. I think they’re still around, but who uses them these days? even if you insist on using a travel agency, you’d do it online right, not by going to one of their branches, unless you want to do something really out of the ordinary. Even then, I doubt any Dutch agency would have this much staff. Stranger still, having them open a branch in Alaska because they want to sell more holidays there. I understand wanting somebody there to represent your agency at the holiday destination, but wouldn’t you hire locals instead? Sometimes Japan really is a foreign country, even in anime, in a way e.g. the UK isn’t.

Ohara’s motivations for not wanting to go are much easier to understand. Who’d want to leave their cat behind? I’ve actually been in a similar situation, when the company I was working for at the time needed more IT people for their Australian operation and was looking for volunteers to go to Sydney for a year or two. Setting aside all the other hassle, learning it could cost thousands of dollars and take months to get my cat shipped over, robbed me of any incentive to do so. Couldn’t do that to her.

Honjoji too is understandable. She loves reading about travel and collects maps, she just doesn’t want to do so herself. That it’s her that comes up with and proposes the fake marriage planfits what we see of both her and Ohara this first episode. Ohara is a bit slow, always getting scolded for being slow to respond when it’s more that he needs to take that little bit extra time to be able to respond correctly. Honjoji meanwhile has the sort of resting bitch face the Japanese in particular seem unable to handle, but has alittle bit more initiative to her. Both read as maybe a little bit neuroatypical, but in as how far that’s intended is anyone’s guess. They do get treated a hell of a lot better the moment they announced their fake engagement though; suddenly they fit in with their coworkers expectations in a way they individually did not. They’re now “the office couple” rather than a pair of weirdos.

An interesting first episode so far, let’s see if it can keep it up.

Six girls from different schools and backgrounds come together to do cheerleading and make videos. It should be relatively simple to make a series about this, but why does Na Nare Hana Nare feel so disappointing? Even when it ended with such a great performance?

Way back in the first episode we met Kanata, who is in her high school’s cheerleading club but sidelined because of some issue and her friend Megumi, who also did cheerleading in middle school but who got ill and had to stop while she recovered and went through rehabilitation. Her other friend is Shion, from a very posh school, famed for her gymnastic ability. Shion is classmates with the fourth girl, Suzuha, a small, silent girl who parkours her way to school every day. Chasing her is how Kanata meets Anna, half Brazilian and aspiring Youtuber and her friend Nodoka, a yoga enthusiast. Anna wants to feature Suzuha in her Youtube channel; Suzuha doesn’t want. Some hijinks and misunderstandings later and by the second episode we got our cheerleading group.

From there on you expect to see the story revolve around these girls with their different backgrounds and abilities to learn to do cheer together, while they’re also looking for opportunities to actually perform, both to cheer up people and to help Anna grow her channel. Interspersed with that there should also be episodes in which each of the girls gets a bit of the spotlight, in typical (school) club anime style. Plenty material in this to fill a series, if that what it wants to do. Unfortunately it’s not the only thing Na Nare Hana Nare wants to do.

The other approach this series could’ve taken, the approach it seems to settle on at first, is to treat it as a serious sports anime. After all, we start off with Kanata and her school cheerleading team at a regional competition, in which an accident happens during their routine. An accident that was so serious that it stopped Kanata from participating anymore. Not because she was hurt herself, or because like Megumi she was physically incabable, but for purely psychological reasons, suffering from something similar to what Simone Biles suffered from in real life. Lacking the confidence to keep doing cheer, Kanata is aimless; her encounter with Suzuha and Anna int hat first episode gives her a bit of her confidence back. Na Nare Hana Nare therefore could be the story of how Kanata regained her confidence and came back to competitive cheerleading. This could be contrasted with how Megumi is struggling with her purely physical rehabilitation and as well with how her cheer club mates will respond to seeing her do cheerleading, but not for them.

Slice of life focused story on how cheerleading can lift up the spirits of your neighbourhood and town, a very P.A. Works sort of thing, or a sports orientated show about coming back from psychological and physical setbacks. Both are interesting and could’ve led to a good series. The problem was that Na Nare Hana Nare didn’t want to choose either approach and therefore half assed both, giving short shift to either.

Honestly, this mixture could have worked, but not in a one cour, twelve episode series. With a main cast of six girls and four or five more supporting characters drawn from the school cheerlead club, there are too many people to give everybody the attention they need. Because of the need to keep both storylines going and little room to stuff them in, plot points from one get dropped when the focus is on the other, most noticably seen in episodes 4-5, which is all about Anna trying to save her beloved local records shop, her second home, from closing through the power of cheerleading and Youtube. Not only cuts that short Kanata’s entire story when it just started, the resolution to it had little to do with what the girls themselves did. It all felt messy and rushed. Had this been a two cour show, with twentyfour episodes, there would have been room for an A and a B-plot in each episodes, swapping focus when necessary but still keeping the other story going. There would’ve been more room to get to know all the characters, when now Nodoka e.g. barely got any attention.

It would have also meant that the whole plot revolving around Kanata, her fears and what exactly happened during that incident, what that incident meant for the confidence of the team as a whole could have been better handled. Because now it was confusing to understand even what happened. Plenty of people thought e.g. that it was this incident that led to Megumi getting hurt to the point of needing a wheelchair, rather than having been ill and requiring surgery for it.

Episode by episode this was a decent show still; the quality of animation and character acting was what you’d expect from P.A. Works, but as a whole this was a failure.