Anime

One of those DAYS

Published on November 1, 2016Leave a comment

DAYS: taking your kit off is a yellow

Sports anime usually offers an idealised view of sports, so cheating is rarely taken seriously in it, other than to make the underdog protagonist (team) even more of an underdog during an important match. This may not matter much for something like baseball, but for football fouling is an integral part of the game, no matter how much we’d like to pretend otherwise. Even so I could overlook that in the world of DAYS fouls didn’t happen, until episode 17 was a bit too blatant in featuring not one, not two but three blatant fouls. First, we got this joker taking his shirt off without getting a yellow as he should’ve, for celebrating a goal that turned out to be disallowed because he was offside. It may seem silly, but had he’d gotten the yellow card, obviously his play afterwards would’ve been influenced to lessen the risk of a second yellow and a sending off. Games have been won or lost by this sort of thing.

DAYS: fouling a striker in the box

More serious is this second foul, a defender pushing the attacker down in the penalty box during a corner kick. That could’ve been a penalty, but here passed without comment. Which does happen in real football, so this is the one I have the least problems with how it was handled. Referees can miss things, especially in a crowded area like this.

DAYS

But then this happens. A defender kicks down a broken through striker, with nothing between him and the goal, arguably denying a clear goal scoring opportunity. This should be a straight red, not just a free kick. But that’s all what happens. A blatant injustice but nobody remarks on it. The fouled on player is just glad to have won a free kick, as do his team mates and nobody protests to the ref. Not very realistic, but it does fit in the ganbare mindset of most sports anime, where hard work and sheer pluck should overcome misfortune and cheating. I guess that’s what the viewers want, but it annoyed me this time.

Sangatsu no Lion — The Hurting

Published on October 31, 2016Leave a comment

Sangatsu no Lion: a stormy march morning

After fifteen seconds of abstract swirls moving against a black background, SanGatsu No Lion opens with the silhouette of the protagonist, Kiriyama Rei, hair blowing wildly in the wind, against a cloudy blue sky. The wind is obviously a metaphor for being restless, uneasy, on edge and we’ll see Rei’s hair blowing around in the wind a couple of times more in the episode.

Kiriyama Rei drowning

The opening theme starts and it’s one long sequence of Rei drowning, slowly sinking, getting out of the river to struggle through thorn bushes, sinking back into the mud again. There’s a stillness to the drowning sequences that’s in stark contrast to the wind of the pre-opening sequence. The water/drowning metaphor also re-occurs several times in the rest of the episode; air bubbling up in a bottle of ice tea signalling stress.

Sangatsu no Lion: a smile like a wound

Coming out of the opening, the first thing we see is a close up of a face, a mouth, smiling, but not in a good way. That’s a smile that hurts, in more ways than one. The woman the smile belongs too may be saying hurtful things, but she looks like she’s hurting too. At this point we have no context for this dream or memory of Rei’s. We don’t know who she is or what she is to him, so we have no real idea of why she is saying this to him. Well, I do, but I cheated and read the manga.

As the dream ends and Rei wakes up, the story finally gets underway. Slowly. Almost five minutes are spent on him waking up, getting dressed and traveling to the shogi hall for a match. No dialogue, no narration, just Rei slowly making his way across town. This is rare in anime; normally you’d be right inside the protagonist’s head, but here you actually have to pay attention to Rei’s expressions and body language. And what I see is what I’ve seen with family members struggling with psychological issues or were recuperating from an operation. There’s a deliberateness to how Rei dresses himself in that excerpt above (courtesy of Wave motion Cannon), a way he pulls in his core that speaks to me of being hurt, of remembering pain. You also see how empty his apartment is, the only furniture being a wardrobe and his shogi board. It’s a gorgeous apartment but it feels blindingly cold.

Sangatsu no Lion: Rei, isolated

The other thing that struck is how monochrome Rei is compared with his environment, visually setting him apart from everybody else, with his ink dark hair, white shirt and greenish-brown trousers. The camera angles seem to reinforce his isolation, with closeups being mainly showing his back, while longer range shots show him alone in the middle of the screen, or only half in frame, face cut off. It all works pretty well in establishing something is wrong with Rei, if not what.

Sangatsu no Lion: some hints of trauma

There’s a lot of back story to Rei that’s only hinted at rather than explained in this first episode, as was also the case with the original manga. We get some clue from the dream that opened the episode, some quick flashbacks during his shogi match, but nothing yet ouright explained. Which makes a refreshing change from most of anime, which likes to front load its exposition. So we get the impression that this particular match is a big deal because of who Rei is playing and it is clear they know each other, but just how and why they know each other is only explained much later in the episode. Unexplained remains why the seventeen year old Rei is living on his own, what happened in his past to separate him from his family, or who the woman is he’s having nightmares about.

Sangatsu no Lion: Momo makes everything better

It’s a long and slow introduction to a character and it’s incredibly oppressive, as was the manga when I first read it. Even with just the visuals, with nothing explained, it’s depressive. And then it all changes a third of the way through the episode — but that’s for another post.

Somethin Fer Da Dads

Published on October 27, 2016Leave a comment

Dara Ó Briain there, on the fundamental problem of fanservice in anime. It’s not that fanservice exists, or that there are fanservice orientated shows, but rather the default assumption that anime fans have to be slightly horny all the time, so better cue up the ass shots, accidental gropings and hilarious female on female sexual harassment. Even if you like that sort of thing, most of it is just embarassing and godawful to sit through when an anime you’re enjoying gets interrupted for a bit of mindless, mechanical “sexiness”. Looking at you, Izetta.

Izetta: obligatory butt shot class=

I mean, why else have a close up butt shot in the middle of a great action scene like this (and it’s not the only example) unless you’re afraid your audience can’t concentrate unless they’re a little bit horny? Is that why there was that groping scene in episode four? To keep viewers’ attention as the action slowed down and exposition happened?

Of course Shelter is anime

Published on October 20, 2016Leave a comment

So electronic musican Porter Robinson got anime studio A-1 Pictures to collaborate on an anime music video for his latest song, it got posted to /r/Anime, the moderators removed it and a flamewar broke out over whether it was really anime or not before death threats forced them to allow it — just Reddit being Reddit. The mods argued that their initial banning was correct because Shelter didn’t adhere to their definition of anime: “An animated series, produced and aired in Japan, intended for a Japanese audience”.

They should’ve gone with Damon Knight’s old idea on how to define science fiction: “science fiction is what we point to when we say it”. By which he meant that it’s the whole community of readers, fans, writers, editors, publishers and so on who collectively determine what is and isn’t science fiction by what they talk about as science fiction. Individual opinions on the definition and what does and does not belong to science fiction may differ but a rough consensus emergences nonetheless. Definion as a process, rather than a rule set, witht he understanding that there never can be a complete agreement.

Had the /r/Anime moderators been less rigid with their definition and more willing to follow Knight’s lead, they could’ve saved themselves the death threats, as in that case it would’ve been obvious that Shelter is anime. Though the creative lead, Porter Robinson, might’ve been an American, A-1 Pictures is of course a Japanese studio employing Japanese (and Korean) creators, while Crunchyroll, involved witht he financing and distribution of the project is probably the world largest anime streaming site. They think of it as anime, as obviously did the /r/reddit readership. That alone should’ve been enough for the mods to have allowed it.

Not actually lesbians skating

Published on October 9, 2016Leave a comment

Yuri Katsuki carried the hope of all Japan on his shoulders in the Figure Skating Grand Prix, but suffered a crushing defeat in the finals. He returned to his hometown in Kyushu and hid away in his family’s home, half wanting to continue skating and half wanting to retire.

Figure skating is a sport I got into thanks to my late wife, who liked that sort of sport which mixes atlethic with aesthetic concerns, where routines don’t just have to be done correctly, they have to be done beautifully. Not that we were huge fans of it, just that we watched it whenever it was on the Olympics and such. Seeing it in anime form would at least be a novelty, but I didn’t expect too much from Yuri on Ice otherwise. I figured that at best I would get a typical sports anime.

Yuri on Ice: full frontal male nudity

Judging from the first episode, I was wrong. The average sports anime doesn’t star a twentythree year old who already reached the top of his sport, only to find himself not good enough to compete there. The average sports anime doesn’t have a childhood friend who has already married and gotten kids with his rival. It certainly doesn’t have naked, well toned Russian figure skaters. it’s refreshing to have actual adult characters for a change, to not have to go through the usual high school routine of club training montages and Interhighs, to not focus on a naive but talented rookie, but rather deal with somebody who has already experienced both success and defeat.

Yuri on Ice: comedic deformity

As you’d expect, and can see in the promo video up top, the animation in the skating sequences is beautiful, graceful and elegant, an animator’s showcase. But where it also sparkles is in the humour scenes. The animation gets distorted, kinetic, while the characters (mostly Yuri) devolve into cartoony, semi-chibli forms to better drive the comedy home. But there’s also a real warmth to these scenes, especially once Yuri is back home, something that contrasts well with the coolness (in both senses of the word) of ice skating. Yuri’s family is a little bit goofy, but supportive and it may be embarrassing that his home town has posters of him as the hope of Japanese skating up, but it’s also nice to be appreciated.

Yuri on Ice: elegant skating

This first episode was all setup and back story, but crucially it didn’t feel that way. The way Yuri’s past came out was handled naturally and it never bored, because it was so unlike what we’re used to from sports anime. He’s not a naive newcomer, he’s already had a taste of the top and he’s already gotten his resolve back to try again. Which means the rest of the series doesn’t have to bother with this and can go straight into the yummy stuff, ice skating routines and providing Tumblr with endless opportunities for slash fiction between Yuri, Victor and Yuri.