Things like this:
Opening credits to Da Capo III and no, it doesn’t get anymore sophisticated past the credits. It’s all jiggling school girls chasing after a bland protagonist for some reason wrapped in a sillier than most supernatural “plot”.
Anime
Hitsugi no Chaika
Hitsugi no Chaika — Coffin Princess Chaika is a 2014 anime series based on a light novel series, light novels being short, usually illustrated novels aimed at a youngish public in Japan. Many of those are on the formulaic side, shall we say, but they make good fodder for anime series and a lot of contemporary television anime in Japan is now driven by light novel adaptions. Light novels do have something of a reputation as making lousy animes, not helped by the glut of harem fantasy adaptations, where some bland bloke is trust into some sort of magical situation as the saviour of the world, involving lots and lots of young girls throwing themselves at him for unclear reasons. The unsatiable desire for new series leads to a lot of twelve episode animes with little to distinguish themselves.
Hitsugi no Chaika could at first glance be mistaken for one of those. You got the nominal protagonist Chaika as the innocent abroad just this side of being sickly sweet, the male focus character Toru and his “sister”, Akari, prone to violent outbursts and accusations of lechery against him. All three are fairly stereotypical characters, found in every other anime series, caught up in what seems like an equally stereotypical love triangle.
What saves it is the humour, which is a cut above the usual “hilarious” slapstick or offensive sexist japery, but is actually based in the characters and themselves. It helps that they’re all likeable people as well, including the antagonists. Chaika is a bit too cute at times, naive, innocent, but also stubborn and determined to fulfil her mission. Akari is hotheaded but not obnoxiously so and is toned down somewhat after her introduction; both she and Toru are competent, professional warriors in a world where war has ended five years ago with the defeat of emperor Arthur Gaz.
Chaika is Gaz’s daughter, lugging a coffin around the former emperor to get his remains back from the eight heroes that defeated him, to give him a proper burial. She runs into and hires Toru and Akari after the former saves her from an unicorn, set upon her by a group of agents from the current regime, wanting to stop her, fearing what she might do with the remains. These are not your usual villains, but decent people with some doubt on whether they’re in the right from time to time, especially as the cracks in the new world order start to show. I like the design of the various characters as well, especially this chap, who looks like a Jack Kirby design.
Speaking of character design, what I also found interesting was while all the main characters look pretty much in the style of modern fantasy anime, the background characters look more like they’d wandered in from a lesser studio Ghibli movie. Much less colourful, much more realistic body types. Nowhere near the quality of a Ghibli production of course, but the feel is the same.
All in all Hitsugi no Chaika is an entertaining anime series much better than it needed to be. Watch it.
Bubblegum Crisis
Back in the late eighties/early nineties, before the internet, when we had to rely on the local videostore to supply us with anime, Bubblegum Crisis was one of the first series to be widely available, through good, old Manga Video. I sort of knew something about anime, through scraps in American comics zines, but it wasn’t until Manga Video got going in the early nineties, that we got a regular supply of anime videos. Bubblegum Crisis, Akira, Appleseed, Dominion Tank Police, Wicked City: that first wave of videos was very cyberpunk influenced and they provided a vision of the future that was just around the corner for us, slightly too young to have seen Blade Runner at the cinema or have read Neuromancer and Schismatrix when new.
We still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day
Anime right? Twenty years ago we all thought it was all adolescent power fantasies with teenage boys flying mecha power suits and heroines in stripperific costumes before we realised that we got them confused with superhero comics. Back then I was lucky in that the local videostore my parents had gotten a subscription to when we’d finally gotten a vcr ten years after everybody else (having had a black and white telly until long into the eighties and only the very very basic cable package) had one or two anime/manga enthusiasts working there and they managed to get all the classics. Akira, Legend of the Overfiend, Fist of the Northstar, Dominion Tank Police, Bubblegum Crisis, Macross, all courtesy of Manga UK and all of a certain consistency. Not bad series or movies by any means, but only a very small part of a much more diverse selection Japan had to offer, tailored to the tastes of western nerds and not too strange.
These days, even if the official supply is still somewhat limited, the internet and various not quite legal solutions can get the dedicated anime fan everything they want. Now myself I’ve never been a hardcover anime or manga fan, being fairly conservative in my tastes, depending on the recommendations of others for cool new series. Which is how I discovered things like FLCL or The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but not the anime series I’ve just started to watch: Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai or AnoHana for short, which means “we still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day” and which is somewhat different from most series I watch because it has gotten reactions like this
I accidently ran across some fan art for the series when googling something else, read the inevitable Wikipedia writeup and hunted down the episodes on the strength of it.
The story is simple: a group of childhood friends, young children, drift slowly apart as they grow into teenagers. One of them, Menta, never grew up however as she died in an accident on that day they found the flower. Now the guy who had been the closest to her, Jinta, is haunted by her memory, not to mention her ghost, who wants him to fulfill her wish she had asked him about the day she died. He needs to bring back the group to do so and move her spirit on, but this isn’t easy as they each have gone their own ways. How much do you have in common with the kids you played with when you were eight now that you no longer see them anymore and you’re in high school?
It’s a very adult in the proper sense of the word, low key, emotional and gut wrenching story about dealing with loss and memory. Any wonder it appeals to me right now?
Giefors
Really everything that came out in the seventies or eighties and has some appeal to thirty and fortysomething grownup nerds is being made into movies or tv series these days, isn’t it? Gatchaman is no exception and while the hardcore fan might find anything but the original anime suspect, I suspect this is really aimed at those of us who got to know it under another guise, as Battle of the Planets, bowlderised and chopped to bits as it was. Gatchaman was my first fandom, playing in the sandlot at kindergarten in the very early eighties and fighting over who got to be Mark, Jason, Tiny though not so much the princess or Keyop. Yet back then we didn’t have the slick version shown above; rather we had something like this: