Wis[s]e Words – Page 92 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Cutie Honey’s a bust

Published on May 23, 2018Leave a comment

I would enjoy Cutie Honey Universe a lot more if these two painfully unfunny assholes weren’t part of it.

Cutie Honey Universe: unfunny sidekicks

As this excellent overview of the new Cutie Honey series has it, putting up with unfunny sidekicks sexually harassing the protagonist is part and parcel of the Go Nagai anime experience:

Of course, Cutie Honey Universe is by no means a perfect show; it is a good series, it is definitely an interesting series, but it has some major offputting flaws. For all the good interactions between Honey and Genet that play with relationships between women, it also uses old women being sexually active as a punchline, puts schoolgirls in their skimpies in bondage and is making jokes about the male gaze even in its opening credits as Junpei and his father orbit Honey, ogling her particulars.

But one comes into a Go Nagai production expecting crude sex jokes and breasts. It is an unavoidable, innately divisive part and parcel of the fiction. You are going to get a show about two powerful, badass women in complicated relationships, but you are also going to get jokes about how good they look and how unattainable they are.

Cutie Honey Universe: sexual harassment as cure for depression

Problem is, Devilman Crybaby showed you could take a Go Nagai series, extract all the interesting things from it, update it for a 21st century audience and leave all the awkward sexual harassment and “comedic” stereotypes back in the seventies. Cutie Honey Universe on the other hand seems to think that what the story needs is for Honey to be sexually harassed out of her depression after she saw her entire school die the previous episode. Their groping routine is not only obnoxious, it actively hinders the story, shutting it down for minutes on end for more “comedy”. It rankles, especially coming on the heels of such a heavy episode.

Cutie Honey Universe tries to put a bit more depth in its story than the original anime had, with the Panther Claw villains a bit more humanises, a bit more sexual attraction between Honey and the main villain, Sister Jill, a bit more introspection in general. But all of that doesn’t work if every five minutes we get these two crashing the scene. Perhaps some people enjoy the contrast between the high drama and the low comedy, but I’m not one of them. There’s so much more the series could’ve done rather than redoing comedy bits already dated when the original anime series came out.

To be Heroine: Chinese is realism

Published on May 20, 2018Leave a comment

How do you represent your protagonist moving from her mundane everyday world into an alternate reality? To Be Heroine does it by shifting languages.

To Be Heroine is an anime series created by the Chinese animation studio Haoliners. Haoliners its start doing subcontracting work for Japanese anime studios, but which has long since started doing its own shows as well, most of which weren’t very good. To Be Heroine is the spinoff of one of the exceptions, 2016’s To Be Hero, which had a core of new, young talent doing the animation for it. That show was a sci-fi comedy, whereas the new series is more of a isekai fantasy series, with the protagonist crossing over into a strange fantasy city. Isekai or trapped in fantasyland stories are omnipresent in modern day anime, but To Be Heroine does a couple of things different. First, instead of being transported to some standard medievaloid world, our heroine instead is transported to a warped version of her home city. Second, to underscore the transition, she goes from speaking Chinese to Japanese.

To Be Heroine: realism for the real world

As usual in this sort of story, we first get a glimpse of Futaba’s everyday life, while she ruminates on making choices and sometimes having to accept not having any choice, while all the while she prepares to go out and gets dressed. The colouring and lightning is all fairly drab, fitting the rainy day it’s set in. Futaba herself too is a bit drab, clothed in shades of black and grey, her hair a realistic shade of black with even the green of the duvet on the left being a bit flat. The same goes for the other people seen in this sequence. Her parents are clearly older, aged, her classmates like herself look like actual teenagers.

To Be Heroine: cuteness for the fantasy realm

The moment the door closes behind her and she steps out into an alternate reality her hair colour turns purple, her eyes become big and round and her voice becomes cuter and Japanese. The colour and lightning pop, her design is rounder and cuter and in general, everything looks more “anime”. So there’s both a visual and auditory disconnect between the muted, realistic, Chinese speaking mundane world and the cute, colourful, Japanese speaking fantasyland. The contradiction between drab mundane and colourful fantasy is obligatory for most isekai stories, but going so far as to switch language is unique to this series, only possible because we got a Chinese studio doing a series for the Japanese market. And then of course there’s the international market watching it subtitled in English (or your local language). It’s a clever use of language as signifier, but you got to wonder how a Chinese audience will like seeing the boring real world represented by their own language… Or that you can instantly become cute when you speak Japanese!

To Be Heroine: cuteness for the fantasy realm

Setting aside that sort of consideration, what impressed me was the consistency with which the language scheme was kept. Chinese for the real world, including in Futaba’s flashbacks in the fantasy realm, Japanese when she’s talking to people there. And as you can see, the contrast in animation, colouring and lightning between the two worlds is kept consistent as well. Here Futaba literally steps out from her flashback back into the fantasy city.

To be honest, despite the praise it got from sakuga nerds, To Be Hero was too crude for me personally, so I never watched it beyond the first episode. To Be Heroine, its successor, looks to have both the incredible animation and a much better story and setting. If it can keep up the quality of this episode, it will be one of the best series of this season.

How is Precure so good?

Published on May 14, 2018Leave a comment

No really? How is Precure this good?

Hugtto Precure: no eggs no life!

To recap: Precure is a long running series of magical girl shows that has put out a new series each year since 2004 following roughly the same formula each time, though each series bar two stands on its own. There’s a team of two or more young teenage girls who’ve gotten Precure powers from a magical talking animal mascot to defend the Earth against some sort of primordal evil, which mainly manifests in fighting the monster of the week while also having to deal with more mundane problems. For more detail, see my review of Fresh Precure, which aired in 2009. Hugtto Precure is the latest installment, started last February and so far has been rather good, episode four being a particular highlight, but I think this week’s episode topped even that one.

Sakugablog has the nitty gritty of just who is responsible for making episode fifteen so great and mentions that this is actually supposed to be a budget saving episode. Which just goes to show talented creators can do a lot even under strict limitations. But what sets this episode apart from regular episodes is not just the good use of limited animation, but the focus on two supporting characters. There’s Lulu, the enemy infiltrant now living with main Precure Nono Hana, who is sent out to buy eggs and runs into Aisaki Emiru, first seen in episode nine, who introduces herself as Cure Emi-ru protecting the world through careful prevention. Emi-ru is great, trying to do all the usual stuff Precures do, in which the show obliges her by using the same musical and animation cues it uses for the real Precures. Intrigued, Lulu follows her (or rather, Emi-ru keeps clinging to her warning her of increasingly unlikely dangers she could encounter as she makes her way to the supermarket to buy eggs) and watches as Emi-ru attempts to help people and fails. Lulu then points out that even if she failed, at least she made the people she helped happy.

Lulu and Emi-ru hit it off immensily and it’s great seeing the fired up Emiru trying to explain things to the stoic Lulu. As the former keeps going into these flights of fancy, the latter keeps shooting her down, but not in a mean way. Rather, she seems genuinely concerned for her when her brother comes in to lecture Emiru on how it’s improper for girls to play the guitar. Lulu defends Emiru by continuing to ask him who died and made him boss as well as why playing the guitar is unseemingly, doing that in the same cold, logical way she has done everything this episode. Only when the brother flees, does Lulu reveal some genuine emotion and upset. Which also leads to the most adorable pout in Precure history.

Hugtto Precure: Lulu pouting

The stoic, logical, emotionless girl is a staple in anime ever since Neon Genesis Evangelion. But what struck me here is how much characterisation and character growth the series could put in one episode. There had of course been hints before that Lulu wasn’t as emotionless as she first seemed and she’s a prime candidate for mid-series conversion to the good side, but in this episode we learned she had a sense of humour, was able to make friends and get angry on their behalf and it all happened naturally. That’s what makes this such a good episode even without the brilliant animation to go along with it. Both Lulu and Emiru gained a lot of depth in what was nominally a gag episode and while this episode was incredibly funny, it also adhered to the standard formula of a Precure episode, showing how much the staff could fit in its limitations.

Otoboke Beaver & finding new music

Published on May 4, 2018Leave a comment

Otoboke Beaver is a punk band from Kyoto named after a love hotel in Osaka that was located near the high school of one of its members. They’re brilliant:

Metafilter recently had a post about the death of the music review’s power to end careers and people wondered how you find new music without looking at sides like Pitchfork et all. For me, finding this particular band started by looking up Shonen Knife on Spotify, then browsing through the related artists, finding another great punk band 54 Nude Honeys, browsing through their related artists list and ending up with Otoboke Beaver. Shonen Knife of course had a brief burst of popularity outside Japan in the early nineties, so I knew them from when Dutch radio used to play them, when it was still possible for cult bands like this to actually be on the radio. Spotify now fills the same function for me.

Reviews, especially those of the Pitchfork variety, have never been that important to me, though there were times when I’d follow the recommendations of a site like warr.org — run by two enthusiasts rather than professional reviewers– religiously. And sometimes it was the random musings of a blogger I followed that got me interested in a particular band — and ultimately in this case, an entire prog rock subgenre. You can only find new music if you’re open to experiment and break out from your regular listening, by either getting recommendations from people you trust, or by just following the trail leading out from a band or artist you already like. What with so much music available effectively for free, there’s no need for the safety net of a review anymore before you sample a new band.

Faces of Deathbook

Published on April 25, 20181 Comment

Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant interviewed an ex-Facebook moderator about how the moderation process worked and it was shocking:

De haat, dat is wat hem meteen raakt. ‘Ik schrok daarvan.’ De intense haat, tegen asielzoekers, Marokkaanse Nederlanders, zwarte mensen. Erik: ‘En alles in Nederland is kanker. Kankerjongen, kankerneger, kankerhoer.’ In Vlaanderen krijgen de ‘makakken’ de schuld, in Nederland de ‘Marokkanen’. Elk gebied heeft zo zijn eigen ‘overlast’: gewelddadige foto’s en video’s van bendes in Latijns-Amerika, porno en geweld tegen vrouwen in het Midden-Oosten. De Portugese en Griekse moderatoren hebben het relatief rustig. Zij kunnen nog weleens Netflix aanzetten. Nederlanders niet: Nederland is het land van de haat, zegt Erik.

First, it turns out the Netherlands is about the most racist, hateful European country on Facebook, with the most complaints per day, lots of it racially motivated. Most of this occurs below the radar, but we saw the tip of the iceberg last year, when Dutch politician and media personality Sylvana Simons who had become the target of racial hatred on Facebook, reported this to the public prosecutor and examples of this hatred were given in the resulting lawsuits. To hear that this is indeed a common occurrence for Dutch people of colour on Facebook is disappointing, but not unsurprising. There is a huge amount of resentment hiding behind the white Dutch liberal pretence.

But second, there’s also the way Facebook treats its moderators, who turn out to have no support whatsoever except from a dodgy “feelgoodmanager”. Barely trained people working for little more than minimum wage are supposed to review material that goes beyond “just” racist comments, but includes snuff videos, child porn and other traumatic material even experts are supposed to only see in moderation, not eight hours a day, five days a week. No wonder so many moderators either quit or self medicate with alcohol or drugs.

But of course moderation is only a cost to Facebook and their real interest is to get as many people as possible posting and who cares what they’re posting. As long as ad revenue keeps coming, Facebook don’t give a fuck.