Articles with the Tag anime

Day 1: let’s start again (with 12 days of anime Christmas)

Anime
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Cute girls doing cute things in New Game

There’s too much anime being produced. I should know; I’m watching all of it. Or at least a good portion, having gotten in the habit of watching seasonal anime as it streamed last year and currently have some 139 series listed for this year as watched, watching or planning to. But even that is only a drop in the ocean. There are over twohundred entries listed on MAL for each of the seasons this year. There’s overlap between seasons of course, but it still means that at any given moment you can watch anywhere between fifty to seventy new series. Even filtering out the obvious crap can leave you with say a fortyone series to follow this season, as may or may not have happened to me.

Cute girls holding hands in Hibike Euphonium

For all that variety though online discussion of shows seems to focus on only a select few. Currently it’s Yuri on Ice with a bit of Flip Flappers and Hibike! Euphonium 2 thrown in; before that Re:Zero or Mob Psycho 100. Before that, Erased or My Hero Academia. You’d expect that with so much choice discussion would be more broad, but instead it’s dominated by the series that “everybody” watched. Which means that a lot of deserving series end up slipping through the nets, watched but not discussed, or perhaps not even watched much at all for various reasons.

A catcher is like your wife in Battery

Case in point: Battery, last season’s Noitamina series, that got picked up by Amazon for their video streaming service back when they still thought all Noitamina series were like Kabaneri. Surprise, instead they got an eleven episode baseball story about a prima donna pitcher not fitting in with his new middle school baseball team and the catcher who tries to get him to change. I watched it and found it okay, noted the gay subtext (hard to miss when the show drives the pitcher/catcher relationship hard), but completely missed that it could be seen as being about growing up gay in small town Japan, as this sadly deleted Reddit post argued. That’s the sort of thing I like to see more off, discussion about not so widely followed series, new point of views.

Cute girls saving schools in Love Live Sunshine

And what better time to do that then during the allegedly traditional twelve days of anime Christmas? So that’s what I’ll be attempting the next twelve days, shining the spotlight on some undeservedly neglected series that aired this year and telling you why you might like them. But first, I’ll showcase a series that’s arguably better off forgotten, a series that only existed to promote a Japanese only MMO but which strangely got licensed by Crunchyroll anyway: Phantasy Star Online 2: The Anime. Look forward to it tomorrow.

Your Happening World (January 12th through April 30th)

Your Happening World
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  • A Mari Okada Anime Timeline – 女のカントク – Ten years ago on March 11, 2006, Mari Okada made her anime movie debut on a film for the TV anime Kaiketsu Zorori (The full name of the movie is Majime ni Fumajime Kaiketsu Zorori: Nazo no Otakara Daisakusen). In honor of that, here’s part 1 of a two part project on Mari Okada.
  • Kiznaiver and Mayoiga: Okada Mari in Spring 2016 | HOT CHOCOLATE IN A BOWL – When I declared two weeks ago that I’d be looking at Okada Mari for this next post in my ‘Anime Writing’ project, I hadn’t actually read more than one of her interviews (the noitaminA one that’s summarised with one mistake here).1 Just one week later, I found myself regretting that rash decision, for I’d come across around ten relevant interviews, and had no idea if I’d even be able to put together something coherent. In the end, I decided that the best thing to do was to focus on the offerings this season that she’s had a hand in: Kiznaiver and Mayoiga.
  • 80sanime — 1979-1990 Anime Primer – I wrote this primer to serve as an introduction to those new to 80s anime. It features 50 titles, all of which are either films or OVAs for ease of viewing. I attempted to strike a balance between iconic productions and lesser-known gems; nevertheless, this list reflects my personal opinions only and is not meant to be definitive. Also, please note that Studio Ghibli films from this era were purposefully not included since they’re already so well-known (I consider Nausicaä to be pre-Ghibli).
  • The Dreaded ‘Anime Avatar,’ Explained — Following: How We Live Online –

Your Happening World (September 24th through December 15th)

Your Happening World
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  • Bibliography | Chromatic Aberration Everywhere – As I tend to read a lot of more “academic” texts when it comes to studying anime, fandom, and interpretation, I thought it might be a good idea to throw up a list of all the things I’ve either read/seen so that anyone else interested in these types of ideas has a place to start.
  • Japan’s Cute Army – The New Yorker – This stressful, ongoing debate fuels the seeming paradox of an “endearing” military force. In Japan, where indirect communication is highly valued, cute illustrations have long played the role of tension-breakers and mediators in situations of conflict. Thus kawaii mascots, whether miniskirted girls or bunny-rabbit decoy launchers, are both a reflection of pop-cultural trends and a way to defuse the very touchy issues surrounding the military’s undeniable presence.
  • The Tyranny of Stuctureless – This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power
  • A Piece Of Toast – YouTube –
  • Otaku Philosophy | Public Seminar – Its origins are in cultural forms imported from the United States after the war. “The history of otaku culture is one of adaptation – of how to ‘domesticate’ American culture… Otaku may very well be heirs to Edo culture, but the two are by no means connected by a continuous line. Between the otaku and Japan lies the United States.”

Hitsugi no Chaika

Anime, Art & Criticism
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Chaika opening credits

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.

Akari, Chaika and Toru

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.

Chaika acts shocked

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.

Chaikas pursuers

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.

background characters

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.

Akari attacking

All in all Hitsugi no Chaika is an entertaining anime series much better than it needed to be. Watch it.