Twelve Days of Anime – Page 2

2013: Nico Nico Gatchaman! #12DaysOfAnime (5)

Published on December 18, 2019Leave a comment

2013 was the year of the Nico.

A strange year for me personally. The long time assignment I’d been on at one boring Dutch bank finished in March and it would take until August before my next assignment, at the same boring Dutch bank. Which meant I spent almost half a year getting paid but underemployed, being stuck at home with nothing to do but play video games. Which sounds nice, but not so much when dealing with the anxiety of finding a new assignment but getting rejected over and over again. I still wasn’t watching anime regularly at the time, but I was getting curious about it, looking for something that I had already found in games like Mass Effect, but not enough off.

Slice of moe anime never came as mellow as Non Non Biyori, a series about four school girls way out in the sticks, where school is one single class and the greatest entertainment comes from going to that one konbini store on the other side of the mountains. The setting was beautiful, the girls were funny, the mood was relaxing. A perfect anime to unwind with. Yama no Susume was similar, a short length series of two childhood friends reuniting in high school and going mountain climbing. Yuyushiki was a more traditional high school club sort of series, but incredibly funny, while Aiura was another short length series and incredibly horny. We also got a new series of Tamayura, Tamayura: More Aggressive.

Gatchaman Crowds was a very well done attempt to update the venerable Gatchaman franchise, first broadcast in the seventies. We still have transforming heroes fighting space monsters, but things aren’t so black and white anymore. When I first saw it, I argued that it is a classic Hegelian dialectic masquerading as a manic pixie dream girl rom-com. The traditional role of the Gatchaman as masked fighter protecting a passive public versus the internet utopian idea of the people helping themselves by the judicious use of social media. The latter looking a bit naive in 2019 to be honest. What also set this series apart was the great music. The opening theme above is great in itself, but if you’ve watched the show the Gatchaman theme is now stuck in your head.

Kyousougiga was a strange series about a magical “mirror capital” hidden set in Kyoto, based loosely on one of the oldest comics still existing. It started out as one shot net animation, directed by one of Toei Animation’s up and coming young directors, Matsumoto Rie, got a few follow-up ONAs and then a full length anime series. It’s strange and hard to describe, full of Japanese mythology and the like, all remixed and reworked, but at heart it is about family and how to find your way back to them. Beautifully animated, this is perhaps the best series of the year and that’s high praise.

Because let’s not forget that 2013 was the year of Kill La Kill, Attack on Titan and Love Live, three titles that would help define the rest of the decade. The first proved that Trigger was a worthy heir to Gainax, the second was the greatest ‘breakout’ anime of the decade, bigger even than Sword Art Online was the year before and Love Live well and truly established idol fandom in the west. Other influential series include Yowamushi Pedal, the biking sports anime that would provide to be a big hit with the boys’ love crowd. Though not as big a hit as the money maker KyoAni stumbled on: Free. The advantage of a swimming sports anime about a cycling sports anime is that in the former, your hot boys can be topless throughout. The ending theme made no bones about what its main attraction was…

Good series this year I haven’t seen yet include baseball drama Diamond no Ace, superhero thriller Samuari Flamenco, teenage angst fest Aky no Hana and nerd drama Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!: No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular! I tried, but that particular series is so cringeworthy it makes me die from secondhand embarassement. I literally had to turn it off when she tries to sneak past her classmates in disguise because it hurt to watch any further. Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru was somewhat similar in that regard, in that it hit far too close to home for me, but it was just bearable enough I kept watching.

Hataraku Maou Sama is a reverse isekai: the demonic overlord of a fantasy world is cast out of it into modern day Japan and has to make a living working as a part timer at “MgRonalds”, while his sidekick does the house work. Little do they know the hero who banished them, Emilia, is also in Japan. Epic battles … do mostly not occur. Instead, it’s a comedy harem show that really needs a second season.

151 shows this year in my library; 82 seen in total. Shows I liked not yet mentioned: Symphogear G (determination to punch fist), the first Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya (my first Fate show), Ghost in the Shell: Arise, Coppelion (radio active proof girls go exploring irradiated Tokyo), Love Lab (inexperienced ojo-sama and tomboy explore romance together), Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi, Hentai Ouji to Warawanai Neko (otaku harem show), Gj-Bu (otaku harem show), Tamako Market, Kotoura-san (esper meets pervert and falls in love because he accepts her) and OreShura (an otaku harem show). 2013 had a lot of harem shows it seems like. I mention them because when I’d seriously started watching anime, two years later, that staple diet after I’d branched out from the science fiction action genres I used to watch.

This is day five of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2014: when Metafilter made me watch Aldnoah.Zero

2012: the world didn’t end, not even in anime #12DaysOfAnime (4)

Published on December 17, 2019Leave a comment

2012 was the year of tankery.

Not the first series to notice that geeks liked cute girls and geeks like military stuff, so why not combine the two, but one of the more succesful. One season, several OVAs, a movie sequel, another movie sequel, in six parts and the revival of the local economy of the town in which it was set thanks to geek tourism. The idea of tanks battles being a typical female sport, a pastime to make young girls “loveable like the clatter of iron tracks is hilarious and the series took it all serious enough. Making warfare look all cute and moe isn’t necessarily the most progressive thing to do, but the series was great fun and the battles were awesome. At heart, this was basically a high school sports series, just with tanks. You got the setup, the assembly of teams, the challenges to get to the final, the inevitable training and powering up sequences to take on increasingly stronger enemies and a ragtag bunch of underdogs taking on the elites of the tankery world and winning despite the odds.

Another was another type of anime altogether. Supposed to be an atmospheric, terrifying horror series, it’s instead most remembered for its incredible camp, over the top death scenes like the one above. Who the hell sharpens their umbrella this much? Naff as it was, I did like it though. Horror being rare in anime, beggars cannot be choosers. The only other series that even touched horror were the comedy zombie romp Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? in its second season and the also zombie based romcom Sankarea. You might also count the survival death game Btooom while High School of the Death got an OVA, but that was it.

Moving from horror to comedy, this was in much better shape this year. Kill Me Baby stoner humour may not have been to everybody’s tastes, but surely nobody disliked the the ending theme with its strange dance. Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou/the Daily Lives of High School Boys was somewhat similar to last year’s Nichijou, consisting of a mix of slapstick and character based humour, each episode have multiple sketches and a largish cast to act them out. Also like Nichijou, it’s one of the best comedies of the decade. A much more niche sort comedy was provided by Joshiraku, with a quartet of four rakugo storytellers talking to each other, the voice over each episode reminding the viewer that even if the dialogue is uninteresting, at least the girls were cute. Even more niche: Teekyuu a short, rapid fire tennis based comedy that has gotten seven or eight sequels since. You need more knowledge of Japanese than I have to get the most of it though.

On the romance side of things, I liked Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun enough to also finish the original manga, but you have to be able to move past the very early scene in which the male lead threatens to rape the female protagonist. In general the story revolves around a stoic 16 year old girl only interested in getting a good job and career and therefore rejecting anything that threatens her studying. the male lead on the other hand is a wild child who in the end only she can tame. What makes the series is the humour and the characters, as well as the supporting cast. Sukitte Li Na Yo meanwhile revolved around a shy girl without friends who catches the attention of her school’s prince and slowly comes out of her shell as a result. Their relationship is established relatively quickly, rather than keeping the will they won’t they pattern of most romance series.

If you’re more in the mood fo a harem series, Oniichan dakedo Ai Sae Areba Kankeinai yo ne! was fairly typical but with the added zest of incest. Something also present, but much less so in To Love-Ru: Darkness, based on one of the most succesful ecchi manga romances of the 21st century. Fun with various alien princesses and their love for an unremarkable high school boy. The protagonist of Seitokai no Ichizon Lv. 2 might want it to be a harem series, but his harem mates refused. High School DxD was a pervy harem show, with the protagonist literally sell his soul to be surrounded by a bevy of demonic beauties. Completely basic, but popular enough to get several sequels over the course of the decade.

Of course the most important series of 2012 was a series whose succes would reshape anime for the next decade thanks to its setting, characters and well done wishfulfilment, a series based on Kawahara Reki’s already popular light novels. I’m talking of course about Accel World. Kidding. Sword Art Online, for all its flaws, for all that everybody got sick of it, was and is hugely influential, kicking off the whole Trapped in Fantasyland/Isekai genre. Whether videogameland or a more traditional but still RPG based fantasyland, the idea that your innate nerd ability to play games would make you king in another world was seductive to say the least. Personally, I’d argue that had the first SAO series stopped with Kirito coming out of his coma, it would’ve been a great series, but the second half of that first series undid most of the good it did. Nevertheless I’ve kept watching each new SAO series as they’ve come out. Best way to watch it is still the abridged series though.

It was a good year for idols. Yesterday I completely forgot to mention that Pretty Rhythm, which would evolve into the Pripara series, debuted in 2011, while this year saw the debut of its main rival, Aikatsu. Both are based on a range of arcade collectable card games and both are arguably the modern equivalents of the traditional Mahou Shoujo series: aimed at preteen and teen girls, featuring transformations, pretty dresses and everyday problems resolved through some form of magic, be it singing or otherwise. And whereas magical girl shows had the monster of the week as the highlight of each episode, the magical idol show has the performance of the week. When I got back into anime some five years ago I’d never suspect that I would be watching this sort of kid show, shows that aren’t even picked up by any of the streaming services here, but still fansubbed the old fashioned way. But I love them. They have heart, a surprising amount of depth and cute characters. On the more adult side, there was the biggest idol group in the world getting its own anime: AKB48 became AKB0048, underground freedom fighters in a Galaxy that had forbidden any kind of entertainment and especially idols. A pretty out there idea that was handled very well creating a series that worked well both as an idol series and a sort of space opera.

Good series not yet mentioned include two KyoAni series: Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!, a lovely and hilarious romance between an embarassed ex-nerd and the girl who still believes in his dark history. That was almost as good as anime could get, but the more serious Hyouka has a shot at being the anime of the decade. So has Kyousougiga, a strange little story about three kids stuck in a mirror city. There were also two Monogatari series: Nisemonogatari and Nekomonogatari, combining somewhat pretensious philosophy with being horny on main. Nazo no Kanojo X managed to go even further with the latter, taking horny and perverting it into something unique if slightly nauseating if you’re sensitive to its kinks.

Statistically: I’ve gotten 164 shows in my library this year, showing that anime production was still increasing, having watched 90 of them, all of them after they aired. We’re sort of getting an idea of what modern anime is starting to look like this year, what with the debut of SAO, but also the establishment of the great Aikatsu/PriPara rivalry. There are more slice of moe series and fewer old fashioned harem shows as well.

This is day four of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2013, the year I started noticing anime again.

2010: Moe fan service and football #12DaysOfAnime (2)

Published on December 15, 2019Leave a comment

If you’re the type of person who likes to ration out their sweets, to prolong the pleasure of knowing you have them, you will understand why I still haven’t finished K-On! Season II. Only ten more episodes, one special, the movie and then I’d be done with K-On and I don’t want to be done with it quite yet. The biggest, most influential title of 2010, its influence still felt almost a decade later. I wasn’t there for all the fan blather and mass hysteria about the Rise of Moe blobs, but K-On is what made Cute Girls Doing Cute Things/Slice of Moe anime respectable and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I don’t want to talk too much about it though as y’all will have made up your opinion about it anyway.

Rather, let’s talk about lesser known titles that ran in 2010. Sora no Woto was one of A-1’s earliest productions and one of its early gems. Revolving around a small squad of female soldiers guarding the borders of Helvetia in a world in which the apocalypse has already happened, but life goes on for as long as it can. The setting is rural and idyllic but in the back of everybody’s mind is the fact that humanity has declined and this is the end. Most of it is pure slice of life though as we follow our protagonist as she tries to fit in with her new squad and become a trumpetist.Don’t expect answers. This is one for those who like Haibane Renmei, or 2017’s Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou/Girl’s Last Tour. There’s a wistful, nostalgic feeling underscoring the series and if you like that sort of thing this is one to watch out for.

Looking at 2010 as a whole, if K-On heralds the future, anime’s dead past is represented by the slew of old fashioned harem, ecchi and other fan service series. There’s no isekai in sight, but quite a few titles in which some ordinary teenage dirt bag either gathers a battle harem or turns out to be the most powerful boy in the world. Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls, Sekirei: Pure Engagement, Sora no Otoshimono, Omamori Himari, Seikon No Qwaser, Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou, Sora no Otoshimono. All are more or less terrible, but all were poular once. Add in things like Queen’s Blade or Koihime†Musou, where the audience standin has been done away with entirely and you have a wish fulfilment subgenre that easily had fifteen or so shows this year, almost as omnipresent as isekai wish fulfilment is these days. Perhaps the best of these series, breast phsyics be damned, was High School of the Dead, let’s survive the zombie apocalypse with my harem of high school girls, nurses and that one fat classmate who is scarily good at improvising weaponry.

Baseball is a given in sports anime and there were at least two typical, earnest series this year, with new seasons of Ookiku Furikabutte and Major, neither of which I’ve actually watched. Instead the sports title of 2010 I’d like to recommend is Giant Killing. Football (soccer), not baseball and professional, not high school tournaments. East Tokyo United is a football team struggling to avoid relegation. Time for a new manager and who better than a former wunderkid who abandoned the team when they needed his talents the most? Well, he did prove his worth in the lower rungs of English football as a coach and if you can make it there, a scrappy relegation battle should be no problem. If you play Football Manager this is the anime for you.

Two little videos dropped in early August that quietly established major franchises. First on August 10, Sunrise released Mokei Senshi Gunpla Builders Beginning G, a oneshot about kids learning to build Gundam modesl and have fun with it. A few years later this would’ve evolved into the Gundam Build series, where young boys and the occasional girl would build Gundam models and then use them to fight in VR. In general for mecha like most years this decade, the pickings were slim. The big title this time was Star Driver, which I saw two years ago but can’t remember much about. Other than that there was gundam Unicorn, which I still need to see.

But the more important video launched three days later, Love Live‘s first single, Bokura no Live Kimi to no Life. Funnily enough, the original anime video for this was also done by Sunrise. No, they don’t do just mecha. It’s a fun little video but you can’t find it anywhere unless you want to sail the seven seas. But the live version by the actual voice actresses is good too. Love Live would be hyuuge in a few years, but for the moment you had to make do with this as well as what’s probably μ’s best song, Snow Halation which came out just before Christmas.

The title of the year for me is Angel Beats!, of which I’ve written before. It’s a messy, over-ambitious series that was intended to be a 2-cour series of twentyfour or twentysix episodes but in the end only got half. Written by Maeda Jun, who has a habit of trying to elevate his stories with psychobabble and pretentious philosophical musings, yet this hit me right in the feels nonetheless. I watched this one hot august night on holiday in the South of France with the family in 2013, not even two years after Sandra had died. angel Beats ultimately is about grief and coming to terms with death. It was just what I needed. Some of the songs in it, like this one, still make me cry hearing them today.

Good series I didn’t watch: shiki, Durarara, Kuragehime, Arakawa Under the Bridge, Nodame Cantabile Finale, Tatami Galaxy. Harem incest trash I did see from this year: Oreimo, which would’ve been a great little series about a teenage wastrel finally bonding with his younger sister, but which instead revitalised the little sister subgenre for the 2010s. And that after KissxSis tried to kill it off through pure boredom. But really, if you need to watch any little sister anime, make it Yosuga no Sora, in which they actually do fuck in the end. Otherwise, the best harem/romcom wish fulfilment fantasy series this year was Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai/The World God Only Knows, in which the protagonist has to help an angel heal the hearts of girls using his godlike romance game skills…

What else is there? Heartcatch Pretty Cure is many people’s best Precure series. Black Lagoon got a new OVA in 2010. Tamayura, a neat slice of moe series about a teenage girl moving back to the city of her father a few years after he died, debuted this year. It’s another series that makes me gently choke up sometimes. Amagami SS was a dating sim adaptation that wasn’t terrible and distinguished itself by not going the harem route, but rather by doing a story for each heroine. When I first watched it I was obsessed by it for a little while but I haven’t managed to finish the sequel yet. Hidamari Sketch had another outing, as did A Certain Magical Index and Yozakura Quartet. Index was a mess, Yozakura Quartet was fun and Hidamari Sketch is another series I don’t want to finish. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what 2010 has to offer: I got 129 series registrered on MAL broadcast this year and I’ve watched 56 of them. I haven’t even mentioned Panty and Stocking yet, Gainax’s last hurrah before all the interesting talent went and founded Trigger.

2010: a busy year. A good year? I’m not sure. Plenty of cult classics and solid entertaining shows this year, one or two true essentials (but none I’d watched) but nothing that stands out on the level of an Evangelion or a Gurren Lagann. K-On is the biggest series this year, but it debuted earlier even if the second season is so much better. In all, you can see some signs of what anime would evolve into over this decade, but hindsight is twenty twenty. Had I written this review in December 2010, I’m sure I would’ve emphasised different series as important, let alone that I’d know about something like Love Live

This is day two of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2011 and a certain magical girl show setting the world on fire enough I heard about it.

Let’s be boring and review the decade #12DaysOfAnime (1)

Published on December 14, 2019Leave a comment

Yes, it’s time for the Twelve Days of Anime Christmas again. This’ll be the fourth year I’m taking part and as it is the last month of the last year of the twentytens, why not be boring and do a year by year anime review? Maybe see what’s the best series of each year, of the decade, the best movies perhaps, all ranked among genres? That sort of thing? Though of course best idol of the decade has already been decided on.

All of this will at least be interesting for me, as I’ve only regularly started watching anime again in 2013/14 and only started watching seasonal anime in Fall 2015. Almost half the decade of anime I’ve only known as backlog, therefore having little to no knowledge of the fan discourse about the shows that aired through it. Looking at my library, there are more than 1500 titles that aired that I found interesting enough to list on MAL. Of those 1500, I watched slightly more than 1000. That’s a lot of anime to go through and it doesn’t even mention movies.

So tomorrow let’s start by looking at those far flung days of 2010. If you want to look at what other people are doing, take a look at the announcement post for this year. If you want to sign up yourself, here’s the Google docs spreadsheet.

Watching too much anime in 2018

Published on December 26, 2018Leave a comment

This year I’ve finished roughly 120 series so far, slightly less than last year. Still a massive amount of anime, but if you watch it week by week you don’t notice it all that much. It only takes another twenty to twentyfive minutes to watch another episode after all. And it’s not as if I pay an equal amount of attention to each series. Some, usually the best, you have to pay close attention to because every moment in an episode matters. With others … not so much.

2018 is my third full year of watching seasonal anime and I’ve now gotten comfortable enough with Japanese to be able to keep an ear on whether something interesting is happening so I can do stuff while watching anime. Some people hate this way of watching, argueing that if you can watch a series while doing anything else it’s a bad series and you shouldn’t watch it. But for me that’s always been how I’ve watched or read or listened to anything; I always like to do something else as well, unless I’m really, really engrossed. Watching anime subbed I couldn’t do that at first, needing to keep reading the subtitles to understand what’s going on, but my grasp of spoken Japanese is now decent enough that I can follow along until something happens.

Was 2018 a good year for seasonal anime? I’m not actually sure but I’m also not sure I actually care all that much. For me personally it started off with a bang: winter 2018 had some of the best series of the year: Yorimoi of course, but also Yuru Camp, Devilman Crybaby, Pop Team Epic, the new Card Captor Sakura, Violet Evergarden and Koi wa Ameagari no You ni, a line up that can hold up to any other season of anime. What’s missing though and what never quite emerged this year is the one anime everybody talked about, everybody had seen, like Yuri on Ice two years ago.

Instead there were several what you might call cult favourites emerging throughout the year, like fall’s Zombieland Saga or summer’s Banana Fish, that part of fandom got really, really hyped about but which never quite became the one series everybody talked about. Not even season three of Sword Art Online managed that: the people who still liked SAO watched it, the people who hated or got fed up with SAO a long time ago …didn’t. Nobody really felt the need to hatewatch it; even Digibro gave up in the end.

It’s not that there weren’t good or interesting series this year, as a look at my blog archives should show. It’s that there wasn’t any one series that appealed to all or most anime fans in the way HeroAca e.g. did when it first came out. Too much anime is being made and worse, it’s increasingly spread out over too many streaming sites. If you want to keep up with everything, you need to watch Crunchyroll and Netflix and Hi-Dive and Amazon and Funimation/Hulu in the US, maybe Viewster in Europe, whatever local anime sites there are in your country and it gets too much, unless, like me, you both have the money and time (especially!) to keep up and all those platforms are offered in your country…

Another reason: 2018 was another bitch of a year, full of constant churn and misery and even if you’re not directly affected, keeping up with everything is a chore. Among all this chaos there was little room for in depth and lasting conversations about anime, instead you got those brief periods of intense focus on the latest series to pick the interest of enough people. On Twitter especially you’d see those discussions flare up and die down for series like Devilman Crybaby, Pop Team Epic or Aggressive Retsuko, absolutely dominating the timeline for a few weeks (more rarely, a full season), then abandoned for the next shiny thing to come along. All of which intensified by the increasing importance Netflix and its habit to just dump an entire series all at once, so you’d get about a week of that discussion as everybody went and watched it at the same times. (Also a process I’ve seen with the She-Ra Netflix report, where the same thing happened.)

No wonder I’ve been watching so many kids shows this year. With a Precure or Aikatsu Friends there will likely never be more than a cult audience discussing it, but because they’r usually such long running shows, the conversation about them remains active for a much longer time when even Darling in the FranXX the most controversial series this year is already forgotten as Goblin Slayer came along.

So than, if there never really was that one outstanding series, the really important one everybody kept talking about even after it finished airing, does that mean 2018 was a mediocre year for anime? Perhaps. Or it could be that anime is just too big now that it is no longer that easy to be the new Attack on Titan (and notice that its latest season didn’t get much buzz either). In any case, the same thing is happening in other media: there’s more of everything, everything is more splintered and everything changes faster. In an age of binge watching the old seasonal model of anime watching we’ve just gotten used to might already be becoming obsolete…

This is the twelfth and last post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Originally it was supposed to come out on Christmas day, but real life drama intervened.