Twelve Days of Anime – Page 3

Watching too many kid shows

Published on December 24, 2018Leave a comment

In this age of simulcasting, when seemingly every anime series is available less than an hour or so after airing in Japan, there’s still a major category of shows that isn’t picked up: kids shows, especially those aimed at girls. Even massive franchise in Japan — Pripara, Aikatsu, frigging Precure don’t get an English language release, subbed or dubbed. (Well, there is Glitter Force, but that uses Precure the same way Power Rangers used its source material, chopped up and Americanised. It’s still a good show, but it isn’t really Precure anymore.) Kid shows then are one of the few areas where, if you want to watch them, you’ll have to rely on fansubs if you can’t speak Japanese and/or can’t watch the original airings.

Luckily there still are a few dedicated groups and fansubbers left devoted to those series, but oh the disappointment when they lose interest in a series you are following. Which was what happened for me with Kiratto Pri☆Chan, the reboot of the Pripara magical idol series, which ended last year after four seasons and some 200 episodes. I was enjoying the new series, but the original translator dropped it after less than ten episodes and the new one couldn’t English very well and in any case also seemed to have stopped doing them. A pity, because I was enjoying it. Kiratto had a bit of a twist on the traditional idol show, as it now revolved around a sort of magical Youtube, rather than performing idol shows. It had still the same beats as its predecessors, but I wanted to see where the series was going with it, but then the fansubs stopped.

Aikatsu Friends is the third iteration of the Aikatsu! franchise: the original series ran for 178 episodes and four seasons and was followed by the 100 episodes Aikatsu Stars, which guydolls in the mix and wasn’t received as well as the original. The latest series is a return to the original formula, with a new idol joining the idol school, teaming up with an already established hot new star, to take on various other idols in friendly competition. The change here is that it’s all about friendship, with the two aimed to become platinum friends and ultimately winning the platinum friends cup to become the top idol team. All this while transforming before performing in a sort of magical virtual reality, as shown above. This and Pripara are series that sort of made idols into magical girls and both originated as arcade video games, where you could unlock new outfits and characters and the like and that’s why each idol has her own transformation cards and usually a favourite clothing line. It’s much less toxic than the actually existing idol industry in Japan of course, but that’s why these series have this fantasy element. If you like magical girl shows like Precure with their devotion to friendship and helping each other overcome your weaknesses, you’ll probably like this too.

Which brings me neatly to the eight hundred pound gorilla of kid shows aimed primarily at girls: Precure, which has been running since 2004 and arguably ran every other kids magical girl series out of business. This year’s series, Hugtto Precure is its fifteenth and therefore an anniversary edition, which has resulted in a couple of guest appearances by the previous Precure. It has also been the most openly queer of all the Precure series, as we saw two posts ago. Sadly the entire Precure franchise remains mostly unavailable in the west, but there is the Americanised Glitter Force edit of two of the older series, which is worth watching if you have children in the right age (eight or so) because a lot of the fun of the original is still present in them. Much of what makes the present series so good is the interplay between Lulu, an android who worked for the big evil of the series until she developed an actual heart and Emiru, a slightly younger fan of the Precures who attempted to become one herself; in the end they both became members. Emiru and Lulu went from friends to close friends to an actual couple and they weren’t the only ones: her elder brother became the boyfriend of Henri, the first ‘boy Precure’ as shown in that earlier post.

The one kids show that is easily available over here is of course Pokemon: sun and Moon, which some purists dislike because it doesn’t look like the original, but since I’ve never seen it having been too old for it at the time, I quite like this series. The character designs are cute, it’s not all Ash all the time, the monster battles are more than decent and every few episodes they pull something really weird out of the bag, which is great. I never thought I’d be watching this but here we are, a hundred plus episodes in and still looking forward to it every week.

This is the eleventh post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: Watching too much anime in 2018.

Watching too much slice of moe

Published on December 23, 2018Leave a comment

The real world may have been a scary and distressing place this year, but in anime 2018 was remarkably cozy.

Yuru Camp: Secret Society BLANKET spreads its influence further

This was a good year for slice of moe series, those shows that focus on the everyday life of usually high school girls (rarely high school boys). When I first started watching seasonal anime a few years ago and started watching everything I assumed these series were made for girls, because that’s what you expect from shows populated almost exclusively with women, don’t you, coming from a western perspective? Anime fandom however quickly made it clear that all those “moeblob shows” were aimed at gross otaku manchildren and you shouldn’t admit too loudly to watching them. Luckily that view is slowly changing as more people lose their hangups about what counts as respectable anime. For me this sort of show probably fuctions like a sort of ersatz emotional labour, getting to relax and unwind by watching anime girls going camping or cheerleading or even going on a trip to Antarctica.

Sora yori mo Tooi Basho: penguin love

Sora yori mo Tooi Basho was not just the best slice of moe show this year, but immediately became my favourite anime of the year and despite stiff competition, hasn’t shifted from that spot. What started out as a light hearted adventure about a girl who realises she never had a big dream and she’s already in her second year in high school in the end turned into a study in grief and processing it. Watching it week by week was cathartic, leaving me on the verge of tears almost every episode. For obvious reasons female friendship is a theme in most slice of moe series, but it’s rarely done as convincingly as it was done here, with four girls at first united only by their desire to go to Antarctica becoming close friends over the course of the series, growing up week by week as they tackled the challenges thrown at them. Such a female centered coming of age story is rare and one told as well as this, even rarer. It was also incredibly funny, which is always a bonus.

Winter 2018 was in any case a strong season for slice of moe shows. Besides Yorimoi there was Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san, about a girl who loves eating ramen and her friend/stalker who loves her very much, Mitsuboshi Colors, about three elementary school girls/shitlords playing around and bullying their local police officer, Slow Start, about a girl who had to skip a year between middle and high school and is terrified people might find out and Hakumei to Mikochi, two literal little women being only a few centimers tall living together in a magical world. But the best of them all was Yuru Camp. Incredibly well animated as you can see above, funny, but above all warm and cozy. You have this one girl who likes being on her own, going on solo camping trips meeting another girl, energetic and outgoing who becomes her friend and also takes up camping, joining their local school’s outdoors club. And where most series would’ve the first girl join as well, this never happens in Yuru Camp: her desire to be left alone from time to time is completely respected. Instead you get a much more realistic view of friendship, where not all the characters are friends, but some are friends of friends, people you’re friendly to but not necessarily are friends with. It was great seeing the friendship and perhaps something more bloom up between the two main characters and all the camping related stuff was fun and reminded me of going camping myself.

The rest of 2018 was less strong, but there were still a few standout shows. Comic Girls was a show about an anxiety ridden high school mangaka who on the suggestion of her editor starts living in a dorm with three other high school mangaka. Equally insecure and thirsty, Kaos was actually a thinly disguised, hopefully exaggerated version of the original manga’s creator. Most of the show was well animated, fluffy fun as expected from a Manga Time Kirara adaptation, but Kaos’s anxiety is handled seriously even when it’s the source of much of the humour in the series. The same goes for the attraction Kaos has for one of her dorm mates: she’s incredibly thirsty about it, but that attraction itself is never ridiculed. It’s this hidden seriousness that makes this a better series than something like Slow Start, which may seem very similar at first blush. Not that the latter is bad, it just misses some of the bite of Comic Girls.

Another standout this year was the third season of Yama no Susume, the half length anime about school girls going mountaineering. In the previous season they had tried to climb Mount Fuji, but our main protagonist,Yukimura Aoi, failed; this season was all about preparing to try again, probably next season. What also drove this season was that her best friend Kuraue Hinata was getting jealous of the new friends she made climbing mountains. It had been Hinata who’d introduced Aoi to the sport in an attempt to draw her out of her shell, but now that she was becoming less shy and actually making friends without her, Hinata became a bit jealous, feeling left out. As you can see from the clip, you don’t need narration to understand something is going on between these friends. That’s always been the greatest strength of Yama no Susume, its incredible character animation and gorgeous scenery.

On the other end of the spectrum we have a series like Anima Yell!, another Manga Time Kirara four panel manga adaptation, with decidedly ‘cheap’ animation, proably because the studio responsible, Doga Kobo, was also busy with a higher profile series the same season. Even a showcase set piece like the clip above isn’t as good a similar clip from any of the series mentioned here. There are a lot of static shots, lots of talking heads and other less obvious ‘cheats’ to simplify the animation. It also lacks some of the depth of the other series, this is based on a four panel gag manga after all and in the first episode especially you could almost see the panels. As such it’s arguable a much more representavive example of a slice of moe series than something like Yuru Camp or Yorimoi. But, it’s a fun series with fun characters, a bit of yuribaiting and it was one of the series I’d always watch first the day it came out. And that’s the real strength of slice of moe shows; they’re almost always a fun time, something bright to look forward to each week even when you don’t have enough energy for something more demanding.

This is the tenth post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: Watching too many kids shows.

Watching too many pretty boys

Published on December 22, 2018Leave a comment

This year, I’ve watched too many pretty boys and not all of them were as cute and sweet as this high school boy and his absolute unit of a monster husband.

Jingai-san no Yome: the bride is a boy

That’s from this season’s 3 minute short series Jingai-san no Yome, about high school boys becoming monster brides, which was adorable and cute and had more than a hint of queer subtext. It would be great if all pretty boy series are like that, but boy howdy is that not the case. It might just be my bad luck with them, but pretty boy fujoshi bait and reverse harems (sic) and the like tend to be the most cynical cash grabbing minimal possible effort anime series. Even when compared to the sister fucker shows. When I first started watching seasonal anime I made a point to watch everything, but I soon gave up on anything that looked like a cute boys doing cute things show because they were all so dull and pointless.

Hypocritical maybe considering how many cute girls doing cute things shows I do watch, even when they’re not all that good, But again, I’ve seldom found any that were anywhere near as dull as a very many cute boys series are. It’s not that I like girls more than I like boys, it’s that more effort is put into the later. So many series seem to think it’s enough to just throw a dozen or more archetypes at the viewer with little in the way of plot, character or visuals to make it more interesting. That’s why I stopped watching them, but this year I’ve found half a dozen or so decent ones being broadcast. Shoutout here to the seasonal first impression guides at anime Feminist, which pointed me in the way of a few of those.

Rokuhoudou Yotsuiro Biyori: pretty boys bringing soup

So for example, spring season’s Rokuhoudou Yotsuiro Biyori might have its complement of pretty boy stereotypes — the short tempered redhead, the big energetic foreign dude, the calm and serious one, the calm and serious one but with glassess — to ship together but it also takes the time to tell actual stories. Working at a traditional sort of Japanese restaurant, these four get involved with the everyday problems of their customers — not all of whom are women — and help solve them, or at least offer a listening ear. It’s all done with a sense of humour and it’s cozy as fuck. If you like iyashikei/healing anime this is a series you’d properly like.

Kakuriyo no Yadomeshi: feeding pretty monsters

Kakuriyo no Yadomeshi also debuted in the spring season and ran for two full cours, a rarity for a pretty boys series. Tsubaki Aoi is a college student raised by her grandfather after her mother abandoned her and like him, she can see ayakashi (traditional Japanese monsters/demons). What she doesn’t know is that her grandfather used her as collatoral for a debt he owned to the Tenjin-ya innkeeper, one of the most respected and feared oni of the Hidden Realm. So one day not long after her grandfather died, she gets kidnapped and taken to the Hidden Realm to marry the innkeeper. All of which is a frustratingly common setup, the normal girl forced into a relationship with an overbearing, arrogant man who she manages to change for the better. A bit dodgy, but once moved past this setup the series is actually quite fun, with Aoi using her cooking talents and quick wit to get herself and her new demon friends out of all sorts of dangers. If you like scenes of cute, fluffy monsters eating food and smart, compassionate heroines this is a good series to try.

Legend of Galactic Heroes: pretty boy fascists

Of course for the prettiest of pretty boys, the ones who put the fashionable into fascism, you have to go to the Legend of the Galactic Heroes reboot, which upgraded both the space battles and the protagonists looks 1000% from the original while keeping the slightly fascist ideology intact. At the very least it got me off my ass and watch the original. The reboot hasn’t quite reached its legendary density yet, but then it’s early days. Hopefully the sequel will not take too long to arrive.

Gakuen Babysitters: merry Christmas

Other noticable pretty boys anime this year were Devils Line, a vamperic mopefest that still held my attention to the end despite its drab colours and animation. There was also Gakuen Babysitters which fell squarely in the cute boys doing cute things camp, in this case baby sitting. This was actually one of the series I was looking forward to because the manga was adorable and luckily the series didn’t disappoint. Ryuuichi and his young brother Kotarou are so sweet together, the other babies are all cute but cutest of all is the tsundere chairwoman who took the two in after their parents died in a plane crash. It’s a good, fluffy series because it has this core of seriousness, of tragedy at its heart. And that’s the common thread with all these series: they have something more than just pretty boys interacting or flirting with each other.

This is the ninth post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: Watching too much slice of moe.

The first boy Precure is genderqueer

Published on December 21, 2018Leave a comment

Well, it took Henri until episode fortytwo, but they told you so in episode eight:

Hugtto Precure: maybe I will try to be a Precure too

Hugtto Precure is the fifteenth installment in the Precure franchise, which as Andrea Ritsu explains has always been somewhat progressive and queer friendly, especially for a kids franchise. In recent years this has intensified: the Maho Girls Precure protagonists kissed, while there was a canon lesbian couple among the precure in last year’s Kirakira PreCure a la Mode . In this context it would make sense for Precure to finally introduce a boy Precure as well, something with which it has flirted in the past. Not out of some percieved need to always crowbar boys into something intended for girls, but because “boys can be princesses too”. And Henri is the perfect “boy” to do so. After all, they are:

Hugtto Precure: a refined Japanese lady and a Parisian

From their very first appearance it’s clear Henri doesn’t think of themselves as a boy, but as somebody for whom gender is irrelevant, wanting to be both and lucky enough with how they look that they could pull this off. Henri is self assured, confident and completely open in how they perform their gender. Henri starts off as a bit of an antagonist of the Precure girls, being friendly ice figure skating rivals with one of them and thinking the others are holding Homare back. Once that’s resolved though Henri becomes somewhat of a friendly face, helping Emiru standing up to her far too serious brother Masato, who’s obsessed with propriety. Said brother ends up becoming his somewhat over protective boyfriend not to long after by the way:

Hugtto Precure: precious boyfriend

That’s from episode 33 when Henri blows a kiss to their adoring audience and everybody, men and women both, get hearts in their eyes, except for Masato, whose actual heart lights up. It’s a nice touch. In general I like the way the relationship between those two is shown: it’s never spelled out but it’s clear these are more than just friends with Masato always there to help Henri whenever the latter is getting depressed. And Henri does have problems: a potential injury threatens to derail his skating career, while the simple act of growing up, of getting taller, having their voice changed threatens their ability to have the gender they want.

Hugtto Precure: precious boyfriend

Henri isn’t in a lot of Hugtto Precure episodes, but the ones they’re in are some of the best of the series, laying the foundation for their eventual transformation into a true Precure. His story fits the theme of the series, with Henri’s worries for a future in which they may have to leave behind skating. Not to mention the fear that puberty will put an end to their ability to be “both a refined Japanese lady and a Parisian” as their body grows more masculine. The villains of the series too are obsessed with the future, wanting to stop time because only that way will people be unable to feel any more pain. They try to seduce Henri with this shared fear of the future and almost succeed, until:

Hugtto Precure: Cure Infini

Becoming a Precure doesn’t solve Henri’s problems or fears, but it gives back hope, a way for Henri to fight through his momentary depression at losing his skating career and see new possibilites again. Having Henri, somebody who struggled not with who they wanted to be but with being able to keep being that person as the first ‘boy’ Precure fits with the whole ethos of the franchise. Of discovering yourself, of finding new ways to be yourself if the old way no longer suffices. Had they just plunked in some random guy this wouldn’t have worked, but with Henri you have somebody who is queer enough to be a Precure, who can serve as a bit of a role model for all boys to know that they too can be princesses, without having to fear Precure will be remade to appeal more to boys in general.

This is the eight post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: I watched way too many pretty boy series this year.

Frankenstein Family: normality is overrated

Published on December 20, 2018Leave a comment

Anime is lousy with absent or downright evil parents, but the ones in Frankenstein Family take the cake, being mad scientists who genetically manipulated their own children for their experiments. They’re gone by the time the series opens, arrested and in prison, which leaves their children to have to care for themselves.

Frankenstein Family

So from left to right we have the twin sisters, one a flower woman who can photosynthesise and grow all sort of flowers on her, the other a spider woman with artificial arms & hands. The oldest brother in the middle looks normal here, but is a weredog (not wolf) and tends to like his doggo form more than being human. Well, who wouldn’t? On the far left is the youngest sister, a mind reader who can’t turn it off so by necessity is a bit of a NEET. Our protagonist is Tanisu, the youngest brother, relatively normal because he’s ‘only’ a genius. Perhaps that’s why he’s the most obsessed out of all of them with appearing normal, conforming, trying to do all the things a normal family would do. Which is hard to do because none of them really have any idea of how to act this way, having been raised by their asshole scientist parents in what was arguably one huge experiment. What’s more, the rest of his siblings aren’t actually all that concerned about this, prefering to do the things that come naturally to them rather than forcing themselves into some ideal of what the average family should look like.

The desire for normality, for being an ordinary school boy is what drives a lot of anime protagonists just before they get dragged up into some grand adventure. That doesn’t happen here. Instead we have Tanisu coming to terms with his sibling’s nature & behaviour, as they in turn adapt a little bit to living in the outside world. In the end however it’s Tanisu who changes the most. He’s still somewhat obsessed with his brother and sisters passing as human, but less uptight about it, more accepting of their monstrous sides, no longer wanting them to repress them all the time. There’s a little bit of a queer subtext to this, isn’t there? Being seen as something that you are not, perhaps needed to be seen that way to not be hassled, but still living with the stress of having to repress parts of yourself.

What else made Frankenstein Family interesting to me is that it’s an actual Chinese cartoon redubbed in Japanese and then brought over by Crunchyroll. Some of the cultural assumptions and shorthand is just that little bit different form ‘real’ anime and I can’t quite put my finger on it. Also, because this is a half length show, the Japanese dub pads things out by having the actual voice actors do some silly skitches and such after each episode. This also include a visit to the company licensing & publishing the original manga with some neat if surface details about translating from Chinese to Japanese and the challenges that brings. It made for a nice little package each week.

This is the seventh post in this year’s twelve days of anime challenge. Tomorrow: let’s talk about the first boy Precure again.