Twelve Days of Anime – Page 8

Day 10: Dictonary bros — Fune Wo Amu

Published on December 23, 2016Leave a comment

Fune Wo Amu: the ocean of words

It’s a shame that one of the best series this year has had so little opportunity to finds its audience. As you know Bob, earlier this year Amazon signed a deal to get the exclusive rights to the Noitamina block of anime. At first this worked out great for them as the first series under the deal was Koutetsujou no Kabaneri, made by the studio behind Attack on Titan with a similar concept, which got a lot of attention. But then the next series was Battery, ostensibly a baseball series but actually about coming out as gay in small town Japan, which for some reason was much less popular. And the series after that, Fume Wo Amu was even less designed to get a mass audience: who’d want to watch a series about creating a dictionary? Especially if you have to get a subscription with yet another streaming service for it?

Fune Wo Amu: a good team

Which is a pity, because Fune Wo Amu is indeed one of the best series this year, a thoroughly mature workplace drama that is subtle in a way that anime often isn’t in depicting conversations and relationships. And the main relationship is the one between the two dictionary bros, the protagonist Mitsuya Majime and the man who recruited him for the dictionary editorial team when he saw he was a lousy salesman but had an unique way with words, Masashi Nishioka. The former has some form of mild social anxiety, finding it hard to talk to people, but being very precise with words while the latter is cocky and confident, if a bit unhappy to work in such an unpopular publishing department. You can see their personalities in everything, from how they sit to how they walk and talk. And though both change and find common ground in their work on the dictionary, the series never presents either one as wrong. Their personality is what it is and that’s alright.

Fune Wo Amu: shipped by grandma

The other important relationship is the budding romance between Majime and the granddaughter of his landlord –who ships the two outrageously– Kaguya Hayashi. Hayashi is a Japanese chef in training when she first meets Majime and throughout the series she keeps her career going, eventually getting her own restaurant. I really like the way she and Majime interact, once they are in a proper relationship together: it feels natural, mature. With the usual anime romances being between high school students taking thirteen episodes to decide to hold hands, it’s nice to get a more adult version. Even if Majime still ends up writing her a love letter to confess. Which actually is so dense and literary written that it takes Hayashi an entire day to figure out it is a love letter.

suddenly thirteen years later

With episode eight, the series makes a thirteen year time leap. It’s an interesting decision and not one you expect in an eleven episodes series. It means skipping over all of the plot developments that were set up in the previous seven episodes, going straight to their resolution. Which means we missed most of the sweet romance building between Majime and Hayashi, going straight to them having been married for several years already, with both Hayashi’s grandmother and her cat having died in the meantime (we also don’t find out what happened with Nishioka and his girlfriend until the last episode). Disappointing as this is, it does pull the focus back on what the series is really about: the work on the dictionary. Having skipped the years of hard slog through the Japanese language collecting the words for inclusion, it means the series can now concentrate on the end spurt.

Fune Wo Amu: the end of the road

Which means that in the series we get to witness the entire birth process of a dictionary and find out why it is important, why the people working on it find it important. For any book nerd like me this is something that hits close to home, even if I’m not particulary interested in dictionaries myself. Fune Wo Amu for the most part manages to do this without preaching, just through showing the various people working on it go on about their business, dealing with minor crisises. This is one anime which truly believes in show, don’t tell, isn’t afraid to let viewers draw their own conclusions. That’s why it’s in my top five shows for this year.

This was day ten of the Twelve Days of Anime. Next: Hai to Gensou no Grimgar.

Day 9: melancholy

Published on December 22, 2016Leave a comment

She and Her Cat

Melancholy is underrated as an emotion in fiction. Used properly, it can be immensely powerful, but the danger is always that it’ll slide into sentimentality. There were two shows this year that attempted to walk this tightrope and both managed to succeed. Of the two, She and Her Cat: Everything Flows was always the most likely to succeed. It is after all based on an Makoto Shinkai short movie, who you may know from the recent mega hit movie Your Name. The series takes the overall story of the movie and expands on it, taking a four minute film and turning it into four seven minute episodes.

She and Her Cat

As the title indicates, this is the story of a young woman and her cat, living together, as told from the perspective of Daru, the cat. It starts when the woman has just started her first job after college and the cat is already at an advanced age. Which means you spent the whole series anticipating and dreading Daru’s death. It’s the nature of cat stories and it is what gives this series its melancholy mood, underscored by Daru’s reminiscences about the past with Her. Available over at Crunchyroll, watching it will take you less than half an hour but if you’re a cat person like me it will leave you an emotional wreck the rest of the day.

Planetarian: moe meets Junker

Planetarian tackles a more grandiose sort of melancholy. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, a man who calls himself a Junker wanders into an abandoned city only populated with killer robots to scavenge for supplies. Chased by one such robot, he ends up at an old department store and when exploring it comes across the store’s old planetarium and its caretaker android, still functioning thirty years after the staff evacuated. Said android is incredibly moe, cute and cheerful, but the Junker is not impressed. Too young to have know life before the war, he has no use for planetariums, cute robots or anything not related to survival. The android, Hoshino Yumemi, on the other hand knows nothing but the planetarium and doesn’t realise why no customers have visited in 29 years and 81 days.

Planetarian: in her element

Needless to say, the junker’s attitude gradually softens over the course of the five episode series, helping Hoshino restore the Zeiss projector and get the planetarium up and running again for one last show before the emergency power that had kept it and Hoshino active runs out. Hoshino gets her show in episode three and it’s the heart of the series. Here we are, in the middle of an abandoned city on a planet torn apart and devastated by war, where survival is all that people are capable off, being shown everything humanity lost by an android that was the peak of human achievement, unaware of the depths her creators have sunk to. It’s a poignant scene that echoes through the rest of the series. As with She and Her Cat, you know Planetarian will end in tragedy but even if Hoshino died, it was enough that she got to play that final show for an audience she could never have expected to have.

This was day nine of the Twelve Days of Anime. Next: Fune wo Amu.

Day 7: the pleasure of having read a book

Published on December 20, 2016Leave a comment

Bernard Jou Iwaku: the secret of reading

Bernard Jou Iwaku is not afraid to tackle the big issues: how to read books if you don’t want to read them, just want to have read them. The courage to read the Wikipedia plot description. Miss Bernard — actual name Machida Sawako — is the sort of poseur you’ll find in any book club or fan group, somebody with an opinion about anything whether she has read it or not. Not a bad sort at heart, if a bit obnoxious and smug.And to be honest, if you’re a reader, there will have been moments when you’d rather not want to read the book you want to have read.

Bernard Jou Iwaku: what to recommend

On the other side of the spectrum is Kanbayashi Shiori, who’s not just enthusiastic about reading books, but really enthusiastic about sharing her favourite books with others — though she has some difficulty in deciding which book to share. She and Machida regularly clash when she gets infuriated by the latter’s idiocy, but in the end Kanbayashi needs her as somebody to talk books with. They’re both book geeks so despite their differences, they need each other.

Bernard Jou Iwaku: geeking out

The series itself is pleasantly nerdy about reading as well and seems to be especially fond of somewhat obscure (American) science fiction authors. In a time when young people reject even the classics it’s amazing that Kanbayashi doesn’t just name drop Egan, Asimov, Heinlein, Tiptree and Clarke, but also much less well known writers like Avram Davidson, Theodore Sturgeon, Olaf Stapledon, not to mention Manly Wade Wellman? I’m seriously considering entering Bernard Jou Iwaku for the Best Related Hugo.

This was day seven of the Twelve Days of Anime. Next: Alderamin / Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm.

Day 6: mecha-nised warfare

Published on December 19, 2016Leave a comment

Kuromukuro: smart mecha action

2016 was a pretty decent year for mecha anime. We got several Gundam series and specials of course, but also the latest Macross installment, a glimpse at the upcoming Patlabor reboot as well as several new mecha series. Of those, Active Raid (police in powered suits) and Schwarzenmarken (East German robots fighting off an alien invasion in 1983) were pretty meh while Bubuki Buranki (five kids combine to form a super robot and fight a worldwide conspiracy) redeemed itself with its second season. But the series that impressed me the most this year were Kuromukuro and Regalia: The Three Sacred Stars.

To start with Regalia, this is what you might call a super robot show, with immortal lolis piloting giant magical mecha fighting an immortal shota piloting an even bigger magical mecha. It started off well, but then ran into production problems and instead of finishing its run in Summer, was instead reran this Fall season. Perhaps that’s why it got relatively little attention. Which is a shame, because this was quite a nice, if simple series. What’s more it’s mecha fights are 2-D animated, a rarity in modern mecha series, as most are now CGI, like Kuromukuro.

Regalia: Rena and Yui

The story revolves around Yuinshiel “Yui” Asteria and her adopted sister Rena Asteria. Yui is actually the empress of Enastoria but for the most part lives like an average school girl. When a giant robot pops up to kidnap Rena, Yui discovers that her loli sister is actually the soul of a magical mecha herself and she needs her to fight together. From there on several other Regalia pairs pop up, some friendly, some not so much as Yui’s country is put under siege and the disaster that happened to a neighbouring country twelve years ago threatens to repeat in Enastoria. Throughout the series emphasises the importance of family and female friendship as counterweight to the very masculine sort of power seeking of the male villain: Yui and Rena may be overpowered by him, but thanks to the friendships they make they still have a fighting chance. Not a new idea, but well executed here and always a pleasure to see among more cynical series.

Kuromukuro on the other hand is the story of a four hundred year old samurai and a modern school girl piloting a giant sword wielding mecha to fight off an alien invasion. This was everything you might want from a mecha series: great fights, good mecha designs, a decent plot that actually manages to answer most of the questions it raises, likeable characters, sword fights and gorgeous animation. But again, it got less attention than I expected. Perhaps because this was a Netflix exclusive and released in two thirteen episode batches at the end of the Spring and Summer seasons respesctively. In an age where every other series is streamed immediately after an episode is shown on Japanese television and anime fans have gotten used to discuss anime on a week by week basis, this may have hindered it from finding an audience.

Yukina Shirahane is visiting her mother, who is the director of a huge research lab looking into buried alien artifacts discovered sixty years ago, just when the lab comes under attack from a series of mecha. She finds herself being shot at by one of the mecha which had managed to enter the building she was in, only to be saved by a buck naked samurai she just freed from one of the artifacts. The samurai turns out to be Kennosuke Tokisada Ouma, whose last memories are of a battle over four hundred years ago. He thinks she is his clan’s princess and vows to protect her, while she is slightly flabbergasted by it all. Circumstances force them to pilot the Kuromukuro (“Black Relic”) together and because of this they’re drafted to fight against the invading alien mecha.

Kuromukuro: family

With twentysix episodes to play around in, Kuromukuro has the room to breathe and give some attention to the daily lives of its characters inbetween the battles. So of course Kennosuke transfers into Yukina’s class and hangs around with her friends. As Mage in a Barrell noted yesterday, the first half of episode one just follows Yukina on her daily routine before all hell breaks loose and the series repeatedly returns to the increasingly turned up side down familiarity of day to day life. Some scenes could just as easily have fit into any of P. A. Works other slice of life series. This gives it a charm that reminded me of e.g. Eureka Seven or Xam’d Lost Memories.

Kuromukuro: smart mecha action

Nevertheless the real attraction is of course the mecha action and Kuromukuro doesn’t disappoint. For once the conventional military forces aren’t entirely useless in fighting robots. Though not up to facing the enemy’s super mecha, the smaller ones can be destroyed by tanks or the JSDF’s own mecha. It’s not just a series of showy one on one battles: both the invaders and the defending forces do have some sense of tactics. And while some of the ways in which the aliens fight make little sense at first and the same goes for their motivations, these questions are satisfactorily answered by the end of the series as is the question why if these are aliens, they look so damn human.

TL;DR: Kuromukuro is a great series you should check out if you like mecha, science fiction or samurai and if enough people do so we may get a second season.

This was day six of the Twelve Days of Anime. Next: let’s look at some short shorts.

Day 5: get a real job

Published on December 18, 2016Leave a comment

You only have to watch the episode above to grasp the essence of Aggressive Retsuko: put upon office lady/red panda Retsuko gets harassed by dumb bosses and obnoxious co-workers, the frustration builds and builds until it erupts — in the form of death metal karaoke. For anybody who’s ever worked in an office there’s a lot that’s recognisable –female supervisors being more lenient to men than women, co-workers slacking off, though some of the frustration she has to deal with is more uniquely Japanese — obligatory drinking parties, near daily overtime. However, although Aggressive Retsuko mocks the daily struggle of office workers, at the end of the day it’s like Dilbert, an escape valve rather than a call to arms. Each episode ends after all with Retsuko declaring she’ll work hard again tomorrow. But who cares, it’s funnier than Dilbert ever was.

This was day 5 of the Twelve Days of Anime. Next: Kuromukuro and Regalia.