Category Archives: Franchises

April 14, 2011

It’s So Japanese

By omo

More musing on HanaIro before I “clear my palate” for Anohana.

The loose coalition of anime fans, or maybe better put, otaku, west of the Pacific, is a diverse group of people. It’s probably many more times diverse than Japan’s domestic crop of late-night anime watchers, pundits, NEETs and hikkis, academics and industry. Just in the Americas alone we have people coming from just about every background you can think of. We have people who may be Japanese transplants, jamming away at Saint Seiya like as if it was 1995 in Brazil, or a bunch of mid-western, white American girls still longing for their teenage years, fawning over Sailor Moon. Well, wait, those people wouldn’t be watching these late night anime in the first place, right? (Wrong?) Ok, in that respect maybe things aren’t so different.

But once we remove that anime context, we are as different as left is from right, conservative as is from liberal, rich from poor, empowered from disenfranchised, homogeneous versus diverse. Or better put: Japanese, or not Japanese. It’s stating the obvious: the world is a diverse place, especially outside of Japan.

I think this is one of the underlying power of anime as a cultural export–its ability to set its own rules, its own context, it’s own instance of Oraclethat cultural database. With it we can unite. Contrast to, say, food culture, it’s difficult to find that sort of a bridge between different people groups since that is something not foreign at all to, well, all of us. Anime is foreign to all of us. Probably even to many Japanese! Well, that kind of anime anyways.

Hanasaku Iroha is a simple example of where this cracks down. It’s like forcing people to watch Japanese TV dramas. Admittedly, what happens in Hanairo is more of an extreme example, but even as I say extreme, it really isn’t really extreme to many people. Being slapped by your grandmother is always an extreme thing, but the difference of it happening within an Indian or Chinese household versus in a typical American, white, urban household is probably better summed up better by American comedians exploiting immigrant families with localizing children interacting with their new neighbors and classmates. [I have a skit in mind for this but I just can’t find the link for you at the moment. Hey look at this.]

Just how seriously should this group of Gen-Y/Millennials take corpeal punishment? Especially when Minko isn’t even related to Ze Grand Baba? Will any of them even think of it as a sign of affection and endearment? How about Ohana’s triple-decker? Surprise me, guys!

I mean, that’s just the beginning. Those who studied Japanese culture or have some exposure via first or third party narratives probably would know about the whole Senpai-Kouhai thing, so that shouldn’t be a shock. The rape thing I mentioned last post is, while somewhat misleading, has a place in this context. It’s like how one can make an argument for the the whole prostitution subtext in Spirited Away. We’re not really diverging from the formula here in HanaIro, if you think about it.

It’s so Japanese! It borderline offends my Chinese sensibilities (ok, not really), let alone my American ones (I think, I’m not sure). Thankfully the western anime-blog-otaku-fandom-sphere-thing is doing all the outrage better than I could ever, and that is probably annoying me more than what sewn-together pieces of the thematic puzzle that we have at episode 2 can possibly ever could. Because at worst, HanaIro can’t be any worse than Summer Wars (and its Yoko Ono reference). Well, I suppose they could make Nako into someone with some kind of hidden talent that saves the day, but that would actually make the show better. Don’t you prefer a tall, athletic, and graceful high school girl from the countryside over a shota bait? Aki Toyosaki not withstanding?

And don’t get me started on the “oh bad mom abandoning your kawaii daughter” thing. This is what makes HanaIro already 10 times better than Summer Wars.

Leave a comment | posted in Hanasaku Iroha, Modern Visual Culture

April 11, 2011

Adjusting Expectations Against Impressions, or Rape as Plot Device

By omo

Over the years I’ve been getting better and setting expectations that are realistic and are often met, when it comes to trying out new anime. Sad to say, often this means “lowering” the expectations against hype. The good news is that there are still shows on a regular basis that meets some of my expectations, or even exceeds.

Also, over time my goals with regards to expectations have slightly shifted. These days my primary goal in having any expectations at all is to increase the enjoyment of a particular encounter with a new show. Realistically speaking it just isn’t any fun to be pessimistic.

There may be other things in play in my case in which helps me adjust expectations, such as my tendency to not be familiar with the source material unless it’s that once-a-blue-moon light novel that I’ve read ahead of time. I think I can handle adaptations from books; Hollywood has prepared me well. I can’t say much about manga or, good luck, video games. Well, I guess I do read a handful of manga, but in the past half a decade or so, there were probably only one or two manga that I’ve read before I saw the anime of, like Bakuman. The end result, for that Bakuman adaptation, is that “the manga is just what you need to read.” And I think watching the anime about a couple’s promise to get the man’s manga adopted into an anime so the woman can voice act for it is way too meta. Reading the manga? Just right. More pertiently, I put my anime in one bin, and the manga in the other. I am just not a manga person, I guess.

I think there are also reasons to believe adaptations are better off judged on its on merit for more accurate adjustments on expectations. The reasons can come in a variety of ways, from being totally unfaithful to source material, to source material being unhelpful to predict the end result, to the fact that it can completely overshadow the adaptation. Of course if you are coming to an adaptation for the reasons that it is connected to the source material, none of what I said makes would make any sense. But in that case you are basically a fish in a barrel and don’t have much of a choice, right?

The other notable thing, which we have a great example of this season, is targeted marketing and why they are targeted. I think it’s easy to get hyped up on a show like Star Driver, because it’s got your typical alternative-mecha vibe all over a mainstream sort of package. It’s a Sunday morning cartoon from BONES. The only thing better would be if it was from SUNRISE. Or is a GUNDAM anime. (Or, for that matter, Sket Dance.) But that is hype for everybody. On the other hand, while most people won’t give two-poops about PA Work’s 10th Anniversary project Hanasaku Iroha, it has just the right amount of hype for just the right kind of people that it is rather highly anticipated from certain circles (namely: emofag-sakuga types, like me). It makes a noise of a drop of a pin outside of those circles (well, it is a SU FEE AH animu, so you’ve got that factor). Despite its stellar pilot episode, I don’t think anyone who didn’t care about the show before would care about it until they were told to go watch it. But it was exactly how targeted hype can make a positive impact on expectation for someone like myself.

Hype can also be a negative indicator for setting expectations. Like the Persona 4 anime that just got announced. Because, well, there’s this thing called a track record. But more importantly, the hype is basically purely from the fact that Persona 4 is well-liked. There is little in terms of the animation production itself that is worth being excited over about. Usually this is a tell-tale sign of suckage.

The real question is, would it be worse than SofuTeni, to put it in perspective of the very present? I think most people do not get Sofuteni enough to be a good judge, so let’s just leave it out there: it’s a softcore…show, as you should expect. So it shouldn’t be surprising to see the content being as is. I mean, there are good reasons why people prefer hardcore over softcore as a matter of principle, after all, and I don’t just mean pornography. But some people don’t have that preference.

I think this season has been a good example (or in other words, challenging to assess realistic expectations) of a variety of things that can go wrong in guessing how a show would be before it airs. Another example would be shows like Tiger & Bunny. Who knew what it was? And maybe, who knows what it is? I think it is a huge mystery, and it isn’t even a very mysterious show. Much like the still-anticipated Madoka anime, part of what makes it charming is the whole mystery behind it. It’s another reason to be cautious about your expectations.

In the more bizarre, circumstantial sense, you get shows like 30-sai no Hoken Taiiku where it could be very enjoyable…if it was not censored all to hell. Maybe it is reason to pick up the source material, or better yet, the eventual uncensored home video release. But there’s not much to fight against arbitrary censoring. I mean I knew it would be censored, but not to this extent. So that’s a downer example: the stars aligned but it was censored.

I guess I’m ruined by Qwaser’s AT-X/web release.

To steer away from porn (again), my expectations were pretty spot on for A-channel and Nichijou. The latter was especially true-to-notion and KyoAni’s brand of humor. I find myself surprised slightly by just how much I was wishing Nichijou to be Lucky Star’s stead, and Lucky Star to never have existed. A-Channel was also surprising in that it is weird in a hard-to-describe way, which made it remarkable [albeit not much else]. It’s hard to be disappointed by weird Japanese 4-koma anime adaptation if you were expecting them. I mean, why wouldn’t anyone be expecting that, right? [I think I shed a single tear when I saw Studio Gokumi’s name showed up somewhere, but that’s beside the point.]

Or for that matter, Sengoku Otome. I guess I’m not quite done with porn yet, but maybe I can take this opportunity to revisit Samurai Girls, as it did that porn thing much better, with more pizzaz. Even in Rio’s case, they really were pretty creative with some of those battles. Perhaps it’s just an example of “you win some, you lose some,” as Time Paradox Battle Maids of WTF (which would be a superior title) was somewhat of a disappointment. I’m not sure if it is a cultural bias, but plot with your fanservice anime? I don’t really need it, but there is a tendency for those with it to do better than those without. Too bad it’s hard to tell if there will be a plot or not in that kind of stuff, ahead of time. Especially when it sacrifices the actual selling point of the shows for the plot points.

That, and among other reasons, is why I recommend having little to no expectations at all before going into a new season of anime. I realize it’s not a practical solution for everyone–instead spending the 5 minutes or whatever it takes to read some first-impression post or a teaser fag-chart, or even the 2 minutes it takes to see a trailer, it’s probably more effective to just watch the damn thing. No expectations, besides the absolutely necessary (genre, target audience, format, notable creators involved). It would have salvaged your 20+ minutes if you watched OreTsuba (and waste another 12 episodes worth of your life trying to follow it this season), and you could have looked up what it was after you saw the first episode (like any sane person should, should the show interests him). Just do it before the rape cliffhanger, for the love of all things good.

I mean it’s beyond the language barrier even. Not to mention most of us don’t scrub clean of Japanese-language sites that speculate on this stuff and get our Japanese brethren’s consensus first, but even then stuff like censorship can still screw with you. It’s tough.

Leave a comment | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Hanasaku Iroha, Modern Visual Culture

April 7, 2011

Last Christmas I…

By omo

Just going to toss these thoughts down before they fly away with the Spring breeze.

Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? – Korean Zombie Desk Car – It’s my most enjoyable, uh, romp this season. It has just the right kind and right amount of randomness. It’s the sort of otaku show that they make every season, that has the kind of self-referential humor that pisses some cancer-speaking-people off and just annoying enough with its senseless plot to highlight that the point of this exercise is all those things otaku like about…things otaku like. Mousou Yuu! Boobs! References to Kira Kira! Of course the drama was pretty amusing that they can even pull it off, but I am not sure if it was used to the show’s benefit.

The only thing left to do is to make Korean Zombie Desk Car our version of Ankoiri Pasta Rice.

Level E – Really enjoyed the show, just as it is. It’s just retro enough, and I really like the ED for some reason.

Fractale – It’s a nice try Yamakan. The story and the composition is all “there” but it just didn’t come together. Which is probably more unusual than I would expect? How many shows like this fall flat? I think noitaminA is flushing them out.

Hourou Musuko – Best show of the season, and I didn’t even read the manga (nor do I really want to). Pretty much everything about this show is spot on, except how we had to squeeze episodes 10 and 11 together. It does have the “you don’t really need to have a vested interest about transgender issues” thing to it, but I think even that is done just right as to not alienate people unnecessarily. OP and ED are not my bag of tea but they are very well done.

Freezing – It was pretty okay except for the horrible pacing for a boobs show. I don’t get why people say the manga is good either. It feels a bit like High School of the Dead, just much less well-produced.

Infinite Stratos – This is the true moe show for this season. Half of which is because of Charlotte. The other day I karaoke’d Straight Jet, and it went down pretty smooth. It’s a quality tune. The ED, as mentioned previously, is cool ensemble stuff.

Dragon Crisis – This is the moe show for the season, and except Yukana’s character, it’s not even that moe. The one quiet girl was more WEIRDO than moe, the Kugyuu character is Yet Another Kugyuu Character and Rose isn’t setting any records there (not even sure if it sets the “most number of times Kugyuu repeat the same word per episode” record). Maruga and everyone that comes after only offer boobs, and not much else. Maybe you can make a case for furry girl but I don’t want to waste my time. Oh wait, oops, too late.

Star Driver – Save the Best Kiraboshi for Last. What he said.

Kimi ni Todoke – I like the first season more, but this one at least pays off. That said, I’m indifferent about the overall story the series covered in season 2. It doesn’t even make me RAEG like it does for some others. The thematic content, however, was pretty interesting terms of talking about communication.

Casulties: Rio, Gosick, Beelz (I should’ve just go watch Gintama), Merry, LOLOL Index.

The Other Type of Casualty: Madoka

Leave a comment | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Fractale, Hourou Musuko, KiraKira, Kore wa Zombie Desuka?, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, Modern Visual Culture, Star Driver

April 6, 2011

Selling Blossoming Flowers

By omo

It’s not always a sensible thing to track TV anime by the studio responsible for its production, but over the past few years there has been some outstanding animation houses that have made a big splash. We are all familiar with Kyoto Animation, but another up-and-comer from outside of Tokyo is the studio P.A. Works. This season they bring us an original, 10th Anniversary title: Hanasaku Iroha.

Shows like Canaan, True Tears or Angel Beats are not super-awesome shows, but they are hardly poor. More importantly, all of them offers some gorgeous scenes and a degree of visual richness that few others offer. Will Hanasaku Iroha be the same? More importantly, will it not suffer in the plot and characterization department like its predecessors? Maybe we can make some sense of it from the so-called book cover.

The main character Ohana is, at first glance, a responsible high school student with a good head on her shoulders. In some ways we’re going to be reminded of Ryuuji from Toradora when we first meet the bright but down-to-earth Ohana, exchanging jabs with her wild and crazy mother. The show itself sets a fairly realistic tone in terms of character interaction and behavior, so the Toradora vibe hits even stronger when we realizes she is seemingly without a father, and the two of them make things meet via her mother Satsuki’s authoring work.

On the other hand, Ohana’s best friend, a nice guy and classmate named Kouichi, is a little less down to earth. He is smart and sensitive, but Ohana is too busy living her life to the fullest to realize his feeling for her. Things quickly comes to a head (and this is all before the first CM break!) when Satsuki suddenly decided to run away with her boyfriend to dodge some kind of shady business, abandoning Ohana to fend for herself at her Grandmother’s hot spring inn thing. The city girl got together with her confidant late at night with an awkward farewell as Kouichi confessed his feeling to a shellshocked Ohana, dealing with probably one too many things going on at a time in her life.

The drama doesn’t let up in the second half of the first episode either. Ohana has never met her Grandmother, who has disowned Satsuki and treats Ohana like some version of a cruel, fairy tale stepmom. Ohana tries to take all this change with proud strides, except she’s now the employee of a classic onsen, where the customer comes first, second and third, and Ohana’s selfish pride probably doesn’t even make it to the top 100. I guess that’s where the drama will be for the time being.

At the onsen, named Kisuisou, we are introduced to a bunch of the supporting cast. It looks like Hanasaku Iroha will focus on the girls around Ohana’s age. Two of them we’ve met this week: the straight-faced and grouchy Minko and the shy Nako. Other notable characters thus far includes the fun and light-hearted head mistress Tomoe, and Ohana’s grandmother / inn manager. I think during the brief tour Nako and Tomoe gave to Ohana we went through approximately the entire cast of Working!! (or Wagnaria!!) and then some.

At this point, the story is still just getting started and I’ve only described about two-thirds of the first episode. For this First Impression piece, though, let me just tell you what excites me about Hanasaku Iroha:

  • Dramatic misdirection. Several times in the first episode, we see Ohana think to herself (ie., inner dialog-style voice over) one way to set us up for something, and then the opposite happens. This isn’t a big deal, but I think we’re going to see the same kind of misdirection apply to not just the little things in the episode, but all over the place as the story continues to reveal itself.
  • Realistic presentation. While this is still an anime with many of the usual trappings, the character drama is presented without grand or funny overtures. Nothing special about this either, but it’s refreshing.
  • Flowing animation. I’ve mentioned it before, but this anime looks gorgeous. Mel Kishida’s design comes across here largely intact, unlike some other anime I saw recently.

To making it less sounding like an ad and more like an honest endorsement, I still have the usual reservations about Hanairo. It’s just one episode, and episodes 2-13 (or as pointed out below, 26) can tank completely, who knows. But with a pilot like this, it’s going to sell to me easily.

I think in a way I wrote this just so I can get some opportunity to write everybody’s names down. They’ve thrown over a dozen of those at us in those 23 or so minutes, and I’m not good with names.

Leave a comment | posted in Hanasaku Iroha, Modern Visual Culture

April 4, 2011

Scryed End for Some, Play in the Play for Others

By omo

I’m satisfied with how Star Driver ended, and this is why.

For starters, Star Drivers is pretty meta. I think it would be almost stating the obvious to say that this is not a good Mecha show. In the various interviews our lead dudes have professed of not having that sort of knowledge, but in the case that you didn’t follow those delicious behind-the-scene notes from Igarashi and Enokido, it’s hard to miss that there’s this Utena-esqe flair in a lot of the elements in the show. In fact the story seemed more like a regular high school intrigue thing with random battles thrown in there for good measure. In that sense it’s kind of like Utena, too: wait, was there anybody watching that as a Samurai flick? I guess the setup is not too dissimilar to a typical story where an outside guy comes in town and raise havoc. And I mean Utena not Star Driver…

The mecha battles themselves are pretty fun to watch per se, but they lack a certain sense of grit, as if it wasn’t really obvious that they were merely vehicles [/zing] to express certain resolution or points of catharsis for character development. But all that glitter and fabulousness isn’t going to fool me! Maybe that is where some find the show disappointing, like all the reused footage in Utena or the lame sword fights.

The second point, to talk about Utena again, is the structural similarity between Utena and Star Driver. I think if you get one show, you should be able to understand the other. This is not to say anything else about how the two are similar, but it is more like we are getting different themes expressed through the same mechanisms. To use an analogy, it’s like being able to understand one story told to you in gibberish probably means you can understand another, different story told to you in the same language. But that analogy also shows how sometimes you may be able to understand something out of familiarity of subject matter despite how that communication is less than perfect, like a weeaboo talking to a Japanese fan of the same, despite a language barrier.

Then we have the meta-of-meta problem. I talked about the play in a play before, and that sums up both what makes Star Driver work and also arguably its largest flaw. And it should surprise nobody that the series ended just like how the play did. Wako poured her heart out during that battle scene, and that’s as close as we’re going to get to a concession (despite the whole “hey, isn’t that voice-over gimmick what someone does in a play?”) And isn’t that a (relatively) radical message in of itself? It didn’t give me a feeling of “woah that’s pretty awesome” like, say, the end to Canvas 2 anime (it’s a spoiler) but this is a much better way to do it than, for instance, Asobi ni Ikuyo. The problem about meta is simply that the audience tend to get caught up in that and miss the main point behind it all, despite that the meta is an illustrative device serving overall thematic ideas.

I phrased it like a problem, but the meta is a guiding post to understand what the hell the show is actually about; it’s an intended feature, not a bug. Maybe you would think Star Driver could have done a better job by trying to express thing, y’know, normally? I suppose that is up to debate.

Lastly, what goes well probably also ends well. Regardless of our feelings about epic bromances, Takuto and Sugata’s final duel was something, wasn’t it? It’s a good note to end on.

Leave a comment | posted in Modern Visual Culture, Star Driver