Or, as some would call it, CG3rd Day 4.
THE IDOLM@STER CINDERELLA GIRLS 4thLIVE 346Castle???????????????????????????????????????????#imascg_4thLIVE pic.twitter.com/85dgAgPVli
— ???????? (@imas_anime) October 16, 2016
Category Archives: Franchises
IDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls 4th Anniversary: TriCastle Story
Autumn 2016 Housekeeping
Just some housekeeping items. Links to relevant quoting. Bolded for topic. Some replies to blogs and some are just seasonal anime musings.
Usagi Drop is a solid anime, don’t let people who follow/read/gets spoiled by the manga tell you anything otherwise. It’s not about morality, but about mode of consumption and letting that dictate what you ought to do, when it might not be a good reason. When I read that post I thought about how anime adaptations sometimes live in this different world than the manga experience. Then again I dig these kind of controversial stuff so I am hardly unbiased.
The only thing I can say about Shirobako’s commercial success is that they sold out of the first run of the Blu-rays pretty fast, but that might have to do with low expectation to begin with. It already has a Blu-ray box on the horizon, too. Given the industry these days it would not be a surprise to hear in a couple years that PA Works will go back to that well. Certainly it would out-delight that recent announcement about Uchoten Kazoku.
I have mixed and some reserved feelings about Girlish Number (PSA: don’t put the (a) in there). I think it is also the anime made just for me. I say this only because a number of us have said this. Are you one of us? For well-intended Americans and Canadians, the show streams on Hulu on Wednesdays with 1 week behind-cast schedule. I might actually do this to rep the show (especially now there’s no more ads for paid service). Anyway, as much as I still have mixed feelings about the whole thing, I can’t expect any more than what it has already given me: a satire on seiota fandom/industry.
Adults are different, but overrated. I would even add a lot of people enjoy adults who act like this, what is the point of being one then… I can confirm this observation, although I made it when I first watched Yuri On Ice. When it comes to pro figure skating, age ranges can run the gamut…of young, as it’s not a sure thing based on the teasers. What’s more interesting isn’t why but what it does. I feel that can make some shows more interesting (Matoi) and some shows tried and tired (3gatsu). Maybe it doesn’t really matter. Man Shaft doing 3gatsu feels just all full of try-hard. I guess when Yamamoto Sayo is directing a girl-pandering anime in the same season, nobody can win against that. On that note, it’s good that we have adults, in the case of children hitting each other with butts and tits seem to call in the moral judgment police–that’s one valid use case.
Matoi and Mahoiku are both good shows to watch together if just for comparison’s sake. I can’t speak about magical girl anime or which tier of nerd hell we’re in in regards to talking about them, but these two approach probably very similar things in a different way. I mean it’s obvious Matoi’s mom will come forward as a key plot item, much like the dying game Mahoiku is doing. Can we get that idol killing game an anime too? (And … Idol Death Game TV TV would be delightful of a name for a TV anime. I kid.)
There’s some Chinese animation that passes for season fare this season. I’m not sure how to feel about all this, other than the toilet humor gag anime does work still. It really comes down to the core staff and material. Also, if the skill and process still need development, try not to create something too ambitious like Bloodivores. Maybe this is related to that one news bit about an animator thinking there are not enough animators to go around. Well, that seems like an obvious thing.
Izetta had me at episode 1 and lost me by the OP. This gun-riding witch thing is hilarious, in that while I’m okay with it as a matter of plot, I’m not so much okay with it when it is the main visual gimmick. It also reminds me of a D&D character I created who would swing around a Spell-Storing Broadsword. I have nobody to blame but myself, to a degree, but this is dissonant when you expect something closer to Indiana Jones and got Guilty Crown (ok not that bad).
Euphon S2 is great. I love what it has going, but I hate how it’s 2 episodes long for a pilot. This show doesn’t hold my attention very well…except if I can marathon it. The voice acting seemed to change even closer to live action. That took a little getting used to.
Nanbaka is dumb. Natsume is chill af, FliFla is weird I guess? I think I would tough it through if it had a good story to tell. Maybe it’s like reading some good writing on news blogs and only to realize the stuff they talk about is dumb and empty. Quality art/passion projects sometimes feel like more an exercise than a thing that can take on life on its own.
What else do I need to name drop? Drifters is OK. Udon no Kuni is not bad, and I like it more than Sweetness & Lightning so far. Trickster is uh, Gackt? I love how 1hope Sniper works in this and that always mean I end watching the episode smiling. Brave Witches is, well, a brave new sequel. I feel like Brave Witches is re-engineered for the present, in that this series incorporates some lesson learned from other franchises and its progeny. I have some hopes for this in fact.
Ping Pong Girls should deserve its own paragraph. It actually is less unlike to Ping Pong than I expected, which speaks volume for something mostly I consider as “throwaway Chinese anime.” Oh wait, I guess that would be Idol Memories (although the Chinese lessons are luls). I mean, what do you call these anime that are clearly made with the, uh, Tencent market in mind?
WWW.Working, on the other hand, seems to be made with the dumb audience in mind. It lacks a lot of craft and charm from the original series, but there’s enough carry-over charm to stick with it. Or maybe because the original series just wasn’t that good so the dropoff in quality doesn’t seem so bad, I’m too stupid to tell. Maybe.
PS. Such cramming for CG4th begins. Let’s see what that does to my viewing schedule. Someone asked me a couple days ago which shows are my top this season, and they were Yuri On Ice, Girlish Number, and maybe Occult 9 or Keijo!!!!!!!!. I don’t know if I have a number 3, but I can see a few shows making strong moves to that spot, with Takkyuu Musume, Matoi and Izetta probably moving up the ranks.
Why Anime: 91 Days
It’s been a bit of a theme. I think in 2016 I’ve watched more shows that pretends to be anime, when in reality they could be much better as live action works. I think 91 Days follow this. A little spoiler below, just very little.
The reason why I say it is because I don’t really see what making an anime out of the story convey any ostensible advantages, as a work in the whole, to tell the story. There are some “meta” advantage, I guess. It’s a lot cheaper to make a 12-episode story than to hire American actors to do a 1920s mobster short series. The runtime of about 4 and a half hours is perfect for a mini-series, and I think the story of 91 Days would even work better. There’s a major advantage in that by approaching a story like an anime, we sort of grade it on a curve, too, with things like suspension of belief and our expectations. Or at least some of us. Maybe, making it into anime allows you to market the work to an established segment that the story may not otherwise reach?
The length of time, in that show, is totally not respected. I mean the guy in the end says 3 months, and he could have said 6 or 18 months and I would have believed him.
Anyway, minor problems aside, we can look at the major problems I have with 91 Days.
- This is a Japanese take on a couple big time mobster themes. The logo image invokes the obvious Godfather feels and I think the way the story panned out in the end is invariably just like it, with the last Don fighting against the scheme put on him and his family. The way the story plays out also make homages to other works of the genre, most notably A Better Tomorrow. But that’s kind of it. The story is written where organized crime gain power due to the power of money and influence of the cartel has as provider of liquor. If you substitute liquor or organized crime with, say, dystopic authoritarian government; or present day and instead of gin it’s cocaine… And I feel this is like where 91 Days dropped the ball. This is a big problem…in as much as some software bugs are actually features. I just find it kind of inauthentic. Aside: a version of Infernal Affairs done like this could be interesting, but that sort of disregards the setting.
- The character acting is so un-American that it is a constant reminder that I am watching an anime. Well, I am watching an anime, obviously, but this is the other aspect, the hard-to-tease part of what makes anime anime, as opposed to all the Chinese anime we see this Fall season (man did y’all watch Bloodivores). To an extent this is my problem with that spy versus spy anime Joker Game–the characters are paper maches of Japanese stereotypes of foreigners. At least in 91 Days since everyone is American (except the main guy who is really just Setsuna F. Seiei, and his good friend, who is more like stereotyped ship bait) the stereotype can’t hold enough diversity to characterize everyone. I put it as a major problem here to distinguish from the causal Japanese-isms. In a mafia film you are watching for that charismatic character interaction, and other than Nero I find this entirely lacking. Not enough Italians, just weirdo Japanese people.
- The main character is Setsuna F. Seiei. Com’on. In the 1920s if you were like this you would never have wormed your way into any mafia, unless they call you the janitor (and he was kind of…not). This is not how things worked! I guess if there was a mafia made up of otaku and fujoshi, it could work… Anyway, he had no hold over me, I had no vested interest in him except for the main plot thing–which is if he will let Nero and the Mafia life win him over or not.
- America is pretty hard to get around even in a car back then. It’s not clear if the sense of scale panned out. Maybe this is something where on paper it was all researched out and thought through, but the anime left out some of the more authentic details. I don’t know. But this also goes into the time scale of things. Ninety-One days is not a long time back then. I guess this is not that important. Would be funny if SPOILER was SPOILED on a New Jersey beach.
Anyway, I thought 91 Days was OK, but I should just go watch more the Wire or something instead as a better use of my time. If you have exhausted all that mafia culture, maybe this is worth your time. If you have not, please go watch something actually good. Like the Godfather films. Or those classic Chow Yun Fat movies.
Naria Girls; Or about Anime
What is anime? This is the kind of semantic game that stopped bothering me. Usually going on to talk about the label and its context, at best, is an exercise in flaunting one’s ignorance, so I have no interest in it on any given day. However I am pretty ignorant to the category of late-night animated features involving improvisational motion-capture and dubbing, as pioneered by this guy.
What I do know is I dearly enjoyed gdgd fairies (esp. season 1), and many of Ishidate’s handiwork. I still didn’t get to Tesabu, but as of this writing I’m within 12 hours of marathoning all of Naria Girls, so I have a slight bone to grind.
On an average internet season of anime, the average anime scoring aggregators are entirely going to malign two things: comedies and animated shorts (although this is not an inclusive list of things the internet do injustice to). Naria Girls is both. I think it’s enlightening to read the reviews on, say, Crunchyroll, and note that about half of them are written by people who have nary a clue. One review kind of turned on its head and the reviewer was too stubborn to backpeddle, and yet too honest to want to correct his or her own mistake. There are two troll reviews. About 7 of them are actually reviews on the merit of the show, and it comes to about a 4-star.
I guess this is a real life example of people not getting it. Which is fine; anime fans in the west don’t get anime, they only get some kind of culturally appropriated regurgitation of what they think anime is.
Sakugabooru Blog
In case you didn’t know, there is a booru where the focus is on Japanese animators and their handicraft in terms of clips from TV (and other) anime. If you want to revisit a scene for the visuals, it’s a good place to start looking. There are no audio in any of the clips though. To foster the community for sakuga fans overseas, they’ve started a blog and started to ask for money to host their booru better.
My problem about sakuga fandom overseas so far is that it celebrates, typically, in a very simple kind of way. It’s literally about the animation, and by that I mean the way images shifts from one frame to the next. There’s also a sense of understanding in contextualizing the careers of various animators, both veterans and neophytes.
But to me that’s not enough. My sense of animation enjoyment extends to not just animation, and specifically, the “sakuga.” Direction, storyboarding and layout, for example, are super-duper important things that I dig even more (arguably). I can understand separating the use of audio (SFX and music) from this fandom but a cohesive narrative has to have all these elements work in harmony, if one can even dare to further a narrative argument about sakuga alone.
I suppose this is kind of the strangeness about sakuga as a fandom vertical, and why it takes some focus-minded fostering. It really is something worthy of study, but also at the same time not really something to put on a pedestal. It is one part of anime that maps well to the Japanese sense of artisan craftsmanship, but it also gets lost inside the reality that it takes a large team to make an anime. And this is all underneath the ever-confusing and ever-prevalent relationship between art and entertainment.
Since I couldn’t find a place on Patreon to voice this, and I pledged a few bucks to Sakugabooru this coming month, I figured it’s worth a shoutout here and I just want to say I pledged because of all the Cinderella Girls translation. For fans of the franchise, the animator relationship between these shows is an added layer of eye-opening relationships and contexts for us to enjoy and understand the source material. It’s not vital but definitely enriching my experience as a viewer of Dereani. It’s always great to see that the key animators from the scenes/cuts you enjoyed are also fans of the material much like we are, so check the below links out:
- Interview: Dereani director Takao and Animas director NishigoriÂ
- Interview: Rising star animator Kouno Megumi
- Interview: Dereani animator round table
PS. This passive-aggressive rant is brought to you by my continued indifference to the Mob Psycho 100 sakugablog posts. I enjoyed the anime a lot (one of my favs this season) but I can’t bring myself to read the blog posts on it… It just doesn’t engage me.