Category Archives: Wake Up Girls!

January 26, 2014

Truth in Reporting: Winter 2014 Report Card Meta Edition

By omo

I am watching them anime. Other than Buddy Complex being the most notable omission, I think I’m ready to roll.

I just want to take a minute to point out Miao’s thin slicing this season. It’s your formulaic ANN-style review trolling which is to say, it’s based on narrative truths that reasonable people find agreeable rearranged without sense (or all the sense, on the other hand). I want to just highlight it for that–this is a relatively “weak” season in a long time. I think part of it has to do with a general shift in late night TV anime. Just compare it with 2010 (or even 2011). But ranking it seems like a futile exercise at best, so there’s no symbolic gesture of not putting Nisekoi in the first spot.

FWIW, he called Wake Up Girls Movie an OAV.

New shows (and long-absent sequels):

World Conquest Zvezda Plot – I’m on the hook for this show. The magical reality unnerves me. It’s uncomfortable. It’s too good to drop. Its vintage too accomplish to expect a “turn off the brain and have fun” show. Except when I try to run this by the grey matter, it is giving me all kinds of warning signs.

Wake Up, Girls – My favorite of the season. I’m not sure if I like them as an idol group however, even if by all means the anime has done its job. I also like how they sneaked in that Tohoku disaster reminder in there. Also blogging over at Jtor.

Seitokai Yakuindomo 2 – I marathoned the OVAs or whatever they’re called just before episode 1. So I went in with a lot of feels and fresh memory. I wonder if this is why nobody licensed it, by the way–the book publisher must own the rights of episodes 13-18. Is this the new licensing hell (say hello to YZQ)?

Wizard Barristers – So far so good. Miss Piggy is a very nice touch. What kind of a man gets nicknamed Hachi Mitsu? A Honey & Clover dropout?

Witch Craft Works – I am glad to be able to lay my eyes on this show. The manga is a terribly boring thing but the anime is a blast to watch; the comedic timing and direction are great. It is fun also to see by how much can the anime exceed its source material. Manga usually is created by one person or a small team of people; maybe half a dozen even for some weeklies, plus some editorial staff. On the other hand up to ten times more people work on an anime adaptation. Odds are any anime production team have at least enough creative power and experience to do the same, simply because so many more people work on any given project, and the core creative team are made up of some or all fire-tested veterans. So what happens when a lame but popular manga gets animated? Speaking purely from a point of view of “animators are people who draw a lot” I think this is what actually happens.

Nisekoi – Similarly. Although it isn’t comedy but just well-executed character drama, see also Bakemonogatari. You know Shaft.

Sakura Trick – Surprisingly engaging in the yuri fanservice way. Not sure if there’s enough to keep me interested, because unless they escalate it’s all a little boring. And if they do escalate every episode, they would be spending half the episode kissing each other by episode 12. Not that is a problem I think.

ImoCho – Okay, it’s actually kind of fun watching the timid, confused and probably traumatized girl trying to climb out of it. I’m rooting for her. It’s also kind of fun watching an anime trying to depict this communication gap between the two step-siblings. I wonder which kind of boys would take note?

Nobunagun – Surprisingly fun to watch but I think this anime belongs to the 1990s.

Nobunaga the Fool – I would watch this if it was actually faster paced. Right now it’s like Horizon S1 eps 1-4, which is just kind of confusing, dreary, but minus the shock factor of huge balloon boobs and the trope pandering. Jeanne is attractive looking and all but so far she is not really a part of anything because the show hasn’t revealed anything that interesting. It’s gotta hurry it up before it loses all its viewers. Needs its clinching moment.

Space Dandy – It’s hard for me to watch–I canceled my DVR service some time last year so it’s week-late Hulu for me. On the other hand maybe it allows me to try watching it like a normal person, which is…I guess people my age group generally don’t watch Toonami. I mean, I don’t remember the last time I was watching cable TV on a Saturday night other than the Space Dandy premiere. Anyway, it’s okay, I’ll probably ride it out if there’s an easy way to watch it.

Noragami – I would be repping this hard if it was on CR. I guess I will give Funi’s EVS some prop for having actually a good enough lineup, but what can they do to earn back my trust? I guess they did have that great holiday sale. I suppose the worse I could do is pirate it, because it sure is better than not watching it at all, right? Maybe? I guess it’s important to note that I basically don’t buy shows I haven’t seen before (other than, say, Mardock Scramble, because I read the book).

Nourin – I can take it or leave it. It’s one of those shows that I would probably watch it if it’s on CR. I guess maybe next year or next sale, EVS or not. 

SoniAni – Kind of like, the show I would drop except if I don’t watch all these shows on EVS, I would have time for this. So I do have time for this. And it’s hardly the most horrible anime. It’s like the most model anime, heh.

Pilot’s Love Song – Same. This show is weird in that while watching it, I’m okay. But after I’m done watching that week’s episode I kind of regret the use of my time. Probably would dropped it a long time ago if not for said EVS issue since this is a CR show.

D-Frag – EVS problem but it’s a pretty okay show. Very “bro” I guess. I think the problem is that it’s a little to convoluted and if you miss the internal logic it’s not that fun to watch.

Chuunikoi Ren – 2chuu2koi as I’d like to call it, but this is a nice change. Much more interesting right off the bat than season 1.

Inari, Konkon, Koi Iroha – I’d pirate this any day.

Mahou Sensou – Dropped because I don’t have the time. Seems okay though.

Hamatora – Dropped because I don’t have the time. Seems okay though. Actually fun to watch in episode 2, if a little predictable.

Houzuki no Reitetsu – Good, solid comedy. Dropped because I got over my Dilbert phase back in the 90s. This stuff is kind of like remaking it for kids going into the workforce in this decade. As an anecdote, when I find some kid at work who falls into all of the usual Dilbert traps, I just sigh and “berate” him directly. Watching Hozuki is like a waste of time.

Saki – Magical girls meets mahjong, the “we don’t have enough episodes so we’ll compress all that we skipped between S1 and Achigahen in 3 episodes but now we can get down to business” edition. Also a Jtor item.

Ongoing:

Nagiasu – AAAAAAHHHHHH

Ace of the Diamond – This is a pretty okay koshien baseball anime. Literally.

Samurai Flamenco – It’s still interesting enough.

Silver Spoon – Yep. One season is hardly a break.

Magi – Yep.

Gundam Build Fighter – This is the Gundam of our generation.

Tokyo Ravens – Okay.jpg

Log Horizon – Finally, story.

Golden Time – Dropped because I don’t really have the time and can’t really be bothered with that Ghost Banri stuff.

Shorts:

Enjoying them all. Even Pupa (whose OP has that “Fantasista Dolls” effect). I think Strange+ and Seki-kun are neck to neck.

Canon

And that’s all for now!

PS. Several blogs I follow waxed poetic on Space Dandy after watching the first few episodes. Basically they all say the same thing, like what I said earlier on. I guess the thing is, it’s just a TV show, like everything we’re watching, you can take it or leave it, and you certainly don’t have to watch everything. Only tortured fans of the medium would, beyond “a thin slicing.” As long as you’re mindful of the usual disclaimers (ie., judging books by covers etc) you are okay. It’s not about “right enough” but knowing what you are in for and getting things working for those purposes. And I think with that in mind, 11:30 PM is way too early for Space Dandy. Proper late night anime is like, 2AM! Imagine watching an anime about putting your arm inside a cow’s anus at 2AM…

5 comments | posted in Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!, Gin no Saji, Golden Time, Inari Konkon Koi Iroha, Log Horizon, Modern Visual Culture, Nisekoi, Noragami, Saikin Imouto no Yousu ga Chotto Okashiinda ga., Saki, Sakura Trick, Seitokai Yakuindomo, Sekai Seifuku: Bouryaku no Zvezda, Space Dandy, Super Sonico, Tonari no Seki-kun, Wake Up Girls!, Witch Craft Works, Wizard Barristers: Benmashi Cecil

January 13, 2014

Modal Consumption Versus Textual Exception: WUG Step Edition

By omo

The public service announcement: Wake Up, Girls! pilot is a movie. Episode 1 of the TV series should not be watched before the movie is. You CAN watch the TV series by itself but that’s like eating a burger by not eating anything but the buns. Yea, you can have a meal this way but it is in no way a valid means of sampling a burger.

That being said, there’s nothing wrong with eating just the buns or watching just the TV series, it is just that doing so puts you in a poor position to criticize, I would think. Of course you can still complain that the burger is too big and you can’t spare another ~26 minutes of your life to watch the full movie (it’s only ~52 minutes, or a tad more than 2 episodes long), I’m with you, like I still have a handful of shows to sample this season and we are on week 2 already. [If you remember, I’m one of those people who would watch Xenoglossia by skipping the middle entirely.]

It kind of boils down to this:

1. Do you need to watch the movie? YES.

2. Who made this confusion possible? Yamakan. Yep. Of course blaming everything on Yamakan is just SOP but the marketing for this show can be a little less confusing. I assumed he wanted to shoehorn the whole pilot in, and couldn’t do it in the allotted time, so, this movie.

Anyway, what I want to talk about in this blog post is how many blogs reviewed WUG in a “first impression” or “enough to pass for judging by the book cover” without watching the movie. As it were, it’s like like judging by Chapter 3 rather than even the Cover? LOL.

Mayu

Methodology: I trawled Google Blog Search and Anime Nano. Then I added a couple from my RSS feed collection. If you didn’t show up in any of those 3 spots, I didn’t count you in. If you didn’t blog in English, I didn’t even look. I quickly read your posts to determine if you watched the movie. In one case it was not clear but I inferred that the blogger didn’t as the post didn’t contain information unique to the movie. Apologies in advance if I made any mistakes. I checked around 17:45 Eastern time on January 13th, so anyone after that (like this) gets left out.

I then also rated each impression as “rotten/not rotten” in Rotten Tomato style. The ones I can’t figure out I leave as neutral and ignore them. Given numeric or letter grades are rare in this context I try to use judgment and err on the “negative” side. If you drop or plan to drop, it’s a negative. If you keep watching, I’m more inclined to rate it positive.

Prediction: I’m hoping to catch a significant number (50%?) of reviews/impression pieces that do not include the movie, because they treat these seasonal review exercises in a rote, factory-like manner where everything’s the same. If they do fansubs, it’s just another download, etc. It’s albeit a little harder on a legit channel because the UI often gives more clue as to what a series has to offer, but the same can be said there probably.

As for the RT metric, I’ll let the results speak for themselves. I would think people who watched the movie would like it more than those who didn’t, because the movie is actually pretty good and the first episode isn’t visually good, not to mention the disorientation possibility for lacking the back story.

Results: Those who watched the movie: 13

Those who did not watch the movie: 7

Analysis: Looks like for people who cared enough to blog about it, most are at least aware of the movie and did watch it before shooting the crap. There are a few blogs that didn’t review the movie but acknowledge it. The rest, I assume, just didn’t know.

Some identified the movie as an OVA, which I marked with a *. I wonder what that means.

I’m actually hesitating counting Tenka Seiha as a minus because you can’t ever tell sometimes, but he seems to have dropped it so there it goes. Mahou Tofu is a true neutral; s/he would have to rate it >= 6 out of 10 to get a +, and I think it actually gets there. For the sake of negative bias, I counted it as neutral however. I think DiGi Kerot actually likes WUG, but his blog post is way too negative to count as a plus.

While only about 1/3 of the sites here skipped the movie, which is somewhat fewer than I expected, the bigger revelation is that a much smaller percentage of the bloggers skipped it out of ignorance. The rest skipped it ostensibly because they didn’t want to spend the time on it, probably because it is marketed as “extra” to the story.

What’s more surprising is that this Yamakan anime, more people seems to like it than not, across the board. If this was Rotten Tomatoes it would have gotten something like ~65% with ANN’s reviewers leading the way with pull quotes, LOL.

Conclusion: In reality WUG should’ve just labeled TV episode 1 as episode 2, and labeled the movie as episode 1. Problem solved!

The more important metric, however, is how rotten each side breaks down. That makes 4 of 7 positive, versus 9 of 13 positive. WUG may be statistically higher ranked for viewers that watched the movie, which is good–you would think ranking a better thing against a worse version of itself should have that effect. But really? I think it’s within the margin of error, barely. Could really go either way.

In order to improve this we will have to sample other anime and get some kind of mean and more samples to get a standard deviation. I think at any rate, it doesn’t disprove the judge-by-cover adage, or that anime blogging is just crap these days.

3 comments | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Modern Visual Culture, Wake Up Girls!