Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2009 11:46 pm
There's still a week left this season, but what the hey, most of the shows I've been watching are done...
Yoku wakaru gendai mahou ("Modern magic for beginners") - I'm told this is based on a light novel series about a girl who can use only one kind of magic-- the kind that turns any other kind of magic into a metal wash-basin, AKA a tarai. The writers could have easily turned this into an obscene exploitation of the tarai-drop meme (where a "failed" spell results in one of those things landing on someone's head with a loud clang-- this was last seen in Negima!?, I think), but thankfully they elected to make the tarai-drop a reserved gag except for the first episode. Production-wise there's not much to complain or compliment about, but a few notable things: 1) They used a Haruhi season 1 episode ordering-- that is, somewhat random in order to work some momentum towards the climax rather than working in chronological order; 2) A few gags were borrowed from other anime-- the most noticeable being based on the voice actress for the lead part, Ai Nonaka; 3) Although the lead character can convert a ton of spells into tarai in a matter of minutes in the first episode, the final episode has her struggling to do this, which makes her skill a bit too contrived (though it does beat using her skill as a deus ex machina device).
Valkyria Chronicles is based on the video game of the same title (which they ought to have ported to the Call of Duty engine given the similarity, but they opted for a really stupid turn-based strategy engine-- see Zero Punctuation's review), where the international politics and sociology take a back seat to the main cast of characters and the ongoing war. To the production crew's credit, they opted to follow the game's plot rather strictly, but this had the result of some episodes being mainly filler (i.e. primarily character development encased in an otherwise extraneous plot device), and the overall plot being incredibly predictable (oh, she's going to die, isn't she?). The animation uses a blend of mainstream elements and a "colored pencil fill-in" for highlights and shadows, which IMO doesn't add much to the show other than an interesting touch. Despite the rather weak plot and shaky characterization, the cast and crew manage to piece together a decent war drama, so in the words of Q2: "Not bad... Not great, but not bad."
Taisho Yakyuu Musume ("Taisho-era baseball girls") is pretty much what the title suggests, and is a unique twist on the sports anime genre (which I generally avoid because they're about as varied as any other shonen title-- as in, not at all). The premise is a high school girl during the reign of Emperor Taisho (who briefly reigned before Hirohito) who decides to get back at her fiance's sexist remark by forming a baseball team at her girl's school that could beat his team-- and as you might imagine given cultural and historical context, it takes a fair amount of shoehorning to get a bunch of demure Japanese girls to assemble a baseball team. And it is a reasonable approximation of American-style baseball, so the girl's pitcher doesn't use the softball pitcher's wind-up (she does, however, side-arm the ball in the end). There's a healthy tension between the comedic relief and straight-ahead drama, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the production never giving laser-like focus to any dramatic moment that should only last 2 seconds in real time. The animation style, which leans towards the shojo side of the aisle, visually reinforces the idea that this isn't a shonen show.
Sora no Manimani: I had to grab Wikipedia and a dictionary-- it means "In the wake of the stars"-- and I probably should've researched that earlier, as now the show makes a lot more thematic sense. This one's about a girl in the high school astronomy club who is obsessed with the stars, and a guy who inevitably gets dragged along with her wacky ways of watching the night sky. This one is a bit like K-On! in terms of story-- that is, it's not as imporant as the characters-- and the production does a pretty good job of keeping the audience focused on the characters that really matter in any given moment, and develop them as well.
Saki probably will continue long after this review, but the set pieces are probably going to be the same down the road. This one's about a girl who joins her school's mahjong team, and she has incredible skills with the game, but initially doesn't have much fun playing it. This is probably one of the better "B" animes of this year, but the story is subordinate to the characters' development, while the characters are a bit flat and two-dimensional-- I suppose that's inevitable, since there are so many of them. The other thing that really poses a challenge to the writing staff is that mahjong scoring rules are exceedingly complex, but spending too much time explaining them would destroy the already weak storytelling. What they could have done is something like Bleach's Shinigami Almanac, where miniature episodes explain the scoring rules in detail (probably with comedic-relief character Yuki doing the explanation). They did a little of this during the prefectural tournament, but it wasn't nearly enough to clear up the confusion, given the commentary from the audience.
Guin Saga isn't Tolkien by any stretch of the imagination, but it gives it the old college try. If anything, its lore is deeper than Lodoss War, and may even rival C. S. Lewis. This one is a bit of medieval fantasy where the magic starts off playing a big role, then stepping backstage. The original novel and the adaptation to anime both make sure that this adventure isn't a re-think of earlier works, but you can't help but see a few influences here and there; in particular, the titular character Guin seems to be very similar to Utawareru mono's Hakuoro (humaoid superhero with amnesia), and Ishtoban seems like a boorish version of Tolkien's Aragorn. There's no really concrete goal that the audience can expect, as danger and inconvenience has a way of changing the direction of the band of companions; in addition, other events in the world are necessary to the overall story, so the story feels slowed somewhat. But all in all, I think this will be a worthy addition to any fantasy fan's viewing collection-- assuming they don't butcher the ending.
BaSquash! started with yet another crazy idea from the mind of Shoji Kawamori; namely, what if giant robots played basketball? Given the mass and comparative joint strengths, you'd think that robots doing all the crazy stunts of street basketball would destroy the robots, but of course that's no problem for Satelight. The robot design was done by a French studio, which makes some sense because classic Japanese robots playing basketball would be way too campy, and there's enough comedic relief in the characters already. The weakness for this show (like for so many of Kawamori's ideas) is that the story has a tendency to wander, or is pushed aside to highlight various art styles. This time around, they evidently learned from past shortcomings and never let the audience forget the ultimate goal of the characters, and gave the "impending doom" exposition another 2-3 episodes compared to earlier works like Macross Frontier (2-3 episodes) and Aquarion (half episode).
Finally, SHAFT's Bakemono-gatari ("Ghost/Demon" (bakemono) "Tales" (monogatari)). This one is decidedly much more "horror" than Natsu no Arashi!, their earlier ghost story, and heavily draws from Japanese mythology. They push the animation envelope as always with their unique visual storytelling, though this does result in an episode where the animation didn't completely make it into the can, so the story had to be inferred from the sound effects-- which would have been effective if they had properly synchronized the filler frames with the sound. Given that they fixed a similar episode from Hidamari Sketch in the DVD release, I'm sure they'll finish it in time for the DVD. Bakemono-gatari is also intensely dialogue-heavy, which means a huge challenge for anyone fansubbing this-- not only is there an insane amount of dialogue, SHAFT throws in frames with nothing but text like they did in the ef series. Like some of the others in this line-up, there are 1 or 2 episodes left, but they're gearing up for a strong finish.
I'll post a comment on next season in a week or 2.
Yoku wakaru gendai mahou ("Modern magic for beginners") - I'm told this is based on a light novel series about a girl who can use only one kind of magic-- the kind that turns any other kind of magic into a metal wash-basin, AKA a tarai. The writers could have easily turned this into an obscene exploitation of the tarai-drop meme (where a "failed" spell results in one of those things landing on someone's head with a loud clang-- this was last seen in Negima!?, I think), but thankfully they elected to make the tarai-drop a reserved gag except for the first episode. Production-wise there's not much to complain or compliment about, but a few notable things: 1) They used a Haruhi season 1 episode ordering-- that is, somewhat random in order to work some momentum towards the climax rather than working in chronological order; 2) A few gags were borrowed from other anime-- the most noticeable being based on the voice actress for the lead part, Ai Nonaka; 3) Although the lead character can convert a ton of spells into tarai in a matter of minutes in the first episode, the final episode has her struggling to do this, which makes her skill a bit too contrived (though it does beat using her skill as a deus ex machina device).
Valkyria Chronicles is based on the video game of the same title (which they ought to have ported to the Call of Duty engine given the similarity, but they opted for a really stupid turn-based strategy engine-- see Zero Punctuation's review), where the international politics and sociology take a back seat to the main cast of characters and the ongoing war. To the production crew's credit, they opted to follow the game's plot rather strictly, but this had the result of some episodes being mainly filler (i.e. primarily character development encased in an otherwise extraneous plot device), and the overall plot being incredibly predictable (oh, she's going to die, isn't she?). The animation uses a blend of mainstream elements and a "colored pencil fill-in" for highlights and shadows, which IMO doesn't add much to the show other than an interesting touch. Despite the rather weak plot and shaky characterization, the cast and crew manage to piece together a decent war drama, so in the words of Q2: "Not bad... Not great, but not bad."
Taisho Yakyuu Musume ("Taisho-era baseball girls") is pretty much what the title suggests, and is a unique twist on the sports anime genre (which I generally avoid because they're about as varied as any other shonen title-- as in, not at all). The premise is a high school girl during the reign of Emperor Taisho (who briefly reigned before Hirohito) who decides to get back at her fiance's sexist remark by forming a baseball team at her girl's school that could beat his team-- and as you might imagine given cultural and historical context, it takes a fair amount of shoehorning to get a bunch of demure Japanese girls to assemble a baseball team. And it is a reasonable approximation of American-style baseball, so the girl's pitcher doesn't use the softball pitcher's wind-up (she does, however, side-arm the ball in the end). There's a healthy tension between the comedic relief and straight-ahead drama, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the production never giving laser-like focus to any dramatic moment that should only last 2 seconds in real time. The animation style, which leans towards the shojo side of the aisle, visually reinforces the idea that this isn't a shonen show.
Sora no Manimani: I had to grab Wikipedia and a dictionary-- it means "In the wake of the stars"-- and I probably should've researched that earlier, as now the show makes a lot more thematic sense. This one's about a girl in the high school astronomy club who is obsessed with the stars, and a guy who inevitably gets dragged along with her wacky ways of watching the night sky. This one is a bit like K-On! in terms of story-- that is, it's not as imporant as the characters-- and the production does a pretty good job of keeping the audience focused on the characters that really matter in any given moment, and develop them as well.
Saki probably will continue long after this review, but the set pieces are probably going to be the same down the road. This one's about a girl who joins her school's mahjong team, and she has incredible skills with the game, but initially doesn't have much fun playing it. This is probably one of the better "B" animes of this year, but the story is subordinate to the characters' development, while the characters are a bit flat and two-dimensional-- I suppose that's inevitable, since there are so many of them. The other thing that really poses a challenge to the writing staff is that mahjong scoring rules are exceedingly complex, but spending too much time explaining them would destroy the already weak storytelling. What they could have done is something like Bleach's Shinigami Almanac, where miniature episodes explain the scoring rules in detail (probably with comedic-relief character Yuki doing the explanation). They did a little of this during the prefectural tournament, but it wasn't nearly enough to clear up the confusion, given the commentary from the audience.
Guin Saga isn't Tolkien by any stretch of the imagination, but it gives it the old college try. If anything, its lore is deeper than Lodoss War, and may even rival C. S. Lewis. This one is a bit of medieval fantasy where the magic starts off playing a big role, then stepping backstage. The original novel and the adaptation to anime both make sure that this adventure isn't a re-think of earlier works, but you can't help but see a few influences here and there; in particular, the titular character Guin seems to be very similar to Utawareru mono's Hakuoro (humaoid superhero with amnesia), and Ishtoban seems like a boorish version of Tolkien's Aragorn. There's no really concrete goal that the audience can expect, as danger and inconvenience has a way of changing the direction of the band of companions; in addition, other events in the world are necessary to the overall story, so the story feels slowed somewhat. But all in all, I think this will be a worthy addition to any fantasy fan's viewing collection-- assuming they don't butcher the ending.
BaSquash! started with yet another crazy idea from the mind of Shoji Kawamori; namely, what if giant robots played basketball? Given the mass and comparative joint strengths, you'd think that robots doing all the crazy stunts of street basketball would destroy the robots, but of course that's no problem for Satelight. The robot design was done by a French studio, which makes some sense because classic Japanese robots playing basketball would be way too campy, and there's enough comedic relief in the characters already. The weakness for this show (like for so many of Kawamori's ideas) is that the story has a tendency to wander, or is pushed aside to highlight various art styles. This time around, they evidently learned from past shortcomings and never let the audience forget the ultimate goal of the characters, and gave the "impending doom" exposition another 2-3 episodes compared to earlier works like Macross Frontier (2-3 episodes) and Aquarion (half episode).
Finally, SHAFT's Bakemono-gatari ("Ghost/Demon" (bakemono) "Tales" (monogatari)). This one is decidedly much more "horror" than Natsu no Arashi!, their earlier ghost story, and heavily draws from Japanese mythology. They push the animation envelope as always with their unique visual storytelling, though this does result in an episode where the animation didn't completely make it into the can, so the story had to be inferred from the sound effects-- which would have been effective if they had properly synchronized the filler frames with the sound. Given that they fixed a similar episode from Hidamari Sketch in the DVD release, I'm sure they'll finish it in time for the DVD. Bakemono-gatari is also intensely dialogue-heavy, which means a huge challenge for anyone fansubbing this-- not only is there an insane amount of dialogue, SHAFT throws in frames with nothing but text like they did in the ef series. Like some of the others in this line-up, there are 1 or 2 episodes left, but they're gearing up for a strong finish.
I'll post a comment on next season in a week or 2.