The Fall 2009 Anime Preview Guide

Carl Kimlinger

Carl writes from rural Oregon, where he was found as an infant nestled in an ogre's skull and raised by kindly farmers. His interests include self-mutilation, human sacrifice, and cultural senescence. He is an anthropologist by training and intellectual predilection, but does nothing professionally with either, preferring to live under rocks with his fellow creepy-crawlies, including best friend Menelaus the Scolopendra gigantea (that's the Amazonian giant centipede to you). He is a hard-core action aficionado, gorehound and romantic, as well as a cinephile and film snob of the highest order. He adores anime of grand humanistic sweep like Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Touch, loves all things cute, and secretly enjoys the unapologetically trashy. He is currently obsessed with Richard Thompson, not that anyone cares.

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Tegami Bachi

Rating: 3 ½

Review:

Get your fairy tale fix right here. In Amberground, a world of permanent twilight, letters are the preferred form of communication. The delivery of letters is a crucial job undertaken by highly trained specialists called Letter Bees. Armed with unique weaponry and accompanied by Dingoes (guide beasts, not the baby-stealing dogs of the Australian Outback), they trek through wastes infested with enormous mechanical beetles to deliver the citizens’ precious packages. When Letter Bee Gauche arrives at the pick-up location for his next delivery, he finds only a scorched ruin and a child chained to a cross. The child is Lag Seeing, and as fate would have it, he's Gauche's letter.

A child's bedtime story brought to life by the miracle of modern animation. The simplicity, the sadness, the wonder—it's all there, along with the artificial dialogue, explanatory ages, and slightly pokey pacing designed to send drowsy tots (and uninterested adults) off to dreamland. Anyone looking to cleanse the palate after a hard day of convoluted ninja politics would do well to hearken up. Refreshingly basic without sacrificing emotional undertones or backstory, it's delivered at a pitch that finds a relaxing mean between the childish and adult. Unfortunately it's also saddled with too much “Terminology”, and is almost certainly doomed to devolve into a series of standalone tales with mildly depressing messages. On the upside, the opening animation promises an adorable sidekick in the near future.

Tegami Bachi is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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White Album Season 2

Rating: 2 ½

Review:

The industry's habit of splitting what previously would have been a full 26-episode series into two arbitrary 13-episode seasons finds its latest victim in White Album, a series also victim to the vogue for sluggish visual-novel-based romances.

Yuki's singing career is flourishing. More public exposure, though, means less time for her alienated boyfriend Toya. And with his father hospitalized with heart trouble, he has less time for her. As the two drift apart, Toya's childhood friend Haruka drifts closer to Toya's troublesome tutoring charge Mana while she in turn continues drifting away from her neglectful show-biz mother. Life, in short, is crap all around.

Your enjoyment of White Album’s second season will depend pretty much entirely on your tolerance for humorless romances with ill-natured yet colorless male leads.  Myself, if I see one more girl crying in the snow over how empty her life is without her resident asshole, I'm going to swallow a shotgun. That said, with thirteen episodes of girls moping in snow already under their belt, anyone watching this will already know whether it's their cup of cold, bitter tea or not.

And in all honesty, amongst humorless romances with ill-natured yet colorless male leads, White Album is top-shelf stuff. It's stylish and mature; well-animated and as well-written as can be reasonably expected. Its music industry milieu is interesting (and heartlessly realistic) and its setting carefully realized (1980s Japan; dig the suitcase-sized satellite phones). It's also relentlessly gloomy and takes itself far too seriously, but if you didn't know that going in, then this isn't aimed at you anyway.

White Album 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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The Book of Bantorra

Rating: 4 ½

Review:

The Bantorra Library is no run-of-the-mill book-lending establishment. It's a repository for books that have been shaped from the souls of the dead. Each is a precious testament to the lives of their creators, a priceless treasure that the Bantorra librarians are willing—and very able—to defend with lethal force. Led by ruthless raven-haired beauty Hamyuts Maseta, the “armed librarians” count among their foes a mysterious religious sect that robs innocents of their will, turning them into what the less empathetic call “Meat”. During a raid on one of the sects ships, one of the soulless encounters a fragment of a book forged from the soul of a beautiful woman who also happens to be an infamous mass murderer.

A tad confusing and hugely intriguing, Tatakau Shisho is intelligent fantasy for mature tastes: filled with tantalizing fragments of a well-realized world, anchored by a powerful, ambiguous female lead, and colored with a hint of trenchant social commentary. Sure the super-powered librarians are straight from a shonen action vehicle and there's at least one obvious info-dump, but they are minor and forgivable flaws in an opening episode full of fresh ideas and unforgettable imagery (a seaborne kamikaze assault by soul-drained minions with bombs in their flesh, a beautifully textured flashback, an empty room in which men are robbed of their humanity by a gramophone). Plus, who could resist a series whose male lead starts off as a literal lump of meat? Talk about potential for character growth.

The Book of Bantorra is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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To Aru Kagaku no Railgun

Rating: 4 ½

Review:

Those who had the good luck or sense to watch 2008's highly polished To Aru Majutsu no Index will Misaka Mikoto, AKA “the Railgun.” She's the level 5 esper that Index’s Kamijou tangled with in episode one, and later helped out of a seriously ugly human experiment. She was one of Index’s most interesting and underrepresented characters, and the folks behind the series had the good sense (or luck) to base this spin-off series entirely around her.

With a cast composed equally of past favorites (Misaka's overly amorous roommate Kuroko) and intriguing newcomers (plucky level zero Saten), a comely balance of humor, fan-service, character and raw adrenaline, and a sleek, attractive look, Railgun is as perfect as anime action gets. The plot of this first episode is simple—Misaka meets and goes out for crepes with Kuroko and her friends only to have their date rudely disrupted by a bank robbery—but the enjoyment derived from it is anything but. Director Tastuyuki Nagai (Toradora, Honey and Clover II) has an undisputed talent for character interplay and economical emotional insight, as well as a wholly unexpected instinct for jaw-dropping action, and the series he crafts is simultaneously thrilling and heartwarming. Escapist entertainment of the highest order.

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Asura Cryin’ Season 2

Rating: 2 ½

Review:

Less a sequel than a direct continuation of the first season, Asura Cryin’ kicks off its second season with its usual ill-blended mix of apocalyptic sci-fi, teen angst and dumb rom-com humor.

The relative peace of Tomoharu's new life is disrupted by the arrival of a koala. While washing the pool as punishment for being a boy in a shonen romance, Tomo is forced to abandon his duties when Ania follows a bipedal koala into the sewers below the school. Tomo and his usual retinue of female company go to help her and everyone ends up lost in the pipes.  With no option but to follow the koala, the group ends up in a series of underground ruins where Misao's interaction with a glass sphere triggers a flashback in Tomoharu that hints at a past (future?) that he knows nothing about.

The show's science-fiction nature has grown into a reasonable draw—throwing out moderately interesting ideas often enough to keep the series afloat—but the show as a whole still suffers from a wildly inconsistent tone. The end-of-humanity prognosticating and identity issues are an uncomfortable fit with its shiny everyanime look, and the harem situations (“Eek! You saw me getting dressed! Pervert!”) and sadly ineffectual humor detract rather than add to the series. In short, it's business as usual. The koala is pretty cool though, as are Angela's opening and ending themes.

Asura Cryin' 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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Kämpfer

Rating: 3

Review: Who, when our ancestors first descended from the trees, would ever have thought that after millions of years of evolution and hundreds of thousands of years of accumulation and refinement of wisdom, we'd one day concoct a gender-swapping, ecchi magical action harem comedy. Our hairy, knuckle-dragging progenitors would be proud.

The plot, or what es for it, goes something like this: one day Natsuru, a perfectly normal teenager, awakes to find that his grotesque stuffed anime (Harakiri Tiger, complete with dragging entrails and trickle of blood from the mouth) has given him a bracelet that transforms him into a super-powered, super-endowed woman. He's told he must fight (why? Who? Who knows) and that when his bracelet glows he's about to transform. Gunfights and hijinks ensue.

Vitriol and instinctive recoiling aside, Kämpfer turns out to be not quite as awful as it could have been. It's lively and doesn't take itself too seriously—both advantages—and, let's not kid ourselves, the prospect of girl-on-girl action can lend luster to even the most preposterous, dimwitted and downright putrid of ideas. This will never be anyone's idea of respectable entertainment (the scene in which Natsuru does battle with his female bladder comes to mind) and it could self-destruct into a hormonal heap of pseudo-hentai harem clichés at any moment, but it's helmed by Yasuhiro Kuroda, the man behind the memorably fun Kyōran Kazoku Nikki, and packed with energetic (if none-too-expert) action, so yes, things could definitely be worse.

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Queen's Blade: Gyokuza no Tsugumono

Rating: 2

Review: The remaining contestants in the Queen's Blade tournament are all gathering in the city of Gainos, ing battles and grudges past. With the free-for-all for strongest Amazon heating up and the Queenhood of the continent up for grabs, Heaven makes its move and sends Nanael to the fray. Elsewhere young Leina worries about the possibility of battling her sisters, while evil queen Aldra fends off an attack by a certain lactating rabbit-girl and characters major and marginal reminisce and rest up for the battles to come.

After a first season of more political complexity than one would expect from a show so resolutely proud of its sordidness, Queen's Blade gears up for a second round of tits, ass, and ass-kicking. Though the t & a may have to wait a bit. There're so many characters to reintroduce and so much plotting to plot that this episode only has time for one girl-on-girl groping and a solitary tentacle rape. Sure the extensive cast of blimp-breasted bimbos spends more time naked than clothed, but seriously, the folks at ARMS are going to have to do better than that if they want to keep their core audience satisfied. Exploitation for those who like their exploitation without pretense.