The Fall 2009 Anime Preview Guide
Carl Kimlinger
by Carl Kimlinger,
Sora no Otoshimono
Rating: 1
Review:
You know those nightmares where you get up in front of your class to do a presentation only to realize that you're stark naked? Given the choice to live that nightmare or watch Sora no Otoshimono…well, I'd probably go with Sora no Otoshimono. But only by a hair.
Scrawny twerp Tomo has a recurring dream about a winged girl who leaves him to live in the sky. When he asks a warped classmate about it, he is sent to a nighttime rendezvous with a black hole-thing, from which falls a (different?) winged girl who instantly imprints on him and promises to do anything, anything he wants her to. Let the rampaging of the libido begin.
There's wish-fulfillment and then there's diseased fantasy. This is the latter. When Ikaros imprints on Tomo, a chain sprouts from her collar (yes, she wears a collar) and wraps around his hand. He spends the rest of the episode literally leading her around by a chain. That is when he isn't ogling her, telling her to strip, and almost (but not quite, he is a good guy after all) forcing himself on her. And that's before Tomo discovers that Ikaros can stop time and render him invisible. After watching Tomo run amuck like a naked, invisible SD leprechaun groping and stripping panties off of unsuspecting girls, you'll need a bucket of soap and a scouring pad to feel clean again. And to add insult to injury, the episode tries to take an emotional turn at the end (no, seriously) that leaves its stinky, sticky fingerprints all over every heartstring it tries to pluck. Never have I been so ashamed to be a man.
Miracle Train
Rating: 2
Review:
A deeply weird combination of education for kids and wish-fulfillment fantasy for girls, Miracle Train is by far the strangest series this season (at least so far). The Miracle </>Train of the title is a magical train that runs through Japan's Oedo Line and is only accessible to troubled young women. On it are a bevy of young men, each a gorgeous personification of a station on the Oedo line, and every man jack of them devoted to solving the problems of worried women. Chinatsu is on her way to the vet when her dog escapes his holder and she somehow ends up on the Miracle</> Train. Can Roppongi, the kindhearted personification of Roppongi station, find her dog and heal the underlying hurt in her heart? With a face like that, how can he not?
Like broccoli dipped in chocolate, this attempt to wrap wholesome education in sugary entertainment does neither any favors. The fan-pandering is brought to a screeching halt with each expository speech, and unless you're among the fans being pandered to, you'll find the entire exercise so preposterous that the educational asides about Oedo Line (built in 2000, it twists around many older lines) and its stations (at 42.3 meters, Roppongi is the deepest) won't stick. Better to keep your veggies and your dessert separate. The series does have a pleasantly deadpan sense of humor that lets you know it doesn't take itself too seriously, but still.
Inuyasha: The Final Act
Rating: 3
Review:
With the assistance of wind demon Kagura, Hakudoshi plans to help Moryomaru, who houses within him Naraku's expelled heart, acquire enough power to overthrow their mutual creator. Where to get the necessary power? Why the Shikon Jewel of course. As they have in their possession the only extant shards of the jewel, Inuyasha's band comes instantly under fire. The resultant clash leaves all parties playing right into Naraku's scheming hands.
Back in 2004, Sunrise made the wise decision to cease animation of Inuyasha until enough original material was compiled to justify reviving it. Five years later, Takahashi's manga has finally run its course and Sunrise has carefully reassembled the original cast and crew to bring the franchise's last remaining stories to the small screen. For the fans who have been waiting with bated breath for the beast to rear its head once more, this will be mana from heaven: pure canon bliss, with more advancement in a single episode than many of the previous seasons saw in their entire runs. For the less scrupulously faithful, or the plain forgetful, though, this will be a thirty-minute whirlwind of unadulterated confusion.
Since its humble beginnings as a “feudal fairy tale”, Inuyasha has become a colossally convoluted monster, and this episode drops us with no preparation into the middle of the miasma. Moryomaru is a demon who ate the demon who sprang from the half of Hakudoshi that had within him Naraku's heart which Naraku had expelled in order to…oh f***. Who the hell can keep up with that after a five-year gap? This is one for the fans—and only the fans. The production's impeccable tho.
Seitokai no Ichizon
Rating: 1 ½
Review:
Seitokai no Ichizon begins with its characters bashing the manga they were adapted from. It's a heady couple of minutes; wildly self-referential and very funny, full of obscure anime references and sly, self-deprecating humor. It's also the best the episode gets. As it turns out, the characters were right: their show sucks.
The story, as such, revolves around the Heikyou academy Student Council. The Student Council is chosen by popularity vote, which naturally leads to a Council of pretty girls. The sole exception is Sugisaki Ken, an eroge-obsessed pervert who got on the council by dint of being the school's valedictorian. The Council meets daily, at which time the meeting quickly self-destructs into a series of discussions about nothing of importance. The end.
One room, four bishoujo stereotypes, one hell-bent harem otaku, and a half-hour of endless nattering. If Satan needs to devise a torture to match my sins, this is it. There are just enough throwaway anime references and incidental jokes to keep the show from sending me to his Princely Darkness early, but not enough to keep the show from stretching out into an interminable spiral of meaningless chatter. Like the snake eating its own tail, the conversations go round in circles until they disappear, leaving benumbed viewers to wonder at the vacuousness of it all. Never has a mere twenty-odd minutes seemed so damnably long.
Nyan Koi
Rating: 3 ½
Review:
A romantic comedy that works as a comedy? What's next, the plague of frogs, or the flaming hail? Nyan Koi's humor works because it isn't really related to its romance. In fact, romance barely comes into this first episode at all.
Irresistibly tempted by the proximity of an empty can to a garbage bin, obligatory normal high-school student Junpei attempts a hole-in-one can-to-bin kick. Newtonian physics lapse just long enough for the can to ricochet into a nearby statue, neatly severing its head. Unfortunately the statue happens to belong to a vengeful cat spirit, who promptly curses poor Junpei. Cursed with the ability to understand the language of cats, Junpei soon learns that he'll have to help one hundred cats or he'll turn into one himself. Not such a bad prospect for a normal person, but Junpei also happens to have an acute cat allergy. Horrified at the idea of dying from an allergic reaction to his own fur, he sets out to right the wrongs of neighborhood cats.
Aside from Junpei's obvious attraction to cat-loving cutie Mizuno, there's precious little romance here. That's a good thing. The series has an energetic, inventive sense of humor and sidelining the mushy stuff lets it stand tall. The can-kicking is staged as a sci-fi encounter—complete with targeting data and computer commands—and the cats, once their language is unraveled, think and talk exactly as cats would. Junpei makes for a funny and sympathetic lead, and even Mizuno gets into the act (inadvertent cat torture: always funny). Of course the real test is whether the series can dodge the twin rom-com curses of harems and lazy ecchi humor, and that...well that remains to be seen.
The Sacred Blacksmith
Rating: 3
Review:
Ever come to and realize that you have a half-hour hole in your memory? Doctors call it a blackout. I call it The Sacred Blacksmith.
In a vaguely medieval fantasy-ish land, newly-minted knight Cecily Campbell is doing her best to live up to her new position in life. When it comes to setting over-enthusiastic merchants to rights she does well enough, but once she is faced with actual battle everything falls apart. Sword shattered and alive thanks only to the timely intervention of magical blacksmith (and crackerjack swordsman) Luke, Cecily decides, screw training, what she really needs is a better blade. So she sets out to find the best blacksmith in the land, which quite naturally happens to be Luke.
Surprisingly, given that it springs from the same animation loins as Samurai Champloo and Michiko to Hatchin, The Sacred Blacksmith is a complete nonentity. It's generalized fantasy of the blandest sort, with nothing—not character, not setting, not even (and this is a shock coming from manglobe) action—to distinguish it from a million other RPGoid fantasies. It's one advantage is its tasty character art (slender yet pleasingly proportioned, with that clearness of eye and cast of the lips that says “manglobe”), but that is zeroed out by Cecily, a purportedly strong female lead who has to be rescued by the hero not once, not twice, but three times. Is that some kind of snide commentary on women's lib? And it doesn't help that Luke is a bit of a dick. Not that any of that is enough to make it a bad series—no, that would be memorable. Instead it's just a…blackout.
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.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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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