The Spring 2011 Anime Preview Guide

Carl Kimlinger

Carl's natural habitat is the dank forests of the Pacific Northwest. He thrives on rain and a diet of cute furry animals. He should be approached with caution, particularly when in an ill temper. He's a sucker for slick visuals and epic sweep, as well as emotional abuse, so with the right combination of Eden of the East and Touch he can be lured into an anime stupor, whereupon it is a simple matter to shoot and mount him in your living room, making for a unique conversation piece.

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Hanasaku Iroha

Rating: 3 ½

Review: Hanasaku Iroha is a picturesque coming-of-age tale in a Japanese inn, complete with soft emotions and hard lessons but missing anyone to really identify with. Ohana lives a fairly carefree life in the big city with her flighty mother. Until her mother's no-good boyfriend racks up some heavy debt and decides to flee, with her mother in tow. Ohana is sent to the countryside to live with her grandmother, who owns a traditional inn. Unfortunately for her, her grandmother turns out to be a hard old bat whose milk of kindness has long since dried up, leaving only iron-fisted discipline and total intolerance for weakness. She has no intention of treating the offspring of her disinherited daughter as her own blood, and promptly puts Ohana to work. Which wouldn't be too bad if her co-workers didn't either ignore, taunt or openly loathe her.

Do a little thought experiment: You're an employee at an inn and a sixteen-year-old girl moves in. She's obviously lonely and uncertain, though she tries to hide it. She's kind of self-centered and not terribly sensitive, but her heart seems to be in the right place. Do you A) Give her some encouragement; B) Goof around a bit because mushy stuff makes you uncomfortable; C) Befriend her; or D) Tell her to go die because you've got your own sh** to deal with and she's obviously a f***ing spoiled brat. Oh, and if you're the boss, there's also option E: Put her to work and beat her when her kindness inconveniences the guests. The series is obviously trying to provide a quiet, realistic alternative to the bawdy, hyperactive, alien-and-ninja school of teen anime, and that's very nice of it, but harshness isn't realism, and cruelty doesn't make your characters complex; it just makes them bad people. Still, the show is beautifully animated and scored, as well as refreshingly sensitive and serious-minded. Plus, there's little doubt that future episodes will have Ohana ferreting out the reasons why the innfolk behave as they do, which will hopefully mitigate future unpleasantness.

Hanasaku Iroha is available streaming at Crunchyroll.

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My Ordinary Life

Rating: 3

Review: Will the world implode if it's afflicted with yet another not-comedy about the mind-destroying minutiae of school-girl life? Maybe, but luckily we won't have to find out for now. While everything from its title to its animators and yonkoma origins suggests that My Ordinary Life will K-on! and Lucky Star in their quest to turn otaku brains into puddles of (sweet!) green goo, it has one quality that sets it apart from its precious moe peers: it's actually funny.

The plot is virtually impossible to describe. And not just because it has none. It has something to do with the everyday ramblings of mildly insane high-schooler Yuka and her sensible best friend Mio. It includes their interactions with their class's deeply weird resident introvert and Mio's goat-riding wannabe-aristocrat crush. There's also a robot girl with a giant wind-up key sticking out of her back and limbs that detach too easily, plus her five-year-old creator. Pet abuse and town-demolishing explosions also enter into the picture.

My Ordinary Life trades primarily in strangeness. It has its meandering conversations about nothing and celebrations of meaningless cuteness, but they tend to be sandwiched between or riven by bizarre non-sequiturs. There's the random scene of quiet classmate Mai playing a dangerous combination of Frisbee and skeet with her dog. There's robot girl Nano discovering that her wind-up key is used to power her rocket toes. And most memorably, there's Yuka's epic pursuit of a really slippery octopus sausage...across desk, through mohawk, past baseball mitt, off of locker and onto floor. Much of it is senseless and even more of it flat-out unfunny, but enough moments combine WTF happenings with Kyoto Animation's over-the-top animation to create big laughs that it's worth sitting through the rest. For now.

My Ordinary Life is available streaming at Crunchyroll.

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Dog Days

Rating: 2

Review: The world of Flonyard is in upheaval. The nations of Biscotti and Galette are at war, a decidedly one-sided one if Biscotti's impressive run of miserable losses is anything to go by. Down to her last stronghold, Princess Millhiore of Biscotti decides desperate measures are called for and summons a Hero-with-a-capital-H. Enter Shinku, an acrobatics-loving middle-school student from Japan. While exiting school in his customary manner—by jumping from the roof—he falls into a magical vortex and ends up taking the meteor express to Flonyard. After meeting Millhiore and learning that Flonyard wars are basically athletics competitions, Shinku gladly accepts the mantle of Hero and enters the fray against Leonmitchelli, the powerful lady leader of Galette.

And that is more than anyone will take away from Dog Days. It is so determined to be harmless that it bleaches itself of all flavor, leaving no impression, good or bad, once it es. The advantage of that is that it's harmless. The characters are uniformly nice, the visuals cute and basically fan-service-less, and the plot a blend of tried-and-true clichés as smooth and easily digestible as cream of wheat. Shinku and Millhiore's relationship is pure puppy love—appropriately enough, given that Flonyardians are all dog-people, complete with little tails and adorable floppy ears—and even the wars are more American Gladiators than Gladiator. The downside is that the show is completely devoid of entertainment value. Comatose patients have more fun in their vegetative states than you'll have watching Dog Days. If you must have your hero-is-summoned-from-Earth-to-save-alternate-world anime watch The Familiar of Zero, or better yet, The Twelve Kingdoms. Or Fushigi Yûgi, or... well, you get the idea.

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Tiger & Bunny

Rating: 4

Review: A sudden mutation has given a certain percentage of humanity superpowers. Will they face persecution and prejudice? Pshaw! That's old hat. No, the Man doesn't come down on their backs; he makes them into the newest reality TV fad. In Schternbilt City the biggest show on the tube is "Hero TV," a program that follows the town's superheroes as they put the hurt on crime and then rates them according to their stats. Winner gets crowned king, and gets the juicy sponsors (one assumes). Losers get their agencies bankrupted and bought up by multinational corporations looking to show off their newest powersuits. And maybe try out a new gimmick or two. Wild Tiger is an old-school hero—you know, the kind who wears spandex and actually believes in justice. He's also kind of a goof and hasn't been a ranking hero in some time. After his latest stunt leaves his company in the red for the very last time, he's sold like merchandise, given a powersuit and told to form Schternbilt City's first superhero duo. With an upstart whelp who has the exact same powers as him but none of his old-fashioned scruples.

The scary thing about Tiger & Bunny is that this is exactly what would happen if people gained superpowers right now. Media conglomerates would jump on them like a pack of hungry wolves and strip every shred of dignity from the pursuit of truth, justice and the American way and turn it into the pursuit of money, money and more money. Corporate sponsors, flashy reality TV shows, trading cards, merchandise, hero-sung theme songs—it may be played for laughs (and get them) but more so even than things like X-Men, this is superhero realism. Where the series goes from here will determine its exact worth, but there is so much potential—the aging athlete trying to make a comeback in a world obsessed with youth, the fist-to-the-face media commentary of its premise, Tiger's fight to maintain a semblance of heroism in an increasingly venal business—that it'd have to be pretty lazy not to go somewhere interesting.

Tiger & Bunny is available streaming at Hulu, VizMedia.com and here on ANN.