The Spring 2011 Anime Preview Guide
Carl Kimlinger
by Carl Kimlinger,
Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera
Rating: 4
Review: Fans who only know Go Nagai through bloody horror series like Devilman and super-robot extravaganzas like Mazinger Z may be surprised by Enma-kun. Based off of the 1973 television series Dororon Enma-kun, it sticks closer in tone to its progenitor than the bloody, nasty Demon Prince Enma (also a remake), delivering rollicking action-comedy with a faint hint of horror. It's the Showa period (that's the 1970s to us foreigners) and average girl Harumi is just out of the public bath, a gossiping granny's warnings about demons at her school still ringing in her ears. Her friends, by freakish coincidence, are on their way to school at that very moment to hijack some toilet paper. Harumi goes along, and is justifiably terrified when everyone else has their faces stolen. Luckily for her, the Demon Patrol—an anti-demon unit comprised of ice woman Yukiko, kappa Kapaeru and royal hellspawn Enma-kun—lives just under the school, and they'd like nothing more than a crack at a face-eating demon. If they can stay awake long enough.
Despite its light tone, Nagai's fingerprints are all over Enma-kun. The sideburns and eyebrows run long and wild, the fan-service is boldly old-school, and the jokes are vulgar as all hell. The gossiping granny, for instance, occupies herself by swinging her pendulous breasts like bolas, and before Enma can defeat the face-eating demon, he must first contend with its thirty-foot steel penis. The more important creative voice in Enma-kun, however, may well be its director, Yoshitomo Yonetani. The series' cheerfully anarchic, charmingly hokey comedic energy is clearly his, as are the motormouthed script, the barreling pace, and the very way the characters move. Some will find his breakneck retro goofiness abrasive, but just as many will find themselves swept up in it and loving every silly second. It is rather difficult to see the show's monster-of-the-week plot going anywhere important, but it bears ing that Yonetani was the guy who tore our hearts out midway through the equally episodic Brigadoon and subsequently steered it towards disquieting romance.
A Channel
Rating: 2 ½
Review: Will the world implode if it's afflicted with yet another not-comedy about the mind-destroying minutiae of school-girl life? Apparently not, since we're still here. But there were times while watching this episode that I felt like my brain would. This is exactly the series I feared My Ordinary Life would be (but wasn't): a floating, weightless thing spun of nothing but whimsy and precious, oversweet cuteness. It's spun around the everyday lives of four schoolgirls: space-case Run, gentle nice-girl Yuuko, unflappably even-keeled Nagi, and ferocious, Run-obsessed underclassman Tooru. Tooru has just gotten into the same school as Run, and she's terribly protective of her. Nagi and Yuuko are leery of Tooru at first—she has a thing for baseball bats that isn't exactly endearing—but soon warm to the diminutive spitfire. Adventures in splitting candy and eating lunch ensue.
A Channel is a genuinely beautiful series, smoothly animated and gorgeously illustrated, with simple yet cute characters and lots of sunny, open space through which cherry petals drift dreamily. It's also perfectly innocuous, its most offensive element being its lighter-than-air yuri undertone. Tooru's fierce personality is a welcome divergence from the whimsical moe norm, and the obvious alienation she feels not being in the same class as her beloved adds a tiny emotional sting to the episode's end. Only in K-On!! (that's the sequel, not the original) has a not-comedy about the mind-destroying minutiae of school-girl life been done better. Still, the thought of spending an entire season choking down its idealized vision of the cutesy innocence of adolescent female friendship is enough to make one nauseous. What I wouldn't do to see the series shape Tooru's affections into a genuine romance with someone unexpected, say Yuuki, or for it to grow a real plot about Run getting a hobby or a boyfriend and drifting away from Tooru...anything, really, besides spending the next eleven or twelve episodes watching endless disconnected vignettes about eating omelets and walking happily home together.
30-sai no Hoken Taiiku
Rating: 3
Review: Can a guidebook be made into a reasonably entertaining anime series? The answer is yes, though it little resembles a guide at this time. In his lonely bedroom, as he approaches the final minutes of his 29th year, Hayao Imagawa tries to sort-of lose his virginity by getting it on with an inflatable woman named Momoko. Before he can consummate the union, however, he is interrupted by a naked sex-god named Daigoro. Daigoro has been sent to help Hayao rid himself of his virginity. He's overflowing with knowledge, but between his brutally frank treatment of delicate matters and his use of questionable educational tools (exploding breasts, for instance), he mostly just makes Hayao's life miserable. He does, however, force Hayao to be honest with himself, which is a start.
30-sai no Hoken Taiiku is based off of a guidebook designed to help men in their thirties who have no sexual or romantic experience. How useful the book is, I don't know, but the anime is as questionable an educational tool as Daigoro's exploding breasts. Aside from a gimme about the importance of hygiene and a cursory lesson in the fine art of fondling, the show seems far more interested in entertaining than educating. Of course, it's possible that there's some useful information hidden in the scenes that are destroyed by the heavy censoring apparently necessary to allow the show on television, but it seems doubtful. The series does, on the other hand, provide a sizeable amount of fun. Daigoro's "teaching" is a vulgar kick, and the scene in which he forces Hayao to it that he doesn't want to throw his virginity away (using his godly ass) is priceless. Still, it lacks the consistency, to say nothing of the depth, to be anything but a mildly interesting oddity. There's better ecchi entertainment out there (far better) and if you really need to learn about sex and romance (and aren't ready for hands-on learning)...well, that's what books are for.
Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi
Rating: 3 ½
Review: Don't let the sappy title (translated as World's Greatest First Love) or the sparkly, embarrassing first minutes turn you away; Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi is a nice, straightforward, grown-up romance. That happens to take place between two guys. One of them is Ritsu Onodera. At one time (specifically during those sparkly, embarrassing first minutes) he believed strongly in true love, overflowing feelings and all the other stuff that young people in love are wont to believe. Now... well, now he's a twenty-five-year-old cynic without a drop of romance in his jaded, venomous heart. That may not have been a problem in his previous life as literature editor, but now that he's about to become a shojo manga editor—albeit very reluctantly—it's proving to be quite the hindrance. He's a hard worker, and he's got a good head on his shoulders, but what use is that when he's fundamentally unable to understand shojo manga? Perhaps his hunky, strangely familiar boss Takano can help him with that...
Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi's main weapon is the age of its cast. Its characters aren't angsty teens or fumbling adolescents; they're grown men who know their minds and have better things to worry about than whether so-and-so likes them and how to hook up. Things like work. The series has a refreshing focus on the pressures and problems of starting a new job in general, and on the peculiar challenges of the manga business in particular. Don't take that to mean that it's dull. Takano's editorial department is, shall we say, unconventional, and it's a gas to watch Ritsu trying to cope with its quirks. Nor should you take it to mean that there's no romance. The chemistry between Ritsu and Takano is immediate, antagonistic, and far from platonic. It's also the chemistry of equals—which is nice. Boys-love isn't everyone's cup of tea, but even coffee drinkers, so to speak, should give this one a try. It won't rock anyone's world, but adult (as in not juvenile) romances are to be treasured, whatever the genre.
Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi is streaming at Crunchyroll.
We, Without Wings - Ore-tachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai
Rating: 1 ½
Review: Sigh. Another season, another eroge adapted to the little screen. Any more it's hard to even get up the energy to be upset about it. There're these three guys in a city. One, Takashi, is a high school boy surrounded by fields of luscious girl flesh. Another, Shusuke, is a terminally hyperactive layabout who spends his time hanging out amongst the cute waitresses at his favorite cafe. Lastly is Hayato, a "handyman" with a foul mouth and a fouler temper, none of which stops him from being a massive hit with the ladies. Each does their shtick and meets lots of girls, one of whom they'll eventually fall for. The end. Try not to hurt yourself rushing to watch it.
Helmed by the guy behind the odious Omamori Himari and spawned by the minds behind the tedious Shuffle!, Tsubasa wa Nai's pedigree isn't one to inspire confidence. Holding a pre-production panty-drawing contest—the winners of which get their panty designs featured in the show—only lowers one's expectations. Interestingly, the show that results isn't quite as loathsome as you'd think. Oh, it's pretty loathsome at times, particularly when a precocious elementary-school girl flashes her lacy black unmentionables at Hayato and asks him if he wants to put his "monster" in her "kitten." It's to the series' credit, though, that Hayato isn't the least interested in taking her up on her offer. He isn't even flustered by it. It helps that the potential harem factor is diluted by using three leads and that one of the three—Shusuke—is sort of likeable (in an irrepressible puppy-dog kind of way). The show loses points for the way its meta-fiction gimmicks (channel flips and intrusive DJs being just two) jumble its already over-complicated structure, and for its tasteless fan-service, but at least it doesn't leave you gagging yourself in the hopes that the vomit will cleanse your palate.
Ore-tachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai is available streaming at Crunchyroll.
Sket Dance
Rating: 3 ½
Review: Let's get this out of the way: Sket Dance has nothing to do with dance. What it does have to do with is a group of high-school troubleshooters called the Sket Club. Teppei Sugihara has just transferred to Kaimei Academy. He doesn't stand out much, being your average bespectacled wallflower, and doesn't much care to. Unfortunately for him, he immediately catches the eye of the Sket Club, a three-person solve-any-problem team that would really, really like to have a fourth member. They're massive weirdoes--exactly the kind of people that a guy looking to blend in should avoid. There's the hat-wearing, ruckus-loving club president "Bossun" Fujisaki, his main investigator "Switch" Usui, who speaks only through a voice synthesizer, and his strong right arm "Himeko" Onizuka, who just can't quite leave behind the yankee mannerisms of her youth. Teppei would rather not have anything to do with them, but when he's attacked by a masked, paint-throwing fiend he's got no one else to turn to.
Odd-jobs agencies are a long-time staple of anime, which can make it a little hard to get excited about another show starring a group of misfits fulfilling the silly requests of troubled folk. Unlike a great many of its peers, though, Sket Dance understands the core appeal of its premise: namely short, varied stories and colorful characters. This episode alone mixes comic action with surprisingly tricky sleuthing, adding in high-school drama and goofy character-based humor just for flavor. The Sket Club, for its part, supplies the cast with plenty of color, as well as surprising depth (for the extremity of their personalities, that is), and a good base-level of charm. It hurts nothing that the show is also refreshingly positive, particularly in the way the Sket throw themselves heart and soul into their clients’ petty problems, or that there's a brain behind its fun-and-games facade. Compound that with solid production values and you have one of the better series of its stripe to come down the pike in some time.
Sket Dance is available streaming at Crunchyroll.
Steins;Gate
Rating: 3
Review: Don't tune into Steins;Gate if you want a good time. This is muddy, deliberately obtuse stuff whose primary purpose is to be mysterious and whose primary pleasure is puzzling out what is happening. The episode begins with Rintaro Okabe, a self-styled mad scientist, attending a talk on time travel. The lecture doesn't go well. Okarin, as he's known to his friends, makes a scene and is pulled from the room, after which he investigates a commotion upstairs and finds a girl he just met lying face-down in a pool of her own blood. Like any good citizen he bolts and texts his friend about the incident, whereupon everyone around him disappears. A moment of confusion later and everything's back to normal—except there's a fallen satellite in the building he just left and everyone thinks that the lecture was cancelled before he ever got there.
It's actually a fairly simple task to devise a sequence of events that explains most of this episode: Okarin's text leads to him discovering that his cell phone can text people in the past, allowing him to tinker with past events such that the lecture, and the murder, never happen. Since he did the tinkering, he re the original time-line while no one else does. The disappearing people are a symptom of the cosmic shift that happens when his action leads to an alteration of the past. Yay. Mystery solved.
The real mystery is where all of this time-travel hocus-pocus is leading. The series is so busy serving up murk and mystery that it fails to provide its plot with any clear direction. Presumably we'll have to tune into future episodes to get that, but aside from finding out if our deductions are right, there's little reason to. Hiroshi Hamasaki's direction is labored and humorless (this despite the inherent humor of having a wannabe mad scientist as a lead character), the visuals are oppressive, the air of paranoia and alienation that Nitroplus does so well has grown wearying, and we're given no compelling reason to care what happens to the characters. Give it a couple of episodes to sharpen some kind of hook and it could be pretty interesting. If not... well, there's always Serial Experiments Lain to watch again.
Steins;Gate is available streaming at Crunchyroll
Battle Girls - Time Paradox
Rating: 3
Review: You'd think with the number of students who get magically transported to other worlds that there would be a police division or two devoted to interdimensional teen retrieval. They'd extract the abductees from whatever world they're stuck in and we wouldn't have to watch their TV shows any more. The abductee this time is an unfortunate slip of girl named (or more accurately, nicknamed) Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi attracts misfortune the way roadkill attracts buzzards. It's always circling, waiting to bite her in the rear when she's least expecting it. Mostly they're just nips: a crush of commuters on the bus that makes her late for school, a perceptive teacher who catches her when she tries sneaking into class late. But one day, while visiting a shrine to pray for good grades, she gets bitten bad. Really bad. Magical-accident-that-transports-you-to-the-past-where-you-become-Nobunaga-Oda's-flunky bad. Luckily Hideyoshi's a girl who can take things in stride... when she has any idea what's going on. Which isn't often.
Actually, to be fair, Battle Girls is pretty decent as far as alternate-world anime goes. Particularly when you take into that it's based off of a pachinko game. It's silly, moderately fun, and not without its mild points of interest—how Hideyoshi fits into the show's all-girl version of the Warring States Period not least among them. It helps that the show avoids romantic complications (and even if there were some, the cast is all-female. Go yuri!) and that Hideyoshi is such an unmitigated idiot. The tragic fates of its historic players (Oda and Mitsuhide, seen here as devoted friends, will eventually fall out, leading to Oda's death, after which Hideyoshi will kill Mitsuhide) ensure that the proceedings don't descend to the dippy depths of Koihime Musou or this season's Dog Days, and the script even works in a bit of educational content. Yes, an item-gathering quest already looms on the horizon, and yes, the battles are incomprehensible, but at least the episode inspires a (slight) desire to see future ones.
Battle Girls - Time Paradox is available streaming at Crunchyroll.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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