Fall 2010 New season anime

Arty style sketch
Sketch - Bakuman

Bakuman: Third year middle school student Mashiro Moritaka is depressed when he thinks about the likely course of his life – the idea of being a high school student, then a college student, then a salaryman, just fills him with dread. He likes to draw, and has thought about becoming a mangaka, a manga author, but his uncle was a real mangaka and never met with any financial success, so Moritaka doesn’t think it’s worth trying.   Ace student and literary prizewinner Takagi Akito finds a math notebook in which Moritaka has sketched his secret crush, pretty student Azuki Miho.  To Moritaka’s surprise, Akito sets about persuading Moritaka to form a mangaka partnership with him, with Akito writing and Moritaka drawing.  Moritaka finds himself being bounced into agreeing, and also blurting out his feelings for Miho, who equally surprisingly dreams of becoming an anime voice actress. A promising opener with adequate animation and interesting characters and script.

3 characters meet
Sudden meeting - Yosuga

Yosuga no Sora: A brother and sister move from the city to their grandparents’ house in a semi-rural area. Their parents have recently died in a car crash, and the grandparents don’t appear in the story so far.  Haruka is a good-looking boy and nearly all the maidens who encounter him promptly become lovesick.  Many of them seem to recognise him, which isn’t too surprising as he was apparently in the area four years previously.  His twin sister, Sora, is frail and has difficulty relating to others.  So far so good – we have some decent animation, an interesting script and characters, and a developing harem theme.  The sting in the tail comes in the last five minutes, when we learn that Sora’s lurid fantasies weren’t just for added colour, as she makes overt incestuous advances to her brother. Then we have a bare-boobs bath scene with another character, and a masturbation scene with a third. We knew this was adapted from a ero-game, but it doesn’t seem to have been toned down at all!  One awaits the following episodes with some trepidation, to discover if this series sensitively depicts Sora’s struggle to adapt to the world and her feelings for her brother, and her jealousy about the female attention coming his way, or if it’s just a load of erotica.

Main characters - PSG
The main characters

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt: With a title like that, absolutely no excuse for not knowing what to expect, particularly as the airing on Crunchyroll requires you to declare that you are over 18.  Not quite p..n but full of bad-taste adult humour.   “Panty” and “Stocking” are two fallen angels, directed by a priest-like character.  The character animation is in a curious non-realistic style, while the brief transformation sequence is in a quite different style

Alternative chara.design
Angel Panty

which one suspects will be a big hit with viewers.  In the battle sequences the angels remove their (ahem) lower garments and transform them into weapons…  Not my cup of tea but will probably be a huge hit as the creators have hit many fans’ tastes on a bullseye.  BTW be careful with the audio when viewing this if you don’t want parents/ neighbours/ partners to sus your dodgy viewing habits, as whereas Japanese soundtracks are almost always unintelligible to the non-fan, you can clearly hear “Panty” being repeated a lot in the opening credits of this one!

MM!: Boy tries to get help to cure his masochism. Encounters a sadistic girl and discovers that his best friend and confidant is a cross-dresser.  Shallow stuff.