Winter 2012 Anime – first looks

Sea scene from air
Rin-ne no Lagrange

I have viewed first episodes of most of the new TV anime in the 2012 Winter season.
New Prince of Tennis: A distinctly shounen sports anime. In the first episode, 50 junior high school players are invited to an elite tennis academy, and have to prove themselves against older players. Full of fantastic tennis feats and tough-guy posturing, this isn’t bad but it’s not really my kind of thing. 3/5
Amagami SS+ A school anime, and sequel to the Amagami SS series and game. I didn’t see the earlier show, but this looks intriguing. Tsukasa Ayatsuji is a smart and pushy young miss who will clearly go far in adult life. She is standing for President of the student body and means to win. Her boyfriend is the wimpy Juinichi. A new character, Noriko Kurosawa, is a rival for President. Both girls nominate Juinichi for vice-president without telling him. After a straw poll is rigged, Ayatsuji steps up her campaign, but Kurosawa invites Juinichi to a meeting (he spinelessly agrees) and snogs him in an effort to de-rail Ayatsuji’s campaign. Clearly school elections are serious business 🙂 4/5
Kill Me Baby: An anime adaption of 4-panel gag manga revolving around an airheaded, but otherwise ordinary high school girl, who befriends an assassin classmate. Not all that funny, and each episode is made up of unrelated short gags, which doesn’t work too well. 2/5
Recorder and Randsell: An anime about two school students, one of whom is of elementary school age and but looks like an adult man, the other being a senior high school girl but looking like a little kid. In the first episode the guy is arrested as a suspected child molester after over-enthusiastically greeting one of his little classmates. The purpose of this anime seem to be to set up child-molesting jokes like this. Not very funny and rather slimy. 1/5
Highschool DXD: The hero, Issei Hyoudou, is a dim-witted, lecherous second-year high school student. A cute girl chats him up, but on his first date ever, she transforms into a devil and kills him. Issei is revived and reincarnated as a devil, and from that day onwards, he serves as an underling of red-haired Riasu, a high-level devil who is also the prettiest girl in the school. This is rather dire, and its main excuse for existing is to provide views of lots of underwear and semi-nudity. 1/5
Senki Zesshou Symphogear: An original anime (i.e. not an adaptation). Another show in which pop music is used to battle against alien invaders. Two girls in a top vocal unit named Zweiwing fight to save humanity against an alien threat known as “Noise.” The show starts with a cemetery scene and then jumps to a concert interrupted by an alien attack. The singers transform and mount a counter-attack. One has to say that this anime looks good, and the alien attack, which turns people to dust, looks suitably scary. However it’s hard to suspend one’s disbelief about an idea that wasn’t too convincing when first used in “Macross”. The action is also so busy that one is left unsure which of the principal characters is supposed to be dead. 2/5
Area no Kishi (The Knight in the Area): A soccer anime, focusing on the high school hero’s relationship with his aloof big brother, who is an international youth soccer star. A football-playing girl from their past joins the school. Our hero has been acting as club manager, but Big Bro leans heavily on him to play again. This isn’t bad, and could be interesting even if you aren’t into soccer. But ‘Cross Game’ it’s not. 3/5
Bodaceous Space Pirates: Before seeing this, I took a very negative view of it: there’s nothing funny about ‘pirates’ when one’s fellow-countrymen are hijacked by Somali thugs, and I hate that lazy branding of sticking on a tricorn hat, a skull and crossbones and a 18th century jacket to associate with 18th-century piracy that wasn’t very romantic in the first place.  On the other hand, in the first episode we see our perky heroine expertly landing a space-ship belonging to the ‘yacht club’, waitressing at the family cafe, learning that her absent dad was a licenced space privateer, and evading some Men in Black who mean her no good. All good harmless fun. 3.5/5
Nisemonogatari: The sequel to “Bakemonogatari’. In the first episode, the hero Koyomi has been tied up and is beng tormented by his girlfriend for no evident reason. In other scenes, he verbally spars with one of his sisters, and hassles that irritating elementary schoolgirl. This episode has the same clever, spiky dialogue and odd or mildly pervy scenes as the previous series, but so far one feels that it’s merely re-introducing the characters.  3.5/5
Zero no Tsukaima F: This is a particularly boring swords-and sorcery by numbers show. It’s the Fourth such series, so unless you saw and liked the previous ones, you should avoid this at all costs. 1/5
Poyopoyo Kansatsu Nikki:An ultra- short episode about a spherically fat cat that insinuates itself into a family and proves very adept at detecting food, knocking things over and generally being annoying. Not particularly funny. 2/5
Rinne no Lagrange- Flower Declaration: Perky heroine Madoka rescues somebody from drowning while still on her way from school, and manages to lose her school uniform in the process. During the day we establish that she’s popular and an ace athlete as well. A mysterious girl in a rather brief semi-uniform turns up and returns Madoka’s clothes, before asking her if she has ever piloted a robot. The mysterious secret base just happens to be nearby, Madoka is shown a shiny robot which just happens to respond to her touch, an alien attack just happens to hit this very area a few minutes later, Madoka of course agrees to get in the robot and pilot it, and and of course she instinctively knows how to operate the thing and defeat her opponent.  This anime looks and sounds great, and the sea-side scenes are beautiful. Madoka is an appealing heroine. On the other hand the scenario of schoolgirl robot pilot fights to save the world is a clunker; it’s been done many times before, and generally with greater finesse than this. 3/5
Ano Natsu de Matteru: A school romantic comedy in which the normal hero, Kirishima Kaito, fools about with his movie camera, and is persuaded by his friends that he should make some sort of film. His eye is caught by mysterious red-head Ichika, who later turns out to be an alien. Ichika insinuates herself into Kaito’s house, and while semi-wrapped in a towel is caught giving Kaito some alien first-aid when Kaito’s older sister and the girl who has a crush on him turn up. Awkward! It’s all quite pleasant but the first half of the episode was a bit dull. 3/5
Another: A creepy drama about a school where a girl called Misaki died 26 years ago, and the students acted as though she was still alive. Student Koichi Sakakibara transfers to the same classroom, and encounters a girl with an eye-patch called Misaki Mei whom other people maybe can’t see. It’s quite well done and the atmosphere, animation and music all seem to be of a piece. 4/5
Daily Lives of High School Boys: Exactly as the title says, three bored and sex-obsessed high school boys hang out together and mess around while bemoaning their lack of success with girls. The first episode has four or so self-contained comedy sketches. Often, while they try to be rational, stupidity is multiplied by three. They role-play talking to a girl, and when they visit one boy and find some of his sister’s clothes, they dare each other to try them on, but only one falls for it, with embarrassing results. When one of them reads a book by the river bank, a literary-minded girl turns up, but their encounter is a failure. While the show is not visually interesting, the comedy-sketch format works well. 3/5
Listen to me girls, I’m your father: First-year university student Segawa Yuuta has just met a busty girl who is interested in him, when he rather reluctantly obeys a summons from his married sister to look after her three daughters for a few days. The older two daughters are children from the husband’s previous marriage. At this point the show starts to look a bit slimy as there is  fan-service involving Yuuta and his young (but actually un-related by blood) nieces. One’s anxiety is not dispelled by the news that the same production people also did the steamy incestuous Yosuga no Sora. It’s only a mild spoiler to disclose that Yuuta will find himself looking after the girls permanently. 2/5