Category: Reviews

Yumi and Kanoko

The series is set in a posh all-girl school in Japan. This latest episode is another delightful comedy of manners, in which Yumi has to deal with Kanoko-san, an over-intense admirer from the first year. The dialogue, as ever, is sparkling.

However the other half of the plot is a bit contrived. Once again, it concerns Sachiko’s neuroses, and her reactions at another inter-school festival. (That poor girl is beginning to look like she needs serious help). There’s a photographer character who doesn’t seem to realise that negatives can be cropped, and a bit of uniform cross-dressing that seems written in solely so that Yumi can be mistaken for her brother (despite having a higher-pitch voice, seemingly).

Still, there is some very pretty artwork, notably in the opening and closing credit sequences.

Some anime I’ve watched recently:

Angel Heart – adapted from a manga by the same writer who gave us City Hunter. This is a City Hunter spin-off. A girl assassin who has been trained as an assassin from a very early age has had enough of killing after her 50th job and commits suicide. The syndicate steal a transplant heart after, apparently,  killing its owner, and transplant it into the assassin (actually, since she has just jumped off a high building, one might wonder if this is sufficient).

The assassin, unconscious for a year, has strange dreams in which the former owner of the transplanted heart urges her to live. The dead owner of the transplanted heart is Kaori and her grieving husband is Ryo.

Not great, but the character designs look good.

Kemonozume – an odd anime, already starting to slip from my mind since this morning. Human-eating demons live among the human population, and a clan of demon fighters is dedicated to getting rid of them. However they are short of experienced fighters. The clan leader is ageing, and one of his sons wants to continue with traditional methods (swords) while the other advocates modern hi-tech methods (robot suits). There are a couple of women involved, one a nice clan menber, the other a rather demonic hot sexy blonde. It has a rather spiky modern animation style

Negima?! – Actually I gleaned much more about this series by looking it up on the Web than I did by watching the first episode. Ten-year old apprentice wizard Negi is sent from Wales to act as a supply teacher in a Japanese middle school, as part of his training. (This would be a tough assignment for an adult, let alone a wimpy ten-year old boy). So, he arrives and has to handle about thirty cute fourteen-year old girls. There are two Negima TV series and this, the second one, is a “retelling” – in other words both have exactly the same synopsis. It bears more than a little resemblance to “Love Hina” in which a limp boy had to contend with a dorm full of feisty girls - in fact the Negima girls’ characters map those in Love Hina.

If you ask me, it would be better to just get “Love Hina” and watch it again. 

Red Garden – set entirely in New York. A spate of deaths sets off an investigation. Young clubbers are unable to remember what they were doing the night before, but it seems it was something nasty. And IIRC they have also become undead.

Taiyou no Mokushiroku – comes in two parts, each near feature length. A series of devastating earthquakes, accompanied by tsunami and eruptions, devastates Japan. The influential Ryo family suffers loss as the son and his wife are killed, and the grandson appears as a plucky survivor before vanishing. The damage is so severe that Japan literally splits in two and has to accept the “help” of the Americans and Chinese for rescue and reconstruction.

Part 1 fast-forwards 15 years to a scene in Taiwan, where Japanese refugees are still stuck in camps unable to return home, and there is bad feeling between them and the locals. The grandson, Genshiro, is in Taiwan, living as a Taiwanese. Remembering his roots, he gets into trouble by sticking up for the Japanese refugees.

Particularly towards the end of Pt.1, I found this lengthy epic rather simplistic, with the characters falling into types e.g. Good-hearted Gangster, rather than having any depth. It also irritatingly shows the Japanese in their “look how insecure and helpless we are” mode. If you swallow any of this bullshit, and I don’t mean this unkindly, just remember that three generations ago the Japanese were invading Asia and trashing China, and that now they have one of the largest armed forces in the region, and we’re all buying their cars and electronic gizmos.

Venus Versus Virus – a traditional theme with a secret clan battling people-eating demons. Despite the title, it’s not much to do with viruses of either the cybernetic or medical varieties – they just call the demons “viruses”. That cute schoolgirl is recruited to the team and does her best. Actually it’s not bad.

Strike Witches – Witches with rocket boosters attached to their legs act as an airborne defence force. Quite the most stupid anime I have seen in years, and also one of the funniest.

Kino and Hermes

I recently bought the compact box-set of Kino’s Journey. The website already has a long review of it (by Dave Baranyi), but I’d like to draw attention to it and add my own impressions.

A youth rides a motorcycle through a desert. We soon learn that it’s a talking motorcycle, so this clearly is not quite the world as we know it. Nor are the rather allegorical countries Kino visits every three days quite part of the world as we know it. The producers of the anime have sought to give it a rather literary feel, in deference to the original books. In short this is a rather unusual anime, thoughtful, and well-crafted.

To give a flavour of it, in an early episode Kino learns that the inhabitants of one country are living in isolation from each other, because somebody had the bright idea of altering the people so that they could read each other’s thoughts, a circumstance which they soon found utterly intolerable. In another, Kino is under-impressed by a local custom, which she later learns that the inhabitants had just invented and tried out on her in an effort to develop some traditions because they didn’t have any. Kino remarks that they do have a custom, but only so long as they don’t realise it.

And some of the episodes are quite shocking. Not in the worst way, but shocking enough. Overall, though good, “Kino’s Journey” is rather downbeat and after watching a few episodes you might develop a yearning for something funny with cute magical girls in it.

Yumi & Sachiko

You’ve probably encountered the popular shoujo TV series “Maria-sama ga Miteru” – if not there has been plenty written about it elsewhere, and there’s a review on my website. Now it has spawned a six-part OAV series, of which the first and second parts have appeared.

OAV1 is a treat, as it opens with the main characters, Yumi and Sachiko having a girly squabble. The dialogue in this scene is a delight, and the faces seem drawn with a peculiar intensity. Yumi gets invited to rich-girl Sachiko’s summer residence, but has to contend with the ill-intentioned machinations of other girls of Sachiko’s circle who are jealous of Yumi because of her closeness to the alpha princess. Yumi’s simple honesty enables her to turn the situation around.
OVA2 was a disappointment for me, for the scenario seemed unconvincing, and the treatment weak. Essentially, the girls on the school council want to arrange some meetings with the council at a nearby boys’ school with whom they hold a joint school festival. They have a problem with Sachiko, who dislikes men so much that she can’t bear to be near a boy.

Tickle

I checked last night on a Polish TV website to see what anime was showing on Polonia1 (a satellite channel) in the early-morning slot. Nowadays there is little anime on satellite TV that would interest those who have access to digisubs, or subtitled anime DVDs. However the obscure low-budget channels from countries like Poland are the exception, for that is where the rare old stuff turns up, some dating form the ’60s and ’70s.
Anyone seen “Magic Girl Tickle” (Majokko Tikkuru)? I thought not. It’s interesting to see this, both for the period animation style, and for the cultural values the animators bring to their work. This one has a scene where a disagreement about love-letters ends in a classroom riot where all the boys are trying to grab the girls’ breasts. Not quite what one would expect in an anime for schoolgirls!

Also running, apparently, are “Yattaman” a long-running fantastic comedy, now forgotten, and “General Daimos” (Tosho Daimos) an old, but rather good alien invasion anime, which is full of cool stuff – aliens with angelic wings, inter-racial romance, giant robot battles, a flying city, robotic monsters, ugly aliens, never a dull moment.

To get this material, you need to be in the satellite “footprint” (i.e. it’s above the horizon and in range), and have the right sort of digital satellite receiving gear. There is information in the satellite section of my website.

Classroom scene

A short 6 minute amateur anime by the CG artist calling himself “Imperial Boy”.
Katari, a young girl who dreams of becoming a novelist, writes a love letter to a boy at her school. This is a remarkable anime with a vision of a quite different-looking world. The clip shows a school classroom, with an arched ceiling and a video screen above the blackboard. The dialog is mostly in voice-over. This short anime impressed me for its originality more than many a full-length pro anime. Watch this guy.
Worth checking out Imperial Boy’s website, which contains some remarkable images, as well as his “Rain” page.

Shinku in her case

Sakurada Jun is a disturbed junior high-school boy who never goes to school beacuse he is unable to socialise with his class-mates. Instead he stays in his room all day, ordering “weird” or “cursed” items over the internet. He lives with his more normal sister, Sakurada Nori. Their parents are absent. (This is quite common in anime, probably because it saves the trouble of having to draw them).
One day Jun takes delivery of a weird doll, which is not just weird, it’s alive and thinks Jun is its servant! Jun’s life gets more disturbed as he is drawn into the world of the Rozen dolls and their sinister “Alice Game”.
Soon Jun has three of the dolls in his house and is drawn into the life-threatening “Alice Game” battles.
This is quite a good anime and if you ever found life-like dolls a but creepy it’s definitely for you. Jun’s relationship with the bad-attitude doll Shinku gradually becomes more complex. Consists of “Rozen Maiden” and “Rozen Maiden Traumend” – the latter is another 12 eps of the same, but with different credit sequence. The whole TV series is now licenced in the US by Geneon. It’s not without humour, for instance the characters quarrel childishly about cakes, and watch a TV puppet detective show in almost every episode.