Shoujo & General Weblog

I’m still following about half a dozen titles from the current season, basically the titles I’ve written about at greater length earlier.
Last Exile – Ginkyo no Fam has done nothing to dispel the reservations I expressed previously. Looking around the Web, I see that it has attracted a fair amount of comment. Much of this is uncritically favourable, or goes into great detail about the personalities of the various characters. There are a few negative reviews that raise some awkward and pertinent questions, such as:
Why are we constantly told that Fam is a great pilot, and not shown so that we can judge for ourselves?
Why is more not made of the potential of the small “vanships” to usher in new kinds of weapons and new ideas about how to conduct military operations?
Why introduce “fan-service” and idiot behaviour by the principal characters at the opening of the 2nd series?
Why are sections of the plot so jaw-droppingly implausible? Such as the sequence where the older princess is snatched off the deck of her flagship. (What a stupid place to stand! What an unlikely manoevure!). Her friends figure out exactly where she is, fly through a battle zone, infiltrate the Ades flagship through a gap in the hull (somebody really ought to tell the Turan general staff about that hole in the armour belt), fly around inside the vast hull encountering only light opposition, finally to confront the enemy commander.
Why set up the Ades Federation as the bad guys plotting genocide and killing the princesses’ father, and then confuse this simple but fit-for-purpose plot by having a scene that depicts Turan as land-grabbing invaders?
When is the show going to bother explaining what is going on and fill in minor but interesting details like what exactly happened to the Turan flagship and its crew?
One would like to think that there’s a clear resolution of how the nice princess suddenly has super-powers that allow her to vape a city with an interplanetary spaceship that pops up like a rabbit out of a hat, but in view of the above, I doubt it very much.
And why are the pirates, who should be a pragmatic and self-interested bunch, aligning themselves with Turan, which has just lost the war, and against Ades, the most powerful military machine on the planet? (Clue: most of them fled from territories over-run by Ades).
Clearly one is supposed to ignore these awkward questions and instead enjoy a predominantly young and female set of characters expressing their feelings and generally acting up like uncontrolled adolescents for much of the screen time.

Continuing my reviews with the second week’s shows:
Chihayafuru #2: The second episode is entirely a flashback to elementary school, where Taichi and Aruta have a karuta battle. Maintains the high standard of episode #1.
Tamayura – Hitotose: #2: The second episode was pleasant, but doesn’t greatly change my opinion about this show.
Phi Brain: Kami no Puzzle: #2: The second episode introduces an annoying character, and the second puzzle, with car-shunting, was rather silly. Goes down in my estimation.
C3 #2: There is more action in episode 2, when a powerful and malign character appears, but I didn’t feel involved and it felt formulaic. Will probably drop this.
Kimi to Boku (You and Me) #2: One of the boys tries to help a fierce little girl who resents his efforts. A bit blander to watch than it reads.
Maken-Ki #2: More of the same lingerie catalogue. See comments on episode #1.
Mashiro-Iro Symphony #2: The boys try to ingratiate themselves, with mixed results. There was little to tempt me to watch any more.
Last Exile – Ginkyo no Fam – Preview: It looks like the flying mecha will be great, but with mention of pirates and princesses, I don’t have much confidence about the plot. The show has been heavily promoted at overseas anime conventions, and is licensed to Funimation already.

Ben-Tou #1: The hero lives in a dorm, and so has to provide his own lunch and dinner. The half-price bento in the supermarket look tempting, but whenever he tries to buy any he is knocked unconscious and trampled underfoot by hungry and violent students. A friendly girl accosts him, but he can’t remember who she is. The most violent of the bento-buying girls offers to let him join her club. It’s quite amusing so far.

Mobile Suit Gundam AGE #1: It’s another Gundam series, and so far quite similar to the earliest series. The young hero, Flit, is handed a memory chip by his mother, who is dying in a collapsed and burning building. It contains plans for a giant robot suit. Years later, Flit, now a teenager, is helping develop that mobile suit, now called the Gundam. He has a cute girlfriend, and a bouncing ball robot pet. Unknown raiders, called the UE for short, attack the space colony in a graphically animated attack, causing considerable destruction, and Flit starts up the untested Gundam and defeats one of the UE machines. Flit looks about ten years old, and one has the impression that this series is aimed at a young age-group. BTW, when I was a boy, “Flit” was a popular brand of insecticide, but that’s not the only reason I am unable to take this show very seriously.

Mirai Nikki (Future Diary) #1:
In the opening scenes, we see the hero wandering around school, obsessively texting a diary of trivia into his mobile phone, and evading the attention of bullies who dislike him partly because he doesn’t mix with his classmates. He has a rich fantasy life in which he talks to an all-powerful God in his bedroom. Unfortunately, a serial killer starts knifing people near the school, and then the God turns out to be real, and hands our hero a smartphone that predicts the future.
I agree that the hero clearly needs psychiatric help, but one can empathise with his fear of the bullies. The bully mentality (needing somebody they can feel superior to, and getting annoyed when the victim doesn’t follow the script) is depicted quite accurately here. This develops into one of the most riveting anime episodes I’ve seen for ages. For this guy, having that girl take an interest in him would be enough to scare him witless, but she keeps appearing in front of him as he tries to run away. What does she want? Is she connected to the serial killer? He dosn’t want to die horribly just yet. We suspect that in fact she just wants to talk to him, but it’s still thrilling. Actually she has a future diary too, and she wants to save him. It turns out that the future diaries predict deaths, and in the God’s deadly game, the last player to foil the predictions and survive, will gain supreme power.
Sure, it’s about as plausible as a political party manifesto, and seems set to cross off one killer every week, but it looks like an exciting entertainment.

Un-Go #1: This is a detective comedy thriller, set in a near-future Japan which has passed through some sort of crisis. A politician about to be arrested on corruption charges holds a party. Unfortunately he is murdered during the party. There are two rival teams of detectives, reclusive Kaishou with his computers and cameras and his daughter Rie, and the “Defeated Detective” and his odd assistant Inga. Rie attends the party, but her team is out-thought by the “Defeated Detective” and the unlikely killer unmasked. That’s a lot to fit into 25 mins without rushing, and this show could have used more time to set out its stall. However it’s a stylish-looking show and has promise.

Guilty Crown #1: In a near-future Japan which has had a plague crisis and is now occupied by a foreign force, the GHQ, Shu Ouma, a nerdy boy, explores a deserted site and comes across a wounded girl. She has a secret something which she insists he delivers for her. He recognises her as a well-known idol singer, and she urges him to take a cat’s cradle from her. He hesitates, mesmerised by her partial state of undress. GHQ thugs arrive and drag the girl away, while Shu cowers on a platform above. He does, however, deliver the object, and a band of insurgents led by a long-haired bishie collect it. Minutes later, the GHQ launch a general attack, ostensibly to cleanse the area of infection. While citizens are shot down in the streets and the insurgents counter-attack with a kind of mini tank, Shu somehow finds the escaping girl and tries to get her to safety. At this point it all goes a bit supernatural, with him taking the girl’s essence and going off to smite the GHQ mecha with a long swordlike thing. Phew. It’s all vividly animated and the action hardly ever stops. Wish-fulfilment rules OK. It looks good, which may be enough to persuade one to overlook a certain lack of plausibility. And did I mention before how the Fall anime come in pairs?

It’s time to have a look at the latest TV anime from Japan, starting with the best, and working downwards. Most titles are licensed for streaming.

Chihaya furu:
The heroine, Chihaya, is a beautiful, confident and strong-willed girl who is fascinated by the card-game karuta. In this, a poem is read out, and the players have to grab the card with the second verse on it. On starting at a new school she tries to start a karuta club, but with seemingly little success. She also re-encounters a boy, Taichi, who was in her class at elementary school and is rather disappointed to find that his interest in the game has waned. In an extended flash-back we learn how Chihaya became interested in karuta. A poor and unpopular boy, Arata, reveals his passion for karuta and fires Chihaya’s interest in it. The younger Taichi bullies Arata, angering Chihaya.
We are told that Chihaya, despite being a bijin is not popular with boys, but the first episode fails to show me why. Seemingly the immature and idealizing minds of teenage boys are to blame. Does Chihara like being sociable? This is left unclear. Chihaya’s sister is a model, but Arata tells Chihaya that she should have a dream for herself.
I’d never heard of karuta, so I Googled it a few days ago. Seems there are many karuta variants, and the poem-based 100-card game in the anime is one possible variant.
In the first week of the season, only with Chihaya furu did I experience the excitement of seeing a show I might actually want to watch.
Altogether, interesting, and no supernatural or ultra-violent content.
Streamed by Crunchyroll, inc. UK

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai (My Little Friend):
Hasegawa Kodaka is a half-English transfer student who has recently enrolled in a Japanese high school run by a religious order. Because he looks foreign and has difficulty in acting normal, his classmates think that he is a delinquent and want nothing to do with him. One day after school Kodaka finds a classmate named Mikazuki Yozora talking aloud to an imaginary friend in an empty classroom. Yozora is a sarcastic, aloof girl,has poor social skills, and turns people off easily. The two talk warily, and find common ground in that neither of them knows how to make friends, yet they both want to have friends so that they will be perceived as being more normal.

Yozora goes off and starts a “Neighbors” club, enrolling Kodaka without his knowledge, so that they can learn how to make friends without going through the social discomfort and problems of joining an existing club mid-term. But just as they get started with the club they are surprised as another student wants to join – a girl named Kashiwazaki Sena who is smart, beautiful, athletic, and popular with boys. It turns out that Sena wants to have a normal friendship with other girls, but instead scares off other girls because they feel that they can’t compete with her. But this is a club filled with strife as Kodaka doesn’t really care to be in it, and Yozora and Sena can’t stand each other and fight incessantly. [Thanks to Dave Baranyi for help with the synopsis :-)]

This immediately caught my attention because it is well-scripted and deals with a real teenage problem. Some people (and not just teenagers) just don’t have the knack of making friends easily, and teenagers are quick to reject anyone who seems a bit gloomy or different. It’s also quite funny, and it’s quite believable that two of the friend-seekers actually can’t stand each other. It’s less believable that Yozora (when she’s lively) is much prettier and more personable than some social outsiders I’ve come across (in fact she’s near enough as pretty as princess Sena.) One has to go to the anime “Princess Jellyfish” for a more forthright depiction of social failure girls. Sena is blonde, but this seems to be just anime hair-colour artistic licence, not an indication that she too is foreign.
An interesting show, and I’m eager to see how it develops.
(By the way, don’t bother watching the “episode 00” preview. It tells one nothing about the flavour of the TV show, beyond suggesting that there will be more female characters, which is scarcely an enormous surprise. A complete waste of time.)

Tamayura – Hitotose: A TV series based on a slice-of-life OAV series from last year. A girl whose father recently died takes up her camera again, and her mother decides to move them back to to her father’s hometown. A well-produced and well-meaning show, but the first episode could have done with a bit more substance and less tearful emoting from a minor character. A series about looking and photographing can work well as an anime, but one will have to see whether this one maintains one’s interest or not.

Phi Brain: Kami no Puzzle: The hero, Kaito, is a smart student at a private high school, but looks like a delinquent. In the opening scenes, he rescues an adult gamer who has become trapped in a life-threatening puzzle maze. He scorns the approaches of the school’s gaming club, but succumbs to the lure of a mysterious and dangerous challenge. Soon he is off attempting to solve a maze. This isn’t the world as we know it, but a magical world in which huge puzzles are constructed near schools.
On his quest, he is trailed by the violent Childhood Friend, Nanaho, who for once isn’t just there to bring him lunches and beat him up when he gets out of order, but provides vital puzzle-solving assistance.
We’ve seen these elements before, but this isn’t badly done, and it will clearly progress through the quest week by week, so may be worth checking further.

Persona 4 the Animation: Apparently this is a game adaptation. A fairly ordinary school student finds strange things happening around him. At midnight a TV set tries to suck him in, then in a TV showroom he and friend fall through a giant set into a very strange world where they are confronted by a puppet thing and then chased by menacing giant tongues, which the hero defeats by somehow summoning a Persona. It was hard to suspend one’s disbelief in the face of this rapid succession of implausibilities. I think you need to be familiar with the game to dig this, so I’m dropping it.

Fate/Zero: A prequel to Fate/Stay Night, which I never saw. The first episode has more talk than action, and I’m not a fan of this sort of elaborate supernatural combat drama, so will drop.
Streamed on Crunchyroll, inc. UK

C3: The hero receives a mysterious cubic box by post from his adventurer father. The box soon turns itself into a naked magical girl who proceeds to turn the boy’s life upside down. Fiya claims that she has been “cursed” and is looking for a cure. None of this is particularly original or well-done, but I thought the scene where Fiya insults the Childhood Friend was hilarious. In the ending preview there are hints of some heavy-duty baddies to be introduced. Whether the Childhood Friend has any special ability remains to be seen.
Not great but it had some tasteful nudity and a bit of panty-flashing, and some humour.

Kimi to Boku (You and Me): Slice of life school story, but this time with the startling novelty of a group of boys instead of girls. They spend the first episode trying to persuade one of their number to join a club. Not exciting, and the characters are not particularly interesting.
Streamed on Crunchyroll, inc. UK

This season the less appealing anime come in pairs:
Maken-Ki: An insignificant youth enters a high school which has just gone co-ed. He has just graduated from an all-boy school and thinks his luck is in. Even more so when he meets his former dojo sparring partner and finds that she is now his sempai and has grown into a beautiful, buxom, and micro-skirted girl. Like everyone else, she fails to point out that this is a school where the students fight each other in magical battles. To school, where our hero soon fall foul of a combative girl who clearly hates him. Forced to fight at the school entrance ceremony, our hero is rescued by a purring sexpot he has never seen before, who claims to be his fiancee. We can skip over the rest, except to point out that there are so many bouncing boobs, crotch shots, tight white panties and firm thighs in this that the startled viewer may briefly wonder if he’s having a sex fantasy himself.

and
Mashiro-Iro Symphony: In the first part of episode 1, the hero spends some time trying to locate his cute but apparently mentally defective sister, who has got herself lost on the way to the shops. This touching study of disability ends when she is rescued by another cutie, also lost, but in possession of a working cellphone. In the second half we learn that our hero is joining a girls’ school which is in the process of merging with another school and going co-ed. At the assembly, the new boys are confronted by the cutie, who announces that she is the headmistress’ daughter, is totally opposed to the merger, and will not welcome boys. This is an adaption of an ero-game, but the character designs for the girls are in a generic moe/shoujo style. I nearly forgot to mention the bouncing globe creature that looks alarmingly like the sinister Kyube from “Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica”, and the generic guy friend.

Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai: Two school classes battle it out. An appalling show full of senseless violence, super-powered nonsense and tired cliches. To summarise it and explain its many annoying defects would be to give it more column inches than it deserves. Avoid.

and
Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon (Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere): The human race has gone back into the past, we’re told, to re-create its history. Cue a school training camp and a lot of senseless violence, super-powered nonsense and crude racial stereotyping. There isn’t even any plot to summarise, as far as I can see. Avoid.

Several sequels:
Hunter x Hunter, Shinryaku!? Ika Musume, Bakuman 2nd Series, Working. I had enough of these first time around so I don’t need to check them again.
Hunter x Hunter is streamed on Crunchyroll.