Category: anime

Sora (center) and friends

New anime – broadcasting Oct 2007. Don’t blame me for the naff-looking grammar of the title – that’s how it appears on the video. This is one of those quiet slice-of-life anime – Sora Kajiwara is a shy girl who is a member of the school Art Club and enjoys drawing things in her sketchbook. The club is supervised by a rather eccentric teacher.

Amiable and pleasant enough, and quite funny, but the character of Sora failed to really interest me and I couldn’t really get into the musings about life and the artistic process.

Kurau & Christmas

This show, dating from 2004, is showing on Anime Network Uk (BskyB channel 195, new ep Sats 21.20, repeats have been Mon-Fri 21.30). It’s a sci-fi drama, with almost all-adult characters. Set around the year 2100, in a future world which runs on “blue” energy, and where Dr Amani is experimenting with another more powerful energy source. His 12-year old daughter is allowed to visit the lab on her birthday. Unfortunately something goes wrong, and Kurau is struck twin bolts of light. What remains looks like his daughter, but contains two entities with fantastic powers.

As the series progresses, we learn more about “reneks“. Kurau, now an adult, is accompanied by her “pair”, Christmas, who exactly resembles the 12-year old Kurau. Kurau and Christmas are in hiding, constantly on the run from the GPO (I think this stands for “General Police organisation”) intent on using her for laboratory experments. There are other people who have been damaged by renek energy experiments. Kurau tries to maintain contact with her father, and is aided by the ex-GPO agent, Doug.

Kurau is pursued by the obsessed policewoman Ayaka Steiger, who reports to the rather sinister Inspector Wong. Another mystery surrounds Ayaka, who is the sole survivor of the slaying of her police officer father and his family some years previously.

Ayaka Steiger

Plus points of the series, apart from some lovely character designs and melancholic theme music, are the strong bonds of human affection between the various characters – Kurau, Christmas and Dr Amami, between Doug and his son, such heartwarming sentiment being rare in anime, and the plentiful dramatic action in the form of battles and chases.

The series is being released on DVD from ADV in the US and UK.

Anime Central UK – the daily schedule is online again. See http://www.animecentral.com/

Anime Network – they still think that keeping the schedule a mystery will encourage viewing, unlike the BBC, Sky, ITV, C4, C5 etc who publish their schedules. Yeah right. By the way, I saw ep.6 of Kurau Phantom Memory showing on Thursday night. Kurau also shows in the Saturday “shoujo” night at 21.30 pm, but at a later episode number, so it looks like Thursday is a “shoujo” repeat night?

I rather like Kurau Phantom Memory, which seems to have more emotional depth than the average anime. It’s weird stuff, apparently about energy beings who have broken through from another universe, but the character designs are very good, also the English dub voice acting isn’t bad.

Yattaman & friend

From the obscurity of Polish satellite TV I recorded several episodes of Yattaman, which was part of the long-running Time Bokan anime of the 1970’s. In TB, Junko and Tanpei are the grandchildren of a mad inventor who produced a time machine, before vanishing from history. Also on his trail are the scandalously dressed villain Madame Margot and her two sidekicks. Successive sequels are a variation on this theme.

The high point of Yattaman is the weekly climax with a “Wacky Robot Duel of the Week” which is totally different each week, and in one example I recorded, the bad guys’ tank disgorges as sub-munitions a squad of tiny leotard-clad girls who give Yattaman a bit of a kicking, till his tank launches a squad of mechanical chickens which repel the dancers by pecking all of their clothes off. Enough to make the viewer fall out of his chair laughing.

As farcial anime goes, this sort of thing has been emulated more recently, but for sheer wacky inventiveness in each episode, it has never been surpassed.

Hasegawa returns

Moyashimon (Tales of Agriculture) Two young men from the country, Sawaki and Yuuki, enrol in an agricultural college in the fringes of Tokyo. Sawaki has a most unusual talent in that he is literally able to see microbes and mold spores! Their first day at college is rather disrupted by a police search for a missing student, Miss Haswgawa. In the college grounds Sawaki follows a trail of microbes and a bad smell to a grave-like hole in the ground, and alerts the authorities. However the person to seize a shovel and excavate the grave is an elderly tutor, who unearths a very dead seal stuffed with rotting seagulls, and explains that this is an Inuit delicacy known as “Kiviak”. (complete with details about vitamins)
At this point Miss Hasegawa herself shows up and complains about the tutor digging up her experiment.

One thing one can say about this anime is that it is different. How many others can you name that are set in an agricultural college, or have screen captions about yeasts, or inform you about revolting Inuit foods? Or have a character who can see microbes? (Not to mention Hasegawa, who is definitely a babe.)

Shugo Chara puts a fresh spin on a very familiar magical-girl theme. Schoolgirl Hinamori Amu has a reputation as a cool and rebellious girl, feared by bullies and school principals, and admired for her style by her classmates. However secretly she yearns to be ordinary. After making a wish she finds three brightly coloured eggs in her bed. After a moment of bewilderment and wondering if she has given birth to them (I am female, after all, she muses), she puts them in her schoolbag.

Soon she encounters the School Guardians, developing a crush on one of them, and discovers that one of the eggs hatches into a fairy, and that Amu herself can both transform and fly.

Shugo Chara is very funny and achieves the remarkable feat of giving a fresh twist to a very familiar set-up.

Shion no Ou is a much darker tale, about Shion, a schoolgirl orphan who is skilled in the Japanese board game of Shogi. Both her parents were brutally killed, and Shion, threatened by the killer, lost the power of speech. She enters a shogi tournament for women, and does quite well. However the player who beat her is revealed not to be what she appears to be, and at the end of the episode a stalker grabs Shion.

This is quite good and I want to see what happens in episode 2.

Miaka (from TV series)

A few weeks ago I got a complete cheapie set of Fushigi Yuugi. It tended to confirm my impression that this series has not stood the test of time particularly well. I was surprised, though, to discover how many OVA episodes came with it (13), and I have now had a bit of time to sort them out.

Labelled as “Oni” are the first OVA set (3 episodes) released in 1996, with an entirely non-Watase script, and generally regarded as rather poor, and the second OVA set of 6 episodes, from 1997. The latter is based on manga volumes 14-18, though much more loosely adapted than is the case with the TV series, and is generally regarded as being better than OVA #1 despite being an attempt, as in the manga, to spin out the story at the request of fans past its natural ending. Apparently these 6 OVA #2 episodes are 45 minutes each.

Then there is OVA #3 “Eikoden”, 4 episodes of 30 mins each, released in 2001, and adapted from a novel by Megumi Nishizaki, based on Yuu Watase’s characters. I’ve seen part of OVA #3 and not been much impressed by this attempt to drag the original characters out for a further airing.

There are also two TV specials from 1996, never released in the US, probably because they are mostly a recap of the TV series.

And if you want more, Megumi Nishizaki actually wrote 13 spin-off novels, and there’s a Fushigi Yuugi prequel manga, Fushigi YÅ«gi – Genbu Kaiden by Yuu Watase.

(for more about any of the above, see articles in Wikipedia.)

Failed suicide

“So Long, Mr Despair” is in colour, but it does have a lot of special effect scenes, and text pages, and other odd stuff. Teacher Itoshiki Nozomu has a hopelessly negative view of life, which frequently leads him to contemplate suicide. Student Fuura Kafuka, on the other hand, has an invincibly positive view of life, which sometimes leads her to deny the facts. Almost every character name contains a Japanese visual pun, for instance the three kanji of Nozomu’s name become the two-kanji zetsubo (despair) when compressed.

And, if you think the teacher is weird, meet the other students in episode #2 onwards. Every one of them seems to dysfunctional or have a major psychological disorder. One is a stalker, another sends vicious abusive e-mails, another, a blonde transfer student from abroad, has a split personality, part passive Japanese girl, part litiginous foreign harpy. When Kafuka rescues her from teetering on the edge of the roof, he sees her underwear, so she sues him for indecent assault.

You may be suspecting that this anime is not for the sensitive or the politically correct. If that doesn’t bother you, be prepared to enjoy an anime that’s a bit different and less anodyne than the usual stuff and has more of the uninhibited bite of the old OVA animes.

There hasn’t been much shoujo anime in the recent seasons, but I managed to find some.

Shuurei (right)

Saiunkoku Monogatari is a story set in the imaginary country of Saiunkoku. In the first series of 39 episodes, Shuurei Kou, a girl from an educated family that has fallen on difficult times, aspires to join the administration, a job normally forbidden to women, but is offered instead a position with potentially great rewards, as consort to the young and irresponsible Emperor, charged with teaching him to be a responsible ruler.

In the second series (also 39 eps) Shuurei has a position as Governor of the Sa (Brown) province. There are suggestions that she be married to a member of another prominent clan in an advantageous political union.

Superficially, Saiunkoku looks startlingly like a 12 Kingdoms side-story, with similar buildings, similar costumes, and even similar-sounding province names. However it’s rather lighter in tone, with romance and comedy as well as political intrigue. Saiunkoku is based on 12 light novels by Sai Yukino. I have only seen a couple of episodes of series 2, but it looks like an interesting anime. The first series is being released in the US on DVD.

Pretty Cure Max Heart: I’m sure I’ve seen an earlier series of Precure… In this one the reset button has in effect been pressed and the two Precure girls are starting a third year at junior high. The Queen of Light passes over and the Dark King has a resurrection. There is a hilarious scene where a giant robot thing materalises and chases the two girls down the street till they get a chance to transform into “Pretty Cure” and start throwing the robot about, eventually defeating it. Nice dresses too.

I’m no sure if this is quite my sort of thing – the target audience looks to be younger girls, but the costumes look good, the lead character is rather cute and it’s very amusing.

Sugar Sugar Rune – two young witchlets, Chocola and Vanilla are friends and also rivals for the throne of the Demon Kingdom. After being given their wands, they are sent off to the human world to collect the hearts of unsuspecting humans – the one who collects the most being the winner. On arrival, they meet their demonic mentor, Rockin’ Robin (a pop star), who enrols them in a regular school, and shows them how heart-collecting is done. The duo have contrasting personalities.

SSR is an action filled comedy principally aimed at younger girls.

Sasami Mahou Shoujo Club As a Tenchimuyo spin-off, this is essentially shoujo-by-title. Sasami is a hereditary magical girl who lives un-noticed among the human population, having been forbidden by her parents to use her magical powers. Her life changes when an new red-haired teacher called Washu arrives.

I don’t know much about this series, but you ought to see the scene where Washu takes a live winged rabbit and two large knives out of a bag and announces that she is going to demonstrate a dissection. (Series now licensed by Funimation. )

Kaze no Shoujo Emily: Another case of shoujo-by-title, though in this case it’s adapted from the novel “Emily of New Moon” by Lucy Maud Montgomery. In this version, Emily is orphaned when her father dies, and is taken in, rather grudgingly, by her late mother’s eldest sister. Emily is a highly imaginative child with aspirations to be a writer (rather reminiscent of Montgomery’s better-known heroine, Anne), and has a tendency to be rather outspoken. She is also very fond of her cat, Saucy Sal. A clash is thus set up between her and her chilly aunt, who dislikes mouthy little girls and hates cats.

Promising.