Year In Review: N-Squared List
Just like last year, I guess some things have not changed. This could be a reference.
Missing Aoi Hana or What Makes (Some) Otaku Tick
I thoroughly enjoyed Aoi Hana during its broadcast the past season. It deserves more credit for being the enjoyable life-like drama that it was. People should talk about it!
It occur to me that one reason why I didn’t write much about it back then is because it just wasn’t very compelling. There’s some kind of emotional or psychological mechanism that failed to fully trigger when I think about Aoi Hana. In contrast to Taisho Yakyuu Musume, for example, there’s just something missing about Aoi Hana which doesn’t trigger the fanboy in me.
To draw a bigger parallel I think we have to go to a series or franchise that’s more engrossing, like the “When they cry” line of games. Or just the general murder mystery genre boom that seems ever ongoing in Japan.
But what is compelling doesn’t have to be so dramatic or intense, I think. Aoi Hana is dramatic enough, at any rate.
What exasperates my longing for this water-color-y motion picture is the new show, Sasameki Koto. It’s almost a subtle deconstruction of the yuri romance genre in how obvious everything is. It’s like because the whole point is trying to be subtle or tongue in cheek about it, the characters go through the motion like someone playing charades.
I exaggerate some, but it’s all so obvious that it just isn’t as intriguing. I applaud that the direction worked out so clearly. It isn’t so easy to be so clear without using words, even if that’s one advantage of the animation medium.
Tokyo Plays Dress-Up for Summer 2009 Anime
Summer anime for 2009 is a good batch. It’s not extraordinary, but I would like to think every season is unique to some extent. It’s just some are more so than others and so far 2009 has been a little more so than others.
I might have said this earlier, but I’ve been reading some light novels that are translated and commercially released in America. I found that there are a few formulaic things that attract me–the writing style, the setting, and the characters. Somehow it’s always one (or more) of these that keeps me reading. Rarely it’s the plot or the funky philosophical worldview (unless it’s wrapped around some context that has to do with the setting or character) or mystery or suspense that keeps me flipping pages after pages. I think that’s basically why I found Bakemonogatari (and Nisioisin in general) worth following at all? Shaft really did a bang-up job on capturing the strangely whimsical but serious nature of the characters.
Naturally, I actually look forward to that Otsuichi adaptation coming out sometime in the future. His writing in the second volume of Faust’s North American release is a refreshing read as well. […and I owe myself a review of that too…] He’s one of the few that I liked both in terms of style and with good, solid character development.
At any rate, it feels that this summer, I’m also watching some of the shows for exactly those things–setting, character, and some kind of flair (as always)… Perhaps the best example of this is Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. If they’re going to spend 5 seconds to tell you “zomg we have meticulously researched this animu” every episode, you bet it’s gonna be meticulously researched, right? And being BONES, that research is likely to come out through the super-detailed background, and character animation as they contort their bodies in…rescue work or some such. Unlike Rescue Wings, this one paints plain disaster rather than merely those who rescues, so the feeling is very different even both have a lot of slow moments. But more importantly, instead of calm seas of some JSDF air base, Magnitude 8.0 kicks off with some version of Neo Tokyo in the OP cuts, as if Bethesda’s next Fallout game is going to be set there. Meticulously detailed and loaded with both researched indeed…?
But if that wasn’t obvious (how could it not lol), perhaps this new new version of Tokyo in Taisho Yakyuu Musume satisfies your fancy better. For those of us watching it for the Taisho setting and the twist, episode one serves up a trip down to the good ol’ capitol way back to 1925. The same city that we may be familiar with is no longer anything but what you find in history books. Asakusa lulz. Perhaps as much as how the physical layout of Tokyo has changed so many years ago, so were the way people behaved. It’s almost refreshing to watch an anime where the girls acted like they were girls, and guys were guys? But wait, I think that’s where the show sort of falls off-balance a bit. The guys don’t all act like what I expected people in the 1920s do, at their age. Either that, or some of them are just really cheeky.
The main cast of characters, however, are fun enough to watch. It’s a team of serious fanboying seiyuu at work, how can I lose… The baseball aspect is not too shabby either, even with the glove goof. They went back to good o’ fingered stuff right after that episode.
A more modern rendition of Tokyo comes alive in Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou, which is something about knowing (or not) “magic,” which in this setting is like old style magic but cast via computer software. Don’t ask me how. But what makes it interesting is how the whole concept of dempa town, or Akihabara, become sea of magic when the creators decide to equate wireless computer systems with nexus of magical power. Tokyo here becomes a more familiar place, since the story takes place in modern time, but the canned results are…canned. This is definitely a show I watch for the setting; it’s another light novel adaptation, and it shows via the complex world the first two episodes have painted.
Shangri-la is still running, right? And it plops the signature Ikebukuro billboards into both holograms and rain-forested ruins? That show is so all over the place. At least it’s got interesting characters, which is probably the only way one could forgive it.
