Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 47 · 12:18am Feb 8th, 2023
A good problem to have: I finished quite a few things in the last two weeks, and I really liked a lot of them, so I'm overflowing with feature-worthy items and already have enough to last the next couple of blogs. It's the other stuff I'm short on. Features this week are a series from last year, Healer Girl, and a Ghibli movie, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, plus four other items after the break.
Healer Girl is another one that I've had a bit of trouble classifying, and it's happened too much lately. >:V
From last year, this initially follows main character Kana, who's been accepted as an apprentice at a local healer clinic. There are already two apprentices there, Reimi and Hibiki, so they become friends. What makes this unique is what exactly a "healer" is. There are your standard kinds of physicians, and this is different.
Healers use the power of music to treat patients. While there is some psychological effect music can have in the real world, this is something more akin to magic, but its effects are limited. To a degree, it is like the real effects of music on healing, where it's about managing the psychological condition of the patient, but it can also be used to treat other ailments, typically more superficial ones or things that I guess would be more classified as therapy? Burns, arthritis, pain, anxiety... things like that. It can't do surgery, but it can be used to bolster the surgeons and make them more effective. That's kind of the picture of it.
They use only singing, though. Instrumental music does turn up some as accompaniment, but it's not strictly necessary, and it doesn't have an effect on its own. Singers do need to tailor their songs to the situation, so that requires learning a pretty big repertoire as well as improvising at times. In another oddity that often turns up in shows like this, all the healers are female. It never explicitly says that only girls can be, though a male one never turns up, leaving me wondering whether men aren't capable of the ability, it's rare in them, or there's no difference and the show just conveniently never showed any.
It kind of gets played both ways, that this is a profession that's been around a while, but even though it's got irrefutably demonstrable benefits, it's only starting to gain much traction as a complementary aspect to mainstream medical treatment. Healer clinics can also prescribe normal medications, though their pharmacologists also need to be experts in the drug-like effects of their songs, and there are also staff who compose new songs.
The plot is more slice of life, and as with any apprenticeship arrangement, it's all just working toward passing whatever requirements there are to be promoted or licensed, and of course there will be some crisis of confidence along the way. And like pretty much any anime, the solution to that crisis is simply to work harder.
Still, in execution, this was a nice series with a fairly unique concept. And about that execution... this series comes awfully close to being a musical. There are a couple of episodes that very much are. One's given a plot-related reason to be, but the others of that type are more like real musicals, where it's just accepted that normal conversation sometimes happens via bursting into song. Broadway musicals can take on many different styles, but I'd call this closer to a Disney sound. If you like that more classical side of musicals, then I suspect you'd like this a lot. I'm not one for musicals at all, but I still liked this, and the music was quite good, featuring some very nice performances by the VAs. The art was very good, too, just slightly different from other things I've seen. And I loved the different styles of sheet music each girl has hanging on her wall for decoration, especially the old-style four-line staff with neumes.
The music had better be good, given its prominence, and I would say this is a series about the music, not that music is just decoration to it. The girls have to find their inspiration to make it work, the way they have to specialize it to the specific application, the way it's at the core of what they do—all that makes it a series that is about the music itself, alongside the character arcs.
Rating: very good.
12 episodes, relevant genres: slice of life, music, fantasy (insofar as the healing effect is essentially magic).
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a Ghibli film (not Miyazaki) that I hadn't heard of until last year. I kept putting off watching it because it runs fairly long (a little over 2 hours 15 minutes, including credits) and so was harder to fit into one continuous spot in my schedule. More on that runtime in a minute.
It's an adaptation of a Japanese folk tale that's over a millennium old, which does have a couple of implications, the one that's germane here being that the same story has no doubt been done many times since. It's not going to dazzle you with its originality, for the most part, but then that's not exactly unusual. It will dazzle with its execution, which is what matters.
An old man from a poor mountain village makes his living cutting bamboo and weaving baskets with his wife. While in the bamboo forest one day, he sees one of the stalks take on a strange light, which goes into the ground and causes a new shoot to spring up. When it opens, there's a small person inside. By small, I mean miniature, not necessarily young. But as soon as he scoops her out to hold her, she turns into a regular-sized infant. He and his wife decide she'll be their personal princess and raise her as their own.
Within a few days, she's grown to look about 10-12 years old and enjoys running around the countryside and playing with the other children. Yet on another trip to the forest, her father sees the strange light again, this time gathering around the bottom of a bamboo stalk. When he cuts it down, he finds the stump full of gold nuggets. Soon after, a similar thing happens again, and the stump spews expensive bolts of cloth. He takes this as a sign from the gods that his daughter is indeed to be treated as a princess, and he needs to do whatever he can to make that happen. So he immediately travels to the capital and spends the gold building a mansion and establishing himself as a new-money noble.
And you can see where this is going. Kaguya (who isn't named that quite yet) liked her free life in the mountains and does not at all take to the endless set of restrictions now placed on what she can and can't do, plus she's expected to choose a suitor.
The most tragic figure here is her father. He genuinely loves her, but he's locked into feeling like advancing her among the nobility is the obviously required course of action, and if Kaguya will just go with it, then surely true happiness will result. Only that never happens, he's confused as to why she isn't happy, and only her mother is perceptive enough to interpret any of her daughter's behavior accurately, yet only ever puts her foot down about one thing to create a refuge for Kaguya.
At the peak of her misery, Kaguya makes a desperate wish that inexorably sets her fate. At the risk of being somewhat spoiler-y, this is not a story that has a happy ending, mostly bittersweet, but then given the age of the source material, those really old fairy tales often don't end pleasantly, including western ones.
So about the themes... this was hailed as a feminist piece, and I simultaneously agree and disagree with that. It's faithful to the source material, and in the time it was written, it's very unlikely to have been intentionally feminist. That doesn't mean that it can't be seen in a feminist light today, and it may well have been chosen for adaptation because of that. I think Kaguya's situation could have been applicable to any gender: the person being forced out of the life they enjoy. Though of course in that time and place, the demands placed on a girl would be more stringent than a boy, so there's definitely disparate impact, and the story does end up hinging on it being far more unfair to a girl.
I really appreciated that Kaguya had very limited supernatural abilities, or at least rarely chose to employ them. The only explicit uses were some projected dreams (though it's somewhat ambiguous whether they are dreams or real) and one use of invisibility that was well executed. Characterization was good all around. Of the background characters, a strange-looking girl who's Kaguya's attendant is surprisingly likable. The art style is beautiful yet simple, mostly looking like charcoal drawings with sometimes sparse coloring. Music was my favorite of any Ghibli film I've seen. As long as you like classical, it should impress.
The only real reservation I have is that runtime. It's quite long, and it feels stretched out in several places. I think it could have easily been cut below the two-hour mark, maybe even another 10-15 minutes below, without losing anything significant.
Rating: excellent.
Kaguya-hime no Monogatari, movie, relevant genres: drama, historical, fantasy.
Good thing I watched one of these by accident so I have four...
Kanamemo (13 episodes)—I believe here "memo" is meant in the sense of the English word. It's based on a 4-panel comic. This show was all over the place. Main character Kana is 13, and the opening of the first episode has her at her grandmother's funeral some years after her parents had died, so she has nobody now. And immediately after the funeral, men come to empty her house of all the furniture. She's effectively evicted with only the possessions she can carry in her backpack because reasons. She's 13. And none of this is played as maudlin. It's supposed to be amusing or at least sympathetic. So she wanders around town looking for a living situation and quickly finds a job posting that includes room and board, but decides the people who work there look weird, so she moves on. But everywhere else she tries isn't hiring, doesn't offer a place to stay, or is happy to take her on but needs to okay it with her parents, an obvious no-go. Which leads her back to the strange place, a newspaper office. They take her on gladly. You never see any sort of article writing or printing going on, so it seems like they only manage subscriptions and delivery there. Of the other five employees, three are in high school, one is in college, and one is even younger than Kana, yet she's the manager: her family owns the place, and despite her age, she's got good business sense. Most of the series is just slice of life things that go on around the office and in their free time, but there's also a fair amount of comedy and some romance. Two of the high school girls are dating (which gets a tad graphic at times), and Kana makes friends with a classmate who works for a competing newspaper. This girl, Mika, eventually seems to develop a crush on Kana. But then we come to the chief source of "humor" and much of the "romance": the college girl, Haruka, has a thing for little girls. She outright says she likes girls aged 7-15. The first day Kana shows up, Haruka fondles her ass and grabs her chest. She's 13. When they all go to a bath, she grabs Kana's chest again. She's 13. Whenever she gets a chance around the office, she'll try to touch Kana's butt and chest. SHE'S 13. This got really tiresome, if you couldn't tell, and the show explicitly says that it's okay because Haruka is a woman. The other characters only stop her when it personally inconveniences them or they see Kana is uncomfortable, not because there's something inherently wrong with it. And Haruka is an equal opportunity offender: she likes Mika as well, and will go after the young boss until threatened with a pay cut. Look, I know "haha, he's a pervert!" is low-bar humor common in anime, but this was even worse. I'm tempted to give it my lowest rating on that alone, but I'll try to be fair and say it was at least a pretty good character arc in the friendship development between Kana and Mika, plus Kana just trying to learn the business. Art was fairly good, music average. Rating: decent, relevant genres: slice of life, comedy, yuri.
Kanamewo (short film)—the site I often use got this confused with Kanamemo and listed it as a special episode of it, so I went into it in completely the wrong frame of mind. I don't know if I would have understood it anyway, as I read a summary of it that discussed things I doubt I would have picked up from the film alone. A lady is riding her bike home in the rain after work, and she sees someone naked and sitting against the fence in a construction site. She wraps the person in a jacket, takes her home, feeds her, and over time, nurses her to health. There's no dialogue, but the scenes cover all the things you'd expect to see in this kind of story: eating together, sleeping, bathing. And sharing a couple of deep kisses. This girl looks quite young, so coming out of Kanamemo and thinking it was a special episode of it, I found it disturbing. It's a completely different animation style, though, and I verified afterward that it's its own thing. But it's hard to retcon my brain. So... here's the actual story, that I don't know if I would have been able to decipher anyway. The young girl is actually a tree goddess, so affected because the construction has cut down the tree she comes from. She can survive as she lives with the woman, but her health continues to deteriorate, either because it just takes time for the construction to hurt her or because of further damage to the stump. They apparently have a relationship, but it ends with the goddess needing to return to her roots, as it were. Not a bad story, and at only five minutes long, it's an effective bit of storytelling. Art is pretty good, if simplistic, and the music is a single song that's also pretty good, though maybe sounds like it's played backward? Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, romance.
Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinju (Flourishing Shouwa—Rakugo Double Suicide, 25 episodes + 2 OVAs)—this was recommended by a friend. I haven't seen the OVAs, which were made before the series. I've seen one source use Descending Stories as the English title of the whole series and one that says it's only the subtitle of the second season. It's a parallel to the literal meaning of rakugo: fallen words. So first off, what is rakugo? I'd never heard of it before. It's a Japanese art form, and the first thing that comes to mind as a western equivalent would be one of those plays billed as a one-man show. They both involve a single performer who's not in a costume and doesn't have a bunch of props who speaks directly to the audience. The performer may use gestures to enhance the story and change their mannerisms and tone of voice to signify different characters. But in rakugo, it's not observational humor or anecdote. It's an actual story, and if what appears in the show is typical, they're most often humorous and bawdy, but some are spooky. Also in rakugo, the performer remains seated the entire time and is allowed only two props: a folding fan (used primarily for sound effects or pointing) and a small cloth. As to plot... at the beginning, a person who's just been released from prison had been very affected by a rakugo performance while he was there, so he goes looking for the performer, begging to be taken as an apprentice. The first season then flashes back to when that performer was just becoming an apprentice himself and competing with a colleague for their master's favor to become masters themselves (which both can do) and inherit the master's name (which only one can do). There are the predictable struggles and a love interest, and some of that ends tragically. Then the second season pops back to the present, when the former prisoner is going through his own apprenticeship amid a time when the art form itself is coming to a crossroads. I think how much you enjoy the show will largely hinge on how much you end up liking rakugo, since performances of it take a significant amount of the screen time. They just didn't land that well with me. That may be because humor can be very specific to cultures. I read a few transcriptions of real traditional rakugo stories (several of which are used in this show), and I didn't find any of them outright funny. Given that they're real ones and thus time-tested and well regarded, I'm probably just not the audience for this. I do appreciate it for the labor of love it must have been, so I'll rate it a tad higher than I might have otherwise. Art is good, and the music is pretty good, too, mostly evoking early- to mid-20th century soft jazz. Not their fault, but I got severe dissonance from the first season's closing song sounding incredibly similar to the closing song of Mike Tyson Mysteries. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, romance, art, historical.
Warlords of Sigrdrifa (Sen'yoku no Shigurudoriva, "Battle Wing Sigrdrifa," 12 episodes)—this was similar to The Magnificent Kotobuki, which I reviewed previously, in several ways. When Earth is threatened by some sort of mysterious and powerful invading force of unknown origin and no known weapon has any effect on them, the god Odin steps in and offers to grant a select few girls the powers of his Valkyries. Instead of horses, they use World War II-era planes that are supercharged enough to hang with modern jets. It's unclear whether each Valkyrie picks her own airplane which subsequently gets imbued with those abilities or the planes are created independently and just given to them. Each one has a unique special weapon, and at least one of them has altered what that weapon is at some point. It's odd that humans have no idea who Odin is, nor do they have a recollection of any Norse mythology, which ends up being a plot point. They pick a nice variety of vintage aircraft to use, some of them obscure, and they're drawn very accurately. As to how they're used... it takes many, many liberties with realistic aerial combat. Not bad on action, though. There's a fair amount of fan service, which gets abruptly conspicuous at times, though a lot of it is concentrated into one strange random comedy episode. The plot mostly follows a particular Valkyrie named Claudia, who's carrying some baggage related to survivor's guilt as she gets reassigned from Europe to a squadron in Japan and tries to fit in. Art is high quality, music is average. Rating: decent, relevant genres: drama, action, fantasy.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
Last 10:
vol. 37 here
vol. 38 here
vol. 39 here
vol. 40 here
vol. 41 here
vol. 42 here
vol. 43 here
vol. 44 here
vol. 45 here
vol. 46 here
As an aviation buff, I'll have to give Warlords of Sigrdrifa a look.
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You might want to check out The Magnificent Kotobuki too, then. Warlords has a better story, but Kotobuki has more realistic combat.
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Oh sure, just keep adding to my to-watch list.
Warlords of Sigrdrifa started out pretty good for me. I liked the idea. The swimsuit episode was one of the funniest things I saw that season, but it was so out there that I thought surely it had to be a character's dream. Through the season, there was a tone shift at least twice. I remember being disappointed by the sadness and interpersonal conflict when we could be having more magic airplane battles. Late in the season, the production value started to fall off. I was also fatigued by the constant trope of "men have to make heroic sacrifice for women despite said women being magical girls."
What I really wanted was a full series of Third Aerial Girls Squad, but I guess Sigrdrifa was okay.
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Yes, definitely a series that had my interest up front but it waned later. At least it's fairly short.