Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 48 · 11:24pm Feb 21st, 2023
Yay for a couple of movies giving me a quick infusion of additional things to review! Featured items this time are a series from just a couple of years ago, Darwin's Game, and another from a decade ago that had a lot of big names involved, Kids on the Slope, plus four other good to not good things, after the break.
Darwin's Game is a genre I haven't watched a ton of, so I might be giving it too many points for originality. It certainly seems like the most obvious way the plot will go, given the premise.
One of Kaname's friends goes missing, but Kaname later finds an invitation from him to join a mobile app called Darwin's Game. When another friend finds out, he warns Kaname never to use it, promising to explain why later. But Kaname doesn't wait, and by activating it, he's compelled to join a survival-style battle tournament. And not having the first clue how any of this works, he gets drawn into his first match.
The first friend is confirmed as dead, and the second one also gets killed while trying to help Kaname during this fight, but through sheer luck, he wins against a guy notorious for killing rookies and starts to discover how the special power assigned to him works. His win draws the attention of several people, most notably a girl who goes by Shuko and is undefeated. She immediately decides she's in love with him, but thankfully, that doesn't come into play much. More to the point, she doesn't want to see him killed and so has to forfeit the match she challenged him to, making Kaname her only defeat. Now everyone's gunning for him, but it's not just the girls who seem captivated by him, and he forms an alliance with a crew of interesting characters.
Shuko may be my favorite character. She is boilerplate in a lot of ways, but I liked her power, and her character design was great. I also really appreciated one named Rein, who aligns more with my preferred strategy of hit and fade. Her power is pretty cool, but people have natural abilities as well, and hers is tactics, even frequently skewed toward knowing when to retreat. As much as anime tends to carry themes of not giving up the fight, and just pushing harder will always get you to win, hers was a refreshing theme of running away from trouble being a valuable option that can be skillfully executed.
There are a few reveals along the way, and to a degree, this reminded me of a somewhat obscure series from a few years ago called Magical Girl Site, which I've reviewed previously. There's some sort of overarching organization, and the more the protagonist players learn about it, the more they decide to put a stop to the whole system, though it's a little less sinister in this series, possibly even a necessary evil.
There is some immediate antagonist they have to deal with, but none of that pie-in-the-sky stuff goes anywhere by the time the series ends, and it's not clear it'll continue. Sometimes manga adaptations do just leave the bigger problem open-ended like that. Another series I enjoyed but suffered from the same thing finally announced after a two-year delay that they would be making another season, but we're now at almost a three-year gap for this one, so I have my doubts it'll continue, and I don't know that it'd significantly change my opinion of it if it did, provided they don't pull a Promised Neverland and completely waste what they started. Art was great, and the music was largely good, too.
Rating: very good.
11 episodes, relevant genres: action, dark, fantasy.
Kids on the Slope sounds like it'd be about skiing or snowboarding, but the title just refers to the hill near school that all the students have to walk up and down. I added this to my watch list at the same time as Terror in Resonance a couple months ago because both had a potentially great teaming of MAPPA, director Shinichiro Watanabe, and composer Yoko Kanno. Plus this is a series focused on jazz, which is very much in Kanno's wheelhouse.
Main character Nishimi has transferred to a new school where he doesn't know anyone. On his first day, the class rep Ritsuko takes him around, and she's pretty nice. Another helpful classmate warns him not to run afoul of a thug named Sentaro. Nishimi has occasional panic attacks, and one sets in that sends him running for the roof to catch his breath, and he unwittingly runs into Sentaro there.
He gets a bad rep, though. Sentaro and Ritsuko have been friends since they were very little, and Nishimi discovers they all have a love for music. Except while Nishimi is a good classical pianist, the rest are into jazz, and Sentaro is determined to convert him.
The show takes place in the 1960s, right in a golden era of jazz. Nishimi does develop an interest, and along with a couple of other people who hang around with them, they like to hold informal jam sessions.
Of course love interests will come up, and at first it smacked of crisscrossed matchmaking tasks, but it quickly unwinds into one of those love chains were A likes B but B likes C but C likes D and so on. I appreciated the realistic and relatable situations that came up within the ebb and flow of all these relationships. Several of the background characters really shine. I also found it interesting that Sentaro and Ritsuko are Catholic, though Ristuko's father doesn't seem to be, and it's really no more than a background detail to add some color to the story.
So, about that music... a lot of the great jazz scores Kanno has written were for wackier shows. This one's more laid-back, and she does it justice, but it's less flashy than you might expect. A lot of the music is made up of well-known jazz standards, so things Kanno didn't write. It is all good music, but it's not her typical style. Art was pretty good, a little older-looking than it actually is, but they did a good job capturing the characters, particularly for Ritsuko, who very much looks the part of a gawky teen who hasn't quite grown into her frame yet.
It's one of the better teen romances I've seen anyway, but definitely recommended to people who like jazz, which I do, so that put it over the line for me as a feature-worthy series. Is it about the music itself? Not really, if that's what you're looking for. It's a central passion for all the major characters, but it only drives the plot in a couple of specific ways.
Rating: very good.
Sakamachi no Apollon, 12 episodes, relevant genres: slice of life, romance, music, coming of age.
And I'll add a plug here for a series I already featured, Way of the Househusband (Gokushufudou). They unexpectedly posted a second season back in December, and if it goes the way season 1 did, there may be another 5 episodes showing up soon. It's just as funny as ever.
Two movies, two series, one of each that's fairly recent and going back a bit.
Fireworks (Uchiage Hanabi, Shita kara Miru ka? Yoko kara Miru ka?, "Skyrockets, Watch from Below? Watch from the Side?", movie)—from 2017, directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, who's pretty prolific, but I've seen very little of his work. It starts with a girl named Nazuna who seems very melancholy. She finds an odd-looking glass object on the beach. She's languishing around the pool when two boys, who both secretly have crushes on her, have to take their turn cleaning the pool, so she challenges them to a race, knowing she can win, and she intends to ask whoever finishes second to her to go to the fireworks show with her. The boys had been arguing with their friends about whether fireworks explode in a spherical shape or a disc shape, so they all want to go anyway. Norimichi loses the race but finds that Nazuna dropped the glass object. He later discovers that he can use it to go back in time and redo things. It's a very similar gimmick to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, but in this case, it seems like he can only return to certain set points, and each time he tries to influence the outcome of things, the world takes on more of a fantasy feel. He tries to understand what has Nazuna feeling down and help her through it, but it felt like it was never concrete enough. Do the increasing fantasy elements indicate it's just a temporary thing they can explore but can never actually change the real world? Or they could potentially stay there knowing it wasn't real? It's way too vague, and when the stakes hinge on that, it saps the story of its power. The ending was likewise open and nebulous about what it means. It's heartfelt in the early going, but ended up being awfully disconnected the further in it went. Not a bad watch, though, as the music was good, and the art was excellent. All that seems to jive with what critical reviews it's gotten. Rating: good but inconsistent, relevant genres: drama, romance, fantasy.
Injustice (movie)—I'm never quite sure what to do with a lot of these Justice League movies. I didn't include Batman: The Animated Series, and as it is so closely tied to that, I didn't include Mask of the Phantasm. The original Justice League series either, since it also came soon after. But the rest all came after anime had gotten a much stronger foothold here and seemed to emulate that style more. Eh, it's a judgment call. Anyway, I was warned this wasn't a good movie. And I watched it because it was on Toonami. I don't follow DC enough to know who most of the minor heroes are. Joker kills Lois Lane and destroys a city, making Superman decide he's had enough, so he kills the Joker and effectively declares martial law. The Justice League splits over who supports him and who doesn't. The fights are fine, and the plot wasn't awful, except for a couple of dumb developments, but characterization was all over the place. Also, there's a time and place for alternate universe shenanigans, but the application of it here is little more than to say none of what happens actually matters because it's in some theoretical parallel universe that doesn't affect us, so it's like the worst use of the "it was all a dream" trope, in that there are no consequences to any of it, so it may as well not be canon. And I say that tongue in cheek as a fanfic author, since our stuff is by definition not canon, though the intent for a lot of it is that it could fit with canon. Music was okay and art was good, right in line with all these movies. Rating: meh, relevant genres: action, dark, drama.
Kiniro Mosaic (Golden Mosaic, 12 episodes)—adaptation of a four-panel comic. Shinobu's parents are friends with a British couple, so they figure she'd like to go spend a couple of weeks visiting them in England when she's on a school break, just for the experience of living abroad. Their daughter Alice is timid at first, but soon warms up, and they become good friends. A couple of years later, when Shinobu is starting high school, Alice shows up by surprise and says she's going to attend with her. Well, she did send a letter ahead, but Shinobu can't read English. Alice soon joins Shinobu's circle of friends, and not long after, her best friend from England, Karen, arrives for the same purpose. Mostly it's light comedy and slice of life for what they all get up to, and the usual running gags for the situation: everyone is fascinated by the blonde foreigners, even more so for Alice since she's small, everyone secretly wants Shinobu's favor, and one of Shinobu's Japanese friends pines after the other. It's interesting to hear the VAs try to speak in English—they largely sound closer to American, but there are definitely places where it seems they were aiming for a British accent, though for a fairly aristocratic girl, she sounds rather cockney. Pretty run of the mill series for the genre, at least until the final episode, where there's a really sweet fairy tale. The humor is mostly light, but there was one funny gag about how their different cultures regard Christmas. Art is pretty good, music average. Rating: decent, relevant genres: slice of life, comedy.
Love Flops (Renai Flops, 12 episodes)—this just ended in December. For some things, the summaries I read fall far short on conveying the tone a series will take. After seeing his horoscope claim some oddly specific things about how his day will go, Asahi encounters five people on his way to school, and after the initial meetings, they all arrange to see him again after school, when they all declare they're in love with him. That's all that the summary I read said about it. That is what happens, but it's hard to tell what mood it will strike. Well, each of those encounters is on the gratuitous side. For example, he literally runs into a Japanese girl named Aoi, resulting in them crashing to the ground with his face buried in her crotch and her undies blowing away in the wind, as they're the string bikini type that actually have to be tied. The other four go similarly, too, with one exception I'll get back to in a moment. They each decide he's an undesirable, but then it turns out four of them are new transfer students in his class and the fifth, a little older, is the teacher. Then they declare their love. Supposedly his father arranged for all this so that his son could pick one to marry, and until he decides, they're all going to live with him and throw themselves at him. Oh, and that fifth person? A guy, because Dad didn't want Asahi limiting his horizons. Fair enough, but their first encounter is Asahi, already weary of meeting several of them, declining to save the guy from a dog attempting to literally ass rape him, then later deciding he couldn't abide leaving him in the lurch and having the dog turn on him instead, this time not attempting but succeeding. I don't like harem shows. I would have stopped watching right then, but I got spoiled on What's Really Going On, which led me to think there would be a payoff. There were clues scattered about as to what the twist would be, but I failed to see them. It does eventually turn into a fairly heartfelt ending, though still a pretty common plot development that doesn't stand out more than any number of other shows doing the same thing. Art was very good, though with tons of fan service, and the music was fairly good. If that's your kind of humor, then give it a go. It's probably pretty good for the genre. If you don't, then there's still a good story, but it's a grind getting there. Rating: decent, relevant genres: romance, comedy, drama, sci-fi.
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. 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
vol. 47 here
Oooh, Kids on the Slope looks like it my be my kind of jam. I shall add it to my watchlist.
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Happy watching!