Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 49 · 11:24pm Mar 14th, 2023
Some oddball stuff this week—I would have had enough for a post last week, but I discovered a series I'd finished had 2 sequels and several OVAs/specials, so... next time for those. Featured items are a recent series, Blue Period, and a movie from a decade ago, Wolf Children, after the break, plus four others that all rated as pretty good.
Blue Period is another one of those manga adaptations that came out while the manga was still going (and that remains the case), which typically will handle that only one of a couple ways. This is one of the better options, where it doesn't necessarily come to a strong conclusion and serves more as a snapshot. That can sometimes leave a series feeling like it doesn't give any sort of closure, thematic or plot-wise, but it's treated well here.
Yaguchi is one of the better students at his high school, so he's on track to do whatever he'd like in college, though he's still nebulous about what. When he sees a girl struggling to lift her art supplies up the stairs, he helps her take them to the art club room and is immediately enthralled by the painting she has there. She encourages him to give sketching a try, and it turns out he's pretty good at it. Thus the art club gains another member.
Yes, he'll decide he wants to pursue art as a career, and his family can only afford a public university, yet the only public art school is incredibly competitive. So in addition to his work in the art club, he enrolls in prep classes geared toward that school's entrance exam.
That's kind of the plot you'd expect, right? It works fine, though it's inconsistent at deciding how much talent he has. He's intimidated by the more experienced students, and his instructors do seem to treat him gently at times, easing the newcomer in. Yet when it comes to do-or-die time, he always succeeds where some of them fail. To a degree, that's not the best direction for a plot to go. I'm in a mind of something like Food Wars! where you never doubt that Soma is gong to win. The strength here is that it all comes across as authentic, what with the technical technicalities of being an artist. No doubt this is informed by the manga's author, who wrote from experience, but it's not enough if a dispassionate writer is handling the anime. I suspect they either had their own art experiences or consulted artists to make it ring true. Not that I'd necessarily know, since I'm no artist, but it's not an obvious fake, and it doesn't tiptoe around the edges of the topic and hope you don't notice it's superficial.
But that's only half the story. The side characters are what make this shine. There's Yaguchi's circle of friends at the beginning, who are given a typical thug look, but they're all genuinely nice. There's the other members of the art club. There are the other students in his prep class. Some of them don't get much screen time, but so many still get vivid characterization despite their limited time on stage. I could list off a dozen characters that I really liked, and several of them have some surprising twists to them. There's only one that I wish had seen some more closure, an art club member named Ryuji, but I'll grant that the manga itself probably hasn't gotten there yet.
Like I do for music-centric series, I also look at whether this is actually about the art or if the art is just carried along to serve the plot. When the main character is the one creating the art or music or whatever, it's usually going to be the case that the series really is about that endeavor, and that's true here. It's the medium through which Yaguchi discovers who he is and who a lot of his friends are.
The cover story is average, but the layers beneath it are quite good. It comes to a soft conclusion, but enough of one that it may end there. Still, I wouldn't be surprised to see it get a second season, if not for Netflix seemingly never following through on any. Art is a good quality modern series as this is just over a year old, and the music was rather good too.
Rating: very good.
12 episodes, relevant genres: art, drama, coming of age.
Wolf Children starts out with a charming opening about college girl Hana developing a soft spot for a mysterious stranger, and it does a good job of showing their relationship developing through anecdote, which makes the real-life time frame of it reasonable while still able to keep a fast pacing to avoid letting it drag. Once it's clear things are getting very serious, the guy, who is never named, reveals to her that he's a werewolf, which involves much different logistics here than it normally does. The most important part of that is he can completely control changing forms.
He says he's the last of his kind, at least the wolf-human hybrid ones, implying some are totally wolf, and I'm hoping just the occasional offspring turned out that way rather than, say, the original progenitors being a human and a wolf. Anyway, they have two children who both prove to be like him. Then he dies in an accident (gee, who could have seen that plot twist coming?), leaving Hana to raise the kids alone. She has to drop out of college, and the money from her part-time job won't stretch far enough. So she takes the opportunity to live in dirt-cheap housing way out in the middle of nowhere so they can be self-sufficient and avoid prying eyes.
A few things hold this movie back a little, and this is one of them. The dad does impress on Hana that she can't expect humans to get along with werewolves, and that's a standard enough thing that I can at least buy it, but it was short on evidence, which limits its impact.
Hana does eventually settle in with the rural community, but some questions do inevitably come up, like why her kids don't attend school. So she carefully works with them on how they need to behave in public to hide what they are. This aspect of the movie was its best. It was interesting and touching how they have to learn to suppress their nature, and Hana feels so inadequate as their only guide through it. The action mostly stays with her daughter Yuki but occasionally switches over to her son Ame as they both find different paths. Maybe it's just because I identified with Yuki's emotions about it better, but I found her journey more compelling than Ame's. Maybe it's because his path didn't involve as much turmoil.
I was pleased that they didn't continually play Yuki as the outsider; she actually fits in very well at school and makes several good friends (though there were also some nice comic moments about her having a very different mindset than them), and when a new boy transfers in partway through the year, they strike up an interesting relationship as well.
The journey getting there was nice, but the movie's weakest part was its ending. Well, the very beginning as well, but for a related reason: the whole thing is narrated by Yuki after she's grown, so the framing from the beginning is linked to how it ends. I'm obviously not going to spoil it, but there were several plot threads, and really none came to a satisfactory conclusion. Each thread would cover the disposition of each main character. For Hana, the concern is whether she'd feel isolated and alone in the long run, but neither child is in a position where they couldn't see her plenty. For Ame and Yuki, the movie sure carries a theme of acceptance, but no such resolution happens. Well, for one of them, yes, but on a small scale, certainly nothing approaching societal acceptance. And the way it happened felt backward, given that it had been drilled into both of them to keep their secret, and anyone who truly understood them would know that. It's far more palatable to gently say you know than to let them agonize over whether to admit it.
The art was pretty, and it seems like one of those that occasionally does the art on top of photographs, but mostly in the early parts. Music was quite good. Given how the ending felt wishy-washy, I debated how to rate it, but the sweetness and the interesting path leading to that ending did push it over the "very good" line.
The writer/director also did one or both of those tasks on two other movies I rated very highly (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Belle), plus one other I've seen and thought was pretty good but that most people seem to like more than I did (Summer Wars).
Rating: very good.
Okami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki, "Wolf Children Ame and Yuki," movie, relevant genres: drama, fantasy.
Good crop of extras this time, as I liked them all.
Justice League vs. the Fatal Five (movie)—this movie has less to do with the title than you'd think. I don't watch much superhero stuff, so like any of these movies, I haven't heard of many of the lesser known characters, yet I still found this easy to follow. In the future, three villains stage a jailbreak and attempt to travel back in time to unite with the other two of the titular pentad. One hero manages to go with them, and what serves as an interesting angle, he suffers from mental illness, which he handles fine with medication, but it's not available in the past. When he gets to the past, of course he'll team up with the Justice League to defeat the villains, and for all that the fights are good, it's still a very predictable plot on that front. Really, it's more about the character arcs. That hero from the future, Star Boy, is obviously one, but also near the beginning of the movie, we're introduced to Jessica Cruz. Many of you will recognize her by name. I did not. She's suffering from PTSD, and then it gets revealed (to those who don't already know) who she is. And she's very relatable. Her arc nicely paralleled Star Boy's, and they find an affinity for each other. Then there's also a small character arc for Mars Girl, who is at least of the same race as the Martian Manhunter and for all I know may be a relative of his. She was pretty endearing, and she's serving an apprenticeship period under Batman. They make nice foils for each other. So as an action plot, it's pretty average, even bordering on anticlimactic, but as a character piece, I liked it. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, drama.
Pantheon (8 episodes)—these are double length, and it's an an American anime-inspired series that aired on AMC+. It looks very much like other shows of the type, so things like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power or Invincible. Unfortunately, this doesn't come to a conclusion, and the planned second season was cancelled. High school girl Maddie had a dad who was a hotshot programmer, but he died some time back. She's bullied at school, which feels like a shallow grab for pathos, as it's not relevant to the plot and barely comes up again after the first episode. She starts to receive chat messages that she's convinced are from her dad, and she discovers he's had his consciousness digitized. This is going to hit a lot of the same points as Serial Experiments Lain. She does find her father and a few others like him, and of course it's all due to some conspiracy that'll divide the interested parties into factions. The more it became about politics and intrigue, the less interested I became. The promise of Maddie finding her father still alive and exploring the possibilities of it seemed an interesting draw. It does ask some thoughtful questions, and if you're a fan of intrigue, you might like it more than I did. Just be prepared for the lack of a resolution. There's some laziness in the animation details. For instance, it mostly takes place in California, and in one episode, a highway exit the characters take is indeed there, but when they got on the highway just minutes before, the signs were for I-95: Washington/National Harbor and US 50: Alexandria/Ft. Belvoir. That's across the country, near where I live. Art is very good, and the music is pretty good, too. Rating: good, but lower in that range, relevant genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller.
Sweetness and Lightning (Amaama to Inazuma, 12 episodes)—another iyashikei series recommended by ferrets. The main characters are a widower, Kohei, who works as a teacher and his young daughter Tsumugi. After his daughter makes an offhand comment one night, he realizes they're always eating pre-made food on the run, and he decides he wants better for her, so he wants to learn to cook good food for her. They go for one last meal out before vowing to start that, and it ends up being at a small restaurant owned by the mother of one of his students, Kotori. The mother is somewhat of a celebrity chef, which gets played both ways. It means she's always engaged with outside projects and is never at the restaurant, so it's always closed. Not once during the series is there a paying customer. That seems odd. But without any demands on the kitchen, she gives Kotori her permission to use it for whatever, and Kohei's family comes over frequently. It's a learning experience for both, as Kotori hasn't cooked that much before and has an odd fear of knives. It's interesting seeing the kinds of foods they make, and that's really all there is to it. It's one of those slice of life things without a plot. It's fun enough, but you have to ignore the economics of how the restaurant is never open, and while Tsumugi is as cute as you'd expect, she does get bratty at times. Whenever she throws a temper tantrum, she gets her way, though that does get somewhat resolved by the end. I was also prepared to say it got a bit dicey, what with a teacher constantly hanging out with one of his students after hours, plus bring in two more with the same age gap: Kohei's best friend and a girl Kotori knows whose parents run the market that supplies them. However, they do their due diligence in clearing everything with everyone's parents ahead of time, so it's all on the level. It took me a while to realize where the "lightning" part of the title comes in, but it's a search engine where they look up recipes. Art was good, music average. Kind of borderline for me, but it was cool to see numerous kinds of food I hadn't heard of before, so I'll bump it up a bit. Rating: good, relevant genres: slice of life, cooking.
The Flowers of Evil (Aku no Hana, 13 episodes)—this was really strange. Middle school student Kasuga is an avid reader, a trait he inherited from his father, and his favorite book is the titular collection of French poetry. He's infatuated with a girl in his class named Saeki, but she's popular and probably out of his league. When he's alone in the classroom one evening to retrieve a forgotten book, he steals something of hers on impulse, and to his dismay, he was seen by a classmate, a girl named Nakamura, who's somewhat of a thug and is intimidating enough that she frequently insults the teacher without him doing anything about it. To her delight, she's finally found someone she considers worthy of taking under her wing to rise above all the sheep, but from his perspective, she's blackmailing him into doing things he's uncomfortable with. At least she seems to be helping him get together with Saeki. Maybe. It does feature Kasuga making some monumentally dumb decisions and bypassing easy ways to get out of trouble, but let it be said that middle school boys are stupid creatures. I say that as a former one. Though it did stretch credulity that, for instance, Nakamura was able to strip him and put different clothes on him against his will. Yeah, this gets a bit graphic at times, but I think the profanity in the subtitles is exaggerated some. The series only covers part of the manga—while I think it does come to a satisfactory if soft conclusion, the finale is just confusing, showing a bunch of disconnected flashes from future events in the manga, to the point I had to read a plot summary of the manga to understand any of it, and I'm not sure it comes to any stronger a conclusion for it. In the end, the central message is basically that everyone has their kinks, it's perfectly fine, and you can find people who will be tolerant of them if not share them. Art is rotoscoped, meaning they filmed it as live action and then by hand or by computer traced each image in the video to turn it into animation. The result is simultaneously very smooth and realistic in shape and movement while being overly simplified in detail most of the time. It's an interesting effect. The background music is quietly atmospheric, while the opening theme is almost absurdist, done in a few different styles, and the ending theme is just annoying. The story does a good job of keeping up suspense as you wonder just how scary Nakamura is. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, romance, psychological, coming of age.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
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vol. 48 here
Ah, Wolf's Children and Aku no Hana. Never seen either, but I've at least heard of them! :D
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Y'know, it finally clicked with me why I liked The Flowers of Evil. It has a very similar dynamic as Heathers.
I'm in a weird place where I feel like I've seen Wolf Children, but am almost sure I haven't.
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I know that when it was newer, there were gifs circulating online, showing off the titular children and their transformations, which are adorable af.
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It just occurred to me that you actually have a wolf child.
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Yes, with Wolfmother.