Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 51 · 10:35pm May 2nd, 2023
I recently retired a number of things that I was holding out hope of getting another season for, so that replenished my stash of reviews a little. Features this time are a series from three years ago, Dorohedoro, and a movie from four years ago, Her Blue Sky, plus the usual pretty good or not good stuff, including a recent one that just finished back in the winter, after the break.
Dorohedoro doesn't come to a conclusion, but it's been three years since season 1, the manga ended before the show even started, and there's been no hint of it getting continued. It's a fascinating piece of world building. Humans live in one world, essentially a run-down slum, and violently resist any sorcerers they find, who look human but are from a different parallel realm and prey on humans as subjects for their experiments. There's a third plane where the demons live, and sorcerers aspire to become demons. Each sorcerer has a signature power, and their magic is enabled by a resource that can be bought and sold according to whether or not their own bodies produce more than they need.
The action follows a human, Caiman, and his friend, Nikaido. Caiman was attacked by a sorcerer and turned into a lizard creature, which had the side effect of making him immune to magic and nearly invulnerable to physical damage, but he'd like to return to being human, so he's tracking down any and all sorcerers until he finds the one who changed him so he can have it undone. It's amusing how it happens: he clamps his jaws down on a sorcerer's head, then a face in his throat says whether it recognizes the sorcerer. Caiman can't hear it, so then he asks the sorcerer what the face said.
There's a lot of gratuitous violence and gore, but it's coupled with a lot of randomness too, often played for humor, and it's an odd pairing that works. There are rather a lot of characters introduced, and most of them are interesting. Behind the scenes of Caiman's struggle is a plot to overthrow the head sorcerer En. His two main henchmen Shin and Noi are simultaneously brutal and amusing, as is En himself, and then the hangers-on of Fujita and Ebisu are even more reliably amusing. Particularly Ebisu, who's gone insane and is oddly named after a god of good fortune.
It's kind of hard to talk this up because of all the randomness, but it's really an experience, and it's one of those rare series that can effectively manage a mash-up of genres. Music is pretty good, there's a baseball episode! and the art is... well, very obvious and (imo) low-quality CGI, which is my major tick mark against it.
There's a series of six OVAs called Ma no Omake that were packaged as a single bonus episode on Netflix, and they're just some more random comedy shorts.
Rating: very good (series), good (OVAs).
12 episodes + 6 OVAs, relevant genres: action, dark comedy, random.
Her Blue Sky only recently got on my watch list. It came out in 2019. I first found it because of the composer who worked on it, I think, but while I've seen a number of his other projects, the only one I can say the music stood out to me as notable was Your Lie in April (reviewed in volume 37). When I also saw that one of my favorite romance writers had done the screenplay (Mari Okada), that was a big yes.
The title comes from a saying I hadn't heard before, and I might not get the wording exactly correct, but close enough to express the sentiment: the frog at the bottom of the well can't tell you how vast the ocean is, but it can tell you how blue the sky is. The source of the quotation is a folk tale saying the frog was arrogant to think it had knowledge of the broader world, but it isn't a direct quote, and the way it's arranged here almost says the opposite to me. The first part already says the frog has limited perspective, so the second part feels entirely extraneous and even irrelevant unless it's subverting that moral by saying something else, like maybe it has a special appreciation for the little bit of world it can see. Really, either interpretation could fit the message of this movie. Maybe both are intended.
The movie starts with a bunch of kids in their final year of high school who've formed a band. They're rehearsing, and a girl, Akane, is watching, along with her sister Aoi (whose name is rather on the nose), who is significantly younger. They ask whether Aoi wants to be in a band when she gets older, and she surprises them all by saying she wants to learn bass. The lead guitarist Shinnosuke likes her choice.
Soon after, Akane and Aoi's parents (who never appear in the movie) die in an accident, leaving Akane to act as a mother to Aoi, preventing her from going off to Tokyo with Shinnosuke when he asks her to.
Thirteen years later, Aoi is a rather good bass player but a typical sullen teen, at the age Akane was in the past. For her part, Akane is in her thirties and working for the local government in the small town where they live. One of the local officials is that old band's drummer, and he's trying to coordinate a well-known act to perform at a music festival they want to start up to bring tourism. And who should be part of that band but Shinnosuke. Except he's become ragged and bitter over the years.
Then Aoi discovers that Shinnosuke's soul has somehow split, and the version of him from back then still exists, but confined to the room where they used to practice (and Aoi still does). Through all this, Aoi finally begins to realize all that Akane has given up for her, and it tears her up. Add in romantic entanglements for several of the characters, and there's plenty of tension to go around.
It even comes to just enough of a conclusion to be satisfactory, that is until you realize it's one of those movies that tells a little more of the story through the pictures shown during the closing credits, and you do get a firmer conclusion. The only tick I have against it is that a couple of the romance angles involve age gaps large enough to be uncomfortable for me, though I know that's common in anime. Whether it's seen as more acceptable in Japanese culture, I don't know, which is something I've discussed with lots of people before. Basically, does anime commonly give the freedom to explore violating taboos, or are these topics not really considered taboo in Japan? I've heard good arguments on both sides.
Art was very good, and a lot of the backgrounds appear to be photos. Music was rather good too, one of the better efforts I've seen from this composer. And the usual question about a music-centric piece: is it actually about the music, or is the music just window dressing? For how little of the music comes from Shinnosuke's band in the past or from Aoi in the present, it's still a very thematic element that makes it important to the movie's message. It's not one of the heavy hitters in that regard like, say, Carole & Tuesday, where music is explicitly used to achieve social change, but I will say it's an essential part of the plot.
Rating: very good.
Sora no Aosa o Shiru Hito yo, "To Those Who Know of the Blueness of the Sky," movie, relevant genres: drama, music, coming of age, romance.
Second helping, and all of these were pretty good.
Arakawa Under the Bridge (26 episodes)—there's really not much plot to this. The setup is that Kou is the son of a high-powered businessman who's been trained never to be in debt to anyone. So when one day a gang of kids steals his pants and hangs them from a bridge, he climbs up to get them and falls into the Arakawa River below. A girl named Nino rescues him, and the only way she seems interested in considering it even is if he'll love her. So he sticks around and lives with all the wacky characters who form their own society there. They're all really insane (Nino claims to be from Venus, for example), so it's just random comedy of what they get up to. It's actually reliably funny. Some of the characters were more annoying, but I liked most of them, and there are a few romantic interests that develop. I only found the show because of the director, who's pretty prolific, yet I'd seen very little of his work, and this sounded promising. There are nominally 26 episodes across two seasons, but each one is broken into shorts (haphazardly, imo, as the ones within a single episode rarely tell separate stories) that number 1-200. If you like random humor and don't mind the lack of plot, this is one of the better examples I've seen. Art is rather good and looks newer than it is. Music is odd but pretty good as well. Rating: good, relevant genres: random comedy.
Ballad of a Shinigami (6 episodes)—also known as Momo: The Girl God of Death. I picked this off the title alone, as I'd seen several shows/movies I liked about grim reapers. Momo is a shinigami (which is oddly mispronounced in the dub) with a winged black cat familiar named Daniel. A fair amount is hinted at but never confirmed, including that she's unusually compassionate for a shinigami, and that while most have black hair and clothes, hers are white. I normally expect this type of show to be about her ferrying the souls of the dying away, but that only happens in the first episode. The middle ones have her comforting those left behind on behalf of someone who's died, and the finale kind of returns to the ferry aspect, but it's different. Each one does reveal a mild mystery about the circumstances surrounding the death in question, but it never builds much tension. The art is very ubiquitous for its time, and while the opening song is fine, the rest of the music is strange to forgettable, often feeling at a tonal dissonance with what's happening on screen. I did like Momo and the characters she helped, but this was still pretty all-around average. If you like the psychopomp genre, it's not bad. I do wonder if the light novels and manga are more consequential. Rating: decent, relevant genres: drama, supernatural.
Ghost Hound (22 episodes)—this was done in 2007 as a project for Production I.G's 20th anniversary. It has a somewhat ubiquitous art style but one that looks a little newer than that. Main character Taro suffers from extreme drowsiness during the day, and he finds that when he falls asleep, he can have out of body experiences where he flies around town. There's a nearby shrine run by a professor and his daughter, and the girl, Miyako, seems able to perceive Taro in his spirit form. Taro's also undergoing counseling for PTSD related to being a kidnapping victim over a decade prior, which he still has nightmares about, related to his sister also being a victim but who died as part of it. He becomes acquainted with two other boys in his school who also learn to do astral projection. That kind of sounds like a mishmash of things, but they are intertwined. It was a genuinely creepy first several episodes with some ghostly happenings and the boys deciding to return to where Taro had been held, in an abandoned hospital that's now periodically underwater in the flood plain behind a dam. Miyako has great design and characterization, and the setting and the intrigue behind why all the supernatural stuff was connected to the kidnapping led to a wonderful unsettling atmosphere. Really, the only strike I had against it early on is that the boys look extremely dumb in the astral projection forms, basically translucent fetuses only with distinct eyes, ears, and... butts, for some reason. They do get to change their appearance later, and one can take on a dog form, which I guess is the title drop? Weird, as it only comes up twice and is barely relevant to the plot. But as the What's Really Going On gets explained as a confluence of politics, science, and religion, my interest waned. Not that it was dumb, more that it didn't suit my tastes as much and kind of ruined the horror aspect for me. It also oddly drops a couple of plot threads, like clearing someone who was falseley accused of the kidnapping, and adequately explaining why a conspirator was also appearing in ghost form, repeatedly reenacting his death. So, it starts out strong but finishes weak. The music was just okay, and the art was good. Rating: good, relevant genres: psychological horror, drama, supernatural.
Isekai Ojiisan (Uncle from Another World, 13 episodes)—it seems likely this will get another season based on it ending on a teaser (and industry rumors), though most predictions have that over 2 years off yet, and I'm not waiting that long to write it up. Takafumi is a college student, and his uncle just woke up from being in a coma for 17 years. There's nowhere else for him to go, so he stays with Takafumi. And claims that he spent those 17 years as an orc in a fantasy world. Yet he can back up his claims since he still has the ability to use magic he learned there. It's all about mutual idiocy. Takafumi soon comes across a girl he used to know when they were young, and they renew their friendship while watching his uncle's memories of his adventures. Both Takafumi and his uncle are shrewd about identifying each other's blindness in romance: Takafumi not seeing that this childhood friend is sweet on him, and his uncle not seeing that an elf in the fantasy world liked him, even though they each realize the other's potential romance. For that matter, an ice sorceress and a cleric type of character also liked the uncle; but for him being totally oblivious to it, it would have veered more into harem territory than I would have cared for. It's all situational comedy at the stupid circumstances the uncle got himself into, but it's reliably funny. Art was good, with a fair amount of fan service. Music was mostly average, but rather good in some places. Rating: good, relevant genres: isekai, fantasy, comedy, adventure, romance.
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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I remember starting Arakawa but fell off it, I should really go back cuz I did find it very funny. I feel like you're underselling the randomness of it though. I recall the starheaded guy and the robot twins being my favourite characters. n_n
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It's definitely very wacky. Hoshi was indeed a fun character, and I liked Nino, P-ko (the gardener girl), Whitey, and Sister. They bring in one new character for season 2, who's mostly annoying. It was pretty funny that for how Chief was as insane as the rest, he was actually a really good leader.
All I know about Isekai Ojisan is it's got some good music. :) But that's actually a novel and, dare I say it, interesting way to approach the isekai genre. I didn't think that was possible!
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I'm not even someone who likes the isekai genre much. Of the ones with a pretty standard premise, the only one I've watched is Rising of the Shield Hero, and even then only because a friend asked me to. Yet there have been a few lately with a cool and different angle on them like Ojiisan. There's another I'm watching this season.
I remember rating Dorohedoro in my top five of its year. My review was "It's a comedy, it's a horror, it's a cooking show, it's psychedelic. It's like what would happen if you were hungry, but instead of eating, dropped acid and watched a Bruce Campbell movie marathon." Definitely lots of interesting characters. Noi is canonically 6'10", which can be used as a yardstick for everyone else. Of the entire album of end credits music, I bought several of them. I suppose my only criticism was also the animation, but I vaguely remember that it was intentionally grainy, in order to match the manga art. Not exactly what I would have done, but it's a style, I guess.
I liked the Isekai Ojisan manga and followed it into the anime. The mid-season production problems that led to it being put on hiatus halfway through killed a lot of people's interest, which is why I'm surprised to hear that a second season is rumored.
Dorohedoro is getting a second season.
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I just saw that, and it's Crunchyroll, not Netflix. No release date announced yet. Looking forward to it.