Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 56 · 11:04pm Aug 29th, 2023
Halfway through the summer season, and I picked up a couple of targets of opportunity: a dub of one I kinda wanted to see started up a few weeks ago, plus one that got good ratings from the spring season just now got a dub. Still plowing through the new things, mostly subs. Features for this week are a couple series that go back a way, Den-noh Coil and Hyouka, after the break with some other stuff!
Den-noh Coil has so many layers to it that I'm having trouble figuring out how to summarize it. The summaries I read before watching it didn't seem to do it justice.
Yuko is an elementary school student who's just moved back to the town her grandparents are from. This takes place in a near future or possibly present day, and much of the technology featured in it was just starting to become possible when the series was made (2007). It's very interesting how accurately this predicts where the technology might go and how society would evolve around it.
Essentially, the internet has become so pervasive through what's a lot like VR goggles. Everyone wears special glasses that connect them to the internet, but it also changes things about how you see the real world, some subtle and some not so subtle. One of the more popular applications is virtual pets. Yuko has a virtual dog, and with the glasses on, she can see it hanging around her and interact with it, but if she takes off her glasses, it's not there.
These pets can get kind of buggy, though, malfunctioning or acquiring viruses, so on her first day in town, Yuko encounters three kids all competing to track down some lost virtual pet so they can claim the reward for finding it. The next day, two of those kids turn out to be in Yuko's class, and she immediately becomes friends with one, Fumie. Tracking down lost pets and viruses is big business, and a lot of kids work for Yuko's grandmother, much to Yuko's dismay.
The first half of the series is more slice of life and comedy as the kids go on various investigations and compete with other groups to claim the rewards or just out-hack each other. It's pretty amusing. A lot of this activity is illegal, and there are enforcement programs running around that can only be seen with glasses. They look like hovering probes of different designs, and while they do combat hacking (which can be destructive to your glasses if you're caught), their main function is to maintain the virtual world, repairing places where the virtual overlay has become damaged and doesn't replicate what's really there. Part of that maintenance is to delete these pets that have malfunctioned, and people would understandably rather recover those pets and keep their status secret than turn them over to the system.
Then the second half comes. It turns very serious and brings up quite a few running themes, some of which, again, are eerily accurate predictions for when the series was made. It starts to question the nature of reality and whether these things that exist only virtually can be alive. There's a theme of memory, and to that end, one summary I read said the virtual overlay makes the town look the way it used to in the past. That's only true in a sense—it's accurately displayed, but in areas where the projection is broken, it does show outdated visuals. It was a deliberate parallel to show that this virtual world, just like people, can get stuck in the past.
A pretty intriguing mystery starts up, where Yuko, as well as a second girl with the same name, seem to have gaps in their memories, and there's more behind this virtual world than the public knows. Trying to reconcile past and present, struggling for identity, questioning the reality of both the virtual and real worlds, and making a point about letting online culture dominate society, how people form connections, whether a consciousness can exist in both places—all those and more are dealt with in surprising depth.
To a lot of the world, this shouldn't even be happening. If it's just caused by some kid hackers and the internet company is handling it, then what concern is it of theirs? Can these seemingly living viruses from the broken areas be a threat to real people, and what caused them to form in the first place? All the main characters have some very acute emotional raw spots that tie into the series' themes and give them compelling arcs.
Art's a little bit different from the standard of the time, and I liked the aesthetic. Music was quite good, too. At first, it was simply a fun series I probably would have rated as good, but by the end, I was impressed, and I'll let myself be tempted into bumping the rating all the way up.
Rating: excellent.
26 episodes, relevant genres: drama, comedy, slice of life, thriller, mystery, sci-fi.
Hyouka is Japanese for "ice cream," the significance of which gets explained about a quarter of the way in. High school student Hotaro has an older sister who's always off traveling, and he gets an odd letter from her heavily suggesting he join the Classic Literature Club. He figures he'll be the only member, but he goes to the room to find a girl named Chitanda (who's from a prominent farming family) already there. It means he doesn't have to be the president, which is fine with him: his philosophy of life is to minimize entropy.
His best friend Satoshi tags along as well, and for all that the club is named Classic Literature, there's barely a hint that they ever do anything related to that. At one point they put together an anthology for a school festival, but it was only slightly implied they wrote it, versus compiling famous works from elsewhere, and that's the only time literature enters into it at all. For that matter, Hotaro's sister is an oddity. She had some role in the club's past, but her obvious desire to have Hotaro join it is never explained. Also strange was the way the show conspicuously avoided revealing her face until pretty far in, and once it did, it left me wondering what the big deal was.
Mostly, Hotaro has a reputation for being able to critically analyze situations, so whenever something odd happens, they get asked to solve the mystery of it. Sometimes this is just Chitanda getting curious (Hotaro knows he's in for it when she entreats him with an "I have to know!"), and sometimes it's a classmate with a legitimate problem. A few of the mysteries are resolved within the same episode, but most take an arc of two or three. The solutions are usually fairly obvious, so it's more about the character interactions than a big reveal, but those character interactions are well done. I really liked the characters a lot, and that was the show's main draw for me.
As it must, romantic tension builds. One of the first mysteries leads them to the library, where another classmate, Mayaka, works, and she ends up joining the club, too. She's had a long-standing crush on Satoshi, and there are plenty of blushing moments between Hotaro and Chitanda.
It can be a tricky business between making the mysteries so easy to solve that they're boring and inconsequential or so difficult to solve that the viewer can't anticipate the answer and it's ridiculous for the characters to. I'd say this came down a bit much on the easy side, but not too bad, and I agree with one reviewer who said that while the mysteries were often fairly trivial matters in a general sense, they were always very personal to the people involved. I really enjoyed the character moments, and it's kind of a unique setup, plus it was just plain fun.
Art is good and looks a little newer than it is (2012), but it oddly reminded me most of a couple of works by other studios, Durarara!! and Eureka Seven. I especially appreciated the attention to detail, like the backgrounds, and... well, another good example is Mayaka's tendency to fidget her legs under the table when in the club room, which takes more work to include but lends a lot of realism. Music was quite good too, by a composer who's pretty prolific, in addition to some stock classical recordings. A bit of fan service here and there, and the OVA is of course a beachswimming pool episode.
Rating: very good.
22 episodes + 1 OVA, relevant genres: mystery, slice of life, romantic comedy.
Children of the Whales (Kujira no Kora wa Utau, "Whale Calves Sing on the Sand," 12 episodes + 2 OVAs)—there's some very interesting world building here. The main character Chakuro (and for that matter, all the society he knows of) lives on a rocky island in the middle of a sea of sand. They refer to it as a Mud Whale, and it does move around, but randomly. His people exist as two types: Marked, who have telekinetic powers but tend to live only 20 years, give or take a few, and Unmarked, who have no powers but live normal lifespans. When the Mud Whale encounters another island, they scout it out to find some artifacts of human habitation but no people, save one girl who is apparently some sort of soldier. To Chakuro and the generation older than him, they had an inkling that other islands could exist but never expected to find other people. But the elders seem to know something. The girl they found gradually acclimates to life there and seems to overcome what PTSD she has, but when more soldiers show up, it prompts them discovering some surprises about the nature of the world, the Mud Whales, and the Marked. It doesn't come to a conclusion, but I've given up after waiting several years for a continuation, and it had kind of degraded into a generic "bad guy wants to take over the world" plot anyway. Art was cool, in a bit of a unique style, and the music was pretty good. Rating: good, though I could definitely see a second season dragging it down a notch by following that generic plot direction, relevant genres: drama, fantasy, dystopian.
Kakegurui—Compulsive Gambler (24 episodes)—I wish NaiadSagaIotaOar still hung around these parts, as she's one of the people who pointed me to this show. It gets compared to the two Kaiji series (reviewed earlier in volume 13), since they're both about gambling, but to me they don't compare beyond a surface level. To a degree, they're about someone climbing out of a deep hole they've dug for themselves, but they're very different in tone. Kaiji is more about the strategy than the characters, aside from Kaiji himself, and it's about working within the rules to counteract cheaters. Kakegurui is more about the characters. While there's still plenty of strategy, it's less about how the games themselves work, since their solution is rarely to use the rules to your advantage. It's usually to find a way to out-cheat your opponent. I find the latter less interesting, but that'll depend on personal taste. So what actually happens here? We start at a school populated by the rich and powerful, where high-stakes gambling is encouraged, even all but required. Ryouta is nobody special, but he's asked to show new transfer student Yumeko around, and she takes a liking to him. At first it seems like he'll be the main character, but the show mostly focuses on Yumeko. She takes on various opponents with no real plot beyond climbing the social ladder, and yet one of her early opponents who becomes her friend (as several others will also do), a girl named Mary, is arguably the main character. She's the one of the principals who actually has an arc. The second season moves into some attempt by outsiders to control the student council, but it doesn't resolve. The whole thing is also a hyper-sexualized take on gambling, and there's lots of fan service. Hell, the closing visual is largely alternating shots down Yumeko's shirt and up her skirt. It rivals Jojo for all the exaggerated posing, facial expressions, and scenery chewing. That said, the art is rather good. Music is mostly fine, but the first season's opening song was very strong, a nice jazz-styled riff that the vocalist does a great job with. Rating: decent, but high in that range, relevant genres: gambling, drama, psychological.
Kakegurui Twin (6 episodes)—prequel series from before Yumeko shows up. It starts with the same fakeout, framing it as if the camera will follow around a nobody character named Tsuzura, then seems like it'll give back story to a girl from the original series named Midari, but it's all about Mary again, appropriately enough. It's more of the same, so not a lot to say about it. The plot that eventually develops is some plan to overthrow the student council, but if you'd seen the original series, then you'd already know whether it's successful. It does end on somewhat of a teaser that there may be more to the story, but good luck getting Netflix to continue anything. Art is the same, music is a small step down. Rating: decent, but pretty high in that range, relevant genres: gambling, drama, psychological.
Piano Forest (Piano no Mori, 24 episodes)—it occurs to me that a fair number of the things I watch turn out to be different than I expected, based on the synopses not seeming very representative of what happens in them. I specifically try to avoid doing the same thing, but who knows, maybe I don't describe them very well. Anyway, this was originally a movie from 2007 (which I haven't seen) remade as a series, and the only thing that was substantially changed, as far as I can tell, was how much emphasis is given to the supernatural. In the series, it's all but nonexistent. Shuhei is a promising young pianist attending a new elementary school, and he meets Kai, a somewhat feral classmate with very humble beginnings who has an uncanny ability to play back anything he hears on the piano. Kai claims to have learned by playing a piano he found in the forest. Shuhei doesn't believe that, but sure enough, it turns out to be true. The music instructor at school encourages both of them and hopes Kai will join Shuhei in the world of competitive piano. The first half of season 1 is about this initial phase, but then it jumps to them participating in competitions. Shuhei is torn, wanting to support his friend but also jealous of how great an inherent talent Kai has and how effortlessly Kai becomes very good. To the show's credit, it does depict Kai as a hard worker, just that Shuhei doesn't always witness the level of effort he puts into it. Then season 2 shows them older and entered in the International Chopin Competition, a real-world thing. Like most competition-based shows, there's little tension over who will win, but there are at least a few twists along the way. I'd mostly recommend it to fans of classical music, since there will obviously be a lot of that, but it takes some qualifiers. Season 1 does have a good mix of things, but by the nature of season 2, you'll hear Chopin almost exclusively, so you'd better be a fan. As part of the competition, each pianist has to select a repertoire, including a concerto. Chopin only wrote two, and the first is far more popular, so you're going to hear that one a lot. And the logistics of having the performances during the show actually differ for each competitor and reflect what the judges are saying about it would be prohibitive, so as far as I can tell, they're all the same stock recording, and you just have to accept the judges' narrative of it. There are some weak political machinations going on that felt manufactured and, at times, for vague reasons. I found it funny in how Japan-centric it was: out of the twelve best entrants in the world, three were Japanese, and a fourth narrowly missed making the cut. Art looks quite dated for how new it is (2018-19), and I wonder if that was made to evoke the film version. It reminded me a lot of Nodame Cantabile in many ways, and as I said in my review of it, that's considered a landmark manga/anime for classical music, so it may be an homage to that as well. The original music for the show is fine enough. Rating: decent, but it may kick all the way up to very good if you're a particular fan of Chopin, relevant genres: drama, music.
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 see I picked a good day to check my feed carefully!
My memories of that show are probably a bit more fond than it deserves. Before watching it, I think the only anime I’d really gotten that into was AoT, which, while having some over-the-top elements, was a lot more grounded and not very fanservicey, so Kakegurui seemed totally bonkers to me at the time and made for quite a fascinating binge.
I rewatched a little bit more recently and had… yeah, basically the same kind of experience as with JoJo, where the aesthetic and spectacle are fine and all but just aren’t enough to hold my interest for that long, so I end up watching an episode and then doing something else. Maybe the story’s better than I give it credit for, but I don’t recall being too impressed on that front beyond some of the characters being moderately memorable.
All that being said, I think it understands exactly what its appeal is and offers a lot of it. I’ve come to appreciate that after some of the really bad stuff out there, so it’s a show I could pretty easily recommend to someone if it sounded appealing.
dang, you had me thinking Naiad had left! D:
Den-noh Coil sounds pretty cool :O
5744481
Yeah, it was certainly worth watching for me. I thought Mary had some sneaky depth to her, and maybe I'm giving the writers too much credit, but I could see Yumeko putting on her act as a bit of a false front to help Mary develop. The fan service I can take or leave. If someone particularly likes fan service, then I'd definitely say this would be for them. The main tick against it for me is that there are two plot lines going on: the gambling itself and the political wrangling. The latter never goes anywhere, and by them putting out a prequel, they've already spoiled that it won't. There's a possibility they'll put out more later, I guess, but it felt like half the show was left hanging.
The opening song for S1 was a banger, though. Great stuff.
And yay for Naiad popping in!
5744485
Easy show to recommend. Just as you ease into it being fun, it turns serious, and it has surprising depth. A friend recommended it to me when I was telling him about a series I featured last time, Deca-Dence, since they have some similar themes.