Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 58 · 11:34pm Oct 3rd, 2023
The last of the summer shows I was watching have finished, except for one that's going through without a pause and two that will get new seasons next year. So the extras this week will have several recently completed series, but the features are a short movie, Hal, and a series from a few years ago, which I'll just give the short title of up here: WorldEnd. More after the break!
So of the summer shows... it really wasn't a great set. Of the ones I watched as they came out, only one impressed me, and one other had some promise. Both are getting additional seasons, though, so they aren't reviewed here. The rest were just average, though I did pick up one later and have yet to start another I got convinced to watch, so the jury's still out on those.
As to new fall shows, there are 8 or 9 that caught my eye and 4 of those have started, one of which I haven't gotten to yet. So of the 3 I've actually seen a first glimpse of... well, more than that. One of them posted 2 episodes to start off, and another posted 4 (!). That latter one was really good, too, so looking forward to featuring it later, unless they pull a Promised Neverland and waste a great beginning.
To the features, though.
Hal was poorly named, in my opinion. Because there are robots and AIs involved, it's immediately going to evoke Hal 9000 from 2001, which is at a severe tonal dissonance. I thought about it afterward, in case I could come up with a way they might have been making a deliberate reference, but I got nuthin'.
It takes place in what appears to be present day, except that fairly advanced robots are a thing. It opens in a rural village that might have been centuries ago, in that it looks like that type of architecture, and everyone's busy at traditional crafts. But there's a robot there, who doesn't seem to have a practical function, and some of the adults have cell phones. And there's a jet flying overhead. Which promptly explodes.
An old man, the robot's owner, calls it inside and says someone important to him was on that airplane. Once you get more of the story, it doesn't make sense that this happens immediately afterward, so either there's a logical plot hole, or some months have passed and I couldn't tell. In any case, there were two people important to the old man, and the one still around can't move on from the other's death. The robot is asked to impersonate the dead one to help with this.
Right away, this struck me as an awful idea. It's like when your child's pet dies, and the next day, you buy him another that looks the same so he'll move on without grieving. Except a whole lot more serious than that. There's even a doctor involved. He works at something like a nursing home (more on this in a minute), but as he knows the old man's family, he tries to facilitate this as much as he can, seeing as how it is a form of therapy. Hal is the boy's name, and the doctor fills him in on the situation, that the robot is to impersonate Hal so that the girl, Kurumi, can acclimate to life without him. At least I'd hope that'd be the long-term goal. If he's meant to be a permanent replacement, that'd have alarm bells going off for me. The good news is that we eventually get a plausible explanation for this approach.
At first, Kurumi wants nothing to do with him. She's completely withdrawn, and maybe everyone would have left her alone, except she's not eating, either, so Hal is worried about her. There's a nice motif of what are essentially Rubik's Cubes that reveal a handwritten wish when a side is solved, and Hal tries to indulge the wishes that Kurumi has expressed. She does warm up to him over time, and this reminded me a lot of an excellent movie I reviewed a while back, called Josee, the Tiger and the Fish. And since I'm bringing up comparisons, I'll get back to the thread I dropped earlier about the nursing home. The old ladies there are a hoot. That's often a nice element to have, and I'm reminded of the senior day care crew in a very good movie I covered a while back (Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop) and the old lady and her helper that Kiki visits several times in Kiki's Delivery Service.
Then there's a twist. I suspected early on that there would be one, and I was somewhat right about it, but not on the nose. It's well executed, one of the better reveals I've seen.
The movie's not without its drawbacks, though. It's a very short run time, just under an hour. That means there's not a lot of time to show Hal and Kurumi's past. When a love interest is central to the story, then characterizing the relationship is pretty important. Rather than fill you in on all the history, going by anecdote often works well, and it's used to good effect here, but I still never had much of a picture of who the characters are. You get a glimpse of Hal's rough upbringing and what interests Kurumi has, but nothing that informs why they work as a couple or how they got together or even originally met. About that rough upbringing, someone else from Hal's past also gets involved, and he does something that... well, like the whole robot impersonation plan, it eventually makes sense, but even then, I still didn't buy it. This guy knows how important Hal and Kurumi are to each other, and he was being awfully callous, denigrating the robot in front of them. The robot's ultimate fate was left oddly ambiguous, too, as nothing happened to it that should have harmed it significantly.
One last drawback that's a YMMV thing, but the site I use only has the dub, which is fine with me, except that dubs are prone to translating sound only, not text, so I had to look up a review to see what the messages on the puzzle cubes said. You can figure out some from context, but there's one at the end in a brief post-credits scene that's not apparent.
So, with all those pluses and minuses, it's going to depend on how much each one matters to you, but for me, the calculus came out to where I still liked it a lot. Art was great, especially considering it's getting a tad long in the tooth now at a decade old, and the animation was very smooth. Music stayed out of the way a lot, but when I noticed it, it was good, and the composer has worked on a lot of other things that had good music.
Rating: very good.
Short movie, relevant genres: drama, romance, sci-fi.
WorldEnd: What do you do at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us? obviously has a ridiculously long title, and those usually go with isekais and/or comedies. This is neither. It's also one where the title is needlessly vague. Even after watching all of it, I don't see how it's more than slightly relevant. It's from 2017.
And it's one of those shows that gives you a very out-of-context initial scene, then spends most of its run filling you in on how it got that way. There's some kind of battle going on, and a girl with a magical sword jumps off an airship.
Next thing you know, a human guy, Willem, is walking through a town and sees a girl running after a cat. An actual animal cat, which I have to clarify, since the townspeople are all anthropomorphic animals of various types (I particularly liked the design of the bird people). Humans are extinct and forgotten, but any races that have human-type faces are called "featureless" and looked down upon. He helps her catch the cat, since it's stolen something of hers, then accompanies her around town until she's caught by some guards who are supposed to be her escort. Her freedom gone, she slinks back to her duties.
Willem's friend, one of the few people who treat him nicely, sets him up with a job with the military as a caretaker at a warehouse for special weapons. Centuries ago, all these races banded together to fight monsters called Beasts, but they lost (and humans were obliterated) and had to retreat to islands in the sky. They're somewhat unreachable up there, but do need these weapons for the occasional Beast encounters, and they would like to eventually retake the surface.
But when Willem shows up for work, he sees no warehouse or weapons. Another sort of caretaker there recognizes him. She's a troll, and she is one of the few who knows what he is, having been on the expedition that freed him from being frozen for the past 500 years. And she explains that all the little girls running around are the weapons, including the teenage one he'd met in town.
They're leprechauns, but the concept of one here is closer to a changeling. They do have magical abilities, but the main one is they can make a one-time choice of something to impersonate, and they're all "encouraged" to choose human form. Why? Because only humans can wield those magical swords needed to fight beasts. With no humans left, it's their only option, and the leprechauns can fool the swords. They take a toll on their users, though. And the girls are brought up with the mindset that they are weapons, powerful but expendable.
Willem is not happy about this, for lots of reasons. Leprechauns are new to him, but other than that, he knows a lot more than he's letting on about the swords and the Beasts. And one specific thing he knows about the swords is that they're not supposed to be detrimental to the users except in extreme cases, but that knowledge had been lost. Now that he's here, he can surely fix that.
Well, he's not the only one harboring secrets. There's more yet to the nature of a leprechaun. One's fallen in love with him, but she's also becoming a victim of a sort of expiration date they have, which has turned up in numerous things I've watched, and maybe I've just had good luck, but that's been interesting every time.
There's no strong conclusion, and part of the ending is ambiguous, too. Willem's fate is implied but not explicitly stated. The true nature of the Beasts is hinted at but not explained. The leprechaun who loves him as well: I was pretty confused by what the ending meant for her. Like... well, I need to put a trigger warning in here anyway, so there's not a lot I can do to avoid spoilers. This is not a happy show. That said, the revelation about what the leprechauns are should maybe make it possible that there are only a finite number of them that continuously reincarnate. The setting of the final scene was indeterminate, so one of them may be returning? Or waking up in an afterlife? I wasn't sure.
Several of the side characters shine, like one of the girls who inexplicably knows all this stuff already, even though they're not supposed to. Art was very good, and the music was pretty good, too, with a nice opening song. I was torn about how to rate this. Due to the lack of a conclusion and all the ambiguity, I can't say it's a satisfying series, but I did enjoy it a lot as I was watching. Its almost slice-of-lifeness amid the tragedy reminded me somewhat of Girls' Last Tour.
Rating: very good, if you can take being left hanging about numerous things.
Shuumatsu Nani Shitemasu ka? Isogashii desu ka? Sukutte Moratte Ii desu ka?, 12 episodes, relevant genres: drama, romance, fantasy.
And the rest, three of them new and one old.
F3 (Nageki no Kenko Yuryoji, also known as F Cubed or Frantic, Frustrated, & Female, 3 OVAs)—based on the plot descriptions on wikipedia, I've seen the first episode only. Maybe the second as well, but I don't think so. They're all self-contained stories. Time I owned up to having seen this, I guess. It's the only full-on hentai I've watched. Back when anime was fairly hard to find in this country, one of the guys in my dorm at college had a subscription to a service that would send him a VHS tape each month with an assortment of new stuff that had been released. I watched one or two of those tapes, which served as my introduction to the very good Slayers, and it was where I saw the passable Plastic Little (both previously reviewed), and other than F3, I can't remember what else was on them. Anyway, I keep this blog relatively clean, so there's not a lot I can say here. Main character Hiroe is in high school and discovers she can't... achieve the desired end state with her boyfriend. Her sister finds out and tries to... help. When that just confirms the problem, her sister takes her to various specialists, at least of the legit-ish type to get at the core issue rather than brute force through it. One kind of inadvertently works, but intermittently enough that it takes them a bit to track down how and why. Mom... wants to help too. Suffice it to say this was not just explicit but on the tasteless end of things—according to the production notes, the distributors had to swear up and down that the "sister" and "mom" were actually unrelated people who lived in the same place, another tenant and the landlady, respectively, who like to use those terms with each other, in order to legally sell copies here. Rating: yuck, relevant genres: hentai, comedy.
Hyakushou Kizoku (Noble Farmer, 12 episodes)—these are really short, about four minutes long each. It just ended. It's based on a manga drawn by a woman who used to be a farmer and grew up in a farming family. There's really not a lot I can say about it, because there's no plot. Each episode is just anecdotes about a particular farming topic, but it's really interesting, because it's filled with lots of stuff most people wouldn't know about farming life, and it's also presented in a really funny, charming way. The finale was random, but the rest of it is factual. I enjoyed this a lot. It takes a real insider like this to give you the real dirt on farming, especially the less glamorous parts the public wouldn't be aware of, along with a healthy dose of self-deprecation and whimsy. Given that you could watch the entire run in only an hour, this is an easy recommendation. Art and music are a simplistic but appropriate style. Rating: good, and pretty high in that range, relevant genres: comedy, slice of life, educational.
Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts (Niehime to Kemono no Ou, 24 episodes)—from the spring season, but double length and continued through the summer without pause. The collective beast kingdoms are at an uneasy truce with the humans, and as a gesture to keep the peace, a human girl is chosen each year as a sacrifice to be eaten by the King of Beasts. Sariphi is this year's victim, and she's resigned to her fate. I did rather like the flashbacks showing when she first understood her purpose. It was pretty stark. Upon her arrival, however, the king isn't what she expected. He doesn't wish her any harm, and she actually gets along with him very well. Normally, he'd help her go off into obscurity, but that wouldn't work in this case, so he embraces change and hopes his subjects will accept her as his intended future queen. She has to endure numerous trials to win over the royal officials, much less the people in general. This is a pretty standard type of plot, though, and nothing here will surprise much. While there's nothing I can cite that it does especially well, there's nothing it does badly, either. It's just kind of middle of the road. My only real issue is Sariphi's age. They're already talking marriage, and she's what, 12? Maybe she just looks younger than she is, but the various human peers from her past seem consistent with that, too, so there was some squick factor for me. Art was average, maybe a little better, and same goes for the music. Rating: decent, relevant genres: adventure, fantasy, drama, romance.
Saint Cecilia and Pastor Lawrence (Shiro Seijo to Kuro Bokushi, 12 episodes)—another summer series that just ended. The descriptions of this are misleading, in a way. They make a selling point that Cecilia is really lazy, but only when she's around Lawrence, as she's not willing to have that be her public face. Yet that doesn't come up in the show as more than an incidental thing, and rarely at that. What constitutes a saint and a pastor here goes according to the "anime doesn't understand how Catholicism works" trope, which is often amusing. What they're calling a saint is more a combination of prophet and counselor. She can get strong premonitions of impending events, bad or good, and her main duty at the church is to be available for consulting if anyone needs to discuss problems with her. And of course she's tiny, cute, and her on-the-job wear shows a lot of leg. She can essentially cast protection spells on people, and she can interact with fairies, though that only comes up once. Pastor is closer to the standard definition, though apparently he's allowed to be married, and the single time he's shown adjourning a service, there are maybe eight people in attendance, though he regularly interacts with far more than that in town. But mainly, this is the story of the two trying to realize they love each other. Various friends and acquaintances try to play matchmaker, and Cecilia's come to terms with her feelings, but don't expect Lawrence to. The manga hasn't ended, so the anime's not going to give you a proper ending. It's definitely cute, but so are a lot of romcoms, and there's not a lot here to distinguish it. The one thing that did pique my interest is how Lawrence tries to keep Cecilia sheltered in this rural area, as saints are pretty rare, and they often get overwhelmed by all the demands on them in an urban setting, particularly one who was well known to some friends of his and suffered a preventable fate because of people's assumptions about her abilities. That was the most dramatic part of the series. Art was very good, and music was also well above average. Rating: decent, but high in that range and maybe kicking into good territory if you just like cute romcoms, relevant genres: romantic comedy.
Not my usual delving into YT shorts, but since PP mentioned it last time...
On Your Mark (short film)—made as a music video, this still tells an interesting story. It's kind of confusing, as it's told out of order and frequently repeats. One specific part of the repetition is different each time, so I'm not sure whether it was supposed to be alternate takes on the story, or if the guys actually executed their plan multiple times. A police team raids some kind of cult and finds a bunch of girls held captive. It's even ambiguous here: in some ways, it seems like they were looking for a specific girl there, and in some ways, it doesn't. They do seem rather callous about the number of dead girls. But the special one just has one form of captivity exchanged for another, until our protagonists decide they've had enough. It's a sweet story with an uplifting ending. Art is what you'd expect from Ghibli, but the music isn't theirs, so it'll depend on how much you like the band this video was made for. Not really my style. Rating: good, and high in that range, relevant genres: 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. 48 here
vol. 49 here
vol. 50 here
vol. 51 here
vol. 52 here
vol. 53 here
vol. 54 here
vol. 55 here
vol. 56 here
vol. 57 here
Noble Farmer is created by the lady who did Fullmetal Alchemist btw n_n
I checked out Saint Cecelia but worried they were gonna lean into the drama angle with how much the first episode harped on about his Father figure who is only seen in flashbacks. Does it stay cute romcom then?
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The father figure comes up now and then, but never in a maudlin way, just in Lawrence remembering lessons the guy had taught him. Though the fate of that other saint in the city might rub you the wrong way. Basically, she died of a treatable disease because the people assumed a saint wouldn't be subject to illness, but it's unclear exactly how that came about, as in she wanted to see a doctor and they argued against it, they just kept her busy enough with their own requests that she never had time to, or she was naive enough that she didn't even know to go to a doctor and nobody bothered to inform her. Seemed like a combo of all three to an extent. It's in the past, but some friends of Lawrence's knew her and are protective of Cecilia as a result, especially keeping it secret she's a saint when they go into the city, though nothing about her life in the village suggests the people there would have that attitude. That comes up in a couple of specific episodes, but the majority of it is cute romcom.
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Ergh, yeah...don't uh, love that. I wasn't super enchanted with the first episode so I think I'll give it a miss. Thanks!
After going down a wild Chage & Asuka rabbit hole last week, after dropping that comment, I came to the conclusion that while the video is still fucking phenomenal, I apparently don't remember the song, or at least I've since confused it with one I like far more. But really, I'm just glad I could find the damn video somewhere!
Saint Cecilia (is that really what they called it? lol) has a really good soundtrack, it keeps coming up in my feeds
And a hentai? Lawdy! :V Hey, at least it wasn't La Blue Girl!