Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 67 · 11:53pm April 2nd
Spring season starts today, though that doesn't stock my reviews too much yet, since a lot of my favorites didn't end. Features this week are one that did just finish, A Sign of Affection, and a movie from 2021, Pompo: The Cinephile. Those and more, one also recently completed, and YouTube shorts, after the break.
A Sign of Affection is the first of the winter shows I was watching to finish. Well, not quite, but the first one that isn't getting additional seasons so that I can go ahead and review it. It's a simple and straightforward plot, so there's not that much to say.
College student Yuki has been deaf all her life and attended schools for the deaf until now. She's not that much of a fish out of water, though, and isn't particularly intimidated about college. She can read lips well enough to get the gist of what people are saying most of the time. As a side note, there's a friend from her old school who turns up a couple of times, and she had different circumstances: she lost her hearing due to an injury, so it was interesting to see the contrast between how they relate to other people. Yuki, for example, is very self-conscious about making any audible noise, even laughing, while the friend talks when she's signing (and doesn't sound different from most people, since she learned to talk while she could still hear).
Yuki meets a guy named Itsuomi on the train, and he just happens to have a fascination with languages, so he's immediately taken by her signing. As it turns out, there's a web of connections she has to him: the girl she likes to hang out with, Rin, is in a school club with him and has a crush on his older cousin, who runs a restaurant. There's no big conflict to overcome, just Itsuomi helping Yuki expand her horizons to a larger world. There's another guy, Oushi, whom Yuki's known since she was little, and I do wish they'd done more with him. He's the only one of her non-deaf childhood acquaintances who bothered learning sign language, and while he tries to be standoffish, he obviously cares about her. Plus there's a bit of a situation with Ema and Shin, a couple of Itsuomi's friends.
If I have one complaint, it's that Itsuomi is really forward, almost to the point it feels like the early plot is rushed just to get the romance going. After that, it's a very sweet story, just not of a lot of consequence, so it's closer to slice of life a lot of the time. If that tends to bore you, then this might not be the show for you, but I would call it an iyashikei one, since it's focused on activities related to sign language and so is semi-educational on that front. A lot of the details of that were interesting to me. You can't have a show about deafness without it being compared to A Silent Voice, fair or not, and this doesn't have any similar drama.
Art was great—it's a very pretty show. The music was good, too, especially the easygoing opening song.
Rating: very good, as long as slice-of-lifeness doesn't bore you.
Yubisaki to Renren, "Fingertips and Affection," 12 episodes, relevant genres: romance, slice of life.
Pompo: The Cinephile is a rather meta movie from 2021 about moviemaking. I'm not much of a movie person, and I still caught lots and lots of movie references. Most people would probably see even more. Some scenes seem referential to famous ones from real movies, and a lot of the place and character names are also referential. Like the girl selected to play the lead in the movie they're making, Natalie Woodward. There's also a running joke of appending "nya" (Japanese for "meow") to the beginnings of many things: Nyallywood, California; product placement of Nyapsi Cola; the Nyacademy Awards, appropriately enough with Oscar statuettes shaped like a cat.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Joel (odd name for a girl, though in some versions you see it spelled Joelle instead) Pomponett is the granddaughter of a legendary producer and founder of Peterzen Studios who's inherited his genius for filmmaking. She's not deliberate in doing so, but ends up exclusively producing B movies, albeit very successful ones. She tries her hand at writing a script and taps her beleaguered assistant Gene as director. The male lead will be one of the biggest-name actors out there, but she chooses a no-name girl with zero experience she'd just booted from an unrelated audition as the female lead, having seen something in her perfect for the role.
On the one hand, it's not a realistic tale. It's more about Gene's struggle to work within his given constraints to create something with true artistic vision. That bit's fine. But the less abstract conflicts, like clashing with the stars and management, are absent—actually quite the opposite, as they're all incredibly supportive. Only one late plot point about financial backing smacks of realism, but it gets resolved very quickly. The movie they make as well: as much as it's portrayed as something artistically wonderful, it's pretty full of cliches, though it does have its moments. Maybe that was the right way to go, as it comes off more as parody, then. I've mentioned this before, but as many of us are writers, or have seen this in something we've read, it's difficult to play up song lyrics, poetry, etc. in-story as amazing and then actually deliver material that lives up to the hype.
It's also an interesting parallel to something that happens a lot in Japanese culture, and it brought to mind specifically the producer of Wonder Egg Priority. Gene was already the kind of person to let work overwhelm his life, but being a director only makes it worse.
Fun, over the top, and a heartfelt if idealized story. Art was very good and reminded me of Sword Art Online. As the in-movie movie is about an orchestra conductor, a lot of the music is recordings of real classical pieces, and of course I liked those. Aside from that, the ending song was pretty good, and the opener a fairly meta thing done in Broadway style.
Rating: very good.
Eiga Daisuki Ponpo-san, movie, relevant genres: drama, comedy, meta.
And some more, a mixed bag of genre, age, and goodness.
Angel's Egg (Tenshi no Tamago, movie)—Paul Asaran recommended this to me quite a while ago, and I promptly forgot, as I didn't have access to much anime at the time. But now I do, so I rediscovered his recommendation and watched it. And I don't know what the hell I just saw. This 1985 movie is very much an art film. You could reasonably ascribe many different meanings to it, and who knows whether you're right. A giant orb splashes down in the ocean, waking a young girl on land who then proceeds to wander around an abandoned city while trying to take care of a large egg. She encounters a man dressed like a soldier, who is the only other sentient creature ever shown. He initially seems like he wants to help her look after her egg, but he's also persistent in asking her what's inside it, and she won't say. It rains almost constantly, and the city is getting flooded, bringing in some religious imagery, though the director himself isn't religious and just has some academic interest in the topic. The ultimate fate of the egg... well, I won't spoil it, but do spoilers even count in altering your understanding of something when there's nothing to understand? I don't even know whether the ending was hopeful or tragic. Art was quite good, especially the scenery, but the two characters usually look like they're intensely bored. Music was pretty good, too, at times sounding like Stravinsky or the weirder parts of the soundtrack from 2001. Rating: huh? Relevant genres: drama, fantasy, surreal.
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet (Suisei no Gargantia, 13 episodes + 2 OVAs), Petit Gargantia (13 episodes + 1 special), Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet: Far Beyond the Voyage (Meguru Kouro, Haruka Zenpen, 2 OVAs)—mostly from 2013, but the last 2 OVAs are from 2014. There's a lot going on here. Ledo is a born soldier, the kind who lives to fight and has never known anything else. He pilots a mech against a race of spacefaring squid-like monsters. But as he gets awakened to serve once again in a major offensive, a warp gate malfunctions and throws him to Earth, which has had sea levels rise greatly. And I mean greatly. Despite this being impossible, it's certainly not unusual for fictional depictions of it to have cities hundreds of feet underwater. He crash lands in the ocean, but is salvaged by a crew from a vast conglomeration of ships linked together into a massive floating city. And on that note, it really reminded me of one of Paul Asaran's planned writing projects that I discussed with him once. A lot of what's here works about the same. Maybe watch it for inspiration? The AI of Ledo's mech determines this really is Earth, where his own race originated, and it was thought to have long since been uninhabitable, but here everyone is. Their technology hasn't advanced near as much, and without a warp gate here, Ledo has no way of contacting his people or returning to them. So he sticks around, learns their archaic dialect, and helps out where he can. A number of side characters play prominent roles, and they're mostly interesting. Amy is the one who hangs around him the most, and for all that she's cute, she's actually one of the least interesting ones. Events start to make Ledo question the war he'd always known, and then he encounters another fleet with a charismatic leader wanting everyone to adopt a similar attitude as Ledo used to have. This part felt a lot like Heart of Darkness to me. Yes, the Conrad novel. The twist ending wasn't too surprising. Art was very good, and the female characters oddly all had permanent shiny blush on their cheeks. Lots of fan service. Music was good, too.
Eh, gonna have to branch into a second paragraph for the side material. Petit was a series of shorts, just a minute long each, that took a meta comedic look at the theme of each episode, and its special was a comedy bit about them deciding what title the show should have. These were fine, though... okay, I only concretely came to a realization lately that I'm probably very late to the game on. There's always variety, particularly in the female characters. Amy's two friends hang around a lot, so of course one's busty, one's average, and one's flat. But I've also noticed this in school shows, with even other aspects. You get a group of girls, and there's often one or two who have different skirt lengths. One will wear no socks, one ankle-high, one knee-high, one thigh-high, and one with full-length tights. The cynic in me says that's so they have all their fetish bases covered. But Petit says it explicitly! Whereas the main show kept it to a minimum, these shorts had a lot of breast-shaming humor, as Amy's friend Saaya is the busty one. Amy's ridiculed for being small, even though she looks average, maybe a little more. Her other friend Melty is quite flat, and Petit outright admits she's fuel for the flat-fetish audience. It was weird. The main series' two OVAs cover some past material, about some of the good guy leaders' pasts, and how the antagonist rose to power. Then the Far Beyond the Voyage OVAs, which are nearly an hour long each, skip to six months after the series ended, first showing how everyone's doing, but then introducing a new antagonist. And then dealing with them in a really rushed fashion that didn't resolve much of anything. Rating: good (main series, and fairly high in that range), decent (the rest), relevant genres: drama, sci-fi.
Hokkaido Girls are Super Adorable! (Dosanko Gal wa Namara Menkoi, 12 episodes)—another just-finished winter show. Tokyo guy Tsubasa relocates to far-north Hokkaido and has some culture shock. Really, that's the best part of the show. I do wonder how accurate the places shown are, like if they made up the residential streets and shopping centers. It's also fun seeing people acclimated to different climates. When Tsubasa goes to his first day of school in frigid temperatures, he sees a girl wearing a short skirt with nothing covering her legs. And life do be like that! Yeah, it's an anime trope to have girls be impervious to cold for the sake of their outfits, but it's at least part of the theme here. But then she gets cold in the classroom, so... It's somewhat educational about the area and its customs, so it's nice on that front. This girl would love to make friends with everyone she can, but a few have been distant to her, yet Tsubasa acts as a catalyst to get them together. The first one of these has an unusual health problem that never comes up again after they first meet, which made it feel irrelevant and wasted. And by the time a third friend joins, all three being girls, it's pretty obvious this is a harem anime, if it wasn't already obvious from the opening credits. The fourth one is another guy, who, like the second one's health issue, seems to be important for one episode then gets dropped. At least the opening credits were good. The song is fun, and I love the dance moves they do at the end. Really, you could watch just that and get the gist of the whole thing well enough. Art was great, but of course packed with fan service. Music was pretty good. Doesn't come to a conclusion at all, but it's not the kind of show that usually does, so it wouldn't surprise me either way whether it got another season. Aside from some cultural interest, this is mostly empty fluff. Rating: decent, relevant genres: romance, comedy, slice of life.
How to Keep a Mummy (Miira no Kaikata, 12 episodes)—from 2018. Sora's dad is a researcher and sends him a casket from Egypt that contains a miniature mummy. It's alive, and he decides to keep it like a pet. Eventually, more types of supernatural creatures show up, one for each of his circle of friends. The series seemed inconsistent in what Sora knew about all this. At first, he reacted as if the existence of supernatural creatures was new to him, but further in, it's apparent it's something he's pretty knowledgeable about, and to his best friend as well, who has a related backstory wedged in to try and give the last episode a plot. There's really nothing here, and I'm trying to be fair. I know slice of life in its purest form has its fans. Normally, I like the genre, but it usually has something else of interest, be it cool characterization, interesting world-building, or one of those semi-educational iyashikeis, but there really is nothing to this other than watching them be cute with their supernatural creature pets. That's a little too vapid even for me, and I was largely bored, but if no-plot slice of life hits a sweet spot with you, then you might find you rather like it. Art was simplistic and a little dated-looking, but I did appreciate the dancing in the closing visuals. I usually find a well-executed dance number in the credits amusing. Music was average. Rating: meh, unless cuteness alone will keep your attention, relevant genres: slice of life.
And lastly, a few more YouTube shorts.
Greyscale (short film)—and I mean short. Almost all of these shorts are under ten minutes, and many are under five. This is only two minutes, including credits. ChungKang again. It really feels like a teaser for a series about cops fighting terrorists, meaning it's good on action and visuals, but there's zero context for what's happening. As a demo of putting together an animation project, it's good, but as a story, there's not much here. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, thriller, sci-fi.
Strange Concert (short film)—you guessed it, ChungKang again. I need to diversify... Anyway, this feels more like one of those proof-of-concept things where they're just demonstrating they can put something together more than having something with an actual story to it. A girl is following a butterfly through the forest, and then a mouse boy takes her via ladybug to where some other animals are singing, then it seems to have been just her imagination coloring how she sees her family? Art was simple but cute, and the music was a single song that's okay. Rating: decent, relevant genres: fantasy, slice of life.
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. 66 here
Hah! I forgot I ever mentioned it to you. Yeah, Angel's Egg is a bit of a trip. I need to watch it again someday just to remind myself of how confusing it is.
Even the Wikipedia article for Angel's Egg says it's more "animated art" than a film. :P
I vaguely recall someone tracking down the exact bus stop where the two main characters meet. I don't know about the rest, but that part is at least real.
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Did that Gargantia series remind you of your floating city story?
5774983
That’s cool that they went for that level of realism. I often wonder. Having real stores, for example, not only has potential trademark problems, but it also means the degree of accuracy is fated to die when that inevitably changes. But the streets are unlikely to, and most kinds of buildings would be slow to.
Heck, branch that into the vast number of shows that take place in Tokyo. The iconic areas are correct, but are the side alleys? The signs on the buildings? At some point, expediency wins over endless (and somewhat doomed to being outdated) research.
All that is to say I’m impressed if they cared to get the exact bus stop right.
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I'll admit, it has some similarities. Quite a few differences, most notable being that the anime features a city of ships whereas my story would have a city ship. Even so, I see a lot of my ideas mirrored in slightly different ways there.
I still want to write that story. I actually got a good ways into it but realized that it wasn't working as I intended to and put it on the backburner to think on it more. When/if I ever get back to it, I'm thinking it'll be a tetralogy of stories instead of one big piece: three concurrent and one conclusion. I think that would allow me to focus on the various concepts/ideas/characters much better.
5775988
There were a lot of similarities in the details during the show, too, like craning smaller vessels into the water to go underneath and do maintenance. These ships had hard connections to link them together, so in some ways it was a single city, but under the ebb and flow of politics, some individual ships may come or go occasionally.
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I don't recall having smaller vessels doing maintenance, but I did have submersibles going to the ocean floor to mine resources. Indeed, an important aspect of life on the ship was that it maintained a constant, consistent schedule of voyages to known mining locations in order to resupply the base resources necessary to keep the ship and its systems maintained. Deviating from that schedule could theoretically doom the ship.
The more you say, the more it sounds like I might want to take a look at the anime for ideas in general. Of course, the central premise of the story was the discovery of land and how that discovery led to something of a cultural revolution for the people onboard. I'm assuming that is a stark difference between the two.
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Yes, land is a different issue here. At first it’s unclear if there is any left. They encounter other fleets and merged-together city ships, but it’s not until the final pair of OVAs that they reference any land, which is just to say there are also clans in control of that who tend to be more warlike. It’s never implied exactly how much land there is.