Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 68 · 11:35pm April 16th
I started way too many new shows this season. D: 15 of them, plus a few continuing ones. Now my evenings are too full. ;-; Anyway, only one real feature this time, a 2005-7 series, Emma—A Victorian Romance (oddly enough, it's a romance), but also one highly recommended short. Extras are two recently finished winter shows plus a couple of movies that just came out last week.
Emma—A Victorian Romance is rather up front in saying what it's about, right? You get exactly what it says on the tin. It's very much in the style of Austen or Bronte novels, but to me, it effectively bridges what some people find inaccessible about those.
In fact, there's obviously a famous such novel, Emma, which made me wonder if this was just an adaptation of it, but no, it's an original story. I had to look that up, since I'd never read that book, nor anything by those authors, but it did feel a lot like the few romances from that era I have read, like Great Expectations.
Wait, come back!
Some people, me included, find that era's literature to be a bit off-putting in how uptight and overblown it can sound. To be fair, there are also people who can take or leave it, or who find that to be an essential part of its charm. But by hewing to the style so closely yet being presented in a visual medium, it gives the lovely atmosphere without getting bogged down in sounding, imo, stodgy. And not like modern movie or television adaptations, either, as they feel to me like they always still have one foot in current culture.
To what actually happens, then. William Jones is the eldest son of a wealthy merchant family, one whose patriarch has designs of leveraging that into a political marriage that would gain them a title. Not that he's a neglectful father by any means, just that he understands it's The Proper Way of Things.
At his father's suggestion (which isn't revealed until later, but that's not a spoiler), William goes into London to visit Kelly Stownar, who was his governess when he was little, but now she's retired. I don't know why he's hesitant about that, but he finally knocks on the door... and is completely taken by Emma, the maid who answers.
Over the next few weeks, he invents any excuse he can find to travel to the city and see her. Mrs. Stownar of course notices, with great amusement. They gradually become friends and develop an affection, but no surprise when The Proper Way of Things conflicts with class boundaries like that, along with the expectation that he'll take over leadership of the family business.
The numerous characters are great, and Emma is so charismatic that she makes lots of friends through the inevitable setbacks. I was afraid it would end up being glib, and in some ways it is, but the ultimate disposition of whether they could gain acceptance of their relationship did have a firm basis in plausibility.
There were a few missteps. An epilogue shows a little about what's become of the main characters, and it felt like they were skipping a lot of Eleanor's story. William is also friends with Hakim, a prince from India. He gets involved in some clever ways, and the stoicism of his female attendants was funny, but they went over the top with him at times, like having him drive a car through the house, that cheapened the humor. It also feels at times like it's glossing over context. For all that there are plenty of examples of William and Emma spending time together, only a few of those actions seem particularly meaningful. I do get the concept of illustrating the whole through snapshots, but I would have liked to see more consequential moments. Along that vein there are multiple instances where various characters make impulsive marriage proposals. Maybe that's just because the actual relationship wasn't too important in that era and the story is trying to hew to that mindset, but it could make the romance aspect feel shallower.
The manga began in 2002, and supposedly originated Japanese enthusiasm for English maid outfits, which surprised me. I thought that fad had been around longer than that. The anime began in 2005 and got another season in 2007, Second Act.
Art is a fairly standard but enjoyable style from a few years before, which reminded me a lot of things like Noir or Tenchi Muyo! Animation was smooth, costume design was beautiful, and they took great care to portray London authentically, though I don't know if that goes so far as to mean every street and the actual storefronts were true to life. There's a bit of brief nudity in a few episodes, just of the type of someone getting dressed. The music was great, and the composer has an eclectic discography, only including a little soundtrack work. Overall, a sweet story with very good characterization.
Rating: very good.
24 episodes, relevant genres: romance, drama, historical.
Moses (short film)—I had to think twice about how to rate this. There's no story to it, but then there's not supposed to be, so ding it for that? Or just ignore it and rate it for how fun it was? There's an old piece of nonsense verse that got used for a dance in the movie Singin' in the Rain, and here, a pair of tap shoes does the dance on its own. Are they alive? Being moved by a ghost? Shut up, because it's a simple cartoon and you're thinking about it too much? Am I asking too many questions? A more definite ghost sees the shoes and is scared of them at first, but then gradually joins in the dance as if they're her own feet, and then looks so disappointed when it ends. This is incredibly cute and impressively smooth animation, done by someone whose name I can't read in Japanese, but the user's page also says @ihsekatuotas, so maybe that's their name? Highly recommended by ferrets and rocks. If you search YouTube for "moses dance ghost" it should be the first hit. Only a couple of minutes long. Just go watch it! Rating: excellent, relevant genres: music, dance.
And for some rather recent material...
Kuramerukagari (movie)—a short movie at that, only an hour long, which just came out last week. It's not based on anything, so there's no additional context, and frankly, that's where this suffers. It's got a lot of great ideas going on, but they never quite connect into a whole. There's an area that used to be a prison, but a cave-in on the grounds revealed vast underground caverns and a massive amount of highly lucrative coal. Now it's developed into a mining city, with the ritzy headquarters on top, the middle class just below, and the blue collar miners even deeper. Because of the geology and industry, new tunnels, caverns, and sinkholes constantly open up, not to mention the damage that causes to the infrastructure making changes to the roads and walkways. So it's become a valuable business for very dedicated and detail-oriented people to document those changes and have the most accurate maps possible. Main character Kagari is one such person, and she's endeared herself to much of the community. Amid this, there's a sort of rebellion going on, plus a security officer from the mining company poking around. And there's just not enough space to flesh all that out. The characters were well defined, and I liked a lot of them, but there's too large a cast to invest with any lasting personality. Kagari herself exemplifies this: at one point, you learn she's an orphan, and she looks at a photo of herself with her parents as she traces a finger over a scar on her cheek, but you never learn any more about her past than that. Some bits of the story are told out of order, and it's one of those stories that likes to have multiple plot threads going on simultaneously and cutting between them sharply, like when person 1 from plot thread A asks a question, and a similar conversation has been going on in plot thread B, where person 2 supplies the answer. When the overall plot is rushed enough, and frankly it's hard to tell at first when those sharp cuts occur since the settings are all so similar, it just needlessly adds confusion to a story that couldn't absorb it. I'd still somewhat recommend it—the setting, world building, and characters are all interesting (in particular, Kagari and the professor's daughter were both adorable), but it just didn't make a solid plot out of all that. The music was fun and had mostly a Prohibition-era feel to it, and the art style, while simple and with a kind of dusty texture to it, was enjoyable. Rating: good, but at the low end of that range, relevant genres: steampunk, action, drama.
Kurayukaba (movie)—companion piece to the above Kuramerukagari that came out at the same time and is also an hour long. It has a similar but different setting, and no common characters, so they can be watched completely independently. In this one, your typical private detective living on the edge of poverty is hired by a journalist to track down a series of mysterious disappearances, and he's highly motivated to—one of the victims is his only client, whose case he's already solved and so is ready to collect his payday. When he has his cliched street urchin kid informant try to gather some intel, she also disappears, so he takes it upon himself to go into the underground area and finds himself in the middle of a battle between a gang, the people they're trying to oppress, and a special police force that seems to have only a tenuous link to the actual police on the surface. He joins up with the police, as they've also been investigating the disappearances, which leads the detective to uncover some blocked memories of his related to who the perpetrators might be. Not to spoil things, but while they do find the missing people (and this is vague—they only recover a small number of them, yet still speak as if it's all of them), they don't defeat the bad guys, figure out why the kidnappings had taken place, or take measures to prevent future ones, so it doesn't come to much of a conclusion. As opposed to Kuramerukagari, it wisely focuses on a small enough number of characters to flesh them out well and has a much more self-contained plot, but doesn't come to as definite an ending. On the whole, I liked it better. Music and art are the same. Rating: good, relevant genres: steampunk, action, mystery, drama.
Metallic Rouge (13 episodes)—recently finished winter show. This started out really strong with an immersive world and interesting characters. Rouge is an android on a sort of special operations team sent to hunt down other androids of a specific type. There are supposedly nine of them. She can appear as a normal human as well, and so she blends in. She doesn't know who's calling the shots; her immediate supervisor Naomi is the only one she's aware of, but Naomi is an effective scout at gathering intel to help Rouge fight. And the primary setting is Mars. Though the visuals are beautiful and the action is good, the story was very sparing on details as to why this is all happening, and that's where it starts to come apart. Androids must obey the obligatory three laws, and this setup is similar to Blade Runner. Then it also takes on a heavy note of Magical Girl Spec Ops: Asuka in that this all came about because of an alien force that attacked Earth, another alien force showing up to help us in the form of android technology, and all this having happened in the past. Asuka still had residual threats of the same nature as the original war, so you don't get the feeling that all the cool stuff is done before the story even started. But here, very little of that war is ever shown, and the current conflict is more conspiratorial in nature. With no war left to fight and all these androids still around from it, there are some growing pains at integrating them into society, and Rouge soon finds out that she may have been misled as to the purpose of her mission. I think it would have done better if it didn't draw out the beginning's vagueness so long and hadn't seemed to be about something else at first. Rouge doesn't actually spend that long hunting before she gets caught up in the conspiracy, so there's a big change in the tone, which is a difficult thing to pull off. It just didn't work that well here. Not that it's bad, just that it didn't live up to the lofty promise it appeared to have at first. It even tries to do a somewhat open ending and close on an action note, but it doesn't feel like a credible threat anymore. Art was great, and I loved the character design, plus the music was fun and quirky. Strong start, but then fizzled. Rating: good, but a bit low in that range, relevant genres: cyberpunk, action, drama, sci-fi.
Pon no Michi (The Way of Pon, 12 episodes)—another of the winter shows that just concluded... maybe. Main character Nashiko is being too loud around the house, so her mother kicks her out, but her absentee father lets her use a shuttered mahjong parlor he owns. Her two best friends go there to hang out with her, then another they meet online joins, then yet another. And the newcomers are more into mahjong than the original crew, who had been playing more casually. This whole thing felt scattershot. The originals like to do other things together, but it takes some convincing for the new girls to, so sometimes they play mahjong and sometimes they don't, and that doesn't cause any conflict or result in there being any plot, nor be focused enough to cater to enthusiasts. It's just slice of life. And as these things go, it can be educational about the subject, but this show does a poor job of it. It makes such a rushed explanation of the rules and strategies of the game that I couldn't follow any of it and had zero interest in the gameplay. The characters are interesting enough, from varied backgrounds, but then any show with an ensemble cast will do that. I agree with what totallynotabrony said when this first started: the girls are all incredibly busty for a show that still has them wearing outfits that aren't revealing in the least. Well except for the tomboyish girl's clingy top she sometimes wears, and the obligatory beach episode. So it can't even make up its mind whether it's going for eye candy. By the time the fifth girl joins, sometimes she seems amply endowed, sometimes not. Plus they have the odd detail that the other four are not only large, but each has a unique shape as well. A sixth girl is added in the last minute of the finale, which was called the finale during the previous episode's preview of it, then it concludes with a cliched "the end...?" I mean, it could continue, for all that it was about nothing and could keep doing that. And I haven't even mentioned the supernatural spirit of mahjong who hangs around, looking like a baby bird, and nothing plot-related develops from it. This show just didn't know what it wanted to be, but it was at least cute enough not to be a chore to finish it. Art was rather good, and the background music was actually pretty good, with the opening and closing songs just okay. Rating: decent, but low in that range, relevant genres: slice of life, games.
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. 58 here
vol. 59 here
vol. 60 here
vol. 61 here
vol. 62 here
vol. 63 here
vol. 64 here
vol. 65 here
vol. 66 here
vol. 67 here
It's too bad Metallic Rouge didn't (fully) pay off; I'd had that one circled as a possibility, but it sounds like it would end up annoying me too much to really be worth it. Then again, I am known to be oversensitive to shows that don't pay off a good premise.
Just as well, I guess; the NHL playoffs are nearly upon us, and that marks the end of my non-hockey-watching time for a good month or so.
5777113
You're not the only one sensitive to that. For how good the production values were, I'm very surprised at how low the audience rating is at MyAnimeList. There are a number of things that tend to make that happen, but one consistent one is not delivering a solid payoff from a strong beginning.
Maybe you should look into hockey anime. I've only heard of a couple and never watched any. Though it seems like sports anime in general often isn't as good.
Interestingly, as I brought this blog up, I was listening to a video review of Oshi no Ko, not sure if you're familiar with that. :B Literally just mentioned it because it's another anime, wtf me
5777158
I had considered watching that when it came out, but I didn’t pick it up right away. The first ep was double length or maybe even a full movie, and the general opinion was that it dropped off in quality after that, so I never tried it. Then when it finished, I didn’t see any after the fact reviews saying it had finished strong. Looks like user ratings are high though. Looks like season 2 will run this summer. I might watch it later if that season also rates well.
I think everyone had high expectations for Metallic Rouge. It was Bones' anniversary passion project, and the trailers looked awesome. When the show debuted, there was an awesome setting, awesome cast, and awesome production, but aside from the occasional fight the plot was boring. There was telling when there could have been showing. As you stated, there were references to other events that probably would have been a lot cooler. As it was, we got tired sci-fi tropes and not much else.
5777113
5777123
The only hockey anime I've ever seen is Puraore! Pride of Orange and I didn't like it. The first time hockey is even mentioned is nine minutes into the episode. Over a minute was spent just watching characters stretch. 17 minutes into a 23 minute episode is the first time we actually see them dressed and on the ice. There were also no fights.
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5777163
I wouldn't say Oshi no Ko dropped off after the first episode, it just took a massive tone shift. It's quality, it's compelling, and it wasn't for me.
5777163
the video in question talked about how the first episode is pretty amazing, with a couple of massive, insane twists, and then it turns into basically a different show afterward and drops what seems like its main setup