Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 13 · 2:27am Jul 14th, 2021
My to-watch list keeps growing, but it's heavy with slice of life series at the moment. I usually like to watch 2 or 3 series of different genres at a time, but I might have to double up on the SoL just to even things out more. Not to mention all the things currently airing on Toonami or that I'm waiting for them to get new seasons of. (I say this as I'm halfway paying attention to a recap episode of Black Clover, which has become thoroughly average after they ruined the arc of the show's one interesting character.)
Anyway, featured items this time are Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, plus a plug for Kakurenbo, after the break.
I gather that Eizouken translates as something like "film club," which makes me wonder why they don't bother translating it. Oh well.
This show was really fun. Midori and Sayaka are friends, and Midori loves to draw anime-type story concepts. Sayaka can ignore/tolerate this, but when they discover new classmate Tsubame also has a passion for drawing characters, she sees an opportunity. Tsubame is somewhat famous as a model, so she'd bring good publicity to anything they do. And Sayaka would never turn down a way to make some money.
They decide to form an anime club, but the staff is steadfastly against such a thing, so they have to couch it as a general film club whose projects just coincidentally focus on anime. But then producing anime takes a lot more than just the foreground, right? So they have to enlist the aid of the art club, the sound club, etc., who all have their motivations to deny their requests, mostly due to the staff's interference and pressure on the student council. Enter Sayaka, master businesswoman. She's a little shit, to say the least, but it's very entertaining to see her manipulate everything to their advantage while whipping Midori into actually doing some work instead of endlessly dreaming up concepts.
They end up producing three short films of increasing scope, and I thought the third was a bit of a let-down, but the point of the series is more to show the compromises they have to make to get a product out on time. People interested in the process of creating anime would like this, but it's a good story anyway.
Little touches abound. The setting is completely fictitious, but the design of the city they live in was very charming and imaginative. The idea that a school would even have a club so specific as sound effects is a funny hyperbole, as is the fact it only has one member who's in charge of an impossibly extensive library that professional studios would kill for, just because she accumulates them passionately. Whenever the girls are around town, something will spark one's creative process, and Midori and Tsubame will start envisioning some new story. They'll narrate what they see in their mind's eye as the art turns more sketch-like, and all the sound effects are performed by mouth at that point, which adds a lot of atmosphere.
This is also yet another show that has been rumored to have another season in development, though I've seen no official confirmation of that. Since it didn't end with any obvious suspended plotlines just begging for a continuation and it's been over a year, I'm not keeping my hopes up.
Rating: very good.
Eizoken ni wa Te o Dasu na!, 12 episodes, relevant genres: slice of life, comedy.
Wanderer D recommended Kipo to me, so I gave the first episode a try. It didn't grab me at all. A girl is wandering around underground in a place she's obviously not supposed to be, and then a cave-in happens, which ejects her up to the surface. She finds the place totally alien. Then it ends. There was nothing special going on aside from a generic disaster and lost girl trope, nothing had happened to endear any of the characters to me, and it just seemed really generic. But I pressed on and tried a second episode. That's where it gets good.
The surface is populated by strange hybrid animals of varying intelligence levels and some that are gigantic. Mostly, it's an "everyone fends for themselves" world, but she does manage to stumble into a few helpful characters: a wild girl named Wolf, a pig-like pet named Mandu, and the team of Benson (a laid-back guy) and Dave (a seemingly immortal insect). They're pretty unique (few humans live on the surface, and Dave's origins get revealed late in the series), but many of the other creatures they encounter congregate in tribes. That's probably the thing I found most impressive about the show: they keep introducing new groups, and they all have their cool and interesting quirks. Not that I liked them all—I found the shrimp, skunks, and hummingbirds mostly annoying. I loved the raccoons, cats, and rats, and the rest I was pretty neutral about. The music was rather good. And Kipo makes for a good protagonist, one who's unflaggingly optimistic in the face of any obstacles. She makes it her mission to unite all these groups to forge peace between them and the humans.
If I have one major complaint, it's that the ending felt like a cop-out. The antagonist's ultimate fate is one that I can't see her willingly accepting, nor one that Kipo should have let her. The plotline itself does have some disturbing implications that humans caused their own problems (a well-used trope) and don't seem particularly apologetic about it, but Kipo's ability to win friends is endearing, and the series' endless creativity kept surprising me.
Rating: very good.
30 episodes, relevant genres: adventure, action, drama.
I already reviewed it here, so I won't belabor it, but Kakurenbo: Hide and Seek is a very effective short horror film. I've rated it very good.
Normally, I like to keep all the material of a single series together, but I just started watching Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon, and given how long the original ran, there's no telling how long this one will go on. Plus it tells a mostly separate story, so I'll go ahead and cover everything prior to it.
Inuyasha (167 episodes), Inuyasha the Movie: The Love that Transcends Time (movie), Inuyasha the Movie: The Castle Beyond the Looking Glass (movie), Inuyasha the Movie: Swords of an Honorable Ruler (movie), Inuyasha the Movie: Fire on the Mystic Island (movie), Inuyasha: The Final Act (26 episodes)—in the present day, high school girl Kagome is attacked by a demon, which results in her being pulled through a well and into the past. There, she meets a boy in the woods (Inuyasha) who seems to be restrained. So she frees him, thinking he'll help her fight off the demon, yet he immediately turns on her, because he wants the same thing the demon does: a jewel embedded in Kagome's body that was thought to have been lost. She's the reincarnation of the priestess who'd been the caretaker of that jewel, had defeated the demon, and had restrained the half-demon boy, which is a complicated subject all its own. They'd been in love but had a falling out due to a misunderstanding. During all this, another small opportunistic demon tries to sneak away with the jewel, and when Kagome shoots it with an arrow to stop it, she inadvertently shatters the jewel. Even small pieces of it can make demons more powerful. And so begins a free-for-all as Kagome and every demon in the land tries to accumulate the entire jewel. Of course the main antagonist is the one who comes closest, and along the way, Kagome makes friends with a priest Miroku, demon hunters Sango and Kohaku, and a small fox demon named Shippo. Inuyasha's also trying to figure out the legacy left to him by his father while he deals with his sometimes-helpful-but-usually-adversarial half-brother Sesshomaru. Of course Sesshomaru has his own little entourage. With a series of this length, you know it's going to take some tangents to the main plot, and things fall into a bit of a formulaic feel in the middle. Plus there's a minor case of power creep. The final season makes a nice endcap to it and provides a surprising twist as to the sacred jewel's true nature. Rating for all: good, relevant genres: fantasy, adventure, action, drama.
Iria: Zeiram the Animation—sometimes this comes as a single continuous movie, though it's quite long for that, and sometimes as 6 episodes. Iria is an apprentice bounty hunter who assists her brother Gren and his partner Bob. They get hired for a mission to rescue the crew of a hijacked cargo spaceship, but something smells fishy about the whole thing. There is no hijacker; the ship has been taken over by Zeiram, a mythical demonic creature that is supposedly invulnerable. Bob and Gren are both badly wounded during the fight, and Iria ends up having to flee on her own, not knowing either one's fate. She uncovers a conspiracy to use Zeiram as a weapon, and she enlists the aid of a formerly rival hunter (Fujikuro) and a young waif (Kei) to defeat the demon and confront what happened to her brother. It's a good if predictable story, but the draw here is the atmosphere. The art style definitely evokes its era, but I think it was well done. The voice acting is a bit stilted, but again, for its era, it's pretty good. The music is very quirky, and the world building is a cool blend of futuristic and archaic. It's a little reminiscent of steampunk, except the overall aesthetic is still future, while the throwback accents are more wood and cloth than metallic. Think an escape pod that looks like a literal metal boat with a stylized pagoda roof. It was also a nice touch that the shields form very faceted, geometric shapes. I'd call this a fresh take on a standard plot, and I remember it fondly (and am almost finished rewatching it). Rating: good, relevant genres: action, sci-fi, drama.
Izetta: The Last Witch (Shumatsu no Izetta, 12 episodes)—this one was kind of weird. It's basically a retelling of WWII with obvious analogs of Germany, Britain and the US. The country where most of it takes place is an analog of Switzerland, who of course wants to remain neutral, but in this case, not!Germany desperately needs a corridor to the lands south of it, so they threaten to steamroll through. Flash back to when the young ruler of the country, Fine, was a child, and she'd discovered an apprentice witch in the woods, even befriended her and defended her from some suspicious villagers. Fine is loath to ask, but she eventually asks Izetta to help defend her homeland. Izetta does, even though her grandmother had made her promise never to use magic to interfere in people's affairs. She dramatically turns the tide of battle and becomes a national hero. Lacking a broom, she uses an anti-tank rifle to fly on, and the uniform they give her seems... impractical for combat and heavy on the fan service. I skipped over a bit about how Fine rediscovered Izetta, but that's related to a plot point about how not!Germany counters her. There are actually two ways. And then you have the usual weasely characters who switch sides on a whim. Anyway, pretty good as a story (I liked the final resolution), and might appeal to someone interested in WWII history. Rating: good, relevant genres: historical, fantasy, action.
Justice League: A New Frontier (movie)—I saw this pretty recently, and it's already faded from my memory. A bunch of superheroes team up to fight an object that's a slightly obscure reference to something from the comics, and... it was just dull. Several characters make stupid decisions, there are lots of pointless cameos. All I really do remember is that right after watching it, I felt like I'd wasted my time. Rating: meh, relevant genres: action, drama.
Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor (26 episodes), Kaiji: Against All Rules (26 episodes)—Kaiji is a gambler, though he doesn't really seem like a compulsive one. He's doomed to lose and get himself in a deep hole, but then he's really clever about getting back out. In Ultimate Survivor, he's tricked into several gambling scenarios: a type of card game on a ship, where first prize is erasure of all your debt, then a pretty sick obstacle course engineered for the entertainment of some elites, and finally, some one-on-one matches against the company executives. In Against All Rules, his remaining debt is used to sucker him into a forced labor camp, where he has to gamble his way into buying a day pass so he can try to take down the company by beating a huge jackpot game. A sad sack like him will never truly win, and he's constantly derailed by being a hopelessly nice guy who can't help assisting those in need. The outcome won't surprise you, but the draw is all the strategy, as Kaiji reasons through how each game works and what the winning strategy should be. If you like strategy shows, this was a particularly interesting one, especially because very few of the games are ones I was familiar with, so I was learning about them with the character. I think most of them were made up for the show. Rating for both: good, relevant genres: sports/games, strategy, drama.
Karakuri Circus (36 episodes)—this was another weird one. There's a lot of back story explaining how things got this way, and I won't delve into that. Suffice it to say there's some political drama about who will succeed as the head of a family, and a random strong guy named Narumi and a very acrobatic lady named Eleonore team up to protect him. A lot of the battles are fought by manipulating large mechanical puppets which are named after historical characters, and then things get even weirder when a plot point about a disease gains prominence, one that's killing a bunch of people, and it worsens unless they can make people laugh. There's eventually a justification provided for that, but it departs so far from what's realistically plausible, and it gave me a big WTF moment. Plus they are really aggressive about drawing Eleonore's groinal vicinity. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, fantasy.
Kekkaishi (52 episodes)—childhood friends Yoshimori and Tokine eventually become the responsible parties in their clans to battle demons. Tokine's much better at it, which just leaves Yoshimori feeling more downtrodden, since he's got a soft spot for her. They're supposed to be protecting someone specific who naturally attracts demons, though they eventually find out they haven't been told the whole truth, and the organization surrounding that person breaks down into infighting. I'd call this an average demon-fighting show; nothing was too compelling about it. Rating: decent, relevant genres: fantasy, action.
Kikaider (13 episodes + 4 OVAs + 1 extra OVA)—I never saw any of the OVAs, so maybe they were necessary to get a conclusion. I don't remember much about this, just that it felt painfully slow-paced with endless one-sided romantic intrigue. Kikaider (aka Jiro) is a robot, and he later encounters the children of the person who created him. The girl, Mitsuko, gradually, inexplicably, and pointlessly falls in love with him as he defends them from an evil organization who can exert some control over him and make him fly into a rage. It's pretty open-ended, and nothing is even suggested to be resolved, whether the bad guy is defeated, whether the romance will ever go anywhere, whether Jiro even survived. Rating: meh, relevant genres: sci-fi, action, drama, romance.
Kill la Kill (24 episodes + 1 OVA)—I haven't seen the OVA. The series is one a lot of people like, but it didn't do much for me. It's supposed to be an over-the-top comedy and parody of the fashion world, and on a level, it succeeds at that. Some of the humor landed with me, but I think the issue is that they gave the main character a genuinely earnest arc that was serious and suffered from too much tonal dissonance with the comic side. It felt to me like it could never decide whether it was a comedy or a drama. To the plot... Ryuko is searching for her father's killer, and she goes looking at a prestigious school where fashion ability determines social standing. She finds a living outfit that enhances her abilities so that she can battle the top students, and of course it's fan service to the extreme. At least her friend Mako was a cute character. The conspiracy must necessarily lead to the top, and the reveal of the enemies' true nature did give the series a nice ending note. It was just ridiculous enough to win me back over to the parody side of things, though overall, I still got too many conflicting signals from it. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, comedy.
Ah, and it looks like I'll hit a batch of highly rated stuff for the next couple blogs, such that there won't be many short reviews to write up. Woo hoo!
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. 3 here
vol. 4 here
vol. 5 here
vol. 6 here
vol. 7 here
vol. 8 here
vol. 9 here
vol. 10 here
vol. 11 here
vol. 12 here
Yeah, Kill la Kill didn't do a whole lot for me either. I think for me it fell into the same problem as Gurren Lagann, where the compelling and serious part got frequently sidelined for wacky low-stakes shenanigans. At least in Gurren Lagann they had the excuse of a lot of that stuff happening along the way, because they're going on a long journey where there's room for antics on the side. But in Kill la Kill Ryuko meets the person who killed her father or whatever in, like, the first episode, and then starts going to school with that person, so it was a lot harder for me to be interested in her running desperately to school in her pajamas or whatever. I only watched a couple of episodes, in fairness, but the dissonance there was strong enough that it just didn't grab me at all. There were a lot of concepts I liked, though, and Mako did indeed have some good moments.
Kaiji has managed to annoy me a weird amount for a show I've never seen. I enjoyed Kakegurui, another gambling anime, a decent amount, and unfavorable comparisons between it and Kaiji seem somewhat popular, but the latter sounds dramatically more gritty and psychological to me. Whereas a lot of the fun of Kakegurui for me was the surreal and larger-than-life personalities at work, so it never struck me as something to take all that seriously, which made the frequent comparison bother me. That aside I have heard mostly good things about Kaiji, so perhaps it shall be checked out at some point.
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I'd never watched a show that focused on strategy so much (other than battle strategy, like any sort of fighting anime) before, so I had fun with Kaiji. It's a fairly distinctive art style. The games' rules are simple, too, so it's not something like Yu-Gi-Oh! where you have to have lots of arcane knowledge about what the cards are and what they can do to follow it. It takes a few episodes each season to get going and introduce why the gambling is even happening, but once that starts, you'll know pretty quickly whether you'd like it. I accidentally started watching the second season first and got about 5 episodes in before popping back to season 1.