Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 28 · 12:43am Mar 9th, 2022
Featured items this week are ERASED and all things Tenchi Muyo!
I'm on a couple of new missions. One I'll hit on below, but I've also added a bunch of series that composers I really like worked on, so with any luck I'll have some great soundtracks to listen to. I also finished enough stuff recently that I'm backfilling again instead of getting further through the alphabet.
ERASED is a pretty brutal ride. But it gets better. I'll get the trigger information out of the way first. It's about tracking down a serial killer who targets children, and one of the victims is doubly affected, as she suffers physical abuse in her home. If that's not something you can stomach, even for shows where everyone gets their due, then stay away from this one.
The first few episodes were tough to get through. Every time it seems like things might be looking up, it pulls the rug out from under you again. But if you stick with it, you'll be well rewarded.
Satoru is twenty-nine years old and works as a pizza deliveryman while aspiring to be a manga author. He has a strange ability, though. Well, not exactly an ability. Definitely in recent years, and implied to have happened ever since his childhood, he experiences time skips. He'll notice he's retracing his steps anywhere from one to five minutes ago, and it means he needs to be on the lookout for something that feels off so that he can prevent a tragedy. He can't control the effect, which he calls Revival. Right away in the first episode, while on a delivery, it goes off, and he notices the truck that just passed him in the opposite direction has the driver slumped over the wheel as it races toward people in a crosswalk. He does save them, but he gets badly injured in the process.
One thing this show does very well is invest in the details. Lots of little things matter. The coworker who sits by him in the hospital until he wakes up. His mother traveling to stay with him and help him at home until he recovers. The effect triggering again while he's out shopping with her, and for once, he's not the one who notices the problem. (Her comment about how him saying something's wrong goes back to when he was a kid is very telling.)
There are a couple of running themes. One is loss of memory. What his mother sees prompts her to admit she, and other parents, agreed to try suppressing memory of murders that happened when he was young, in order to avoid scarring them. But all that business rears its ugly head again, and even though Revival had never allowed him to go back more than five minutes before, it now takes him back to those times so he can try to unwind some tragic events in the present and the original ones in the past that led to it all.
Like pretty much any time travel story, it sometimes takes multiple attempts to get it right, which is a tricky matter when Satoru can't control when and how it works. Then there's the other theme, and that's being alone. The targeted children had been ones who were isolated for one reason or another, and with his knowledge from the future, Satoru can keep any of them from ever being alone. And necessarily, it brings back that other theme of recovering memories—who actually remembers day-to-day details from eighteen years ago?
It's just before he goes to the past (which happens in the first episode, so not really a spoiler there) and as he's remembering it all once there that the message of aloneness really sinks in with him. Of the three victims, one was a student at another school, one was a friend of his, and one was a classmate he never got to know. Except he has one stark memory of that last one, Kayo: he noticed her standing alone in a park one night on his way home from school, and she was never seen again. So if he can keep her from being alone this time around...
I love the way the story is framed, with older-voiced Satoru narrating in his head, and it is sweet to see him care about these people. His mom really is a great person, and a charismatic teacher enthusiastically helps him out, too. He may not understand what Satoru's about, but he can get behind whatever makes the entire class support a previously marginalized and ignored student.
The usual questions come up, but it's still handled in an interesting way. If he can keep Kayo alive past the date she'd originally disappeared, how does he know she won't disappear on a different day? If he saves her, how does he know someone else won't just be targeted instead? There's still a killer out there, after all.
A very clever series, and I was pleased with the outcome. I'd been warned the ending was controversial, but now that I've seen it, I'm not sure why it would be considered that. The art had a bit of a unique style to it, and I rather liked it. Music was pretty good. I was a little confused by the meaning of something at the end, though. Satoru didn't always seem to notice it, but whenever Revival activated, a strange butterfly would appear. One does at the end as well, but without a time skip, so I couldn't figure out what that was for.
Rating: very good.
Boku dake ga Inai Machi ("The town where only I am missing"), 12 episodes, relevant genres: mystery, thriller, dark.
Tenchi Muyo! is one of the few harem anime I've enjoyed. Probably because it's the first one I saw, so I wasn't tired of the genre yet. There's a ton of material, and I haven't even seen half of it, but it's a fairly mixed bag, and I kind of ran out of enthusiasm in continuing with it. Mostly because the last couple I saw weren't that good, so it felt like it was going downhill. It's also something like Neon Genesis Evangelion to where it continually retells alternate versions of the events.
Main character Tenchi is seemingly living as a normal high school boy. But that's when the aliens showed up (for reasons related to a series I previously reviewed, Dual! Parallel Trouble Asventure). First, he finds Ryoko after her ship crashes and tries to help her, but he soon finds she's lying about her past and is being pursued by two galactic police officers, who arrive soon after... and a distress signal lures Ayeka, a galactic princess... and then her little sister Sasami follows... and then Ryoko frees mad scientist Washu... and then they all get stranded on Earth. And pretty much all these ladies except for Washu fall in love with Tenchi.
At first, it's standard romantic comedy fare, but the plot soon turns to political intrigue. Ayeka is heir to the galactic throne, which of course means there are forces plotting to take it from her, and her absence makes it a convenient time to start, so she and all those associated with her are now framed for treason. What follows is a pretty standard quest to clear their names and defeat the usurper through long odds of an entire galaxy being against them. It's a pretty good adventure and intrigue show, and as for the inevitable flood of shipping, I was firmly in the Ayeka camp. It's the first (and only?) show where I found myself shouting at the screen that Tenchi was an idiot and needed to just get together with Ayeka already.
Rating: very good.
26 episodes, relevant genres: adventure, romance, drama, comedy, fantasy, sci-fi, harem.
Next one I saw was Tenchi in Tokyo. The ladies all show up in this time while chasing Ryoko and Washu, who stole a special crystal from Ayeka. After Tenchi defeats Ryoko, they all decide to hang around, and of course the harem stuff starts up again. However, Tenchi is rather taken with a classmate of his, Sakuya. There's the inevitable baddie trying to take over Earth, and that's the real draw of the series. I liked that plot a lot, and as Tenchi gets closer to Sakuya amid all kinds of weird things happening, another girl named Yugi befriends Sasami.
There's not a lot to say here, as it's a straightforward plot, and going into any more detail would end up spoiling things. Suffice it to say this was my favorite entry in this universe, and I thought the romance was well done, and it's an actual romance this time, unlike the first series. Sakuya ends up being a compelling character, and some of the decisions she, Tenchi, Sasami, and Yugi have to make regarding their disposition lead to to a somewhat heartbreaking yet promising conclusion. Things might yet turn out well for all of them, but it could take a long time.
Rating: very good.
26 episodes, relevant genres: adventure, romance, drama, harem.
Next up is Tenchi the Movie: Tenchi Muyo in Love. This is a pretty standard time travel story, where a bad guy goes back in time to kill Tenchi's mom and prevent Tenchi's family from being a rival to him. The usual cast accompany Tenchi back as well to assist him, though he mostly has to stay hidden to avoid causing paradoxes. It wasn't bad, and if you enjoy the franchise, it's worth seeing, but there wasn't anything particularly notable about it. At least the harem aspect was kept to a minimum, but then so was the romance, which is odd, given the title. Or maybe it was just too lackluster for me to remember it? I haven't seen it in over 20 years.
Rating: decent.
Movie, relevant genres: adventure, drama, sci-fi.
And the last one I watched is Tenchi Muyo! GXP. A boy named Seina is recruited into the police force after barely surviving an officer's crashing ship. But she offered him the application thinking he was Tenchi. Thus begins his career as a galactic police officer, even though he's woefully unprepared for it. The usual characters only appear in passing, most of it focusing on Seina's attempts to learn the basics of his job and somehow inadvertently endearing himself to every female crewmember. It's amusing enough, but without being given much of a reason to care about any of these characters, I was never very invested in what happened to them. So again, it's fine for fans of the franchise, but hard to recommend on its own. And I'll sum up in general to say the art of all these is on the plus side, and the music was average.
Rating: decent.
26 episodes, relevant genres: adventure, comedy, sci-fi, harem.
Cannon fodder ahoy! Nah, some of these were pretty good.
Candy Boy (7 episodes + 1 special + 2 OVAs)—just for reference, the special takes place just before the series, the first OVA takes place 2 years before it, and the second OVA happens sometime during the series. I fell victim to wikipedia's summary leaving out a rather important detail here. In my quest to find good yuri friendshipping anime (but still willing to watch romance ones if the premise sounds good), I happened upon this one. Twin sisters Yukino and Kanade are from Hokkaido up north and have traveled to attend high school in Tokyo. Yukino seems a little more carefree and a little airheaded, and she enjoys swimming. Kanade is a little more uptight and thoughtful (yet she's the one their younger sister Shizuku calls the dumb one), and she enjoys art. It's mostly slice of life of their third year in high school, plus the little obstacles they hit as they try to navigate classes, finances, and college prep. But the big thing is that there's a younger student, Sakuya, who is enamored with Kanade. She's obsessed with her and constantly makes overt attempts to date her, but Kanade has zero romantic interest in her. Though she does tolerate her somewhat as a friend. Yukino's willing to trade Sakuya photos of Kanade and some of her sister's possessions. That's where most of the show's comic moments come from, and it's cute enough in that regard. But inasmuch as friendshipping yuri is easy to read romantic intent into it if you really want to, this one does stray into obvious romance territory, which wouldn't be a problem so much, except that it's between the twin sisters. And that is the detail wikipedia left out, so I'm warning you about it now. I really don't care for that kind of thing, and the series was short enough that I could live with it (episodes only range from 7-20 minutes long, most around 10-12), and it doesn't really pop up in earnest until later on. So I found that aspect really creepy, and I'd be tempted to give it a yuck rating on that, but I'll be fair. It was cute enough in other regards. Art quality was a plus, and the music seemed a little better than your average pop-type soundtrack. No idea what the title is supposed to mean. Rating: decent, relevant genres: comedy, romance, yuri.
Fragtime (OVA)—this was a lot better than I expected it to be. I found it through kind of roundabout means. It came out back in 2019, and while I was watching Psycho-Pass last year, this somehow got mixed in with the OVAs for it. On the site I most often use, the "next" function normally stops when you get to the end of a series, but in the movies and OVAs section, it'll queue up something seemingly random sometimes. Thinking it was another Psycho-Pass OVA I hadn't heard of, I looked up a description of it, and it didn't grab me at all. It seemed more adult than I usually like to watch, and it sounded like the kind of thing that would be a convenient romance without the context to justify it. Fast forward to just a couple weeks ago, when I finished watching Maria Watches Over Us. As I said in my review of it, it's easy to read romance into the relationships it presents if you're of a mind to, but they're not explicitly said to be, and there's plenty of plausible deniability. It's easy enough to find yuri shows that are romances; many places don't even tag them as romance when they are because they feel it's implied by the yuri label. And I don't mind watching yuri, but Maria did yuri friendshipping well enough that I wanted to see if I could find other good non-romance yuri. And of course Wikipedia has a list of yuri series. So I glanced down it and read the descriptions of some items in it, and Wikipedia does indeed have the issue that they don't always bother tagging them as romances when they are. I added some of them to my watch list even though they were romances, plus a few that seemed like maybe they wouldn't be. Fragtime was in the list, too, but I didn't recognize the title until I read its synopsis and remembered having read it before. Still not all that interested until I saw it was a one-off OVA instead of a series, so it's only an hour's investment. A high school girl named Moritani inexplicably has the power to stop time for about three minutes. She doesn't relate to people well, so she often uses it to slip out of social interactions. On one such occasion, she sees the popular girl Murakami sitting on a bench (note: it's a good idea not to give your characters names that are too similar, or it can be hard for readers/viewers to keep them separate). In a bit of indulgent curiosity, Moritani wonders what kind of panties Murakami wears, so she has a peek... only to find out Murakami is apparently the only person unaffected by the time stoppage. Murakami instantly takes a liking to Moritani, and they end up secretly dating. If there's a major weak point to the show it's lack of context. You just have to take it for granted that Moritani has this power. You don't get her history of it, you don't get the background of why Murakami had liked her for some time. It can end up making things feel contrived. And what follows is a dysfunctional relationship, which is why the description never interested me in the first place. But it's handled a lot better than I would have thought. Murakami takes delight in using her friend's power to do things they normally wouldn't, some self-serving and some not, but she comes across as very controlling. In the end, they're just two pretty broken people who find some comfort in each other, and they each have to come to terms with an identity crisis. I thought the character arcs were well done, and for all that both girls started out in an unhealthy place, it leads to an upbeat note that I appreciated. Murakami in particular really doesn't have an idea who she is, which leads to the story's climax. You do get thematic closure, though plot-wise, it's a fairly open ending. I kind of debated rating this higher, but the number of things you simply have to take as a given means that it doesn't do the best job of creating investment, and it leans a bit much on the titillating stuff in a few places. Its ratings are a little lower that I would have thought. Maybe that's why, but it's still a nice story. Good art, and while the music mostly blended into the background, the closing songs were good. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, romance, yuri.
Plastic Little (OVA)—I finally found it. In an earlier blog, I referenced something I'd seen a long time ago called Pet Shop Hunter, but a search on that title never turned anything up, nor did a search on what few plot elements I could remember. Now that I found it, I have to think the title search would have come up with something, as that is literally the main character's job and the name of the ship type she commands, but I must have simply not recognized the real title or what little plot summary came up. Though the top hits were definitely something different. Anyway, this starts with a scientist who invented the system for levitating a cloud city getting murdered by a corrupt military leader and helping his daughter Elysse escape. Elysse then encounters Tita, captain of a pet shop hunter, a type of armed vessel that captures large, dangerous creatures to sell on other planets. The plot will surprise nobody, as Tita helps Elysse ferret out the bad guy's plans and kill him, managing to take on the whole military with their one ship. It's over the top and nothing too special. If there's one reason to watch, it's the varied crew Tita has and the dynamic between them all, though at less than an hour long, it doesn't have the space to develop more than a couple of them. It's also extremely fan-service-y, which, oddly enough, I didn't remember, having Tita topless numerous times, Elysse sometimes as well, and generally very revealing clothing a lot of the time to boot. It also was one of three productions to have what was trademarked at the time (and according to a friend who's a trademark attorney and actually looked it up, it was cancelled almost ten years ago, so it's available) as a "Jiggle Counter." So you know what you're in for. Of course the ship has a huge indoor hot springs bath, and of course an extended scene takes place there, and of course there's breast shaming humor. I could do without that. Art was rather good for its time, music was average. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, drama, sci-fi.
Slayers Return (movie)—this was a pretty standard entry in the alternate continuity that pairs up Lina Inverse with Naga. I won't belabor the setup, as I already talked about it back in vol. 23 (recent enough that it's linked at the bottom of this post). As usual, someone wants to hire them to defeat a bad guy, only this bad guy has no idea what he's doing, unleashes a monster on the world, and decides he'd better switch sides and get rid of it. Really, this is just like an extended episode, and it doesn't do anything noteworthy. If you like the Naga stuff, then it won't disappoint, but I'm not so much a fan of those. Rating: decent, relevant genres: fantasy, drama, action, adventure, comedy.
Someone's Gaze (Dareka no Manazashi, short film)—since I'm writing these as I finish them but posting them in roughly alphabetical order, I'll need to say that I got into checking out writer/director Makoto Shinkai's work after having seen two or three of his movies I've liked. This reminds me a lot of another of his short films, She and Her Cat, which I reviewed a couple posts ago. Both are about a young lady in a transition point of her life and told from the point of view of a pet cat. In this one, main character Aya is recently working and living on her own in a near-future Japan. It alternates between views of her current life and when she was little, and for being in a small package (it's only about 7 minutes long), it delivers a lot of context about her history. Like all teenagers, she'd felt like her parents were a burden and sought to distance herself from them, though her mother had been working overseas for years at that point, so she'd mostly lived with her father. There's an interesting parallel in how both their careers are going, and the pet cat in question is also in an interesting position as to whose pet it really is. Aya's father bought it for her when she was young, but it stayed behind with him after she moved out, which is strangely appropriate, since he's the one who seems to be in more need of companionship. At least Aya thinks so. This is a compact yet pretty touching and accurate portrayal of how the father-daughter relationship changes as both parties age, and what kinds of circumstances bring them back together. Music was pretty good, plus a nice background song toward the end, and the art is consistently good in Shinkai's projects. Rating: good, relevant genres: slice of life, coming of age.
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. 18 here
vol. 19 here
vol. 20 here
vol. 21 here
vol. 22 here
vol. 23 here
vol. 24 here
vol. 25 here
vol. 26 here
vol. 27 here
I only saw a handful of episodes of Tenchi Muyo!. It was largely meh for me. I remember being amazed that the censors thought my little kid brain wouldn't notice their attempts to censor Ayeka's and Ryoko's hot springs nudity by giving them the anime equivalent of paint swimsuits. Some of the things censors will do to shows boggle the mind.
When I saw you said "Cannon Fodder" I thought you were going to review that one! LOL.
Erased was brutal. Very worth the watch though.
5642452
That kind of censorship is pretty standard, and I can often shrug it off. Like when Cartoon Network aired Outlaw Star, and they put a sports bra and biker shorts on Melfina when they first found her and when she gets in the ship's control center. I'm also now going back through Sailor Moon since there are significant chunks I never saw, but I'm watching the newer dub this time, which isn't censored, even though it's still rather tame. The older dub couldn't even tolerate there being a silhouette of someone in the bathtub, so it made the water opaque, filtered out any bits where you could see the leotard bottom under the girls' skirts, changed several effeminate bad guys into women, and famously altered Uranus and Neptune's romance into unusually affectionate cousins.
5642455
I'm unaware of a series called that, but I've heard of that title as one of three parts to a sci-fi anthology movie called Memories. Is that what you're talking about? I'd read the description of it before and was undecided whether I wanted to see it. But now that I see Satoshi Kon did the screenplay for part 1 and Yoko Kanno did the music for part 2, it goes on the list.
5642496 yeah, Memories is an excellent anthology. And Cannon Fodder had a very interesting filming method.
5642496
Sailor Moon was one of the earliest anime I watched and so I wasn't geared to notice such things. The only one I was aware of was the Uranus/Neptune "controversy" which, even as a kid, I thought was unnecessary. I totally shipped Jupiter/Mercury.
5642533
Oh, Memories! I only saw that one once, and it was a long time ago, but I remember liking it a lot. A pity, I can only remember one story in the anthology, and then only the ending.
5642535 My guess would be Magnetic Rose? That one sticks to your brain XD
5642536
Had to look it up, but yeah, that's definitely the one.
Ah, Erased.
Okay, personally I'm in the camp of not liking the ending. The reveal of the killer just felt so...i dunno, uninspired? Like, I was surprised by who it was, but more because they were such an obvious suspect I'd immediately discounted them as a possibility because hey, that would be too boring, couldn't be that. Rest of the show was pretty decent, but it did throw me off there. Glad you got more out of it tho.
On the other hand those cat shorts sound extremely cute, can't really say no to 7 minutes.
Tenchi in Tokyo was my first entry into the series. At the time, it was considered inferior to its predecessors, but I liked it. Granted, I never saw all of any of it, and only ever checked out GXP besides, but I always thought it was a fun series and yeah, harem before harem was crap.
5642535
Ah, a bold choice of ship! I got into Sailor Moon the same way I got into MLP: watching it expecting to make fun of it then deciding I actually liked it. I might talk about it some in a future blog, as it's interesting to compare all the versions of it out there.
5642551
I also felt like the killer was an obvious choice, but I was more engrossed by the strategy and thriller aspects than the mystery, so that didn't affect my enjoyment. Given that someone had told me the ending was controversial, I was expecting Satoru's friend Kenya to be the killer, or maybe that it'd be an "everyone dies" ending, but the actual one was the clear frontrunner.
Since you mentioned plural "cat shorts," I presume the two She and Her Cat items also caught your eye. They're definitely good, though on the melancholy side, with a bittersweet finish.
5642646
It's been so long since I saw anything SM that I honestly can't recall why I liked the ship so much. I also didn't really watch a lot of the show, maybe enough episodes for a season (but not all from the same season) and a movie or two. Jupiter and Mercury were always my favorites though, maybe that has something to do with it.
5642657
They may well have been my favorites too. Jupiter is great. Though S3 Pluto is an enigmatic badass (I mean... several of them had cool-sounding attacks, but Pluto Deadly Scream is pretty intimidating), and Saturn can be too.
5642657
Ah, and I forgot to reply about Tenchi. I liked it a lot when I originally watched it, but that's going back over 20 years now, and I hadn't watched much anime up until then. It makes me wonder if I watched it again, would I still think it was that good.