Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 32 · 11:16pm May 3rd, 2022
I'm coming up on a huge stretch in the alphabet without anything I'd given my highest ratings, so I'm faced with either reviewing like 20 things today (which I'd rather not do) or split it up and have only one featured item this week. And that's what I'll do: a series from just a few years ago, Hinamatsuri, after the break, plus still a large-ish number of other items that varied from good to bad.
Hinamatsuri is cut from the same cloth as Space Dandy. It's mostly wacky comedy, but they slip in some good heartfelt moments, too.
It starts out with Yoshifumi Nitta, a mid-level yakuza, who sees a dimensional rift open in his apartment, and what looks like a metal egg with a face on it comes through. It clanks on the floor, and the face looks over at him, but doesn't say anything, so he assumes he's hallucinating and goes to bed. The next morning, it's still there, but now it's asking him to set it loose.
The first episode did not sit well with me. What emerges from the egg is a middle-school-aged girl who has very strong telekinetic powers, and while she's pretty deadpan and emotionless, she does use her abilities to menace him into giving her whatever she wants. I hate that kind of character, even in the case it's played seriously in a thriller genre, but as comedy, I just don't find it funny. But I kept watching and was well rewarded.
This girl, Hina (the title fuses her name with the word for a holiday or festival, in a bit of a pun, since that's already the name of a festival related to dolls), eventually comes around. She's more ignorant of how normal people are supposed to behave than malevolent, and while her path of destruction does continue, it's by accident or with good intentions.
It's also one of those series that has a large cast of very enjoyable characters, and the side ones often shine more than the main ones do. So many of them are a delight. You get Anzu, who arrives the same way Hina did and with the mission of eliminating her, but Anzu becomes such an adorable and sympathetic character. Almost all of the show's genuine emotional beats involve her. Then there's Hitomi, a classmate of Hina's, once she decides to go to school, and she's the type who gets embroiled into all sorts of madcap situations just because she can't put her foot down about anything. Those two were by far my favorite characters.
Though not formally divided into parts, episodes frequently cover two or three separate mini-plots in sequence, though every one of those storylines gets intertwined. It's just shy of being random as it follows Hina and Nitta around, and how her arrival was the catalyst that makes all manner of amusing things happen. The show frequently had me laughing out loud, and aside from having to get over that hump in the first episode, I enjoyed every bit of it. Art and music were both rather good, and this was a lot of fun.
Rating: very good.
12 episodes, relevant genres: comedy, slice of life, drama.
And lots more stuff, some recent, some not.
Adachi and Shimamura (12 episodes)—on the surface, this is a pretty standard middle school romance, but it does hit a few different angles. Shimamura likes to skip class a lot and sneak over to the storage mezzanine area of the gym, where it's quiet and she can be alone. But one day Adachi gets the same idea, so the two start hanging out together. There are some old ping pong tables, so when there's no PE class going on downstairs, they play. One thing that makes it different is that it's not that saccharine, and very little of it is played for awkward comedy. Adachi has a mostly absentee mother, and she's never really had any friends, so she's very clueless about how normal people relate to each other. Shimamura is... I'll call her a higher-functioning introvert, where she socializes fine and has a circle of friends, but her inner attitude toward it all is a bit unique. Lots of these shows will have one broken character that the other helps to heal, but they've both got problems; more to the point, they have quite different manifestations of the same problem. Adachi can't deal with more than one person at a time, so she easily feels shoved aside whenever Shimamura engages with anyone else, and I can totally relate. I was like that as a young kid. It was nice to see the two stumble through their friendship and try to figure out what makes the other tick. Adachi's a little more shrewd, but she lacks the context to understand Shimamura, whereas Shimamura is more oblivious. Of course Adachi entertains romantic notions about Shimamura, but she doesn't even have the context to understand her feelings or if it's actually love. There ends up being more a theme of change, and whether it's a good idea to embrace or resist it. I liked this overall, but there were a few drawbacks. The first is the other thing I alluded to earlier about this show taking a different tack than most: by the end, there's very little that's resolved. It's also a tad on the gratuitous side, and they introduce a character who claims to be an alien (it's never confirmed if this is true), and her involvement is extraneous. I found her annoying, and her presence didn't facilitate anything else in the plot, so she just seemed like pointless fluff. If you don't mind something leaning more to the slice of life side and less about developing the relationship, this was pretty good. Art was a plus, and the music was fine. Rating: good, relevant genres: romance, slice of life, yuri.
Piano: The Melody of a Young Girl's Heart (10 episodes)—I chose this off the title alone. Middle school student Miu (who seems to have a cat with the same name as her) is a talented young pianist. Her best friend Yuki is an up-and-comer on the track team. Together, they navigate the scene of how to approach their crushes, plus Miu has a somewhat cold and distant piano teacher, which starts to eat away at her confidence. Really, this show felt like it was nipping around the edges of most of its topics without ever directly tackling any of them. The only one that ever comes to a head is Miu's crisis of believing in herself. There's an upcoming recital for the students at the music center, and her teacher has decided he will only submit her as a participant from among his students, but it's up to her whether she wants to. And after asking her to play something from memory at one of her lessons (whatever she liked—it didn't matter what), he's impressed by what she plays, and when he asks what it is, she says it's something she came up with herself. Now he directs her to not only be his sole representative at the recital, he wants her to write an original composition to perform. The pressure does not do her any favors, which leads to her questioning whether she can, whether she even wants to play in the recital, and whether she wants to continue playing piano at all. As a central plot, that all went fine, but the romance B plots and the bit of intrigue that seems to surround Miu's teacher and big sister feel tacked on. I think it's rather telling the way the series ends, with her going out on stage, noting who is and isn't in attendance, and sitting at the piano. Fin. No resolution to any of those B plots (though I realize I've just spoiled what her decision was, yet the gravity is more about the process than the result), and while you do hear snippets of her composition as she practices it, you don't hear the final performance (or ever hear the entire thing all the way through, for that matter). Wikipedia sometimes lists some of the critical response to shows, and after watching, I was surprised to see one who back in 2010 listed this as one of his top 10 all-time anime recommendations. It just seemed way too much of a slow burn to me, with very uneven pacing that doesn't gain much interest until near the end. I've seen numerous other music-based shows I liked more, though maybe not one so closely focused on this kind of performance anxiety. Music was varied, mostly good, and it struck me how so many series, especially musical ones, have background music that sounds a lot like Erik Satie's compositions, for those of you who understand that. Which makes sense, I guess—they would lend themselves to being atmospheric but not intrusive. I'd recommend it mostly for people close to the subject matter. Art is average for its time. Rating: decent, relevant genres: drama, slice of life, romance, music, coming of age.
The Place Promised in Our Early Days (movie)—another entry in my trip through Makoto Shinkai's work, this one being his first full-length movie. This is a rather confusing story. After the end of WWII, treaties ceded Hokkaido to the USSR, leaving numerous families split. It's fairly reminiscent of what happened in Korea, but I don't know whether it's supposed to be an allegory for that. Anyway, the Soviets begin building a strange massive tower there that can be seen from as far away as Tokyo. Pretty much everyone is fascinated by it, including schoolmates Takuya and Hiroki. A girl named Sayuri rounds out the trio—I thought she had initially asked Takuya out and been turned down, but maybe I was misreading who that was. The boys work at a subcontractor that builds weapons, and business is booming due to the military buildup surrounding this tower, since whatever it is (and has been for decades now) seems to be nearing completion. On the sly, they're using scavenged parts to build an airplane with the hopes of flying over to see what the tower is someday. Then Sayuri disappears, and the pain of it leads to a rift between the boys, who give up on their airplane and go their separate ways. But once the tower activates, it's believed to be a gateway to alternate universes, and if it's not stopped, the Soviets can overwrite a large area around the tower with whatever alternate reality they want. And this is the movie's weak point: I don't understand what this buys the Soviets, it's very destructive to both sides, and it's not even clear if they can control which reality manifests there. However, Sayuri seems to be a key to why the tower hasn't worked correctly so far, and while it's an interesting concept, it's hand-waved as to how that works, though it's related to dreams, and through the brief connection they can establish while dreaming, Sayuri and Hiroki realize they love each other. It's just a question of whether she has to give up any semblance of a life to keep the world safe. It skips around in time a fair amount, plus the dream sequences are in different apparent time frames, so it's hard to keep track of when you have to organize the timeline, realize when things are not supposed to be sorted by time, and catch the difference between reality and dream. I'm not the best at this kind of thing, but at least the basic plot comes through clearly. While it's not the most amazing thing out there, it definitely shows promise for Shinkai's later output. I teetered on the edge of calling this decent or good, so I'll let it round up. Art was very good, music mostly blended into the background, but when it did gain some prominence, it was pretty good. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, romance, sci-fi (insofar as alternate realities exist).
The Wind Rises (movie)—another Ghibli film, and one I didn't watch until last year. It focuses on Jiro Horikoshi, telling a biographical story (but one that takes a number of liberties with it) about his youth, adult life, and career. He was the chief designer of the legendary Zero fighter plane used by Japan in WWII. Of course a Miyazaki film would focus on aviation... I'll say up front that I would have expected this to have only limited appeal to anyone who's not an airplane enthusiast, but my wife liked it, so who knows. My son was a little bored by it. When Jiro was a little boy, he was fascinated by the airplanes he'd occasionally see, which were a new technology at the time. He dreamt of being able to design them someday, and he proves to have a natural talent for it, so after college, he gets assigned to a design bureau with a friend of his. This is very much in line with what my day job is, so I found it interesting. It's even possibly somewhat educational, as it's pretty accurate about the trade-offs you have to make in a design. I do wonder how accurate it is about the innovations he's responsible for—at least from my perspective, they seem obvious, but that's just the way technology goes. It's easy for any of it to seem simple in retrospect. While a lot of the plot revolves around the demands of his work, it would bore most audiences if that's all there was to it. So there's an engaging B plot about him falling in love with someone and trying to balance his work and home life. While it's more implied than anything else, he also seems to have an inner conflict between loving airplanes and knowing what his designs are being used for, plus having to play along with the political games. So I'm not in the best position to say whether I think an audience of laypeople would like it, but it does tend to be rated highly, so I guess it's got enough. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, historical, biography.
The Wonderland (movie, sometimes known as Birthday Wonderland)—I agree with the chief criticism I see of this, that it's desperately trying to be a Ghibli movie, but it can't quite get there. Which is also something you see said about Mary and the Witch's Flower, though I quite liked that one. A teenage girl named Akane is pretty timid and doesn't like being around other people at school, so she fakes being sick. Her mom plays along and lets Akane run an errand to pick up something in town from her aunt, who owns a curio shop. While there, Akane finds what appears to be a ceramic cast of a handprint, and it fits her own hand perfectly. Furthermore, it won't let her hand go, and then a strange man dressed in an anachronistic fashion comes up from the basement to inform her this means she's to be the savior of his world. He won't take no for an answer. Aunt Chii comes along, and the man's assistant helps out on their quest as well. The atmosphere is what brings this closest to a Ghibli feel: the world is full of whimsical, varied, and fun elements that make it rich. I liked Akane and her aunt, and it was interesting seeing them try to navigate this world, sometimes on their own and sometimes with help. But I didn't like the man (Hippocrates) much, and as he's a major player, he soured the film some for me. Plus it was weak on the plot, where it felt like there was never that much conflict. There's a relatively straightforward path from start to finish, with few serious setbacks. There was a little twist to the end, and it does have that Ghibli type of ending, where it's often revealed that nobody is actually that bad. Art was very good, both in quality and fluidness, and the music was pretty good. I liked it more for the visuals and atmosphere than the plot. Rating: good, relevant genres: adventure, fantasy, drama.
The World be Enclosed (Kakomareta Sekai, short film)—another of Makoto Shinkai's short films, actually his first. There's not even sound or motion, just 30 seconds of still shots that seem to show a couple of friends travelling around? I'm not really sure what this was. Rating: decent, relevant genres: slice of life.
ThunderCats (26 episodes)—an anime remake of the original series. It was supposed to run for two seasons, but it got cancelled after the first, so the story is just left hanging. If you're familiar with the original cartoon, it mostly follows the same plot, though it's not aimed at quite as young an audience, so it doesn't pull its punches. Some cat-like race of people have crash-landed on a strange world with a large variety of native races who prove to be either friendly or antagonistic. The original more played the long game, leaving it vague what the overall goal was, and while the new one was clearer about it, it still felt largely episodic. Given that it's unfinished, I'd only recommend it to fans of the original who want to see an updated version of it. Art was good, music average. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, adventure, drama, sci-fi.
Tokko (13 episodes)—some years ago, a massacre happened in a suburb of Tokyo, where a swarm of demons invaded through a portal. That section of the city is now kept cordoned off, but there are still occasional demonic incursions, and a special police force has been set up to counter them, populated by survivors of the original incident. Such people have absorbed some demonic power from their experiences, so they can fight the demons on equal footing. To put it bluntly, they do not get along with the regular police. The endgame is pretty generic here, just to defeat the demon hordes and regain the pieces of an artifact whose destruction allowed the portal to be opened in the first place. I kind of feel bad when I can't come up with much of a description for some of these, but this is just a standard example of a demon-fighting show with some police procedure added in. It never interested me that much, and it didn't come to any strong conclusion. When the ultimate goal is to recover 108 fragments of the artifact, and you only have 13 episodes... yeah, you're not going to tell the whole story. Art was average, music average at best. Rating: meh, relevant genres: action, horror, supernatural.
Tokyo ESP (12 episodes)—a high school girl named Rinka suddenly gains a superpower upon seeing a strange supernatural fish swimming around in the air, which touches her. Now she has the ability to phase her body through solid objects, and I appreciated how realistically the show dealt with that. For instance, if she phases to go underground, she'd better find a hollow space somewhere to rematerialize, or she's screwed. (I guess the fact that even then she'd be rematerializing in the place of air molecules gets glossed over.) She uses her power to go around town in disguise and act as a superhero, but the public becomes very suspicious of her on principle. She meets up with a couple other people who have the same idea, but then a larger organization that's more bent on large-scale social change uses their abilities (all unique and gotten the same way Rinka did) to strong-arm the government into complying, so... basically, they're terrorists. Rinka and her compatriots do what they can to fight back, but the bad guys have an interesting plan, one I've seen done similarly elsewhere, to turn loose these supernatural fish throughout the city, granting powers to tons of random people, just to sow chaos. Through it all, there's a boy, Azuma, who's a friend of hers and had been with her when she got her power, meaning he has one, too: he can teleport. This series really flew under the radar for me, as I'd never heard of it, but it popped up on Prime Video, so I gave it a shot. And it was pretty good. It does bring the terrorism plot to a close while leaving it open-ended what Rinka, Azuma, and the rest will do going forward. Apparently it's banned in China, but I don't remember the details of it enough to postulate why. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, drama.
Tokyo Ghoul (48 episodes + 2 OVAs)—I cheated a bit, as the title changes some over the course of the sequel seasons, and there are still new things upcoming for the property, but I only ever saw the first 24 episodes, and I have no desire to see any more of it. There are ghouls living among and disguised as humans, and they have to eat human flesh to survive. They mostly try to remain in the shadows. Main character Kaneki is human, but due to a medical procedure to save him after an attack, he becomes a human-ghoul hybrid and constantly has to fight his nature. He joins up with some ghoul subculture and makes a few friends there, and he hopes to find some way for ghouls and humans to coexist, which puts him at odds with a faction who's tired of hiding and just wants to menace humans openly. So, basically the same idea as Grindelwald. The emotional appeal here is really over the top, and while the fights feature pretty good action, Kaneki is such a goth edgelord that I hated him from the word go. Well, he started out as a whiny sad sack, but then he turns into an edgelord. This is certain to appeal to the teenage girl crowd who like this kind of dark fantasy thing. I just found it immediately tiring. I hated the protagonist, thought the plot was formulaic, and I was glad when Toonami (keeping my fingers crossed that they don't pick it up at some point) didn't continue past the second season of it. Rating: meh, relevant genres: dark, fantasy, horror, supernatural, thriller.
Tokyo Godfathers (movie)—and thus completes my trip through Satoshi Kon's directorial projects. Three homeless people live together, an old man Gin, a middle-aged drag queen Hana, and a runaway teenage girl Miyuki. While scrounging around, they find an abandoned baby. Hana immediately wants to take it in and care for it, Gin considers this bad news, and Miyuki's mostly in Gin's camp about it. But Hana won't listen to them. At least Hana does concede that she'll look for the baby's parents if the other two agree to let her keep it in the meantime. And so goes their adventure around town, hoping they can find the baby's mother. This is very much a movie that's more about the journey than the destination, and these three characters' paths frequently diverge and come back together in their quest, each one encountering various obstacles. Plus each has to confront regrets from their past: Gin and his lies to his family; Hana's departure from the showbiz community; Miyuki's dispute with her father. There even ends up being some intrigue involving the baby's origin. By the end, it's all wrapped up in a nice bow, and along with Millennium Actress, they're the only Kon things that don't ever get very dark. This is a nice feel-good thing, which is unusual for him. Art is always good in Kon's projects, and music was pretty good. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, mystery.
Tribe Nine (12 episodes)—In my search for good baseball anime, I saw this new series announced back in the fall. It takes place in a future Tokyo, where gang warfare tore the city apart, so a new decree was made that disputes can only be solved through games of extreme baseball, or XB. It differs mostly from regular baseball by the scale involved. Bases are several city blocks apart. You also have to tag the runner out before he can get to a base—catches are never outs. But tagging can be done rather... forcefully, with the intent of kicking the runner's ass. The city's regions are divided among tribes, and main character Haru by chance meets up with the leader of Minato Tribe, who likes Haru's quickness and ability to dodge, though he has zero baseball talent. A muscle-headed tuna fisherman named Taiga also joins up about that time, and one of the tribes is trying to take over the city, leaving the rest to form an uneasy truce to band together. It's a very predictable plot, and as it doesn't feel much like actual baseball, it didn't have that draw for me either. I liked a lot of the characters, though, particularly Minato Tribe's manager and catcher, Arisugawa. Her design was pretty cool. Eh, it comes across as a pretty standard fighting show. Art was a plus, music was pretty good. Rating: decent, relevant genres: sports, drama, action.
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:
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vol. 23 here
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vol. 26 here
vol. 27 here
vol. 28 here
vol. 29 here
vol. 30 here
vol. 31 here
Tokyo Godfathers was surprisingly sweet, I remember enjoying it very much when it came out. But then again, I'm a Millennium Actress mega fan lol.
Is the new Thundercats the one that started in Thundera and Cheetara is some kind of thief, or am I thinking of a different Thundercat series?
And well, what to say about Hinamatsuri that I haven't said to you already? I still need to do a Sunset's Isekai with Hitomi coming in for work.
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Oh crap, I never thought of that. Yes, Hitomi definitely needs to do a turn as a bartender.
That does ring a bell about Cheetara, but the series aired in 2011, so it's been a while. I think it must be, by process of elimination, since the original didn't do that, and nobody watched TeenCats Go! ThunderCats Roar.
5655137 There was a very interesting bit in that Thundercats series. There's a point in Mum-Ra's monitors where you can see some other 80s shows, don't know if you caught them. Particularly Tiger Sharks and Silver Hawks.
Ah, yes, I recall The Wind Rises. I agree, it may not be something that will appeal to the average viewer. I really liked it myself, but I have always had a fascination with airplanes that made the movie of particular interest to me.
Then there's Tokyo Godfathers, of which I have so many fond memories. I like to think of it as a story about little miracles. All the things that happen in it are so incredibly unlikely, but the show goes out of its way to kind of wink at us and say "yeah, we know." I really liked that aspect of it. I don't see it regularly or anything, but it's become one of my favorite movies for the holidays.
Random fun fact: The Japanese view Christmas as a romantic holiday, to such a degree that it actually serves as their Valentine's Day. It's curious that Tokyo Godfathers takes place on Christmas Eve and yet makes no mention of the romantic aspect of the holiday in Japan. Perhaps this was Satoshi Kon's way of thinking outside the box by refusing to do what was expected for a movie set in the holiday season.
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Hm, I didn't know that about Christmas, particularly since anime still makes a big deal out of Valentine's Day as well. Though come to think of it, the Valentine's Day stuff is often friendshipping as much as romance, like exchanging chocolates with your buddies and senpai.
5655146 I'd say because it's really not about the whole holiday and more about Miyuki realizing where she really belongs? TBH I'd love to have seen the KFC impact on Xmas there, but XD
dude, that Thundercats reboot was so fucking good argh even with the unresolved ending, because you could tell at least they had one planned, they weren't just gonna make up season 2 as it went
I had plans once upon a time to redo it with ponies in place of the characters, but never got around to it, and it's no longer fresh enough in my head ._. Thunderponies, though. It coulda been a thing.
Tokyo ESP sounds cool.
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Yes, ThunderCats did have a strong sense that it was actually going somewhere. And in this case, we don't even have a manga to see what that was. D:
Tokyo ESP was a nice little diamond in the rough. Not amazing, but far better than most things I watch on a whim, and Rinka was a pretty cool character. And I always love it when writers actually think about the physics of how these things would actually work. Like if Rinka's inside a wall, she can't unphase to push herself off and get back out of the wall. She has to make sure she's got the trajectory and speed to get through in one jump. Which also means that jumping blindly is incredibly risky. Phase out so the enemy's punch just goes through you? Fine, but if they're smart about it and then keep their arm in you, then you'd have to have planned ahead for your momentum to carry you away, or they can just hold you like that until gravity pulls you into the ground. Safer up a couple of floors, so you always have rooms under you to fall into. That's some kind of fridge horror, if you ended up permanently stuck inside a solid object.
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And the thing is, I somehow completely missed the original Thundercats when I was a kid, and I still loved the reboot! (And was subsequently dismayed by the creation of Roar...)