Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 33 · 12:37am May 18th, 2022
Getting dangerously close to finishing the alphabet and deciding how to handle things once that happens. Still in the middle of a stretch where I didn't have much rated very good or excellent, so I'm just going to have one featured item again, but it's a really good one this time, and there are multiple entries in the continuity: Violet Evergarden. That and eight other mixed items after the break.
Violet Evergarden does so many things right. I usually save these bits for the end, but the art was beautiful and the music was fantastic. Oddly enough, I'm not sure how much of what you actually hear is on the soundtrack, as I listened to that, and a lot of it has typewriter sound effects over it, which didn't happen for the series. Still great music, though.
One of the many wins is the effective cold opening. We see main character Violet waking up in what seems to be a triage center. She's confused, because the last thing she remembers, she was in a military uniform and in a battle. Now she has two prosthetic arms and she's being told the war is over. When she asks after her commanding officer, everyone either says they don't know who that would be or gets evasive.
This all takes place in what looks like an analog of northern Europe with a tech level around WWI. Except for prosthetics, that is: Violet's arms are fully functional. It also brings up something that occasionally happens in anime, and I've talked about instances of it before. There's a premise you just have to accept without thinking about it, because if you do think about it, you'll immediately poke a bunch of holes in it.
In this world, post offices have suddenly become big business. I don't know whether that's because the concept is new or advances in transportation have recently made delivering things much more viable. Violet's former commanding officer (Gilbert) had a friend who owns one of these post offices (Hodgins) and made him promise to look after Violet if anything happened to him. So Hodgins takes her on as an employee and lets her use one of the boarding rooms on the premises. At first, she assists one of the deliverymen, but then she becomes enamored with another kind of job: auto memory doll. And here's where you just have to roll with it.
An auto memory doll is someone available for hire when a customer needs to write an important letter but just can't figure out exactly what they want to say or how. Dolls may travel quite long distances to meet with clients, and it may take them days or even weeks to get everything just right. Yet this service is still pretty affordable so that people of pretty modest means can still hire a doll. The better-known ones have a longer wait list, of course.
The series does eventually delve into Violet's past and why Gilbert was special to her, and it informs why she seems so cold and emotionless most of the time. Yet as someone who understands her own emotions, or emotions in general, very little, she turns out to be incredibly gifted at helping other people express theirs as an auto memory doll.
It does a good job of progressing her own emotional development and revelations about her past as slow-burn things in the background as each episode is more about her meeting a client and completing an assignment. For lots of series, these mostly one-and-done encounters just don't have the space to be very emotionally engaging, but this series does it well. It skillfully gives all the context needed to become invested in each of the scenarios, plus a lot of the characters make later appearances, lots of them having formed a lasting relationship with Violet, just further showcasing her growth.
The side characters shine as well, from the clients she becomes friends with, to Gilbert's family, to her coworkers at the post office. It doesn't come to a very strong conclusion, but I didn't mind so much, since I took it more as a mood piece. There is an OVA, but I won't go into it, as it can slot in as another regular episode. I don't recall if it was any longer than one.
Rating: excellent.
13 episodes + 1 OVA, relevant genres: drama, romance-ish, coming of age-ish.
Later came a film called Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll. It was a bit odd, as it feels like two separate stories. It starts with Violet helping out a girl at a boarding school, more as an assistant than her auto memory doll duties. Eventually the girl warms up to Violet and shares her history. The first half of the movie is just a flashback that fills in that history as context for the second half, where someone from the girl's past tracks down Violet to try and reunite with her old friend. I still liked it, but it felt like two separate stories, and it also doesn't come to a strong conclusion, but it's at least one of those that strongly hints how future events will play out. It was described as a spin-off film, making me wonder if they meant it as a launching point for another story about these other characters, but as far as I'm aware that never happened and none is planned.
Rating: very good.
Movie, relevant genres: drama, coming of age.
And finally, Violet Evergarden: The Movie. Unfortunately, I can't say much about this one without spoiling it. I'd said the original series didn't come to a strong conclusion, and that includes what happened to Gilbert. This movie starts with a framing device that I had mixed feelings about. At least a few decades in the future, a girl who's revealed to have a connection to one of Violet's more memorable clients from the original goes inquiring about what had happened to Violet, prompting the movie to go into flashback mode for most of its duration to fill in that story. I wasn't clear on whether it was the girl imagining it or just an omniscient point of view showing it (I'm pretty sure it's the latter), and it pops to the girl again to wrap it up at the end.
While filling in the story of Violet's life subsequent to the series, she comes across a letter in the dead letter area of her post office that may have a tenuous clue to Gilbert's fate. It's kind of a strange way for that to come about, given what had been strongly hinted about his disposition, but there you have it. That does end up being indicative of the why in addition to the what. So Violet takes a leave of absence to travel to a faraway land and see if she can follow the trail to its end. And as she so affects everyone she meets, Hodgins just can't help going along for whatever support he might lend. I'm going to have to leave the description at that.
What I will add is that the site I often watch these things on when out of other options is weirdly slow to get new movies and OVAs while lightning-quick at getting new series. I waited over a year for this to show up, and once it did, they had only a dub. Fine, I prefer that anyway. But this couldn't have been an official dub. It didn't use any of the same VAs, and most of them had strong accents. Not that it hurt the presentation, but it was a little jarring after you get used to what voices they'd had before.
Rating: excellent.
Movie, relevant genres: drama, romance.
Plowing through some more end-of-alphabet stuff.
Humanity Has Declined (Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashiti, 12 episodes + 6 mini episodes)—this is also sometimes called Mankind Has Declined. I looked for the mini episodes but couldn't find them anywhere. The main series follows a young girl who's never actually named. She recently graduated from some form of school, though it's not clear what level it's equivalent to. The human race has been on the decline for some time, and while you can see modern cities abandoned in the distance, people now congregate in small villages that mostly have the aesthetic and tech level of the 1800s. There are fairies living around, too, who sometimes help people on a whim, and the protagonist has been appointed a UN liaison to the fairies, for lack of anyone more qualified. That all sounds like a dark setup, but very little of the show is. The fairies look like chibi elves, and there's really no plot. Two of the episodes are one-off stories, but the rest are all two-episode arcs, and they're just random, somewhat silly but usually not outright funny, surreal weirdness. I don't know how to classify it or what audience to recommend it to. Some of it seems like parody, a bit of it is eerie, but a lot is just odd for odd's sake. I think the arcs are shown in reverse chronological order, too. It's just... strange. If you like strangeness, it's worth at least checking out the first two episodes to see if it clicks with you. Art and music were both pretty good. Rating: decent, relevant genres; slice of life, drama, random, surreal.
Trinity Blood (24 episodes)—the anime glosses over a lot of the context for what happened in the past. The Wikipedia article for the series goes into all that in the short description, and I'd recommend reading that after watching, as it's hard to pick up much of that from the series alone. This also falls under the "anime doesn't understand how Catholicism works" trope, as the church is a major military power waging war against vampires. Without all the background, it just appears that it's a battle of humans versus vampires, and the humans have a vampire on their side as well, one of a much more powerful form. There's a corresponding bad guy, but he's as much in it for himself as siding with the lower vampires. Not much gets revealed about their past, or if it did, it was so rapid and jumbled that it didn't sink in. So it mostly feels like vampire warfare, though I think it was one of the better examples of it I've watched. The ending felt more like it just stopped than concluded things. So... not great on plot, at least if the series is your only source of info, but I thought the characters and action were all worthwhile. Art was good, and I don't remember the music, so probably average. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, thriller, supernatural, sci-fi.
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (movie)—a young girl was abducted by a vampire, and years later, her father and brother both independently start enterprises to rescue her, though it's unclear whether she had gone with him unwillingly. There's not really much to say about the plot. It's very straightforward. These hirelings all go to rescue the girl, maybe they do, maybe they don't. It was pretty unmemorable to me. Rating: meh, relevant genres: dark, fantasy, horror, action.
Vampire Wars (movie)—I gather this one is considered a classic. I had to read a summary of it to remember it at all, and even then it's not ringing a bell. Some attack occurs at a NASA base, and when a CIA agent from there is found dead in Paris, a French agent follows the trail to an actor and a vampire cult, and... this obviously left no impression on me. Rating: meh, genres: dark, supernatural.
Virus Buster Serge (12 episodes)—this is based on a game, which rarely turns out well. And this one didn't. In a technological future, machines are increasingly falling under the sway of a virus, and Serge is part of a police force specially formed to combat it. He can't remember his past, and for some reason, he hopes helping out with this struggle will allow him to recover it. Pretty standard hacking plot, military, police, whatever. There are few surprises to be had, and while I liked a couple of the characters, I never found it very interesting. Yikes, three duds in a row. Rating: meh, relevant genres: action, sci-fi, cyberpunk.
Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song (13 episodes)—here we go, getting back to something good. The title is a weird choice. The main character's real name is Diva, but one little girl calls her Vivy. I think Fluorite Eye is just a reference to her purple eye color, though the series never uses that at all. Androids have become common, but for some reason, science has failed at making them generalists, so each one is given a single function to perform. Diva's function is to sing, and she performs on a small side-stage attraction at a Disneyland-type park. She aspires to make it to the big stage at some point, and a young human girl that assists behind the scenes is trying to help her find the spark to her music that she lacks. She can sing technically very well, but there's no artistry to it. Then one day after one of her concerts, all the AIs in the park suddenly go nuts and start attacking any humans they can find. Only Diva is unaffected. Next thing you know, we've skipped back several years, and Diva's back at the beginning of her career with a cube-shaped AI claiming it's from the future and it needs her to help ward off an apocalypse. Here, it takes on a time-loop motif, but almost with a Quantum Leap aspect, as the cube calculates what actions Diva can take to head off the undesirable future, then recalculate after achieving her mission to see if it worked. But remember: androids are supposed to have one function and one function only. Asking her to branch out into secret agent infiltration shouldn't work, but as had already been established, she's no ordinary android. She'd been designed (possibly with some influence from earlier time loops) to be exceptional. All of this is to prevent a violent anti-AI organization from gaining traction, but I also enjoyed the way the time loops happened. In some cases, it may take her several tries to fix the immediate problem, but then years may pass before the cube returns to say there's a new one to solve. And one of those time jumps in particular was handled really well. Kind of heartbreaking, in a way. Of course there will be a treatment of what it means to be human and whether Diva is actually alive, as a backdrop to the episodic fights against the enemies each time. I thought this was rather good, and the how and why of Diva being the one who can ultimately influence the future was an interesting twist. Art was very good, and so was the music, as it should be, in a series this music-centered. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, sci-fi, drama.
Voices of a Distant Star (Hoshi no Koe, short film)—another foray into the work of Makoto Shinkai. It's only the length of a standard episode. It starts out with high school students Mikako and Noboru in a seemingly normal present-day Japan. That is, until they see a large spaceship launching to go battle alien forces. Upon graduating, Mikako passed the requirements to join the ship's crew, but Noboru didn't. She pilots a mech, and the mission of the fleet she's assigned to is to push the aliens back from Earth, but this is done inconsistently. It seems like this is the first actual combat, as we'd first encountered the aliens on Mars and gotten slaughtered by them. Mikako's group engages the aliens there, then forces them back to Jupiter, then to Pluto. Now, I said back in my review of the movie Gunbuster that I appreciated the realistic way it dealt with time dilation. As the ship traveled at near-light speeds, it opened up an age gap between Noriko on board the ship and her best friend back on Earth. Something similar happens here. The fighting gets too intense at Pluto, and the fleet withdraws by a light year, which would put them a lot farther from Earth. I guess the implication is that the defenses are thickly layered back in that direction, and they trust Earth can be kept safe while these battleships go in the opposite direction? They then warp to Sirius but then claim they're the first humans to ever see the planets there (to my knowledge, none are known to exist), which is odd if they so easily have the capability to go there, particularly since one seems habitable. They eventually do get attacked there, as well. All along, Mikako has been sending messages to Noboru whenever she can, but they're obviously taking longer and longer to get to him. I think the same effect happens, where on Earth, Noboru is aging much faster than Mikako, but it wasn't always clear. In the meantime, he's been working his way up to be qualified to serve in the fleet as well, and by the end, he's on his way to join her, but it gets left pretty open-ended. I again liked that they treated time dilation realistically, and the enemies looked cool, but the rest seems more to create atmosphere and lay out a premise than to have that much of a plot. Art was surprisingly dated-looking for how relatively recent it is, music was pretty good. I'd recommend it for the world-building and science over the plot and characters. Rating: good, though lower in that range. Relevant genres: sci-fi, drama, romance, action.
Voltron (124 episodes)—more an adaptation than a straight-up anime, this aired after school when I was quite young. I liked it well enough at the time, but I suspect it wouldn't hold up that well now. There were two incarnations of it: five lion mechs that could combine into a large one, and a fairly large number of ground and air vehicles that could combine into another. They were separate series at first, but in later episodes, both would show up, and I think I remember that there were some connections, familial or otherwise, between pilots of the two. As to plot, it's just a monster of the week thing, where an evil empire with generic plans for galactic domination unleash a huge fighter only to have Voltron defeat it, usually after failing to do so as individual mechs, making me wonder what the point of them being separate in the first place was. If it's just the logistics of parking a huge robot somewhere when it's not in use, fine, but then why not combine right at the beginning of any given fight? There was a recent-ish remake of this, and I've heard mixed things about it, so I'm undecided about whether to watch. Any opinions on that? Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, adventure, sci-fi.
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. 32 here
I liked Violet Evergarden quite a lot, but I agree about it not coming to a very strong conclusion. The more self-contained episodes generally worked very well for me, but the overarching plot, less so.
For instance, if I'm remembering correctly, the first letter she writes successfully, when she goes to a seminar on being a doll or whatever, was very terse and direct, but in a way that fit the situation, so I was hoping we'd get to see her language and communication skills gradually evolving. And it sort of did that, because the next thing she did was an apology, so quite formal and, again, direct. But then I think the episode right after that, it's jumped to her composing love letters, which seemed like too big a leap to not show how she got to that point.
A similar thing happened at the end, at least for me. She narrates about how she's finally learned what love is, and I was left wondering how and when exactly that happened. I could easily see that second point making more sense on a rewatch, since things tend to click better for me when I know more clearly what the point of it all is.
The setting also bothered me, mainly in conjunction with the decision to make the legendary badass soldier also be a petite waifu. I think I could've bought into it quite easily in a more technologically advanced setting, like if she were piloting a mecha or something--and they're inventing a fictional one with inconsistently very advanced technology anyway--but they seemed to tie so much of her combat prowess to just raw physicality, and also made her a teenage girl. It's not a massive complaint, especially since they do largely avoid showing her in direct confrontation, but it feels like they wanted a particular premise but also a particular aesthetic and didn't put in the legwork to make the two mesh neatly.
ah, Vivy I've heard about just recently, great soundtrack, need to see it sometime :D
5658181
It's a great series, I also highly recommend it. The only major issue I had was the post-credits scene of the last episode.
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I could somewhat easily buy Violet as a fearsome soldier, just because of the way they made her origin. She'd been orphaned and on her own for years, living in a disputed area right on the border of a fierce war, so she's seen some shit. I could see her being badass out of sheer necessity, and they do at least paint her as pretty feral at first.
5658181
Yeah, the music was good. I watched the dub, and Christine Vee did her own singing. She's not professional caliber, but she's pretty good, and when I watched this, I'd only encountered her as Marinette in Miraculous (but since also as Sailor Mars in the VIZ dub of Sailor Moon, where she also does her own singing).
5658186
Now I forget what happened in that scene...
5658188
hey, Christina Vee's at least good enough to sing cover songs on Youtube! :D
On your earlier recommendation:
I gave Little Witch Academia another try and have been enjoying it more or less. I mean, as much as I knew it had to happen, the arch-nemesis character introduced in Episode 14 still made me roll my eyes, and really, Episode 18? A giant robot? Really?
I'll definitely keep going for the last seven episodes, though.
On the other hand, I've watched Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai through twice now, bought the Blu-ray of the movie that wraps up the major threads the series left dangling, and have ordered the English translations of the original light novels since there are more books about the characters after the stories covered in the anime. The second season of Komi Can't Communicate has new episodes on Netflix every Wednesday, but there's still no word as to when the third and final season of Hilda might surface, something that's a little troubling with Netflix firing so many people involved in their animated programing lately. I mean, Lauren Faust was halfway though development on a show called Toil and Trouble when they told her they'd cancelled it...
Mike
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Little Witch Academia does play to a younger audience, so there aren't many twists that will surprise. There is one that caught me unawares, too, and I hope it'll do the same for you. The mecha ep was definitely a low point. I really like a lot of the characters, though. Sucy is a riot, I like that Diana is almost immediately shown to be a good person after her initial snobbery, Amanda is fun, Constance is best witch, and Akko's unflagging optimism is energizing.