Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 41 · 10:55pm Sep 27th, 2022
Had the opposite problem this time: plenty of other stuff but holding out for a second thing I wanted to feature. And the featured items are Akebi's Sailor Uniform and Takt Op. Destiny, plus the usual extras, including one that just finished a few days ago, after the break.
Akebi's Sailor Uniform is adorable and totally safe for ferrets. It succeeds despite doing two big things that are generally a bad idea in storytelling. First to the premise, though.
Akebi lives in a rural area in a really nice house. Think stereotypical English country cottage of stone construction with beautiful gardens. However, this locale isolates her quite a bit: at school, she's the only student in her grade. Same with her younger sister Kao, and there are no more youngsters on the horizon, so the school will close when Kao graduates. I've only seen that mechanic of a dwindling school done once before, and it was a series I really liked, Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea. It's a pretty informal school, too, with no uniform, as far as I can tell.
Based on a music idol Akebi is obsessed with, she's always dreamed of wearing a sailor-style uniform. The private school her mom attended in her youth isn't that far away, so her parents transfer her there (after she passes the entrance exam, of course). I don't know how typical this is (rather rare, I would assume, as I would think the schools would provide/sell uniforms or have the style on file with the local clothing stores so you can get one there), but Akebi's mom is a very good seamstress, so she makes Akebi a uniform.
Extremely proud, Akebi shows up for the welcome assembly on her first day... only to find out they'd switched to a blazer-type uniform some years back, and her mom never knew. But that doesn't mean the new style is exclusively required, and they grandfather it in.
The rest of the series is mostly slice of life depictions of her getting to know each of her classmates. There are fewer episodes than classmates, and some of the girls get featured in more than one of them, so they kind of get tackled in groups, but it's another one of those shows that manages to make a fairly large cast all interesting and memorable. Each has her own little quirks, some of them standard, but some inventive.
Take the first girl she meets, Erika. When she feels nervous, she likes to clip her nails. She finds the act and the sound calming, and she even kind of perversely likes the smell. And that's such a weird detail. Weird but realistic. I certainly have a couple of odd smells that I like. And I remember a friend of my sister's strangely liking the smell of skunk odor, as long as it wasn't too strong. Such things really add life to the characters.
What did the story do badly though? I alluded to two storytelling decisions that are usually considered bad. One is that Akebi is such a Mary Sue. She's good at nearly everything she tries. And like any Mary Sue who's not a Mary Sue, she has one thing she's a complete klutz at, and of course it's cooking. Everything else, she's either already good at or picks up very quickly. Her first day in gym class, she runs so fast that all the athletic clubs come by begging her to join. The upperclassman members, even. And except for one girl in the class, who eventually comes around, they all immediately like her.
Why does that work? Because while that affects the degree of the story's point, it doesn't change the point itself. And they all pretty much like each other immediately, too, so Akebi's not getting special treatment. That leads to a corollary: all these girls hitting it off with each other really well leads to lots of shipping bait. Different pairings are shown having one-on-one interactions quite a bit, and it's frequently of the hand-wringing, face-blushing type. I don't know how to take this. As fan service, sure (and there was a not-insignificant amount of the eye candy variety, too), but then you have to believe every possible pair has latent romantic interest in each other. Thus I have to assume it's only meant as platonic, but it's super-easy to read romance into it if you want to. I mean... try not to, for the amount of it that's there.
And the second issue: this show is sweet. Really sweet. It's so sweet that it comes out the other side. There aren't too many shows I would describe as such, but this was saccharine. And yet I liked it, because that doesn't take away from the point it's making.
What is that point? It's easy to lose sight of, amid all the banal interactions that permeate the middle of the show, but remember that Akebi's had an isolated school existence, so she's not up on how to deal with other people well or what the social norms are. Thank goodness she's naturally a people person, or she'd probably remain a hermit. But she grew up somewhere that she had no friends, simply from a lack of available people. She's gone to this new school with a bottled-up fear that she never will, and while that gets put to bed immediately on the first day, when she meets Erika, it doesn't click with her until near the end that she has lots of friends now, people who truly care about her. The last few episodes bring that theme up again, making for a sweet, and not overly sweet, conclusion.
This was the first anime made from a manga by this artist (and the manga is still going), so I hadn't seen anything quite like this style before. It's odd in a few aspects, like how the eye shape makes almost everyone look sleepy. Or daydreamy. I really liked it though, and the quality is really good. I'd even call it beautiful. The music, too—if you like classical-ish stuff, the music is overall very good, and I especially liked the closing song (which, oddly enough, was different for one episode early in the run).
Rating: very good.
Akebi-chan no Serafuku, 12 episodes, relevant genres: slice of life, yuri.
Takt Op. Destiny is another one of those series that especially appealed to me because of its subject matter, but I don't know how much it'd appeal to a general audience. In fact, I suspect this show may be too clever by half.
Just take the title. I may be ascribing more here than the writers intended, but hey, that's nothing new in the fandom world. The main character's name is Takt, which is really odd, considering he's Japanese. Destiny is a warrior he created (more on this in a bit), and "Op." is a musical abbreviation for opus, which signifies an artist's creation. So the title can be read as Takt's creation, Destiny.
However, I think the choice of name for him was very deliberate so that the title would resemble an abbreviation and seem to say Tactical Operations: Destiny. It works both ways, and I hope that was on purpose.
totallynotabrony recommended it to me as one where music is integral, not necessarily that he said it was a great show, but it turns out I rather liked it.
The show takes place about 25 years in the future, and some time before that, two meteor showers hit the Earth. The first rained down some gem-like stones, to no ill effect (aside from getting pelted by rocks, I guess). The second produced black rocks, and monsters hatched from them who get enraged by any harmonic sound, driven to obliterate its source. As a precaution, governments everywhere abolished music, though there are still ways to produce it in small soundproofed areas that the monsters can't hear. With music gone from the world, the monsters go somewhat dormant.
However, the gems from the first meteor shower begin to manifest as intelligent warriors called Musicarts, and they can use the power of the music the monsters hate to destroy them. It seems like there aren't very many of them, though. In another nod of cleverness, the Musicarts are each born from the passion of a particular piece of music, and they take their name from it. I'll get back to this, too.
They can operate independently, but they tend to be stronger when they bond with a human who can direct them in battle. Such humans are called Conductors, though the Musicarts themselves usually refer to them as Maestros.
Takt's father was a legendary orchestra leader, and Takt grew up alongside another family, the Schneiders, with three daughters he was friends with. Over time, the Conductors and Musicarts have congregated in New York City to form an organization against the monsters, including the oldest Schneider daughter and their parents. Takt and the two other daughters stayed behind on the west coast, but an uncharacteristic monster attack leaves him and the youngest daughter Cosette wounded, her mortally.
But amid his passion for music, particularly Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that he'd been going through a piano reduction of, a Musicart spawns. They normally incorporate on their own, but they also don't normally incorporate in the middle of violence like that, so the chaos leads to an unexpected result: she's incarnated into Cosette's body.
Getting back to the cleverness of the names, it may well go over too many heads. For example, Takt later meets another Conductor named Lenny who has a Musicart named Titan. She was born from Mahler's First Symphony, also known as "The Titan," and the one time she goes into high-power mode in a fight, excerpts from that symphony play in the background. Same with Walküre, named after Wagner's opera of the same name. Beethoven's Fifth doesn't have a subtitle (which often just come about over time, not by the composer's choice), but Beethoven said the effect of the characteristic pattern of the first four notes represented Fate knocking at the door. Thus she has the name Destiny.
And I really like her characterization. She's one of those types who's very naive and robotic, even played for a fair amount of humor that way. I've liked several characters of that type recently, including Ellis from El Cazador de la Bruja, which I reviewed a couple of blogs ago. It also makes for an interesting plot thread of her trying to determine who and what she is, since some essence of Cosette may be left behind in her.
Because they've now become a Conductor/Musicart pair, they decide, with middle sister Anna's help, to travel across the country to New York, where they can join the other Conductors and try to eradicate the monsters from the world. This requires avoiding much of the middle of the country, which is still infested with them, and they help several communities along the way, as well as discover that the Conductors' organization has some of its own shady dealings going on.
It has a fairly open ending, but the good kind of one that does achieve thematic closure and a firm direction for how the future will go. The art was great, very smooth, though did show some more obvious CGI in places. Particularly for the vehicles, which were an odd aesthetic: for something set in the late 2040s, all the cars were 1970s models. Music had better be a plus, and it definitely is, both the original works and how it infuses the relevant classical pieces. The closing credits even weave in a later melody from Beethoven's Fifth which many people might not recognize.
Rating: very good.
12 episodes, relevant genres: action, drama, sci-fi, music.
And I actually have a lot of other stuff backing up. Deal with all of it at once, or save a few in case I come up short of them next time? Eh, I'll grab 6 of them.
Cleopatra in Space (26 episodes)—originally a webcomic I started reading long ago. It later turned into a print comic, leading the author to discontinue the webcomic. I didn't keep up with the print comic, so I went nearly a decade having forgotten about it when I saw it had been turned into a cartoon. It tells the story of a far-future world where it's been determined that the only way to save the universe from an encroaching evil is to nab Cleopatra as a teenager from the past and train her up to lead the future galactic armies (which are of course Egyptian-themed). There's less context in the webcomic, so I never really saw who the head bad guy was or what his motivation was, and the only companion Cleopatra seemed to have was an intelligent cat named Khensu, who served as a mentor. It was a pretty good action/intrigue comic, but as a cartoon, it's been made much more kid-friendly, but not in a smart way, mostly by loading it with tropes and going for toilet humor (says the guy with the only story on the site to use the word "terlit"). It's been so long since I read it that I can't be sure, but I think the series is far more focused on the training aspect, having much of it set at a high school. And so it becomes a rather standard high school action cartoon, and they introduce a few buddies for her (again, who may have been present in the webcomic and I just don't remember them, but they were definitely not nearly as prominent, if so). Pretty good, as the genre goes, but season 3 ended on a big reveal and cliffhanger, and then the show just stopped. Those 3 seasons all came out over the course of less than a year, but now after almost a 2-year gap, I haven't seen the first hint that it will continue. So by now I've given up. Art is good, and the VA for Cleopatra does a good job, even sings the theme song. Art is a western anime-inspired style and good quality. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, adventure, comedy, drama, sci-fi.
Engage Kiss (13 episodes)—just ended this past weekend, and I'm happy to say it gives a much more definite conclusion than the last episode promised with a title like "Unresolved Grand Finale." There's an interesting business model here, like Ghostbusters without a monopoly. A sort of island city-state named Bayron City has tapped into a plentiful energy source, making it the envy of the world, but it's also getting beset by demon attacks. No way those could possibly be related, right? When a demon attack occurs, a very quick process happens by which it's posted to a forum where demon-slaying services bid on it, and the lowest bid gets the job. They have to complete it, and if their bid was too low to cover their costs, then they have to eat the loss. These companies will also hire subcontractors for extra muscle. Main character Shu had largely been unsuccessful, but suddenly starts winning lots of bids, as he's got a demon girl named Kisara bound to his service. Using the very thing they oppose makes everyone else uneasy, but it hasn't caused any problems so far. She's pretty strong on her own, but she can power up more if Shu kisses her. From the first episode alone, it appears that's all there is to it, but by the second one, it's clarified that he's paying her by giving up memories to her. One of these subcontractors is headed up by an ex of Shu's named Ayano, so there's your source of comedic tension, as Ayano and Kisara compete for Shu's favor. Add in two other characters who show up later in the series and also have unnatural attachments to Shu, and this veers too close to a harem anime for my taste. As a demon hunting plot, it's nothing that new, combining that hunting with the usual mysterious past, but it's pulled off pretty well. The art is very good, though gets pretty fan service-y at times, and the music was overall good, particularly the cute closing song. Characterization is fine, but by the numbers as you'd expect for these types of characters, but I do have one complaint, and that's Shu himself. By the end, you piece enough of his past together to paint a picture of him that's very different from how he's seemed during the show, which on the one hand works with that theme of lost memories, but on the other, makes him seem very inconsistent, as those memories shouldn't have changed his fundamental personality that much. And the "unresolved" referenced in the finale's title does come through in the nature of the bad guys being very vaguely defined, as well as what future threat they might pose, if any. More a personal thing, but there's one specific way that memory loss affects Shu that made for an interesting hook, but it gets partially ruined after only a few episodes. I'd say why, but I don't want to spoil it. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, comedy, drama, romance, supernatural.
Fena: Pirate Princess (12 episodes)—even though this finished some time ago, I held off reviewing it because I thought it might continue. It does come to a conclusion, but when Toonami reran it as a marathon, they specifically called it season 1, and why call it that unless a second season is intended? Apparently lots of people assumed there would be another, but a recent news release said that while they had considered it, the window for that has passed. So, what's it about? Main character Fena lives on an island that's little more than a resupply base and brothel for the British Navy. She washed up there as a child and doesn't remember her past much. As a young, beautiful, exotic girl with her silver hair, she figures she'll fetch a high price for her virginity (she's in her early teens, which I did not appreciate), but she has a plan to take the money and run... somehow. She ends up getting rescued by a band of legendary bandits, leading to the Navy coming after her with some mercenaries of its own. The bad guys really felt like One Piece characters to me (which isn't a good thing), but the good guys seemed a lot like the team in Akame ga Kill! I especially liked the engineer/marksman girl. Then it becomes a tale of intrigue as multiple secret organizations fight over the fate of the world, and Fena herself discovers her portentous past. As a story, it's fine, and I liked a lot of the characters, but the ending felt abrupt and somewhat vague, even as it did come to closure. The music was pretty good, and the art was beautiful. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, adventure, drama, mystery, supernatural.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Tachikomatic Days (26 episodes)—Stand Alone Complex is one of those shows that has a post-credits scene in each episode, and for some shows, those continue the plot. Some, like this one, have that scene as a separate companion series. However, when Toonami aired the series it's a part of, they had to cut it for time, so these never aired. Otherwise, I would have seen this series already, but I went to track it down. It's just quick comedy of what the Tachikoma (small spider tanks with an onboard AI) do in their spare time. It's pretty random humor, but I found it enjoyable enough. Fine for what it is, though it probably loses a lot of that if you haven't seen Stand Alone Complex. Rating: decent, but doesn't stand alone (heh) well, relevant genres: comedy, random.
Texhnolyze (22 episodes)—I watched this because Yoshitoshi ABe did the character designs, and I tend to like the projects he's on. It starts out very opaquely, with an underground boxer seemingly having worn out his welcome with the people in power, so he gets attacked and left for dead. In a theme that will keep getting repeated for much of the first half, he seems to get outmatched by street thugs a lot for someone who was a prize fighter. Then it jumps to a couple of other groups: a crime syndicate, a group who believes in cybernetic prosthetics, a group opposed to them, and some kind of secret government, plus a guy from a foreign land who appears to know more about what's going on than anyone else. It takes a while for all those plotlines to cross and it to become clear what the overall story is, and I wouldn't blame anyone for getting bored well before that point. The boxer, Ichise, eventually gets his damaged limbs replaced with prosthetics, embroiling him in all the hubbub, though through it all, there's the show's most interesting character: Ran, a young girl who seems stoic most of the time, and who can see visions of the most probable immediate future. Once all that "what the hell is going on" early stuff passes, it turns into more of a gang warfare show, but it does come back to using cyber as a frame to question what humanity is, and whether by becoming more cybernetic, it opens our future or closes it off. At times, it got a bit too psychobabble-y to me, which plagued my enjoyment of one of ABe's most loved works, albeit one I found fairly inaccessible, Serial Experiments Lain. And in the end, I feel about the same way here—it's an easier to follow plot, but it's still largely philosophical, saved by having very good art. It was a bit of a slog to get through, but it had its moments, although I'll warn you that it's pretty bleak. Music fine, average to a little better. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, philosophical, cyberpunk, drama.
Wings of Honnêamise (Oritsu Uchugun: Oneamisu no Tsubasa, movie)—also known by the longer title Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise. I'll say up front that this is a beautiful film. The art is in a style representative of its time, but very well done, with lots of creativity in the scenery and objects. I'm impressed with all the technical detail they got correct in the aircraft design. It starts out in a society similar to ours, around the 1950s, and a young man Shirotsugh who's always dreamt of piloting the new jet aircraft, but he doesn't qualify, so he instead joins a new branch of the military. This Space Force is more for show, as the country has barely even managed to put small satellites in orbit and has no established rocket technology. But behind the scenes, they've secretly been developing a manned rocket, billed as a triumph to humanity and a powerful weapon, depending on whom they're pitching it to. But it gets funded, and Shirotsugh is the most layabout member of the force. Still, he volunteers to be the first astronaut, inspired somewhat by a girl he's become fond of after seeing her preaching in the streets. A lot of the early going felt like a more comedic take on The Right Stuff. Once their rival nation catches wind of the scheduled launch, they of course perceive it as a threat and will do what they can to stop it. And therein lies the movie's biggest weakness. There are only ever a couple of snags in the process to get this all working, and despite at least one of them seeming to be very serious, nothing ever substantially impedes their progress. Having a straight line from start to finish with no setbacks does not an intriguing plot arc make. And then it doesn't even come to a conclusion, just ending on a standard plea to disavow war and treat the planet with respect. Not that it's a bad message, but we're here for the story of it, and that includes how the story ends. Music was really odd but also strangely enjoyable. Great visual piece, not a bad plot idea, but it stops more than ends. And I was put off by how one character was completely excused for an attempted sexual assault. Really, the movie didn't even seem to say there was anything wrong with that. Rating: good but with reservations, relevant genres: drama.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
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vol. 37 here
vol. 38 here
vol. 39 here
vol. 40 here
I haven't met that many people that have watched Wings of Honnêamise, that was the anime that got me a spot in the anime club back in high school when we subbed it. It's a very beautiful and inspirational anime.
Looking at my ratings for last year, Takt Op. Destiny would have been #4 on the list of Anime of the Year...until the last third of the season when it started asking more questions than providing answers. Like, what was even that ending? Big bad acknowledges he was stupid, magical girl turns into USB stick, main guy lives but nobody cares, big sis is now her own magical girl???
The production was quality, though, with deep characters and cool fight scenes. Of all the music-focused animes I've ever seen, it was actually more about the music than most.
I, too, have always had an appreciation for the smell of skunk :B they are super cute is why
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What confused me about big sis is that now she's apparently both Musicart and Conductor. Musicarts can act alone, but it was implied she was a Conductor too.