Author: psgels

Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 31

by psgels, posted in Porfy no Nagai Tabi



Short Synopsis: Will Porfy be able to find Mina in Rome?
Highlights: World Masterpiece Theatre: masters at delaying the inevitable.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 9/10
Holy crap! Mark, you were absolutely right: the creators had no intention to reunite Porfy and Mina so easily whatsoever, but they made this so god damn close, it’s annoying, and yet it’s exactly episodes like this that show the huge strength of the World Masterpiece Theatre series. This episode restored my faith back into this series entirely.

The episode starts as Mina stands at the market square, and advertises for Isabella. It works, and Isabella gets more customers than ever. Porfy meanwhile still has no clue where to look for Mina (apparently Apollo never managed to convince him of Mina’s whereabouts), and Olga continues to steal the bags of innocent tourists with an interesting smirk on her face.

Isabella compliments Mina on how well business went that day, so she takes her out for a bit of dinner. Her husband and father, unfortunately, weren’t as lucky and just lost nearly all of their money from a bunch of talented card-players. That evening, Porfy gets treated especially well by Bruno, the innkeeper. Olga then arrives and gives him an overly large sweater that she managed to steal.

When Isabella and the others are having dinner, Carlos is obviously angry, as his father mentions that in such a large city, there’s bound to be other talented card players. Isabella then apologizes to Mina, at how the restaurant they’ve chosen is too crowded, but Mina just shrugs it off and Carlos gets annoyed at Mina again.

The next day, Porfy gets a BIG clue from one of the guys who stands at the market. He’s seen Mina along with Isabella that day, and he reckons that they’ll be back in the next one. Porfy rushes home, happy that he’s about to find Mina. As he and Olga eat their dinner, one of the other guests gets annoyed by the poor quality of the soup that got served. Olga secretly makes fun of her behind her back. Carlos and his father meanwhile return back from another day of work, and this time they made big bucks. They reckon that they’ll still remain in Rome for one day (!!), and then travel further.

The next day, Porfy gets woken up loudly by the hotelkeeper, and gets falsely accused of having stolen the bag of the above-mentioned woman. He tries to explain that he hasn’t stolen anything (obviously, Olga was behind this). The attitude of the hotelkeeper changes entirely, and he locks him way into his basement, telling him to stay there until he tells the truth. The woman tells the hotelkeeper to call the police, but the hotelkeeper thinks that Porfy’s a bit too young for that. Olga meanwhile acts like nothing happened…

Porfy tries to escape, but fails. At the same time, Mina and Isabella get ready to work that day as Carlos flirts with Isabella a bit and tells Mina to make sure to work properly. They work throughout the day, as Porfy is still locked up. He tries to escape at one time by pushing the hotelkeeper aside, but gets caught very quickly by a very angry Bruno.

One of the market salesmen (the one who told Porfy about Mina and Isabella) was about to tell Isabella about a “guy who was looking for them”, but he gets interrupted by a customer. Carlos meanwhile, gets a visit from the two guys from two days back, who took away all their money. They beat them up and take away all their money. Carlos then suggests leaving Rome immediately, so they go to Isabella to pick her up.

Back at the hotel, Olga is about to leave as the angry woman comes down to complain again, and she accidentally opens Olga’s bag. Lots of stuff then pop up, and Olga flees, while Bruno goes to Porfy and tries to apologize. Porfy rushes to the market square, though, without paying attention to him, but Mina is already gone. When he talks to the market salesman of the day before, he tells them that Isabella and Mina were picked up by two people and boarded a bus, probably to continue their journey to a nearby city, but he doesn’t know what kind of bus, since they all look like each other. The episode ends with a shot of that very same bus, as it leaves the city of Rome.

Now THIS arc is exactly why I love this series so much. The arc was very short for this series, it only lasted three episodes, of which one was a recap. And yet it was chockfull of cross-references, flashbacks, foreshadowing and symbolism. I should have known that it wasn’t a coincidence that Porfy made friends with a thief. Especially since Olga was portrayed as someone who may do things against the law, but she minded her own business and was portrayed as a friendly and rather witty woman. The former arcs also always made Porfy make friends with genuine and honest people, so you wouldn’t expect this arc to be any different, and yet she does get Porfy is so much trouble, because he trusted the wrong person.

And really, now that I’m getting to know this series, I’m getting really worried about Mina. I mean, how many times has it been that Carlos has looked down upon or criticized Mina? If that isn’t building up, then I don’t know anymore. Nothing really happened between them in this episode, but there still are 21 episodes left for this series, so there’s plenty of time for them to get on each other’s nerves. Ultimately, Isabella is seeing Mina as a replacement for her daughter, and at one point this really has to go wrong, and the question is: can Porfy really find her before that happens?

Next up should be random travel-arcs again, so I’m not sure what the creators have planned. I really hope that they’re going to be more interesting than the Sicily-arc. It’s strange… there was hardly any build-up there, and it felt much more ad-hoc than the rest of this series.

Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 05

by psgels, posted in Natsume Yuujin-Chou



Short Synopsis: Natsume goes after a promise that Reiko once made but never fulfilled.
Highlights: How does this series manage to stay so heart-warming and relaxing?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
This episode showed yet again that this series has enough inspiration for its stories, even though the main premise of Natsume, returning the names of the youkai only takes about five seconds. This time, we see that Reiko did more than just take a bunch of names when she was young, and this episode shows that she also was a blatant liar. It’s frustrating: we hardly know anything about her. All that was revealed was that she’s basically being portrayed as the antagonist of this series, and how forcefully collected the names of many different youkai. But we never get to see her intention behind it, why did she do these things in the first place? What did she look like when she grew up?

This episode was all about good friends, getting into fights, symbolized by Natsume’s two classmates who got into a fight, and just as easily made up again. The youkai in this episode also got into a fight with his best friend (because he let his name get taken away by Reiko), but the difference here is that they never bothered to look for each other, and just stayed at the same place, which yet again shows that the sense of time for Youkai is considerably different from that of humans. They seem to have no problem with waiting for decades at the same spot, and talk about things that happened fifty years ago like they happened yesterday.

I’m really not sure about that black-haired classmate of Natsume… he appeared (and disappeared) a bit too coincidentally in front of Natsume when he was needed the most, and at the same time he can’t be another youkai, as Natsume’s other classmate was perfectly able to see him. Unless, of course, said classmate (I believe she was the class president) can also see them occasionally.

Mission-E – 05

by psgels, posted in Mission-E



Short Synopsis: This time, a woman with a Kansai-ben accent is being chased by the foundation.
Highlights: Fun chase scenes.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Definitely the best episode of Mission-E so far. It really was one of these episodes that was fun to watch, and ended with a powerful cliff-hanger. It was interesting, seeing how Maori at the beginning of the episode got talked to by one of her classmates, and she got invited to spend time together, which she only hastily declined because a sudden mission popped up. That is indeed the perfect way to get yourself separated from the rest of the class.

And god… it really took me a while to figure out that the shades-guy from the foundation was actually Adol Brinberg, simply because his personality probably made the biggest shift out of all the members of the cast of Mission-E. There’s absolutely nothing of his playfulness that was seen in Code-E. This is probably because he lost his sister: because of her, he could goof off, because she’d keep him in line so that they could still finish their missions.

I’m not sure whether the woman in this episode was Mils Brinberg or not, but the signs point towards yes. She wasn’t just a regular woman, being able to outrun the foundation for so long, she had a suspicious mole that I could have sworn Mils had as well, and she could have died her hair. I’m just not sure why she was speaking in Kansai-ben, but I can imagine how she could have received Type E when the resort went haywire, back at the end of the first season. What’s also interesting is that she doesn’t seem to work for the foundation, or at the very least Adol doesn’t know about her, and yet she kidnapped Maori at the end of the episode.

Ultraviolet: Code 044 – 05

by psgels, posted in Ultraviolet: Code 044



Short Synopsis: 044 tries to get rid of 724 and his henchmen.
Highlights: Solid action that knows when to stop.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Here’s one thing I don’t get: why the heck is this series getting so much hate?! I mean, I can understand how people can dislike this series: the art style, dark mood and Osamu Dezaki’s direction style aren’t for everyone. But when I look at sites as AniDB and MyAnimeList, with their abysmally low rating for this series and read some of the comments about this series, I just can’t seem to understand where all this hate is coming from.

This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged (and enjoyed) a series that was hated by a large amount of people, but at least there I could understand why people were hating it: the lead characters of Night Head Genesis did whine an awful lot. It’s obvious that they’re going to get on the nerves of many people. El Cazador was all about its characters, so if you don’t like them, then there’s nothing much left of it. Blade of the Immortal has been based on a rumoured excellent manga, so of course people will be disappointed if a studio like Bee-Train gets the rights to animate it. For Ultraviolet, I just can’t imagine any reason why someone would really label this as the worst show of the season.

Granted, the only really bad thing of the first episode of this series was the huge amounts of fanservice, but that doesn’t really explain the low ratings. First of all, series with fanservice are often popular in the online crowd (as demonstrated by series as To Love-Ru, Kanokon, Sekirei and Code Geass), so why should this be any different? Second of all, the fanservice was nowhere near as bad or blatant as in series as the ones mentioned above. And third of all, the fanservice disappears nearly entirely after the second episode anyway.

So someone, enlighten me. Why the heck is this series so bad? Why has this series the most amount of “suckage” when compared to all other series that aired this Spring and Summer?

In any case, this episode was more action-packed, as 044 gets rid of 724, who turns out to have been jealous of her all along, as number two in the organization. At the same time, Mathilda and Garcia (who probably are also in trouble, seeing as how they helped their friend 044 kill off many of Daxus II’s subordinates) seem to be joining her, and reveal a bit more about her past.

There were a lot of fight-scenes in this episode, they were obviously not the best animated (probably due to lack of budget), but they were interesting to watch nonetheless. I’m interested to see where this series is going now: 044 is free now, and Daxus II can’t track her down anymore. 044 will probably go after Luka, but what’s going to happen after that?

Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


Franz Kafka was once a German author, famous for his downright depressing stories. I’ve only read one work of his (about a salaryman, turning into a huge beetle and then dying from loneliness), but I can fully understand why he got that reputation. A Country Doctor is the interpretation of director Koji Yamamura, the director of Atama Yama on one of the guy’s short stories.

I think it’s already apparent through the screenshots, but the director went for a surreal approach with this 20-minute long movie. The character-designs are constantly warping into strange shapes, and the entire movie is chock-full of symbolism about the old country doctor that plays the main character in this story. You might need a second viewing in order to fully understand what’s going on.

Overall, I liked a country doctor. It’s a great short horror-ish story, but I do think that the director went a bit too overboard with his visual effects. The warped character-designs only distract from what’s really important in the movie, and the plot doesn’t flow as smoothly as you’d like at times. It’s just like Shoji Kawamura’s Spring and Chaos: you want to give a classic writer too much credit and go overboard with the style so that the style actually works against it a bit.

Nevertheless, the art style does look great and apart from a few humps and bumps along the way, the story is well-told for such a short time of 20 minutes and it gives a good look inside the mind of the titular country doctor. A country Doctor is obviously not for everyone (stay FAR away if you hate depressing stories), but if you’re looking for something surreal and have half an hour to burn, then why not give it a chance?

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 8/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 8/10

Nijuu Mensou no Musume – 15

by psgels, posted in Nijuu Mensou no Musume



Short Synopsis: Chiko now lives away from her aunt, in a mansion along with Tome. Haruka visits her and forms the “Detective Girls”.
Highlights: A rather silly episode…
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
I’ll withhold judgment for the detective girls-arc of this series for now. Seriously, I have no idea what to think of it or what to expect, knowing the rest of this series. I really need to see the next episode to form a valid opinion for this series. The fact remains that this series has had plenty of light moments, which make you fool that this series is just goofing off, while they’re in fact just building up.

In this episode, Haruka and Chiko don’t really go and look for cases, but instead they get visited by a number of burglars. The process of catching these burglars was rather silly, especially since Haruka had act and claim her moment of glory (which involved her and Tome, crashing down some stone stair on a bike), but the few moments where this episode was serious were really good. Akine’s back-story gets completed, and it turns out that he lost his sister back in the war, and Chiko resembles his sister a lot. He also finally leaves Chiko’s aunt (which may have been a bad thing, as she’s probably going to hire someone tougher), and we still don’t know what these burglars were doing inside Chiko’s house. They were not normal burglars, because they still tried to attack Chiko, even after they were found.

Most of the humour in this episode was rather corny, but I do admit that I laughed at Haruka’s fantasies of the glamorous future missions of the Detective Girls (with Chiko as the invincible warrior, Tome as a seductress and herself as the fearless leader). The messy animation during the fight scenes also looked really good, and it surprised me. Bones isn’t really a studio that often experiments with its animation (in fact, I can’t remember having seen any experimental animation from them apart from this series).

Telepathy Shoujo Ran – 07

by psgels, posted in Telepathy Shoujo Ran



Short Synopsis: Ran, Rui, Rin and Midori solve the case of the haunted resort building.
Highlights: Dialogue-heavy like no other.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Whoa! Since this is a NHK children series, you wouldn’t expect the dialogue to be so hard to understand, but Telepathy Shoujo Ran somehow manages to do it with this episode. Heck, the entire episode was one huge non-stop dialogue, with perhaps one or two seconds at which people weren’t talking. I really must say that for a children’s series, this series is pretty smart.

Okay, so if I understood correctly:
– Inside the resort, one of the guests who were staying with his family was killed.
– The one who killed him is an old classmate of his. The two of them killed (at least, that’s what I suspect, in any case they buried the guy’s dead body) one of their friends when they were young, and were too afraid to admit that what they did was wrong.
– They buried him at the place where the inn is right now.
– After the recent ghost sightings, the culprit wants to buy the inn, in order to get rid of the evidence and rumours.
– The culprit then killed the victim by throwing ice-cold water on him, to cause a heart failure.
– I didn’t quite catch why the victim had to be killed, but I suspect that he had enough of keeping their sin secret and he was planning to notify others of it.

This is why I love these NHK children’s shows. The kiddie series are of course to be avoided, but the series that air here can and will be surprisingly mature for their audience. Tsubasa Chronicle was about the only exception, but take a series as Dennou Coil, which very openly discussed the issues of death and forgetting about the deceased ones. Kaze no Shoujo Emily in its turn was very poetic, and also managed to slip in a number of deaths and mature topics, and Telepathy Shoujo Ran looks about to do the same. There’s of course censorship: the death are never referred to directly, and yet this episode was nothing short of a murder mystery story.

Seriously, I wish that Dutch children’s television was as good as this. I’m not saying that American children animation is bad, but nearly all of the stuff that makes it across the Atlantic IS, and everything is horribly dubbed. I mean, how else are these children going to learn any decent English?

Okay, enough ranting, my point is that I really liked this episode. For a murder mystery, this episode was surprisingly interesting, especially due to the lovable cast of characters, and even the ones that only appeared for one or two episodes are enjoyable to watch. I also liked how this episode combined both fake ghost sightings with real ghosts. That grandfather in bermudas was a nice touch. 😉

Macross Frontier – 17

by psgels, posted in Macross Frontier



Short Synopsis: The plot thickens as Ranka’s ability to calm down the Vajra gets more and more important.
Highlights: Ozma gained a lot of depth in this episode.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Satelight, you disappoint me. With the huge budget of this series, you couldn’t even find a good voice-actress for the seven-year-old Ranka? Joking aside, this episode might very well be my favourite of the entire series. It’s really one of these episodes in which nothing much happens, and yet the plot is pushed forward a lot. It’s very much different from the intermezzos we saw in the first half of this series, which mostly goofed off. The selection of insert songs was also pretty nice to listen at, and complemented their scenes well.

Especially Ozma was awesome, with his brotherly worries about Ranka. Macross Frontier isn’t exactly your manly mecha-series, but this guy provides an appreciated exception to this rule. We now also learn (that, or I noticed this a bit late) that he’s been having an affair with Catherine. Strangely enough, it was also interesting to see Alto act more as a side-character. Interesting how some main characters make great side-characters, and side-characters make great main characters.

Speaking of side-characters, I do have one complaint. In this episode, we learn that Kuran has a crush on Saotome, but it felt really abrupt, which got me thinking about how little airtime she’s actually had in this series. I mean, she’s been really overshadowed by the rest of the cast of Macross Frontier, even though she’s got a pretty interesting character, and there are more people like that on this series. I also feel that Catherine needs more time to be fleshed out, and especially people like Bobby, Lam, Mena and Jeffrey Wilder have been horribly ignored so far.

Space Battleship Yamato Review – 70/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


Coincidence can be a very strange thing… I started watching Space Battleship Yamato, and only five episodes later, this piece of news pops up. I mean, what are the odds of that happening? It doesn’t look like a remake, but more of a new movie, but still, based on the first television series of a franchise that spread three series and countless movies, it’s got its work cut out for it.

Space Battleship Yamato is the classic among classics, and Matsumoto Leiji’s debut into animation. Aired in 1974, after Lupin Sansei and Alps no Shoujo Heidi it was the very first television anime to get any significant popularity and it single-handedly defined the space opera genre for anime for many decades to come. Heck, even Mobile Suit Gundam has borrowed a lot of inspiration from the simple storyline of Space Battleship Yamato (executed much better and more interesting, of course).

After watching this series, I can see why it caught on so much. The story is simple but effective, and the crew of the Yamato is adequately developed in order to prevent the series to get dull after its halfway-point. Topics such as honour, love and manliness often pass the screen when pepole aren’t fighting, and the manliness seems enforced by the downright epic soundtrack. It’s of the kind that keeps sticking to your head like glue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being the best soundtrack of the seventies and early eighties.

But of course, this series was developed when anime was in such a young stage, and still needed to mature a lot. For starters, the storyline is incredibly simple: Earth is in danger and Yamato sets out to save it. It’s well told (and the main characters actually don’t get involved with the storyline by accident, and are instead trained officers), but I can’t help but think that it could have used something to spice everything up more. It’s like eating a salad without any dressing whatsoever. Sure, the lettuce is nice and all, but does taste rather plain. The ending does try to spice things up at least a bit with a number of plot-twists, but the problem is that this actually works against them and creates a Disney Ending (seriously, haven’t these people ever heard of checking a person’s heart pulse?!).

Then there’s the ton of technical errors that can be spotted in this series. The director and animators weren’t the most careful, and it’s clear that the production of Yamato was hurried a lot. Sometimes, there are odd leaps in logic (for example, one frame the Yamato is heavily damaged, full of holes, the next it’s magically fixed), the animation can be inconsistent (the bad guys suddenly go Vegeta and change skin-colour in the middle of the series), the animators have clearly trouble to synchronize the characters’ mouths to the voices properly, but the most grating is the huge amount of scientific inaccuracies that would make Gurren Lagann jealous.

Overall, Space Battleship Yamato is an average anime: it doesn’t stand up against most of the better series that we have today, but it’s certainly not bad. The art style has matured in quite an interesting way and you can see the typical manliness of the action scenes from the early days of anime, and today’s anime would definitely be something different if it wasn’t for this series.

Storytelling: 6/10
Characters: 8/10
Production-Values: 6/10
Setting: 8/10

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 05

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: Birdy goes after the terrorists that were behind the explosion of the previous episode.
Highlights: Pretty much pointless story, but very nice art.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
Well, this episode seems to conclude the outer space-arc of Birdy. The villains in this episode weren’t much special, and seemed a bit hastily thrown together. They hardly had any background and just weren’t interesting at all, but for now I’ll just see this arc as a means of giving Birdy her background, and showing a bit of the world where she came from. If that were the case, then the rest of the series had better be significantly better than what was shown here.

One thing that did impress me in this episode was the excellent art. The budget is still nowhere the high levels of the first episode, but I like the amount of imagination that was put into the character-designs and especially the background art. The creators made great use of the fact that the episode was set in an unknown alien environment to make a number of pretty unique art setting.

I think the only really interesting thing about the story in this episode was that it showed how the police-system on Birdy’s planet is pretty much one big mess, where multiple divisions are working on the same case without cooperating with each other. In this episode, Birdy ended up tailing someone who was already been tailed by another guy.

But please, can we finally move to villains who don’t look like some sort of street-punks? The villains in this episode who looked at least a bit attractive turned out to be either spies or betraying their boss. I mean, it’s getting pretty predictable if you can just recognize the real villain, just by the way they’re drawn…