Category: Finished Series: Slice of Life/Drama

After the last episode, two weeks ago, I remember noting that I hoped that the creators would go for a new OP for the second half of the first season, because Blue Bird was getting obnoxious. I did not mean a simple remix by that. Seriously, it sounds a little different, but it mostly feels like the composers were rushing to produce something different. On top of that, the recap of the previous episode took up a minute and 24 seconds. These things are getting longer and longer.

Having said that, though, this probably was the best Bakuman episode to this point. A nice start of this year. It would probably have been even better if it were a bit faster paced, but my opinion of Eiji really changed the moment that he actually stood face to face with Moritaka and Akito. This episode finally had a bit of good tension, where it nicely combined Eiji’s refusal to draw the right manga to Moritaka’s insistence on drawing a mainstream battle manga.

Also, Japan. It’s the only country in the world in which little girls can get black belts in Karate. I’ve been practicing for eleven damn years and I’ve only still gotten to a brown belt…
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Merry Christmas, everyone. Bakuman’s thirteenth episode probably isn’t the best way to celebrate it with, but at least things are slowly getting more interesting. The show may be slow, but at least you can say that every episode so far has progressed the plot. This episode was all about the main characters’ debut into the NEXT magazine, the introduction of Shounen JumpJack’s rating system and Moritaka and Miho finally start exchanging mails with each other.

I’ve heard from a lot of manga readers that the rivalry between our lead characters and Eiji Nizuma is supposed to be very good. In this episode I caught my first glimpse of interest in this. It finally introduces a bit of tension between their manga with the rating system. The differences are thankfully made not too big like you see in some shounen series, and if developed well and interestingly it definitely has potential.

Now that thirteen episodes have passed, the big picture of Bakuman is mostly unremarkable: it’s enjoyable, but nothing has caught my interest yet. Considering how this series might even go beyond fifty episodes, I guess that it’s excused from taking things easy here, but at the same time it is rare for a long series to not include any kind of hook whatsoever in its first season. Take a look at Hikaru no Go, which had some amazing first episodes to gain momentum, or Glass Mask, which already had very compelling characters right from the start. Even the World Masterpiece Theatre series, notorious for being slow, had already done something major at this point.

There have been series like this, though: which took their time and didn’t do anything major for their first thirteen episodes, most notably Touch and Maison Ikkoku, who instead depended on their long-term character development and twists that happened later on in the series. At this point, Bakuman is still miles away from those series, but at the same time it’s also not bad or annoying, like how a lot of shounen series start out that promise to get better later on.

On a completely different note: next week will be new year’s hiatus, so there’s not going to be an episode. After that, I hope that the creators are going to switch to a new OP because the current one is getting obnoxious.
Rating: * (Good)

Yay second season!

There is one thing that I don’t quite get, though, It’s not specific for this series, but because no DVDs have been sold yet, this clearly was a second season that was planned along with the first season. The same goes with Nurarihyon no Mago: there were hints here and there that the producers were already working on a second season. The same goes for series as Natsume Yuujinchou, Birdy the Mighty and White Album. My question is though: why don’t they immediately announce these sequels like what TWGOK did? It certainly would have saved me a ton of annoyances and opportunities to whine…

Anyway, so yes: Bakuman will at least have 39 episodes, and most likely it’s going for 50. That explains the slow pacing. Just note that my entries will probably be rather short for the upcoming episodes, because so little happens in each episode so there’s very little to say.

This episode was all about middle school graduation. Again, it was nearly completely focused on one topic: Moritaka and Miya. The slice of life around it was the best part of this episode, though. The romance still is too simple at this point and instead I enjoyed the characterization around it.
Rating: * (Good)

It’s interesting: there are a lot of those series where fans of the original complain about stuff that was cut out. This season has a lot of series in which the opposite is going on: creators trying to stuff everything in, to the point of a really slow pacing. This is fine and dandy of course, if it wasn’t for one major flaw: the uncertainty of that second season. That just shows how difficult it is to balance the story of a manga correctly into anime format and creating a good balance between pacing and cutting.

Bakuman again: this episode was pretty good in the way that it was very slowly progressing the story, devoting an entire episode to just the wait of the announcement that they made it into the Next magazine. If Bakuman were 50 episodes I wouldn’t have much of a problem with this episode, but at this point I’m getting a bit impatient: will this series be able to make enough points with 25 episodes of length or will it be another one of those series that spends too much time on building up?

Apart from that though, there really wasn’t much to say about this episode: everything is pretty much moving along as it has been. This show is far from static, but at the same time there’s not much acceleration either, to move into physics terms for a bit.
Rating: * (Good)

So, JC Staff have been working on four series at the same time this season. The strange thing is that somehow Bakuman ended up with the least impressive animation out of the four. Zakuro has some amazing artwork, Index got their best inbetweeners while Milky Holmes was chockful of interesting poses, Bakuman always looked a bit average in comparison: the animation did its job but never really stood out. This episode was the first time in which the visuals really caught my eye, especially the poses were finally a bit creative and detailed. Hattori in particular surprised me by showing some completely new sides of him.

With this episode I finally understand why people keep calling this a hot blooded manga making series. Especially Hattori suddenly getting fired up brought a lot of new stuff to the table, and I especially liked how they were desperately trying to come up with interesting premises, and how hard it is to not take creativity for granted. That string of uninteresting premises that they came up with really shows that they were under a lot less pressure for those ones, so they probably didn’t spent as much time or effort into making it original (especially the one with that dude and the sword looked generic).

I also liked it a lot when the editor in chief popped up. This partly was because he was the main cause for Hattori’s sudden change of personality, but also because of how maturely he treated Moritaka and Akito: he knew Moritaka’s uncle, so he felt no need to sugarcoat things like Hattori had been doing. I just love his confidence, and that he seems far less secure when he was still working with Moritaka’s uncle.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Another episode where the biggest airtime is devoted to the romance. If I had known this at episode 2 or 3 and wasn’t forced to blog this series, then I probably would have given up on this series, but at this point things definitely have gotten better. The problem was really was that it made some bad first impressions, the way in which Moritaka likes the girl whose mother was liked by his uncle and whose best friend has a crush on Moritaka’s best friend, not to mention that she wants to be a voice actress: the creators used it well for the story, but it was just too convenient.

The romance is well developed, though. This episode had a lot of fun sorting out Akito’s love live, which was pretty enjoyable. I’m also glad that the romance is actually moving forward at a steady rate instead of getting stale. It’s far from True Tears or White Album levels though and it still has a long way to go, it made use of some annoying cliches that make no sense, like when someone pretended that you can only like or dislike someone, with no inbetween.

Also, my memory may be fooling me here, but this may be the first time in which someone was actually suspended from school for a while, due to a violent incident. In any case it’s something you don’t see often. I also liked how Ishizawa did not get punished, which lead characters to discuss some very down to earth flaws in their school rule system. Quite realistic.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

This was really looking out to be my favourite episode of Bakuman thus far, but I didn’t really like the ending. That annoying classmate was a bit too much here in a series that tries to be realistic. It was a bit of a cheap way to create drama, and this show doesn’t need him. I mean, there are assholes and all, but this guy is just a caricature.

The rest of this episode impressed me, though. It was all about the psychology of the two leads: they’ve passed their fist big hurdle, but how do they keep themselves professional enough to keep writing? This episode was entirely meant to flesh out the flaws of the two leads and it definitely made them more interesting to watch.

On top of that, in the end the story they came up with (which indeed was both visually and in terms of its concept more interesting) got rejected. In the end it remains a competition between other manga authors to compete for a spot inside a magazine, and apparently the producers found the other premises more interesting. I’m really interested in the manga story that the creators eventually do find interesting enough to publish.

This episode also was about Moritaka’s worries of his art being not good enough. Compared to the pilot, his art has also gotten quite detailed, but to me it seems like the thing he’s looking for is inspiration. At the same time, I think that he’s also unrightfully thinking that he’s miles behind Akito’s writing, after all it’s one thing to come up with a premise, but the real challenges for Akito are to weave an entire story around it.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Most of the episode was dedicated to the romance, so I first want to nitpick a bit: in what year is this series set in anyway? I ask this, because people know mobile phones and email addresses, yet haven’t heard of instant messaging software or computers at all. Is it common for Japanese households to not have a computer? And are instant messengers like MSN a lot less popular in Japan than what they are in the rest of the world?

Regarding the portrayal of the actual romance, it was actually starting to get pretty good, though I did not like how Miho suddenly started crying from out of nowhere: it lacked build-up and was a bit too much for that particular scene. But really: I’m now at the point at which I’m nitpicking at these tiny details: there’s a lot of stuff that this series did right. With the usual romance series I’m not even able to pick those details like that apart. This episode really served its purpose of developing the relationship between Moritaka and Miho, and I especially liked how this episode talked about their future and how they keep in contact after they graduate. The next step should be to de-wimpify them: give either of them some guts to actually talk to each other.

The end of the episode also properly introduced the new genius high school manga author. Standalone he’s pretty much what you’d expect, but the thing I’m interested in the most is how he will clash with Moritaka and Akito.

This episode also reminded me how completely pointless these copyright aversions are: Shounen Jump is censored to Shounen Jack, and yet the manga openly talks about Dragonball Z and One Piece. Is it okay for someone to use products of a company, but the name of the company itself is taboo or something? It’s still a comppletely ridiculous practice: these copyright laws are enforced because the companies in question don’t want their names dirtied, yet the way in which their names are modified (Shounen Jack, Deegle, WC Donalds) makes no attempt to hide what they’re referring to. Bloody legal system.
Rating: ** (Excellent)