Category: Kaleidoscope

This week, I’d like to apologize for not sticking with Yumeiro Patissiere’s first season. I originally stuck with it for five episodes before giving up, but here’s why:

The things I appreciated about this series back then was that even though this was a show in which people are accompanied by strange sweets fairies, it didn’t pull a la Corda d’Oro and suddenly make their characters incredibly talented: they still had to work really hard for it. The thing that turned me off however was that it was already getting dull and repetitive after five episodes. I especially didn’t like the cheesy drama around the arrogant rivals that appeared in front of the lead characters, and on top of that I was also bothered by a lack of creativity…

…so why did the drama in this series suddenly become so good? Where did the inspiration come from for the Professional arc? This second season acts like the two main gripes I had with the first season never existed. The current episode marks the end of the Sweets Kingdom arc, which really shows that better than ever.

The sweets kingdom is… bizarre. What mind came up with that and what kind of state was it in? For the past three episodes, the characters have travelled to various places to collect some conveniently located sweets ingredients. An entire forest made out of baumkuchen? What the heck? This episode went even further by explaining how Sweets Spirits are born. That was without a doubt the weirdest explanation of the “birds and the bees” that I’ve ever heard.

Just about everything about the Sweets Kingdom makes no sense, but that probably was the intention of the creators: to just make this very imaginative fantasy world. It definitely gave me a lot to laugh about for the past three episodes, not to mention Kashino walking around in a pink teddy bear outfit for the entire time. I’m really suspecting that the creators did that in order to avoid confusion with the Kasshi fairy, since the two look so similar. I have not watched the first season, but is there a reason why these three fairies look like Kasshi and the two others look so much like Kashino?

And regarding the drama… why did it suddenly turn this good? I mean, compared to the first season, the characters are much less obnoxious, it’s much less forced and actually quite genuine. Of course, you need to like the childish kind of series in order to enjoy Yumeiro Patissiere. I don’t think that I’m going to end up watching the first season anytime soon (50 episodes is looooong), but the new season definitely surprised me.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Ah, who cares? I’m just going to talk about two shows this week. Don’t expect it to turn into a habit, but this episode was just too awesome. Episodes 2, 3 and 4 probably turned off a lot of people, but the past two episodes really made up for it.

Episode five was mostly awesome because of Osamu Kobayashi (yeah, the guy from Gurren Lagann’s fourth episode), but this episode was really everything that this series should be: crazy and over the top fast paced action. The first few episodes made the mistake of focusing too much on the shock factor, which is neat for one episode but becomes boring quite fast.

The bitch-fight between the two angels and devils was completely awesome though. The focus was much more on the addictive chemistry between these four than the shock factor and dirty references, and the toilet humour instead got used effectively in the action scenes at the second half of the episode. This was really the first episode of this series where the chemistry between these characters really worked. On top of that, this episode was well paced and didn’t drag on like some of the previous episode as well.

It’s really these kinds of episodes that I expected when I first learned about this series. The second half of this episode just continued building up the action without getting boring: that’s how varied it was, moving from battles with angry cars to toilets, shootouts and random chases: there was a ton of creativity in this episode that went much beyond the usual gimmicks of this series. It’s also here where the music really helped making things even more exciting.

The big question now is whether this show will be able to keep this up. It is the perfect set-up for an action series without any bounds whatsoever, but the creators really need to make use of it and let their creativity run wild like the previous two episodes. If the remaining episodes will be like that though, then this will end up as an awesome series.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

This week I’d like to talk about this surprisingly charming slice of life series. And I guess gather my thoughts about Shinbo at the moment. I mean, I consider him to be an excellent director. The thing I hate however is how he is working on way too many projects. Just get him to work on one single project every year or two years: that will make them extra special, especially with the wait time in between. Why can’t he just leave Shaft’s other projects to the other directors at Shaft? Why does he need to hold their hands for every single series?

My big annoyance with Shinbo is that I’ve just seen too much of his series and I really do not want to sit through another one of his uninspired series. At this point, those series are easy to spot because he ends up doing one of two things:
1. Repeat himself. The best example of this is Natsu no Arashi 2, in which the first four episodes talked about the exact. same. freaking. subject. But also Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei. My guess is that that’s also why I can’t enjoy Arakawa Under the Bridge: there are just way too many similarities between the two.
2. Take his style way over the top to the point where it loses all its charms and ends up only getting in the way of telling the story. Examples of this (in my experience at least) were ef – a tale of melodies and Bakemonogatari.

Soredemo Machi is neither: it neither tries too hard, and while maids have been milked to death in anime, the delivery is fresh here. It doesn’t try to force down as many random jokes as possible, but instead focuses on just portraying the characters without trying to pretend to be anything more, and on top of that the different stories are varied and not repetitive. Finally.

Arashiyama is quite likable. In this episode she was mostly just a side-character, but even there she was pretty enjoyable as she tried to encourage Toshiko and her brother’s romances. It neither dragged on, and yet you could see that she loved to tease them. These kinds of romances are now also cliched as hell (‘I want to propose to you but I’m too scared so I just say something that sounds like “love”), but the creative characterization still made them enjoyable. If the characterization of Togainu no Chi was as good as this episode, I really would not have minded it being a dating sim.

On top of that, I’m glad that we finally have a Shaft series with a proper budget here. Especially the first two episodes had very good inbetween animation, but this episode too was very dynamically animated. I also like how all of the characters have their distinct character-designs, rather than just feeling like stock puppets with different eyes and hair pasted on top of them. On top of that, it’s also an interesting technique to use CG in frames that aren’t moving: it certainly took me a while before I noticed it.

It’s not perfect, especially in the way that those title cards get more annoying every episode, and there are times when it tries too hard (like with the chair in the previous episode), but I like its charms and how down to earth it is. It’s also got some good jokes as well (like the Czar and Luther).
Rating: ** (Excellent)

This week, I would like to rant a bit. On the downright lazy job that Madhouse did on Iron Man. They’re usually known for their imaginative and well thought out series. They had the freedom to really go anywhere, and yet they chose this. There’s something wrong with just about every part of this series apart from the music. The soundtrack really is wasted on such a series.

Starting with the visuals. I know that it’s shallow, and I usually only dismiss character-designs when they’re too generic. But dammit, when your main character looks like a freaking GOAT, that’s where I draw the line here. Tony Stark, a suave businessman with a ton of experience, looks ridiculously stupid, and the rest of the cast also doesn’t look much better. It really looks like a cheap outsourced series where no real effort went into making this look good, where most of the action is simply CG because it’s easier to animate.

Not to mention that the action scenes themselves don’t make any sense. This episode took place in space. You know, an open world with nothing in the way. And yet this episode dared to pull off the fact that you can hide from the vision of your enemy. TWICE.

As for the plot, I usually don’t have anything against episodic series. Iron Man is a bad example, though: it’s just a string of random unrelated cases that Iron Man has to solve. Only one of them really dealt with Tony’s past, for the rest it was all filler: nothing showed anything new about the characters, nothing really fleshed them out, and nothing really built up to the rest of the series. If the stories themselves were good, then this could be forgiven, but… they’re crap.

This episode… what exactly where the bad guys thinking? They put in a huge amount of money and effort in order to launch a parasite satellite that somehow can manage to beam into people and have them cough up blue blood. Leaving aside how ridiculously impossible this is, what baffles me the most is what they want to achieve with this: people end up coughing blue blood, and yet when they’re brought to a hospital and rest for a while they turn out completely fine. I mean, if I were to design such a thing, I’d at least make some kind of beam that is… you know… deadly and stuff. On top of that, they didn’t even hit the guy they meant to hit, thanks to Stark’s radiation shield. I mean, there are the kinds of stupid villains who screw up during a shoplift, but wasting so much money on something completely pointless. That really takes the cake here.

We’re five episodes into the series now, and what do we really know? The reporter still is as annoying as ever, Tony likes to go after women and his assistant is perfect in her preparation. Oh, and that there are some guys after Tony’s life for some reason. There’s no depth, no effort at all is spent asking “why”: we’re just spoonfed everything without much of a coherence between anything. I mean, I can forgive a cheap budget, but you can write a good story with any kind of budget: there are no excuses for such a sloppy script.

And the worst thing is… that we haven’t even gotten started yet. Is it known at this point whether or not Wolverine, the X-Men and Blade will also have the same staff here? That would be pretty disastrous. And it’s not like series based on comic books are doomed to fail here, because there have been a number of good examples throughout the years: Ultraviolet, Batman and Witchblade put down very respectable anime that stood on their own, and even beyond that there are the Animatrix and Power Puff Girls, which also translated very well to anime. And yet, we first had Heroman, and now this. I’m not really sure what went wrong in 2010, but they all just feel so dumbed down and safe, taking so little risks. It’s a bloody shame.
Rating: — (Bad)

I’m going to try something completely different this season. I’m pretty happy with blogging Bakuman, Yakumo, Letter Bee, Star Driver, Kuragehime and Squid Girl this season, but I just couldn’t make up my mind on the twelfth one. Neither TWGOK nor Togainu no Chi seems really interesting enough to cover weekly for an entire season. So yeah, Togainu no Chi is hereby dropped. Instead, I’m going to try and blog a different series each week.

There are a lot of shows this season that I want to say something about, without having to discuss it every single week. I’ve got about 8 to 12 of them, depending on my mood and how they turn out. In the final weeks I’ll cover the most interesting ones once more. Oh, and for the record: a week for me starts on Monday and ends on Sunday.

This week, I’d like to talk about by far the most underrated series of the season: Milky Holmes: it averages a score of 6,28 on MAL, and a whopping 5,41 on AniDB, and while I admit that this is a very guilty pleasure of mine, I also want to say that none of the comedies this season has managed to make me laugh as hard and consistently as Milky Holmes.

It’s utterly stupid, and yet has flashes of brilliance in its jokes. The jokes are all completely fresh: this episode had the cast, among others, play twister in an ancient museum in order to get their powers back, end up in jail and liking it because at least it had food, and locked up in an ancient tomb with a horny English teacher.

Speaking of which, that English teacher is probably the funniest guy on the entire show. For a show that has relatively little fanservice for a moe show aside from the ED, it does have a few points that are just completely wrong, and most of those really involve that teacher. That trunk scene was both utterly hilarious and utterly disturbing.

As a parody, this series rocks, though, as it completely tears the kaitou genre apart. I’m not really sure why, but most Kaitou-parodies in anime turn out more like homages, even though it’s often a very silly premise. The whole premise of this series takes this just to the absurd: just about everything about it is over the top, and yet it doesn’t lose itself in its insanity, as it does have a narrative and a plot that keeps it going. As a moe parody, this also has everything that I have been missing in TWGOK: it knows that it’s completely stupid, and therefore likes to break a few conventions here and there, like that trunk scene (no, I can’t let go of that. I mean, even the most graphic and controversial fanservice series this year didn’t bother to go that far).

Most of the time with moe series, creators use these cliches to make their cast seem stupid or cute. And the thing is, that I see no cliches whatsoever in Milky Holmes, other than the ones it makes fun of and even at episode three it still shows no signs whatsoever of slowing down. This series turned out to be much more creative than I could have expected, but its stupidity will probably turn me insane if I were to try and blog it every single week.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Ah, you know what? The World God Only Knows is hereby dropped. I thought about it a bit more yesterday, and realized something here:
– Panty and Stocking pokes fun at cute girls and American cartoons. It’s characters are thin, but it is a better comedy and parody than TWGOK.
– Squid Girl may not be a parody, but it’s still a much better comedy than TWGOK and its entire cast is far more down to earth and likable than Elcea.
– Milky Holmes has a great time taking the piss out of moe shows and the detective genre, and is also a far better comedy and parody than TWGOK.
– Kuragehime has a cliched premise, and yet it’s a far fresher and better comedy than TWGOK.
– When you look at the series that are carried over from previous seasons, you have Marie&Gali 2, which again with its creativity is far a better comedy and parody than TWGOK.

I didn’t realize this back on Wednesday, but damn: that show is redundant.

As an alternative, I’ve been considering Togainu no Chi and Otome Youkai Zakuro. Even though Togainu no Chi is much less well produced, it does have the potential that I don’t feel at Otome Youkai Zakuro. Until that changes, I’m interested enough in covering this series. This episode still was pretty poorly produced and acted, but the script was pretty solid, providing some much needed introductions and a much more varied cast. Mystery does remain one of my favourite genres, and this episode, unlike the first, had me intrigued.

It’s clear that the lead couple is gay at this point, but that was not one of my worries for this series. Instead, the bad bishie series are just like the bad moe series, in which they have this really weird and unnatural way in which they portray their characters. These are the series like Hanasakeru Seishounen and Miracle train, in which the characters act like a bunch of catalog models, or how everyone and his dog is suddenly gay. Most of this can be blamed on bad actors, who try way too hard to catch attention. Togainu no Chi has a few of those, but it’s not the entire cast here. This episode showed that the main couple knows how to at least be a bit subtle, That guy in the bar kept hopping back and forth between hammy and reserved, though that kid that was introduced in this episode is trying way too hard.

If a bunch of characters are gay, but well portrayed, I have no problems with them. Just in the same that moe girls get really annoying when they only try to pander to their audience without doing anything more. But really… that dog. I’m not really sure what to think about him…
Rating: * (Good)

Okay, so this one will be blogged, mostly based on how many people were looking forward to it. I’m going to take your word for it that this is supposed to be a parody, rather than something that doesn’t know it’s using its cliches. Overall, this series has some similarities to Togainu no Chi: both are series based on very popular franchises. Both weren’t the best at adaptations and both have rather bad directors. In TWGOK’s case, it’s been saddled with Shigehito Takayanagi, the guy behind Hime-Sama Goyoujin, a series whose entire premise was nothing but stupidity. You can really see those influences in Elcea, or was she also such a moe blob in the manga?

Still, the reason why I chose this series over Togainu no Chi is that it does have some decent characterizations. The main character is far from your average lead character and I’m expecting that this will continue on for the entire series. I especially want to see this series pulling off its female characters correctly, instead of making this into yet another series in which the lead characters makes a bunch of stereotypes fall for him. The twist at the end of this episode was a good start, but far from enough. A big problem is that there’s also no continuity: one moment there’s a hole in the house, the next moment that hole is gone. That stands out especially after a series like Squid Girl did this right.

Parodies are my favourite genre in anime comedies. To me, what constitutes a great parody is a series whose entire premise is made around making fun its subject material, and exploiting its flaws. With its premise, TWGOK made a good start, but at the same time I feel like it plays too many things straight, again, especially with Elcea. I really hope that her stupidity will be used to prove a point in the near future, because the cooking scenes, the scenes in which the classmates act like a bunch of dogs over the hot girl near the lead character, and the scenes in which Elcea immediately believes that sisters and brothers should bathe together: those aren’t parodies, they’re overused cliches and stereotypes that plague the moe genre. Obviously, if this series keeps that going on for too long, I’m going to switch over to Togainu no Chi or even Index if that too turns out to be a disaster.
Rating: (Enjoyable)