Category: Special Articles

Here is a list with the shows that are scheduled to air. (At least, that’s what I assume. Notify me if it isn’t complete). – No direct sequels; that’s just boring and predictable. – Apart from that, I accept any series with an airdate between September 20th and November 11th. – Please refrain from spoiling synopsises or staff lists. I’m still trying to enter the Autumn Season with as little information as possible about the upcoming shows, and I’d like to keep it that way. – The poll will end at September 30, 23:59 GMT. All votes that arrive after that will be ignored. Here are the current scores: Kimi ni Todoke – 44 Romance of the Three Kingdoms – 36 Kobato – 34 Kuuchuu Buranko – 31 Winter Sonata – 25 Letter Bee – 23 Armed Librarians: Book of Bantora – 18 A Certain Scientific Railgun – 14 Seiken no Blacksmith – 11 Fairy Tail – 11 Jungle Emperor Leo – 8 Darker than Black – 8 Sasameki Koto – 7 Blue Literature – 7 Nyankoi – 6 Kampfer – 3 Seitokai no Ichizon – 2 Ai no Kusabi – 2 Yumeiro Patissiere – 1 Sora no Otoshimono – 1 Note that with comments that selected three series, I just picked the first two. The people who voted for Darker than Black II and ignored the “No Sequels”-rule can of course always change their votes. A Second Note: it just turns out that Jungle Emperor Leo isn’t going to be a TV-series at all, but instead just a TV-Special. Those who voted for it can of course change their votes.]]>

You know, wasn’t this summer season supposed to suck? I mean, from the things I caught here and there this seemed to be a rather small and underwhelming season. And yet, I have only seen five new series so far (four if you don’t count the umpth Saint Seiya), of which three of them are already interesting enough to blog, and have a lot of potential to become great series. Is the rest of the season going to be filled with dumb harems and Code Geass clones or something?

In any case, with series airing a week before the rest of the season, it’s always hard for me to decide whether or not to blog them, because I have no idea whether or not there are going to be any better series turning up later. For Umi Monogatari it’s the same, as the majority of the new season has yet to air. Still, this episode definitely showed me that this series has a lot going for it, and I can always drop it if even more better shows pop up.

I’m obviously not blogging this series for the aestetics. While the animation is great, I first want to see it remain great for the next couple of episodes, and the art style itself is rather plain, with your average collection of moe stereotypes (one of the lead characters has yellow hair, one has red hair and one blue hair. Gee, those are the three primary colours, where have I seen that one before?). There’s lots of fanservice and all, but thankfully it’s handled tastefully: you don’t see any close-ups to jiggling boobs or strange crotch shots. That’s enough to keep it from getting annoying.

What caught my interest with this series was its characterization. The spring season already had a lot of series with an excellent cast of characters, and Umi Monogatari sounds like a nice addition to them. The three main characters feel realistic and very sympathetic. There are a lot of emotions in this series, but none of it feels like cheese, and it’s surprisingly genuine. It’s the charms of the main cast that really makes me want to watch more, and it makes for a pretty relaxing series with still a lot of drama.

The storyline is obviously going to need a bit more work (evil demons have been unsealed and need to be stopped by a certain sea priestess and air priestess), but I like how this series toys with your expectations. Along with unsealing those evil powers, the little mermaid also unsealed a rather strange turtle. That one I didn’t see coming.

Rating: * (Good)
Successfully carries the atmosphere further with some great animation and characters, even though the plot is a bit clichéd.

Okay, so most of you probably know that I don’t write a lot of editorials because I suck at them, but I still want to say a few words about this subject. After Howling-Kun mentioned the DVD-sales of certain shows in the shoutbox, I started looking at some of the other data in this topic. Now, this is not going to be a rant on how most of my favourite shows aren’t getting any DVD-sales. Everyone’s of course entitled to what he wants to buy (although it does get harder and harder to associate myself with this fandom when shows like Training with Hinako top the charts…).

Instead, those rankings reminded me of all the fuzz that’s going on, and how many people seem to be claiming that “anime is dying”. With this many times that the same doom-scenarios popped up, I almost started believing this myself, until I saw the actual facts in the following graph of DVD-sales in the topic mentioned above.

Well, I may not be an economist or anything near it, but here is my interpretation of the graph. First of all, I don’t get any of those arguments about how anime is supposed to be dying. Sure, sales have gone down compared to 2005, but that’s just a very selective analysis: compare it to ten years ago, and you can see a huge increase in sales. The decline in sales of the past years is about the equivalent of a kick in the groin: sure, you’re going to be walking funny for the next couple of hours, but “dying” is a big overstatement.

The thing is, that the year with the biggest sales was 2005. Interestingly enough, the response in 2006 to this was a huge increase in the amount of different anime titles that was released, as everyone seemed to be profiting from this boom in the sales of the industry. Unfortunately though: just like in the stock market, when sales suddenly go up, this isn’t going to continue forever. Right now, the anime industry is trying to find a new balance amidst the significantly increased interest in anime for the past ten years, and until it has found this the market is going to wobble around like a drunk student on his way home.

And as for the relatively low sales figures of 2008: did you seriously expect anything different with the current economic crisis? The recession has also hit Japan very hard, so it’s of course to be expected that last year’s sales would decrease. What I actually haven’t seen yet is people who are looking at the future. Sure, reports like this are nice and all, but they seem to assume that this recession is going to take forever.

With a bit of luck, the economic crisis is going to be mostly over in 2011 which is going to allow the industries to recover. So what’s going to happen with anime when that point arrives? When that point arrives, people are going to have more and more money to spend on anime, so there actually is a chance for a very solid recovery in the not-so-distant future. Who knows?

And really, as long as producers are able to churn out well-produced series of which they know are never going to sell well, I’m not buying those “anime is dying”-arguments anymore. As long as there are Genji Monogataris, Himitsus, Porfys and Kaibas, it shows that the animation companies aren’t at the real edge of destruction.

A few months ago, I was asked if I could do a post once in a while about some of my other interests aside from anime. It took me a while to think of something interesting to write, but I figured that I might as well use this post to keep track of the different books and novels I read from time to time. Do note that this list is over the scope of a couple of years: I’m a very slow reader, and usually take three months to finish one book. These all have nothing whatsoever to do with anime or Japan: most are either American thrillers, fantasy or European history, or a combination between these. Do note that some of these entries contain spoilers.

The Dreamers 1: The Island Thurn – David Eddings & Leigh Eddings
A story that takes place in a fantasy world, where a huge focus is spent on building up, and setting everything up correctly. While it’s a bit too caught up in its need to do everything by the book, give every single character background and enough time to develop, up to the point that there’s not much excitement along the way (nothing really happens through the first three quarters of the book), it does deliver nicely in the end, although nothing spectacular.

The Magic Circle – Catherine Neville
The prime example of how you can also get too convoluted. This novel set out with grand ambitions, as it attempted to tell a plot that spreads across 2000 years, with a story containing a huge amount of symbolism, referencing Jesus, Hitler some Roman Emperors and other notable historical figures all caught up in it. In the end, though, it becomes clear that it never really knew what it wanted to go for, and the story didn’t really accomplish anything, other than establishing the ridiculously complex family history of the female lead character. Seriously, in the end the twists about her family became so formulaic that you can almost predict the exact page at which the next increasingly ludicrous plot twist would arrive. It’s got a lot of nice trivia, though. The author really did some intensive historical research on this one.

The Collectors – David Baldacci
A very nice in-depth look in how con artists do their jobs, as we follow a group of four of them as they try to get away with a multi-million dollar scam. Great attention to detail, and a huge focus on careful preparation, only ruined by a joke of an ending which forsakes everything that the story has been building up for and instead goes for a nonsensical action end. The other story that runs parallel through the book also isn’t the most interesting: a bunch of old people solving a murder may sound good on paper, but it’s not the most exciting thing out there.

The Golden Compass – Philip Pullman
Excellent book, and I still need to get my hands on the continuation of this one. The whole idea of every person being accompanied by his own daemon (a sort-of animal that accompanies him everywhere; they even can change shapes for children) is fleshed out really well. The lead character may be just a little girl, but she’s a very likable lead. This is one story that gets increasingly better as it goes on.

Gone Baby Gone – Dennis Lehane
Absolutely fantastic. There’s no other way I can say it. The sheer imagination with which such a police thriller is told still amazes me. It’s an in-depth look at police cases involving missing children. It tells the story about two detectives, looking for a missing four year-old girl, and continues to keep the reader in the dark throughout the largest part of the book. But when a second child disappears, it finishes with an incredibly strong final quarter. I can safely say that this has been the best book I’ve ever read.

The Lost Labyrinth – Kate Mosse
This book tells about two stories as they intertwine: one about 12th century Carcasonne (France), and the other, happening about 8 centuries later. The former one is really good, with a likable female lead and a story that gets increasingly more interesting. The latter, however, just feels like second fodder in comparison. It’s full of plot holes, lacks detail and especially the romance that pops up near the end from out of nowhere feels a bit jarring. It’s got quite a few nice ideas, though.

Deverry: Daggerspell – Katherine Kerr
I’m only nearly halfway through this one at the moment, but I’m having a lot of trouble to get through it. Basically, this book is the first one of a large series of fantasy novels as it tells of a series of very annoying romances. Seriously, we have this guy who already was screwed in the head. His father dies and he continuously angsts and throws tantrums about it. He then proceeds to screw his sister and kill his best friend (no, really). When the bugger finally dies, you’d think that the annoyance finally stops, but no: he reincarnates, and the annoying romance starts all over again. Sure, in the end the story might have a very good conclusion, but I’m about to just drop it because people continue to behave like complete and unlikable imbeciles.

So yeah, one thing I noticed is that each medium has its own share of strengths and weaknesses. The things I noticed with these novels is that in nearly all cases, the thing that decides whether they succeed or not is their final quarter, the rest is all or mostly build-up. Nearly all of the above-mentioned ones either had very promising first halves, only to fall apart completely in the end, or fairly uneventful first halves, only to come together wonderfully in the end.

Another thing I can appreciate is the large diversity of lead characters. Okay, I may have just picked out the right books for this, but it feels like every lead character of the ones mentioned above comes from a different age group, as opposed to anime which tents to usually pick out teenagers. Still, the reason why I prefer anime to novels at this point is that novels lack the ability to suck me in and create an atmosphere. I’m a big fan of all sorts of things multimedia, and the thing I like about anime is how it combines all these things (audio, visuals, storytelling, etc) in order to create a coherent story. So yeah, in the end it’s just a matter of personal preference here, though with some of the above mentioned books, I’m glad to be able to have read them. Especially in the case of Gone Baby Gone. There are geniuses in every single kind of medium.

I may update this entry in the future as I read more. In the meantime, what are some of your favourite novels? I’m really a noob at this medium, so some help in deciding what to read next is always appreciated. ^^;

Well, it’s the time of the year again where I’m swamped with work, right before the Christmas Break. I’m having exams (or finals or whatever you call them in English) next week, and so I can’t use the distraction of blogging right now.

I’ll be back next week Friday.

Just for the information, for the upcoming winter-season I’m again planning to not look at any of the promo material of the upcoming series, so again I won’t be writing a preview for it. I’m going to make one exception for this, though: Konnichiwa Anne, the next instalment of the World Masterpiece Theatre. I figure with such a title, and the “kids”-label most people who might be potentially interested in the series will be turned off before the series even started.

For those of you who don’t know about the World Masterpiece Theatre, here’s a short description. They started back in 1975, and each year, a new series of usually around 52 episodes would be shown as an adaptation of a famous children’s novel. One of the big trademarks of the franchise was the huge focus on creating “real” characters: characters that felt like real people. The different series come in all sorts of different sizes: sometimes they get gut-wrenchingly sad, others are quite light-hearted, others are inspirational. They can be surprisingly mature for mere children’s’ series, and therefore are also an excellent watch for the older viewers.

This has both its good and bad points. The good side of the franchise is that because the characters are so well fleshed out, they become a delight to watch, and they’re very easy to identify with as a viewer. The bad side is that nearly every series of the franchise is very slow paced. There are a lot of slice of life moments that help to identify and define the characters in question, and if you can’t enjoy those, you probably won’t find much enjoyment, and the series will most likely bore you to death.

Anyway, about Konnichiwa Anne. It’s based on the novel “Before Green Gables”, which is the prequel of the famous children’s novel “Anne of Green Gables“, a novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and adapted in 1979 into an anime by Isao Takahata of Ghibli-fame. The original series was a slice of life series, which depicted five years out of Anne’s teenaged life.

Before Green Gables actually wasn’t written by Lucy Maud Montgomery herself, but instead by a completely different woman: Budge Wilson. She wrote it in 2008 as the 100th anniversary of the original novel, and it can be very well considered as professional fan fiction, telling about the first eleven years of Anne’s life, which only had been hinted at in the novels (or the anime, at least). What the tv-series told us about Anne’s past was that her parents died when she was only three months old. She then moved from family to family, living there as something as an unwanted child for those already overcrowded families, eventually ending up at an orphanage.

So my prediction is that this series is going to be completely different from the original Anne of Green Gables anime, and that instead it’s going to be a very dark but heart-warming slice-of-life series with quite a bit of drama every now and then.

The problem with this series is obviously going to be that there’s a very low chance of it actually getting subbed or licensed. I was hoping that the fanbase of Akage no Anne would at least give this series a small advantage over Les Miserables and Porfy no Nagai Tabi, but it’s nearly one month until broadcast and the information about the production staff hasn’t even been announced yet for goodness’ sake. All we know is that it’s going to be the next WMT and that it’ll be based on the book Before Green Gables.

However, if you’re a fan of sad slice of life series, then I do urge you to give this series a chance if it does get subbed somehow. In any case I’ll probably be providing a detailed summary for each of the episodes, for those who want to watch it raw but are still uncomfortable with Japanese. The World Masterpiece Theatre Series are actually relatively easy to understand.

Oh boy, time flies by fast. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been ding this for three years at this point. Last year I celebrated this by showing some statistics (props to Google Analytics), which is what I’m going to do this time as well.

General Statistics:
Up till now, I’ve made 2217 posts, regularly blogged 80 television series and 11 movies and OVAs.
The site has been received 1661636 unique visitors, which consist out of 1037409 first time visitors and 624227.
10025 comments have been posted (many thanks to everyone who posted one)

Top-10 Most Accessed Series:
(note that this list is from the past year only, otherwise it’d just look too much like the list I made a year ago)
10. Mobile Suit Gundam 00
9. Macross Frontier
8. Jigoku Shoujo
7. Baccano!
6. Dennou Coil
5. Shion no Ou
4. Ghost Hound
3. Les Miserables
2. Higurashi no Naku Koro ni
1. Saiunkoku Monogatari

Top-10 Most Accessed Posts: (Thankfully a lot less crazy than last year)
10. Darker than Black Review
9. School Days Review
8. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Review
7. Shigurui Review
6. Sword of the Stranger Review
5. Autumn Season 2007 Preview
4. Himitsu ~The Revelation~ – 02 (why this one of all posts that I made got so many hits… I don’t know…)
3. Summer Season 2008 Preview
2. Spring Season 2008 Preview
1. Top 10 Anime
(An interesting observation is that none of my series reviews made the list when I made it a year ago, and now it’s full of them)

Top-10 Google Keywords: (aside from the obvious ones as “psgels”, “star crossed” and variations of “top 10 anime”)
10. himitsu the revelation
9. dennou coil
8. darker than black review
7. soul eater 12
6. shion no ou
5. takane no jitensha (surprising amount of people that are interested in this cute but unremarkable ova)
4. saiunkoku monogatari
3. porfy sucks (No, really. The counter is on freaking 1636 hits for that one. Why in god’s name 1636 people feel like finding out how much Porfy sucks is beyond me. )
2. baccano
1. shigurui

Amusing searh-terms (or downright weird ones)
“school days” anime very annoying – I agree!

anime ep spanking high girl ass – Really nice to see that those who visit my site for mature reasons…

battle programer psgels – That sounds kindof nice…

claymore pee – For god’s sake… why?

incest with my mother – You don’t need to tell that to the world…

psgels eats cake – mmm… cake…

it is not hard to know that the sprng season is coming – indeed, it isn’t!

why is the season called autumn & not something else – um, good question…

psgels is gay for porfy – I can’t believe that people are actually searching for this…

true tires anime – The next Initial D!

which girl is shinichiro in true tears – Oh, the fan-fiction….

“she turns evil” – How did you end up here?

psgels fails at life – I’d like to meet the bastard who typed this and have a long and thoughtful discussion with him. >:(

“skunk rising” – what the…?

“which question is this” – it isn’t this one…

‘by the big slippers of big slipperdom’ – This one’s my favourite ^^;

10001001010100

[qq[]q]qq]q]q][][][][][][] – Do not ask me what these guys were hoping to find with this, let alone how they ended up at this site…

3d too – 4D three!

; that explains a lot – it does!

a bishie in toshokan sensou i won’t have it! – unite and destroy the bisies in Toshokan Sensou!

anime girl gives kid money in bag made from magic illegal angry cars float – this is actually a pretty nice idea.

what does it mean when im getting pushed by a ghots – prolly that your spelling goes wonky

Next up in the category of “ah, why not?”, I figured that it might be interesting to revive a little contest I held a year ago. Before the start of the spring and autumn-season of 2007, I ran a small poll where readers could nominate an upcoming series. The one with the most votes would be blogged, no matter what, which resulted in me blogging first Claymore and then Gundam 00.

I decided to not do the same for the past spring-season because I needed a small break from it, but it’s a fun thing to do about once a year. Especially since this time I’ll have no idea which show I’ll be forced to blog until I watch its first episode.

Anyway, here are some concrete rules:
– To make a valid vote, drop a comment leaving your selection. You can select up to two series from the upcoming Autumn season.
– The anime with the most amount of votes in the end will be blogged for at least 12 or 13 episodes (in the unlikely event that the series in question becomes way too much of a chore to cover).
– Here‘s a list with the shows that are scheduled to air. (At least, that’s what I assume. Notify me if it isn’t complete).
– No direct sequels; that’s just boring and predictable.
– Apart from that, I accept any series with an airdate between September 25th and November 11th (yes, those were the first dates that came to my mind)
– Please refrain from spoiling synopsises or staff lists. I’m still trying to enter the Autumn Season with as little information as possible about the upcoming shows, and I’d like to keep it that way.
– The poll will end at September 30, 23:59 GMT. All votes that arrive after that will be ignored.

Here are the current scores:
Tytania – 23
Michiko to Hatchin – 20
Skip Beat – 14
Tales of the Abyss – 11
Chaos Head – 10
Hakushaku to Yosei – 9
Shikabane Hime – 8
Kuroshitsuji – 7
Toradora – 6
Kurozuka – 6
Casshern – 6
Yozakura Quartet – 5
Today in Class 5-2 – 3
Ga-Rei-Zero – 3
Mouryou no Hako – 2
Macademi Wasshoi – 1
Bihada Ichizoku – 1

Now that the discussions about the autumn anime season have started, I might as well note that for those who are wondering: I’m not planning to make a preview of the upcoming season.

It just feels like everyone and his dog is already doing one, so I don’t see what my attempts can add, since they were never that good anyway. The only advantage I had was that I wrote my previews always relatively early, but this time the first previews for the autumn season already popped up around the half of July. There’s no way I’m going to compete with that. If you want to see an autumn season preview, just go to Animenano and search for “fall preview”. I personally recommend waiting until Hashihime publishes his/hers (I’m still not sure about his/her gender…), as his/her thoughts are always very interesting to read.

The second reason is that I wanted to try a little experiment. For the past few years, I’ve always tried to prepare myself as best as possible, by reading synopsises, staff lists, et cetera, so that I knew what to expect. That doesn’t make much sense, though. I mean, I can understand how someone who’s only planning to watch a handful of series needs to separate the cream from the crop, but I’m going to watch the first episode of every new series anyway. Then what’s the point about getting excited about a series that might disappoint, or dismissing a potential gem because it doesn’t look interesting enough at first glance. Quite a few of my favourite series actually didn’t make too good of a first impression when I first saw them (Simoun, Shion no Ou, Kaiba, Mahou Shoujotai), and I’ve often been disappointed by a series that looked good because of its staff list and promo-art, but turned out to be complete garbage.

Hence why for this season, I wondered what it’d be like to go into a season without knowing anything about the upcoming series, save from possible sequels of course. With that mindset, I obviously can’t write a fall preview at the same time. I personally love being surprised by a series, so who knows? All I know is that I’m going to be enjoying the second seasons of Gundam 00 and Jigoku Shoujo, and for now I’ll just assume that the rest of the season will consist out of dull and uninspired shounen-series.