Category: Anime Reviews

Let me talk a bit about Ryousuke Nakamura. For a long time, this guy was my hero. He started off as an assistant director to Monster, in my opinion a big reason why that series got such a ridiculously solid adaptation, and then in 2008 he came with the groundbreaking Mouryou no Hako. No TV-series was like what we saw there. A year later, he completely rewrote the classic story of Hashire Melos to the point of brilliance, while he still kept incredibly faithful to the original work. This guy’s hands were pure genius. Afterwards, he left Madhouse, the company he was under contract of, and he started working freelance.

Now the problem with working freelance is that it’s a lot harder to land really good jobs. The best example of that is Dai Sato, a brilliant writer (think Erbo Proxy, Eureka Seven), who in the meantime of writing episodes here and there has resigned to writing kiddie shows in order to pay the bills. Ryousuke Nakamura thankfully fared better, but even then he has not gotten the golden opportunity that will give him complete freedom yet. The only television-series he did was Aiura, which was a 5-minute episode show about a bunch of girls that do nothing. It was incredibly well executed and all, but you can’t do anything with that kind of a setup. Beyond that he’s done all kinds of jobs here and there, from episode directing to storyboards, to production progress, to also just animating.

There is only one serious thing that he took the main seat as the director at… and its biggest focus is a romance between middle schoolers. That’s also its biggest problem right there: Monster! A tense thriller across Germany! Mouryou no Hako, a ground-breaking mystery chockful of Japanese folklore after World War II. Aoi Bungaku! A look into the mind of the writer of Hashire Melos! Nerawareta Gakuen! A teenaged romance with time travel!

So yeah, there are cliches. He doesn’t shy away from that. In some cases, he even takes cliches, gives the illusion of subverting them, only to subvert those subversions again and adhere to the cliches, repeats that several times after. And yeah, when you take into account that there will be lots of teenaged hormones… this pretty much is a beautifully executed movie. It takes care to make its four main characters well rounded, the side cast all are enjoyable and likable, the story brings in enough twists. With the cliches ingredients, it tries to make as much of it as it can and the themes that it uses, and the ideas that the whole story revolves around are actually pretty damn interesting. This also is not one of those romances in which nothing happens. Stuff does happen. It’s cliched obviously, but the most important part is this: both the characters and the relationships between these characters are constantly evolving.

Visually this show is perfect. You can see lots of the signature tricks that Ryousuke Nakamura loves to pull for his series. There obviously are the shots that are spammed with sakura leaves, but also the more subtle things. When characters move, they move full of energy and inspiration. Their facial expressions are full of emotions. All of this leads to a cast that feels very believable and relatable. This movie is already more than a year old and I didn’t notice any sort of buzz around it. It’s a pity, because it’s pretty damn charming for what it is. I’d say that the acting in Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo was a bit better than this one, but it’s definitely not by much.

Then there is the ending. I want to talk about it, but I’ll be as vague as possible for the sake of spoilers. At first sight the ending seems to suggest that it was rushed. Things happen fast. However, I believe that it somehow worked out very well. It’s the kind of ending that doesn’t explicitly spell everything out for you. It allows you as a viewer to fill in the blanks, and it’s even a bit open to interpretation at some points. I would not call it rushed to the point where it becomes flawed. Instead it makes the ending work and gives you something to think about. Not bad for a movie targeted at kids.

Okay, so I didn’t want to exit 2013 without having seen Masaaki Yuasa’s Kick Heart. It’s only twelve minutes anyway, and I consider him to be one of the best anime directors out there.

The story here is pretty silly and mostly serves as a backdrop, so I mostly want to talk about the nature of this little short: how it was crowd-funded and they actually got Masaaki Yuasa to direct it, Mamoru Oshii served as the consultant to make it happen, and They got a lot of talented animators involved. Because of this I love it. The creative team here attempted something really ambitious, and they actually succeeded in it.

Because of that, it’s also not surprising that Masaaki Yuasa got full creative control over the animation, and this probably is his most personal work since Mind Game. Especially with Yojou-han Shinwa Taikei you could see that it wasn’t just his work, albeit it still was really well executed, Kaiba was probably also forced into at least a normal storyline (for very good reasons by the way, because it turned out amazing), and even Kemonozume looked like some compromises had to be made. Here, the only compromise was the short length of only 12 minutes. He could really goof off as much as he wanted here, and the result is incredibly trippy. The animation is utterly gorgeous because of it.

This short made me learn a lot about Yuasa’s style, and I’m even more amazed at how well he works together with other people. This guy, when he is on his own, he can create completely unique stuff like Mind Game, but when he’s more under control he actually manages to get the best out of everyone, leading to the masterpieces that were Kaiba and Yojou-han Shinwa Taikei. He really is one of the most talented directors out there.

Kick Heart was incredibly silly, so don’t expect the same emotional intensity of is other works, but still his talents really show here and it was a great watch, and it serves as an example of how to do anime right.

Noucome! You do not want to know how long I have been waiting for a series like this. More than half a decade, at the very least. Finally a series comes along and puts the incredibly overused harem genre in its place. And it actually does it well. Thank you!

So to elaborate: the harem genre is one of the worst genres in anime, and it has been so for about a decade now. The worst part is the sheer amount of series that have been made of it. They give anime a bad name and the vast majority of them just completely sucks. Over the years of course, enough attempts at parodies have appeared.

The problem with these parodies was that they weren’t really parodies. They’re just harem shows with their tongue in their cheek. When you have this mentality though, you only make things worse: you’re not funny, and the tongue in the cheek is just an excuse to put in even less effort into your writing because any flaws can be overlooked this way. A lot of parodies make this mistake and just adhere to the things they’re trying to make fun of, and with the harem genre this resulted into one giant mess. The only successful series so far probably was Ben-To, but that was just a really well executed series first and foremost.

Noucome though, goes all the way. This series finally aims to highlight the stupidity in the harem genre, and it finally aims to really make everything about it look ridiculous to show what so many series nowadays are getting away with. It finally takes the usual tropes like the quiet girl, the ditzy girl, the energetic girl, the student council, and with some great jokes and its premise shows how bad these things are. The protagonist is wonderful in fully acknowledging what a horrible person he is while this show keeps finding ways for him to enact generic harem scenes, and take them to the ridiculous. For that effort alone, I applaud this series. Because it has a lot of flaws, unfortunately.

Like most series, this series does lack an editor. The writers have great ideas, but other ideas are just plain bad. For example, everything about the main female lead (the one who falls from the sky) just doesn’t work: where all other characters are meant to highlight the flaws of their stereotypes, she’s just the generic dog-like girl with no brains and a huge appetite that we’ve seen millions of times before. She gets old really fast.

Second, it’s unfortunate to see that the writers can’t keep up their wit for the entire run of the series. With only 10 episodes, this is delightfully short (a comedy really does not need to be long!), but even then the second half has a few bad episodes, and especially the last arc is a pool episode that, while still containing some good jokes, is also full of pointless repeated boob-jokes that don’t go anywhere and an incredibly rushed and hacked ending that doesn’t really resolve anything. It’s a really clear example of the creators not knowing whether there is going to be a sequel, and therefore they try to include a bit of both, resulting in a really big mess of a final episode. It’s a shame, because there really is comedic gold in good endings, yet the amount of comedies that actually go for this can be counted on two hands. Another problem this series has is that everyone and his dog conveniently gets anmnesia when the writers need it the most. It’s passable when done once, but the writers just keep relying on it.

Nevertheless, Noucome first looked to be a series with the worst premise you could imagine. It turned out to be the biggest surprise of the year for me, and especially the first half was pretty much the best way in which such a bad-sounding storyline could ever have been animated. Can we now kill the harem genre. Please?
One-Sentence Review: The first harem parody that actually is a parody. Terrible ending though.
Suggestions:
– Ben-To
– Touka Gettan (Also not really a parody, but another great example of how to spice up the harem genre)
– Aquarion Evol

Normally I try to avoid spoilers with these reviews, but screw it, it’s Pokemon. Pokemon The Origin is a bomb of nostalgia. If you haven’t played Pokemon Red, Blue or Green, then you will not enjoy this one slight bit. This really is made as pure undilluted fanservice for the fans of the first games. Pokemon was the first anime that I watched on Dutch television that made me aware of the existance of anime. Pokemon Yellow was the game that had me hooked, more than any other game when I was younger. So yeah, I am a fan, Pokemon holds an irreplaceable part in my childhood. And biased.

Here’s the interesting bit about this OVA: it’s got so many things that the television-series did really badly. And yet at the same time, it’s got some huge flaws that the TV-series was better at.

Let me start with the positives: finally, after more than a decade of pokemon, we’ve got it: a Pokemon anime without Ash. Team Rocket is present, but Jesse, James and Meowth are completely gone. in fact, the only regular characters who do return are Giovanni, Professor Oak, and Brock and Misty as Gym Leaders. This is what I’ve been waiting for: the pokemon universe is open to so many different stories and interpretations, so it sucks that it always has to be the same thing. I gave up on it years ago for a reason.

Next up: the length. At four episodes of just 20 minutes, finally Pokemon has come in bite-size chunks. The TV-series was absolutely notorious for wasting time, for running for way too long and including so many pointless stories that dilluted the experience. In these four episodes the creators picked the best parts of the game and brought that to animation.

All of the characters, in terms of acting at least improved from what we’ve seen of them: Giovanni actually has a personality, Brock stopped being the womanizer and now is just a gym leader, and all of the pokemon stopped trying to look and sound cute. They behave much more like animals. Heck, there was one brief appearance of Pikachu, and somehow the creators managed to give it mouse noises. That is one thing that I did not expect them to get past the marketing machine.

Now, the bad stuff: you obviously can’t stuff one entire game in four episodes. The solution of the creators is to have Red recap the things that happened off-screen. Great for fans of the game, but anyone not familiar will just scratch their head, wondering what the hell is going on. The only single reason I tolerate this is because it’s pokemon: any other show attempting this would have not worked at all. Adaptations need to stand alone, not give the message of “you need to check out the game/manga/whatever if you want the complete story”.

What also stood out was that this OVA became quite a good example of the difference in adaptations between today and fifteen years ago: adaptations today follow much closer to their original source material. On one hand this creates less obnoxious filler, but on the other hand this also limits the creators when they take over something stupid, or something that doesn’t work. This stands out especially in game adaptations.

There’s something bizarre in the entire game meta being visible in these OVAs, like pokemon have life bars now, they talk about level. People hand out sics with moves on them. Oh, and the battles themselves also become really weird because of this where the main focus is adhering to the game rules, rather than common sense. Take the fight against Brock for example: oh yeah, it may follow the game’s rules and all, but what we saw there was the equivalent of a big tank being drop-kicked by a hamster. Pikachu’s victory against the Onyx actually made sense. You can give the original series a lot of flack, but at least they looked at the different powers and used their heads, whereas in The Origins you have a Charizard whose tail keeps burning even when he’s underwater.

The characters also really suffered, and the creators I think made the explicit decision not to flesh them out or give them much depth. They get all their depth from the nostalgia with the games. This worked particularly strange with Giovanni, who behaves really weird throughout the parts he’s featured in. Heck, he loses to a kid and just abolishes his entire organization, even though losing to a kid just a few minutes earlier did nothing to him. But yeah, this entive OVA fails to make any ounce of sense. The original series has more logic in it than what we saw here.

But here’s the thing: When I first learned of this OVA, I imagined that it would be this big budgetted OVA, or at least something really solid. This was everything but solid, and the animation budget in particular wasn’t that impressive. This leads me to believe that this was a simple experiment: a test to see whether it’s worth it to also cater to the older fans of Pokemon. A pilot, if you will. And that idea, I really support.

Pokemon deserves to have some stories in it that target a different demographic than the usual kids. There are plenty of adult players who would like to see a more mature storyline animated, I would definitely see a market for that. For future experiments, I would really suggest: try sometihng standalone. Don’t depend on the games. Make sense. Take yourself seriously. Have a main character who isn’t a kid. I know that the last point is really stretching it, but hey you made Pikachu talk like a mouse, so apparently you do have freedom.
One-Sentence Review: A nostalgia bomb and not much more; do not watch if you haven’t played Pokemon Red, Blue or Green.
Suggestions:
– Pokemon, The Indigo League Season