Category: Anime Reviews

Poor Medaka Box. Its second season had the worst timing imaginable. Here’s the thing: for the past few years, me and Shounen Jump Adaptations didn’t have the best relationship. Sure, there was the occasional gem with Level E, but most series got on my nerves like no other by taking so many ages to actually get somewhere. There are so many of these adaptation that are paced out too long in order to keep the story going in their constant fear of getting cancelled. The first season of Medaka Box actually took advantage of that by actually doing something interesting within the first 13 episodes. It didn’t take ages to change and move somewhere. There was variety.

And then the past autumn season happened. And the juggernauts of Hunter x Hunter and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure came and challenged just about every boundary of the shounen genre, showing among the best of what Shounen Jump has to offer. And Medaka Box tried to air is second season alongside those two. Yeah, it paled in comparison, unfortunately.

The first season of Medaka Box was a generic school series that at a certain point goes over 9000. The second season is different, though: it consists out of a collection of fights between people with all sorts of powers. You can see that a lot of thought was put into these powers, how they work and how they can be beaten. It goes further than most shounen fighting series do, and you can see that the series has quite a bit of fun in analyzing all of these powers along with their stories. And that’s about all this series does.

The problem with this series, like most other nisiOisin’s works, is that the balance is lost. The problem is that this series spends so much time and focus at talking and explaining how all these powers work, that it forgets to put focus on the rest. This show aims to break some traditions of the shounen jump genre with how elaborate these powers, but at the same time it also falls in the same pitfalls by having way too many characters pointlessly talking and analyzing the fight.

And the fights themselves… it’s not like they are of the kind that remain interesting for 12 episodes. The first season had novelty: the characters did other things than just fighting. Here, they don’t and it becomes obvious that Gainax didn’t put their top people on this series: for their standards, the animation is rather bland, and feels too much like they directly copied and pasted manga panels and moved a few things here and there, that ends up looking a bit bland.

Then here is another thing: the characters of this series have their wrong priorities.I mean, this series understands that characters need to have back-stories, and those stories are indeed often insightful and all. The show is not good at all at fleshing out its characters, though: most characters jus have one or two sides to them. They’re not fun to watch because all of them are defined by their powers and backstories, instead of their actions, if that makes any sense.

I am indeed a tsundere for nisiOisin: up till now despite my annoyances of him, I have watched every adaptation of his that came out so far, because I do think that he is a talented writer. The tsun in me though is starting to win terrain because of how unbalanced all of his stories are. I really care about the big picture how all the small pieces are used together. I’m missing that a lot with his series due to the obsessive focus he puts on his dialogue and Medaka Box is the same: it had some very interesting ideas. But did I enjoy myself for the most part with this series? Well, only the final two episodes really ended up catching my attention to be honest, but they did not succeed in making up for the rest of the episodes, especially because this season was supposed to be the part where the story really started, and to be honest I prefer the variety of the first season over the second.

Suggestions:
– Law of Ueki << This show is pretty much Medaka Box if it did focus on actually being fun. Yes, this my favorite comedy ever. That's a big difference there... - Hunter X Hunter
– Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

Okay, so I crowned Poyopoyo as my favourite comedy of 2012. Here I have some more room to explain that. First of all, this series did not make me laugh the hardest out of the comedies of 2012. It did, however, make me laugh the most and it was the most consistently funny series of the year. I can perhaps recall three or four of its 2-minute episodes that did not make me chuckle out loud.

That’s the beauty of this series: it’s short, yet has a ton of content. Every episode is divided into four to eight sketches that describe the daily lives of the main cast, and hardly any of them feel like they have been put in there just to fill time. They all have a point or a joke to make, and really few of them feel flat. When it’s able to do that for 52 consecutive weeks, it really manages to be something special.

And what makes this show funny? Well, most importantly its cast of characters. The show follows a farming family and the people around it. They don’t exactly develop much, but this series is masterful at fleshing them out: showing their different sides in different situations, showing how they typically and un-typically act. And all of this with a good dose of humour. They become really fun and enjoyable to watch, already quite quickly into the series.

About the animation… yeah don’t expect too much of it. It is solid for what it does though: you don’t need to expect crappy flash animation, and the camera angles are consistently sharp for its designs. Voice acting is really good though: the voice actors really manage to bring their characters alive. In terms of background music, there is not much variety: one track is just constantly being played, but it is a very good track nonetheless.

Poyopoyo as a series is more than just funny. It’s also very relatable. It contains tons of scenes that hit home. Sometimes for just pet owners, but also for everyone. Beyond that, if you’re interested you can just give it a try. It’s a really accessible series that you can just jump into whenever you feel like.

So, Btooom. A suspense series that tries to see what you’d get if you turned Bomberman into a real game. With real bombs. Or at least, that was the intention of the original creator.

The show got the suspense part right, but with the action scenes, you do need to turn off your brains, because the bombs in this series seem to favor the lead character: blasts that kill others are ones that only manage to scratch him, he manages to dive away from situations that were seemingly impossible to avoid, and all that is coming from a hikkikomori who never exercises and never leaves his room.

So yeah, the side characters for this series are much more interesting, but here is where this series surprised me, because these guys are actually really good. Like the main character, they too have been thrust into a game in which they’re forced to survive using real bombs, but unlike him they lack the magical main character powers, and really have to fight for their lives there. The way the creators do this is actually quite interesting, and I especially want to tip my hat for Taira, who really stole the show for me as this burdened old guy who you hardly ever see in such an important role as he is here.

They also are something else: varied. There are kids, adults, muscled army officers and weak accountants among them. This has an interesting effect for the action: every battle in this show is different and fought in a different way. It’s not immediately apparent and I only realize this as I’m writing up this review, but they really help to keep this series fresh and new through its 12-episode airtime. The show ends with a lot of things unresolved (hoping for a second season there…), but it does end at a logical point in the story and makes for a short but sweet and intense ride.

Having said that though, the thing remains that some things in this show are very contrived. A lot of them have to do with the lead couple. I won’t reveal the big twist around them, but it’s a really bad one that you could have seen from miles away. The two play of each other nicely, but you do get the feeling that the lead female is just there so that the lead male can have a girlfriend.

There are a few exceptions to that, though. One thing that this show loves to explore is the darker side of human nature, and when it starts playing with that it goes into some pretty interesting directions. All of this isn’t enough to make it stand among the better series of the season, but for what it did it did well.

Suggestions:
– Blade
– High School of the Dead
– Shikabane Hime

Here’s a quick one: Studio Mappa are some of the talented people who branched off from Madhouse in order to start their own studio. I was expecting great things from the people who among others were responsible for Casshern Sins, and they definitely delivered that with their debut work of Sakamichi no Apollon. Naturally I was very eager to see their next work, which turned out to be something completely pointless and silly.

Seriously, this is what Teekyu is: two minute episodes of four high school girls who try to be as random as possible. This show is nothing but 24 minutes of moe and juvenile madness that makes no sense. Nothing more. There is no progression, nothing really happens. Just that randomness. Still, I managed to finish this show and I didn’t really have to force myself to it.

The thing with this show is that even though it’s completely stupid, it’s well made. Most shows with 2-minute episodes are cheaply made, and the concept of inbetween animation is nonexistent for this series, however the animators make sure to make every frame unique and you can really see them play around with their camera angles. There is a lot of creativity in the jokes and the randomness as well, and I admit that there were quite a few times that I laughed out loud. You do need to be able to stomach hyperactive humour if you want to watch this series though. That’s the only prerequisite.

But yeah, this just is a show to just shut your brains off and watch, and for that it does its job of keeping you entertained on a superficial level. The creators here just wanted to goof off a bit inbetween their projects with something completely silly. And yeah, silly it was. Also, I’m not going to break down this show’s ratings in four categories, because that would be entirely pointless. I just see it as a show with a rating of 77,5/100, or a show that even though it doesn’t hit any heights and may have some big flaws, it’s still worth watching.
Suggestions:
– Mr.Stain on Junk Alley
– Gag Manga Biyori
– Eternal Family

The target audiences for movies are completely different from those of TV-series. What’s most impressive is that the most overused genre, the family movie, is actually consistently very good and that there are very few people taking advantage of it with cheap and bad story-lines, like what’s currently happening with the fanservice in TV-series. They’re all attempting to be well executed.

Having said that though, there are a lot of movies that just look like each other. I’m of course talking about the My Neighbour Totoro-inspired series: you take a village, you take a kid, and you take some sort of supernatural being, and you try to create a heart-warming story around it. The stories indeed are heart-warming, but they don’t really try to do something new with the genre and tropes. Miyazaki himself did this with Ponyo, a few years ago, but apart from that I can’t really think of many other movies. A Letter to Momo however, gives a really good attempt to stand out, though.

It’s just all so real. These movies stand out with their realism, but this one reallygoes the extra edge: Momo really feels like a typical young girl, and this movie adds so many quirks for her that other movies look over. It’s all in the details, though, but those details are amazing. The animation also really shows this, with a lot of Madhouse’s top people working on it. The faces in this movie are all 2-dimensional, but they have depth. The way they’re animated, the way they move: you feel like they’re more than just a few drawn lines, something quite rare in today’s animation. It only adds even more to the realism and believability.

Where this really sets itself apart though, is in the supernatural creatures that visit Momo. They are nearly always innocent: cute, adorable, mysterious. In this movie, they’re the complete opposites: while they have good intentions, these beings are flawed, annoying, they continuously cause trouble, they keep stealing from everyone, they keep harassing Momo, and they have just generally un-likable personalities. And yet it’s been a while since I laughed as much at a movie as here. They are the kind of characters that were supposed to be annoying, yet only ended up really charming because of it.

The overall plot of this movie is something you should not expect much of: you’ve seen it before in other movies. However, the way in which it does this is remarkable and defnitely deserves a watch as one of the best attempts on how to do it since Totoro. For the Jin Roh fans who were looking forward to this movie though (the director of Jin Ron has also directed this movie, working on it for seven years): expect nothing like it. This movie has no political messages whatsoever, and is the complete opposite of Jin Roh was. It’s a bit of a shame considering how original Jin Roh was and all, but that does not make A Letter to Momo any less impressive.

Suggestions:
– My Neighbour Totoro
– Junkers Come Here

Horizon had so much going for it. In this season of creativity, it fit right in with its premise, and all sorts of weird powers for each of its characters, its unique sense of combat and its huge back-story. Along the way though, something went wrong with me. What went wrong, and why did this happen?

The thing is, that even though I mildly enjoyed this show, I could hardly bring myself to care about it. I barely managed to finish this sequel without dropping it and each week I had to push myself to watch another episode. It’s not like the episodes themselves were boring: there was enough action and creativity to prevent that from happening and this was far from as generic as Tari Tari was. Still, there is something in the style of storytelling that just could not catch my attention.

The reason behind this is something that I’ve noticed in a few other Sunrise series as well (they’re the one who produced this series), mostly Gundam: the action overload. This show wants to try so hard to deliver action that it keeps on delivering as much action scenes as possible. These action scenes are well animated, and they involve interesting powers clashing against each other, but there is so much focus on them that this show forgets about everything else. The balance is completely gone!

The result is that among all these creative action scenes, nothing really stands out. This show starts with a scene, then moves onto the next and then the next again, without any of them making any impact beyond mild entertainment. It’s like having a 7-course meal in which every dish consists out of some variation of chocolate pie: sure it’s delicious and all, but it’s just way too much and too monotone.

A nasty side-effect of this is that this show also refuses to spend time on fleshing out its cast. Every scene has to make an impact or build-up for the action, and we hardly ever get to know the cast beyond a few comedic skits that do very little in giving them any kind of character to sympathize with. The majority of them are bad boob jokes anyway. And I mean, there is this romance subplot that feels forced at best, but that’s the most character development we see in this entire series.

Horizon is a show that does one thing really well, but instead of using the rest to support this, it just ignores this. The complete lack of any attention to balance just made me unable to care about what was going on. The plot and setting are saved by good source material, but in the end I just can’t recommend this show because of this.

Suggestions:
– Armed Librarians – The Book of Bantorra
– Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto
– Law of Ueki