Category: Anime Reviews

Okay, so I finally managed to check out this movie. My big fear before I started watching it that, now that he’s almost reached his retirement, Hayao Miyazaki would have lost his touch by now, especially considering how his previous movie (Howl’s Moving Castle) was arguably his least impressive work. Nevertheless, these fears were ungrounded: Ponyo shows that the old master still has plenty of tricks left up his sleeve. And then some. Miyazaki’s movies that he made for Ghibli can basically be divided into two categories: epic and down-to-earth. With Ponyo, he tries to combine the two by creating a charming little story about a five year old boy who meets a goldfish with magical powers, and yet creates enough opportunities to show off some amazingly creative visuals and animation that you wouldn’t expect in such a down to earth movie. The result really works and it’s become a movie that’s suitable for any age to enjoy. The animation really shows how much work went into this movie. Even though CG is the norm in today’s anime, Ponyo is entirely drawn by hand, and contains a record number of 170000 hand drawn pictures. This series really shows how much you can do with just animation: in an industry of anime in which the norm is to cut corners, this movie is full of life with an amazing attention to detail in even the slightest moves, and there’s hardly any frame in which something isn’t moving. The amount of eye candy in this movie is also amazing, and even though the art style is simpler than in some of his previous works, the visuals still rank amongst his most impressive. This movie also excels in its portrayal of five-year-olds. I read somewhere that Hayao Miyazaki lives right next to a kindergarten school or something similar, and so he’s had plenty of opportunities to fully study how little kids behave. Kosuke is a bit timid, but a very likable young lead. This series doesn’t have much character-development and background (only a few side-characters have a serious change of character), but considering the story and situations they were thrown in, they didn’t really need to: it was fun enough to watch them as they were and extra focus to get some character-development or background in would only have gotten in the way of what’s really important. My problems with this series lies within some of its messages it attempts to teach to kids. With the environmentalist that Hayao Miyazaki is, I expected that he would show the bad implications of major floods. Instead, a flood in this series just appears, puts an entire landscape under water for a few hours and then disappears without ever leaving a trace. Oh, I’d wish that reality were this simple and convenient. Or how about people who’ve lost their ability to walk, and suddenly are rid of their problems due to magic. Yes kids! If you have some sort of incurable ailment, just hope that a person with magic will arrive and wave these problems away! Anyway, it’s been more than a year now since I watched all of Miyazaki’s major movies. Looking back, his movie that turned out the most memorable for me was Porco Rosso, which probably was his most mature movie. Ponyo, his least mature movie, probably isn’t going to take that place, but yet it is a very charming movie to behold and definitely worth the watch unless you absolutely can’t stand childish stuff.

“David Production may be a new and young animation company, but they’ve really proven themselves so far. They’ve got their own identity already and they’ve produced nothing but well written series. They’re definitely a new company to look out to.” Yeah, I wish that I could write that right now, but DOGS is so hilariously bad that it’s a miracle that the producers even agreed to release it. It’s basically a 4-episode OVA (based on the DOGS manga apparently), but it’s so badly produced and written that I don’t think that anyone is going to be able to take it seriously. The biggest of its flaws is its hopeless overacting. Every single character tries to look as cool as possible, but they overdo their coolness way too much. The result is four episodes full of incredibly cheesy and overacted drama whose only merit is that it’s so hilariously bad that you’re bound to have a laugh or two at how ridiculous it is. There are of course also a lot of emo faces that only make things even less believable, considering how little build-up every story has. Another problem with this show is that it’s based on a much larger manga, and this series does absolutely nothing to hide it. That’s why the four episodes are just a bunch of random chapters animated, without bothering at all to try and fill us in about what’s going on, why things are happening, who the characters are, and they simply cut off when their time is up, leaving a massive amount of plot-holes open. Of course, it’s not like this series isn’t enjoyable. This OVA is best watched along with a bunch of friends and liquor; it’s a great way to pass an hour. Obviously, that just doesn’t warrant any kind of praise or high review score. The only praise I can give this series is that the art is pretty decent: it looks crisp and clean and while nothing amazing, you can see David Production’s influences. And of course the Engrish curses were awesome. I know that this series was based on a much larger manga and all, but that’s no excuse. Hitsuji no Uta for example was also based on a large manga, and yet it did succeed in condensing its story into only four episode, with some amazing results. If that series could do it, then why couldn’t DOGS?

Here’s another one I haven’t heard anyone talk about, or even mention for that matter. Kaze no Youjinbou is an obscure series that aired back in 2001, but seems to have become nearly forgotten over the past eight years, which is a bloody shame because it’s a really good series. Recommended for anyone who’s into a good mystery series. This series is about criminal gangs in a small mining town, and the street-punks, corrupt politicians, villagers and police officers around them. Street-punks and yakuza in anime are very often incredibly stereotypical. They’re either a bunch of screaming and evil paper bags who appear just out of random and attack the lead characters in order to insert some random tension, or they’re portrayed as those cheesy thugs with a heart of gold and a strong sense of bushido. Kaze no Youjinbou however portrays them as ordinary people: not pure evil, but it also doesn’t try to glorify their greed, the crimes they commit and their twisted outlook on life. It tries to look into what drives these people to start horrible turf wars that involve entire towns. And I must say that they succeed in this very well. But at heart, this series is a mystery-series, based on a classic film by Akira Kurosawa. The thing I liked best about this series is how it really takes its time to let the story introduce itself instead of rushing through the beginning: you won’t have any idea what this series is going to be about in the beginning, because it’s very carefully introducing every major character, while showing a very detailed portrayal of how they live their lives. You’ll never know when something is just meant to flesh out the characters or develop the plot the moment it happens and despite the very slow pacing, there’s always something small going on. This series has really done well in making its setting come alive in the first half. When the lead character runs into someone, it feels like this someone was there because he’s part of the setting, rather than for the sake of the plot. Even when characters are out of the screen, you can feel tat they’re all carrying out their own agendas, instead of waiting for the camera to focus back on them. Unfortunately, this effect disappears in the second half, which becomes more like a straight-forward gang war and this show loses a bit of its subtlety. It’s because of this that in my opinion, the second half is less impressive than the first half: it’s another one of those mystery-series that’s better at asking questions, rather than answering them, but it nevertheless keeps your attention until the end, which does wrap up everything nicely. The animation in this series ranges from really bad to really good. This means that there are some action scenes that are a bit hard to take seriously due to the incredibly cheap visuals (a certain scene of a car driving down a road stands out in particular), but in exchange for that there are plenty of scenes that have absolutely amazing visuals. The colour-palette is full of washed out and grayish colours that give this series a very cold atmosphere, but the direction is what really gives this series its own unique visual identity. There are lots of very creative camera angles, gorgeous shots and poses, awesome shading and some of the animated scenes are full of life and detail that make a huge impact when they need to. Especially episode 13 stands out in these downright awesome visuals. It’s a shame, really. Today, I pretty much consider Studio Pierrot as the single worst of the big animation companies out there. However, before they found their cash cows of Naruto and Bleach, they were a really good production company, with their own visual style and quite a few excellent titles on their names. Ever since Victorian Romance Emma ended however, they seemed to have completely given up on trying to do anything creative with their talents, and that’s such an incredible shame. Series like Kaze no Youjinbou, Great Teacher Onizuka, Fancy Lala and Emma definitely show that they’ve got the ability to do much more than what they’re doing right now.

I went into this series quite a false assumption of what it was going to be about. With a title as “Yugo the Negotiator”, it sounded like a mature and realistic series in which the lead character Yugo would calmly negotiate himself through various circumstances. Little did I know that this is a series which tests the boundaries of what the human body can take, a series which tests the boundaries of credibility in its plot twists and a series which tests the boundaries of how much tension you can insert in a story with such a dull sounding premise. So yeah, this series features two arcs, both of which are about Yugo trying to rescue a person who has been captured by really dangerous people. The key in is success is investigation: he always carefully checks the background of the people he’s dealing with and you can also see that the creators of this series have taken their time to give a very detailed portrayal of the countries that this series is set in (Pakistan and Russia). With such a detailed setting, you’d really expect that the rest of the series is also going to be very realistic and believable, but unfortunately the rest of the plot is really shoddy, ludicrous and often loses focus of what’s really important. In the end, while it had a lot of potential, Yugo the Negotiator to me stands out as one of those series with an identity crisis. Its focus should have been the negotiating: getting hostages away from danger, but quite a few episodes are simply dragging Yugo’s body to hell and back: we see him being tortured by 50 degrees of heat, minus forty degrees of cold and some other of Russia’s cruelest torture techniques. And while this would have been fine on its own, it gets a bit hard to believe to simply see him stand up and walk away afterwards like nothing happened. The ending of the series also carries this air that you just can’t take seriously, in which just about every plot twist in the final two episodes stretches the limit of suspense of disbelief. Add to that the mysterious reason why the creators have Yugo team up with a sexy woman who falls in love with him but is generally useless to the plot and the fact that most of Yugo’s plans leave an awful lot to a very flimsy lady fortuna and you have a series that simply fails at being credible. However, don’t get me wrong in that there’s nothing to get from this series, because it is a very intense ride from start to finish. If you can accept the fact that there is no way that this show is ever going to make any iota of sense, then you’ll be thoroughly entertained by all of the different and creative twists and turns that the plot makes and the horrible things that the characters have to go through. In terms of storytelling, it fails; but in terms of entertainment it definitely isn’t a bad way to spend 6 hours. So yeah, in the end Yugo is pretty much the epitome of a Marty Stu. The plot often doesn’t make any sense, but if you set your mind on zero you’ll be fine with this series. It has enough to offer to keep people in for an intense ride throughout the 13 episodes, but really… do not take it seriously.

Sunrise and mechas go together like cheesecake and… well, cheese. They’ve been producing their mecha-epics for decades now, ranging from the immensely popular Gundam and Code Geass to the lesser known Overman King Gainer and Zegapain. Still; call me crazy, but out of all their mecha-epics I’ve seen so far (barring Escaflowne, if that one also falls under the genre), my favourite is this rather obscure game adaptation of the Zone of the Enders. I’m surprised as well to see how well this series turned out. It’s in no way the most sophisticated series out there, but it really does a lot of things right where a lot of the other Sunrise shows have fallen horribly. It’s some good old-fashioned entertainment that hardly ever has a weak or dull moment, never drags and provides plenty of interesting situations, action and characters. What stands out the most is the cast of characters. Anyone who has been bothered by the immense amount of shows that star whiny teenagers will rejoice: FOR ONCE we have a series in which the lead characters isn’t in his teens, twenties or even thirties! James Links is 49 years old, and even his kids are fully grown adults with their own careers now. I believe that the amount of series that can boast the same can be counted on one hand. The creators really make use of this opportunity to develop the lead cast into a varied and lovable cast of characters. The story here is about a bunch of characters who are involved into the main plot because they were dragged into it, but because they all had different jobs at the start of the series, they all stand out in their unique talents and the series really makes use of every characters’ specializations and experiences. The lead cast, because they’re all adults, also have rich and inspired backgrounds and this makes it very easy to relate to them in the decisions they make throughout the series. This series also has a lot to offer in terms of science fiction. This show takes place in a setting in which Mars has been colonized, and the creators don’t forget to spend enough time to flesh this setting out a bit, like explaining how the politics work between the Earth and Mars, how people grow food, what’s up with the atmosphere, the smaller gravity and how people travel between the two worlds. It’s not ridiculously complex, but it is believable and really gives this series a great backdrop to work with. And really, this was the first series I’ve seen that took care to address the matter of deceleration when it comes to high-speed outer-space travel. That definitely was a nice touch. And the soundtrack! While the OP is a bit… weird (DANGAAAA! Give me more DANGAAAAAA!), the rest of the soundtrack is truly excellent. It was composed by Hikaru Nanase, who most people will probably recognize as the woman who made the soundtracks behind Noein and Requiem of the Phantom, and she again works her magic in this series, with especially one of the best EDs I’ve listened to in a long while. The animation is nothing special, but it does enough to bring the characters alive and not get in the way of anything. There are a few small flaws here and there, but nothing that really should get annoying. The creators did a wonderful job of keeping the cheese under control, but there are a number of minor scenes in which the cheese becomes a bit too aggravating. A few of the characters are a bit too stereotypical and lack depth, but these cases are mostly about minor characters and scenes. The main storyline is a strong and entertaining one, and even the final battle is a very engaging one, rather than your typical dull Sunrise ending. Zone of the Enders is yet another example of why game adaptations don’t suck.

Spiral is a battle of wits. It’s set up in such a way that the lead character (Narimi Ayumu), who is a highly gifted teenager, has to face a number of opponents who rather than simply shooting him to death attempt to bring him down by creating all sorts of puzzle situations for him to overcome. Not really the most believable of all premises, but it does work. Because I have to admit, these mind games are well created. They’re creative and not as ridiculously elaborate and far-fetched like you’d see in shows as Death Note or Code Geass. The creators really did well in keeping a balance between believability and ingenuity, and that’s where the fun comes from: the situations in this series are so created that a lot of them can be figured out by the audience as well. The characters make well use of their surroundings, and also carefully try to analyze the persons they’re dealing with and predict what kind of moves they might make. The mind games and the psychology in this series is what makes it worth watching, and that’s a good thing because apart from that there really isn’t anything notable for this series. Spiral basically is a series that’s really good at one thing… but fails to stand out in any other way. The lead characters are serviceable: the creators are good at analyzing them, but they could have been fleshed out much more. The villains however are a real joke: we learn absolutely nothing about them: they’re just a bunch of paper bags with no motivation whatsoever. But the biggest problem with this series it the fact that it leaves so many questions open. And sure, I’m not often concerned with this and I usually don’t mind if a series leaves a bunch of plot-holes open at the end. But Spiral takes this to a completely different level when it fails to answer just about every major question it asks throughout the series. Seriously, this series just stops at one point and nothing whatsoever has been solved. My guess would be that this is another series adapted from a manga that never got its second season due to unpopularity. Such a shame! Anyway, whether or not you’ll like this series is simple: if all you want is a battle of wits, then this series isn’t going to disappoint you. Especially the first half of this show has everything that makes for a bunch of very interesting mind games. If you’re interested in something else though, then you’d better stay away, because this series sure as heck doesn’t have it.

You might be wondering what the heck I’m doing with something that looks like a weird bastard child of Astro Boy and My Little Pony, but this is actually the last series that Osamu Tezuka directed in his life, before succumbing to cancer. In fact, he sadly couldn’t live to see its completion. It was recommended to me by hairgreen, so I decided to give it a shot. Aoi Blink really is a children’s adventure. It follows the lead character Kakeru as he travels together with a talking flying horse, two thieves, a princess and a bus driver in the search of his father, who has been abducted by the evil bad guy. Is it formulaic? Yes. Is it simple? Yes. Does it have very odd survival chances for the lead character? Obviously. Do I regret watching it? Nope. The format of this series of course has a lot of problems in terms of believability. The side-character’s motivation is simply that they support Kakeru in his quest to find his father, and are hungry for an adventure. They don’t have a lot of history or background either, so they’re not the most complete characters out there. The basic format of every episode is also rather predictable: the characters arrive in some sort of town, have some fight with some bad guy who is causing problems in this town and at the end of the episode everyone is happy and the characters leave again. Yet, this series does have enough to make up for this. The characters may lack background, but because they’re such an odd bunch travelling together it becomes fun to watch them; Osamu Tezuka has always been known for his ability to create lovable characters, and here too he creates a cast with a nice little chemistry together. He also stands out in his creativity: it’s amazing that at the end of his career, he still had more than enough interesting ideas stuffed into this series. A big reason that makes this series avoid the pitfall of most boring adventure series is that a lot of episodes, while their scenario is nothing new, they are centred around some interesting idea. At first sight, this series does have a clear distinction between good and evil: evil people do bad things and good people are nice. However, despite the lack of a gray area between them, this series starts playing with these morals surprisingly often: sometimes people you’d think are good are actually evil, some good people come across as evil at first, some good people are brainwashed to be evil and one episode even has this reversed. This especially becomes fun near the end. I’m not going to say much about the ending because of spoilers, but the final episode in this series was my favourite of the entire series, in which in a series which seemingly existed out of random episodes, everything surprisingly comes together in a truly kickass conclusion. Aoi Blink is a flawed adventure series, which is why I rated it rather lowly. Kakeru, despite being a kid and all, manages to outsmart grown adults over and over throughout the series. But if you’re looking for adventure, then this series has it. The characters are simple and childish, yet they grow on you. Because of this, there are a number of episodes that are a bit tedious to get through, but if you’re into children’s adventures then this series has a lot to like. If you are not interested in this genre however, this series isn’t going to cause you to see the light.

Xebec is a strange animation company after all. You never see them among the big guys and most of their works are seemingly mediocre, and yet as I watch more of their works I have to admit that they somehow hit the mark a surprising amount of times. If I had to mention something at which most of their great works stand out at, it’s the way in which they put in a lot of slice of life and quiet scenes in seemingly action-packed premises; only Pandora Hearts doesn’t have this and I have to admit that it’s not really the best thing to advertise your series with. Still, it does work; Stellvia again shows how when it takes a premise doomed for failure and yet turns it into a very enjoyable series. Stellvia of the Universe starts out with a really flawed premise: in a certain science fiction setting, a seemingly average girl boards a space pilot school, suddenly turns out to be a l33t hax0r and somehow ends up piloting the mecha that holds the fate of humanity in its hands. I watched the entire series and still find it hard to believe how far she came in only one year. On top of that, this series also has some utterly horrid character-designs to work with, along with CG that really doesn’t try to integrate with the rest of the show. And yet the characters made this premise work somehow. The above mentioned slow pacing really allows for the creators to show the daily lives of the protagonists, which allows the characters to get fleshed out really well; this doesn’t just go for the main characters, but also the side ones, and because of this they become able to carry the faulty premise of this series. Obviously you don’t want to watch this just for the drama, but eventually the drama that does come out is poignant and genuine. Near the ending however, the series does get a bit annoying, though. It keeps focusing on the angsty romance between the two lead characters a bit more than what’s healthy for this series, especially because the romance tends to get in the way of just about everything else that also needs attention. Because of that, the finale lacks a bit of the impact it could have had. Nevertheless, this series definitely has its good points and even the graphics don’t get much in the way as soon as you get used to the horrible designs. Science fiction is obviously a very popular genre in anime, but Stellvia does stand on its own amongst some of the behemoths of this genre, rather than being a mish-mash of other series. It’s neither the best from Xebec or science fiction obviously, but a very nice watch nonetheless.

Watching a series like Nadia is interesting, if only because of the place it takes up in the history of the adventure genre. It’s based on the novel 20000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, who was one of the pioneers of the science fiction genre and wrote about aeroplanes and submarines before they were even invented. The visuals are clearly inspired by Laputa Castle in the Sky, one of Ghibli’s earliest classics, and you can also see traces of the awesome Mysterious Cities of Gold. In its turn, you can see its influence amongst great future adventure series as Bonen no Xamdou, Blue Submarine No06 and of course Ashita no Nadja. Amongst these excellent works, Nadia obviously doesn’t stand out as the greatest adventure ever, but nevertheless it’s an excellent series and a proof of Gainax’ ambition. Nadia starts out as an historical series in the year 1889 and shows the two lead characters (two kids named Jean and Nadia) as they are chased by what at first sight seems to be the prototype for Team Rocket. Gradually though, this series gains more and more depth, and the setting develops into something truly epic, and a great look at how science fiction would have been more than a century ago. We gradually get to see more and more of the back-story of the world that this series plays in, which really becomes increasingly more interesting as the series goes on. Throughout the series, we get to see a wide variety of situations, as we see Jean and Nadja travel on aeroplanes, hot air balloons, robots, the Nautilus Submarine of which the novel 20000 Leagues Under the Sea has become famous for, and much more. There’s also an entire arc that takes a step back from being epic, and instead has the lead characters stranded on a desert island for about eight episodes, with the focus being much more on “slice of life” and trying to survive on that desert island. While it will probably be boring for those who are watching this series for its action, but these episode did a great job of fleshing out and developing the characters. But what great action this series has! Consider that this series aired in 1990, it looks like no other TV-series that aired before. Hideki Anno did a great job in creating a TV-version of the Ghibli-esque graphics, in the days that Hayao Miyazaki was really at his most prolific. The series has a excellent selection of rich and colourful character-designs and other graphics, and while you can see that the drawings in this series were still done by hand, the animation is surprisingly smooth and detailed. There unfortunately are a bunch of flaws that hold this series back from calling itself among the greatest adventure series out there. Especially the villains of this series just are hardly fleshed out. The major villain is your typical evil mastermind who wants to take over the world, and every single one of his subordinates has the personality of a paper bag. It’s very hard to take these guys seriously and consider them a serious threat, even though they’re usually competent at their jobs. I think that it’s also because of this that the ending contains a bunch of weird Deus ex Machina that just seemed to have been inserted to wrap up the story. Also, Nadia may have been a bit too often a damsel in distress, especially in the first half of the series. At times the show is a bit hard to watch, because the barrier between men and women forms a major theme for especially the lead couple, but most of the important characters end up nicely developed by the end. Nothing memorable, but this development does makes sure for a bunch of really charming scenes in which this development comes together. And a honorable mention has to go to King, the animal side-kick who proved that subtlety and GAR do go together.