Category: Other:

2008 came with an interesting trend: actually good shounen-ai series…. what? At least I liked them…

Granted, there’s no denying that this series is aimed at fangirls. Nearly every episode features some gay sex scene that… will feel rather awkward for any straight male like myself. The characters are way too quick to jump into bed with each other and make some hot steamy love. But at the same time, this series can brag about some very good romance, that even teach a lot of straight love series a thing or two.

Because the characters are nearly all adults, which shows an interesting difference with all the teenage romances out there. This series’ outlook on love and relationships turns out to be quite realistic. It’s about understanding your partner, (obviously) how they deal with sex, the sacrifices you make for each other and what it means to be in love with someone. Sure, the characters in this series are gay and all, but this series wouldn’t have been that different if it talked about straight couples. Apart from the fear of breaking the taboo of loving a member of the same sex, perhaps.

Because this series deals with three different couples, it can really take an in-depth look at gay romances, despite how disturbing this may sound, as it can take a look at different scenarios and situations and develop them. What really sold me in this series is the fact that it’s critical of itself. There’s plenty of self-jokes in this series and the pieces of comedy here and there are hilarious, preventing this series from becoming too dramatic for its own sake.

The graphics could have used a bit more work, though. Obviously, the visuals aren’t the most important thing in this series, but the character are very hard to keep apart for the first few episodes, which is the sign that the character-designer needs to feel ashamed of himself. The music does the job, although I do want to give attention to the excellent OP that this series has.

Obviously, if you’re one of those people who hates gays with passion, you should stay far away from this one. However, if you’re looking for some quality romance, Junjo Romantica is a pretty good recommendation. It’s an interesting look at how three different romantic relationships form and develop. The dialogue is witty and to the point. It may be a bit too angsty at times, but in terms of romance, it delivers. There seems to be a second season somewhere in the future, and I’m scared to say that I’ll be looking forward to it…

For Batman – Gotham Knight, four of my favourite studios Studio 4°C, Production IG, Bee-Train and Madhouse came together and delivered a collection of six short movies about the comic book legend of Batman. Much like The Animatrix, all have different art styles, though unlike the Animatrix, they’re much more tied together. They’re all action somehow, and share the same dark tone.

First up is Studio 4°C, with the movie “Have I got a story for you”, which is probably the most down-to-earth and different of the six stories, and yet it’s typical Studio 4°C, as they show a Batman adventure, through the eyes of four street-kids. It’s a great introduction, that gives a bit of mysterious air to the concept of Batman, especially for those like me, who haven’t seen too much of the guy. The next movie, Crossfire by Production IG continues this trend, by only showing a very few scenes of him, and instead focusing on a couple of cops. It’s perhaps the movie that makes the least amount of sense, and the ending feels like a rather Deus ex Machina. It’s a nice idea, but there are too many plot-holes in this one.

The rest of the movies then shed the air of mystery, and start focusing on Batman himself. Two show a bit of his background, and the other two show how he takes care of a bunch of bad guys. Field Test by Bee-Train tries to explain the things that happen in Crossfire. In this, it fails, but it does build up Batman’s character into more than just a main character, with the characterization that Bee-Train has always been good at. Next up is In Darkness Dwells, which is excellent for those who want action. The villains are a bit dull for those unfamiliar to the Batman universe, but at least they make the action-scenes tense, and a feast for the senses.

Studio 4°C then brings the fifth movie: Working Through Pain, which is probably the reason why this movie earned its PG-13 rating. It’s the most imaginative of the six movies, as they show how Batman deals with the concept of “pain”. The final movie is called Deadshot, which ends with a thriller. It’s the only one of the six where the main villain ends up actually interesting, and the extra bit attention to Batman’s character is also appreciated.

Overall, my personal favourites were Working Through Pain and Field Test, because they show something about the man behind the mask, and turn Gotham Knight into something beyond “just another action movie”, and they make the rest of the stories fun and interesting to watch. The movie isn’t perfect by far, and most of the villains are just one-dimensional, and uninteresting. The stories aren’t the most solid either, and sometimes they rely too much on the comic books, alienating those who haven’t read them. However, as a dark action-movie, it does deliver.

All right, one more moe-series before I’m going to dive into some of the more obscure stuff again. When Air starts, it’s typical Kyoani: there’s the sarcastic male lead without any responsibilities, there’s the shy girl without any friends, the sick girl, the smart girl, the spunky parent, lots of physical comedy is used during the lighter conversations, the females have overly large eyes, strange magical things happen, etc, etc. But damn; it’s such a sweet story.

Like Clannad, Air starts out predictably: there are three main girls, and the lead guy hops from one girl to the other and watches her story unfold, only to become something completely different with the second half. Clannad decided to drop the supernatural stuff and focus on its characters and slice of life instead, and as it turns out, Air did the complete opposite: the side-characters get dropped completely, and instead it develops into tear-jerking mystery-series. There’s one particular plot-twist that really sets this series apart from every other dating-sim adaptation, though. It involves the lead guy, but I’ll refrain from mentioning it for the sake of spoilers.

Let me just say that Air is the perfect choice if you’re looking for a sappy drama as well. I personally couldn’t stop crying in the final two episodes, even though a similar set-up in Kanon left me completely bored. Simply said: Air has been the best eroge adaptation and Kyoani-series I’ve seen, and successfully removed some of the bias I had towards both the genre and the animation studio.

Peculiar in this series is the magic system. Like Clannad, it’s never really explained properly. Things just happen and get blamed on the magic that happens to be there, and the creators just leave it to the imagination of the viewer to try and make sense of it. Somehow, it works: the things that aren’t explained aren’t of the kind that really needs to be explained, but if you like your anime to be complete, then you will end up disappointed.

Overall, I think that Air is a series that you’ll either love or hate. The final episode is also a recap, which in a way is the best place for such a thing: you can just skip it, without needing to worry about that possible two minutes at the end of it that might or might not contain new important footage, since the story already finished anyway. My only real problem lies within the first episode, I guess. The male lead sure happens to walk into and befriend the right people, but there have been so many series that made the same mistake that I’m not going to hold this against this series.

I think that my biggest beef with Kyoto Animation was that when I was seriously trying to give them a chance, despite their huge hype, it rewarded my patience with Kanon’s Makoto-arc and Lucky Star, which both bored me to tears. As it turns out, those were just the worst works of the studio (in my opinion, at least), just how every animation company has its good and bad series.

Overall, Air is more than just a story and characters. It’s got something surreal added to it that makes it special, along with a terrific cast of characters for a 12-episode series. It’s got the best male lead of any harem I’ve seen thus far, and despite the number of plot-holes, I loved watching it. It’s series like this one that show the power that 12-episoded series can have, and thinks beyond the box. The first half keeps the viewer nicely busy with random stories, only for the second half of the series to develop into something really special.

Whoa, I might as well start this review in the same way as I did with my Rocket Girls Review: I really need to be more careful on choosing which series I want to drop. When sola originally aired, I basically dumped the series after episode one, without giving much thought to it. If I recall correctly, I dropped it because the characters looked too moe. Little did I know that I was ignoring a great mystery-series.

Sola indeed starts off slow, but it’s a series that carefully builds up its storyline until its own climax. Every episode, a little bit of what’s going on is revealed to the viewers, while the rest of the airtime is filled with how the different characters live their daily lives, and are affected by this storyline. There is a lot of symbolism at the sky, and even though the graphics may not look like anything special, the soundtrack has a sort-of soothing feeling.

The end result is excellent. In the final third of this series, the whole story comes together like a charm, with a number of excellent plot-twists and a surprisingly great ending for such a series. The characters have done a pretty good job of bringing this series alive, and it’s partly thanks to them that the finale turned out so well.

There are a few problems in this series, though. When you start looking at the details, a number of small plot-holes appear that could easily have been answered. Things like, where did Mr. Goatee get such a fancy sword? How did he learn about Matsuri, and other things I can’t reveal due to spoilers. This series, however, is at its worst when it tries to be funny, because quite frankly, nine out of ten cases, it isn’t. This becomes especially apparent in one of the DVD-specials, which degenerates into a boring pool episode.

Overall, Sola is another reason why Spring 2007 was an awesome season for me. From the outside, it looked like your regular dull harem series, so I never suspected there to be anything deeper beneath it. This is just one of these reasons why I need to give everything a chance, no matter how dull the premise looks. The mystery in sola was excellent, and despite a few flaws here and there, I’m happy to have watched this series.

Vampire Knight is probably the closest you can get to a gothic anime. It’s dark-themed, lots of black, there are vampires, et cetera, et cetera. If you like your main dish to consist of angst and bishies, then look no further, because Vampire Knight has lots of it. Unfortunately, that’s also where its problems lie…

Angst can be beautiful if used well, but it can be disastrous if abused. It works best as support, or a stepping stone towards something bigger. Vampire Knight doesn’t seem to realize this, and delivers its angst with buckets at a time. The result is that nearly every episode can easily be summarized by “angst, angst, angst, bishies, angst, angst, angst, angst, et cetera”. There’s hardly anything else!

Because of this, it was indeed only a matter of time before Vampire Knights would enter the realms of cheese. It started out solid enough, but eventually, once Ichiru arrived the sinking ship was beyond rescue. Cheese can also come in good (Suteki Tantei Labyrinth, for example) and bad (the latest episodes of Code Geass come to mind as well), and the cheese here unfortunately kept edging for that nasty bad side.

I wish that there was at least something I could praise this series for, but I can’t get much further than to say that it’s been a very consistent series. For each episode, you know that there’s going to be angst and bishies, and thankfully the plot is interesting enough to have some potential for that second season that’ll arrive in October, but if you’re looking for quality entertainment, you’d better look somewhere else.

I really need to be more careful on choosing which series I want to drop. When Rocket Girls first aired, I lasted four episodes until I gave up. I mean, it was about a space-agency that plucks a random girl off the streets in order to make her an astronaut; I was sceptical from the start. I tried to give it a few chances, but the first four episodes were mostly about the female lead Yukari being the teenager that she is, and disagreeing with everything. I predicted that these training missions would take until episode 10 or something, so that the final two episodes could launch her off into space, and that didn’t seem like worth the effort to me.

Well, that’ll teach me to make baseless predictions… as it turns out, those first four episodes were just proper build-up and Yukari ended up in space in already the fifth episode. The whimsical nature of the first few episodes is only because a major theme in this series is the contrast between responsibility and irresponsibility. I’m glad I went back to this series, as it turned out to be pretty enjoyable.

With the biggest strength of course being the characters: they’re pretty nicely developed for a 12 episodes series. Yukari may be a hard character to warm up to, but once she gets past her moments of teenage angst, she really starts shining. There’s an overall good chemistry between the different members of the cast, the side-characters also have defined personalities that make them come alive.

There’s one little issue with the voice-acting, though. After the first half of this series, a third main character shows up, and her voice is way too high-pitched for her own good, which tends to break the flow of this series a bit. The rest of her character is fine, but her overly squeaky voice made her my least favourite character in this series.

The creators obviously simplified the setting a lot, when compared to real-life rocketry, in order to make it not get in the way of what’s really important in this series: the characters. It was also a solid way to not get lost in its own techno-babble. Still, they overall did a pretty good job in coming across believable. This series has a lot of similarities with Sky Girls, and if you liked one, you’ll probably like the other.

It’s strange… the more I experiment with my new series rating-system, the more annoying the old system becomes…so that’s why I’ve decided to stop using this old system. In any case, the reason why the next old anime-review this time is partly because I had other things to do, and also because Hunter x Hunter has 62 episodes. And to think that after the series, I still need to watch three OVAs that came out after it, but those are for another time.

Hunter x Hunter starts out as a classic shounen-series. It takes a group of people with special powers (Bleach has shinigamis, Naruto has ninjas, Hunter x Hunter has… hunters), gives them a number of different powers and specializations, creates a number of large organizations and picks a generic young male to be the main character. Of course, with such a huge amount of episodes, I was redundant to check out this series, but ten episodes in, and I was hooked. This is everything a shounen-series should be.

Hunter x Hunter is basically divided into two halves, with an incredible difference between them. The first half feels like a huge game, where Gon (the main character) and his friends need to overcome a number of challenges in order to become hunters. It’s a standard shounen-plot, but its charms come from the cast of characters. It’s so much fun to watch not only the main characters, but also the side-ones as they try to become one of the hunters, and on top of that, the main villain stands miles above his counterparts in series as Naruto, Dragonball Z and Bleach.

This series only really sets itself apart from the rest of the genre with its second half, though. It starts out pretty bad, admittedly. The Zoaldyeck-arc is pretty much the worst arc of the entire series, only to be followed by yet another dull training-arc, but afterwards the series slowly unfolds into a story about the mafia, that for once isn’t about destroying/ruling the world. It’s here were Hunter x Hunter introduces real jobs, such as being a body-guard, and interesting ways for hunters to make money.

The problem with lengthy shounen (at least the ones I’ve seen), is that they get duller and duller as they go on, usually thanks to some kind of training-arc where the creators abuse their powers a bit too much in order to god-mode their main character beyond the point of believability. Gon indeed gets powered up a bit too much, but what I like about this series is that he still is nowhere near the power of the strong guys. Heck, even the main villains aren’t the strongest characters in this series. The creators also make use of the fact that Gon is just a child: it unconsciously lets his enemies spare his life, instead of killing him.

One major annoyance with this series (apart from the training arcs, that is), is that during the times of building-up, it’s got the “everyone who isn’t strong is an idiot”-mentality. Whenever Gon is facing weaker enemies than himself, they’re always portrayed as cocky idiots without any brains or tactical knowledge, and things like a one-in-ten-million talent are pulled out of the creators’ sleeve in an attempt to explain his superiority. Thankfully, there are enough characters with depth to them. Especially Kurapica is someone to watch out for, because the character-development he goes through is truly memorable.

Also, this series has avoided one more subtle pitfall of shounen-series: wounded characters remain hurt, and don’t get magically healed in the next episode. When characters get punched in the face, it remains swollen until it gets a logical reason to heal. The overall animation isn’t anything special, but I really appreciate details like that one. The soundtrack is also really effective for a shounen-series.

Overall, in terms of seriousness, Hunter x Hunter is definitely my favourite shounen-fighting-series. Overall, it still doesn’t match up to the humour and fights of the Law of Ueki, but it easily takes second place. The thing that worked against it the most was its main character: Gon. He does have a number of really memorable moments, but the creators waste way too much time in trying to make his power catch up to the strong people, and he often takes away the screen-time of the much more interesting characters. It’s a thing that unfortunately every series of its kind has. The rest of the cast is rock-solid, though, and especially the second and final quarter of the series deliver. I’m curious whether the three OVAs that came out afterwards will keep this same quality, or fall horribly like nearly every other show of its kind.