Hey everyone, we’re back with another podcast. This time it’s about a director (Seiji Kishi), a writer (Mari Okada) and an animation studio (Bones). It’s about an hour length in total, and in it are Deadlights, Juno, Slashe (Nihon Review) and Mr. Flawfinder (Standing On My Neck). Enjoy, for those of you who are interested.
http://deadlightanime.blogspot.nl/2013/08/seasonal-anime-podcast-episode-3.html
This string of episodes was just amazing. Really, I’ve heard that for an epic series, Shingeki no Kyojin has a simplistic story, and that is indeed true. However, this series is a master at emotions. Its aim is not to deliver the most complex storyline, but instead it’s here to deliver epic action scenes, and that’s something that was elevated to an artform here.
This just was complete despair. Episode 16 was all about everyone accepting the fact that they were all going to lay their lives in front of Eren. The two episodes featured this massive slaughter that had just about everyone run for their lives, with only some people escaping through some sort of miracle. That’s something that I have very rarely seen done better.
Oh, and tactics. Military bloody tactics. When was the last time that these were done so well? When was the last time at which you actually had an entire grasp of how big the army in question was? What the positions looked like? How the formations change depending on the situations? How well this was translated over to the animation screen? I mean, that was just brilliant. I remember how the small armies in Sengoku Basara, Guin Saga, and even Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto were just lumped together as “one army”. Here, every squadron counts. Every position has meaning and affects what happens throughout these two episodes.
Also I still love the kinds of series that downplay their main characters. Eren again had nothing to do in this episode and thus we get to see much of the side-characters who could show their characters off. And really: the main cast remains the main cast: there are people with huge talents in this series, but they are all downplayed: Eren has huge powers, but they’re incredibly random. Armin is really smart, but he’s really weak. Mikasa is very nimble, but she often isn’t at the right time at the right place, and that commander guy is also very nimble, but a total asshole who left his subordinates in total darkness about his plans, nearly killing them. It’s amazing how well this all balanced out.
Rating: 6,5/8 (Amazing)
The thing with the writing of this series is that it’s sloppy: it simplifies some things for the sake of telling its story, and it makes most of its characters simple-minded for that purpose as well. Overall it makes sense, but it needs some idiocy to make everything fit, not to mention that it hops from one scene to the other really fast.
With these three episodes though, I’m starting to see what this show is trying to do.Old superhero series were characterized by the fact that the main character usually is the one who does all the work. He’s aided by his side characters, who sometimes get to stand in the spotlights, but when you look at the random passers-by: all they do is run away. They’re just cardboard cut-outs in the backgrounds, not doing anything at all and having no other significance than showing that the city that’s getting destroyed is not a ghost town. Gatchaman plays with this really well.
Whenever there’s an accident, people react to it. They cooperate in order to solve their problems and become a bit of a hero. Gatchaman is a decidedly modern series that really touches upon relatively modern themes, and shows like it are really rare. The last show that did it as well was Eden of the East, I believe.
Social media is a really big theme in this series: it’s how we’re all connected, and how we’re all trying to be the center of the world, and all trying to be heroes. We want to feel part of this whole important network that connects millions, and play as the hero. And yet, this series does not forget the “social” part of social media: everyone is cooperating. Everyone with similar purposes is connected so much more easily.
The strange thing is that the most interesting part of the show only has to do with the main characters because of the main female lead. The other members there hardly use social media. I mean the lead female was built up to be the new girl and all, but in a sense, the other Gatchamen are also new here.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)
What an unbelievably charming episode!
I mean, I’m stumped here. The premise of this episode: “the cast makes pizza”. This should have been an average filler episode. And yet, somehow the creators did it: they took every single characters, grabbed their talents, and combined all of that into a delicious pizza. Hachiken set everything up, but beyond that he got so much help from everyone, ranging from a teacher who illegally stashes a bunch of cheese in a school building to a classmate who deals in vegetables. And of course getting his own pig named and slaughtered.
On top of that, these pizzas were really made out of organic ingredients. The cast just had this challenge set to them, and overcame it while fleshing out just about every character and remaining incredibly fun to watch. Yeah this was written by a very talented writer who really has mastered emotions in her delivery. And at the same time, this series never gets preachy: it’s got a lot of organic food, but it doesn’t sugarcoat things either, as shown by that Kentucky Fried Chicken reference. Also, Gouda cheese, the first time I’ve seen Dutch food in anime (Gouda is a city in the Netherlands, famous for its cheese; don’t go there on a holiday though because nowadays it sucks).
Also kudos to the animation for how it brought all of the side characters alive. Their enthusiasm for the pizza really rubbed off. Hmm, I want to eat pizza now too… Damn you Silver Spoon!
Rating: 6/8 (Awesome)
“Vegeta, what does the scouter say about his power level?”
Okay, so I just caught up to Hunter X Hunter, episode 91. Overall at this point when I’m behind on so many series, it just isn’t practical to do monthly summaries anymore. That would be way too confusing and I’ll only do them again when I’m reasonably up to date with everything. However, I do have an opinion of this series that I want to voice, because this show still continues to work my patience. This frustration was at its highest at episode 90, and thankfully episode 91 made it a bit less.
But yeah, let’s get a bit into my state while I was watching episode ninety. Do you remember Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, and how the pacing slowed down at the point where the series started to go into the material that was not in the first series? Well, Hunter X Hunter did that too. Yeah.
The difference obviously was that Full Metal Alchemist started with a really fast pacing, while Hunter X Hunter has always taken its time. Sure, it was a bit quicker than the 1999 version, but even then it took a year and a bloody half to catch up. The result is that ridiculously long fight between Gon and Knuckle that went on for waaay too long.
And sure, I like the Chimera ant arc. Emphasis on Chimera ants. I like how they’re growing, expanding and changing, and how they’re coping with the people who come and threaten them and how that plays out. I’ve gotten really tired of watching yet another training arc for Gon and Killua. I mean for god’s sake, how much more can you go with that? “What is this, Dragonball Z?”
Well, that comparison turned to be way more accurate than what I could have hoped with that turn that Gon and Knuckle’s fight took when they started talking about power levels. Power levels! Afterwards they started fighting exactly like what they do in small battles in Dragonball Z: they stand while their arms become a bunch of speedlines. It got even worse when in the next episode the king turned out to be a goddamn cell clone.
Seriously, if it wasn’t for episode 91, I would have probably given up. I mean I like building up and all, but you need to be interesting while doing that. You don’t need to be so shounen-esque as a shounen series. It was this series that showed us that in the first place. Just send Gon and Killua on a bus for an arc, just like what you did with Kurapika or something. Thankfully though, the fight was not dragged out any longer, and instead we got a satisfying conclusion that focused more on the aftermath. That was great, especially if that means that the two of them are going to be out of the picture for a while now.
I am noticing a very nasty trend though. So far, the new episodes have been like this: we first have this string of episodes that aren’t really anything special and dabble along, followed by one awesome episode, followed again by a bunch of boring ones. I don’t know whether I want to continue watching if that pattern continues. The big difference between this series and Space Brothers is that while both series are slow, Space Brothers remembers to be charming and endearing in every single episode, even though it takes bloody ages to get somewhere. I don’t have that with Hunter X Hunter.
I’m still amazed at how drenched this series is in culture. This show goes into so much more detail than anything else about the world of Tanuki, Tengu and other mystical beings. The creators really did their research, and it shows: it’s really rare for a series to feel this authentic. I don’t know enough to know how much this show made up and how much of it is taken from japanese folklore, but even then: in both ways the culture in this series just sparkles with life.
And still this show is diverse. The plot is coming together, but still every episode manages to be different, and highlight a different part of the lives and traditions of the characters. I loved the idea of having a sake-powered flying house, and Benten also turned into quite the character. On one hand, she ATE the father of the main character. On the other hand, she acts like it’s the most natural thing in the world and has fallen in love with him.
This series sure loves its contradictions. It’s especially a big part of episode five, which showed a posh club of spiritual leaders debate whether the tradition of eating tanuki is really worth it, put next to this one guy who loves tanuki so much that he also loves to eat them. It’s really bizarre to look at tanuki this way when they are portrayed in this really weird cross between human and animal. That’s also what I love: no tanuki or tengu really lost that animal side: nobody here feels 100% human. Sometimes it’s more apparent than others, but Yasaburo (I hope that that was his name) hiding for so long was so wonderfully characteristic of an animal that feels threatened.
The acting in this show overall is really good. Characters all have their quirks, yet they are more than just that. Everyone has multiple sides, and the lines they deliver are brought convincingly. This show also knows perfectly fine when it needs to be dramatic, and when it just needs to let things play out casually. You can really see that this was written by a brilliant writer.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)
I really want to apologize for the lack of updates. I’m currently trying to catch up on Uchoten Kazoku’s episodes. I should have an episode review of them ready tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d like to talk about what it means to be blogging, and the moment that every single blogger dreads: the lack of updates. This is a very personal entry, but I hope that it helps both myself and others who are in similar situations. For those of you with a tl;dr mindset: I have no intention to quit blogging; I still really like tihs blog, and nothing about that has changed.
In my nearly eight years of blogging, I have seen a lot of blogs coming and going. In general, the short-lived blogs quit because the author loses interest: it’s a nice little experiment, but either a loss of enthusiasm for anime itself, or the inability to just blog regularly is usually the reason for these blogs to close down. For the longer-lived blogs, the reason usually is that people grow out of anime; they change and the priorities in their lives. I’ve also seen a handful who come back after a hiatus of a few years, but that usually just ends with a few posts.
As for me, I still identify as a blogger. It’s true that we just had the worst Spring Season in the past ten years, and a pretty abysmal Winter Season as well, but I really noticed that that didn’t diminish my love for anime. There were plenty of series that still captured me, ranging from Aku no Hana, Shingeki no Kyojin to From the New World and Chihayafuru. And the current Summer Season is really showing that Anime is far from dead. Series like Uchoten Kazoku, Tamayura, the new Rozen Maiden: I already love them and I really want to cover them.
So yeah, the problem is where to find the time to blog everything. I’ve said before that I’ve been very busy, both with my full time job, and that I’ve got a much bigger social life than what I used to have now. I always was a bit vague on what that actually meant, so let me elaborate a bit on my schedule.
I actually just started my new job last week. It’s a job of 36 hours per week. Mondays through thursday I work eight hours, and on fridays I work half a day. On fridays and during weekends, I usually have some sort of appointment with some friends of mine, or attend some public events that I know that people with similar mindsets attend as well. On weekdays I’m usually at home around 6pm, and done with dinner around 7pm, ideally.
The thing is, that it’s not like I don’t have the time to blog anymore. I know for a fact that if I use my time well, even with all my appointments, I can blog 12 shows per week and even have time for a movie. It’s also not like I don’t have the energy for it. I know from experience that I can get energized while watching a good episode. This season is full of those series! The problem is that I spend way too much of my time on the internet, browsing pointless videos that serve no point whatsoever. I’d say about 20% of it is useful: checking mail, keeping up with friends, that kind of stuff. However most of it is just random goofing off; spending way too much time on facebook, or watching stupid Let’s plays on youtube.
Let me get on a bit of a tangent here, because I also dabbled in a bunch of western games during the past half year. This is sortof relevant to this post, because I noticed that playing these games only increased my laziness in the long run. The thing is though, that gaming nowadays sucks for me. And it’s not like I picked bad ones. I’m talking about games like Minecraft, Civilization, the Binding of Isaac. Games that sound good and full of depth on paper, and I used to be a fan of civilization in the past, but every single one of them gets bogged down by repetition. Minecraft had me mining the same rock for hours after each other. Civilization starts off interesting, until you have to do the same tasks over and over again and games take waaaay too long, and the Binding of Isaac also isn’t really random once you realize that all you’re doing is running through a bunch of rooms and shooting things. It’s also a problem that I’m not good at gaming, so it takes me even longer than the people
Another example of this: platformers. I recently played Rayman Legends, after being a big fan of the first two Rayman series. But there too, the levels just kept looking way too much like each other and halfway through the level designers just give up and start to recycle previous levels. This is the same repetition I see at all kinds of other platform games: everything is just way too similar after playing a bunch of levels. There is way too much repetition and way too little creativity. Even Skyrim got tedious after killing the umpth zombie.
NB: as a honorable mention, these are western games that I do consider to be good:
– Portal: It’s short, witty and keeps you interested; the hype is very annoying, but this is what games should aim to be. And I mean the philosophy of variation, not just literally paste Glados in every game. That totally misses the point.
– Temple of Elemental Evil: a western RPG, half broken without a fan-made patch and a bare-bones story. However, what I loved is what you could completely customize your own set of characters and most importantly: you are encouraged to make these characters flawed and incredibly diverse, making it ridiculously fun to do all sorts of creative things with them, and watch them grow. The only downside: the more characters you have in your party, the less experience you get, the more you need to grind. Grinding is evil!
– Beyond Good and Evil: short game, divided into four arcs. Every arc is different and focuses on a different element of gameplay and has a different atmosphere.
Anyway, repetition. It can be incredibly evil. It can trap you in this routine that you can’t escape from. The more you get used to it, the more you keep looking for options that offer easy kinds of repetition. However, there are enough examples of good repetition. This is the type of repetition that is fulfilling. Think about getting out of bed at the same time each day, doing exercises on a regular basis, spending time on your hobby (in my case blogging). The annoying part is that the evil repetition easily has power over your will and motivation to focus on the good repetition, and once you lose that focus on the good repetition, getting back is impossible unless you put in effort.
You can’t just say “I’m going to do better”. That won’t work, you’ll usually succumb to the evil repetitions usually within seconds. You need to completely change your mindset, and actually DO it, not just talk about it. Acknowledging the problem doesn’t work, while wasting time on the internet I see way too many people just joke about it, without offering any practical hints of how to get over it (9gag is by far the worst offender of this, and everyone should actively block that evil website).
So I was wondering what you guys do in order to get out of a slump? For me, I noticed that with other parts of my life, the concept of fear or impending doom was a good motivator, and at this point in my life I have learned how to turn fear into positive emotions. I haven’t learned how to create it and make use of that, though. Go ahead and share some of your experiences.
Thank god I finally managed to catch up to this series. And don’t get me wrong, Space Brothers is awesome, but it’s also so intimidating to fully watch through. I remember that a few years ago, when the average series length started to change from 26 episodes to 13, that I lauded the series that went on really long. At this point, I see that things just are not so simple: ideally, series should go on for like 26 or 39 episodes (on average, there are always exceptions): that way they aren’t cut off early, they’ve got their time to build up their story, but they are also forced to be concise. As much as I love Space Brothers, it drags. A lot.
These episodes comprise two arcs: the first one focuses on Sharon, the second focuses on flight training. Sharon’s arc was really good here. I nearly got a bit teary-eyed when Serika brought the bad news to her, that she really should see a doctor. In terms of character-develooment, these episodes added so much to Sharon’s character.
The pilot training, I get why it’s important, but I also feel like it’s reusing a lot of things from previous arcs. It was nice to see this one character who appeared months ago to reappear again, but this is the second time that Mutta ends up with an instructor that everybody finds weird but is actually secretly brilliant. It’s again some sort of astronaut training.
Don’t get me wrong, these episodes raised plenty of good points. I mean the past number of episodes showed the first real hints of why Mutta will set himself apart. First of all he now has the motivation with Sharon, plus he also has the instructor who can bring him to the top. I also like that it criticized the ranking system for astronauts due to the arbitrary assignment of teachers, and it did give some insight about flying a jet and all. Overall the episode just was not THAT interesting to watch. Build-up is awesome, but you do need to keep in your audience’s attention.
Rating: 4,5/8 (Good)
I love how different this series turned out to be from the original Rozen Maiden! It still has the same characters, but the atmosphere, the execution, and the themes are completely different here. That’s what a good sequel should be: avoid the tried and true and go into its own direction! It also really helps that this direction is much more mature now.
These past two episodes: they’re really well detailed! Heck, over the span of three episodes we’ve just seen one doll, and even she appeared at just the end of the third episode. In the meantime we get a full look into the life of the grown-up Jun, and into his mind. Because of this we can really see how meeting with Shinu is subtly changing him. There’s enough tension between his job, and taking care of Shinku as well, not to mention how Shinku said at the end of episode four that this can only last for seven days. The whole interplay between young and old Jun is also very good.
What’s also different: there is quite a bit of symbolism added in the narration, ranging from that kid’s story that always pops up in the middle, to various visual symbols when characters are explaining things. The question now is what will happen next: they’re obviously building up to something. Will they be able to use this build-up?
Rating: 5/8 (Great)
Seriously. This is one of the cutest anime that I have seen in a long, long while. I mean, over these entire two episodes, I just kept going “d’awwwwww” at just about everything the characters did. That is very rare for me: usually I hate series that aim to be cute. The big reason for that is that 90% of those characters are not characters: they’re either cardboard cut-outs, they try to play up their cuteness too much, plain stupid, contrived, and just plain underdeveloped. Tamayura has something that makes the entire cast different from that.
What Potte is trying to do: that really invoked empathy from me. Perhaps my own shyness connected with her, or perhaps it was because of how much development she already has. These two episodes really were about overcoming shyness, and they really did that well. Even beyond Potte, that one teacher was a very nice touch, about how it took him like, 20 tries to ask what he wanted. And the whole performance. It was so bad, yet so adorable!
The new character already feels right at home after four episodes, and the great thing is that she doesn’t feel forced in, but it was more than logical for her to appear. The rest of the cast, Potte’s friends, they’re close to her and all, but most of them don’t share her passion for photographing,and the ones that do are either much older or younger. Here she managed to find someone of her own age and experiences to connect with.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)