Hello everyone, there are only eight blogs left in the Aniblog Tourney, and we made the Quarter Finals. Caraniel’s Ramblings is up next, be sure to check it out before voting.
You can vote here: http://aniblogtourney.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/quarter-finals/
Back in 2006, Kenji Nakamura surprised probably everyone with his three episode masterpiece that was Bake Neko, part of the Ayakashi-television series. It was trippy intense and brilliaantly written and built up, Together with Kenichi Kasai’s adaptations, it defined and popularized Noitamina and brought it to a mainstream audience. Ever since, Kenji Nakamura has been releasing a new series every now and then, with 2012’s installment being Tsuritama, at which he completely diverges from the types of shows he normally does.
I loved all of his previous works, but they collectively all had one downside: the characters. Relatively little time was spent on fleshing them out, and most of them were pretty one-sided and didn’t really come to life. Tsuritama is entirely dedicated to attempt to do this correctly, and it works. The plot is simple on purpose exactly to allow the characters to play themselves out naturally. There are relatively few action-packed climaxes in this series, but all of them have clear meaning and kick ass and ultimately make it a really fun show to watch.
And even though this series takes it easy in terms of pacing, it definitely doesn’t take it easy in terms of the ideas it has. This series really thrives on originality: it may have a teenaged cast, but within that it has many fresh ideas, like an alien with a watergun, a duck named Tapioca, or how about an entire series dedicated to fishing? Especially in the second half of the series the scenarios get particularly creative.
A downside is that this series does take a while to get going. The first half of this series contains a lot of build-up and is pretty much fishing 101 as it drills the necessary fishing skills into the main charachter in order for him to function properly in the second half of the series. While this can get a bit boring at times, I can’t deny that this series has a really well written structure: it knows exactly how much story it should have to not get rushed, it knows how much time to spend building up an make its characters feel alive, while stil having enough time to actually deliver on the fun and action-packed bits. Noitamina-series are infamous for their pacing issues, but Tsuritama is a series that gets the balance and format just right.
| Storytelling: | 8.5/10 – Fun to watch and a greatly paced out structure and a creative scenario. |
| Characters: | 8.5/10 – The series is fun because the characters are fleshed out well and get to play themselves out naturally. |
| Production-Values: | 8/10 – Not as trippy as you’d expect from Kenji Nakamura, but still has a unique and colourful look and wild animation where it matters. |
| Setting: | 8.5/10 – Really tries to be original amidst all of the teenaged series that try to see who can rip each other off the most. |
Suggestions:
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The animation of this episode was slightly rushed, towards the end some distorted faces popped up. But still, this really was fun. Perhaps not as fun as the build-up that preceded it, but this definitely was a worthy way to end this series.
Really, this season is full of interesting endings (not counting the ones that cut off for another season). There is a lot of refreshing stuff amongst them that tries to do things differently from the norm. The best examples of this were Fate/Zero and Lupin, but Tsuritama also had a great climax that was full of emotion, yet avoided hammy drama completely. The big bad guy turned out to be completely different from the evil overlords you usually see. We already knew that he was of Haru’s kind, but for it to be such a fidgety guy is completely different from what I expected.
The epilogue was great too, but I have one problem with that one. This is a series that thrived on originality, and yet one cliche slipped through: the one where a lot of drama is created around the characters saying goodbye to each other. The characters had a great time together, but now it’s time for everyone to move on and go their own ways and… wait never mind! They just return as random transfer students!
Overall, Tsuritama was Kenji Nakamura doing something completely different, and succeeding at it. I wouldn’t sy that it was his best work: Bake Neko still stands out as his masterpiece, and I’d also consider Mononoke to be more interesting. And ultimately C’s ending was more interesting because of how well things came together. Despite all that though, it definitely trumped all of those series in terms of characterization and fun: the character in Tsuritama really felt alive and the plot feels complete and not rushed at all.
Rating: *+ (Great)
As the spring season approached, it seemed clear what would be the series with the most interesting staff working behind it: Sakamichi no Apollon, the director of Cowboy Bebop coming back after many years of absence to work with some of Madhouse’s top animators and the always lovely music from Yoko Kanno. And then a new Lupin series got announced.
Seriously, the people involved in this project: it’s directed by Sayo Yamamoto, who directed Michiko e Hatchin, the scriptwriting powerhouse of the recent years Mari Okada wrote the series composition, Shinichiro Watanabe (the same director of Cowboy Bebop) did the music production, Takeshi Koike is behind the character-designs, and on top of them there are some episodes written by Dai Sato (the guy who wrote Ergo Proxy and Eureka Seven) and Junji Nishimura, the director of Simoun. All of these people are responsible for masterpieces, and here they were stuffed into one single project. The result is a breath of fresh air.
Now, I do have to admit one thing:: the influence of all of them is clearly visible, but don’t expect any of them to surpass themselves here. Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna is far from as good as the series that these people became known for. When you set the standard lower and compare it to the series that have come out in the recent years though, it really stands out as something unique that anime definitely needed.
This series just oozes style from beginning to end. The character-designs are just gorgeous and every episode is just chock full of inspired images and artwork that go completely against the trend of current anime. There is a TON of nudity in this series, but the fanservice is completely different from the juvenile fanservice you see in all the other shows these days.
This series is really focused on adventures, just like the Lupin series it’s based on. This time though, the one who stands in the center is Mine Fujiko. The episodes are all varied and very different from each other, and they all are chock full of references and homages to other works of fiction that use often-used female character tropes, which it then proceeds to subvert completely. Seriously, the huge amounts of boob in this series may not make it so apparent, but Mine Fujiko is a very strong and independent character.
Beyond this, this series is also a whole lot of fun to watch: there are some episodes that have great chase scenes, others have great action scenes, yet others are much more focused on well written dialogues and yet again others thrive on using weird plot twists. It’s a really well made series.
There are a few things that do hold this series back though. First of all there are the character-designs in this series: they look gorgeous and really detailed. But they also are really hard to animate consistently, and yet, the creators definitely try to animate as much as they can. The result is unfortunately a lot of jerky movements and facial movements that just look off or strange.
The second is that this series has little character-development, but that’s just a minor issue. The creativity that went into the characters and their re-imaginations, complete with how they play off each other more than makes up for this. This is why I love remakes for anime: a lot of them are really made by fans of the franchise who don’t care about trying to recreate them as accurately as possible, but want to give their own spin to them, and Mine Fujiko to u Onna is no different. the more I write about this series, the more complete it starts to feel, and that’s a sign of a really good series.
| Storytelling: | 8.5/10 – Loads of variety and a bunch of great scripts that come together really well. |
| Characters: | 8.5/10 – The characters are used really well and play off each other wonderfully. This excuses the sometimes jerky acting more than enough. |
| Production-Values: | 9/10 – Very artistic and unique. The art is where this series set itself apart among the many shows with gorgeous graphics this season. |
| Setting: | 8.5/10 – Where this series rocks is how there is so much to be read in between the lines. It’s a homage and a parody at the same time, and it references a wide variety of different works and uses this really well. |
Suggestions:
– Michiko e Hatchin
– Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin
– Ultraviolet: Code 044
So, what did Lupin decide to end with? With an exposition episode. I really expected an epic action-packed episode instead, but this works too, even though it’s a kind of ending that’s very easy to screw up by rushing through things way too much, or turning the story into something completely different.
This episode was slightly rushed, and it actually was completely different from the rest of the series, but it worked. I like the balls of the creators to go with an anti-climax like this: throughout the enitre series we’ve seen it established over and over again that Mine Fujiko was abused and raped as a childBut no, she was just brainwashed at some point and she had always been a thief like she is now. It’s awesome to see that the creators had the balls to go with such a creative ending, rather than going with the most obvious type of ending and I really appreciate this creativity.
So in the end, we still know very little about who Mine Fujiko really is, but she doesn’t have a ham-handed backstory that screams “pity me!”, and instead we’ve got a main villain with one heck of a messed up backstory. The ending was pretty much a “life goes on”-ending with Mine Fujiko getting revenge on the girl that kept her brainwashed for years, her mother is left behind in her own castle without her daughter, Oscar disappeared, and everyone else pretty much ends up doing what they’ve been doing all along. Normally I’m not too fond of these types of endings, but here they strangely fit: Lupin is a series about adventures, and this series was just a small sample of the places that these people go to. Best ending of the season so far? I’d say so.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
What I find to be strange is that the creators go out of their way to mention the 20 rules of mystery, only to ignore a few of them, most notably the rules that state that there should be one and only one detective. For the finished product, one of the characters had to step up and take the role as detective, or perhaps the seventh person that the writer was looking for was supposed to have been that person.
Apart from that I guess Oreki’s theory fits most of the rules if you very broadly interpret them. In particular there is Knox’s first rule which says that the culprit should be mentioned in an early part of the story. Yeah, I guess that he was “mentioned” by being there through the entire course of the movie: it’s a different medium than what these rules were intended for after all. Or take the rule that says that the culprit must have played a more or less prominent part in the story: again, he has, you just didn’t realize it. There is one rule I’m a bit iffy about though: the one that says that no willful tricks may be played upon the reader. Did Oreki assume that the usage of a cameraman as an actual character wasn’t so much a trick, as it was something that is just a part of the movie?
Still, it’s pretty interesting to think that he did get things wrong. With the Hyouka mystery he only missed a few parts, but this rope is a pretty big thing to miss out on. The acting was also really well done at that moment where Mayaka called Hotarou out on this, and we definitely got to see some new sides of the characters.
Rating: *+ (Great)
I really appreciate that there are still series out there that are able to devote an episode to a single thought experiment. This episode may not have been the most eventful, but it was clever. Really clever. It took the issue of a famous TV-anchor complaining about the tax that space flight has on the economy, and created a different response for like what? 6 different characters? All of those were insightful in their own way, apart from the theory from the nervous guy perhaps. This series keeps finding new brilliant ways to use its newly huge cast.
This show doesn’t just have one smart character, it really has a bunch of them and I really like how this series is able to show the talents of all of them, especially in Mutta’s group. Mutta is the oddball who is able to think outside of the box, Serika and Nitta are the best performers in concrete tests, while the other two whose names I’ve forgotten play as the voice of reason… in completely different ways. I do wonder why the nervous guy made it all the way through the selection process: what made the quirky director take interest in him?
A few weeks ago I mentioned that this series was like a shounen series without the shounen with it having the characters carry out various assignments. This episode pushed that even further and the creators found far more interesting things for the characters to do. For that Rubix guy’s response they even did research for English philosophers on the matter.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Sometimes, a show comes along that has the best of intentions… but just seems to miss the boat by a few inches. Jormungand is scheduled for 24 episodes, this first season covering 12 of them and this seems to be enough time to cover its entire story about weapon dealers who travel all over the world. This should have been an awesome series, but instead this season had more than a dozen better series. So what happened?
Well first of all this season is awesome, that’s definitely a matter of bad timing for Jormungand, but even then there is a reason why it failed to stand out. I’ve seen quite a few comparisons between this series and Black Lagoon, but that’s not quite right. Black Lagoon had a cast of widely varied and colourful characters. Jormungand wants to have a cast of colourful characters, but gets a few things wrong.
The series definitely knows its basics: every episode is dedicated to give background and a story to at least one member of the cast. These backstories and developments are definitely interesting. It also fleshes a bunch of them out quite well, most notably Jonah. The problem though, is that it doesn’t do this with every character.
Now, that on its own isn’t a bad thing: the trick with a series that has a huge cast is to make every character feel unique and part of the story. And that’s where Jormungand falls down, especially with its villains. There is no big villain in this series: every arc has its own antagonists, and they’re all pretty much carbon copies of each other. The creators keep recycling two or three archetypes over and over again: the loud-mouthed complaining boss, the ditzy and spunky female sidekick and the silent soldier. After seeing the protagonists easily beat these characters over and over again with seemingly no effort, things get a bit boring. This series also really likes snarky characters, up to the point at which just about every bloody characters is snarky to some extent.
And that is a shame because a series with this concept is destined for greatness. The places that the characters visit are unique and beyond any cliches, and it really toys with the themes of weapon dealing and morality in a fresh way. And there are definitely interesting characters, but they’re just overshadowed by the unremarkable ones. But here is the thing though: it still has plenty of potential for its second season. It laid out more than enough build-up for that. The second season will have to put in much more emphasis on getting better villains, but there are plenty of hints that it will. There is plenty of interesting stuff in this first season, it just gets held back a bit. Remove that and who knows what you’ll get?
| Storytelling: | 8/10 – Fun action scenes and good pacing. Battles are too easy sometimes. |
| Characters: | 7/10 – There are way too many similar characters and archetypes throughout the series. The few good characters don’t manage to save this series from being dragged down by this. |
| Production-Values: | 8/10 – Funky soundtrack, its own visual identity and nice animation. |
| Setting: | 9/10 – The most interesting part of this series, with still a ton of potential left for the second season. |
Suggestions:
– Madlax
– Black Lagoon
– Mobile Police Patlabor
I remember that it was often a pain to sit through the first season of Kimi to Boku. Chizuru, the blond haired kid especially got on my nerves many times. The thing is however, that despite that, it did know how to build up and create good characters. And that’s the nice thing of second seasons: you’ve already done the introductions and fleshing out so you can fully focus on the good stuff.
As a result, Kimi to Boku’s second season is a lot more bearable. Chizuru definitely develops his own charm and the chemistry between the characters only gets better and better. Every episode takes one of the characters, whether this is a main or a side one, and does something clever with him or her. There’s a lot of character-development to be found in this series.
Another big difference is that the focus on drama is much greater, and by that I mean that the creators take up much more time in order to let the serious scenes play out as smoothly as possible. The result is very atmospheric. The first season had most episodes structured where most of their airtime would be random goofing-off, with some sort of redeemable twist at the end. The second season is more really slow development with you at the end realizing how much has actually been added to the characters.
You obviously need a bit of a thick skin for Kimi to Boku, because Chizuru can and will get on your nerves, but beyond that this is just an excellent drama with loads of interesting characters. The second season can be a bit slow at times, but heck: it’s been a while since a slice of life series came around that was this good with a predominantly male cast.
| Storytelling: | 8,5/10 – Great atmosphere, and loves to take its time to let events play out well. |
| Characters: | 9/10 – Tons of subtle character development. |
| Production-Values: | 8/10 – Solid animation: nothing special, but no abuse of still frames either. |
| Setting: | 8/10 – A typical high school that for once doesn’t feel over-exaggerated. |
Suggestions:
This episode thankfully wasn’t as bad as the previous episodes, and instead it was just a build-up. Unfortunately though, it showed a lot about the structure of this series and how much time it has actually wasted. But before I comment on that: we finally see Rook again… only to have him state the obvious and disappear again. Great use of him, guys!
Now, about this episode: it actually went back to the brainwashing again. Even though this disappeared for nearly half a season, here it is back like nothing happened. So yes, this series will turn Kaito’s friends against him. So really? What were those previous episodes about anyway? A random repetitive tournament that revealed the motivation of the Orpheus Order and a random beach episode. None of them really said anything about any of the characters, save for that very corny backstory and returning Nonoha back to the kitchen. They did absolutely nothing with the theme of brainwashing people
If these episodes were mentioned to flesh out the characters, then they pretty much failed because none of the characters emerged as better from those episodes and some of them even regressed and became more generic. Only this episode finally tried to delve deeper into the characters, even though it had plenty of annoying moments with everyone and his dog running for president. You could have made so much better use of these episodes. Take control of a few more side-characters; continue trying to recruit Gammon again by using his sister or something. Give Nonoha a puzzle she can actually solve. There was so much potential for these episodes. You obviously don’t care about having a puzzle in every episode so you could have taken one episode off to dedicate to the past of one of the characters.
I think it’s pretty clear by now: the first season was completely planned out when Sunrise suddenly came with the announcement for a second season. And my guess really is that the script was rushed in order to get the second season to continue immediately after the first season. Sunrise has very solid planners, so keeping the animation quality up was no problem. But thinking of a completely new series with complete new threats was way too much. This is especially the case considering that Sato Junichi switched from the director to the series composition: it’s very likely that he wrote this second season while directing the remaining episodes of the first season. That’s the only explanation I can think of for such a shoddy writing-job from his side, because there are just too many things wrong with that string of six episodes.
Rating: (Enjoyable)