It’s halfway through the season and people are already starting to look to the next one…and I’m still finishing my First Impressions for spring. Heh. The final two candidates for my ever-growing watch list are Real Drive and Toshokan Sensou.
*Cough*
In other news I’m thinking about changing my blog’s theme to revitalise my enthusiasm…Frozen Twilight 1.0 is beginning to look a bit drab.
I’ve been trying to come up with a reason for finding this show so addictive - is it because Kotoko shares the same VA talent as two of my other favourite female leads, Darker than Black’s Kirihara and Tokyo Marble Chocolate’s Chizuru? Possibly. In all honesty though, everything about Kotoko’s character is funny and engaging - her good-natured persistence is simultaneously foolish in the extreme or thoroughly deserving of respect, depending on your point of view on such things. Personally I have to concede that she’s doing really well in the face of adversity, not to mention a guy who doesn’t deserve her devotion or admiration.
It’s like Gainax, without the bounce
Swap the genders round and you have not a shoujo romcom but a shounen romcom sans the fanservice - imagine Kotoko as a clumsy guy who does badly at school and Naoki as an attractive but cold-hearted female genius…and congratulate yourself on thinking along the same lines as Ken Akamatsu. I mean, from that standpoint Itazura na Kiss is a bathing scene away from being Love Hina; it’s still superficially a stablemate to Kare Kano because of the setting and vintage, but the latter has much more drama and angst. Maybe this sort of series was popular back in the mid-90s because I’m loving InK for that old-school aesthetic that KK shares.
My thoughts on Mnemosyne are now a mixture of embarrassment and disappointment - I feel duped into thinking that it was going to be anything special and frustrated that it has yet to realise what potential I thought it had. The trouble with this show is that what can make for a great opening episode is not necessarily good enough to sustain a full series - a real bummer after giving it such an enthusiastic welcome.
A day at the office…you have to admit that ‘The Heavy Drinking Shoujo-ai Detective Agency’ sounds like win
The gratuitous sex and violence, coupled with hints to a back-story that are not followed up or explained, aren’t unexpected when a show is setting things up in its first instalment, after all. Getting the viewer’s attention takes top priority with the explanations and real substance turning up later on; it’s pretty standard procedure in episodic storytelling. Sadly, I’m halfway through this particular show and all it’s delivered in subsequent outings is more of the same.
After a shaky start I’m finally beginning to warm to Kaiba. I was initially disappointed with how it took a similar tack to Kemonozume in that it relied rather heavily on its superficial quirkiness when other aspects were all those we’d seen in the genres before. Kemo was a fairly straightforward show conceptually but its visual style and the accompanying storytelling approach made it special; similarly Kaiba looks unlike anything else but I was desperately hoping it would follow up on its promises and offer more than this. In episodes three and four it did just that.
The structure of this series has taken me by surprise a little since our two young heroes wind up ending a war within an hour and a half of screen time - not bad going by anyone’s standards. I guess this means that we’ll be treated to a number of short arcs like this shown consecutively - those of you who have read the light novels might be able to shed some light on this but I don’t think we’ll be seeing a bigger picture in a over-arcing storyline sense. On the flipside any developments could be purely character-driven but whichever way I look at it, the narrative seems to be more episodic than I expected it to be; I’m hoping this won’t harm the strength of the storytelling.
The op theme is still my favourite of the current season’s (although Kaiba comes close…more on that later) and the BGM is in keeping with the old-fashioned adventure vibe. I really ought to start capitalising Adventure when used in the context of A & L though, since it is firmly set on maintaining that traditional approach to entertainment that the likes of Miyazaki were doing over a decade ago; I guess it could also be thought of as a modern take on the World Masterpiece Theatre vein.
It seems that the lolicon dabacle is mercifully dead and buried so we can now all concentrate on what Kurenai is and does rather than what the misguided individuals think it is. It’s certainly an unusual series, both in terms of aesthetics and storytelling - this is to me a shining example of well-made seinen anime that I find to be so refreshing and enjoyable. We need more shows like this - it has single-handedly cured me of my temporary writer’s block, which I’ll bear in mind when it finishes its all-too-short episode run.
Dialogue-driven win: lol@irony too
I’ve heard the art described as a bit patchy, which I concede is the case on occasion; while I appreciate the op and end animation sequences I can’t say I actually like them (and the black-and-white trimmed school uniforms make the students look like extras from The Prisoner too). There is a certain je ne sais quoi to the animation though, which a post at Hashihime helpfully explained; apparently the unusual technique of recording the dialogue first and animating it afterwards is applied to Kurenai, which gives it that organic and natural flow on-screen. Red Garden was treated the same way, as was Akira iirc. I’m sure this way of doing dialogue is more labour-intensive but the extra effort isn’t lost on me - it makes everything else broadcast at the moment look stilted and dry in comparison.
There are a number of things I could do as a reaction to burn-out (if that’s what I have) but I think recommending new additions to my own feedreader is the most constructive. My answer to everything at the moment is “I can’t be arsed.” Do that post on Kurenai I promised to write? Can’t be arsed. Reply to a week’s worth of other blog posts that I promised myself I reply to after reading them? Can’t be arsed. Mow the lawn? Can’t be arsed. You get the idea.
The QFT-ness of the subtitles speak for themselves
Since I Can’t Be Arsed to write a proper blog post I’ll instead point you in the direction of other blogs who still CAN be arsed. They’re on my blogroll and/or feedreader but since they’re 1. new and 2. especially good I think they deserve a special mention. The support of the Empire of Britannia in these recommendations is purely coincidental, honestly.
I was initially very sceptical of an NGE remake due to the cash cow-milking that the show has suffered from during the past thirteen years already; as much as the original series and cinematic alternate ending have been instrumental (pun intended >_<) in my interest in anime, it’s always felt like an exercise in taking a good story and squeezing as much money out of it as possible. Not that this stopped me watching the first Rebuild movie anyway, you understand.
My reasons for having any faith in this new Eva outing are largely centred round the fact that many of the key staff from the original series are on board, from the likes of Shiro Sagisu and Yoshiuki Sadamoto (soundtrack score and character design, respectively), Gainax alumni Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki, not to mention the main VA telent; it’s like catching up with old friends. Even the maestro himself, Hideaki Anno, is sitting above them all, supervising with an eerily Gendo-esque air of Just As Planned on his face. When he’s revisiting his most famous creation after so long it certainly suggests that he has a damn good reason to revisit it.
How hardcore am I? Apparently hardcore enough to sit for over eight hours between midnight and the break of dawn in the name of cinematic entertainment…my head aches, I’m sore all over and badly in need of a shave and a proper night’s kip and my eyes look like bloodshot piss-holes in the snow. This year marks my third successful attempt at the notorious Anime All-Nighter that forms part of the annual Sci-fi London festival; this year I dragged along one of my friends (the brave soul who’s marrying one of my sisters next year, incidentally) for the ride, which made an already entertaining evening even more fun. I’d already seen three of the evening’s offerings in some format or another but it was still great to experience them in the AAN setting. This year’s running order was an impressive one: Appleseed: Ex Machina, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Tekkonkinkreet and Vexille.
Every year the AAN has a special sort of atmosphere, this time around aided by a guest appearance by the Alien (yes, the Alien) and the Predator (yes, the Predator) who wandered into the downstairs foyer beforehand, hugged my future brother-in-law among others, danced to Yoko Kanno’s Voices and left via the lift. Where’s a camera when you need one?
Need…sleep…so…zzzz
The free tea, coffee, Red Bull and various types of ice cream were on offer as in previous years and it was also good to see that the seat allocation system was repeated, because it saves a lot of hassle. The venue is pretty posh by cinema standards too, so the wide variety of stuff on offer is hosted in a clean and classy location - always pleasant and comfortable in my experience. Incidentally, we had time to kill beforehand so caught a special showing of the live-action French cyberpunk movie Chrysalis, which was really quite impressive; well worth a watch if you get the chance.
The fact that the next three in line, Kaiba, Kamen no Maid Guy and Kanokon, all begin with the same letter is pure coincidence by the way - I’m not trying to be clever or anything here. It’s the ‘Experimental Edition’ of my Spring 2008 first impressions: the first is itself experimental while the other two were another attempt on my part to try something a bit different in another sense. The results were mixed.
You don’t know if fifty minutes of your life will be wasted on something until you waste those minutes on it. That’s the price for being open-minded I guess
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