アニ・ノート

Our favourite BRW said, “I’m just sad that it’s over now, but at least there’s still the OVA to look forward to and the everlasting hope that they’ll produce more of it some day.” Myself? I cannot decide if I love Kyoujyu or Mizubutchi more. Kyoujyu is a bit of a creepy enigma, but she’s a main character and has all the best screen time… Anyway, it’s pretty much a done deal that I’m completing a “girls in arts” show for the first time. Tough luck, Yuunocci. Tell Shinbo to animate you better in Hoshimitsu.

Tenka Seiha:

Well, this has been quite the trainwreck, literally. I remarked that I was disappointed in how generic it was way back in episode one, but it managed to distinguish itself by tossing the writers off the cliff entirely. That’s not a compliment either. The show had severe problems with its tone and development from start to finish and never came even close to matching the action or production of the first episode. Hell, Seika, the random side character that had absolutely nothing to do with the entire second half of the show had more development than Yuu and Sylvie.

This does not bode well for Cheburashka.

While testing archives[1], I found an old post, mostly dealing with the surprising hold ef had on my imagination. With ef firmly in the past, sounds like a perfect opportunity for a little side-by-side.

Honestly, I find it shocking that ef and Lucky Star managed to keep it up. They were shown so long ago. Also, ef was under an intentional handicap where I avoided blogging about it, or merged several posts into one. And it’s still on the top.

If counters were reset, Toradora would’ve been the champion. And I don’t even like it all that much. I suspect that a big part of it is in the endless discussions with inattentive bloggers caught by surprise by its ending. And Strike Witches, well… The last hurray of GONZO was really big until it crashed in the usual GONZO fasion.

[1] Wordpress 2.8.4 broke posts_nav_link: using an empty string as argument makes it to produce the default value instead of nothing as before. I fixed archives by replacing it with next_posts_link and previous_posts_link, which do not rely on empty strings in arguments. Then I ran a random check of archives and saw the post linked above.

A few commenters claimed that blogrolls were useless, but I still remember how invaluable they were for me when I ramped up on my reading, so I keep mine up as a kind of a public service to new readers. If such function is assumed as primary, the blogroll has to be short, best of the best. A short blogroll is also easier to update. My subscription list includes about 190 anime blogs of varying quality. Dumping that into blogroll would make it just as useless as said.

Warmed up after the metablogging, he decided to deliver some smackdowns.

I understand [Juuden-chan] really pushed the envelope in terms of what you can get away with and still be on broadcast television, what with masochism and urination in every episode. Or so I hear anyway. I couldn’t deal with the insipid plot long enough to even find out if that claim is true.

He heard wrong. Nonetheless, after a reasonably promising start, I suspended Juuden-chan without a great fanfare. The treatment of Arresta by the scriptwriters is my main complaint, so it’s a manifestation of weak “Ami effect“. However, I doubt that Juuden-chan can stage a toradoresque comeback out of suspension.

[Umineko] has most annoying cast of characters I’ve seen since Code Geass R2, which is saying a lot. The dialogue comes across as extremely forced, the characters are all wholly uninteresting, and most of the plot and pacing feels as though the scriptwriters just grabbed random text from the game and stitched it together slapdash.

An enthusiast of Umineko admitted at #animeblogger that the random stitching is indeed the case, but then… Beatrice.

A predictably slow tale of highschool life and budding romance, Sora no Manimani won’t knock anybody’s socks off. It does, however, manage to provide a good amount of random humor, some cool astronomy lessons, and the occasional heartwarming moment.

He forgot to mention inept animation and the little bitch of a main character, but otherwise that’s about what it aims to be.

Yuri. That’s the only term that [Aoi Hana] can really be described with, and also its only “redeeming” quality.

If you’re into that you might enjoy it, but beyond that gimmick the plot doesn’t really offer anything interesting or substantive. The characters are incredibly one-dimensional, and not in a good “one-dimensional funny trope character” way. And did I mention that the one dimension is yuri?

Ouch.

By the way, Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou is inexplicably missing from the list, although Element Hunters were included (and deservingly panned).

Just as I was afraid they would, Japanese and American students in Akita completely segregated themselves and do not talk at all, with one notable excetion of American boys who chase Japanese girls. Those are persistent enough to knock down the cultural barriers and get some language practice. Administration tries their best to help, by mixing up Japanese and Americans in dorm rooms for example, but with mixed results. There’s also a program underway where students are matched with “conversational partners”, which may be more useful.

UPDATE: In case anyone thinks I omitted something, the disparity is noticeable, but I have no data. And it’s not the point anyway.

The best show of the season receives an expected nod from The Big N. Lots of words how wonderful it is and all, but then there’s this little caption:

The better Tamaki.

We cannot be friends anymore…

Not much to go on, but it looks like he enjoyed it to the end (although I knew that he would).

At this point, I consider Yasuhiro Yoshiura as a story-writer and anime director superior to Makoto Shinkai.

Sound like a very faint praise to me.

Apparently, it was a real snotfest:

DCJoeDog: When they showed Yuuki’s life from birth to death I literally broke down and started bawling.

Polaryzed: I wanted to see the last ep so bad that I watched it a lunch at work. BIG mistake. Really hard to explain the sniffles and wet eyes to people.

Ken: I get misty-eyed over emotional things sometimes, but never shed real tears for something… until this show. =\

Sebastian: I don’t believe i have cried this much since… well… ever.

And it just goes like that, every comment. Wow.

UPDATE: Neko: “I cried a lot during these last three episodes.”

The 2D Teleidoscope was at the periphery of my scan already, but thanks to J.P.’s careless comment that included unions into “modernity” (as if benevolent associations didn’t exist in China for centuries) I dismissed witout reading a post that was worth it. To wit:

So I’ve found myself increasingly bothered by what The Last Samurai seems to say about that part of Japanese history. What the movie tells us is that modernity, in the hands of the Japanese, is false and dangerous: The spirit of industry is a fat, scheming middleman in a western suit; it’s a haphazard military killing off true warriors with foreign-made gatling guns. Meanwhile, we’re asked to value the backwardness of old Japan—a quality that left the Japanese vulnerable to white conquerors—which the film recasts as the lost virtue of “honor.”

A westerner is forever changed by his exposure to a traditional village, to the point where we’re supposed to believe that he is more Japanese than some of the natives. And, they conclude, isn’t it so sad that the Japanese killed off what was left of their REAL culture by trying to beat the West at their own game? Frankly, from that perspective, it looks like an Orientalist crock of shit.

While I can’t say that this summer’s Taishou Yakyuu Musume is in any way a deliberate response to The Last Samurai, for a simple otaku show its take on modernity is remarkably more nuanced. Koume, our heroine, literally resides in a cultural halfway house, going to school in a kimono and coming home to help out at a western-style restaurant. Her classmate Akiko lives a more westernized life, but the social expectations thrust upon her are still quintessentially Japanese.

There’s more.

Meta above, Omo and a few others keep promulgating the silly concept of The Last Samurai being “not for Japanese”. What difference does it make? Avatar stated that creators of RahXephon strictly disclaimed the consistent world background; fans retconned it. Was it in any way “false”, if it was coherent with the story? Japanese mapping The Last Samurai upon themselves have a better leg to stand upon than any other post-interpretors. It was originally their story that Hollywood appropriated for crying out loud.