Here on Myanimelist there is a feature called clubs, where you can set up a private image board and forum for your own little corner of the weeaboo subculture. Few of these clubs are still active now that Discord servers do their job, but in the site's heyday there was a group called the Anime-Uber Elitists Club, with membership requirements including having logged a lot of anime and maintaining a low average rating. It was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and dropped the exclusivity before eventually ending all club activities a year or two back, but it created an "Enlightenment Chart" of approved anime, voted on by its
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members, which is still a great resource for finding lesser-known, snob-friendly anime to watch. Chilling on that list, beside the likes of Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, Princess Mononoke, and... Mononoke, is Digimon Tamers, which entered the chart with a vote of 5 for, 1 against. The club never did and never conceivably would have even held such a vote for any other season of Digimon, so how, you may ask, did this happen?
The short answer is Chiaki J. Konaka. Yes, the acclaimed script-writer and series planner behind Serial Experiments Lain and Texhnolyze fulfilled the same role on the third season of Digimon. This fact alone means that no matter how refined you want your anime taste to seem, you can comfortably admit to liking Digimon as long as you pretend it's *only* the one season. I revisited Digimon Tamers because of this exact type of discourse and waited about 30 episodes for the show's deep and mature themes to surface before finally accepting that I was duped into watching a 20-hour trading card commercial for children.
Okay, let's be fair, there *are* certain aspects of this show that stand out from the rest of Digimon and invite comparison with Lain. The main character is a Digimon-obsessed kid named Takato who collects the cards, watches the anime, and draws his own Digimon OC named Guilmon instead of paying attention in class. Takato gets to live every late-90s kid's dream and have his fan-made Digimon come to life, but the first thing he sees it do is incinerate live rats with its fire breath and episode 1 ends with him cowering in fear that he might be next. The series is set in the real world rather than the Digi-World of the previous two seasons and Takato has to hide Guilmon in a park and steal bread from his parents' bakery to feed him. Later battles against feral Digimon cause collateral damage to the point of leveling several city blocks. Where the core cast of the first two seasons were a team from Episode 1, Tamers' female lead Ruki spends the first 8 episodes ordering her partner Renamon to kill Guilmon. There is a mysterious and power-hungry blonde government man named Yamaki-san who wants to commit genocide on all Digimon and keeps accidentally ripping holes in space-time that make the wild Digimon threat much worse. Ruki's insistence that Digimon are only for fighting is deliberately contrasted against the pacifistic beliefs of deuteragonist Jianliang (whose partner Terriermon mindlessly sprays entire rooms with machine-gun fire when he evolves, but eventually learns to control this urge). Takato finds himself caught between these two perspectives, and the three of them approach a more balanced philosophy as the show progresses, not seeking fights but battling when there is something to protect.
Most importantly, Digimon can die. The lore used to state that every Digimon is reborn in an egg upon death, but in Tamers they kill each other and metaphorically eat one another by "loading their data" to become more powerful. This is intended to give Digimon a more realistic, animalistic nature. A major character named Juri gets a Leomon as her partner who is then killed by the anti-hero Impmon and the rest of the series tries to deal with the grief of the former and the guilt of the latter.
There are no real villains in Digimon Tamers. One of the show's major themes is moral relativism, with the second arc having the Tamers fight Digimon calling themselves Deva after the deities in Hindu tradition and declaring their leaders the Gods of Digimon. Jianliang has a chat with his kenpo sensei about these Deva where the sensei explains that what is good from one perspective might be evil from another, and sure enough the Digimon Gods turn out to be mostly chill. Only one of the four loathed the idea of Digimon living with humans and attacked Japan for that, but the Tamers and the other three Gods help him get over it instead of killing him. Yamaki learns the error of his ways and becomes a stalwart ally of the main kids in the second half of the show. Even the final antagonist, the D-Reaper, who *acts* like a typical nihilistic anime villain, is just an old computer program for automatically emptying filled hard-drives that evolved out of control.
And then there is Impmon, an insecure rascal who torments the heroes, bullies the lovable but helpless Culumon, and rants about the need for Digimon independence from humanity. Later we learn that this persona is a front for the loneliness and fear he has been living with since running away from his own human masters, a pair of toddlers who would accidentally hurt him because they were too young to know better. Impmon slowly begins to trust Takato and friends despite his own manifest personality flaws, but still betrays them, after thinking over how kind they've been to him and how it's abundantly clear he knows he shouldn't. He does this for power because of his own self-loathing need for glory, the Digimon God turns him into Beelzemon, and he kills Leomon only to lose to an enraged Takato, ill-gained power be damned. He is only spared because Juri, whose Digimon he just finished murdering, begs for him. Only after a few episodes of reflection on these events does Impmon finally decide to accept his guilt and atone for his actions. This is a legitimately solid anti-hero arc made especially good by the betrayal scene in the middle, which communicates how hard it can be to do the right thing when you're used to being bad.
Now it might sound like I love Digimon Tamers and think it's really deep, and that's probably because the show is better in memory when you can focus on the admirable things it attempts and not the mediocrity of the telling. Remember just how long 51 episodes of anime is. Lain turns its world and timeline on their heads while examining the fading line between the real and online worlds in 12 episodes. Evangelion completely builds up and then deconstructs all its characters in 26 while still making time for giant robot battles. Impmon's story is told in five minute-chunks scattered throughout maybe 15 episodes of these 51. He doesn't even show up until episode 6. Yamaki spends around half the series fiddling with his lighter and repetitively ranting about how much he hates Digimon before finally starting to show a shred of personality. Even when his character arc is done he has gone from generically antagonistic government man to nondescript support character. There is one humanizing scene of him sitting at home with his girlfriend and otherwise he only exists to serve the plot. Leomon dies in episode 34 and his tamer Juri hides behind a rock for a second shortly afterward, whereupon she gets kidnapped and impersonated by the D-Reaper (whose version of her is a catatonic homunculus) and we don't see her again until the show is nearly over. This means we miss out on the chance to see how she processes that grief in its early stages, and even when she comes back her mental state, which is supposed to be the main focus of the final arc, gets around one tenth as much screentime as the Tamers fighting endlessly-spawning polyps of the D-Reaper for like fifteen exhausting episodes. Most of the series' runtime is dedicated to the studio-mandated one battle per episode, complete with over-dramatic canned animations of the Digimon evolving or their tamers scanning Digimon trading cards (available now at participating retailers) to power them up, sometimes back to back to back - I swear there is an episode where Jianliang performs the full ten second "Card Slash" animation five times in three minutes.
I don't mind these fight scenes, but their frequency leaves the more complex character arcs strapped for time despite the show's great length, and the writers then use exaggeration to expedite them until they transform into tiresome melodrama. Instead of a long and difficult road to redemption after Impmon's decision to atone, there is one scene where he reconciles with his toddler tamers and then he turns into a lighter-shade version of Beelzemon to show he's over his character conflicts. The rest of the cast instantly forgive him. Juri immediately goes near-comatose when Leomon dies and spends the rest of the series curled up in a ball inside the D-Reaper while Takato yells about how he's going to save her. There's a plot thread about her having a strained relationship with her father that is communicated through one scene where he says something mean to her over the phone and then the only other time he appears is to drive a van kamikaze-style into the D-Reaper and apologize for not loving his daughter enough. Two scenes suggest Jianliang struggles with being an older brother to his sister Xiaochun, including one where he almost hits her because he can't convince her to sit out a fight for her own safety. This is never mentioned again or explored further. The real reason it happens is because this the same episode where Jianliang fuses with Terriermon to become SaintGargomon for the first time, so the writers felt the need to throw in emotional problems for him to solve by getting a power-up.
The format frequently clashes with the show's attempts at more serious storytelling. The writers wanted to portray Leomon's death as a shocking event, but ruined that somewhat by the title card five minutes earlier which reveals that episode is called "The Kind-Hearted Hero Leomon Dies". Sometimes the fight scenes seem more grounded and add loss to the story, like when the kids fail for two episodes to stop a giant boar Digimon which is demolishing their town, or when their families evacuate the city under threat of the D-Reaper, but then the Digimon evolve because of the all-defying power of friendship and the kids find out that the more they believe the more powerful their Digimon cards will become, so they just believe their way to victory for that battle. They don't seem to remember this trick when they're in a bind later on. Juri meets Leomon when she is being chased by wild Digimon and he suddenly jumps off a rainbow to save her. Ruki has a cliché rival character arc where she goes from literally saying "Digimon as friends? Hmph, ridiculous!" to learning that friendship is the true strength and Renamon will never evolve without love. While the themes of grief and guilt don't really undermine the fun of the Digi-battling, the inclusion of these Shonen tropes eventually makes it hard to take the deeper themes seriously.
Tamers doesn't know how to stick to its own strengths. While the real-world battles and their real-world consequences were a nice change of pace, the series returns to the Digi-world for the mid section and that aspect is lost. Cutting back the cast to three main kids and their Digimon (compared to Digimon Adventure's seven of each) gives them more time to develop, for the viewer to get introduced to their families and daily lives, and makes the Digimon evolutions feel more special (the original series had a new one every episode for the first 10), but then they add another four tamers - Xiaochun, two of Takato's classmates named Kenta and Hirokazu, and Ryou, a rival of Ruki's in the Digimon card game. The series never really explores these kids as characters, they just end up hanging around for the final battle with no clear role. Kenta's partner Digimon can blow bubbles that cancel the D-Reaper's powers for no adequately explored reason but to give him something to do. Hirokazu has Gaurdramon who is supposed to be able to evolve into Andromon but never does. I think there's one scene where he launches a pair of missiles at the D-Reaper in all the endless battling against it. Ryou fights on the frontlines with the main trio but feels like a third wheel because he has only appeared in like three episodes prior to that. He was supposed to be stranded in the Digital World for over a year before the series starts, but we never get to see how this changed him when he came back or affected his relationship with his father. There is one cute episode about Kenta and Hirokazu befriending the old person Digimon, Jijimon and Babamon, which speaks to how this show is better at delivering fun one-off adventures than deep themes or character development.
My point here is not to warn you against Digimon Tamers. I liked watching it, and I think it does a good job being what it is: a light action show with a lovable cast of characters, funny J-Pop music with Engrish lyrics about how cool it is to Card Slash and Digivolve, and amusing battles against weird over-designed monsters. By all means watch it, but watch it for those things. It isn't Konaka elevating Digimon into some psychological masterpiece. If anything it's Digimon elevating Konaka since he can't get away with his usual ponderous atmosphere building and emotionless philosophizing in a show for eight-year-olds. To compare this series to Lain or Evangelion is to create a false impression of what is really a childlike hero's journey 90% of the time, and going into it expecting enlightenment will only set you up for disappointment.
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Feb 23, 2023
Digimon Tamers
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings Spoiler
Here on Myanimelist there is a feature called clubs, where you can set up a private image board and forum for your own little corner of the weeaboo subculture. Few of these clubs are still active now that Discord servers do their job, but in the site's heyday there was a group called the Anime-Uber Elitists Club, with membership requirements including having logged a lot of anime and maintaining a low average rating. It was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and dropped the exclusivity before eventually ending all club activities a year or two back, but it created an "Enlightenment Chart" of approved anime, voted on by its
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Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Dec 13, 2022
Kanojo no Omoide...
(Manga)
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Mixed Feelings
Katsuhiro Otomo is a crucial figure in the history of both anime and manga, and his work has influenced creatives all around the world, from Ghost in the Shell's Shirow Masamune to Kanye West. I use the word work in the singular because it's easy to think he has only one, that being Akira, which is a medium-defining masterpiece of an anime film and an important, accomplished manga, with such detailed art that it's painful to even imagine the wrist-breaking effort Otomo spent over its decade of publication. A handful of anime fans know he directed the impressively well-animated Steamboy, but after Akira his
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most commonly known manga is probably Domu, which only 5,000 people on myanimelist have read. For this book, Memories, that figure is less than 800, perhaps in part because its only English publication was a short-lived 1995 printing by Random House Australia.
When I fell in love with Akira in 2019 and started looking into the rest of Otomo's oeuvre, this was listed for over $150 on Amazon - but the French version, whose title is the English word Anthology, had a printing in 2009 and was closer to $20. That was the version I bought, which introduced the small hitch that I didn't know how to read French. A few years later, with some practice in the language from reading comics such as Spirou and Titin, I finally came back and finished this. As the name implies, the book is a collection of short stories from early in Otomo's career, published in periodicals for young men throughout the 70s, particularly Young Magazine. Their most immediately noticeable characteristic is just how *short* they really are. The first, Flower, in full color and inspired by the French artist Moebius, is only a few pages long. Two others, Sound of Sand and Minor Swing, begin with the main character trapped in sand or goo respectively where a more traditional story would take the time to introduce the characters and show the audience exactly how they wound up in such a sticky situation. They tend to end abruptly, often anti-climatically, and feel more like gag comics that build to a punchline rather than serious attempts at storytelling. In the post-face, where he reflects on each story, Otomo says of the aforementioned Sound of Sand that he doesn't remember how he came up with the concept or what he was trying to do with it. All he has to say about the segment Electric Bird Land is that he wanted to create something with Birdland in the title as an homage to the New York Jazz Club, since he loved Charlie Parker's recordings from there as a child. The collection mainly serves to throw a bone to people who are really fascinated with one of two works: Akira itself or Magnetic Rose, Satoshi Kon's captivating take on Memories from the film anthology of the same title (whose other two segments, Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder, have no analogs here.) Memories headlines the collection and is one of the most atmospheric of the short stories, but doesn't really measure up to Kon's characteristically psychological extended take from the film. Akira's precursor Fire Ball is the main event of the album. It is set against the backdrop of rebellion and totalitarianism, and its lead characters are two brothers with psychic powers, one working for the police and the other the resistance. This predicts the dynamic between Tetsuo and Kaneda that is, to me, the emotional heart of Akira and the reason it's so great: two people who find themselves as enemies despite their brotherly love for each other. That kind of emotional confusion drives a lot of powerful storytelling throughout all kinds of fiction. Fire Ball *predicts* the dynamic, but it doesn't *actualize* it. The two brothers don't fight over their difference of allegiance. Their only interaction is a jovial conversation after meeting for the first time in years, where they catch up on each other's personal lives and a death in their family. Its most memorable scene comes from the inhumanity with which the cop brother is then dissected for science, in a scene many times too graphic for a Western youth comics magazine. The anthology presents a deliberately cultivated 1970s identity. Hair (named after the musical) is a parody of Fire Ball where the rebels are long-haired hippies who steal the world's last King Crimson vinyl from a museum and their scheme to take down The Man is to bring back the common cold, which has been wiped out for a hundred years in the comic's totalitarian future. Authoritarianism is associated with obsessive cleanliness throughout the collection, especially in Electric Bird Land, where automated military mechs gun down impurities like a man's long hair (along with all his clothes), or a dropped plant from a "strictly ornamental" glass ball. The other reoccurring theme, also popular in the era, is pacifism, or rather distrust for all forms of military activity, particularly through the Planet Tako stories where political conflicts and genocide are experienced by slightly phallic cartoon sushi ingredients, and Farewell to Arms where a sci-fi war-mech wipes out a platoon of helpless soldiers (accompanied by a cool background art style based around digitized photography.) In comparison to these depictions of systemic cruelty, though, I was personally more disturbed by the horror story Minor Swing, where the main character emerges from a rotten sea covered in black tar that hardens in the sun until he suffocates in a cement shell, and the people around him let him die, even as he begs for help, because they see him as a monster and not a human being. This covers all the stories except "That's Amazing World", a quartet of short comedy versions of famous stories from the west: Aladdin, Noah's Ark, Knights of the Round Table, and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. These are probably the weakest part of the collection, inoffensive but pretty fucking stupid. For the Old Man and the Sea, when Santiago pulls the marlin onto his boat, it turns out the have the lower body of a woman, so he rapes it. In Noah's Ark, Noah and two of his sons eat all the animals on the ark except for the reptiles before they finally find land, and one of the boys remarks that they should've thought to bring a woman, which would've been a funny observation on the story except that Noah and his sons do bring their wives aboard the ark in the Bible. What you have here on the whole is a collection that's a little uneven and never excellent. The artwork is great, and there are some neat little stories, but it's hard to really recommend unless you're so into Otomo you want to study him - especially given how hard it seems to be to access in English.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Feb 6, 2022
Mother 2: Ness no Boukenki
(Manga)
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Recommended
Ah, Earthbound, now there's a classic game. In the 27 years since it first hit shelves in Japan, how many creative people have claimed it as a source of inspiration? Indie game devs, comics and reviewers, and even South Park writers have built some part of their art around recapturing the feeling of Shigesato Itoi's avant-garde video game adventure. This tie-in manga, by Nintendo old-hand Benimaru Itoh (who also drew the Star Fox and Super Metroid cartoons for Nintendo Power,) is far from alone in its ambition of directly adapting the game - you can find all sorts of fan artists trying to turn Earthbound
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into a comic online. None of them have managed to capture the original game's unique vibe quite right, though. I'm sure part of that is because Itoi's style truly is inimitable, but it's also because Earthbound is SUCH a video game that it's impossible to adapt to any other medium. Sure, it's story-driven in a way that seems like it would translate to a book or a comic better than some other games, but all its most impressive moments were deliberately designed around the perspective of a silent protagonist and the interaction between a player and a set of game mechanics. A webcomic having main character Ness get grossed out at finding a hamburger in a garbage can doesn't quite have the same impact as dropping that burger into his inventory and letting the player eat it if he wants.
Take the final boss fight, for example. It's an unbeatable representation of pure evil that doesn't even keep track of how much damage your attacks deal. There was a conscious intention that the player, upon seeing its distorted skull-like face and hearing the unnerving dissonant score, would freak out and unload all his mightiest attacks to no effect, until several turns later, exhausted and about to lose, he might resort to praying for salvation - which turns out to be the only way out. Sure, you could recreate the arc of this fight in manga - have the kids throw out big flashy moves, get beat down, and then start to pray - but that wouldn't really carry the same impact that YOU, as the player, finding yourself that helpless conveys. Maybe that's why this manga just doesn't have that part. Or maybe that's because it came out in 1993, a year before the game, and was based on a version that didn't have all the story details finalized, as evidenced by the screencap printed on the first page, which has slightly different geography than the same area in the released game. Combined with the lack of printing space that made this a breezy 13 chapters, that might be why it deviates from the canon story around a third of the way through, introduces new stuff with no in-game basis, and skips over a lot of the plot. From the perspective of a Mother fanboy who dug this up almost three decades after the game came out, that's disappointing. I wish we got to see places like Moonside, or the Your Sanctuaries, or Magicant, and the manga's final battle doesn't hold a candle to the groundbreaking storytelling the game would end up having. I've spent a lot of time comparing this to its source material, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's best approached as its own thing, or at least that you shouldn't expect it to exhaustively cover everything the game did. After all, if you want that, just replay the damn thing. As a curio for fans, Itoh's comic is honestly kind of cool. It has a really unique Seuss-inspired art style that almost doesn't feel like anime at all, which is surprising considering how samey a lot of anime and manga art can get, and its cheerful adventurous tone makes it a light and pleasant thing to read. I got a kick out of the expanded role of the Runaway Five, the comic's interpretation of the lead characters and their interactions, and especially the elevation of Pogo Punk, a generic enemy from the game, into a significant secondary character (even though I personally like Yes Man Jr. better.) Or at least that's true up to a point. There are some important changes that didn't have to be made, and that ultimately remove the element of discovering the dark side of the world that is a crucial aspect of the game's story. On one hand, it's nice to see Buzz Buzz get a chance to follow Ness on his adventure, but his death at the hands of the kid's next-door neighbor was important to setting the tone for the rest of the game. Ness doesn't fight policemen or watch his corrupt mayor get re-elected in the manga, and he doesn't get led into a trap by his own libido either. I miss those things, because they're fun and had a point, and they would've been totally adaptable to this medium. Speaking of Ness' neighbor, the change in roles for Porky, from true villain of the game to JUST his outward ineffectual facade, is also too bad. In the game, you meet an alien life-form bent upon destroying all humanity, but the most terrifying figure you come across is the petty narcissist who lived next door all along. There was a lesson in that. That's a good microcosm for the manga. It's cute and charming, but it lacks the depth and artistry that make the game so important.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Oct 21, 2019 Mixed Feelings Spoiler
This review contains spoilers for both the film itself and season 1 of SAO.
A Sword Art Online movie was a good proposition. The one area of near-universal praise that the franchise has attracted is for its visuals. Animated movies have higher and more focused budgets than TV serials, which means prettier graphics and more fluid animation. The reduced overall running time makes it harder to find space for a large ensemble cast or a complex narrative - things SAO has spectacularly failed to implement in the past. A movie, then, sounds like a good chance for it to focus on its strengths and minimize its ... faults. It's too bad that they chose an AR-based story to adapt into the movie. The first season of SAO was at its best when it depicted the sense of wonder that arose from exploring its fantastical online worlds. The streets of modern Japan, at least for me, can't measure up to that feeling, even when enhanced with holograms of magic and monsters. If we are to evaluate an anime on its own terms, we can't waste much time complaining that some of the fight-scenes in this don't add much to the story or progression. Nor indeed should we criticize the scene where Asuna takes a bath and the camera makes a point of treating us to a generous view of her bum. SAO is a dumb franchise whose only real purpose is to give us the visceral appeal of looking at things we find pretty. On that note, and for his part, Kazuto doesn't get a bath scene but looks great in his Ordinal Scale uniform. This movie starts off with a lot of promise. It doesn't waste too much time getting to its well-animated fight scenes (the first one is about 15 minutes in, but that's responsible pacing.) What I particularly like is that Kazuto is struggling in AR games and sits around feeling left out while everyone else has fun with them. He's out of shape and physically weak, and these flaws are finally hindering him now that AR is such a fad. Seeing him alone and morose, and knowing it's because of his own faults, makes him more sympathetic than usual. There's even a rather amusing scene where he trips over a curb in the middle of a fight. The film's antagonist, Eiji outclasses him completely when he arrives. This is a first for the series. He injures Asuna while Kazuto is nearby but helpless to prevent it, and then he effortlessly beats down Kazuto himself. That leaves our hero on his own to get to grips with his wimpy real-life body and his skills in the new game. Unfortunately that character growth is rushed. Kazuto struggles a little in one AR battle and then the movie skips forward to the point where he's one of the great players, practically defeating major boss encounters on his own. Two hours is an above average length for a film, and can be especially costly for an animated project. It is possible to make an anime film that long that feels like it uses all its time purposefully and packs a lot of meaning and development into its run-time. Just look at Akira for a great example of that. Ordinal Scale is not that kind of movie. It's loaded with slow-paced dialog, dull internal monologues, and flashbacks, even re-using animation from previous seasons of the T.V. show. It feels like 60-90 minutes worth of content that was watered down and stretched out to fill 120. I felt that the climactic battles were a particularly big let-down. When Kazuto finally faces Eiji again, the film cuts to an idol's musical performance and a large portion of the fight takes place off-screen. Perhaps to Japanese viewers the idol performance, which had also seen significant build-up throughout the film, would be exciting enough to justify this, but to me it was incredibly frustrating. Kazuto rips off an artificial enhancer that apparently explains all of Eiji's strength and then immediately dispatches his now-helpless opponent, which is a deeply underwhelming resolution. It would feel more like the hero had overcome a great obstacle if his enemy were truly strong rather than a cheater. I feel like there has never been a really satisfying moment of high-energy uninterrupted sword-fighting in this entire goddam anime. Like Kazuto early in this film, it's always tripping over itself with exposition or strange digressions. The film's final battle, against the 100th floor boss monster from SAO, takes place in VR. We'll leave aside the fact that SAO's creator previously stated that he himself was intended to be the 100th floor boss and that therefore there should not have been some other entity coded into that place. What the switch to VR for the big climax signals is the pointlessness of the entire film. All of the skills Kazuto has learned and the weaknesses he's overcome throughout the movie are rendered irrelevant in its big final battle. The changes it makes to the characters are all reversed by the end and the AR technology will never come back to the spotlight. This Ordinal Scale story has zero significance to the story of Kazuto himself. It is not art, and makes no pretense of being art. It's a silly fan-service heavy distraction that will keep you occupied for two hours but that ultimately contains no substance.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Oct 17, 2019
Sword Art Online II
(Anime)
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Not Recommended
On a hot summer night, would you spoil your anime for the wolf with the red roses?
One thing cannot be denied where Sword Art Online is concerned: it's good for starting arguments. I still remember all the debates my friends had about it when it first aired - and joining in myself, writing an angry 3/10 review of the first season. Looking back, I was young and filled with uncontrolled bias. I was obviously frustrated at its popularity, and reading over my teenage comments on the show's use of nudity, where I noted that it was exclusively female, betrays a confused frustration at the fact ... that we never got to see the rather cute male lead with his shirt off. So naturally when the second season's promotional artwork revealed that he spends the first half playing a game where his avatar looks like a girl, I decided to stop watching - which amusingly caused me to miss out on the fact that this season ends up having exactly what I wanted to see. What's funny is that after revisiting SAO with a little more experience and a more complete process of self-realization (meaning some distance from those biases,) I think it might actually be worse than I realized as a boy. It suffers from appalling storytelling and flimsy characterization from start to finish. What really dunks it into trash territory is the handling of sexual assault. SAO eloquently demonstrates how not to do it when it comes to that, using it for cheap shock value and depthless cartoon villainy and having the victim overcome the associated trauma not just through revenge, which would be bad enough, but through vicarious revenge meted out by someone else. I thought it would be fun to review the second season, as a chance to give my updated thoughts on the series as a whole while preserving my original review so that anyone can bring it up and embarrass me with it if I get too smug. Watching through the early episodes, I was shocked to notice a substantial drop in the quality of the writing compared to the first season. The Gun Gale Online arc in season 2 seems to have psychological pretensions. I have to advise that SAO stay far away from this kind of subject matter in the future, because its writers have neither the patience nor the depth to make good use of it. It's the kind of psychological writing where everything is exaggerated to the point of meaninglessness. Newcomer Shion is established in a flashback where, as a ten-year-old girl, she mercilessly guns down a would-be bank robber, firing again and again despite the effects of recoil on her tiny body. The adults in the room stand around uselessly rather than help her with the disarmed and injured criminal. It would've been enough to have her shoot him once, SAO. Of course, this experience was so traumatic that seeing the finger-gun pose makes Shion throw up from stress, which a set of mean girls use to bully her. It just comes off as a little absurd when it's an abstract hand gesture that's intended to represent the thing she's scared of, and the severity of the reaction makes it start to feel inhuman. She overcomes this trauma by playing an online game about guns, adopting an in-game persona that doesn't have the same fears. I don't mind that part because it establishes why this character feels the need to spend so much time online, something that was lacking in the first season but is generally better in the second. The problem is that it's so likewise exaggerated - it has no effect until she wins a tournament in the game, at which point her fears vanish almost altogether. When she tags along as a secondary character afterward, they never come up again. Our protagonist Kazuto goes through something similar. It turns out he killed some of the player-murderers during his time in SAO, the guilt of which torments him with feelings of monstrous self-loathing. I feel I have to cite the rules, here, SAO: you're not allowed to pretend your main character went through a traumatic event during a previous arc if you didn't think that was important enough to show us at the time. Kazuto continually talks about how he repressed the memories and expresses guilt for that, which is funny because it's such an obvious band-aid designed to cover the fact that the writers simply didn't think of it until now. It's blatantly contrived and shows how poorly-planned and half-assedly constructed the storytelling in SAO is. You know, I really don't like killing, but even I think Kazuto is being melodramatic. He slayed murderers in battle, where it definitively constituted an act of self-defense. There are different rules there. We see him go into fits of hysterics when he encounters one of their allies a second time, and it's hard to believe against the confidence and power he normally displays, just like the guilt clashes with the battle-rage he's shown before. It's nice that they're giving him some weaknesses and chances for growth, but I'm not sure if his characterization is better or worse after this season. The sudden trauma combined with his willingness to exploit his girly appearance when previously he was proud and honorable make me think he just becomes what the story wants him to be for its latest set-piece, rather than having a fixed identity. Both of these characters get to a good place eventually. They start to appreciate what they protected by taking the lives they did, which helps them forgive themselves. Surprisingly, that's exactly right from a character development standpoint. It's just that they get there through such brute and painful storytelling, so much melodramatic whining, and such a crushing amount of expository dialog that the journey itself is worthless. Even more appalling is the motivation of the first-arc villain, Death Gun. He starts killing because he got bad advice on how to build his character in an MMO. I wish I were joking, and what makes it all the more asinine is that he's repeatedly shown to be able to accomplish a great deal in the game with that character anyway. When his identity is ultimately revealed, it's someone who is such a non-entity in the story up to then that it lacks any impact. Death Gun's motives are part of a half-baked plot thread about people living too much inside games. I'm glad SAO is attempting to deal with this concept, because it's a question that has been hanging over the franchise since the beginning, but since it's only applied to our heroes in a very distant way it's not worth much as of yet. There's a little bit of token dialog about how it applies to Kazuto which indicates an idea with potential, which I look forward to seeing terribly mishandled in some later season. SAO constantly contradicts itself. Someone mentions that the game console they use isn't connected to the heart, but it monitors the heart rate anyway. Kazuto and Shion sit in a cave while the game's live broadcast, which the killer's accomplice watches, reveals them, but they still successfully execute a plan based around hiding their location from him. They talk for ages about concealing their weapon choices from other players, but the live broadcasting of their matches immediately renders this moot and Kazuto goes around swinging his lightsaber in the lobby. It's clear that the writers don't play video games, because elements like porting a super-powered character to a new game, which destroy the progression and balance of the games, are all over the place. The shooting-based Gun Gale Online apparently uses randomness to determine where bullets will hit, which would annihilate any shooter because precision aiming is the core gameplay principle of that genre. It also differentiates between physical and energy weapons, with physical being good against players and energy against monsters, which naturally gives griefers, who will build for physical weapons, such a huge advantage that PVE players will hardly be able to fight back. Let's not even get into the missed opportunities. GGO's shooting-based combat gives Kazuto a new learning curve to deal with, but he imports his hyper-powerful character from another game, masters the dodging mechanics on his first go, and gets a lightsaber (complete with questionably-legal sound effects straight from Star Wars,) so that he doesn't have to bother learning to shoot. This is how SAO goes, we all know this by now. The fight scenes in this are a tease. It has the most skimpy tournament sequence I've ever encountered, where even the main characters' fights are mostly skipped or cut down to a few boring seconds. Kazuto's first fight has him just hold his lightsaber against a guy until he dies - they could have at least had the decency to make the kid take him down with a flurry of quick swings. Later on, he's supposed to have fought and lost to a powerful player, which would've been a nice thing to see, but is only mentioned as part of a staggering flood of expository dialog. The overbearing exposition even interrupts major battles. When Kazuto finally faces down Death Gun they start by standing ten feet apart having a long conversation. The fights against giant boss monsters are mostly pretty dull with the beasts standing around gormlessly while the players wail on them, and it has an over-reliance on using colored lights against a black background to represent a bunch of characters attacking at once. There's even one sequence where a boss fight is about to begin and then the show just cuts to the aftermath. The teasing element almost seems intentional at that point, but it's frustrating rather than titillating. This series has something like five minutes of decent fluidly-animated sword fighting sequences scattered throughout hours and hours of interminable melodrama and exposition. Has it come across that there's too much dialog yet? Because there really is way too much. Kazuto and Shion sit cuddling in a cave and talking about their feelings for like 2 full episodes (on camera, too, apparently to no concern on the part of Kazuto's girlfriend,) while an exciting battle royale allegedly goes on outside. The final tragic story-beat is another especially dense example of this, where the feeble storytelling is supplemented by a terrifying deluge of boring conversation painstakingly explaining what everything means and how we're supposed to feel. I was a confused young man in 2013, but I feel I've come a long way since then. I wish I could say that SAO has matched my progress, but it still seems to be unsure of what it wants to be. The monumental exposition dumps and a later storyline about Asuna's relationship with her mother indicate an emphasis on drama rather than action, and the romance that was so important last season takes a back-seat now, with each of the leads having an independent arc in the spotlight with minimal interference from the other. The video game progression returns to the focus for a couple of episodes in which Kazuto getting a new in-game sword is treated as terribly important, which he then uses all of once before the end of this season. The dark psychological themes of the GGO section clash with the fluffy adventure story and cute-but-sappy children's tragedy that follow it. SAO originally had the strong father figure of the "death game" premise to help direct and support it. I would still contend that the story should have ended after that - it has had real problems sorting out its stakes since then. In this second season, it's (also like me) a teenage boy who has been abandoned by his dad: uncertain, alone, and looking to whatever confident surrogate big-brother or new technological trend it can find to support itself, which is why the next seasons are about Augmented Reality and then a full-tilt conversion to the Isekai genre. While it's still innocent, still attempting to be itself rather than following others to fit in, what does it give us to remember it by? It occasionally comes alive in small moments. Kirito getting beaten down by Death Gun in GGO, his body covered with little glowing cuts, while his real-world equivalent Kazuto lies shirtless in a hospital bed, breathing heavily and sweating from his cyberspace nightmare, makes him seem vulnerable for once and was the closest I came to empathizing with the little bastard. Shion confronting her bullies now that she's stronger communicates her growth by showing rather than telling for perhaps the only time in all of SAO. She and Kazuto have arcs that parallel one another, which is good narrative structuring. When Kazuto shows up to help Asuna during her solo arc it gives a little sense of the strength of their relationship and a chance for him to make use of the skills he learned in GGO and the sword he found in the previous arc. It has colorful high-detail backgrounds and cute character designs. The dynamic between Asuna and her mother has a shred of complexity for once and actually gets resolved in a mature manner through compromise. Asuna's mom is definitely the most compelling antagonist the show has and arguably its best character. Asuna feels that her mother is stifling her self-expression, so she turns to the online world, where she feels free to be the person she wants to be. That's enough for me. It's definitely more compelling than the business about Kazuto distancing himself from his family because he found out he was adopted in Season 1, which was undermined by the fact that he was shown to have a close and friendly relationship with his cousin/adoptive sister. Likewise, Shion and Yuuki have sufficient reasons to withdraw into the online world. And it leaves us on the promise that sometime later, the same will prove true for Kazuto, which if done properly could finally give some justification to this whole sordid franchise by deconstructing the unexamined enthusiasm he has for technological escapism. We would be naive, however, if we believed that. Asuna's mother disapproves of her relationship with Kazuto. This invites the question of how we as the audience would react in the same position. Kazuto goes a long way to rescue Asuna from a powerful man in Season 1, which I don't believe a lot of boys his age would have done, and if we take the cave-battle cuddling sequence in the innocent spirit in which it was apparently intended he has been quite faithful. He supports her in her endeavors and studies new technology (a growth industry) for his career, even using creative applications of his skill-set to help her and her friends. If he were asking to marry my daughter, I would give him my blessing - and silently resign myself to some very boring family gatherings. But unlike its protagonist, SAO is an abusive partner. It shows off its pretty backgrounds and animations, and it always promises to get better, but if we take it back it will inevitably come home drunk and slap us with its mediocre characterization and appalling storytelling. It would be better if we left it and tried to move on.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Oct 13, 2019
Tanoshii Muumin Ikka
(Anime)
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(27/78 eps)
This review was produced in a facility that may contain traces of spoilers or spoiler-related products.
Tove Jansson's Moomin is a national treasure in Finland, and its author a major literary celebrity. Almost every Fin who grew up in the 90s has probably seen at least a few episodes of Tanoshii Muumin Ikka, although they may not have known that they were viewing a Finnish re-dub of a Japanese cartoon, just as I couldn't have told you that Pokemon was Japanese when I watched it as a child. It's not as well-known elsewhere - as a matter of fact, I seem to be the first non-Scandinavian ... to review it on MAL. We Canadians must have some kind of affinity for Moomin, because a publishing house from this country is also responsible for the first English re-printing of Jansson's Moomin comic strip. We probably relate to Scandinavians because we spend so much time in the cold. Jansson's comics are delightful, but they just might be too edgy to show your kids. One memorable story-opening has Moomin putting on a cute little pair of swim-shorts to go and drown himself (someone on this site claimed that Moomin is a precursor to Final Fantasy VII, but this sequence proves that it is actually the precursor to End of Evangelion,) and one story opens with the contemplative line "Why is it that the heroine in a book is always more beautiful than the one waiting at home?" and deals with the destruction of Moomin's relationship with Snorkmaiden. Another good example appears when Moomin's demure mother hunts and kills a wild boar, enraging his wife, who shortly after calms down and forgives the family because she found him boring - but asks them to at least bury his bones. Tanoshii Muumin Ikka is lighter than that, but it retains a portion of the comics' edge. The first episode contains something very near to body horror, and every member of the Moomin family has his own moment of comic callousness or cruelty. The episode where Moominpapa abandons his family to go adventuring returns from the comics, for example. Contrasted against the saccharine tone and cutesy character designs, this allows Muumin to boast of surprisingly strong comedy and characterization, so that while it's not as edgy as the comics it is no less delightful. I could only find 27 episodes of this show in Japanese (I couldn't bear it in any other language once I was used to the great opening animation and Dio Brando voicing Snufkin,) and I plowed through those in exceptionally short order. I was particularly drawn to the atmosphere and to Jansson's strange character designs (Snufkin's outfit is also a great, visually distinct design.) All of Moomin's central characters and bizarre creatures have some kind of symbolic significance to them. The Groke, for instance, represents loneliness. Because she freezes everything she touches, contact with others becomes impossible, so that although The Groke is a reoccurring image in Finnish nightmares she is sympathetic at the same time. It's even possible to take the interpretation that Tove was representing herself with these monsters. Jansson reportedly based Moomin Valley on memories of her childhood. Her family's summer home must have been quite beautiful, if this anime is anything to go by. Images like the river re-awakening at the start of spring or Snufkin playing his harmonica on the bridge while Moomintroll stands beside him and listens have stuck in my mind since I watched it. Heavy rain and winter snow transform the valley into a different place, and the stalwart Moomin explores it with his friends even then, finding the beauty that the tough whether unveils. In one episode, a zoo's staff mistake the Moomins for hippos and capture them to put on display. While another anime's heroes might stage a daring rescue in the dead of night, sneaking past the zoo's guards, Snufkin and the Hemeulin take a different approach and scientifically prove that Moomins are their own species, using this evidence to persuade the zookeepers to free them. This is part of a short arc that also includes man-eating (but music loving) plants, whose first episode ends with Snufkin sitting in the center of the creatures playing his harmonica while they swing to the music, an excellent atmospheric scene that uses the proximity of danger to enhance the feeling of strangeness and wonder - a feeling that is also prominent in the beautiful, carefully composed music and captivating bizarre imagery of the encounter with the Lady of Cold. That feeling and the aforementioned eccentric comedy are the two main strengths that run through the series. In contrast to the comics, the anime places a much greater emphasis on the relationship between Moomintroll, the protagonist, and Snufkin, a hobo who spends his summers in Moomin Valley. This turns out to be a wise decision and their bromance forms the emotional heart of the entire series. The highlight of what I saw was the two episode arc composed of "Snufkin Leaves on a Journey" and "Snufkin Doesn't Come Back," which deal with the tug-of-war between Snufkin's introverted tendencies and his love for Moomintroll. Their relationship is emotionally resonant and complex because Snufkin's nature means he needs to travel alone, unfortunately leaving the young and extroverted Moomintroll confused and despondent. Despite their mutual love they cannot be together during the winter simply because that's how Snufkin wants it, although it pains them both. Tove was probably using it to represent longing itself, when she came up with the clever idea to have Snufkin leave every winter. This pair of episodes also contains the visual apex of the series in the form of the campfire exchange between Snufkin and Teety-Woo, which uses beautiful animation to imitate the flickering light and long shadows cast by a fire in the night. When Moomin offers to leave his family and travel with Snufkin, he is demonstrating that he's close to growing up. His father allows it (but Snufkin does not) after recalling the adventures of his own youth, which he remembers fondly to the point of obsession, often being preoccupied for long hours writing his memoirs. Nostalgia is the main theme of the series for Moominpapa, for Tove, and in all likelihood for the viewer, and Moomintroll in this episode has a parallel to the rest of us. Moomin Valley is such a scenic, immersive, and inviting place that it's tempting to stay there forever. But we all must grow up and move on, whether it's to make our own adventure, to follow a close and admired friend, or simply because we aren't willing to watch the unprofessional English dub. No one can blame us, though, if we occasionally wish to go back.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Oct 11, 2019 Recommended
This review contains quite a substantial amount of spoilers.
How come nobody told me Gundam is this great? I feel like I've gone through my childhood with redheaded half-cousins only to find I have an older brother who can play an electric guitar in each hand and always buys me ice cream. I remember seeing Iron Blooded Orphans back in 2015 and thinking I'd probably like to watch more Gundam, and after watching The 08th MS Team I just wish I'd done so sooner. I came to this series in a slightly unusual way: I saw the seventh episode first. That made a positive first impression, because ... the seventh episode contains some strong individual moments like the protagonist nearly freezing to death, a memorable nightmare sequence that uses the image of bloodstains trailing from a dying man's fingers onto an astronaut's visor, and the honorable antagonist receiving word that his side has lost a strategic fortification, which implied the kind of complex morality I love to see in stories. Most significantly, it's the episode where Shiro (the hero) and his lover Aina reunite. They fight on opposite sides in the war and go from trying to kill each other to working together to survive in the cold to bathing together in a temporary hot-spring for my favorite scene of the episode. Shiro enters first and covers his eyes as Aina gets in the water, and when she tells him he can look we see him slowly peek through his fingers and then relax and say how fast his heart is beating. It's very cute, and displays some well-done animation: there are quite a few frames for Shiro uncovering his eyes. I think that gave me a positive opinion of the protagonists, the romance, and the series as a whole, when I went back to watch it in full. It still qualifies as the show impressing me with its own content, and there were a lot of even stronger episodes to come. The romantic aspect of it made enough of an impression that I went to MAL's forums to see what other people had to say on it. What I found was almost unmitigated negativity, including oddly frequent unfavorable comparisons between Aina and Shiro's relationship and the one between Sword Art Online's Asuna and Kirito, to whom Shiro was directly compared. That was a bit jarring, but then my mother did always tell me I was a different sort of child. Whatever we may say about the fast pacing of this romance, it's hard to deny its effective structure. Shiro and Aina meet as enemies in the first episode and cripple one another to the point where they have to co-operate to survive the hostile environment of outer space. They then separate to opposite sides of the war, unsure that they will ever meet again, before Shiro can even return the watch Aina lends to him. Later, they meet as enemies a second time, against all odds, and decide to make good on their relationship - sacrificing a great deal to do it. All of these things are deeply romantic, particularly the progression from enemies to partners. I find it easy to believe that experiences like these would inspire passionate feelings in a pair of lovers - and they give the proper emotional resonance to the love scenes. The apparent fast pacing is partially an effect of the series' efficient writing - it never dedicates screentime to the separated Shiro and Aina pining for one another. Instead, it communicates that through small details, the clearest being that Shiro always wears Aina's watch on a chain around his neck, so that it touches his chest. Keep in mind how their relationship serves the story's progression and themes. It informs both characters' arcs, shattering their already-lacking enthusiasm for the war, and reinforces the later theme of difficult reconciliation between two sides. Both characters deal with intense suspicion from their own nations as a result of it. The romance is additionally well-handled because it depicts the two working together to solve problems, from their first meeting to the end of the show, and because both characters maintain their own independent character arcs, which are similar in ways that help demonstrate why they're compatible. I'd like to indulge this comparison between Shiro and Kirito for a moment, because Kirito is a good standard example of overdone heroic characterization that weakens the associated story, while I would contend that Shiro is an example of heroic characterization done properly. In episode 1 of Sword Art Online, Kirito sits in his bedroom listening to a podcast, morosely looks out the window, and then plugs in his headset, giving a self-confident little grin. Most people's introduction to Shiro has him looking out a spaceship window smiling, and then excitedly speaking to everyone else when he catches his first glimpse of the Earth. Shiro comes out better here because he shows a greater degree of spontaneity and emotion, which help him work as the perspective character we're supposed to root for. Moments later, Klein picks Kirito out of a crowd and asks him to instruct him, it being obvious from Kirito's confident stride alone that he knows what he's doing and can give good advice. Contrast this against Michel ignoring Shiro to write to his girlfriend, and then reacting with annoyance when Shiro speaks to him. People tend to trust Kirito immediately or else very quickly, after some quick demonstration of his competence. When Shiro arrives at his new post as the 08th MS team's leader, people take bets on how long he'll last. The respect of his own subordinates is exceptionally hard-earned for him. They see him as an unproven rookie even to the point of disobeying direct orders early on. What's even more impressive is that each of them comes to respect Shiro at a different pace. The stalwart Sanders owes Shiro his life and remains fiercely loyal from the start, but Michel consistently doubts or opposes him for a long time and the curmudgeonly veteran Karen Joshua looks on most of his choices with tired disapproval, all the way to the end. While Kirito mows down enemies with an effortless swing of his sword, Shiro struggles for minutes on end to take down single unnamed soldiers. In his second episode, he pursues an enemy in an attempt to show off, gets separated from his team for nearly a full day, and is written off as dead by most of the base. Another useful parallel occurs in these episodes: in episode 2 of Gundam, Shiro falls into leech-filled water and gets his clothes covered in mud. Meanwhile, in SAO's episode 2, Kirito gracefully takes down a boss monster and earns himself a cool new coat. When Shiro meets the girls that eventually fall for him, they both introduce themselves by firing at him. Karen, meanwhile, never entertains any kind of romantic feelings for him whatsoever. While some of Kirito's harem-like female companions have a bit of tsundere snark, they all subordinate themselves to him pretty quickly. He starts as a mentor to Asuna. Other girls like Lisbeth and Keiko come to him for help. And while Asuna spends the second half of SAO awaiting Kirito in a cage, Aina remains Shiro's partner to the end, even supporting him in their final escape as he struggles to walk. The fundamental difference is that SAO always makes a point of making Kirito look cool. When he's becoming a pariah it's in service of noble goals and doesn't really impact him because he's a loner anyway (not because he lacks social skills, but just because he's too cool for friends.) Gundam doesn't pull its punches with Shiro. People fight against him or treat him with indifference. He makes bad decisions and looks weak or foolish. He is almost irrelevant to the actual outcome of the war he's fighting. His fundamental values turn out to be naive and impractical. He sweats in the heat and nearly freezes to death in the cold while Kirito strides confidently through a blizzard without a coat. He's always vulnerable and in danger of dying at a single slip-up, while Kirito can stand still and tank enemy players' hits just to show off because he regenerates faster than they can possibly hurt him. Both of these characters begin from the same long-lived stock hero: the kind black-haired anime boy who holds human life in highest esteem and is tortured by the deaths he could not stop. But while Kirito never really feels like anything more than a stock character and doesn't drive much emotional investment, Shiro really does come off like a real person and is quite lovable. A lot of it's in small details: Shiro grumblingly blames his subordinates for his own mistakes and starts petty arguments just to assert himself as a tough leader. He makes bad choices and lets his personal feelings compromise his dedication to duty. He comes close to death and it terrifies him to the point of hysteria. We can still believe in him as a hero because when it really matters he buckles down, keeps calm, and does what needs to be done. Gundam is very adept at handling its tone. While there are some scenes of melodrama and the unlikely nature of the romance might clash with the grittyness of the military sections for some, it does an excellent job mixing moments of levity and heroism with its harsh military nature. It has the best kind of comedy in an otherwise-serious story, where it's used to humanize the characters and build up their relationships. Eledore jokes that Michel's girlfriend will leave him for writing too many letters and later transfers Sanders' "reaper" nickname to the kid, both of which are genuinely funny and additionally serve to give the impression that they're getting to know one another while they work side-by-side in the tank. This series is an excellent example of an ensemble cast, where all of the characters interact with everyone else in different ways and display ever-growing relationships and independent character arcs. There's an impressive amount of change almost all of which is brought on organically by the decisions of the characters. Look at how characters like Aina, Kiki, and Michel react to Shiro the first time they see him and then compare that to their attitude toward him in the final scene, for instance. A moment that demonstrates all of these strengths at once occurs in episode 6. Kiki steals a letter from Michel's girlfriend to make fun of him, laughingly reads it at first, and then apologizes and hands it back to him as the letter becomes more downbeat, describing the sorrows of separation from a lover as brought on by the war. Not only is it a great use of a mid-scene tonal shift and a legitimately touching moment, but it serves to advance the relationship of the two characters and give more detail to the series' depiction of the difficulties of war all at once. This in turn demonstrates the ultra-efficient writing that makes the 12 episode OVA so impactful. I want to call attention to this show's excellent end credits sequence, composed mainly of a single still shot from a fictional video camera, trained on Shiro sitting down and reading a book while all the action and animation occurs around him. Beyond this creative framing, it's also used to give a little bit of extra characterization to the crew, some of whom are aware of the filming while Shiro isn't and jokingly flash the peace sign into the lens - or, in the case of Eledore, whose head is out of shot but is identifiable by his action - spreading a pornographic magazine so that its contents show up in the video. When Shiro finally does notice, he makes a stern face at the camera and then throws his book at it - but you can see him smile just a moment before it hits. This is an example of how the show deliberately uses its visuals to tell us about its characters. Since the characters whose faces we don't see are still identifiable by their actions (Kiki has the camera,) it's a testament to how distinct and well-defined their personalities are. In addition to animation and expressions, Gundam uses background details, like the way the characters decorate the cockpits of tanks or mobile suits, to add subtle nuances to its characters and world. The visuals are equally important in realizing its rather strong and evocative atmosphere. This series runs through a variety of locations from the scorching desert and jungle to frozen mountains to outer space, and each of them is full of little details that help the viewer immerse himself. Shiro stumbles upon a floating corpse while stranded out in space and when he ducks into an oxygenated room in a decimated space-station his abandoned helmet floats in the foreground while he speaks to Aina in the background. He sweats and removes his jacket in the jungle and takes shelter under a sheet in the desert while Sanders slowly collects water from underground. In the mountains, Shiro and Aina stand on the now-frozen water that they bathed in moments before. During the fight scenes, we're treated to ideas like water slowly leaking into a damaged mobile suit or Shiro camouflaging himself under the earth to await an enemy. Importantly, the atmosphere is used to create a sense of adversity. Shiro has to use his wits to survive the inhospitable climates he's forced into, and a long stay in the desert saps the will and focus of the crew while they're on an important mission. All of these things are impressive and show how carefully put together the OVA is. The difficulty Shiro has taking down single enemies and the detailed atmosphere help to form one half of the relative realism for which this Gundam series in particular has a reputation. The military operations themselves - the details of war - are displayed in a slow-paced, logistics-heavy manner that's enjoyable to watch and further supplements the series' tone. The second half of that realism comes from the serious depiction it gives to the nature and effects of war - the aspect that elevates this series to the status of a classic. There's a character (I can't remember his name, because it is only spoken once) in this show who only appears in one episode, operating a Zion Mobile Suit. He keeps a photograph of his young son on the inside of his cockpit. His son is never mentioned in dialog - that photograph is the series' only indication of his existence. The father is characterized as kind and honorable, befriending a child from the Guerilla village and attempting to de-escalate tensions when his group ends up in battle with the Guerillas and the Federation. This man dies. He does not die nobly for a worthy cause and it is not a cackling villain who kills him. He dies a pointless and ugly death in a meaningless, avoidable skirmish started because of the weaknesses and fears of both sides, and he is killed by Shiro Amada of the 08th MS Team - the series' hero. The show does not stop to remind the viewer in explicit dialog that a good man has pointlessly died. We never see his wife and son mourn him or go through life irrevocably damaged by his absence, but we may imagine that if we like. It would be easy to miss his death altogether, or to pay it little attention, because it occurs in the middle of an intense battle sequence that determines the fates of a massive number of characters. It simply happens and the show moves on, allowing the viewer to think as much or as little of it as he will. It's not even the emphasis of its own sequence, which is used to demonstrate Shiro's powerlessness to uphold his own beliefs in the midst of the war. This understated, powerful, and deeply purposeful - and therefore undeniably artistic - character death appears in a direct-to-video spinoff of a cartoon blatantly and totally designed to sell toy robots to little boys. It's a funny world we live in. The show makes sacrificial idols of its naive heroes. Shiro and Aina have a great estimation of the value of human life. They're tired of the war and simply trying to get through it while preserving as many lives as possible, because they can't do anything to change the outcome itself, an admirable part of its structure that emerges because of its status as a spin-off to a complete story. The show makes a point of repeatedly demonstrating just how powerless they are to achieve that goal, mercilessly killing the people they have worked so hard to save - and frequently forcing them to be the ones to do it. It makes no secret of the fact that there are noble people and villains on both sides, and that its heroes are capable of being cowardly, weak, petty, immature, and hypocritical. It ends with most of them as half-forgotten outcasts - if not fugitives who will be remembered as traitors. Mobile Suit Gundam: the 08th MS Team is a tour de force. It's good enough to be instructive: it uses its medium to serve the story, it's full of atmosphere and character-building adversity, and it's a master-class in tone. Watch this anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Oct 9, 2019
Dragon Crisis!
(Anime)
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Not Recommended Spoiler
This review contains spoilers.
Someone should make a harem anime with a gay protagonist. I don't mean a show about a gay guy slowly building up a cadre of half-implicit male love interests. I mean the usual set-up where a nondescript dude is inexplicably attractive to every girl he meets, except that he's gay. Think of the drama that the character would be faced with, constantly enduring unrequited sexual advances from girls (an enviable situation to his classmates but deeply uncomfortable to himself), and unable to refuse them with the truth for fear of judgement from society, but still motivated to go through his adventures and meet ... all these girls out of pure-hearted altruism. A careful writer could use this premise not only for a metafictional analysis of the harem genre, but for incisive commentary on societal norms, adolescence, and the relationship between men and women. Dragon Crisis! is not that anime. It's a predicable little fantasy/harem show that's superficially about fighting monsters but in practice deals with teenage romance through the filter of trite wacky hijinks. I mention the idea of a gay harem protagonist because Dragon Crisis! made me think of it. There's a bit of an odd tendency in these shows. I think it emerges because they're trying to reconcile the wish-fulfillment elements with the need for adversity in narrative. Harem and ecchi shows go one of two ways: the protagonist is an unapologetic sex-pest but repellent to all women, or the reverse, as is the case with Dragon Crisis!'s Ryuuji: all the ladies love him but he's somewhere between oblivious and uncomfortable in response. I don't know of any anime whose protagonist really strikes the more life-like balance between the pair. The best example that comes to mind is Shinji Ikari, but his character displays a specific psychological issue: withdrawn self-repression that eventually explodes horrifically. I've never seen an anime that deals with the sexual aspect of the ordinary teenage male experience in a detailed or realistic manner - but that would be the territory of a smarter show than Dragon Crisis!. In the case of Dragon Crisis! there's an apparent disconnect between the protagonist and the target audience. Ryuuji slinks away from female affection as he would from the slowly-closing jaws of a yawning dragon. The boys watching probably wish he'd take a girl out once or twice and have some fun with his one legitimate superpower of attractiveness to the opposite sex - they would, and that's presumably what they've come to see. Although the show sort of slays my hatchlings by the end, my interpretation of the whole thing is that Ryuuji is gay but hasn't come to grips with it yet. And while he struggles with his sexuality, Dragon Crisis! has a hard time making sense of its own format. It makes a point of giving Ryuuji and token loli Rose linked backstories and combining powers, which would fit in a focused romance story, but then marginalizes their connection so that Ryuuji can hang out with the supporting female cast for two episodes at a time, and rather than staying around to build a big ensemble cast, those supporting girls mostly leave after their self-contained arcs are over, coming by now and again rather than sticking around as dedicated parts of the team. That makes the series feel less cohesive and the adventures less important. I can understand why it wouldn't be viable if there were 30 different girls or something, but this is a 12 episode series. Would it really have been so much to ask for them to come up with things for the ice dragon and cat girls to do in the background? What's really unfortunate is that the all-important introductory arc about Ryuuji meeting Rose is horribly paced, so that it can be compressed to three episodes and the other girls can have their mandated two episodes with the hapless gay boy. It's a real case study in how a story needs its breathing room. Rose starts out unable to speak and then begins using one-word sentences, and then I swear to God she makes the jump to complete grammatically-correct sentences in the space of a minute: she babbles a single word, someone asks her a question, and then she answers it with complete eloquence and no commentary from the rest of the characters. Then the arc's antagonist, Onyx, storms in, effortlessly smacks down Ryuuji, and threatens to butcher the kid until Rose comes with him. This is traditionally the point where Ryuuji would go through some training, become a man, make peace with his homosexuality, and then storm the villain's temple as a fully-formed badass and beat the girly-haired git until he's sorry. Instead of that, Ryuuji gets a cool knife. Apparently that's all it takes. He picks up the knife from a conveniently-nearby underground vault, learns to use it in two seconds, and then jumps right back into the action and gives Onyx what for. There's a pathetic little scene where Onyx tries convincing Rose that humans hate her for being a dragon, and she professes her hatred for humanity to the main characters in response. Ryuuji defuses the whole thing right away by saying that he likes her. And that's really too bad, because it undermines two scenes that could've been impactful. First, there's the moment when Rose tells Ryuuji that she hates him. For a second the characters just stand there shocked. That could've been a powerful scene if it had lasted longer or become more difficult to solve, because even a draconic treasure hoard of fancy knives are worthless against emotional manipulation. It could have forced the heroes to continue standing there in helpless awe, injecting an interesting sense of adversity and a healthy dose of heroic failure into the narrative. Then there's the scene where Ryuuji wins her back over. This is meant to be one of the big emotional payoffs of the series, and don't give me that standard spiel about the show being a comedy. In this scene, it's taking itself seriously. Because their relationship hasn't gone through any real build-up or tribulation, and because Rose's turn is so blatantly manipulative and superficial, this big emotional climax fatally crashes before it can give a single flap of its scaly wings. Onyx responds to Ryuuji's sweet knife by transforming into a giant dragon. Rose and Ryuuji have a paired power-up sequence and then Ryuuji swings his knife once, sends out a shockwave, and Onyx collapses. It's probably the most pitiful fight scene I've ever seen in an anime, and it's for the same reason of pacing. We need to see them trade blows and Ryuuji take some hits to convey the idea that Onyx is threatening. If he just collapses in an instant it simply makes him look pathetic, which, in turn, undermines the already negligible sense of progression these episodes were supposed to give the characters. This is the only time we see a dragon until the last episode, by the way - and it's just as much of a let-down then. If you've noticed the extremely tortured dragon-related metaphors I've been using so far, they're here because I decided at least someone in this relationship should make an effort to include some goddam dragons. What this show calls dragons are actually anime girls with wings. One girl called Maruga claims to be a white dragon and provides some exposition on dragon society, and I don't think she ever shows her wings. There's one scene where the baddies have an airplane and she stands on the runway, and I thought "Oh cool, she's about to transform and we'll see a dragon fight an airplane," and trust me, they thought of that idea! But Maruga doesn't transform. In another scene, she sprains her ankle and Ryuuji has to carry her home on his back. If she had wings, she would get by just fine, so there's really no doubt that she's just a bookish fraud with some magical powers. You know what, I think I've figured it out. We only see Onyx actually transform into a dragon and he goes down with one swing of the knife. I think what's happening is that he's actually inflating a giant dragon-shaped balloon, and he's no more dragon than Maruga is. There are no real dragons in this show, and their supposed presence is a metaphor of some kind. Since they're long and serpentine, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they represent phalluses in some way. That would certainly explain why Ryuuji has such an affinity for them, and it would re-contextualize Onyx's statement that Ryuuji can't coexist with dragons in an interesting way. That's to say nothing of the whole business about kissing a dragon causing it to mature, keeping in mind that maturation tends to be accompanied by growth, and that a dragon can't properly express its romantic feelings until it "matures" in this way. Yes, I like that: for Ryuuji in particular, the path to manhood involves eschewing the safe and familiar option of celibacy (represented by his cousin Eriko) as well as the societally-approved heterosexual marriage (represented by his classmate Misaki,) and instead reconciling with his feelings toward dragons. Although the prospect of a dragon maturing and showing its love for him is terrifying at first, accepting and expressing his own love of dragons is a positive step forward for him. Speaking of which, Ryuuji is something called a Level 10 Breaker, which is treated as if it's very impressive but doesn't really have a clear meaning. Characters at lower "level" consistently outperform him and there's a scene where he gets tested by being bound with ball and chain and thrown into a pool. He survives, but we don't see how, and he never really displays superhuman physical capabilities outside of that scene. In fact, if we return to the scene where he carries Maruga we can see that he gets tuckered out from the exertion of that task. If she were a dragon, she might weigh more than you'd think, but there are no dragons in this series, which proves that Ryuuji has the physical strength of a normal skinny kid. Therefore I choose to believe that the weights are also symbolic, representing the societal values that prevent him from expressing who he truly is. I'm convinced that saying "Breaker Level" is a cutesy way of talking about how many inches long his dick is. You see, there's a scene at a party about halfway in where his cousin euphemistically hands him his little dagger and says that he'll make a big impression if he shows off his "lost precious." Not long afterward, Ryuuji feels the need to inform some kind of institution about his massive Breaker Level (possibly the Guiness Book of World Records?) and they send a representative to verify it. The first thing she does when she arrives - and I swear I'm not making this up - is demand that he undress so she can take his measurement. (Ryuuji's body language and facial expressions during the nude measuring scene reveal that he is deeply terrified by the whole procedure, by the way - and he naturally decides that he's more comfortable having a guy do it, and so has his best friend, a character who frequently hugs Ryuuji out of relieved affection when he learns that he's not with girls, I might add, take his "measurements.") This interpretation does raise some more questions when one takes into account that Eriko is a breaker level 7, though. It's not so bad once you get past the introduction. The artwork is cute except when they add a strange-looking extra line under the characters' mouths, an effect which made me uncomfortable. It settles into an inoffensive episodic structure and there's a certain appeal to Ryuuji's almost parental concern for the girls and the simple laid-back scenes where the characters just do things like eat cookies together. There's a fun little episode that parodies horror films about halfway in which is probably the highlight. I thought the English knight guy was kind of funny, and it's nice that he is portrayed as a decent person despite being an anti-dragon antagonist. I liked the friend of Ryuuji's classmate Misaki who tried to help her get into his pants, as hopeless a cause as that was. I felt for Misaki too, actually. Her competition initially consisted of a loli and Ryuuji's cousin, so she probably could've managed if she wasn't such a nervous wreck. She got dragged through a lot of danger as his satellite, too, which I imagine would've made it rather galling when Ryuuji inevitably left the whole harem to hook up with his buddy Masato. Ultimately I can see a younger and less jaded boy than myself having some fun with the show - but only for its comedy. I don't think anyone would defend it as a touching romance or an insightful depiction of the awkwardness of growing up. There are no dragons in this show, and the villains are so weak that it can hardly be said to contain a crisis. Therefore, its proper title is "!," which I feel represents it well: it's a meaningless but inoffensive burst of noise, like the screech of an anime girl. I have one last point of speculation to share about !, which is that it was planned to be longer at some point. The rules of its world never get properly expanded upon, it's stated that Ryuuji's Breaker Level will let him use lots of powerful weapons but he only gets the knife, and most notably there are the beginnings of a storyline about the Society (the lads who sent a woman to measure Ryuuji's willy) being corrupt because they hoard magical artifacts and refuse to use them for the benefit of civilians. That potential arc winds up completely forgotten. If they did intend to make more of it, then that's another indication of what has already been proven: that civilization at large has deemed ! a failure. It was rushed into a single 12-episode series and no one remembers it or cares to defend it now. That being the case, my decision to pick on it some more is clearly redundant. Why have I bothered, then? I couldn't help myself. I saw a chance to make dick jokes and I took it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Dec 31, 2018
No Game No Life
(Anime)
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Not Recommended
No Game No Life is pure wish fulfillment. Every element of it is built for that, from the protagonists' superior intelligence to their immediate and lavish success (including Sora's waifu harem) to their escape and rejection of the real world. Life is a bad game, in the words of the leads, and they speak for the presumed audience. Seeing people who can't fit in here shine elsewhere, when their unrecognized talents are allowed to take effect, is obviously meant to strike a chord with people who are unsatisfied with their own lives.
It's rather shameless about it. I can't imagine a young man having the nerve ... to watch NGNL with his mother in the room, even if he might enjoy it in private. Camera angles and effects of motion or wind are deliberately used to expose the female characters' breasts or underwear, and the game-based rules of the world are frequently exploited to create sexual situations. The latter is not strictly a contrivance, because Sora is a sexually frustrated character and the show's fascination with these things mirrors his own - as well as that of the target audience. For the most part this isn't that unusual. Most of these components are standard to the ecchi genre, to which NGNL belongs. What's slightly less standard is that it uses those techniques on an eleven-year-old character. When combined with the fact that this particular character is the protagonist/audience surrogate's sister, this element alone is enough to make the show understandably repellent to a lot of people. Its success as a franchise does not appear to have been hampered too much by that - at the very least, it has the marketing right. Judging a wish-fulfillment show by its depth or narrative consistency is to miss the point somewhat. It's not too different from judging pornography by its acting. These things are not the goals of the works in question. NGNL doesn't waste much time contradicting the established traits of its characters and destroying some of the sense of its world, but if doing so helps its visceral appeal that serves its goals. From that angle of analysis, it's the right sacrifice to make. If it's only about wish-fulfillment, maybe NGNL should have just begun with Sora in the role of God and his harem fully stocked. Instead, it makes choices that theoretically make it better as a traditional story at the cost of the wish-fulfillment, like giving the siblings weaknesses. It goes on to bungle that, from a narrative standpoint. The siblings' primary weaknesses are co-dependence, fear of crowds, and difficulty with people. Either by forgetting those weaknesses or contriving a way to make them irrelevant, the story nullifies them all within its twelve episode run. Sora and Shiro successfully play out a game and win while separated, despite turning into helpless wrecks the first time they're out of sight of one another. The show allows the weakness to be debilitating only as long as there are no stakes present. Sora becomes a charming, generous, sociable guy when its time to earn a new waifu. The siblings lose their cool when exposed to what they think is Tokyo - and then completely regain control when they learn that it isn't, before that fraudulent weakness can do anything to harm them. In all likelihood, this inconsistency exists because of thoughtlessness on the part of Yuu Kamiya, the author of the original light novel. It works out from the standpoint of wish-fulfillment, though. People don't really want to be gods. They want to face challenges and overcome them easily. That's why it's better for Sora to have to win his harem one by one, and why it works better when he has these illusory weaknesses. If we accept its capacity for wish-fulfillment as the only valid criteria to judge it by, and assign it a numerical value accordingly, NGNL might well get a perfect score. But that doesn't sit right with me. I think it would look silly at the top of my list. In my estimation, great artistic significance is a necessary condition to earning a place there, and NGNL does not have that. Even a slightly lower score like an 8/10 would feel inappropriate, because it indicates excellence. I don't think NGNL is excellent. I think it's crass, poorly planned, cliche, and often tiresome. If I were to make such criticisms of a work of pornography, the defense would state that they were irrelevant. But I don't think a fan of NGNL would do the same. He would try to defend its story and its characterization. Thus, at the risk of closed-mindedness, I'll have to judge it the way I would judge a normal work of graphic fiction. And by that standard it comes up short. Sora and Shiro cannot really be the protagonists of an interesting story - at least not in the world of NGNL, where all conflict is resolved by games. They are invincible there. The series begins with them defeating the God of that world. Nothing they do from then on contains any tension or doubt. Their victory is a foregone conclusion. The story manufactures drama by pretending otherwise. In one goofy scene, Sora has to rely on outside intervention from his sister to win at Othello against a character who should stand no chance against him in that game. Othello is a simple board game with easily-understood rules: precisely the type of thing where Sora and Shiro reign supreme. This doesn't appear to be some whim of the character's either. The show tries to pretend he can lose there, but it's completely transparent. At best, the implications of the world are under-explored. They create a kind of brute lawlessness. Perhaps one could work and build savings there, but he could always lose everything in a game. This would undoubtedly change the way people act. Things like national borders would be difficult to enforce, because an intruder could always force his way through just by winning games - but this might lead to the creation of a game-playing warrior class which enforces the borders. NGNL does not deal with this. The nation-state itself would have to be re-evaluated, because armies would become pointless. Yet NGNL's world resembles any other fantasy story. It changes the method of conflict resolution but does not think through the consequences. Teto, that world's God, pulls quite a fast one on the siblings. He tells them that all the games in his world follow simple well-defined rules. This is quickly proven false: they end up playing a game of chess where the pieces have human wills. These wills do not follow well-defined rules. The resulting game resembles the imagination-based playing of young children, where the rules are constantly re-invented by both parties so that they will not have to admit defeat. Naturally, the socially-inept Sora becomes an incredibly charismatic leader for the duration of this game (a skill that he would not have praticed in the games he played on Earth, which never contain that kind of human element.) Later they play a video game where their own physical characteristics effect their characters' stats. Elements of the real world they hate so much intrude on this perfect new game-based world, but the siblings don't complain - or even notice. A lot of the dialog deals with the concept of strength proceeding from weakness. This idea is supposed to be personified by NGNL's heroes, but that is blatantly untrue. Sora and Shiro's success comes from their absurd intelligence, which can only be understood as a great strength. It's the most significant theme of the story, and it is quickly contradicted by its own events. The siblings even use their phones constantly without depleting the batteries, in a country where electricity has yet to be discovered. The characters, world, and themes immediately fall to shambles. NGNL gets all this wrong in just twelve episodes and still finds time for its annoying, overdone sexual humor. Unless it's your first anime, chances are good not much of that will seem new to you. Ever seen an anime where the girls are bathing and the guys act as if sneaking in to watch them is a kind of life-affirming quest? There are a couple of redemptive elements. In some of the games, there's enough detail and believably to the method the twins use that seeing it unfold is entertaining. They defeat one character who has every other advantage by using knowledge from their own world, and that makes sense. There's a conflict between Sora and a character named Clammy that arises because of two legitimate but conflicting points of view, rather than sheer malice on the part of the latter. It also has a visually appealing art style - that's its most uncontested strength. No Game No Life is lazy and exploitative. Most of its artistic choices were made not from interest or inspiration, but for marketing. It's cheap, which is why it gets done all the time. Its one particular strength is that it makes good wish-fulfillment if that's what you're looking for. If it isn't, a critique like this must only serve to reinforce what you had already guessed by reading the synopsis.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Dec 30, 2018
Angel Beats!
(Anime)
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Recommended
What a let down. I went into Angel Beats expecting a sloppy narrative I could tear to pieces. Instead I got something essentially competent. I suppose that's what I get for using the relations page of the "Anime Uber-Elitist Club" to satisfy my masochism.
It's only appropriate to evaluate an anime on its own terms. It wouldn't make sense to complain that an hour-long comedy film lacks the detailed characterization and historical parallels found in Legend of the Galactic Heroes. So let's dispense with complaints like the one-note nature of Angel Beats' side characters. It's a thirteen episode series and its primary goals are related to ... humor, action sequences, and the development of a small cast of main characters with half-episode backstories. Leaving the side cast to their joke roles is the right choice. There's no time for them. Style over substance is the cliche most commonly associated with Angel Beats. It's not completely unfair, because style is the stronger axle in its case. P.A. Works spared no effort or expense: the coloring and shading are particularly well-done, and the animation is fluid when compared with the competition. The opening is especially high-quality. They produced a lot of solid original music for the in-story band, whose performances are synchronized to to the action for a stylish, exciting effect. Even the use of title cards and headers is well-conceived and high-effort. The show is fast-paced and well-structured. It manages to convey the majority of its exposition in ways that are entertaining to watch: Otonashi's introduction to the world, for instance, is tense and exciting. He has to rely on the accounts of Yuri and Tenshi to decide what to do, and both are evidently unreliable. Trusting the wrong one could be a matter of life and death - or so it seems at the time. The humor is also a strong point. I almost never laugh at Japanese comedy, but there were several different occasions that I found chuckle-worthy. The characters have enough charisma to be enjoyable to watch and to give the viewer a sense of investment. They build relationships gradually and believably, and they bring different perspectives to the situation that play off one another in some interesting ways. Angel Beats is consistently entertaining as a result of these strengths. It's easy to imagine a lot of people binging it in one sitting. That all counts for something. Don't be too quick to disdain style in comparison to substance. Most shows have neither. But let's discuss substance. Angel Beats is loosely based around the Catholic concept of Purgatory. It's set in an afterlife designed to bring fulfillment to teenagers who had tragic lives. Some people say it's a unique premise, but that isn't really the case. The essential dynamics and the school setting are familiar to us all: so much of Japanese media uses metaphor to depict people seeking happiness through the amelioration of certain regrets. They love to give physical form to emotion like that over there. It even bears a resemblance to some western media like "Ghost Whisperer." Angel Beats becomes a bit more atypical through the characters' existential rebellion. They oppose God Himself for creating a world in which they had to live through their horrible and unjust lives. This is a concept I have some respect for, and I like how it develops too: that rebellion ends up hurting them more than anything else, because they are only generating meaningless chaos. It's suitable for people who have been exposed to equally-meaningless tragedy and to their immature status - it can even be likened to a refusal to grow up. That is made clear at a few points in the story, where characters sabotage their own fulfillment, or that of others, in order to stay where they are. They eventually decide to move on, which is represented in the story by reincarnation. That serves a convenient secondary purpose - characters with complete arcs are promptly booted from the story. The backstories and the plot are completely unrelated. This was unavoidable since the story takes place in the afterlife. That's unfortunate, because it means that the show is incapable of creating the kind of satisfaction that comes from a completely cohesive narrative. But they're still relevant because they inform the characters' actions. Yuri, who had the cruelest and most unjust life, is the progenitor of the rebellion and has the hardest time abandoning it. In contrast, Otonashi, who wished to become a doctor, ends up taking on a healer's role by providing the alternative. Those past tragedies are explored through long flashbacks. The good pacing shows here: they are usually strong - or at least attention-grabbing - as self-contained stories, so that they don't feel slow or boring. They also provide a distinct separation between the darkest parts of the show and the comedy, so that Angel Beats cannot rightly be accused of containing jarring tonal shifts. Outside of the backstories, none of the violence has any real weight, due to the mechanics of the world - no one can die or even suffer injury. It's a good decision for comedic purposes. It lets the show use morbid jokes without destroying the tone. A lot of the comedy proceeds from the mechanics of the afterlife and how they change people's behavior. But it introduces a separate problem. Nothing is ever at stake in Angel Beats. No one can die, and pain is rendered meaningless through the comedy. The threat of disappearing exists at first but is ultimately undermined. Another mechanic gets introduced to give a sense of threat for the last episodes. It ends up being meaningless too. Losing possessions is irrelevant because anything can be magically fashioned from dirt - which is the show's biggest mistake, because it undermines large segments of the story. There's an entire episode where the characters are trying to save an armory, although its entire stock could be recreated from soil. There's a plot point later involving mass theft - an unnecessary risk in light of this mechanic. The show can take refuge from that loss of tension because it is a comedy, but it isn't exclusively a comedy, and the rest of it suffers - in particular, the final "tragic" story-beat falls flat. Things get a little messier later on. It's revealed that most of the initial conflict was a result of a simple misunderstanding, which is difficult to believe because of the difference in scale between the conflict and the misunderstanding. When the final twists are all revealed, there's a poorly-explained exception to the normal rules of the world, designed to allow Otonashi to go there. There's a cheap storyline involving Tenshi's character. She makes a heroic sacrifice which will supposedly change her as a person - then the story negates it. This is contrived to keep her previous character as is, and it further undermines the show's attempts at a dramatic plot. It's not too hard to complain some more. For example, Otonashi's backstory covers a time frame that does not gel with his supposed death at seventeen. But what a nitpick that is. There is a connection between Otonashi and Tenshi. It's astronomically unlikely that they would meet the way they do. I can imagine some people calling this contrived. I don't mind it. It seems like it was meant to depict them as a pair of destined lovers, in essence. There's no great reason why that concept can't exist in this story. Ultimately, Angel Beats is damaged by its lack of strength as much as its flaws. The main characters end up being two-dimensional rather than truly deep. Otonashi, for example, doesn't have a very dynamic personality at all. He is mostly defined by good-will toward everyone. The strength of his character comes more from verisimilitude than depth. He's able to joke around and build relationships with the others, which humanizes him but doesn't give the viewer much to think about. Tenshi might be the weakest, since she lacks much of any individual will, which I suspect was done to enhance her appeal as a waifu-bait character. There is some merit to the themes of trauma, growing up, and moving on, but it's nothing so tremendous in terms of either depth or execution. It has none of the characteristics of a masterpiece, except perhaps its stylistic strength. It has none of the characteristics of a train-wreck either. If its production values were taken away, I would still call it good.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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