RakiRaki's Profile - Reviews

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BirthdayFeb 18
JoinedFeb 12, 2014

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Apr 21, 2018

Fate/Extra: Last Encore (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

At the time of writing this review, there is a trailer making the rounds online for the upcoming film Christopher Robin in which a CG Winnie the Pooh talks to Ewan McGregor in the instantly recognisable voice of Jim Cummings. To hear this voice, which has become so ubiquitous through Disney as to be permanently associated with the character, coming from the mouth of a CG teddy bear in live action is both deeply nostalgic and unspeakably confusing. The effects of seeing the Fate franchise moved into SHAFTland are not quite so dramatic, but comparably bizarre.

SHAFT are a studio of limited gifts. Their works are instantly recognisable, ... and although their style is undoubtedly their own, it teeters on the verge of predictability after seeing two or three anime filled with the same abstract imagery and sharp colours; meandering monologues and jarring close-ups; shiny-skinned and scantily-clad girls; characters who tilt their heads back; and the myriad other tells that alert informed viewers that they are watching another SHAFT production. Whilst this is an unmistakable asset to an anime whose themes and characters accord with the SHAFTian style, such as Puella Magi Madoka Magica, it is liable to distract and irritate in other circumstances.

Thankfully, the opaque chuunibyou babble that characterises all of Kinoko Nasu's artistic output dovetails nicely with SHAFT's predilection for directionless talking head monologues delivered either in ironic deadpan or with ironic pep. This lends a certain lightness to Fate/EXTRA Last Encore's inevitable rhapsodic elaborations upon the, uh, Moon Cell (?), which by ufotable's trusty and exquisitely detailed pen may have been treated with grim earnestness. Wait, is this a good thing?

Perhaps it doesn't matter. Despite an excruciatingly SHAFTian first episode in which protagonist Hakuno Kishinami is introduced as a student in an virtual reality institution apparently modelled off Madoka Kaname's middle school—an identical glass-walled design is used in both anime, so we can only assume the programmers were big Madoka fans—Fate/EXTRA Last Encore turns out to be at least as entertaining as the Monogatari series and less time-consuming. Much of this entertainment is admittedly thanks to the gender-swapped Nero Claudius, who is as likeable a Saberface as Type-Moon have created; apparently written under the reasonable assumption that nothing Fate-related will sell without an Artoria clone attached, Fate/EXTRA Last Encore truly goes the distance in its reliance upon its ostentatious and proud heroine to carry the anime on charisma alone.

Can SHAFT be blamed for their emphasis on Nero? Given the willingness of masochists worldwide to endure endless Monogatari iterations on the promise of more Senjougahara content, the allure of a charismatic female babbler appears to be a winning strategy for the studio. It is undeniable: the quality of Fate/EXTRA Last Encore is directly proportional to the screen-time and dialogue allotted to Nero, hence the nigh unwatchable first episode in which she is absent. She preens, she proclaims, she proselytises. She says 'umu!', which is attractively declarative. She has gigantic breasts and knee-high golden armoured boots with stupendous heels.

Umu! This anime has characters. Besides Nero! It has characters. A few of them are even familiar to us. Rin Tohsaka plays a supporting role as an amateur thigh boots model. I am sure this role will prove satisfactory to Tohsaka's ravenous enthusiast community, which perdures as resolutely as Saber's. We also have small appearances by Shinji and Sakura Matou‚ the former of whom is as characteristically unsympathetic as his ordinary iteration, but with added head tilt. The rest of the cast is composed of new characters, including the requisite heroic spirits. SHAFT takes advantage of the freedom that the virtual reality setting provides by using the environment occupied by the spirit as part of their set piece e.g. Robin Hood appears in a forest area.

These new characters inflate the cast, but unlike earlier Fate adaptations like Fate/Zero and Fate/Apocrypha, the focus of Fate/EXTRA Last Encore is quite narrowly on our protagonists, forgoing a broader view of all the Holy Grail War participants. Whereas those anime conveyed the impression that the various combatants were in equal danger, with no overwhelming preference shown towards any character, Hakuno and Nero's enemies are predominantly presented as antagonists, and they receive limited characterisation before being dispatched. On the one hand, this makes the show more predictable; but it also proves more economical given the episode count of ten, and it's hard to argue with this approach when Nero is clearly the central driver of the plot, urging the unmotivated Hakuno to continue his fight.

Umu! This anime has a plot. Besides Nero! It has a plot. After unexpectedly summoning UmU, Hakuno discovers that he is the first Master to contract a Servant in this ambivalently apocalyptic virtual reality future world for a thousand years; however, he has lost his memory of everything before his last moments at school, making him effectively a brainless magic meat puppet. With little else to do besides study Nero's breasts in the VR thermae (unintentionally satirising the otaku lifestyle more ferociously than any of those tired light novel adaptations with otaku protagonists), he successively traverses the computer generated environments of the moon machine reality's 'strata', including a city, a forest and a ghostly dreamland. On each stratum, he engages in the standard combat between Masters that is the hallmark of Fate. As such, the other Masters are fought in a discrete and consecutive fashion rather than in a free-for-all.

Umu! So far so simple. The computer generated nature of these strata is actually the point we should emphasise, because it permits SHAFT to express their incomprehensible visual style to its most fully abstract expression in sharp congruity with the comparably incomprehensible dialogue. Altogether, this produces a mental effect unprecedented in anime history or phenomenology, which I would metaphorically describe as the gradual transformation of the brain into fluffy fresh cotton candy. I touched the Swirl of the Root and, unable to handle the truth of the universe, I ceased to exist as a continuous consciousness. I have rejoined the Akashic Records and my physical shell hosts but sugary sweet pink happy fluff created by my vestigial organs as a hopeless immune response to the mental onslaught of Fate/EXTRA Last Encore.

Umu! Okay, I am back. I cannot tell if Fate/EXTRA Last Encore is a good anime. I believe I enjoy it unironically on the basis that it was probably produced ironically; but because I cannot verify this, I also harbour a suspicion that I may be inappropriately enjoying an autistic man's severely disturbed attempt to contrive 'human drama'. Actually, on second thought, this describes at least 30% of my experiences with any media involving Type-Moon and SHAFT individually, so it follows that overlap between the two would produce this outcome. There is no possibility of escape: this anime must be accepted.

Umu! Let's begin again: I cannot tell if Fate/EXTRA Last Encore is an anime that expresses a capacity to be enjoyed by a wide audience, but it will probably be appreciated by anybody who actually wants to watch it. Yorokobe, shounen.

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Apr 21, 2018

Fate/Apocrypha (Anime) add

Recommended

There is no excuse. The heresy must be eliminated. Fate/Apocrypha is a good anime.

It is not, mind you, a groundbreaking or even great anime. The first episode is an excretable exposition dump that it stutters through at cocaine speed with morphine enthusiasm. The themes are fairly shallow, despite the dubiously intentional irony of a late climactic scene in which three Christian heroic spirits appear to have trouble identifying a Gnostic heresy until the apparently irreligious homunculus Sieg reminds Joan of Arc (yes, Joan of Arc) that salvation doesn't come from escaping the material world. The art and animation are unexceptional and lapse from time to time; characters ... stumble off-model or lose their shading. The OST does a fine job at setting atmosphere and building tension, but the sound design over-relies on an odd thudding bass noise for powerful attacks during fight scenes, usually the Noble Phantasms (translation: big superpowers) of heroic spirits. The characters follow conventional and predictable patterns of development, and their designs are not comparable to the iconic and ubiquitous images of Saber and Rin Tohsaka—with perhaps one major exception. It has little of Fate/Zero's severity and intrigue.

Fate/Apocrypha is not remarkable in its capacity to inspire awe and fear, ecstasy and agony; but it is remarkable fun. It is Fate as B-movie horror. It is set in darkest Romania. Dracula is a character; he has long green hair. Frankenstein's monster is summoned as a cute girl who communicates in sniffs and grunts. A crossdressing paladin plays a pivotal role in the story. A campy William Shakespeare narrates and comments on events as they unfold. Joan of Arc has enormous breasts. While the gravitas of Fate/Zero may be absent, Fate/Apocrypha is more tonally consistent in its Gothic dramatics, displays of violence and sensuality, and copious sentimentality.

The twist on the Holy Grail War in Fate/Apocrypha is that the conflict is waged between two teams composing seven mages each rather than seven against each other. This variation, called the Great Holy Grail War, is fought between the London-based Mage Association and a Romanian clan called Yggdmillennia, who are respectively represented in their war as teams red and black, the traditional colours of gaming computers and school shooters. As is frequently the case for Fate, this premise carries much of the anime's intrigue and provides the large cast of characters with clarity of purpose.

It is on this basis that Fate/Apocrypha's success rests. The ostensible main character of the show is Sieg, a newly made homunculus who is unexpectedly gifted with the heart of Siegfried, a heroic spirit summoned by the Yggdmillennia family. He is largely a cipher, and his development, although serviceable, is nothing special. He learns of himself as a conscious individual, confronts the good and evil of humanity, and falls in love with Joan of Arc. Joan herself, a Servant summoned as a neutral Ruler to arbitrate between the red and black teams, largely follows the model of the Artoria character in her self-sacrificial commitment to justice. Mordred, another prominent character who resembles Artoria physically rather than personally, is largely defined by her resentful relationship to the latter—daddy issues Saber. These stories do not prove exceptional on their own. Yet the anime rises above the sum of its parts not only because of its consistent tone but also the integrity of its plotting, which carries every character through their development in a satisfactory fashion.

To expound on this point: as a means of understanding how Fate/Apocrypha's storytelling manages to entertain despite the anime's deficiencies, it is instructive to consider Re:Zero, another light novel adaptation whose failures are the mirror of Fate/Apocrypha's successes. Fate/Apocrypha and Re:Zero are anime with enormous casts, which expose a vulnerability in both: with so many characters spreading thin the show's limited timeframe, how do you balance their stories?

Fate/Apocrypha solves this issue by the Great Holy Grail War itself: there are plot contingencies that make each character relevant even if their individual developments fail to engage viewers. Re:Zero, meanwhile, is reliant to the point of absurdity upon Natsuki Subaru, its protagonist, whose development is so foregrounded that there are no contingencies of plot or character that could possibly impede or distract from his implacable movement towards his beloved Emilia. The plot of Re:Zero is borderline indescribable because it merely occurs to Subaru as an afterthought. He is troubled by an assassin, a dog shaman and a cultist over the course of the series, but these obstacles are effectively irrelevant except as vehicles to progress his character. The infamous scene in which he rejects breakout character Rem also marks the end of her prominence in the anime, because her role has been fulfilled at that stage. Characters appear and are discarded; the mistake of many viewers was to believe that Rem mattered as an individual character rather than merely a reflection of Subaru's outsider identity and incomplete development. Re:Zero's setting is overstuffed and underutilised, whereas Fate/Apocrypha never allots its roles without purpose.

For example, the death of the Frankenstein's monster character in an early episode of Fate/Apocrypha could have served merely as a dramatic touch to the first major battle of the Great Holy Grail War and a means of developing Caules, the Yggdmillennia mage who served as her Master. Instead, the character's death comes back to influence the outcome of a battle late in the anime. In other words, Fate/Apocrypha knows its strengths well. In an action-oriented and melodramatic show like this, the tightness of the plot can afford to supersede the intricacies of individual characters. Despite the grand scale of this anime, there is surprisingly little bloat.

With all that said, it would undersell Fate/Apocrypha to suggest that its characters are simply cogs in the machinery of the plot. Provided you have the stomach for sentimentality, there are moments of genuine pathos. In Fate/Zero, the camp appeal of characters like Caster and Ryuunosuke threatened to undermine the grave tone of the anime; here, excess is the name of the game and exaggerated characters augment the experience. Indeed, despite a weak first episode that fails to establish tone thanks to its excessive exposition, the error is corrected immediately in the follow-up when Astolfo cheerfully announces himself and encourages his comrades on the black team to make their introductions. From this moment, we know what to expect.

Okay, it's worth talking about the trap. If the sheer quantity of fan work is a fair measure, Astolfo is the breakout character of Fate/Apocrypha. His design has proven appealing—his paladin's armour, with its golden ornamentation and furred white cape, is ostentatious and androgynous, reflecting his gregariousness and effeminacy as well as it does his intuitive sense of justice. Characters of unshakeable idealism are standard fare for Fate, providing a counterbalance to the dim and violent world they inhabit, but Astolfo's light touch approach to goodness is unique, and appropriate to this less serious show. Unlike Artoria and Fate/Apocrypha's Joan of Arc, who labour for the good under the sombre burden of divine will, Astolfo's goodness is emotional, instinctive and obvious: he just does the right thing. Compared to Sieg or Joan, he does not develop much and we see little of his inner life, yet his proactivity, force of character, and anchoring sense of moral rectitude are enough to draw the anime's events around him and give him an outsized presence in a story that relies primarily on its audacity rather than its depth. If there is any really great character in Fate/Apocrypha, it is Astolfo. The only competition is probably Mordred, whose chemistry with her Master, the necromancer Sisigo, is charming; they serve as the wild cards of the plot and their development together is sweet and cathartic. Besides them, it's all about best boy.

The ultimate question of Fate/Apocrypha is to what extent it deserves credit for achieving its limited aims as well as it does. It may not possess the depth or seriousness demanded by those who stand waiting for the next Fate/Zero, nor can it compete with ufotable's stunning art and animation, but for a vestigial appendage on the greater body of Fate works, the inflation in its value as an adaptation is substantially more dramatic. Fate/Apocrypha began as an esoteric irrelevancy two steps away from fanfiction and was adapted as a minor opus. For a work whose name literally declares its discontinuity from the Fate canon, this is an overwhelming achievement. There is really nothing meaningfully wrong with it.

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Dec 3, 2017

Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu (Anime) add

Not Recommended

There is a particular kind of incompetence on display in Re:Zero. A popular 2016 isekai anime in the mold of Sword Art Online, Re:Zero adapts a light novel series of the same name, and indeed its particular incompetence is frequently found in light novel adaptations, though I cannot imagine that it is improved in the original work. It is the incompetence of a story that has no idea what it is about but is determined to continue anyway. Re:Zero is notable for being among the worst offenders in this category of incompetence, because it is not wholly a disaster on an episode-by-episode basis, making its ultimate failures all the more glaring. ...

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Nov 1, 2017

Shinsekai yori (Anime) add

Recommended

Shinsekai Yori is that rare thing, an anime adaptation of a novel—not a light novel, but a novel, a capital-N novel—and it shows. The plot unfolds gradually and deliberately, free from the limits of episodic stories that reliably return their characters to the status quo. Indeed, characters age and develop over the course of years; romances, families, and individuals rise and fall. Its scope is panoramic: it creates a complete picture of an alternate world centuries into the future and a small community living there, allowing the writing's focus to transgress from the psychological lives of the characters into disquieting political allegory while remaining thematically congruent. ... At the centre of these themes is the question of appearance vs. reality, truth vs. mystery. Are there truths that should not be known to the world? Can the things we love be used to control us and conceal the truth; and is it sometimes better to keep it that way? Up until the end, there are unresolved questions about the strange idyllic world of Kamisu 66, the rural town that is the fulcrum of the story, and it is unclear whether such questions should be resolved when their answers have such devastating consequences.

Shinsekai Yori is named for Dvorak's popular symphony of the same name; it is interesting to note that the 'From the New World' symphony and its iconic melody in the second movement were originally meant to evoke the mystery and promise of a very different New World: America, at a time when the predominant European attitude towards the United States had not fomented into disappointment and resentment. In a similar way, the wonder of the Japanese pastoral in the early episodes—the harmonious, isolated world of magic and mystery—steadily declines over the course of Shinsekai Yori. When the melody is reprised in the last arc of the show, it summons not mystery and potential but loss: the loss of innocence, the loss of moral certainty, and loss of that new world where great things were possible. New World becomes Old World, with all its vices.

The show principally follows the lives of five characters who grow up in Kamisu 66 and belong to the same class group at school, where they learn to control and command the psychokinetic powers that led to their world's state of technological regression. After an encounter with a sentient library robot from humanity's past, the twelve-year-old characters are exposed to the first of several revelations about their world that continue throughout the show and dramatically affect all five of them personally and psychologically. These revelations focus on the horror and transformation that human societies underwent after the appearance of psychokinetic humans who could kill with a thought; but rather than emphasise merely the nature of these powers as a lesser show might, Shinsekai Yori uses these developments symbolically and allegorically to comment on human psychology and social organisation. There is also something unmistakably Japanese about it; the extreme accommodations necessitated by these psychokinetic humans, or 'PKs', including genetic modifications that prevent them from killing other people, smell something like Tokugawa era enforcements of isolation and harmony. Japan in the days of sakoku was the only country to successfully rid itself entirely of firearms; we are wont to criticise this kind of self-imposed isolation, but when the alternative suggested by Shinsekai Yori is a nightmarish chaos in which indolent despots mass-murder powerless commoners, it raises the uncomfortable notion that such enforcements may sometimes be not only necessary but good.

This unhappy impression is compounded by the psychological effects that these revelations have upon the five children, which have far-reaching ramifications in the tiny community of Kamisu 66. There is a consistent suggestion of an aristocratic ethos in the show: that good personal character is the only factor that plays a part in whether one is worthy of power and forbidden knowledge. Saki, the main character, is singled out as possessing unique mental strength, while Mamoru, a gentle-hearted boy who spends his time drawing pictures of his unrequited crush Maria, is unable to emotionally handle the unpleasant realities to which he is exposed. This ends in disaster when he becomes a target for the Board of Education and runs away from home; Maria, following him into the snowy wilderness, bears his child, a birth whose consequences are ruinous in the final arc of the show, when the baby returns as a Fiend—a PK who is able to overcome their genetic programming and use their powers against humans. Similarly, Saki's friend and crush Shun, a kind and intelligent boy expected to excel, is overcome by his own powers, which leak destructively into the world. The nature of this disorder is, in a none-too-subtle metaphor, described as rooted in the subconscious mind.

It undersells Shinsekai Yori to describe its setting as a dystopia, although it bears a particular resemblance to the sedated society of Brave New World, where drugs and sex are used as a means of political control. The things we love blind us: the library robot explains how the social engineers of their community encouraged young people to relieve stress and tension through sex, heterosexual and homosexual, like bonobos, so they ignore the mysteries of their condition. Characteristically, the only one to resist this is the mentally strong Saki: we're not monkeys, she says. At that early point of the story, there is still an idealism that resonates in her words. If the Kamisu 66 Ethics Committee and Board of Education represent the enforcers of harmony and a Tokugawa-style consensus, Saki seems initially like a Western transplant, a humanist or Christian seeking truth; cynicism sets in later as she is groomed by Tomiko, the head of the Ethics Committee, to become the next leader of the community and guard the hidden knowledge that undergirds their society.

Indeed, the position of the humanist is occupied by a very different character in the last arc of Shinsekai Yori. Early in the show, when the twelve-year-old children are seeking to escape discovery after speaking to the library robot, they encounter two members of a genetically engineered slave race called Monster Rats (bakenezumi) who help them to evade capture. The first, Squealer, is a sweaty and dishonest groveller whose supplicating attitude to humans belies an apparently self-interested core. The other is Kiroumaru, a strong but gentle retainer who shows a loyalty and kindness to the children that reads as more genuine. These two become central figures as the characters age into adulthood. Squealer turns against the monarch of his colony, overthrows her in revolution, and encourages other rats to do the same in their own colonies—that he would eventually rebel against his human masters also is a predictable development, and the show's final conflict focuses on this attempt by Squealer to seek, in his view, liberation for his people. Kiroumaru assists the humans in their struggle to repress the rebels.

The injustice of the rats' condition is not underplayed. The last secret unearthed in the show is that this race of slaves is not the result of genetic experimentation on naked mole rats, as initially believed, but human beings, modified to appear like rats so that they could be killed by other humans; they are the descendants of the commoners who escaped mass-murder by the PKs. Yet, as we see the contrast of the underhanded Squealer and the dignified Kiroumaru, the text does not make much effort to justify the former's efforts until its conclusion, when he stands defiantly on trial against a panel of PKs who mock his humanist declaration. 'We are human!' he cries; and is promptly sentenced to an eternity of physical and mental torture, kept alive as a bundle of nerves and slime. As for Kiroumaru, he admits to Saki that he too had republican fantasies once, but abandoned them and instead sought to do the best he could to improve himself within the system. This cynicism is unexpected in popular media: to accept iniquity as a natural condition and endure its travails is not a comforting moral imperative, especially to Western humanists.

In the final moments of Shinsekai Yori, we see Saki and her partner Satoru raising children in their thirties. They are the only two remaining of the five schoolmates who encountered the library robot. Together with their progeny, they express hope for a kinder world; but this is not Squealer's hope for universal justice or a transformation of society. Their only expectation appears to be for personal justice, for the secret truths and mysteries of their society to be guarded not with jealousy or paranoia but rather good will and charity. In perhaps the show's most subtly dark moment, Squealer is extralegally granted the release of death by Saki; his truth will go unspoken and unknown to the world, but Saki decides that she still bears a responsibility to that truth. In the end, therefore, the virtue of truth is only apparent to the ones equipped to handle its implications. No, this is no New World; it is the Old World, with all its vices.

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Dec 17, 2015

Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works 2nd Season (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

I don't get it, guys. I don't.

Why Unlimited Blade Works? Why this underwhelming, anticlimactic excuse for a spluttering car crash of a visual novel route? Did ufotable have to faithfully adapt every wheel-spinning two hour conversation in which Pollyanna protagonist Shirou is repeatedly called a dweeb for his goofy idealism? Did they have to make sure we were reminded what a complete loser Archer is every time he appears, legs spread like his balls are prickly pears, perched on some conveniently placed rubble? What is actually appealing about Archer when his only major personal distinction from fellow Fate/stay night snarkster Lancer is his adolescent moral ... nihilism? What is there to admire about a character who is so unimaginative that his inner world is literally a wasteland full of imitation swords? Why do people like Archer?

Why did ufotable pick the route where the mid-boss is Caster and the teacher with the upside-down glasses? How did they fail so hard at making a pair of cynical murderers interesting? Why include a half-hearted tribute episode to the tragic homunculus Illya in the route where Illya and her Servant, Berserker, are a mere afterthought, as though ufotable realised that she deserved more attention than Caster ever did? Why couldn't we just have had the Berserker vs. Saber fight like in the Fate route? Why couldn't they at least have spared a thought for the narrative arc of poor neglected Saber, left to wilt after the misery she withstood in Fate/zero? Why did every free second of this show have to be filled with endless identical monologues about youthful idealism?

On that note, what is even the point of adapting a route where breakout character and franchise cash-cow Saber is fully relegated to the background throughout and possesses barely any agency of her own? Why did they retain the awful premature ejaculation of an ending, in which school rapist Shinji turns into the Smooze and Shirou has the worst fight ever with the supposed King of Heroes, Gilgamesh, who can't even be bothered to change out of his chavvy streetclothes? What kind of action anime peaks with two angry men yelling repetitive dialogue at each other while swords fly everywhere? Why is Saber's only half-decent action scene a stilted sword battle with a literal fake Servant whose entire shtick adds up to a convoluted version of the air conditioner's dilemma in The Brave Little Toaster (I was designed to stick in a temple! I like being stuck in this stupid temple!)?

Why was the last episode an OVA set in a twee version of London? Why is this new environment merely used to stage an oh-shucks cameo from Luvia and an extended moment of incredulous Jaden Smith-esque brain-death from Shirou as he spews all over Saber's dimly remembered non-heroics by wondering how it could be that history is real if English people aren't real?

Why do people like Unlimited Blade Works? How was this better than the Studio DEEN anime besides its production values? Is it really any less slow and repetitive? What is there to like about Shirou's stupid, abortive psychodrama? Is it just Rin? Is that it? If so, how can you account for the horrible, horrible reality that this route isn't even about Rin so much as it is about Shirou literally talking to himself for hours and hours only to come to the same conclusion with which he began? Is she really worth it, guys? Is it really worth *this*? Really?

I hope you're all happy, Tohsaka fans. Go cross-dress in some thigh-highs and hate yourselves, you failures. Roll on Heaven's Feel.

Clarification edit: UBW does work well in the context of the VN, but holy holy it was a bad idea to adapt it straight.

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Jul 30, 2015

Kara no Kyoukai Movie 5: Mujun Rasen (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

Given that I haven't rated any of the other Kara no Kyoukai movies below an 8, the harsh drop here certainly disturbs the graph. Indeed, a 6 might seem incongruous—and for the acclaimed fifth movie of all things! Rather than waste everyone's time by ill-advisedly trying to compress this movie's problems into a pithy introductory hook, I'll simply quote the antagonist, Souren Araya, as he expounds upon his villainous motivations in a dying speech near the end of this movie, the second-lengthiest in the Kara no Kyoukai franchise. Read aloud in sonorous tones for full impact.

"Humans are hopeless. This is a story from long ago. ... You can't save every human, so how can you save the ones who weren't saved? There is no answer. But if I can open [the spiral of] origin and end the world—if I can record and observe all deaths until the end of the world—if I can observe the unredeemed and unsaved from the start, then the ones who died meaninglessly would obtain a meaning. I would be able to know their happiness."

When I was watching Mujun Rasen, one of the guys I was with asked if the unfortunate fellow had dementia at around this point in the dialogue. I couldn't blame him.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not the best Kara no Kyoukai movie. It's not even the second-best. Actually, it's the worst. How this particular instalment of a truly great film series became widely celebrated as the best of the bunch is beyond comprehension. It preserves Kinoko Nasu's worst—underline WORST—storytelling instincts, and precious few of his finer ones. Reams of incomprehensible expository dialogue flow like cement from the flapping mouths of its characters; I shudder to imagine what was left out. This movie pulls the drag chute hard innumerable times over the course of its two hour length. Perhaps because of the cinematic medium, it was even more excruciating than is usual for Nasu—at least when Kotomine wanted to bust my balls with lore for two hours in a church at the beginning of Fate/stay night, I could click through fairly easily.

Some cynics may argue that this movie's popularity is thanks to flashy, well-directed action scenes that appeal to the simple-minded. My response is that most of the ADD-addled audience that they're imagining for this movie would be instantly put off by the constant talking head interruptions that deemphasize said action, and equally by the unending flow of esoteric chuunibyou fodder, especially during the second half of the movie—when most of those great action scenes take place. The truth is that I don't understand why this movie is the most critically acclaimed of the Kara no Kyoukai series, and I'm not sure I ever will.

On that note, this is possibly the chuuniest thing I've ever seen. This movie has an invisible character, and its name is Choony. This specter haunts the screenplay, possessing characters at will to use them as its mouthpiece. Choony's delight in fuelling the adolescent imagination with mind-melting Nasuverse esoterica is so great that he troubles nearly the whole cast of this movie, speaking through them at regular intervals and ruminating on such vital concepts as the Swirl of the Root and the Counterforce for five to ten minutes. Once Araya and Cornelius Alba show up, Choony goes into overdrive, barely allowing the viewer more than a few minutes between its droning interludes.

Mainstays Shiki, Mikiya, and Touko, when not possessed by Choony, are as likeable as ever, and the tortured Tomoe, a new character introduced in this instalment, is a welcome enough addition to the cast. Naturally, the central mystery revolves around Tomoe, and his connection to a strange apartment building in which his impoverished family once lived. Convinced that he killed his parents in said building yet unable to decipher his own memories, he runs away from home and encounters Shiki when she saves him from some thugs in an alley. His arc is compelling if predictable. On the other hand, Araya is the least relatable antagonist in any genre film I've ever seen. Calling him a magical practitioner of human experimentation is altogether too bound to the chains of reality, so I'll just refer to his little speech above if you want to get to grips with his character.

This is not a bad movie. As always for the series, the music and visuals are superb and often achingly beautiful. The achronological structure is interesting and clever. Nasu generally avoids playing to archetype, and though the high-concept, high-falutin', and determinedly abstract dialogue keeps this well within the field of big R Romance, the characters still emerge, at their best, as far more grounded and mundane than they have any right to. Granted, they have far fewer opportunities to display these qualities than in the other movies, but at least they're there.

Yet in spite of all that, the rating must remain 6. This movie's premise is simply too disconnected from the broader issues it desperately tries to represent. Earlier (and later) instalments in Kara no Kyoukai balanced lore with something more visceral; real human experience was integral to the philosophical babbling. This movie is defiantly obscurantist, and its ideas concerning the meaning of human life are unnecessarily wrought into the ugly template of bubble-headed fantasy concepts. It's not totally incoherent if you can understand what Choony is saying, but a truly great movie should transcend a niche audience.

"Humans are poor losers."

Shut up, Araya.

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Jan 4, 2015

School Days (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

Orright me mates!! This here is a classic anime me mates a classic deconstruction of the harem genre!!! It's a deconstruction because the main bloke bloody well shags all the fit anime birds doesn't he??? I'm telling you me mates you'll get a shock watching this!! I was eating me dinner when I watched it and I nearly spilled gravy all over me trousers!!!

This bloke Makoto is a complete bantersaurus a true lad!! First off I think he's just another chinese cartoon wussy boy with a limp willy but then he really turns it all around!!! He's into this bird right named Kotonoha more like ...

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Jan 4, 2015

Psycho-Pass (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

Why am I writing this?

"I requested the anti-moe approach," declared Motohiro Katsuyuki, executive director of Psycho Pass, in an interview with Anime News Network. "That is because, we as children, as boys, we loved the high-tension, the man-dramas of Gundam and Patlabor. Those kind of dramas with the man-on-man action."

"To veer from moe," explained director Shiotani Naoyoshi, "we took the heroine and the hero, and to start we DIDN'T have Akane take her clothes off, and had Shinya take all of his clothes off."

Having cannily revealed moe as little more than crude attempts at titillation—unbelievably, the very first individuals to have EVER MADE this ... cutting insight in the nearly ten years since the moe bloom began—the directors and writers of Psycho Pass proceeded to wow us all with the story of Tsunemori Akane, a sleepy-eyed waif who doesn't know how computers work, runs like a K-On! character, and spends at least ten minutes per episode being condescended to by her pretty boy colleagues. She doesn't allow their dismissals to affect her high opinions of them; during an early episode involving hackers and internet celebrities (including the inauspiciously named "Spooky Boogie," the allegedly anarchist cat), she has her romantic fortune read and argues with her computer about the prospect of going on a date with her colleague and smexy model of masculinity, Kogami Shinya. Truly this anime has transcended the moe virus. The scales have fallen from my eyes. This is so much better than those shows where the female characters have meaningful friendships with each other and aren't routinely criticized for being insecure and incompetent.

This anime is barely worth talking about. The cast is a set of tortured caricatures who at best wish they were as interesting as Ghost In the Shell's Batou and Togusa. Most of the male characters look like they belong in high school, especially the orange-haired Kuroko no Basuke reject. There's two nearly identical tsundere guys, one of whom is Ginoza, the Inspector chiefly responsible for haranguing Akane.

"Fools learn from experience," he intones nasally in a way that no human has in the history of planet Earth, "while the wise learn from history. Are you a fool or are you wise?"

Akane does begin to hit back against this pretentious man after tolerating his patronizing platitudes one too many times, only to have it explained that he has a *dark history* that led him to his present state of inanity. He's just trying to protect her Psycho Pass and preserve her purity, you see! Have no fear, though: by the end of the season, Akane achieves her goal of becoming a halfway competent police officer and can even use all that complicated technowizardry without any exposition from Ginoza and Kogami, despite never overcoming that crippling unknown condition that leaves her unable to fully open her eyes. Ginoza, meanwhile, ends up declared a potential criminal and demoted to Enforcer, though I'm confident this demotion will not affect his ability to condescend to Akane. It certainly never stopped Kogami.

The plot makes an attempt at raising Minority Report-style questions about crime and precognition, which would be more effective if the show didn't descend into stylized melodrama and anime cliches about Akane's pure heart. At the end of the day, it's an Urobuchi show; the story is told well even if its individual components are awful. The seasonal arc concerns the police's hunt for a man who aims to bring down the Sibyl System (the network that measures the potential criminality of Japanese citizens), and is thrilling if not especially novel.

But hey, if you ever wanted a poor man's Ghost In the Shell, here's Psycho Pass! What a thoroughly pointless show.

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Mar 10, 2014

Fate/Zero (Anime) add

Recommended

Fate/Zero is a show as confident in its storytelling as it is confused in its aims. After many tries, I've filed it away still unable to describe what point Urobuchi is trying to make with this. The closest I've come is that it's a condemnation of idealism, but this is only weakly supported by the text, and I suspect that impression is more a function of it being a prequel to a visual novel that thoroughly affirms the great moral significance of ideals. In that light, Fate/Zero's grim, cynical ending merely serves a narrative purpose. This doesn't make it unwatchable or even bad, but it ... does make it a fairly predictable addition to the Fate continuity—if you've read Fate/stay night, this will be exactly what you expect it to be and not much more than that.

Still, that isn't to say that Fate/Zero is boring. The art and animation are sharp and precise, Urobuchi's excellent storytelling makes Fate/Zero as thrilling as anything Code Geass has to offer. The characters, themes, and mood of Fate/stay night are flawlessly transferred to this show; Kotomine remains among the best antagonists I've ever seen in a genre show, and Kiritsugu's backstory does him justice, bringing to life that strange, cold silhouette hanging over Shirou's every action in the VN. Urobuchi's Saber is somewhat one-dimensional—though there are certainly less attractive sides to the character than the whole honorable knight routine—but then it isn't really her story. It's also tough to complain when she receives such a heartbreaking character moment at the end of the show, dragging her down to the nadir she needs to be mired in to set up her for Fate/stay night. Without giving away too much, it's a deeply affecting portrayal of Saber's lowest ebb, anticipating the sequel in which she is finally rewarded for her martyrdom, for all the years that she shouldered the shame and sin of her people in the name of justice and honor. Nonetheless, you'd be forgiven for thinking that she's little more than a gender-swapped Lancer after watching this.

I suspect the problem with Fate/Zero is that Urobuchi does not write characters in the same way that Nasu does and there's an odd disconnect there. This wasn't an issue in Madoka because it was purely an Urobuchi creation, but it hurts Fate/Zero simply because Fate/stay night, for all its many faults, had some extremely distinctive character writing. Whenever Kotomine or Kiritsugu are onscreen, this show comes to life. Kotomine is a devilish twist on the fairly played-out some-men-just-want-to-watch-the-world-burn Joker-type villain in that he's wracked with confusion and contradiction—a man who became a priest just to avoid confronting his darkest impulses. Watching him come to terms with himself over the course of Fate/Zero is absolutely thrilling. Some of his dialogue with Gilgamesh might be a little on-the-nose, but the tendency to tell rather than show is a trait Urobuchi shares with Nasu, and it doesn't detract from the intrigue. Unfortunately, the new characters, as well as those without any backstory established for them in Fate/stay night, are all exceptionally dull and predictable by comparison. Kariya is a character with plenty of potential that was entirely squandered; the same goes for Tokiomi and Aoi, whose stories only affected me because of my familiarity with Rin and Sakura and the legacy left for them. Kayneth and Sola-Ui are indescribably bland villains—so bland that Urobuchi apparently didn't even bother to resolve their storyline with Lancer.

I'm darting around the main point here, though; these plot devices masquerading as characters are nothing compared to this show's attempt to introduce a pair of legitimately developed characters in Rider and Waver. These two are almost entirely superfluous besides their involvement in plot development—especially Waver—and are by turns irritating, predictable, or both. Urobuchi is not a very funny writer, and though there's nothing on the level of Madoka's "girls shouldn't like girls" gag, Rider and Waver's painful attempts at lightening the mood in the early episodes of the show come off as dull and obvious. The show starts taking them more seriously later on, but this doesn't improve things, as I'm fairly sure that they have the same conversation about twenty times—Waver's inferiority complex acts up, Rider makes some gruff, paternal gesture to stop his navel-gazing and cheer him up, and they ride off on their chariot. The principal problem is that Waver's arc is damnably obvious. The first time you see him, you just know that he's going to end up finding the respect he wants by entering the Grail War and stepping up to the challenges it presents. That's exactly what happens, and though that might be forgivable if that story was told in a way that you don't expect, it just isn't. The ponderous tone of the Fate universe means that we spend a painstakingly long time listening to these two repeat themselves, so if you hadn't figured out where Waver's character was headed after the first few scenes with him and Rider, don't worry—you'll get a hundred more opportunities to witness this shallow development again and again. Waver's story has no particular thematic congruence with the rest of Fate, nor a deep connection with the other characters. At this stage, he's just some kid, and the focus on him dilutes Fate/Zero far too much.

Rider is significantly better, though he still comes off as a little superfluous thanks to his interactions with Waver, and never really ascends beyond the level of archetype despite some interesting backstory. He's an obvious foil to Saber, a Nietzschean font of vitality living selflessly by living selfishly, indulging in his passions and laughing all the way to Valhalla. In other words, he's Gilgamesh, Saber's preexisting foil, without the potent streak of nihilism that made Gilgamesh that much more unpredictable. Rider justifies his behaviour through a belief in master morality and rational self-interest; Gilgamesh doesn't even think such things are worth justifying, and that's what makes him the more interesting character. To give Rider his due, the idea of a journey to seek out an impossible ideal—his principal motivation—has some thematic weight in the broader context of the Fate universe, but there's no real point to him as he relates to the other characters. There is one thing that he contributes to the dialogue: his beliefs mean that he can challenge Saber on her principles, while Gilgamesh is devoid of principles in the first place. It would simply be out-of-character for Gilgamesh to question Saber. Gilgamesh sees the tragic beauty of Saber's condition without necessarily endorsing or dismissing it—he merely beholds it as it is, caring only if it serves his own interests. Still, with the emergence of plot developments at the end of Fate/Zero that throw Saber into despair and self-doubt, it's questionable whether Rider even needed to challenge her, especially when she already has Kiritsugu's cold utilitarianism to contend with. The overarching problem remains that the dialogue about idealism was already set up by Fate/stay night and Fate/Zero largely just mimics it. The addition of Rider to that dialogue seems like an afterthought.

There's also the matter of Caster and Ryuunosuke, who are either deployed to meet Fate/Zero's edgy grimdark quota or played for laughs; it might not surprise you that I didn't partake in any. That said, they are far more interesting antagonists than Kayneth and his phoned-in villainous arrogance, and I appreciated Caster mistaking Saber for Joan of Arc—quite a clever and appropriate little touch—but in many scenes, they're merely buffoonish and pad out the show even further. In a universe so concerned with little details and thematic cohesion, characters ought not to be playing such shallow roles.

The best episodes of Fate/Zero are the ones that cut out the fluff; Kiritsugu's backstory, told over the course of two episodes, is particularly good—revealing any of it would spoil it, even if you've read Fate/stay night. It's baffling that Urobuchi is so very good when he's dealing with someone else's characters, but is incapable of introducing any new character here whose purpose and relevance I can fully describe beyond their role in the plot—Rider is the lone exception, and even with him, it's pretty shaky. There is, however, one episode of Fate/Zero that is definitely superfluous, and yet I can't help but enjoy it. That episode is Rin's Adventure, a sweet little diversion around midway through the show that focuses on one of Fate/stay night's best characters, Tohsaka Rin. In Fate/Zero, she's still an elementary schooler, and it's a real treat to see here the beginnings of the sharp-tongued, reluctant heroine she would become.

Ideally, one would read Fate/stay night before watching this, but for those unwilling to slog through a visual novel, this is better directed and more accessible than Studio DEEN's Fate/stay night. It's good rather than great, but it's entertaining above all. If you like tight plotting, high production values, and men talking in dark, earnest tones, this is worth a watch.

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Mar 8, 2014

Bakemonogatari (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

I thought it might be interesting to write part of my review of Bakemonogatari in the style of its most wearying dialogue, but then I asked myself: in imitating that self-referential style, do I need to reference my own little gimmick in order to preserve the spirit of that dialogue? And if I do, am I still really mimicking that dialogue or am I doing something wholly different by virtue of distancing myself from that idea right at the get? Also, isn't the word "self-referential" among the most totally autological words in the English language? The word "small," for example, seems autological, but one would ... need to know the length of every word in English in order to definitively say that the word "small" describes itself. On the other hand, it's unquestionable that "self-referential" is a word that makes reference to itself. There's something very strong and pure about that, don't you think?

Regardless, it's peculiar that a show so committed to developing believable psychological interiors for its characters has so much self-involved, unreal dialogue. Granted, said psychological interiors are regularly externalized as monstrous wordplay-based apparitions, but the show still seems to genuinely believe in its characters as real people. The whole postmodern self-referential spiel comes off as shallow and almost immediately becomes tiresome—though in all fairness, it's mostly thanks to Senjougahara. Hanekawa, the smart, hardworking class president, was instantly my favorite character just because she talked like a real person. When she turned up in the Mayoi Snail arc, I was at the verge of dropping this altogether, but she was such a breath of fresh air that I kept going, if only to see her story—which, by the by, was easily the best arc of the five featured in Bakemonogatari. The dialogue shines best when the show stops being so pleased with itself. The other most praiseworthy aspect of this show is its minimalistic, SHAFT-y style—it's visually striking, and the surreal scenery is complemented by the equally spare BGM. You won't find another anime that looks and sounds quite like this one. But then again, you probably knew that already; it's pretty much the one thing everyone knows about Bakemonogatari.

This show is described by detractors as a wish fulfilment harem. I would agree, with the caveat that I have no idea whose wish this is granting. Besides Hanekawa, Kanbaru was the only other character I genuinely liked, and both of them had dialogue that was at least marginally more subtle and thoughtful than Araragi's painfully predictable interactions with Hachikuji or Senjougahara's incessant babbling. Hachikuji herself isn't too bad of a character in theory, but she's executed with the subtlety of a train crash. Sengoku allegedly has more development in later seasons; here, she's fairly bland, though I admit to a few juvenile snickers whenever she started pulling the submissive seductress routine and making Araragi uncomfortable. She might have benefitted from being given some more focus during her arc, but I certainly didn't object to seeing more of Kanbaru, whose good-natured demeanor belies quite a dark, conflicted character.

Returning to the main point: I can only surmise that Bakemonogatari fans are all a bunch of unashamed masochists, because this show relies heavily on the assumption that Senjougahara is a character good enough to break up Hanekawa's arc with a date episode that completely excludes all the other girls. To clarify, it's pretty inarguable that she's a bad character, but I can't help finding her thoroughly unlikeable. "Stapling my mouth" pretty much tops my list of things that leave me with a seriously bad first impression, and even once Araragi starts dating her, there's this weird threat of physical violence pervading their interactions. After he tells her that he met Kanbaru, she gets up on the table, sticks a pen right up to his eye, and threatens to push it in and gouge out his eyeball. The usual range of explanations offered by fans in defence of her actions don't really satisfy me, either. She's had a troubled life, sure, but childhood trauma is a poor excuse; that is to say, her past might explain her behavior, but it doesn't justify it. Clearly, it isn't at the level of abuse here—she's supposedly just teasing him—but I still have to pacify myself occasionally with the explanation that Araragi is a masochist who enjoys that kind of thing. Luckily, the date episode was mostly free of violent undertones. Instead, it was just insufferably indulgent, and it's here that we strike at the meat of my problem with Senjougahara beyond any personal misgivings: frankly, no real person has ever talked like her and it makes her into this formless, jabbering nothing obscuring a halfway decent character. The idea that written dialogue can imitate real life speech is obviously flawed, but here there's no attempt to mirror it even superficially. This show wants to have its cake and eat it—you just can't mix psychological realism with such transparently self-aware, self-referential archetypes. This doesn't make a bad show, but it really hurts Bakemonogatari's cohesion, far more so than even the most puerile harem moments. It's too damn on-the-nose, and it makes what could have been a great show into just a good one.

This might all seem rich coming from a user with Louise in their favorite characters list, but she's really just an affectionate holdover from my days of being a horny teenager who didn't really care if Louise beat Saito to death as long as she kept on being cute and tsundere. I wouldn't enjoy Zero no Tsukaima if I watched it now. Given that, I suppose I've inadvertently imitated Senjougahara here in coyly refusing to address the obvious conclusion until now: Bakemonogatari is a show best enjoyed by horny teenagers.

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