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“What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And all that's nice,
That's what little girls are made of.”

According to this popular rhymes, the famous genre referred to as “cute girls doing cute things” so deeply ingrained in the media of japanese animation doesn't sounds nearly as much preposterous as many want to believe. Yet there are certain occasions when the concept is simply turned upside-down and girls suddenly become interested in “snips and snails”, be it for the sake of including in the story a stereotypical tomboysh character or to justify the existence of said character in its apparently sugar coated ... world.
This review won't be so assumptive as to think that A Lollipop or a Bullet is the first or the most successful story using such plot device, it will be made clear though how Kazuki Sakuraba, better known as the authoress of the mystery/romance Gosick series, managed to give great care and balance in her own coming-of-age story.

A Lollipop or a Bullet starts in a very by the book way, presenting in the first page the protagonist of the story, Nagisa Yamada, seeking a “dessert for nobles” in the mountains, then shifting the scene one month prior to narrate the events that eventually lead to that search. Nagisa is a middle school girl without much faith in the world or in life; during an age when most of the children are too busy having fun to think about their future she already chose that none of that matters to her. People would find her country town to be a pleasant tourist destination, yet she can only think about the nuclear plant, the reformatory, the prison, the mental hospital and the military base located in the outskirts, places everyone avert their eyes from.
Having had a troubled family past, she resolved to stop dreaming of the sugary exi average girls live in and devote herself to become an adult as soon as possible, already planning her job and her career as a soldier in the above mentioned military base, relying only on her own forces and taking reality face on, like a real “bullet”. Everything seems to go according to her plans until, during the last year of middle school, a transfer student suddenly appears in her class. The name is Mokuzu Umino and at first glance she's just a plain weirdo, costantly drinking water everytime she's nervous and calling herself a mermaid in search of a true friend. Despite avoiding as much as possible to be involved with such a troublemaker, Mokuzu gets interested in Nagisa precisely because she's the only one who's not curious about her circumstances, and one-sidely resolves to make her become the friend she needs.

From here on the setting is developed like a stage play, where each act stricly links with the previous and following, with the focus revolving around the strange relationship that develops between the two protagonists and the world around them. Nagisa soon gets tired of that eccentric liar, but Mokuzu's enigmatic character and behavior only furtherly drag her in the deep of her own childish world and troubles, slowly shaping the psychology of a young girl whose flawed logic goes far beyond a traditional seek for attention.

Being an adaptation of a one book long novel, A Lollipop or a Bullet focus is more oriented on the character development than on an all-round story. The narration of the events and the relationships between Mokuzu and Nagisa is told from the latter's point of view, adding a curious yet well-placed aura of mystery behind the plot. The title of the second chapter “Heavenly Creatures” can be taken in this case either as a curious coincidence or as a well thought reference to a similiar and more famous title.
The fundamental use of several recurring images and dialogues is aimed to properly convey the feelings behind the messages of the tale, as well as outline the two conflicting view of the world: the realistic and disillusioned act made up by Nagisa is the childish attempt of a young girl to be prepared to endure all the hardships in the world. Against this conception there's the dreamer and happy-go-lucky Mokuzu, whose facade of joyful lies is simply a proof of escapism, ultimately designed to avoid said hardships and convince herself that everything has a meaning, even the worst things in life. To prove this, she's not content with just sharing her stories, she also want to drag everyone in her world, as her own way to scream for help and flee from the solitude and harshness of the existence she's bound to live.
While the story can be redundant and slow-paced due to the deliberate repetition of certain parts, what really strikes to the reader is the growing sense of anxiety painted by the unveiling of the events, and this is where the ability of Sakuraba as a writer is made clear to the reader.
Likewise, the art from Iqura Sugimoto, better know for her manga Variante, are without any doubt appropriate for this kind of story. The rough and skinny design of the characters depicts the “dirty” atmosphere right from the first pages and keeps increasing its effectiveness as the story gets darker and darker after each chapter.

Being a shounen with the psychological growth of a shoujo and the themes of a seinen, A Lollipop or a Bullet might really turns off a lot of readers, expecially those who can't bear stories that deals with realistic drama in a hopeless and absolutely believable style. That being said, it still serves its purpose as a full fledged bildungsroman, so the more seasoned readers will be easily get caught by its depressing stance on an usually more light-hearted genre of narration.
It might sound preposterous to compare this title with equally dark yet more cryptic and symbolical tales such as Gogo Monster, Goodnight Punpun and Wings of Vendemiaire, but the differences in storytelling and the similiarites between the themes of a tragic growth of characters are indeed what makes each of these manga unique and stunning in its own way.

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts...”

With these verses, William Shakespeare summed up in his “As you like it” what would three hundred years later become the foundation of Goffman and Pirandello's philosophies. That's right, every human, every day plays an act, wearing a different mask in any situation as the latter would write, all to keep on living and mingle inside this society which sometimes is more of a fictional world than the real theatre.

Along came Hiroki Endo and, taking inspiration by real and imaginary ... experiences, he wrote his own personal view of the world, giving birth to a miniature stage with many different settings and characters.
Known as the author of the long running series Eden and All Rounder Meguru, Endo is renowned as an eclectic artist who struggled to find his path in life and reflected this kind of dramatic events in his psychological stories with plenty of drama and black humour. His “Tanpenshu” (or short stories) is a collection of works made since his debut in 1996, and includes seven one-shot manga published during the following four years, all serialized the Afternoon magazine from Kodansha.

It all began with "The Crows, the Girl and the Yakuza", Endo first tale about his recurrent theme of the “dog-eat-dog” world, where the strong oppresses the weak, unable to fight his fate and in a desperate search of strenght. And so we follow Aoki, an old yakuza who, after meeting a lonely girl surrounded by crows, begins to meditate about his life and why he chose to be an outlaw. It all comes down when the weak discovers how each life is precious and important in its own way, making the crow be forgiven and get back the white feathers it once lost.

Right after we have “Because You're Definitely a Cute Girl", the confusion of a high school girl regarding sex and relationships, weighted by the reading of Jung writings and her feeling of displacement and repression of the emotions she desperately seeks to let out. Both at home and outside, she feels like being forced to act like a good girl, a normal teenager and a lovely daughter, while constantly wondering why she has to put up with all these things until she eventually snaps. The unbearable weight of society is hinted in every dialogue, from a middle school girl who doesn't want to study Maths to the gesture of checking the lenght of the skirt after hearing a group of girls discussing about fashion.

Despite having been published on the second volume, chronologically the next one is “Platform”. The story centers around Takayuki Shinohara, the younger son of a respected yakuza boss, and how he relates as an outsider to his father and older brother's buisness, in a sort of “cold war”, as it is said in the manga. It's a tale about the search for love from those who we consider as “family” and about the future: the platform in the title is a symbol of change, referring to how departing and arriving from a train station is often a way to start a new life and cuttng all the ties with the past. As a matter of fact, in the end the protagonist will have to choose between which world he wants to live in and how far he's willing to go to secure it.

The last story from the first volume is “For Those of Us Who Don't Believe in God”, probably the most meaningful of the whole collection and a masterful example of metafiction. It embodies the concept of “world as a stage” itself, presenting a theater troupe in the middle of the preparations for their show. Meanwhile, lives link on and off the stage, with a director going through a crisis with his partner and using the show as a therapy and to mock his fellows, making people play a role which is ironically and diametrically opposite to their situations, which makes them reflect about their current lives and life in general.

“Hang” means escape. Not in a literally way, obviously, but with a little bit of mental associations it's easy to interpret it like that; as we know, “hanging” is both a way to kill or to suicide, most of the times the latter one, and suicide is seen as the only way to flee from all the problems and worries. The title also hold another meaning, which is referred to the travel of self-destruction of the two main protagonists, Shokichi and Megumi, from the boundaries of humanity, just to find out that there's no escape since all the world is “hanging” to the technological development.

"High School Girl 2000" , as stated in the synopsis, is a semi-autobiographical story about the author himself while lazing around during his job and thinking about some major events in his high scool and adult life, from the inspiration to be a mangaka to the arrogance of a man who apparently realized his life's goals (in that period he was in the first year of Eden's serialization so he could feel a little overconfident). Overall the story doesn't have a clear connotation as drama or comedy, it constantly swings from one to another as showing the worries of a young boy and the disillusionment of a thirty-years old man. It all ends when someday Endo suddenly feels old, despite the relatively young age, and wants to have sex with a high school girl!

“Boys Don't Cry” is the name given to an original six-pages story written expressly for the tankobon and it concludes this collection. It shows the delirious and nonsensical situation of two young people discussing about their unrequited loves on a school roof while debating and insulting each other.

Written in a simple yet sometimes prosaic and theatrical way, Hiroki Endo's Short Stories are also a good way to keep track of his development as an artist: his drawings increase in quality in each story, going from very simplistic sketches to more detailed and refined. The major themes also go under a constant change, losing the original aura of complete despair and gaining little by little the ability to watch everything from a different viewpoint and maybe even joke about some events.

What can be perceived by reading these short stories is a general introduction to the author as well as the deepening of some of his costant references in his later works, such as the conflict between the everyday struggle in the world but with the everlasting conviction that it is worth to stay strong and keep on living.

“I believed in reincarnation until 5 minutes ago.”
“Then what happened?”
“I died.” - Johnny Hart  

What would you think of a story that begins on a school roof, with a girl standing beyond the fence on the verge of suicide, and suddenly she starts to discuss death and reincarnat- oops, "metempsychosis", with a young boy voiced by some 40-years old guy, and then to resolve their argument they have a rape intercourse in a different dimension? If your face is now twisted in some confused or disgusted expession then you have a clear idea on how people react after watching this “anime”.

Tsui no Sora, commonly translated as Endsky, is a weird show, but ... not weird in the sense that eyes weep blood in a pool or black tentacled ball float in the sky. They probably couldn't afford these scenes so they were cut off from this OVA.

Originally an eroge from SCA-JI's KeroQ company, Tsui no Sora came out in 1999 as one of the most controversial and bizarre titles produced at the time. It fell right under the newborn genre called “Denpa”, which refers to when ordinary settings are suddenly turned upside down for mysterious reasons and cause people to act odd, victims of the spreading madness.

Tsui no Sora fits perfectly under this description, though the “ordinary” and the “strange” have never really any established border throughout the whole episode. In all likelihood, it is the production studio behind the adaptation that is to blame for it, among many other problems.
As some readers may know, there are some canonical ways to adapt a visual novel into an anime. The first method is to cover all the major points in the story and, if there are many branching endings with the same value, choose one and conclude the series while sticking to it. The second is to do the bare minimum in order to gain as much as possible from loyal fans, without giving much care toward the actual result. The last one is not having the will and money to do any of the aforementioned, and produce a few hentai DVDs that can promptly be used as paperweight or frisbees.
Such was the fate for titles like Kara no Shoujo, YU-NO, MajiKoi and, object of this review, Tsui no Sora.

Despite these ominous results, those who tried to squeeze the story into 23 or so minutes (13 without the ero scenes!) should be praised for their attempt to preserve some of the story's main themes. The result is something  that is literally unforgettable.

From the very beginning, the viewer is presented with an ordinary love comedy between a common wimp and his childhood friend which is (unbelievable but true) a tsundere. But this joyful routine is interrupted by an unfortunate chain of events, which involve rapes, lesbian fantasies, more deep reflections about metempsychosis, and a confession that sounds more like a prostitute advertising her body than a girl expressing her love.
Also, it seems like normal people may recover from the trauma of a close friend's death just by eating a hamburger; maybe this is a reference to how real life is more complicated than we make it, and that every bad event just doesn't mean anything if you have someone to rely on (and to scrounge a meal from, for that matter).

By the end, everything will finally come together, and with a little help from some ghosts we'll understand how raping girls is actually fundamental in having mystical delusions about metempsychosis. What would Plato think about this?
So, are people actually able to reincarnate? Watch this and find out yourself; if per chance you find an answer, then you probably understood this better than the studio that produced it.

Story aside, what makes Tsui no Sora truly unforgettable is its technical feats: the art and  animation are revolutionary, something totally different from every other production. In fact, it's  an incredibly audacious and daring move to use both MSPaint and Power Point toward making an anime. No one had ever thought of this, and the sheer originality of this choice provides for some of the most incredible animation ever seen (in the literal meaning that it's hard to accept them as reality).
For those of you who were lucky enough to watch the uncensored version, wait patiently until 2:10. You will certainly feel the urge to screen that single frame and set it as your desktop indefinitely. Last but not least, a great cameo from an american show! They hired the guys who worked on South Park to make the backgrounds, and their work clearly oozes emotion from every monochromatic, two-dimensional building.

The sound is also top-notch; what a magnificent idea to hire random passersby as voice actors in order to give the whole anime a very authentic feeling. As a result, we have the bad guy which is basically a short adult who got a plastic surgery to look like a teenager and a protagonist that suffers from a cold in the middle of spring... or summer. It's not very clear what season the anime is set in.
Aside from that, we also have the pleasure of feeling the implicit connotations of every sound effect. For example, they illustrate that raping is a bad thing by replacing the sound of ejaculation (which actually has no sound) with some random ripping, as if the guy held onto some paper and ripped it the moment he came.

Long story short, Tsui no Sora is, for various reasons, something that you will unlikely forget. Luckily, you also won't wake up screaming in the middle of the night, but the side effects of watching this will affect your mind so much that everything else will appear like a piece of fine art in comparison.