Back to colonelpanic's Profile colonelpanic's Profile

お殴りしてもよろしいですか？

Working!! places high among my favorite anime. The show uses many kinds of humor, some more culture specific than others, and should appeal to many kinds of people. The characters interact in surprisingly believable ways considering how much the show focuses on humor.

Like many comedy anime, Working!! throws a group of characters together to create a situation for humor. However, in most cases, this effort seems labored and implausible. The approach is basically: 1. Create weirdos with the most extreme quirks you can. 2. Make up a reason for them to be stuck together. 3. Do a bunch of random stuff and hope some of ... it gets a laugh. Working!! doesn’t discard the formula. It just does the whole thing better. It uses characters more like real people instead of freaks you would only see in an anime. They come together as coworkers (much less contrived). The humor comes from their interactions, instead of whatever random events a mangaka decided to shoehorn them into so he could make his deadlines.

On that note, the characters drive the show. They make the story. Their flaws and insecurities create misunderstandings and humor. Frankly, I’ll be breaking this show down by character because I couldn’t come up with any other way to do it justice.

Takanashi Souta looks like he’ll become the main character, but he never really does. Living with three large, selfish sisters led him to obsess over their opposite: small, vulnerable, and cute things. He comes to Wagnaria when a tiny high school girl (Taneshima) approaches him about the job.

Takanashi Sisters: Souta’s three older sisters cause him no end of trouble. One does nothing but drink and cling to him after her latest boyfriend rejects her. One works as a lawyer. She seems to live with the rest of the family after her personality led to divorce. The last one is a novelist, and she needs Souta to care for her constantly because she can hardly stand on her own legs, much less take care of herself. His younger sister is the reliable one. She works hard to support her brother (which is also worrying in ways you’ll need to watch the show to find out).

Taneshima Popura is short. She’s also naïve. She’ll do anything to grow, so the kitchen staffers love to feed her bad ideas. Souta dotes on her, always calling her small and cute and prompting pouty displeasure.

Inami Mahiru is the sweetest, gentlest girl you’ll ever meet. She’s shy, demure, and prone to girlish embarrassment. …as long as she doesn’t see a man. Her androphobia reaches unheard of extremes, often resulting in injuries and broken furniture.

Satou Jun works in the kitchen. He’s tall, and he looks a little rough, but he’s a nice guy. His usual no nonsense attitude conflicts with the manager’s eating habits. He’s also unlucky in love.

Souma Hiroomi works with Satou in the kitchen. Outside the kitchen, he only works when he feels like it. People often take over whatever he’s working on. (Watch the show to find out why.) He enjoys watching whatever interesting things happen to his coworkers.

(Manager) Shirafuji Kyouko eats constantly, and she's so bad at work she helps out by slacking off. She basically aged out of juvenile delinquency.

Todoroki Yachiyo carries a sword. For some reason, she’s completely oblivious to others’ reactions to it. She obsesses over the manager constantly, making her food from the company stores. She misses important things about her coworkers because she thinks so much about Kyouko.

Otoo Hyougo is a business manager. He comes around occasionally, but usually he’s off on personal business.

Matsumoto Maya is the normal one. Sort of.

A friend of mine once told me that if asked to describe Pacific Rim, he could sum it up as “a perfectly good stupid movie.” I enjoyed Pacific Rim. I also enjoyed Cross Ange.

Most of this show falls clearly into the realm of self-parody. The fanservice in particular made me laugh almost every time, and by itself would make Cross Ange the best new anime I've found in a long time. Further, when an episode ended, I actually cared what happened next. Usually I stop watching for a while and do something that feels like work before resuming a show, because nothing holds my ... interest anymore. The show even uses a swimsuit episode, but instead of going wild with how stupid swimsuit episodes are, it takes a more prudent path, relegating it to the B story line behind an important section of the main story line. (Maybe its creators found that one too lame to do much with.) Of course, it still finds time for humor. I loved the "it's a tradition" explanation after Ange's quizzical response to the sudden, inexplicable swimsuit party.

That said, you’ll find nothing revolutionarily new in the story. I’d call it fun, but not groundbreaking. Even the big reveal midway through had me saying, “yeah, I knew that from the moment I laid eyes on those things.” Of course, I seem to predict all kinds of things that people around me find mind-blowing, so maybe it’s not so obvious to everyone else. Either way, I found the characters a refreshing change from the usual cardboard cutouts. The show explores a surprising number of them, expanding its world in the process. (more on that subject later…)

Cross Ange is certainly not for everyone. Plenty of people find fanservice (humorous and otherwise) terribly offensive. The show also explores hatred, prejudice, violence, and general mean-spiritedness in ways that may scar the timid.

Many people in our own world will never understand that any other point of view besides their own could possibly exist. When they encounter someone who thinks differently, they can only see something wrong with the other party. They can only view the world through their own value system, as they utterly lack the ability for introspection required to recognize that anything they believe could potentially be less than perfect in some way. They can’t place themselves in another’s shoes even for an instant. Angelize faces these problems, and some people hate the show for it.

In the beginning, Angelize (thinks she) lives in a perfect ordered world. Violence, hatred, etc. etc. do not exist because she lives in an age of reason at the pinnacle of human evolution, but oh, wait… something called norma threatens that order. Obviously this aberration must disappear. Human happiness depends on it.

She sees a norma for the first time, and stops to talk sense into the child’s mother. Clearly it’s time to try for another child. The police will remove this one, letting everyone’s happiness continue. I laughed out loud, and even took a screenshot of the baby in a cage. Humans of our society may find this absurdity repulsive, but only because we judge it as outsiders. Angelize views these events through her own values: the values her society indoctrinated her with all her life.

Naturally when the world finds out Angelize can’t use mana, she can’t accept it. She can’t possibly be a savage norma. She finds out firsthand how “humans” treat norma, but even when she arrives at a norma facility, she antagonizes everyone around her by treating them as inferiors. How dare they treat a “human” (and royalty at that) like a norma?

Ange needs a lot of time to accept herself, those around her, and the world as it really is. That last one gets particularly difficult. How the world really is changes every time she meets someone new, because she keeps learning new things and considering things she hadn’t before. By the end of the show, she forms an entirely new value system. She also learns to see things from others’ points of view, even when she disagrees with them. It’s a pretty handy skill for someone so ready to start fights.

When I first started examining anime for the season, I completely passed this over. Every time I looked, I saw mediocre ratings. After reading what pretty much everyone else has to say about this thing, I wasn’t expecting much. I’m glad I gave it a chance.

Most shows of roughly this type spend half their first episode spouting expository dialogue (and probably a good portion of the rest as well). Black Bullet lets you pick things up on your own. It contains far less exposition than most anime, and what it uses is well-placed and unobtrusive. If your mood isn’t favoring a brainy show, but ... you’d rather do without the spoon-feeding, you’ve probably found the right anime.

I can’t think of any point where Rentarou really annoys me as a protagonist. On the contrary, he seems like someone who is genuinely trying to become a better person, even while learning to deal with the cruel realities of his world. In many ways, this show is about his growth as a person.

If you ask me to point to the show’s greatest flaw, I’d go right for the harem aspect. It holds the greatest potential for destroying suspension of disbelief. I certainly wouldn’t classify this show as harem genre, but for some reason EVERYONE in this show is enamored of its largely unassuming protagonist. I don’t mean to turn anyone off. Black Bullet shares little with harem anime besides Rentarou’s strangely magnetic effect. Even villains like him.

Sidonia’s quiche is probably best described as “dumb but fun.” It does a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense. The pilots are all idiots, especially early in the series. None of them follow orders. Whenever a fight starts it turns into chaos as they all do random things. In fact, that’s basically how their whole society works. Most of the jeopardy in this show comes from people's stupidity, which makes it very hard to understand how they managed to avoid blowing themselves up for so long.

In particular, I found it hard to suspend disbelief during an incident where a quick look at mission ... data would have instantly clarified what happened. Obviously these people are so advanced that they don't need to record flight data of any kind. Wait, are we meant to assume that they just don’t care? After all, it’s not like suffering severe losses in combat is a big deal or anything. It’s not like it matters if a mission ends in utter failure and the big world-ending monster comes and kills everybody. Hey, where did the monster go? Maybe it fell into a plot hole while the main character was unconscious. Ah, well, it doesn’t matter anyway. Time to shut off the brain. There’s a second season coming, you know.

While Freezing is limited by its intended genres, it still manages a certain level of quality within those limits. For example, it has lots of fast-paced battle scenes (good), but because it shows fights all the time it leaves very little room for character development (not so good).

Further, the fighting does not need to take so much screen time. This show pauses in way too many places for expository dialogue. For every few seconds of a fight, the action will stop for a moment so a couple of lines of dialogue can tell you exactly what you're seeing. It's kind of stupid, since half the ... time you'll be thinking "what show do you think I've been watching up to now?" Maybe they figure people who watch anime at whatever early hour of the morning this originally aired are too tired or stoned to pay much attention, if they've been watching at all, or maybe they figure it adds more screen time for nudity. I dunno.

Freezing would be better if they removed most of the dialogue from the fight scenes and used that time to improve the characters and story.

Tokyo gets mysteriously and very suddenly trashed. Monsters start coming out of cell phones and the main characters use their poke... er, um... demon summons to fight them. This, of course, attracts the attention of a shadowy government organization that is tracking just that sort of activity with some kind of sciency looking stuff. The men in black capture our heroes, take one of them aside, and explain to him that they are JP's: an organization established with a great deal of exposition. This pretty much sets the stage for... a great deal more exposition. Did I mention that the demons look and sound ... ridiculous, or that nobody ever needs to charge a phone?

Yet for all its idiocy, this show is actually not that painful to watch. Some readers are, no doubt, asking why I can say this about a show filled with clichés and bad running jokes. Here's a question in return: why do people watch action movies? Many have an inherent silliness, yet they can be surprisingly immersing.

I recommend abandoning this show if you haven't decided you like it by midway through the second episode. Actually, I only say to give it that much time because I have seen comments all over the place saying that the first episode isn't as good as the rest, and a few that say it gets worse as it goes along. I don't know where all of that came from. The quality seems pretty consistent throughout. In fact, that's why I finally got bored and looked for spoilers. Sure enough (according to what I was reading), it ends exactly the way I would expect it to, and seriously, a lousy ending is one of my pet peeves.

This comic has a nice ending, but it's pretty much what it appears to be at first glance. The story is certainly not the most memorable part. It's mostly ecchi stuff. There are some misunderstandings. Some lead to humor, others not so much.

There are things that I enjoy about this comic. There are also times when it seems overly long (especially since its obvious where things are going from pretty early on). Some of the chapters feel that way by themselves too. There's only so much of the ecchi stuff that can happen with each ploy ... before it starts to get old. There's also a character that seems pretty redundant (apart from what is quite possibly the funniest comics page I have ever seen).

On a side note, I find it interesting that (according to the epilogue) Rika had many female fans, and Yuka had many male fans.

Scrapped Princess is one of very few titles that I think better of every time I watch. Part of this is my growing understanding of Japanese language and anime. Part of it is that Scrapped Princess is a lot more complicated than it may first appear to be. It has numerous layers of subtlety that you may miss out on during the first viewing. That isn't really a problem, since it is pleasant and enjoyable as a simple fantasy story with a slight twist. The unfortunate thing is that it may not draw you back for a second viewing.

On repeat ... viewing, I found that the characters and their interactions were a lot more complicated and engaging than I remembered them being. I found that the show as a whole had a lot more to say than I remembered. I also found that I simply appreciated the artistry of it. Scrapped Princess was one of my earliest experiences with anime. In the time since my first viewing, I had watched many others. I had learned what to look for.

On a side note, I am even more convinced after reading the reviews here that pretty much everyone watching it completely missed what the show was about. I ended up reading all of the reviews. I hoped more and more that one would show that someone got it. It's possible (lets give people the benefit of the doubt) that, like me, no one wants to explain it explicitly . It kind of reminds me of all the conversations I've had regarding what the Incredibles is about that have me saying "How can you possibly not know!?!!? They were practically screaming it at you throughout the entire film!". In both cases the main subject comes up in dialogue frequently, but somehow everybody misses what's really going on.

Crime Wedgie (or Cry Moo Wedgie, if you prefer) is of passable quality, but it is definitely schizophrenic. I had a difficult time watching it without having thoughts that distracted from the show: thoughts that contained words like "contrived" and "juvenile". It just seems amateurish.

Some shows can mix multiple genres and come out okay. This one doesn't. The shifts from one thing to the next are so sudden they destroy any attempt at suspension of disbelief. I would try to develop the idea that I liked the show. That idea was repeatedly repulsed when the show ... shifted. For example, one minute the show may be trying a sweet, innocent teenage romance thing. The next minute it is sexualizing bizarre things like scissors, hair, strangulation, and riding crops. The breath fog only makes it seem more perverse.

For me, that was the biggest issue. I may forgive amateur effort. I may also forgive jarring genre shifts. The feeling I got watching this thing was too much for me though. I have watched my share of ecchi anime. Some are pretty good. Most are downright awful. None make me feel so thoroughly unclean for having seen them.

Some time ago, my brother was telling me about a conversation. Unfortunately, I don't remember who was talking to whom. It may have been a conversation he had with a friend, or something he watched in the Futurama DVD extras. At any rate, it went something like this: "I love Futurama! It's a very funny show about the future!" "... ... ... Exactly which part of it is about the future?".

My review of Geneshaft has been a long time coming. It was pretty new when I first watched it. At the time I saw tons of ... reviews on other anime sites, and they all made me think of that line from Galaxy Quest: "Did you guys ever watch the show?". There really wasn't anything that anyone had to say that I could reconcile with the idea that they had actually seen the material they were supposedly reviewing. I've never felt so alone. To this day, I still find the disconnect somewhat frightening.

When I was taking a quick look at Geneshaft after recommending it as similar to another show, I laughed out loud at item b in Nyron's review: "No one on MAL who's reviewed this series has actually watched it, or their reviews were written from memory months or years after half-watching the original run on TV." Actually, that significantly understates how jarring the reviews used to be, but most of those websites no longer exist anyway.

The main reason I have taken so long to write about Geneshaft is that I hate to say "well, you just don't get it". However, that really is what it boils down to. For example, the first time I watched Geneshaft, I found several of the characters almost intolerably annoying. It wasn't until I had watched the whole thing and understood why they were how they were that I ceased to find them annoying. This show has suffered oceans of undeserved hate because it does what it needs to do, right to the end, regardless of who will take unwarranted offence. That's one of its strong points. It proceeds unflinchingly to its final destination, rather than wimping out and rendering the entire story meaningless. It's unfortunate that so many people dislike Geneshaft, but the more I read of others' comments, the more I am convinced that even those who like it don't really get it.