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A cool thing about the internet is that it has allowed everyone to become a content creator. While access to mass media and print publication was once closed off to all but society’s most privileged, we now live in an age where anyone with an Internet connection has access to an audience of literally millions. This seems like a weird way to open a review for a show that was broadcast on four different Japanese TV channels, licensed by Sentai Filmworks for a North American Blu-Ray release, based on an ongoing series of light novels with 8 volumes in print as of this writing as ... well as a manga adaptation in Monthly Comic Gene magazine, so let me tie them together: Mahou Sensou reads like somebody’s DeviantArt fanfiction.

I’m not saying that free digital publication is a bad thing—it’s given us some of the greatest contemporary works of art and literature—but I AM saying that unskilled, unrefined content creators are published right alongside the hidden geniuses, and Mahou Sensou has a lot more of the former than the latter. If you’ve ever been on DeviantArt (and if you’re on an anime website, it’s a pretty good bet that you have), you know exactly what I mean. The show’s very title is a microcosm of itself, and represents about as much effort as is present in the rest of the show. “Mahou Sensou” probably sounds like it’s something pretty cool, if you don’t know any Japanese, but it’s the blandest, most basic title imaginable. There’s wars! And they’re fought with magic! MAGIC WARS. That is so cool, if you are twelve. It sounds less like fantasy-action series and more like a specialty Lego playset, except the Legos encourage imagination and creativity and can be enjoyed by all ages.

Mahou Sensou opens with a foreboding, post-apocalyptic urban landscape and some dramatic conflict between two siblings. It then immediately cuts to a more mundane setting with a similar inter-family conflict featuring our hero, ordinary high school boy™ Takeshi Nanase. I could say that the parallel of these scenes and characters is deliberate, but I get the feeling I’d be giving the author far too much credit. In any case, it is summer break, but Takeshi is off to school anyway to escape the immense pressure of his home life, which seems to consist of his brother and mother staring at him silently while all the lights are turned off. At school Takeshi runs into his doting childhood friend™ and pretend girlfriend Kurumi Isoshimi (the circumstances of their relationship are explained later, and are as convoluted as you’d expect them to be, so I won’t get into the details—if I examined every plot hole this review would never end). Shortly after Takeshi meets a mysterious otherworldly girl who falls from the sky™, Mui Aiba, and she drags him into her ongoing conflict with four equally mysterious and otherworldly assailants. Also Takeshi’s cool friend™ Kazumi Ida shows up, I guess because we need an even four protagonists? The provided reason is he’s there for remedial classes, but again, there’s nobody around but Main Character, Girlfriend, and the mysterious otherworldly folks. We’re not even halfway into the first episode and this already feels less like a television-ready product and more like a clumsy first draft. Not even a first draft. More like a bullet-point list of story notes.

Well, anyway, the long story short is that MC, Girlfriend, and Cool Guy all get dragged into magical combat (perhaps you would even say…a war?? A magic war, perhaps????), and by the rules of this universe, being exposed to magic makes you a magician. There’s several different rigidly-defined, mutually exclusive classes of magic, each of which is carefully explained in detail both by the Mysterious Assailants and other characters through unnecessary expositive dialogue over this episode and the next, and whichever one you get to use is apparently random. One of the assailants shoots magic bees and, shortly thereafter, nonlethally explodes. The explanation given (again, through expositive dialogue) is thus:

1. A long time ago there was a big MAGIC WAR. To spare the non-magicians from getting caught in the MAGIC CROSSFIRE, a group of MAGICIANS using MAGIC split the world in two.
2. There are two worlds, the “living world” and the “ruined world”, and the ruined world is where the MAGIC WARS continue to this day.
3. The Ghost Trailers—the bad guys—want to keep doing MAGIC WARS in the real world (I think? It’s been three months and I watched 32 shows. Go easy on me.), but the good guys—Wizard Brace—want to protect non-magicians.
4. Wizard Brace cast a spell called “the gift”, by which if you use MAGIC to do MAGIC WARS in the living world, you nonlethally explode and you can’t do MAGIC any more.

The point of exposition is to answer questions, but all this does is raise them. If you can’t do MAGIC WARS in the living world, and you become a magician by being exposed to MAGIC, where do magicians even come from? Is a propensity for magic genetic? Clearly not, since (spoiler alert) Takeshi’s mother is a highly skilled magician, and Takeshi has no skill until after Mui converts him. And furthermore, how was he converted in the first place? Mui shoots MAGIC from her MAGIC GUN at least twice, and the mysterious assailants, while also wielding more mundane, non-magical weapons such as Great Big Anime Swords, also use magic attacks with absolutely no ill effects up until MAGIC BEES gets penalized for it. And if Wizard Brace wants to keep non-magicians away from the MAGIC WARS, what was Mui doing in the living world in the first place? It would be one thing if she was pursuing the Ghost Trailers to stop them from doing their EVIL MAGIC, but they were chasing her. We’re barely two episodes in and the show is already a clusterfuck.

I’ve already given the plot synopsis three paragraphs and a numbered list, which is probably more than the author gave it, so I’ll sum up the rest quick. When the battle ends Mui takes Takeshi and friends—all of whom have been converted into magicians—to the “ruined world”. They are given the choice between being sent back to the living world with their memories of the past several hours wiped, or to move to the ruined world—leaving their lives, friends and families behind—and enroll in MAGIC SCHOOL to become soldiers in a MAGIC ARMY to fight MAGIC WARS. All three of them agree to this with literally less than a minute of deliberation. Okay, so we’ve established Takeshi is an angsty little whelp who doesn’t like his home life, but what about the other two? We even learn later on in the show that Kazumi is the sole caretaker of his younger sister. (She also becomes a magician, because Kazumi blows up their apartment, with magic. He doesn’t get Gifted for it though.) None of these kids think twice about leaving behind their real-world obligations to do MAGIC in MAGIC WORLD, and after the second episode they practically never look back.

I’ve spent more words on the story than it deserves, and I haven’t even gotten into the deepest plot holes or the most trodden clichés like Takeshi’s Big Magic Anime Sword or how the Magic School actually works or Takeshi’s family drama or, as previously mentioned, his fake relationship with Kurumi. And I’ll avoid going into much further detail, but it’s worth mentioning that Mahou Sensou literally ends on a cliffhanger. Things appear to be wrapping up in the penultimate episode, but the finale dumps a ton of unbidden plot twists on the audience out of nowhere and then ends abruptly without resolving any of them. Which is especially bold, considering how even these twists fail to make me interested in seeing the plot actually get resolved.

There’s so much more to talk about. Let’s talk about the animation. Let’s talk about how Madhouse is the living contradiction of simultaneously being perhaps the best and worst animation studio in Japan. Madhouse did Monster, Nana, Dennou Coil and Kaiba, but it also did Chaos;Head, Photo Kano and this. Madhouse shows are either a brilliant, innovative feast for the eyes or they are garbage, and nothing in between. You can see traces of brilliance, like a good animator walked into the wrong room: the ending sequence is interestingly directed and fluidly animated, with excellent use of colour and composition that isn’t to be found anywhere else in the show. The director of Mahou Sensou is about as well-read on film as its author is on story structure. Every shot of Mahou Sensou, besides the aforementioned ending sequence, is boring at best and obscure and difficult to look at at worst. The colours are flat, desaturated and depressing—it could be an attempt to create atmosphere if not for the fact that literally every shot is like this, even when the show forays unsuccessfully into light-hearted rom-com. The animation itself is…not good. Frame count is low, characters are frequently off model, and it often seems as if the animators are trying to restrict movement to conserve the budget.

So if not to the animation, where is the budget going? The voice cast’s salaries, most likely. The casting choices for Mahou Sensou are bizarre, to say the least. It’s a late-night anime with lots of cute, moe girls who adorn the covers of the original light novels, but most of these girls are brought to life by B-list seiyuus with limited résumés. They’re not bad, per se, but they’re not very good, either. Of course, you could say; Mahou Sensou is hardly an A-list show, so it’s not like they’ve got the budget for A-list voices…until you take a look at the cast of the male characters. Mamoru Miyano! Kenichi Suzumura! Toshiyuki Morikawa! Jun Fukuyama! Truly, the night was dark, for all the stars were in Mahou Sensou. When I heard Miyano’s voice uttering some of the first lines of the show I couldn’t believe it. He’s got some of the most recognizable pipes in the industry, but I had to double-check to make sure it was him. Takeshi is the blandest, flattest, most forgettable male lead in recent memory, in a show that is for all intents and purposes marketed towards straight men. His lines could have been delivered by a carefully-trained parrot and the show wouldn’t be any worse for it. Why shell out the cash for Miyano? It’s not like he really brings his skills to the show, by the way. Miyano in Mahou Sensou is not Tamaki Suou or Light Yagami or Rin Matsuoka. He’s…really not very good at all. I know he’s got more talent than he expends here, so he’s either giving exactly as much effort as Mahou Sensou deserves or the show’s voice director is sleeping on the job. The same goes for just about everyone else—Suzumura’s affected Osaka-ben is grating and Morikawa sounds completely uninterested in anything at any time. Jun Fukuyama actually delivers a totally competent and acceptable performance, but he’s not in the show much.

The show’s soundtrack is where it truly shines, in that it is thoroughly average instead of being subpar or outright bad. The opening theme by FictionJunction veteran Yuuka Nanri is a generic chamber-pop number—her vocal work is certainly impressive, but the song lacks anything to keep it from being just another fantasy anime theme. On the other hand, the ending theme is quite good. Nano is one of a wave of utaites-turned-major label artists that have emerged in the past several years and, like many of their fellows, brings a breath of fresh air to the previously stale and stagnant anisong industry. “Born to be”, Nano’s contribution to Mahou Sensou, is catchy and powerful, with a meaty bassline and just enough pop in its pop-punk to avoid giving the impression that it’s taking itself too seriously. The song features lyrics in both English and Japanese, and as an American expat Nano’s pronunciation is flawless (not that I’d fault them if it wasn’t, because English is fucking hard). The lyrics, while technically grammatically correct, are corny as hell, but it’s not like anyone goes into anime music expecting Sufjan Stevens, so it’s totally forgivable.

In addition, Nano’s vocals are featured on a few tracks by series composer Masato Kouda. Kouda is already an accomplished composer, known for his work on Devil May Cry and Monster Hunter, but Mahou Sensou was my first exposure to his work. It’s not bad; one or two really good tracks, a few really bad ones, but mostly in-betweeners. Worth mentioning is “NEW WORLD” (which might not have actually been in the anime proper—it’s labelled on the tracklist as “soundtrack version”, but it’s worth listening to regardless). It moves seamlessly between uplifting orchestral instrumentals, to Nano rapping in English over an electronic beat with piano accompaniment, to a bouncy disco string section. It’s less than two minutes long, but it’s a great track—too good to be stuck in Mahou Sensou, probably.

All that having been said (and if you did read all of it: thanks!), I’m about to say something that might blow your mind. It’s true that Mahou Sensou is objectively and subjectively of poor quality; amateurishly written, amateurishly animated, amateurishly executed in every way. And I would not say that it’s “so bad it’s good”, or that I really gained any enjoyment out of watching it at all or that my life was enriched by having experienced it in any way.

But I would like to see more bad anime like Mahou Sensou.

Let me clarify: in a perfect world, I would not like to see anything of Mahou Sensou’s quality at all. I don’t want to see more bad anime, but when you watch as many silly Japanese cartoons as I do, you get exposed to a lot of shit just by the fact of Sturgeon’s law. But I would rather watch Mahou Sensou a dozen times than sit through Wizard Barristers one more time. I would rather watch Mahou Sensou a hundred times than sit through even one episode of ImoCho.

Mahou Sensou is bad, but it didn’t make me angry. I did a lot of rolling my eyes and laughing out loud in disbelief at how utterly cliché and ridiculous everything was, and I often wondered how the show could have such little self-awareness, but never—not once—did I feel genuine malice towards anyone involved. Mahou Sensou did not offend me, and although I’m certainly none the richer for having experienced it, I don’t feel much poorer either. For as long as there are nerds, there’s going to be anime, and as long as there’s anime, a lot of it will be shit—but I want more of the shitty anime to start taking a page out of Mahou Sensou’s book. It’s bad, but it’s somehow cute, in that I get the feeling that it’s written by someone who is very young, or at least inexperienced. Whoever wrote Mahou Sensou has very little knowledge of literary structure, conflict, storytelling, or even how the real world or real people work. No one in Mahou Sensou is a real person, they are a walking list of tropes, recycled and regurgitated from a thousand anime characters before them. Things happen in Mahou Sensou not to progress the story or the characters, but because they are cool, or they are well-trodden anime clichés. It’s bad, but for some reason I want to pin it up on the fridge.

I’m not saying it’s totally innocent. There are a handful of weird moments of objectification scattered here and there—for some unexplained reason, the first time Kurumi uses magic, her breasts expand (this never happens again), and I can recall at least one very clichéd “the hero walks in on the heroine in some manner of undress” scene. But these scenes are relatively quick and painless, and feel more like the author felt obligated to throw them in because that’s just something that HAPPENS in anime, rather than because they feel any actual antagonism towards women. It’s true that the female characters are undeveloped and two-dimensional, but so is literally everyone else. The last chunk of the show is a very tired “damsel in distress” arc, but Kurumi has at least a little agency while being held hostage—much unlike Sword Art Online’s revolting, misogynistic mess of a second half. Everything about Mahou Sensou feels like it was written by a child, and while that means it’s of very poor quality, it also means theres nothing cruel or mean-spirited about it, overtly or otherwise. I almost feel bad talking trash about it, because it definitely doesn’t WANT to make me feel bad feelings, and I’m pretty sure it’s doing the best that it can.

So would I recommend Mahou Sensou? No. Absolutely not. There is nothing you stand to gain from the experience of watching it. It might not be malevolently bad, but it’s still bad, and everything about it is poor. However, I would make the following to anime producers: instead of maladjusted adult men with a deeply-rooted hatred of women, might I suggest turning to thirteen-year-olds to write more anime scenarios? Fresh, new talent could not possibly hurt the industry.

There was a time when I, too, had faith in J.C. Staff. I still do, actually. I’m stubborn. But try as I might to cling fondly to the days gone by, to classics like Azumanga Daioh and Excel Saga, even guilty pleasures like Shakugan no Shana, it seems that J.C. Staff is relentless in their efforts to drive me away. An admirable mission, that.

So here is Hidan no Aria. I’ll confess. I was excited. I have a soft spot for action harems, loathe though I am to admit it. I’m one of the last cynics in anime fandom who doesn’t completely loathe Rie Kugimiya (she’s ... not bad, she’s got range; it’s not her fault the squeal is what sells, and everybody’s got to pay the bills). Takashi Watanabe of Boogiepop and Shana was directing, and early promotional artwork looked…well, not promising, but certainly not the worst of the genre. I didn’t get my hopes up, but I expected the kind of show I could guiltily binge on and then tell all my friends I hated to keep up the elabourate façade that I am a man of taste.

All this is just so you know that I gave Aria a fighting chance.

With all that said, it’s bad. I mean it’s really bad. Not Togainu no Chi bad, but nowadays my attention can only be diverted from erotic fanfiction and 80’s movies to tear an especially terrible Japanese cartoon a new arsehole, because I like easy targets. So that’s the terminology we’ll settle on—especially terrible. And it is. It is a new low for J.C. Staff.

But I’ve beat around the bush long enough. Let’s get to the point.

The world of Hidan no Aria is one where the Butei, an elite international martial organisation, trains its members at the high school level. That’s right. In this world, international treaties on child labour are unheard of, and hundreds of parents see no issue with sending their children to a school where the use of firearms is not only commonplace, but required. Furthermore, the students of Tokyo Butei High—quite unlike my high school classmates, most of whom, by the time graduation rolled around, had yet to master the delicate art of pissing straight—perform incredibly well in this environment. Oh, but it’s not just the coursework they have to worry about. Butei High students must apply their lessons to real life when they are targeted by the Butei Killer—a criminal who sends high-speed Saw-esque murder puzzles after the teenage students. This individual has yet to be apprehended, as Butei graduates and all other law enforcement agents have better things to do than bother with a serial criminal with a rigidly-defined M.O. who regularly targets minors, and endangers civilians in the process. Yep.

Now, I wouldn’t still be watching anime if I had issues with suspending my disbelief, but would it really have been so hard to age the cast up four or five years, to college-age? The plot would remain practically untouched, and, really, it’s got nowhere to go but up. But I digress.

The rest of the plot involves a lot of looking at girls’ underwear (whether it is on their bodies or off), and some nonsense about Sherlock Holmes and other fictional characters (and at least one out-of-place historical figure) that is so astonishingly, mind-numbingly stupid that I have no words for it. Aspiring writers, hark! Don’t always stick with the first idea you get, because it is usually righteously fucking ridiculous.

The animators seem to stumble over the character designs despite the fact that they are not terribly complex. Characters are frequently off-model, and their movements are stiff and awkward. Their hair moves bizarrely, even by anime standards: when disturbed it jumps up suddenly at an odd angle and waves around for a while before jumping back into place. Fabric works much the same way. Inbetweens are practically non-existent, leading to movement that looks like jumpy cardboard rather than a fluid transition from one position to the next. Furthermore, all of J.C. Staff’s recent productions have had this weird kind of Gaussian-blur layer over every frame, making the outlines blurry and subdued. The animation isn’t awful, per se, but it’s mediocre at best.

I don’t have much to say on the show’s score. It’s boring. The themes are fast-paced, but forgettable and generic, while most of the background music kind of blurs together. The purpose of a soundtrack is to elicit emotional response and set the mood for a scene. Aria’s music is just kind of there because they had, like, way too much money and thought it would be cool to buy a composer. The vocal work is...well, you know what you’re getting. Rie Kugimiya puts on the sort of performance she is infamous for, Junji Majima is a forgettable harem lead, and the rest of the cast could all switch places and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

The real beauty of Aria (and I mean that in the most bitter, sarcastic, miserable way) lies in its titular character. Aria H. Kanzaki is evil. I really mean it. She is a special kind of sadistic, childish evil, unfettered by the cautious try-hard some authors exhibit when writing adults. She is rotten to the core. She is spoilt, murderously violent, infinitely selfish, and utterly loathsome. If she were the antagonist, I might even be giving this show a positive review. I would be forced to tip my hat to an author so skilled at manipulating his readers that he can craft a character that summons such immediate distaste in everyone. I’m not a violent person, but I’d say she needs a bit of discipline in the form of a high-speed baseball bat to the mouth.

But she’s not the antagonist. She’s not even an easily-overlooked secondary character. Her name’s in the title. And we are supposed to love her. We are supposed to pile our disposable income on Blu-Rays and posters bearing her visage, on models of her likeness to sit precariously upon our shelves so that we can steal a peek at her plastic panties.

Aria H. Kanzaki is really the lowest the tsundere phenomenon can go. I don’t have anything against tsunderes, really. In fact, when written carefully and realistically, they are some of my favourite characters. Aria is not a tsundere. She’s a psychopath and a bully. She is hysterical, she is capricious, she is downright mean—she is everything that might lead a man (were he so inclined) to roll his eyes and scoff and say, “Women! Am I right?”

Which is a good segue into my next point.

I’m not mad at Aria, because she is a fictional character, and that would be silly. I am mad, however—frothingly so—at the author. Chuugaku Akamatsu has written a character who he believes to be a sympathetic woman. The audience is supposed to watch her temper tantrums and violent fits the same way we might watch an angry child, despite the fact that Aria is more than old enough to know better. Her fits of rage aren’t horrifying—they’re cute! This sort of behaviour is just the thing the author—and, he perceives, his audience—expects out of a woman.

Now, we could say that Aria’s temper—and, by extension, the exceedingly childish behaviour of most of the rest of the female cast—is just the author clumsily trying to write a realistically flawed character. People aren’t perfect, after all, and violently temperamental women (and men) do exist!

But I’m not stupid, and, hopefully, neither are you.

The author’s intent matters. The target audience matters. The moe phenomenon matters. Japanese society and its views on women matter. The context matters.

Look. I’m not saying that you’re a bad person if you enjoyed Hidan no Aria. Do what makes you happy. I’m not saying that you’re a bad person if you enjoy any fiction that carries some unfortunate implications in its characterisation of women, people of colour, GLBT people, or any minority—it’s perfectly possible for a story that is otherwise well-written to stumble a bit when it comes to political correctness (and I hate that fucking term, because it implies that treating other people like human beings should be done out of obligation and not common sense), and this is okay, as long as it is discussed. And I’m not trying to take away your titty anime. There are plenty of shows that reward the viewer with gratuitous unmentionables while at the same time sporting a cast of realistic, relatable, well-written female characters. In fact, if Hidan no Aria was a good show that happened to have a horrible female lead, I might not even mention it. Well, maybe in passing.

But Hidan no Aria is bad, and I hate it, and writing this review feels like a weight off my shoulders after nearly five hours wasted on this garbage. So I will mention it. And I did. And I think I’m done now.

Togainu no Chi is an embarrassment.

It is an embarrassment to Nitro+, the producers of the source material. It is an embarrassment to A-1 Pictures, who have proven with titles like Birdy the Mighty DECODE and Ookiku Furikabutte that they can do better. But the most tragic part is how horrifyingly embarrassing it is to the BL genre and its fans. The genre, despite its booming popularity and flourishing diversity in manga and doujinshi, suffers greatly somewhere in the transition to animation—for some reason, the anime industry doesn’t like the genre very much, and even hugely popular titles are treated to adaptations with cut corners and ... tight budgets. This does nothing to improve the reputation of BL, whose detractors dismiss it all as shallow, pandering garbage, insulting and even offensive to actual homosexuals; and its fans and followers as noisy, awkward high-school girls of unrefined taste with no appreciation for the finer points of artistic pornography.

Togainu may be the greatest slight to the reputation of the genre yet.

The story is simple (but don’t let the story know that—it carries itself as though it is the most sobering parade of man’s inhumanity to man since the last time someone made a holocaust film): in the not-so-distant future, a third world war has split Japan into two fractions: one which has been civilised and rebuilt (of which we see very little), and another which is a lawless wasteland. The main character, Akira, is some kind of professional street fighter in the more civilised region before he is falsely accused of murder. While awaiting trial, a strange woman offers him freedom on the condition that he move to Toshima, the lawless region, and participate in some kind of battle royale. The prize is, from what I can gather, leadership of some kind of illicit drug company, which the strange woman wants to take down from the inside.

You may have noted that my plot description is rather vague. That’s because, even after completing the show, I’ve barely been able to string together a series of events. The show is a clusterfuck. Firstly, the backstory—the splitting of Japan—is never mentioned in the series itself. I learned that from the plot summary on MAL. In retrospect, the opening narration of the first episode—delivered by an utterly bored, slow, monotonous and uninvolved Takumi Yamazaki—was probably describing the war and the proceeding division, but if it is, it’s through a metaphor so thick and incomprehensible that it’s completely nonsensical if the viewer is not already familiar with the plot (a point which I’ll return to later). Every episode opens with a similar narration, each slathered liberally with “metaphors” and “analogies” and other such things that the scriptwriter smugly pats himself on the back for remembering from secondary school, and none of them are any more meaningful than the others—and once the character n (pronounced ‘Nano’), who has been providing these narrations, enters the story, the viewer is treated to the same half-assed pseudo-depth in his dialogue.

Speaking of n, let’s take a little break to talk about the characters. Though the show boasts a fairly broad cast, the scriptwriter (or, possibly, the author of the original game) actually only knows how to write three kinds of characters. Akira, n, and Shiki all share a personality (or lack thereof): they are dead-eyed, silent, constantly bored, and rude and dismissive to even their comrades (but it’s okay, you guys, because they all have dark and tragic pasts that are never explained). Keisuke, Rin, and Motomi also share a personality: the ‘team cheerleader’, a ray of sunshine in dark and gloomy Toshima (maybe it wouldn’t be so dark if the animators didn’t airbrush solid black onto every frame). And every other cast member shares the third personality: annoying. Oh, sure, they have little traits and quirks slipped in to make them seem different—Shiki kills people, Rin acts like a twelve-year-old-girl, Arbitro partakes in gay orgies (I’ll also return to that later)—but they have such a lack of real personality, motivation and relationships that they are impossible to sympathise with or really feel anything for.

Shiki is supposed to be an ominous antagonist, but all he really does is wield a sword as opposed to a knife (like most of the cast) and wear black leather. Kiriwar and Gunji are supposed to be fearsome opponents whose quarrels provide spots of comic relief, but they’re so unfunny and so unintimidating that they feel more like a waste of time. And so on and so forth for every other cast member. I’m willing to forgive Akira’s lack of personality, to an extent—though I haven’t personally experienced the visual novel, the role of the protagonist in a BL game is usually little more than a cock magnet. That said, the scriptwriter could have at least tried to be flexible.

The series, with its convoluted writing that seems almost as if it’s trying to be harsh and unwelcoming to newcomers to the franchise, appears at first glance to be pandering to the game’s diehard fanbase. Yet, simultaneously, it drives off the diehard fans by stripping the story of all the naked, sweaty man-humping for which it is so beloved. In the anime, explicit homosexuality and eroticism becomes the exclusive property of the antagonists—Arbitro wouldn’t be such a wildly offensive depiction of the ‘depraved homosexual’ if he wasn’t the only character having actual gay sex. In this regard, Togainu fails for the same reason most eroge adaptations fail—when stripped of its sex appeal, the story is left to fend for itself, and it often does not fare well. But the difference between Togainu and a series like, say, Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka is that at least AkaSaka still makes time to denude its ladies and reward the viewer’s patience with gratuitous underthings and bare flesh. The cast of Togainu rarely, if ever, removes so much as a glove.

Which is probably for the better, considering to my next point: the animation. The horrible, awful animation. Togainu is hugely popular within the BL fandom and one would expect it to receive a lavish treatment—which it seemed to, when the PVs and opening animation were released. The opening, set to a Hot Topic-core J-rock number by GRANRODEO, boasts smooth, dynamic animation with thick, bold lines; the promotional videos were montages of exciting, intense, fast-paced fight scenes. At a passing glance, the animation seems, if not cutting-edge, at least impressive and visually stimulating.

Then, the series itself begins: Togainu seems to be funded on the contents of A-1 Pictures’ swear jar. The low frame count and complete absence of attention to detail could pass in a slice-of-life series, but in an action-heavy show where hand-to-hand combat occurs at least once per episode, it’s inexcusable. Backgrounds are plain and lifeless; every scene is deeply saturated in grays and greens and, for indoor scenes, browns. It’s one thing for a series or a scene to stick to a limited palette—it can draw the viewer’s attention to certain details or emphasise a mood—but it’s another thing completely to make every frame so dark that the show itself becomes a chore to watch. Oftentimes a black shadow will be cast across half the screen: sometimes it’s used as censorship, but more often it covers parts of characters’ faces or even (on multiple occasions) the entire screen, leaving only one corner visible. This, combined with the three-month delay in DVD releases, leads me to believe A-1 may be pulling a SHAFT here: Togainu is simply unfinished, and the DVDs will contain retouched and even re-animated scenes.

Character models may as well not even exist for as much as the animators pay attention to them—characters often look unrecognisably different between scenes and even frames. Togainu has one of those particular anime art styles where small facial details such as eyelids and Cupid’s bows are outlined. This style is popular in manga, and it doesn’t feature in anime so much because faces must be very carefully proportioned—when they are not, they look freakishly distorted, as they often do here. When characters experience emotion, they talk or narrate about them rather than acting them out (this is because action costs money). This show is just as fond of Dutch angles as Battlefield Earth and misuses them almost as much. Action scenes are handled clumsily, to say the least: when stabbed or even lightly grazed, characters explosively spurt gallons of luminescent red Kool-Aid. In the show’s grand finale, the animation somehow finds a way to get worse, and awkward angles and slow pans over clouds and cityscapes are set to the soothing sounds of metal scraping against metal and characters grunting in pain. Then, the camera remembers where it’s supposed to be, and cuts back to characters grievously injured or bleeding copiously. “There’s a really kickass fight going on,” the animators reassure us, “but we just can’t show it to you.”

The show’s soundtrack is, surprisingly, one of its strong suits. The show swaps ending themes every episode, and the always reliable Kanako Itou provides no less than three of them. Itou’s numbers are upbeat without losing a dark, mournful atmosphere; the other ending themes are mostly forgettable (but not bad) J-rock numbers. The background music, on the other hand, runs the gamut from listenable, even pleasant, to absolutely grating. One of my favourites is a slow, mournful guitar piece with a soft electronic beat, and I’m also fond of the crunching hard rock that plays during the first fistfight of the show. A good number of the tracks sound like the show is tuned to an early 90’s grunge radio station—whether that’s a good or a bad thing is up to you.

Togainu sports a cast of big-names, but seems not to really know how to use any of them, haphazardly assigning them parts they’re not suited for. Jun Fukuyama as Rin is one of the more upsetting choices, as high pitch is not Fukuyama’s fote. Kishou Taniyama sounds strained and forced as Gunji, and (as I’ve mentioned before) Takumi Yamazaki as n could not possibly sound more bored and slow if he tried. Most of the rest of the cast—Tomokazu Sugita and Hikaru Midorikawa especially—have much greater ranges than the show gives them credit for, and, though they perform competently, it’s a shame they weren’t really utilised.

Most hentai is better animated and better scripted than Togainu no Chi. In fact, Togainu should have been released as a direct-to-DVD hardcore title. It still would have been terrible, but at least there would be cocks involved, and the show wouldn’t get lost in its own pretentiousness so easily. It doesn’t matter what you’re watching the show for—everything’s been done, and better, somewhere else. Looking for a plot-heavy BL series? Watch Loveless. Edgy, bloody, post-apocalyptic action? Highschool of the Dead’s a recent title. Grimdark drama with touches of sci-fi and supernatural? Any (good) Nitro+ adaptation. Togainu no Chi is a slight to its genre and, hell, the anime industry itself.

Watch something else. Watch anything else.

There seems to be some great misconception among the general viewership that a work of film needs to be bursting at the seams with blood and sex to be “mature”. More people will see a film that wears an R rating like a badge of honour on a weathered veteran than will see Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva and films like it, and it’s their loss.

‘Eternal Diva’ is the first in a planned series of anime films based on the Professor Layton series of puzzle games. Though the games aren’t for everyone, the movie takes place years before the games’ timeline (with the exception ... of a brief scene at the beginning, but it’s easy to tell what’s going on), so the uninitiated needn’t worry over catching up to a long, pre-existing canon. The plot is simple enough: Layton and Luke find themselves trapped in the middle of a contest, hosted by a strange masked man, in which the winner will gain immortality, and the unfortunate losers will all die. But not all is as it seems (is it ever?), and the professor and his young apprentice make it their mission to get to the bottom of the affair.

The plot is multi-layered, thought-out, and pristinely paced, though it never quite stops itself from being patently ridiculous (Hershel Layton built this helicopter in the jungle with a box of scraps!). As the film builds towards its climax it becomes increasingly bizarre, but by that point it doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. That said, it’s fun all the way through, and if the viewer can suspend his disbelief long enough to watch Layton fall hundreds of feet through the air and land with his trademark top hat undisturbed from its place, he shouldn’t have too much trouble with the rest of the plot.

The writing does a remarkable job of fleshing out even the minor characters; they all have their reasons for pursuing the prize of immortality (some more noble than others). Every character has a defined personality and motivation without resorting to “quirkiness” (with the exception of Growski, though he’s not a bad character—bless justice-serving, shark-wrestling, moustache-having hairy bosom). As for the main characters, the titular Professor is an almost paternal character whose patient, distanced and logical approach to even the most outrageous of subjects gives the viewer a sense of respect for the character, rather than seeming elitist or even creepy (as it would were it guided by clumsier writing). Luke Triton, our young Watson, manages to be cute and believably childlike without grating on the viewer’s nerves.

The character designs are unique among anime, and they will further endear some viewers (like myself) and drive others off. The art style is a very simplistic kind of imitation of Western cartoons with an unmistakably Japanese twist, and the film is set in dusty, sunny Edwardian England, unafraid to dabble in steampunk. The art and even the way the characters move is expressive and fluid enough that even a quick glance over a character gives the viewer an idea of their personality. Upon seeing the character designs, one could be forgiven for expecting the same childish cartoon art in the whole picture, but OLM takes care to render the Victorian architecture—and other settings—in loving detail.

Those familiar with the Professor Layton games will recognise a few songs from their soundtracks making cameo appearances here, particularly Layton’s own catchy leitmotif. The film’s original songs aren’t too shabby either, sporting surprisingly entrancing vocal work by Nana Mizuki (let it be said that this is the first time I’ve found her voice to be anything other than grating). There’s not much I can say about the voice acting, simply because it’s very good—though some minor characters have exaggerated, embellished ways of speaking, it works, and it’s not unexpected (this is, after all, a cartoon).

If it sounds like I’m gushing about the movie, it’s probably because I am. It’s hard to remember the last time I enjoyed an anime this much, and although it can probably be attributed to my fannish expectations and love of the games it’s based on, I can’t imagine anyone honestly calling Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva a bad movie. It’s worth a chance; give it one.