Category: Animation

Gotcha

Old-time Gatchaman
Gatchaman, 1972

The fourth episode of Preferential Measure Organization Stella Women’s Academy High School Division Class C3 ((as J. Greely translates the title)) suggested that the series might be more than just a sports/socialization story. Subsequent episodes have not fulfilled my hopes, and I’m getting tired of muttering “idiot” at the protagonist. Unless I hear that the eighth episode is markedly better than the previous three, I’m through with Stella etc.

Gatchaman, revised
Gatchaman, 2013

Instead, I’m watching Gatchaman Crowds, Kenji Nakamura‘s current project. Nakamura makes anime unlike other anime, and he doesn’t repeat himself. Last year’s Tsuritama was concerned with fishing, regional dances and alien invasions. Before that came [C] Control, about money, and Kuuchuu Buranko, about psychiatry. His outstanding show remains Mononoke, about the nature, origins and intentions of certain demons. It was one of the best shows to be aired in anime’s annus mirabilis, 2007. This time around Nakamura is considering superheroics.

Continue reading “Gotcha”

Today’s mystery

[ASFS] Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari – (Bakemonogatari ED) from jacklong on Vimeo.

Why is “Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari” the top seed in the Anime Music Tournament? It’s not bad; the arrangement is solid, if a bit overwrought, and the recording demonstrates that Ryo can work with real singers as well as Hatsune Miku. It may well be one of the better songs in the tournament. But I don’t hear anything remarkable in it. I’ve listened to it several times, and as soon as it ends, I can’t remember a single phrase well enough to hum.

I’ve gone through all the tournament entries now, and what I said earlier stands. (I’ll admit that I didn’t listen to each and every one all the way through. Sometimes, if a song didn’t catch my interest after the first verse and refrain, I skipped to the middle to see if there were any surprises there. There weren’t.)

A few further notes:

1. Radiohead? Really? Gah. At least Yes is worth listening to. Radiohead is allegedly brilliant, but whiny twit Thom spoils everything they do.

2. The more homogenized, pasteurized pap I hear, the more I appreciate forthright rock ‘n’ roll like “Ride on Shooting Star.”

3. Evidently Ali Project is out of favor these days. I expected at least “Coppelia no Hitsugi” to make the cut.

4. While the majority of the nominees were new to me, most of the ones I judged to be good I was already familiar with. I did find a few songs worth adding to my playlists, though. “Forces” sounds like Karkador-era P-Model — no surprise, since it’s by Susumu Hirasawa. I might have to track down the Berserk soundtrack. “Hanaji” has a pleasantly trashy psychobilly feel, and “Shoujo S” (which reminds me of The Monkees for some reason) rocks nicely.

5. Curiously, the opening and ending themes for The Tatami Galaxy sound better separated from the animation. The wispy vocals in the latter song, “Kami-sama no lu Toori,” are peculiarly effective combined with the spooky synths.

Odds and ends

Little Arkansas River

After two summers of desert heat, we now have a summer of tropical monsoon rain. The Little Arkansas River, which runs north, west and south of my place, is the highest it’s been in years. More rain is predicted.

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It occurs to me that comparing Stella etc. to Girls und Panzer is misguided. Yura has more in common with such painfully self-conscious characters as Inu x Boku SS‘s Ririchiyo and Tsuritama‘s Yuki than with with Miho, and the story thus far has been more about Yura learning to play well with others than about girls playing with guns.

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Ryutaro Nakamura, who directed Serial Experiments Lain and Kino’s Journey, recently died. Jonathan Clements’ appreciation is here.

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Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita‘s Mediator should beware the dangers of undead hair.

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I generally consider “critic” to be a subset of the category “pompous fool.” Here’s an example why.

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ISON is approaching.

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One of my pictures was yesterday’s Botany Photo of the Day.

Notes, mostly off-key

The first round of the Anime Music Tournament is underway. The organizers have made all 256 nominated tunes available in a convenient two-gigabyte download. I’ve been working my way through it. Since they usually picked the full-length version of each song, there’s just a bit less that twenty hours of music. It’s going to take me a while to listen it all.

A few comments on what I’ve heard so far:

1. Is this the best anime has to offer? There are some good tunes, but the majority are forgettable.

2. About half the songs sound alike. You can tell them apart if you listen carefully: song A has a disco-ish rhythm section, song B has a particularly breathy singer; song C has piano and strings; song D has distorted guitar and strings; etc. But the similarities are greater than the differences. They’re all based on the same template, all feature nasal girl singers at the upper end of their ranges, all are overarranged and overproduced, and they all blur together in my mind.

3. Masumi Itou, by virtue of her superior songwriting skills, has earned the right to sing in a little-girl voice if she wants to. All other female vocalists need to learn to use their full vocal ranges and sing full-out.

4. Japan needs altos, baritones and basses.

5. I forbid all use of string sections, real or sampled, in popular music. Synth pads, too. After listening to hours of gooey music, it takes something like The Rodeo Carburettor to blast the slime out of my ears.

6. What the hell is Yes doing here? “Roundabout” is an old favorite, and I prefer it to the vast majority of the other nominees, but it’s an “anime” song only by the loosest possible definition. (Beware: the track included in the big download skips once near the end. If you have another recording — and you should — listen to that instead.) ((I have no problem with including such numbers as “Duvet” or “The Sore Feet Song,” since they are generally unknown outside of anime, but Yes has an enormous world-wide audience.)) ((Let me offer a deal to the tournament organizers: “Roundabout” can remain in the running if they can explicate the lyrics.))

7. Those who only know “The Sore Feet Song” from watching Mushishi are in for a surprise.

Collector’s item

Tsukimi

So Steven is looking for girls with red half-rim glasses? Here’s one he might have missed: Tsukimi, from Princess Jellyfish. ((The frames look brownish here, but elsewhere they’re clearly red.)) (It’s a good show, often very funny, that badly needs a second season, but I suspect that it’s not quite to Steven’s taste.)

Briefly noted

Stella 9

Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3, is Gainax’s shameless attempt to capture the Girls und Panzer audience. It’s slightly more realistic: set in a high school that’s larger than some colleges, the girls fight with airguns rather than tanks. The first episode wasn’t bad, and the animators pointedly did not show any pantsu. I’ll probably continue watching. Update: In the second episode, one of the characters steps out of the shower wearing just a towel, and later bounces a bit; this is a Gainax show, after all. Still, it’s mild as fanservice goes. Stella etc. promises to be a pleasant entertainment featuring a bunch of (mostly) non-neurotic eccentrics, but it’s not another GuP.

By the way, if after watching Girls und Panzer you’ve got the yen to drive a tank, you can, if you’re in Georgia. (Via Borepatch.)

The Brickmuppet endured the entire first episode of Watamote and wondered where the punch line was. I only made it half-way through; this just isn’t my kind of humor.

Thomas McDonald has begun a series of posts on Tarot cards from a Catholic perspective. When I learned that il sole penetra le illusioni was a mahou shoujo series based on Tarot decks, I was curious to see how much the writers got right (very little). The show looks like it’s intended to be a dark fantasy in the vein of Madoka Magica, but between the bad botany and the middle-aged transvestite, the staff didn’t quite nail it. Still, parts of the first episode were odd enough to be intriguing, and I might watch the second episode. Or I might not.

The first episode of the current iteration of Genshiken was largely about a girl who was actually a boy. Never mind.

More screencaps from the first episode of Stella with the very long title below the fold.

Continue reading “Briefly noted”

Exploding princesses, etc.

(Via Darwin Catholic.)

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Siegfried — Game of Thrones version

An unexpected Dragonball fan:

In my ballet training, I had no enemy but myself. Especially when I would watch myself in the mirror in the studio and execute my ballet routines, I often envisioned myself as Son-Goku struggling with the enemy. When I would fail, my hair would look darker; when I would triumph over a seemingly impossible task, my hair would appear blonder than it is.
Whenever people watch me dance, I hope they see the character I’m trying to impersonate onstage. I might be the noble prince from Swan Lake or the Prodigal Son; I might be a beggar or a soldier. In reality, I am just a geek owing everything I can do to an ape alien named Son-Goku.

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The Man Who Was Thursday was one of my favorite books years ago. I thought it was a fantasy, but apparently it is one of the most realistic spy novels ever written.

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Presenting George Herriman and Krazy Kat, with appearances by archie and mehitabel.

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Killer trees? Poisons aside, I don’t think so. Killer bromeliads? Perhaps.

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What is the worst Bob Dylan song? I’m tempted to say all of them — Zimmerman, to my ears, has a modest talent for doggerel and none whatsoever for music — but some of his songs are worse than others. I’ll nominate one that’s a bit obscure nowadays (though not obscure enough), “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.”

Well, up the stairs ran Frankie Lee
With a soulful bounding leap
And foaming at the mouth
He began to make his midnight creep
For sixteen nights and days he raved
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest
Which is where he died of thirst

If you perceive anything in the lyrics beyond the clanging rhyme, you need to detox.

It’s been a tedious week …

… and I could use a little silliness right now.

Sailor Fluttershy

When I read Dusty Sage’s comments on Equestria Girls, it occurred to me that there might be another bipedal variation on the Pony theme extant. And indeed there is. Is there ever.

Continue reading “It’s been a tedious week …”

Notes, musical and otherwise

There is an anime music tournament in the works, and the organizers seek your nominations. The following are what I came up with during breakfast this morning. There’s a lot of Susumu Hirasawa, Masumi Itou, Yuki Kajiura and Yoko Kanno. It’s not by accident.

Haibane Renmei — “Free Bird”
Paprika — “Mediational Field”
Azumanga Daioh — “Soramimi Cake”
Noir — “Salva Nos”
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica — “Sis Puella Magica”
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita — “Yume no Naka no Watashi no Yume”
Macross Plus — “Voices”
Paranoia Agent — “Yume no Shima Shinen Kouen”
Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto — “Kouya Ruten”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Lithium Flower”
Shin Sekai Yori — “Wareta Ringo”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Inner Universe”
Paranoia Agent — “Shiroi Oka – Maromi no Theme”
Pumpkin Scissors — “Mercury Go”
Level E — “Cold Finger Girl”

Inevitably, I forgot a favorite: “Poltergeist,” from Ghost Hound.

***

No one ever visits my photo gallery. I decided to open a Flickr account, so even more people can ignore my pictures. It seems I timed it just right — the Flickr page sure looks pretty, but I have to wait for it to load completely twice before I can do anything there. I joined a few Flickr groups and, again, I timed it just right. It seems that Wichita photographers hang out at Facebook nowadays. Although I do have a Facebook account to keep tabs on family and friends, as a policy I post virtually nothing there. That’s not going to change.

***

Satsuma-jima

Satsuma-jima, not far from Kyushu, has been a bit feisty lately. I grabbed the picture above from the JMA webcam (third from the bottom of the list) this morning.

From the chariot boudoir

If you can’t find the video you want on YouTube, look elsewhere. (This is the complete recording of the song, not just the excerpt included in the eighth episode of Girls und Panzer (and censored on Crunchyroll). The missing section of the anime begins around 1:50.) ((Though the censored section is back on Youtube for now.))

So we’ve had girls with guns, girls as guns (or is that guns as girls?), girls with mecha, girls as combat aircraft, and now with girls with tanks. ((It’s actually not that new. See Those Who Hunt Elves — on second thought, don’t. It’s lousy; not even Kotono Mitsuishi could redeem it.)) It’s probably all just pandering to otaku, but perhaps there is something more sinister going on. If anime reflects reality, Japanese young men generally are either hapless dweebs or sparkly bishies and crossdressers. If you want to form an army, they’d be useless. You’d be better off drafting young women, who in Japan have talent for using the tools of war, and often magic, too. Girls und Panzer may be just the latest in a series of entertainments designed to accustom the Japanese to the idea of women as warriors.

At least one Chinese writer sees “evil intent militarism” in Girls und Panzer, though it’s difficult to follow the argument as interpreted by Giggle Translate. ((Giggle Translate insisted that the original language of the linked page was Irish.))

Chicken emergency

Miscellaneous notes:

• I’m mostly taking pictures these days in my available time. Wichita, perhaps the least interesting place visually in North America — it’s not even ugly — is as photogenic as it ever gets right now. Although it’s already summer (spring lasted most of one morning last week), temperatures haven’t yet hit 100°, and I can ride around town without risking heatstroke.

Roadblock

• My route home from work yesterday was more circuitous than usual, with one intersection closed off by the police. I missed the excitement, but that may be just as well.

• I watched several more episodes of some current series but ended up dropping them all. I probably will eventually watch the rest of Suisei no Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. The first three episodes showed more thought than any of the other shows I sampled, and the art looked good, too. The Brickmuppet and Steven both praise what they’ve seen so far. Valvrave the Liberator features not just mecha, but vampires, too (and in recent episodes, I gather, boys and girls trading bodies). It might be of interest to Wonderduck when he’s recovered from the horrors of Vividred, but I’ve had enough.

Chiaki

Instead, I’ve been rewatching some older favorites, Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, Mouretsu Pirates (for the third time) and Shingu (I’ve lost count).

Bunny warrior

• You can download the materials to make a paper model of a tank at the Girls und Panzer website here. Also, Brave Combo has worked its magic, or whatever it is, on “Katyusha.”

• It’s been a while since I mentioned ponies. Here’s a list of several with their Civil War general counterparts. (Via Dusty Sage.)

• The title of this post is from Looking for Bobowicz, which I listened to earlier this evening. You can download it here.

Hmmm

Discovered while browsing in Wikipedia:

[Graham] Greene’s film review of Wee Willie Winkie, featuring nine-year-old Shirley Temple, cost the [Night and Day] magazine a lost libel lawsuit. Greene’s review stated that Temple displayed “a dubious coquetry” which appealed to “middle-aged men and clergymen”.[16] It is now considered one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of children for entertainment.

It may be just as well that he didn’t live to see moe-licious anime.