I couldn’t resist making my own 2048 game, using images from the Girls und Panzer movie. Beware: this can be terribly addictive, and if you have work that must be done, do not click here.
Update: I made another one using images from GATE and a different online game maker.
(If you are unfamiliar with this sort of game, you play it by using the arrow keys on your keyboard to push the tiles around. There are eleven (2,048=2^11) different tiles; revealing the last two is not easy.)
Flip Flappers is the most interesting series I’ve seen since Kill la Kill and Shin Sekai Yori, conceptually and artistically. Each episode is different from every other episode. Much of it is pure fun, with frequent shout-outs and parodies, but there are depths and eccentricities and mysteries enough to inspire reams of speculation and analysis in the otakusphere. If there are twelve episodes, there are only three left to explain just what is going on. While the writers seem to know exactly what they are doing, I’m still concerned that it could fall apart at the end, or end with nothing resolved. We’ll see.
I reviewed the first episode, looking for Mimi. Do you see her in any of these screencaps?
Something else I wonder about: Is Cocona asking the right question above? Consider these names: Cocona, Mimi, Papika, Toto, Yayaka, Yuyu. One doesn’t fit the pattern. Throughout the show, Papika’s behaviour has reminded me of a playful Labrador retriever, sniff sniff. What is she? What would happen if the band around her ankle were removed? She and Cocona may be a complementary pair, but a pair of what?
As this lousy year nears its end, it’s time to shop for next year’s calendar. I looked for Japanese anime calendars and found a number worth considering. These are some that caught my eye.
The first episode of Miss Bernard Said. mentioned Yasutaka Tsutsui, and I checked to see if any more of his books have been translated into English. A quick search showed nothing new. However, I did find translations of a few of his stories online:
Those of us with blogs, we need to post cheesecake in [Steven Den Beste’s] memory. I think he’d like that.
Steven did indeed like pictures of pretty girls. However, I don’t share his taste for cheesecake. Instead, I grabbed several thousand of the pictures from the header at Chizumatic and assembled them into a slide show with music from Girls und Panzer. The pictures flash by at a rate of five per second; epileptics beware.
Cocona’s green rabbit in Flip Flappers is named “Uexküll” in both the Crunchyroll and Viewster subtitles. That doesn’t seem like a traditional Japanese name, so I did a little searching and discovered theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll. According to Wikipedia,
Uexküll was interested in how living beings perceive their environment(s). Uexküll argued that organisms perceived the experience of living in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, ‘self-in-world’ subjective reference frames that he called Umwelt (translated as milieu, situation, embedding-lit. German for environment). These Umwelten (plural of Umwelt) are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the “Umgebung” which would be the living being’s surroundings as seen from the likewise peculiar perspective or Umwelt of the observer. The umwelt is composed of two parts, the innenwelt or self-oriented features, and the Umgebung, or world-oriented features. Together, they describe the individual’s subjective viewpoint, or embedding, which has the property of being ubiquitous, as compared to the observer’s objective viewpoint, which has the property of being universal.
Um, okay. Possibly Uexküll’s Umwelt and Umgebung lurk in Pure Illusion as Faust does in Madoka Magica, though it will take someone with more patience with modern philosophy than I have to explain it all.
In Flip Flappers, serious-minded student Cocona sees a red-haired girl flying on a powered surfboard. Later the girl pops up behind Cocona, sniffs her, and introduces herself as “Papika” before they fall down the rabbit hole concrete pipe into Wonderland “Pure Illusion,” accompanied by a small yellow robot/cyborg. There they find themselves in a winter landscape, but it’s apparently not very cold, and the snow is sweet. More odd things happen for no obvious reason. Cocona loses her glasses, which Papika retrieves with considerable difficulty. Cocona’s eye change color, her short black hair becomes long and purple, and she finds a glowing blue object in her hand. A variety of other characters are introduced, including some who observe Papika remotely through laboratory equipment.
Flip Flappers reminds me of Kyousougiga in its anything-can-happen eccentricity, but whether it’s as well thought-out as the earlier series remains to be seen. Masumi Itou is part of the music crew; her presence is clearly discernable in the ending theme. I’ll probably keep watching Flip Flappers unless it turns stupid.
Update: You can also watch Flip Flappershere. The translation is different from Crunchyroll’s and makes a little more sense in some places.
Three of the students in Miss Bernard Said read a lot; the fourth one would rather talk about books than read them. It’s a flimsy framework even for a short, but it is about books, which compensates for a lot.
I know I watched Kiitaro’s Yokai Picture Diary, but I don’t remember anything about it — which might be all you need to know.
Against my better judgement, I tried ClassicaLoid but didn’t last long. It was a dumb as I had feared.
I watched three minutes of Drifters, which was a bloody mess, and I mean that literally. Ick. It seems that the gore might not be its greatest failing. Other shows that I quit in five minutes or less include Soul Buster and Occultic;Nine.
In Matoi the Sacred Slayer, men get silly when they see a little cleavage, and women take advantage of it. Meh. There might be a good mahou shoujo story beyond the fanservice, but I don’t have the patience to find out. (Steven has a more positive take.)
The protagonist of Nazotokine is a flat-chested secretary at an advertising agency who finds herself trapped in a strange place until she solves some riddles. She’s no longer a kid, but she nevertheless undergoes a mahou shoujo-style transformation into a decidedly non-secretarial outfit. Suddenly she is no longer flat. Even though it’s another short, it felt stretched out. I might watch another episode to see if the riddles are of any interest.
Sengoku Chōjū Giga is yet another short. This one uses the style of the proto-manga Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to tell silly tales of Odo Nobunaga. Here Nobunaga is a cuckoo, and is cuckoo. The art is distinctive, but otherwise this is an ordinary gag anime.
Many more screencaps below the fold. Click to embiggenate.
• Raff, Riff, of Notre Dame, Indiana
• Bunny, Soul, of Williams Bay, Wisconsin
• Vader, Darth, of Spokane, Washington
• Mouse, Mickey, of Anaheim, California
• The Elf, Buddy, of North Pole, Alaska
• Hydrox, Cookie, of Newport Coast, California
These and the others on the list are all better choices than any of those offered by the political parties.
I looked at random first episodes of the fall shows debuting on Crunchyroll. Overall it looks like another season for watching old favorites and working on my backlog, but a couple show promise.
Easily the best is The Ancient Magus’ Bride. Chise, a girl without a family who sees yokai, lives with a sorcerer in the English (I think) countryside. Her guardian/owner/future husband has an animal skull for a head, but he seems to be a decent, caring fellow who enjoys a cup of tea. At various times I was remineded of Spirited Away, Natsume Yuujin-cho, Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Gaiman and The Twelve Kingdoms. It’s worth checking out if any of these names mean something to you.
Unfortunately, The Ancient Magus’ Bride is an OVA rather than a regular series. There will be two more episodes released six months apart. If you want more, the manga might be worth tracking down.
A better broomstick (or “boomstick”?)
Izetta: The Last Witch is yet another alternate history of WWII. This time, the principal characters are a strong-willed and capable princess from a small country in central Europe, and a “white witch” with red hair. What particularly interested me was the music. One scene is set at a performance of The Magic Flute, and we hear parts of both of the Queen ofNight’s arias. It’s probably too much to hope for more Mozart in future episodes, but I’ll likely will watch another episode or two to see how the story develops. The ending art hints that there will be yuri; if that happens, I’ll drop the show.
Other shows I sampled:
Nyanbo! features CG cardboard cats doing cardboard cat things during its brief episodes. A character I would rather watch appears momentarily at the end.
Guess who
Kaiju Girls is a sort of mahou shoujo parody with very short episodes, except that the chibi girls transform into chibi monsters. It’s almost too light to call “fluff,” as is Ninja Girl and Samurai Master.
I watched five minutes of Tiger Mask. Ugh. The hell with it.
To my astonishment, I made it all the way through the first episode of the latest iteration of Time Bokan. It straddles the border of silly and stupid, but it might be tolerable for those who occasionally enjoy a little dumb humor.
This looks strangely familiar
Magical Girl Raising Project looks like an attempt to be another Madoka Magica, this time pitting the girls against each other in a battle royale. Without Shaft, Akiyuki Shinbo, Gen Urobuchi and Yuki Kajiura, though, it’s not likely to work. The black and white parti-colored mascot is probably a shout-out to Danganronpa, a show I have zero interest in. Ubu is watching it; I’ll check in a few weeks to see what he thinks of it.
Magical Girl Raising Project is populated by girls. (People obsessed with “gender identity” will be pleased to learn that one of the girls is not a traditional female.) Touken Ranbu – Hanamaru is populated entirely by young men with pointy chins, many of whom also wear red eyeliner or dangly earrings. Gee, I never realized that swords are so effeminate. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, and it’s rendered innocuous by horseplay and slapstick, but it’s not for me and probably not for you, either.
One curious note: both Time Bokan and Touken Ranbu – Hanamaru deal with historical revisionism. Neither do it as well as Peabody and Sherman.
Additional screencaps below the fold. Click to embiggen.
One of the many shows I don’t plan to watch this fall is ClassicaLoid. ANN describes it thus:
The story follows high school students Kanae and Sōsuke, who live in a provincial town that is trying to revitalize itself with music. One day, suddenly “Classicaloid” versions of Beethoven and Mozart appear in front of Kanae and Sōsuke. When the suspicious-looking Classicaloids play music they call “mujik,” it has a strange power: stars start to fall, and giant robots appear. Now every day is tumultuous. Eventually, more Classicaloids start to appear such as Bach, Chopin, and Schubert. What is the great power that the Classicaloids have? Are they friends or foe to humanity?
The show’s music will include pop, rock, techno, and other arrangements of famous classical works, arranged by well-known Japanese musicians. The official website states that the show will also feature “battles, slapstick comedy, heartwarming stories, and light love(?).”
It sounds dumb, and while you are welcome to do what you like with Liszt and Tchaikowsky, I don’t appreciate anyone monkeying around with Chopin.
One of the composers victimized is a certain Bądarzewska. I’d never heard of this person, so I did a little searching and discovered that the composer is presumably Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska. She wrote a piano piece called “The Maiden’s Prayer.” From Wikipedia:
Percy Scholes, writes in The Oxford Companion to Music (9th edition, reprinted 1967) rather unkindly of Bądarzewska: “Born in Warsaw in 1838 [sic] and died there in 1861, aged twenty-three [sic]. In this brief lifetime she accomplished, perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of absolutely every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilised world with a piece of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull technical sense, could play. It is probable that if the market stalls and back-street music shops of Britain were to be searched The Maiden’s Prayer would be found to be still selling, and as for the Empire at large, Messrs. Allen of Melbourne reported in 1924, sixty years after the death of the composer, that their house alone was still disposing of 10,000 copies a year.”
The composition is a short piano piece for intermediate pianists. Some have liked it for its charming and romantic melody, and others have described it as “sentimental salon tosh”. The pianist and academic Arthur Loesser described it as a “dowdy product of ineptitude.”
You can listen to the piece here, and Bob Wills’ version here.
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The only current show that I’m following is Mob Psycho 100. Though less overtly comic than One Punch Man, it has much of the same sensibility, with a similar contrast of naiveté and cynicism, and with a similar satirical edge.
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I gave up on Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress half-way through the first episode. Pixy stuck it out and reports that it is
Completely implausible. These people are so dumb the zombies would starve to death.
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At one point in Summer Wars (recommended), a list of people who solved a puzzle in the movie is displayed. While rewatching the movie recently, I spotted a familiar name. You might find other names of interest, variously misspelled.
There are a bunch more pictures that will take some time to go through.
Update: I’ve edited as many as I’m going to. As usual, the organizers did their damnedest to make taking pictures difficult, and none that I took are any better than snapshots. You can see them all here.
I may visit Anime Festival Wichita next week, after skipping it for several years. It’s kinda dinky and the halls in the venue are too narrow for all the cosplayers, but it is within bicycle distance. It would be helpful if its website were more informative. The “events” page states that “The full schedule will be available soon.” It has said that for months. Five days away, the schedule is still not online, which makes it difficult to plan my weekend. (Update: it’s now the day after the convention, and the schedule has still not been posted there. I did eventually find it on the official AFW Facebook page. (There’s another page that turns up first in searches, but it’s the wrong one.) I hate Facebook.)
If you have a hankering to attend an anime or anime-related convention next week, you don’t have to come to Wichita. There are at least ten others scheduled for the same weekend, from Illinois and South Carolina to Finland and France. There’s even a “Sailor Moon Celebration” in Toronto.
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So, what have I been watching lately? Mostly older stuff. I’ll marathon the rest of Ushio and Tora when I have the time — the word is that it ends well — and I might finish Tanaka-kun someday, but otherwise I lost all interest in the spring season. Nothing this summer looks very promising, but I’ll sample some first episodes when they’re available and see if there are any surprises.
I looked around for sheet music to the “Säkkijärven Polkka” featured in Girls und Panzer der Movie. Apparently no two musicians play it quite the same way. Most of the versions I found don’t sound much like the tune in the movie. However, I did find a simple piano arrangement that matches pretty well here. (I suspect that it was transcribed from the OST.)
I finally had a couple of hours to devote to Girls und Panzer der Movie. Quick reaction: If you liked the original series, you’ll like this. If you found the original too implausible to enjoy, this is no different. For those who haven’t seen the original: if the idea of watching high school girls engage in the recreational equivalent of war with real WWII tanks sounds like fun, check out the series here. If you like it, then track down the movie. You can watch the movie first, I suppose, but it will make less sense and you’ll miss the significance of the various characters’ actions. I don’t have time to write a proper review, but there are reviews here and here (beware: the latter has many spoilers that aren’t hidden).
One of my father’s favorite booksOoarai expects that every duck will do its duty
As Steven guessed, one of the highlights for me was a lively Finnish polka with kantele and accordion in the soundtrack. The movie’s makers didn’t pick the tune at random; “Säkkijärven polkka” has a little history behind it. To make Steven happy, I’m placing the tune below the fold.1
So you’re in the mood for a good old-fashioned shounen story about fighting monsters with magic, but every time you watch Twin Star Exorcists you wish someone would slap some common sense and courtesy into the characters? You are in luck: Shounen Onmyouji is available on YouTube, albeit as an old fansub tranlating the dialogue into something similar to, but not quite that same as, English. (It’s intelligible; you just occasionally need to translate the translation. (Update: The second episode and beyond use a much more readable translation.))
Shounen Onmyouji was one of the last series licensed for North America by Geneon, just before it ceased its American operations, and consequently most of it is difficult to impossible to find legally at reasonable prices. Someday someone will rescue the license — it’s too good a show to remain forgotten — but who knows when?
