(If you’re reading this at Anime Nano, don’t bother clicking through. This is just the traditional “no time to write” post.)
Nutcracker season is imminent. While I’m not on stage this year, I will be in the auditorium taking thousands of pictures during tech week. There won’t be time for anime or anything else beyond work, sleep and photography. Things should return to what passes for normal around the middle of December. There might be a book review or two, but otherwise don’t expect much activity here until then.
*****
If you need something to read, there’s plenty of fuss in the otakusphere about whether anime will survive. The most cogent discussion is, predictably, at Steven’s, here and here (be sure to read the comments). See also Avatar, Author and DiGiKerot.
Poor Sawaki. In the third episode of Moyashimon he learns that there are things with stronger fragrances than kiviak; in the fourth, he is publicly humiliated, he learns more about animal husbandry than he really wanted to know, and his stomach hurts. He ends up in the hospital, a particularly nightmarish place for him since he can see all the interesting microbes (including viruses) in the air there. Moyashimon is probably the most interesting new series of the fall — that I’ve seen, ((I haven’t yet seen Kaiji and I’ve only watched the first episode of Shion no Ou so far.)) anyway. It’s certainly the most unpredictable. I have no idea what’s going to happen next, except that Sawaki won’t enjoy it.
Addendum: the animators got careless early in the third episode and gave Professor Itsuki a mouth:
*****
Three episodes in, Ghost Hound looks to be a thirteen-episode series inflated to twenty-six. The story may yet astonish me, but the pace is glacial, and I’m losing patience. I’ll stick it out for a few more episodes, but it threatens to be a major disappointment.
When Chiaki is the focus in Minami-ke, it’s fun. Kana, however, is nearly as annoying as Tomo Takino, and Haruka is just plain dull. The principal motif in the fourth episode is tugging on skirts, which does not improve matters. I think I’ll pass on the rest. If I want to see a Ruri, I might as well wait until Nadesico is available again next year and enjoy the real thing.
Sketchbook explores the boundary between laid-back and comatose. It makes Aria seem like an action/suspense thriller. Sometimes that’s just what I need, but usually it isn’t. The fourth episode — or was it the fifth? They all blur together — is devoted to the cats that fascinate Sora. The bear-like top feline (I’d call him the alpha male, but like all the other characters in Sketchbook, the cats are too mellow to even consider fighting) wants to wear a collar. It’s a mildly entertaining story, like every other episode, and I don’t regret spending a half-hour on it, but there is very little substance there. If you’re in the mood for something serenely weightless, this is your show.
The show that l am enjoying most this fall is also the oldest, Alfred J. Kwak from 1989. There may be a political subtext to the story, and the subtitlers find plenty of occasion for historical notes, but the emphasis is on entertainment, not polemics. Although this is a children’s show with a straightforward narrative and uncomplicated characters, adults can enjoy it, too, particularly adults disappointed with the fall anime season.
Incidentally, it’s worthwhile to listen to the Dutch dub as well as the Japanese. I like the Dutch opening song better, even if the other is sung by Megumi Hayashibara.
Is Ahiru no Quack, or Alfred J. Kwak, the greatest anime of all time? Wonderduck thinks so, but he might not be entirely unbiased. This Dutch/Japanese production from 1989 looks like it could be suitable for children and tolerable for adults. Those who are disappointed by this fall’s offerings might want to check it out; if nothing else, it’s a different style of art and animation than is usual these days, and it features Megumi Hayashibara.
My worry is that it will become an agenda-driven show in which the messages overshadow the characters. I also wonder if the translators are reading too much into the story.
In the second episode of Ghost Hound the story finally gets going. There’s a summary of the kidnapping eleven years ago as it is understood by Tarou and the townspeople. He has another dream, this one about the beginning of the events then, and he discovers a eerie realm near the shrine where Miyako lives. We also get a hint about what the title refers to:
The other series I’m watching this fall so far — Miname-ke, Mokke, Moyashimon, Sketchbook — are just lightweight entertainments and nothing more. With Ghost Hound, it looks like there will be a substantial series, after all. It’s still in the expository stages and the shape of the main story isn’t clear yet, but I think it’s going to be worth following. The main problem for me will probably be remembering that Ghost Hound isn’t Lain redux. This may be difficult, because there are significant parallels, from overlapping realities to the visual and sonic distortions.
After a four-month hiatus, the fifth episode of Master of Epic has finally been translated. This time, the topic is “skill.” In first skit, a young woman learns to sew to impress her crush, and overdoes it. It’s mildly humorous. There’s also a housewife at a flea market, another brief bit with Chuu and Bukotsu in which Chuu does something uncharacterstically cute, an illustration of good and bad luck involving a cannon, and another lengthy installment of the intermittently amusing Diaros Island saga. And that’s it. Yawn. There seems to be something missing — five things, actually, one blue, one yellow, one pink, one green and one black.
In other words, skip this installment and hope that it takes less than six months for the next to be subtitled. The previews promise that the Waragecha Five will have two skits then.
Just wondering: does “larufa kuina vashiina” mean anything?
*****
I watched the most recently subbed episodes of Moyashimon, Sketchbook and Minami-ke, and there isn’t much to say about them that I haven’t already said. All three remain on my watch list. The first continues weird, the second weightless and the third funny. My only problem with the last this time was that there was too much of Kana and not enough of Chiaki.
For the heck of it, I made a few avatars. These are all 80 pixels square, suitable for gravatars, which are now part of the WordPress armory. Right-click to save to your disc — you know the drill.
I spent some time this evening at the Wichita Asian Festival and took a few pictures. Pictured above is a moment from the Japanese folk dance “Soran Bushi.” Note the traditional footwear. There are more pictures on my other weblog.
Both Wonderduck and Astro have declared their love for Sketchbook full color’S, so I watched the first few episodes. Initially I was put off by the main character. In the first episode Sora seems not just painfully but pathologically shy and sensitive. However, the subsequent episodes emphasize her otherworldliness, and she seems less like a mental case and more like Osaka’s artistic cousin. Also, however strange she is, she not the only eccentric around:
I doubt that I’ll ever like Sketchbook as much as Mr. Duck does, but it is on my watch list. Slight though the series is, it’s appealingly whimsical, and it’s refreshing after noisier, busier shows.
Sketchbook earns bonus points for being 100% fanservice-free. It’s an anime in which high school girls wear knee-length skirts. (But it loses a point for the pointless apostrophe-capital “S” in the title.)
*****
Kana achieves a certain measure of self-knowledge
I’m ambivalent about Minami-ke. It does feature potentially the best comic character since Osaka, and the first two episodes are funnier than Lucky Star and Hayate no Gotoku combined. Chiaki is a very bright, very deadpan grade-school student. She steals the show as Ruri did Nadesico. She has a mischievous streak, and her hyper high school sister Kana is an easy target. The two live with their older sister, apparently without parents or other guardians.
Funny though it is, Minami-ke makes me a bit uneasy. The first episode is largely about kissing, which Kana wants to demonstrate to Chiaki. The second concerns panties. What will the third feature, bra sizes? I’m not sure I want to find out. (Note that there isn’t any actual fanservice in the show, just the threat of it.)
*****
Although I was not exactly enthralled by the first episode of Ghost Hound, as I noted below, I am still certainly going to follow the series. Nakamura et al may yet come through.
*****
I’m no expert on swing, but the more I listened to the Oh! Edo Rocket soundtrack, the more familiar it seemed. “Matsuri,” for instance, may not have quite the same melody as “In the Mood,” but it sure reminded me of the earlier tune. It bothered me, so I posted a few of the tunes on my other weblog and asked if they sounded familiar. The consensus in the comments is that the pieces are pastiches of swing originals, not quite plagiarisms but damn near. So, if you like the music, instead of the OER soundtrack, you probably should look for recordings by Glenn Miller and his contemporaries.
Given the creators of Ghost Hound, I was afraid that the show might be pretentious, incoherent or incomprehensible. The first episode suggests a worse possiblity: it might be dull.
Tarou has a recurring dream, which he describes into a voice recorder when he wakes up. He falls asleep in class. Two other students are introduced who are probably going to be major characters. One is a smarmy newcomer, the other is a surly outsider. Also making appearances are Tarou’s parents, the school psychologist with a curl in the middle of his forehead, and a girl who appears both in Taro’s dream and on the road home from school.
So far, it’s been mostly introductions, a little backstory and a little strangeness. Nothing much happens, and none of the characters are particularly engaging. The liveliest part was the fly buzzing in Tarou’s dream. This is just the first episode, of course, and presumably Chiaki Konaka and Ryutaro Nakamura are setting the stage for serious weirdness. Still, I was underwhelmed.
Konaka and Nakamura earlier collaborated on Serial Experiments Lain, which will be ten years old next July. After viewing the first episode of Ghost Hound, I watched the first episode of Lain again. There they didn’t waste time on introductions but plunged straight into the strangeness. Perhaps they ought to study their old work to see how it’s done. (Or perhaps they should have drafted Yasuyuke Ueda and Yoshitoshi ABe.)
Sawaki, who has just begun his studies at an agricultural college in Tokyo, can see microbes with his naked eye and even pluck them out of the air. What he sees doesn’t much resemble the pictures in books. To him, bacteria and fungi have cute little faces. Nevertheless, he can accurately identify species.
The first episode of Moyashimon serves mainly to introduce the main characters. Besides Sawaki, there’s his friend Kei; Professor Itsuki, whose mouth is hidden by his mustache except when — well, you’ll see; and Hasegawa, who doesn’t dress like a student at an agricultural college and who refuses to believe in Sawaki’s ability. There’s also lots of friendly yeast floating around.
What kind of story Moyashimon is going to tell isn’t clear yet. The alternate title of the series, “Tales of Agriculture,” suggests that it’s likely to be a episodic microbe-of-the-week show. Whether it continues to be interesting once the concept’s novelty wears off remains to be seen. (I hope the writers don’t try to top kiviak. Ugh.) There was no indication of any romance (though Hasegawa’s outfit hints at something else), so one can hope that Moyashimon will be angst-free. I’ll definitely be watching more of it.
A pleasant surprise (for me; YMMV): the ending theme is by Polysics, the outstanding exponent of hypercaffeinated neo-Devonian rock ‘n’ roll. The lyrics have nothing to do with the show, or anything else, but I don’t mind.
Seven years ago, when Shion was very young, she witnessed her parents’ murder. She hasn’t spoken since then. Under her foster parents’ tutelage, she has become a prodigy at shogi, the Japanese version of chess. The first episode of Shion no Ou deals with events at a women’s shogi tournament. Poor traumatized Shion may be the least complicated character in the series. We’re only one episode in, and already it seems that everyone else has either a secret or an agenda. There are also strange men observing Shion’s every move.
It sounds ridiculously melodramatic, and the story might eventually collapse under its own weight, but the beginning of Shion no Ou is quite watchable. I’m curious to see how it develops.
*****
The second episode of Rental Magica provides some background for the president and the Celtic magic specialist, and the hell with it. I’m sorry, but the story is not interesting and I don’t give a damn about any of the characters.
*****
I enjoyed the second episode of A Young Person’s Mushishi, a.k.a. Mokke, more than the first, partly because it wasn’t the horror story I was expecting. The spirit Mizuki encounters this time is friendly and helpful, but it doesn’t quite get the distinction between right and wrong. The story suffers slightly from preachiness, but not fatally. It looks like this will be a good show for kids.
*****
In my notes earlier about Baccano!, I don’t think I sufficiently indicated that it’s often a very funny show. There’s plenty of bloodshed and fair amount of horror, but comedy is likely to strike at any time, particularly when Isaac and Miria are around. I’d like to put an excerpt or two on the video weblog, such as Isaac’s recounting of their criminal career in the sixth episode, but the fansubs are in Mac-hostile mkv format, grrr.
Update: I added the opening of Baccano! to the video weblog.
*****
Nota bene: as a matter of policy, I do not approve anonymous comments with obviously phony email addresses, e.g., doesntwork@donttryme.bleh.
While waiting for Ghost Hound and Moyashimon, I’ve been watching Baccano! Four episodes in I’m beginning to get some idea of the story. The series could be first-rate, or it could be a massive trainwreck (in more than one sense). We’ll see.
It’s set in Prohibition-era America. The characters cover a wide ethnic range — can you name any other anime featuring a Czeslaw? — though quasi-Italian names predominate. A lot of them are mobsters from the Mafia and the Camorra. Many, if not most of them, are immortal. You can shoot them full of bullets and cut them up, but in a little while the blood oozes back into the bodies, severed fingers and heads reattach themselves, and wounds magically heal without a trace. Some of them are pretty nasty — one is a outright psychopath who favors white suits because splatters of blood show up so brightly. Others seem nice enough.
The story focuses on the events on the train the Flying Pussyfoot ((Originally the Grand Punk Railroad, if I’m interpreting the book titles correctly.)) between Chicago and New York. Something is hidden on the train, perhaps a couple of bottles of immortality elixer, perhaps a bomb. The passengers include many mobsters and many immortals. There are also Isaac and Miria (the former played by Masaya Onosaka at his most clownish), a pair of enthusiastic nitwits to complicate the already complex proceedings. Bloody hijinks ensue.
Ordinarily a show this violent wouldn’t interest me, and if the narrative were presented in straightforward fashion I would have quit after the first episode. Baccano!‘s novelty is that the story is is told in bits and pieces, skipping backward and forward in the years from 1930 to 1932. Following the plot is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Even if the series is ultimately disappointing, there is still the pleasure of fitting the pieces together.
The story might be worthwhile. Baccano! is based on a series of light novels, and that is often a good sign. The main problem, aside from the level of violence, is that we never spend much time with any one character. Thus far, most are one-dimensional, though a few of the quieter ones hint at some complexity.
I doubt that Baccano! will ever have much of a following. It expects the viewer to pay close attention and remember what he sees, and some of it is brutal — when I rewatch the series, there are several sections I’ll skip. Still, on the basis of the first four episides, I’d rate it the second-best series from the summer that I’ve sampled, after Mononoke.
The Wikipedia page focuses more on the novels than the anime, but it does have a list of characters that might be helpful to keep on hand while watching. There are no serious spoilers there yet, though that might change.
I’m sitting on top of the parliament building, resisting tear-gas attacks from air force helicopters that circle above me like flies. I will soon enjoy my very last cigarette, my last show of resistance. My comrade, the painter Kusakabe, fell to his death just moments ago, leaving me alone as the last smoker remaining on earth. At this very moment, images of me — highlighted against the night sky by searchlights down below — are probably being relayed live across the country from TV cameras inside the helicopters.
I’ve got three packs left, and I refuse to die before I’ve finished them. So I’ve been chain-smoking two or three at a time. My head feels numb, my eyes are starting to spin. It’s only a matter of time before I, too, fall lifeless to the ground below.
It was only about fifteen or sixteen years ago that the anti-smoking movement started….
And so begins “The Last Smoker,” one of the stories in Yasutaka Tsutsui’s Salmonella Men on Planet Porno and Other Stories. The story chronicles the growth and ultimate triumph of the anti-smoking movement from the point of view of a chain-smoking writer. Desperate though his plight is in the opening paragraphs, an even more dire fate awaits him.
I first became aware of Tsutsui while reading about Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, which is based on one of Tsutsui’s novels. Paprika was ultimately disappointing — spectacular though much of it is, the whole is less than the sum of its parts — but the premise, more fully developed in a book, could be interesting. Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, a better movie, is a sequel of sorts to another of Tsutsui’s novels. I was curious about him, so I checked Amazon.com to see what was available. Although he is called Japan’s Isaac Asimov, little has been translated into English. There’s a series of Telepathic Wanderer manga, an out-of-print collection of “psychic tales” and Salmonella Men. ((Checking Amazon.com just now, I discovered that there is a newly translated Tsutsui book out, Hell.))
Tsutsui’s stories aren’t much like Asimov’s. In “Rumors About Me,” the narrator finds that his daily activities are the subjects of newscasts and televised panel discussions and are written up in newspapers. In “Don’t Laugh,” an inventor devises a time machine and can’t stop laughing. In “Hello, Hello, Hello!” a self-apppointed financial advisor exhorts the inhabitants of a block of apartments to greater frugality, emerging without warning from the next room, the wardrobe or the toilet to confront the narrator before he wastes any more money. In general, there is little extrapolation and plenty of absurdity. Tsutsui is primarily a satirist in this collection.
The title story is the closest approach to conventional science fiction. Explorers journey at great personal risk through the unnatural hazards of Planet Porno, where “only indecent life forms are allowed to exist.” There is considerable discussion between the narrator and the prudish Dr. Mogamigawa about evolution and devolution. During the Second Green Revolution, we learn, the “obnoxious hippies” were herded onto spaceships and banished from Earth. Perhaps their descendents live in the settlement of Newdopia.
Some of the stories are better than others. The least interesting to me is “Bravo Herr Mozart!”, a nonsensical biography of the composer: “Mozart was born at the age of three. The reason for this is not known. He was born in his father’s house in Salzburg — probably because he didn’t have a mother.” Etc. YMMV. There are several others I’m not likely to revisit. Most, however, are quite readable.
It should be clear by now that Salmonella Men is not the least bit like TokiKake, and that however dark Paprika might be, Tsutsui’s writing is darker. It’s also funnier, with absurdities, slapstick and surprise endings. If you enjoy satire and black humor, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno might be worth your time.
*****
I’m pleased see that The Kawaii Menace is now included at Anime Nano. I’m also a bit embarrassed that my first post listed there had nothing to do with anime, and that this one is only tangentially anime-related.
Edo cyber café, circa 1842. The otakusphere has been around longer than I had realized.
There’s still little time for anime. The only current series I’m up-to-date on is Oh! Edo Rocket (or Oedo Rocket, or Ohedo Rocket). ((Though I download Denno Coil and Seirei no Moribito as new episodes become available)) Eighteen episodes have now been subtitled, and it continues as off-the-wall as ever. The word is that the dramatic story is concluded in the twentieth episode and the remaining six focus on comedy, which is fine with me.
The soundtrack is distinctive. About half of it is big-band swing; the rest is mostly swing/rock hybrids, with a bit of pseudo-flamenco here and there. I don’t know how well it will sustain repeated listenings, but in small doses it’s fun. Here are a couple of examples:
[mp3]http://tancos.net/audio/03-Swing.mp3[/mp3]
(This tune recurs in different arrangements throughout the series. Another setting can be heard in the second video excerpt here.)
Speaking of soundtracks, I discovered yesterday that the other dealer is selling Geneon CDs for $5.99. This includes many outstanding OSTs — Haibane Renmei, Azumanga Daioh, Someday’s Dreamers, Noir, etc.
I used to play Joplin half a lifetime ago when my fingers were in shape. Using his music in the soundtrack could backfire, of course. I hated The Sting partly because I disliked Hamlisch’s arrangements. I hope Yoshihisa Hirano uses the original piano scores.
Incidentally, while most of Scott Joplin is lively and cheerful, he did write a few slow pieces, e.g., “Solace,” and some of his later rags, while not depressing, do leave a bitter aftertaste, e.g., “Scott Joplin’s New Rag.”
The first episode of Moyashimon serves mainly to introduce the main characters. Besides Sawaki, there’s his friend Kei; Professor Itsuki, whose mouth is hidden by his mustache except when — well, you’ll see; and Hasegawa, who doesn’t dress like a student at an agricultural college and who refuses to believe in Sawaki’s ability. There’s also lots of friendly yeast floating around.
