Tag: Current viewing

Missing. Last seen in episode four

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.

Yeast (Moyashimon)

Penicillin (Moyashimon)

Black mold (Moyashimon)

Chuu (Master of Epic)

P-chan (Sketchbook)

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.)

What is Sawaki looking at?

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.

Here are some notes on the biology involved in this episode.

*****

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.

How high the moon? (Ginjiro, Seikichi, Sora)

I’m tempted to say that Oh! Edo Rocket is an anime unlike other anime, but in fact I am reminded of several other shows. Like Jubei-Chan I, it oscillates between farce and drama; like Excel Saga, it’s wildly off-the-wall; like Noir, there’s potentially a complex story behind the story (as of episode ten — there are sixteen more to go, plenty of time for the writers to make a hash of things). Nevertheless, there really is nothing quite like Oh! Edo Rocket‘s combination of broad comedy, science fiction, history, horror, romance, parody and nonsense.

The premise is that in early 1840’s Edo, where all “luxuries” are outlawed, the strange girl Sora asks the fireworks maker Seikichi to make her fireworks that will reach the moon. By a curious coincidence, the residents of the row house where Seikichi lives include an expert carpenter, a tile-maker, the best mechanic in Edo and two mathematicians, among other eccentrics, all of whom are fascinated by the idea of a rocket to the moon. Meanwhile, “sky beasts” appear in the area, some of which have a taste for the blood of young women.

Overall, silliness dominates, from the character designs to the blatant anachronisms. The writers will do anything for a laugh. ((They do draw the line at offensive and gross-out humor.)) Ginjiro the locksmith goes fishing and catches a teevee set. Shunpei the proto-nerd keeps a pocket calculator in his room. There’s a henshin sequence involving a sort of sentai team; however, instead of cute magical girls, the transformees are homely adult men. At one point four of the characters are turned into cats, who perform a jazzy musical number. And then there is the crazed fireworks maker Tetsuju the Fuse, who drinks at a bar staffed by tanuki. And a flaky magistrate. And a girl with Tenchi Muyo-esque hair. And so on. (I’ve uploaded clips of Tetsuju’s first appearance and the singing cats to the video weblog.)

Despite all the absurdities, the story moves steadily forward. It’s not all foolishness. Some parts of Oh! Edo Rocket are nightmarish. Although the opening animation focuses on Seikichi and Sora, the central character is actually Ginjiro, who early on declares that he only does what is fun. As his past is revealed, it becomes clear that his attitude is inspired by bitterness, not frivolity. He is involved in nearly all the sub-plots, and he will likely face the most complex decisions of any of the characters as the series reaches its climax.

The art and the music deserve mention. The backgrounds (and occasionally foregrounds) look like paintings and contrast with the crisp lines of the character art. The effect is that Ginjiro et al seem like actors on a stage. The opening and closing themes may be listenable J-pop, but the background music is mostly big-band jazz.