Pinky Pinky Love

Welcome to Round One of Funimation's double-barrelled load of Yoshihiro Nishimura, Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl, which is probably his most mainstream movie yet. Mind, that's an extremely relative term, as much of the humor involves self-mutilation and some truly grotesque blackface.

I actually don't have as much to say about this one as I'd have liked, it's basically a sappy/campy romance of the kind Andrew likes to rail against, only with occasional scenes of extreme(ly hilarious) gore. It has a fairly charming candy-colored pop aesthetic going on, but there's not that much happening underneath; calling it a parody would be giving the script more credit than it deserves. You can kind of tell this was based on a manga because the focal point of the love triangle is an annoyingly bland milquetoast, but then I guess that's why his name isn't in the title, he's just a toy for the eponymous duo to fight over.

The male lead's charisma vacuum is only a mild problem, the big one is that the movie is almost paced in reverse; the most effective/random sequences come up front and things sort of gently peter out as it goes on. A shaggy-dog twist at the end almost justifies the actual plot, but not quite.

After letting it sink in for a few days, I think VG vs FG dethrones Samurai Princess as the weakest Nishimura production I've seen, if only because it's the least audaciously weird (although I should repeat that we're grading on a pretty strong curve here, we do still have Kabuki Frankenstein running around). It's fun to see once, but nothing's really stuck with me. I still have high hopes for RoboGeisha, though!

Baccano 1710: Crack Flag

Baccano 1705: The Ironic Light Orchestra was one of the better books in the series; a tightly focused book with an unusually small cast for Narita: three characters, two we already knew, and one who clearly did not end up becoming immortal. Indeed, later books reveal that she died in 1710, so this book was always going to be the story of how she met her end.
Narita admits in the afterword that he found it incredibly difficult to kill her off, and declares that he will never do this again. It really sounds like he wrote himself into a corner he couldn't get out of. He doesn't seem to have had any actual story to go with what we already knew, so this book ends up like an insanely boring Cliff's Note retelling of something like two years of disconnected scenes that never add up to anything. It felt like the plot didn't actually gel till page 282, and it ended another twenty pages later. The embarrassing framing device involving this narrative retold by a poet drives home just how tedious and leaden the whole affair is, and the M. Night Shyamalan worthy series of bad idea shocking twists towards the end makes this the single worst thing Narita has ever written. Hopefully he knows it and will avoid ever forcing himself to write a book he has no interest in actually writing.

Strange Tales of Del Rey part 2

I'd figured the omnibus releases were just cutting losses on less-profitable titles, but it looks like it was foreshadowing them getting out of the biz entirely. Except, sort of not at all? As he so often does, Chris Butcher lays everything out cogently.

I hope to god this more or less ends up as Del Rey taking over Kodansha USA's publishing instead of the other way around.

Tell me what, Tell me what, Tell me what you want

Looks like the beloved classic Berserk is getting a new anime project. Sankaku Complex reports (the site is NSFW) that the latest volume of the manga includes a note simply saying that "a new anime project has begun."

Rumors have been flying around about a new season of the Berserk for the longest time. I've spoken with folks at Media Blasters who would have been more than happy to put up a pile of cash to make it happen, but it just dragged on. Apparently there were some leaked images in 2009 (Sankaku Complex - again, the site's NSFW) that not only looked nice but apparently hinted at some involvement from Studio 4C, which would be a dream come true for me.

The Japanese website for Young Animal has a number of very suggestive dates: 9.30, 10.1, 10.2, 10.4 & 10.5. The English phrase "commercial film" makes me wonder if this anime project is (or will include) a movie.

Few details. Lots of possibilities. I guess we'll have to see what happens over the next few days, but I'm pretty excited.

Just remember: put your glasses on, nothing will be wrong.

Pretty much all gleaned from Sankaku Complex (links above) and a pointer by a friend

"I understand. Your only choice is to revolutionize the world."

Now THIS is the Utena I remember.


Ikuhara is fully in his occult-opera groove, and mmmm, that is some glorious nonsense. It's
downright magical. My desire to blog wars with my desire to not ruin anything for anyone lucky enough to not have seen this yet, so I'll just stick to the big picture.

So, after the student council spent all of last arc trying to break Utena's will with their own, we switch tactics from the overt to the repressed... and make a clean break from their themes with a remix of "The Revelation of Absolute Destiny", themed dueling arenas, and the infamous Elevator of Emotional Torment.


The Black Roses' schtick is creating duelists from that old Jungian anime favorite, the shadow. In response, Utena starts relying more on her own "higher self", Dios, to win battles, rather than her own skill, or even luck.

Not that she seems aware of this. The Black Rose antics provide the first overt "magic" we've seen that isn't dismissed as a trick of some kind, and while Utena doesn't seem too shaken up, she does turn to another character to stay centered. We'll see how this works out.

Amazingly, the dub is actually sort of good here! The always magnificently-hammy Dan Green and Liam O'Brien foreshadow their yaoistic pairing in Descendants of Darkness with Mikage and Mamiya, and Akio's fiancee totally sells her trip through the Elevator. Shame the rest of the cast is as awkward as always.

So yeah, the Black Rose arc is full steam ahead for loopy greatness. Utena's particular charm is the way it totally wears its heart on its sleeve, but isn't above blowing off some steam by going even further over the top to poke fun at itself (which is to say yes, there's another Nanami comedy episode on this disc, and it's actually one that gets directly referenced in the movie). I genuinely have no idea how much of my love for this show is totally legitimate and how much is camp value, but the series definitely swings both ways.

I felt it important to note

This thing totally exists.

Halcyon Lunch

The more things Hiroaki Samura writes, the more convinced I am Blade of the Immortal is his least interesting work. He's been writing the final arc of that manga for as long as I've been reading it, so either he was crazy wrong, or they won't let him end it. (I think it and Oh! My Goddess sell more than all the other titles in Afternoon combined, so this would not be surprising.)
But they have begun letting him run two books at the same time. He's done some work for the art porn magazine Erotics F, and now he's doing Halcyon Lunch, a launch title for Afternoon's new spin-off, Good! Afternoon.
He's been, apparently, drawing sketches of this girl since 1997, but largely unconnected to any actual stories. He seems to have vaguely intended it to be some sort of magical girl series, which is pretty far from what he ended up with.
Instead, Hiyosu is an omnivorous prepubescent space alien hanging out with a homeless dude and pot-growing hippie girl. She can and will eat anything, and vomit it back up. But once she vomits things back up, they generally get recombined into hideous monsters.
The presentation is even more dense and meta than Ohikkoshi was; the first chapter alone has a Find the Differences in These Two Panels puzzle and a shot demonstrating the dangers of lazy video game camera programming. A shot of Hiyosu bursting into the bath is handily covered by a postcard soliciting reader comments, and one chapter is riddled with insipid comments from an off-screen character's Twitter account. It is very much the sort of manga filled with lines like, "Oh no! He's imitating Unit-01 while reciting the names of train stations on the Hachinohe line! His mind is gone!" are very much par for the course. The zombie dog is even retconned as the dog from the cover of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure vol 1.
I suspect it will be criticized for lacking any real semblance of a narrative, but I'm predisposed to enjoy books with an insane thing on every other page.

When? Where? Who? Which?

So, thirteen episodes into the Utena rewatch, and I find myself curiously dissatisfied. It's not like this stretch of episodes is bad or anything-- sure, two of the six episodes are taken up with a Nanami comedy episode and a recap, but we do get four episodes of Touga in full manipulative bastard mode, along with an expanded version of Utena's rescue by the prince that toys with dramatic irony and unreliable narrators.


It's good stuff, and finishes establishing the characters and obsessions the rest of the series will be riffing on, but somehow it's just not hitting me like it should. The only part that seemed especially Ikuhara was the the hilarious bit from Miki's two-parter where he remembers Touga's dialogue much more homoerotically than he actually said it.


(and speaking of that, the awfully-acted dub takes some... interesting liberties with the dialogue here and there. I can't imagine the rerelease will keep that. Almost a shame)

Are operatic swordfights just not enough to hold my attention any more? That seems doubtful. More likely, I've just watched and rewatched this opening stretch too damn much for it to have any impact any more, which would make sense considering the first thirteen eps were all CPM had for like four years thanks to some poorly worded contracts. I believe the movie actually came out here before the Black Rose arc, which is probably the worst possible way to see that film, but more on that much, much later.

Anyway, we're finally out of the setup phase and headed into the meat of the show, and hopefully towards the amazing, lush lunacy that made me remember it so fondly. I never did actually watch the Black Rose sequence in full, hopefully that'll shock me back to life.

Mysterious Girlfriend X 6

Idol Master, scourge of the manga industry, has claimed yet another victim.
Volume five already had me worried that he was being led astray, abandoning the hints at a larger mystery in favor of more conventional romantic comedy plotting, and this volume entirely centering on a The Prince and the Pauper storyline involving an idol singer that looks exactly like the mysterious girlfriend is not really qualming those fears.
Not that he does this in any normal way, of course. Urabe is completely against the idea of replacing the idol singer, obviously. And the idol singer herself wears a bizarre set of bondage gear under her skirt to prevent her from losing her temper and flattening people with a high kick. (She's gotten pretty good at undoing the spring.)
The early stuff works best, before the idol fetishism comes into play, and the scissors versus high kick fight is entertainingly id-riffic. But the whole idol thing has pretty much always left me cold, particularly when they aren't exploring how fucked up it is.
Even beyond the idol thing, however, this plot line feels like a tangent on what I really want out of the book. Even if she'd been a normal actress or something, I'd have still wondered why he was so obviously avoiding following up on the foreshadowing about Urabe's identity, and her family. Perhaps he started to actually break that storyline and it didn't work, or felt like too much of a departure from the twisted romantic comedy early on, but unless he cracks it soon, I'm worried the series will peter out.
Then again, the increasingly terrible Seattle Kinokuniya stocked a huge pile of it, suggesting this approach has boosted sales quite a bit. So what do I know.

Satoshi Kon dies

From here.

Got a text about this a few minutes ago, and it still doesn't feel real. Don't know what to say...

New Policy: I Only Post About Series Beginning With U

So we all know Makoto Shinkai, right? Well, think of Kazuhiro "Romanov" Higa as his evil twin. They both have a rep as one-man anime studios, but Higa's muse leads him to ridiculous, rip-roaring pulp action instead of emo teenagers. His output may look like a PS2 cutscene (which is in no way an exaggeration; he worked on the two Gungrave games), but you can't fault him for sheer, demented charm.

I first heard of him from his unbelievably random English-language magical catgirl '70s gun-fu epic Catblue Dynamite, and he also did some kind of Dominion Tank Police reboot called TANK SWAT that I can't find ANYWHERE, but today let's chat about his earlier time travel adventure Urda.
The plot is insane. I'll just say it involves a bioroid space loli from NASA's warp drive project falling through a wormhole back to WWII, as long as you understand that this is just BEGINNING to scratch the surface of the awesome/dumb here. This is basically one plot twist after another, sandwiched by random ludicrous action scenes. It's only about half an hour long, and circumstantial evidence on the DVD leads me to believe it was originally webcast in five minute chunks, which does the already scrambled narrative no favors.

But if you're going to watch this, it's not going to be for the plot, it's going to be to see someone have a hand-to-hand rocket launcher fight with a Nazi cyclops on top of a speeding Jeep. Urda is not "good" in the conventional sense that refers to quality, originality, or cleverness, but it is "good" in a WHOO HA HA DID YOU SEE THAT way. The fun is in the actual animation, so it doesn't screencap too well, but if you liked any of the other stupid things I've posted about here, I recommend tossing this one on your Netflix queue.

THAT'S ME!/EVOLUTIONREVOLUTIONEVOLUTION!

Has it really been a decade since I last saw Revolutionary Girl Utena? Time to fix that.
Quick primer: Utena Tenjou is basically a good-natured shounen adventure protagonist hanging out in a boarding school melodrama. While going about her business of cutting through all the histrionic bullshit making everyone's life miserable, she falls into yet another genre, a fighting tournament to rescue a princess of sorts. Hmm... when I lay it out like that, I recall that Bryan Lee O'Malley has admitted to liking Nana, but I wonder if Scott Pilgrim isn't a little influenced by Utena too.


Either way, this is very much a sister show to Evangelion, exploring and exploding the tropes of its chosen genre (I'm particularly fond of the unusually literal version of the all-powerful student council). Utena usually wins her fights by refusing to play along with everyone else's drama and applying out-of-context solutions to the problems presented, and now that I think about it she only seems to fail when her enemies trick her into questioning her own judgement and thinking inside their boxes. Let's see if my memories are correct; so far I've only rewatched the first seven episodes, and Utena hasn't really started relying on her customary tactic of winning by exploiting the opponent's psychological flaws, or just cheating with the power of Dios. So far they're pretty much just establishing all the characters they will later tip over like dominoes. Well, episode 7 is one of my all-time favorites, but then I always was very fond of Juri.


I think I probably will rebuy the Right Stuf version, if only to be rid of CPM's horrible old policy of "we will give you one chapter stop every fifteen minutes and you will like it" (and the hardsubs on all the dueling songs). Of course, you shouldn't be skipping past anything anyway; the show has a lot of ritualistic elements (the shadow puppet Greek chorus, the fight songs and catharsis during battle, and and of course the ascent to the dueling arena and drawing of the Sword of Dios) and as far as I'm concerned sitting through the opening and ending is just another one. Besides, those songs are awesome.

If I end up rewatching the whole thing, maybe I'll finally write something about the alchemical symbology that seems to underpin the whole series (the Rose Bride being a dark girl dressed in red that everyone abhors but wants to possess is extremely suggestive). I wonder sometimes if Kunihiko Ikuhara did this deliberately or just backed into all this Jungian stuff by being his weird self (I never actually watched his Sailor Moon work so I can't say if it was any more blatant there), but he'd certainly never say even if you asked, saucy bitch that he is. It's a shame he never really did much else after the Utena movie.

Also, I give up

I'm officially enjoying this inane, insane show. I only wish I knew why the hell they only animated half an episode last week.

Even A Fortean Can Draw Anime

Presented more or less without comment.




Actually no, I do have one comment. How is it that Chiaki Konaka is somehow not attached to this project? I actually find it kind of hard to believe given that he seems to live and breathe Forteana.

Red Eagle

Remember Tears of the Black Tiger? Director has a new movie.

Cat Shit One

I've never wanted to see something dubbed so much in my life.
Cat Shit One (aka Apocalypse Meow) is basically a hard core war action movie done with adorable fluffy stuffed bunnies. (You can see the stitches in their feet.)
Japanese hard core military jargon, however, is so riddled with terrible Engrish that I found it really detracted from the intended experience; now matter how intensely you growl, "You copy?" it doesn't sound at all bad ass.

The short film is a fucking blast, though. Never read the manga -- I think my impression was that he drew bunnies because he couldn't actually draw at all. But I appreciate the idea, and hope this does well enough to encourage more.

Neck

So Maijo Otaro wrote the story for a movie. I didn't really think there were many people capable of tapping into his unique wavelength...

...but I am entirely unsure how they managed to make something with that much Maijo insanity clearly evident still look really generic. The Japanese film industry is kind of a meat grinder. Throw anything into it and it will shit out a wacky comedy or a weepy melodrama.

Full Redline trailer

Now with more Engrish.

Occult Academy 2

Think I'm ready to commit to this being pretty dang great. Time Agents sent to save the future FROM ALIENS, Nostradamus, ghosts right out of The Haunting, and the pace just keeps things moving at exactly the right speed.

Hey, maybe Princess Resurrection won't suck this time

The first anime was a fucking disgrace, but the new OAV at least has loads of blood!

Shiki Ep 1

A lot of what I was afraid of is certainly true, but it's also way more faithful than I expected. Generally, I think the structural changes are very smart decisions, compressing the first volume or so heavily -- without really feeling like they are -- and focusing on a single character's story, ending with something like a hook.

The aesthetic, however, is more of a problem. The more conservative designs are generally working fine, but Fujisaki is not exactly known for conservative design work. What the fuck he was thinking with Atsushi's ugly gorilla design is beyond me, and turning Megumi into a pink haired goth loli is pretty typical of the exaggerated approach to her character they've taken. All of the beats of her personality and arc are identical to the novel, but instead of playing these realistically -- making her a painfully naive, hopelessly lost kid -- they've turned it into generic Asuka-inspired anime yelling. This works better than it should -- it's probably a good sign that she managed to still be a little bit sympathetic despite it all -- but coming to this directly from the novels I couldn't help but feel they'd done her a disservice.
There were enough moments in this that did capture the original tone that I'm planning on watching a few more episodes, and will keep my usual bile in check. Basically reserving judgment for later.

Nurarihyon no Mago

Or, how not to fucking do anime.
I swear to god, I actually saw someone claim this show was original because the lead character is not a swaggering cocky stock shonen lead. Yeah, wimpy Megane-kun -- the second most popular one-note terrible shonen cliche protagonist -- is SUCH an improvement.
It is very, very, very hard to convince me anything with yokai in it is worthless after only one episode -- I stuck with Kekkaishi, after all, and that manga has a terrible opening.
But Nurarihyon not only has not a single original idea, it doesn't even use GOOD cliches! Every cliche it uses is SHIT! When it even bothers putting in enough work on characterization or plot to rise to the level of cliche!
Most of the fucking characters don't even get sketched in enough to actually become cliches! The entire plot of the episode consists of what any show not written by fuckwits would do as SET UP in the first five fucking minutes, but instead of paying off the set up they just abruptly end the episode as tediously as possible!
Characters that have special powers and want to be normal has always been one of the fucking stupidest cliches out there -- has anyone alive ever fucking been able to identify with this shit? -- but usually they at least both giving a fucking reason, explaining why this character is so desperate to be normal. Nurarihyon clearly has a reason -- Negima...whatever his fucking name is says something about deciding this a long time ago, which will presumably involve a tedious flashback to something really not interesting at some dire point in this dire show's future, but such an impossible stupid cliche really needs to put that stupid fucking reason front and center or the entire show collapses like a pack of cards. Likewise, if the main character's awakening is going to be a central point in the show, maybe it should fucking happen in the first episode. That might be a decent starting point for your stupid story, hacks! Instead, he starts to awaken, and they stop him for no apparent reason! They actually start to introduce the fucking hook, and then decide it's too soon!
Jesus Christ, this better be raping the fuck out of the manga, or I have no idea how the fuck it ever survived in Jump when Jump's fucking canceled everything worthwhile they've had for the last four fucking years.
If you liked this episode, you officially like shit. You eat shit for breakfast, you fucking fecalpheliac. Get away from my blog.

Double Zombie Fun Time

High School of the Dead is blast. Normally I'd be turned off by this level of fan service, but they manage to hit the proper Crank-like tone to make it all seem like part of the gratuitous package, and the episode just flies by. If they can keep this kind of pacing up through the whole season, great. If they feel the need to slow things down and focus on the characters, it might fall apart; I think the character stuff in this episode was one step more complicated than it needed to be, which made it feel interesting in the minimal time it got, but I doubt it was original enough to stand up to actual scrutiny. Bonus points for actually using music from 28 Days Later.

Occult Academy sort of surprised me. Since the Anime no Chikara original anime series initiative was zero for two -- I'm not the target audience for Sora no Woto, and Night Raid took an interesting concept and put the audience in a coma -- and this had really drab character designs and a generic sounding concept, I barely even mustered the enthusiasm to give it a shot. But the actual show sort of took me by surprise. I'm having trouble telling if it was actually good or just Kuroshitsuji style unhinged enough to be entertaining, but it never quite went the direction I thought it would, and really sold several big moments. The headmaster accidentally resurrecting his own corpse at his funeral via a tape of his last message to the student body was pure Ghostbusters, and there's an amazing bit with an axe that made me wonder if they'd played Deadly Premonition. And the live action end credits featuring dead children lying in a field is just mind-boggling. Let's hope they're actually going somewhere with this.

Kimi to Boku ga Kowashita Sekai

Recap: In Kimi to Boku no Kowareta Sekai, Hitsuuchi Samatoki's romance with his sister Yoruichi is interrupted by MURDER. The case is eventually solved with the help of Byoinzaka Kuroneko, who attends school in the nurse's office because she is pathologically afraid of people. She also sleeps with anybody who asks her to, a fact Nisio appears to have conveniently forgotten in the five years between these two books.
In Bukimi to Soboku no Kakomareta Sekai, Kushinaka Choshi's sister is murdered, and he sets out to solve the mystery with the help of Byoinzaka Meiro, Kuroneko's cousin. Meiro does not talk, but communicates volumes of exposition through facial expressions alone. Kuroneko herself makes an appearance near the end, to tie up some loose ends and make sure we all understand that Choshi is the creepiest fuck Nisio's ever created.
The third novel finds Kuroneko (narrating) and Samatoki on an airplane. Kuroneko's distant relative, Usui, has funded a trip to London to help out an old friend of his -- a mystery novelist who believes his new novel is cursed, and anyone who reads it will die. Their flight is interrupted when the man sitting next to Samatoki is murdered.
Chapter two kicks off with Samatoki (now narrating) reading the short story Kuroneko wrote on the plane, in which the man next to them is murdered. They meet with the mystery novelist, and then make a beeline for 221B Baker Street on the grounds that this is clearly the first place anyone in their right mind would visit in London. (Samatoki would have preferred to see the Rosetta Stone.) Along the way they solve the mystery of how the mystery novelist faked his wife's suicide.
Chapter three kicks off with Kuroneko narrating again, and pointing out that the previous two chapters were actually written by Kushinaka Choshi, who actually accompanied her on this trip. And of course, the mystery novelist's wife actually died in a plane crash. As they tour the British Museum -- or rather, Kuroneko does, since Choshi refuses to stop staring at the Rosetta Stone -- they solve the mystery of the mystery novelist's agent's suicide.
Chapter four kicks off with Samatoki narrating, and demanding to know just who the hell Choshi is and why Kuroneko replaced him. Of course, the agent actually died of a heart attack, and the only thing they've been sent here to do is prove the novel isn't cursed, which is why Kuroneko just finished reading it. In the morning, Samatoki finds her dead, with an army knife through her chest. He goes to see Phantom of the Opera, but fails to solve her murder.
Chapter five kicks off her absolutely furious with him for killing her off in his chapter of the novel they're writing, particularly since he failed to actually come up with a solution to the mystery. She didn't read the novel, but instead pointed out that it couldn't be cursed if the novelist himself was still alive. At this point Usui calls their room and tells them the novelist has been found dead...and the time of death is the day before they actually met him.
The epilogue has them both at the airport ready to go to London. Usui -- who is actually Kuroneko's father -- paid for the trip in return for their feedback on the novel he'd written. The trip is then canceled due to terrorism in London.
Gloriously meta from beginning to end. I'm clearly going to have to go get the fourth book in the series now.

Summer anime part 1

I normally only sample a couple of anime a season, and then don't finish watching those.
But this season I have discovered that watching this shit on Himawari Douga improves it immensely. Having several thousand Japanese otaku watch the thing and mock the shit out of it can make a certain level of garbage palatable.

Ookami and the Seven Counts of Plagiarism:
I think this was supposed to be the big name light novel adaption, and it seems to be hitting that audience. Who needs original ideas when you carefully cut and paste proven character types from other series wholesale? If this was at all self-aware it would be a parody, a sort of light novel Murder by Death, but it doesn't really seem to know how derivative it is. The tumbling sequence was nicely animated, but the show is mostly a testament to how willing people are to respond to even bad shows as long as they follow the formula.

Amagami SS:
Five girls share one character design! And it isn't a good one.

Legend of a Legendary Hero:
Wow, it's like the 90s again, only shit. I remember when you still had to beat people with a stick for trying to pretend Lodoss was good, and Slayers seemed like a breath of fresh air at the time. It didn't age well. So a series that basically is a giant rip-off of Slayers with less personalities, even more one-note gags, a director who can't film action, and a script that thinks lurching between boring heroics and the kingdom of the bishonen will do anything but prevent either of them from being interesting...well, I'm amazed anyone finished the thing.

Mitsudomoe:
I watched the whole thing after they busted out the Battle Royale music early on, but there was very little else of note. I suppose they think they're fighting the lolikon menace by making everybody fat? Or are they catering to the chubby chaser pedophiles?

Shukufuku no Campanella:
Suddenly I found myself longing for the thrills and excitement of Legend of the Legendary Hero. I literally stopped listening to the opening monologue halfway through, and was equally unable to make it through any further dialogue without my brain just refusing to process any more language. When entire conversations receive the presentation of a budget rpg -- character picture moves in from the right, other character picture moves in from the left, alternate -- you know this is made by people who have given up on life.

Kuroshitsuji 2:
Fucking bad ass. I had no knowledge of the original at all, but the kid stabbing his maid's eye out with a finger for looking at him was the most over the top shit since Elfen Lied, and following that immediately with the butler tap dancing on the balcony to Mozart before swinging on a chandelier, yanking the carpet out from under the table so it flew into the air, and then setting it while wall running around the walls of the room pretty much sold me for life. Apparently it is actually about two other characters who are far more boring, which is a shame. I dug this enough to go back and watch the first season, which has just enough crazy to hold my attention, but nothing that even came close to the sequel's level of batshit. Hopefully the sequel keeps this shit up. It would be a shame to regress immediately.

Proof there is no god

Spaceships! Melodrama! Amazing hair! YAMATO!

Yukito Kishiro vs. the PC police

Battle Angel: Last Order has apparently gone on infinite hiatus.
According to Kishiro's blog, as he was busy drawing the 100th issue, and the accompanying magazine cover, he received a phone call from an editor asking to make three small changes to dialogue in the upcoming reprint of the original Battle Angel series. Specifically, to instances of the word "hakkyo" (to go mad) and one use of the English word "psycho." Their reasoning being that these words were associated with schizophrenia. Kishiro asked if they realized that this request could lead to him missing his deadline for the 100th issue, and refusing to allow them to reprint the old series. His editor said yes. Despite this being a work that has already been published twice, this was considered important enough to overturn all the publication plans. Kishiro decided to be professional and meet his deadlines, and allowed the changes to go through. He now regrets it, but admits he would have regretted not allowing them too.
Either way, he posted on his blog that there might not ever be an 101st issue.

Return to Zaregoto

Thought I'd use the bunko cover, just for variety.
After wrapping up the Zerozaki novels in style, I thought I'd head back to where it all started and reassess.
I've often stated that I liked the first enough to buy the second, and the second enough to buy everything he'd written at the time.
A bad mood could have changed that story. Man, does the opening to this book drag. I'm not saying everything before the first murder is dire, but it is certainly a focus-free meander, vaguely trying to introduce his cast but none of them really managing to make of an impact. Except for Kunagisa, who...hasn't aged well. Treating a character with a litany of moe traits as if she were a legitimate character was relatively novel then; I'm not sure it's been all that widely imitated even now, but the louder moe traits have come to grate a lot more, and I wound up finding her a lot harder to like.
Nisio's explained at some length that this first book was the toughest novel he's ever completed; something like three page one revisions that dramatically changed the book, shifting it from a novel intended to launch a series of mystery novels with Kunagisa as the detective, to an oddball sort of fake mystery novel that accidentally reads more like a character study of Ii-chan. Every now and then they sit down and make charts of alibis or attempt to solve locked room puzzles. He has a few amusing stunts hidden here -- the three puzzles ascend through the dimensions from paint on the floor, to a high up window, to an incident that could not have happened at the time it happened -- but by and large these bits accomplish little, and are there to be skimmed till something more interesting happens.
Ii-chan initially presents himself as minimally as possible; he's almost a mute video game protagonist, he has so little personality, and so little involvement with anyone he talks to. The people around him are complete in themselves; they could have the same conversations with a stump, and be just as happy. Even the few bits of personality he does show off just encourage us to identify with him; he's befuddled by the crazier things people say, capable of making the odd self-deprecating joke, and resigned to letting himself be led around by everyone else.
It's a trap, of course. A disquieting flash of anger from him at dinner is the first sign that he might have been lying to us. With increasing frequency, the other cast members stop talking to stumps and start projecting themselves onto Ii-chan's careful blank slate. Each of them believes themselves to be describing his personality, and Ii-chan agrees -- or tells us he does -- with every scathing evaluation unleashed on him. That these descriptions contradict each other doesn't seem to bother him.
The climax to this reading of the novel comes well before the mystery is resolved and the killer caught; the emotional climax of the book comes in a scene where a berserk bodyguard triplet maid breaks her omnipresent silence, drags Ii-chan into a room, feeds him a pack of lies a mile high -- lies so ornate he can't even begin to work out if there's a kernel of truth to them anywhere -- and prompts Ii-chan to take what feels like the one moment of genuine emotional honesty he displays anywhere in the volume. He asks her a question -- a question phrased as a metaphor, the subject of the metaphor ambiguous, his meaning buried in a lie. The closest thing we get to peeling back the layers of what he tells us and seeing what he's trying so hard to keep from us, and it makes no damn sense at all.
Coming back to that scene after the whole series and it blew my mind again. There's something hidden at the center of this inexpertly presented, amateurish, awkward first novel that rewards rediscovery.

Sympathy for Mr. Vampire

So I'm flicking through Netflix's streaming catalogue, and see a vampire movie by the director of Oldboy. I bet that'll be really visceral and extreme! Wow, I could not have been more wrong. Thirst turns out to be inspired less by Rice or Stoker than by the Coen Brothers and Zola (Emile, not Arnim or gorgon-).

Apparently I sold Chan-Wook Park's range short; Oldboy had moments of black humor, but there's a definite Raising Arizona or Big Lebowski quality to the proceedings here. Perhaps I should have remembered he directed a romantic comedy set in an insane asylum.

I don't think I would have enjoyed Thirst as much if I hadn't gone in cold, so I won't go into much detail, but it's definitely worth checking out.

I'll chop your head off! And then eat it

So yeah, Toriko is pretty much the Axe Cop version of Yakitate!! Japan, just a pure unfettered appeal to the oral stage id. Of course he lives in a house made of candy and eats chocolate bannisters for breakfast. Of course he's the biggest, strongest dude in the world who can beat up anything with knife-and-fork style kung fu. Why wouldn't he be?

The main thing this has going for it is the pure, absurd, manic energy. The actual plotting and writing is the same thing we've seen before in a thousand other rowdy shonen series, and the art is just crude enough to look unpolished, but not crude enough to actually look like a deliberate style (and the fact that Shimabukuro can't seem to decide if he's channeling Go Nagai or Tsukasa Hojo doesn't help). Based on this first volume, it's not the kind of thing I'll be rereading like Yakitate or Iron Wok Jan, but I will probably keep an eye on it.

Redline

Embedding is disabled, but shiiiit. Now angry that the lame ass Seattle Film festival failed to book this AND Yatterman.

Gantz live action

It has to be better than the Gonzo version, right?

I need a consult here

This can't possibly be as amazing as it sounds, can it? Because it kind of sounds like Iron Wok Jan with even more actual animal murder. Either way, sounds like I need to check it out.

Never Forget

Professor Go is completely useless.

Shiki

I'm not normally big on writing about half remembered books read six years ago, but there's enough misinformation running around about Shiki I felt the need to try and get things straight somewhere. Shiki is a novel -- not light novel -- by Fuyumi Ono, author of the Twelve Kingdoms books (which were actually light novels. Confusing!) The hardcover edition was two massive volumes, and the bunko edition was FIVE volumes, each of which ran for five hundred odd pages. It took me two months to read (although I was reading other books in between each volume of Shiki to keep myself from getting burned out.)
Fuyumi Ono intended Shiki to be an homage to the Stephen King novel Salem's Lot; the story is essentially a Japanese version of that basic concept. A very old fashioned, traditional Japanese mountain town is plagued by a mystery disease; it eventually transpires that the new residents in town are vampires, and are attempting to convert the entire town in the hopes of creating a safe haven for their kind.
While the story is an ensemble cast, and frequently changes the point of view as different characters play their roles -- I wound up writing down people's names and roles in a massive map scrawled all over the book cover, just trying to keep it all straight -- the two primary characters are the town doctor, and a Buddhist monk who writes surreal fiction in the style of Edogawa Rampo.
The novel is a very slow, creeping dread that takes a thousand pages to even reveal the vampires and goes on for another volume well after the point you'd have expected it to end. Ono's dense, literary prose can be a bit of a slog at times, but incredibly evocative at others, and it's well worth a read if your Japanese is up to it.
It's a very strange choice for a manga and anime adaption. I haven't read the manga, but it's by Ryu Fujisaki. I read the first volume of his Hoshin Engi and found it pretty dull, but at least coherent; I then read his Waq Waq when it ran in Jump and found it completely unintelligible. While his design sense can be extraordinary at times, the flow from panel to panel is gibberish, and he's prone to fits of stylization so extreme you can't even figure out what he intended to depict in individual panels. He's an incredibly poor choice for the material, and the garishly lolita gothed out character designs are about as far removed from the source material as it is possible to be. Judging from the ads from the Shiki anime, and the covers of the manga, he's also shifted the focus to the two high school characters; relatively major characters among the supporting cast, and if the storyline in general were stripped down to just their stories it would probably still be a coherent whole. I'm cautiously voting this as actually a pretty smart move on Fujisaki's part. I'm definitely curious about the Noitamina anime, and hoping they can manage to meld the manga art style to some of what made the original novel work for me, but it's very much an unknown quantity at this stage.

Annual Trick is awesome post

Still Not My Cuppa

So, you might have noticed we're a little divided on the subject of Akiyuki Shinbo. I'm generally in the "hate him" camp; I've always been fond of Tenamonya Voyagers, but SoulTaker's unrelenting visual noise made me angry and Le Portrait de Petite Cossette actually gave me a headache and I had to turn it off after five minutes, so I avoided everything else he did until Bakemonogatari. But I did genuinely enjoy that, and it seemed much less pointlessly difficult to parse than his earlier work, so I figured I should look back at the early stuff and see if Shinbo really has calmed down since I last checked, or if I've just gotten used to his style.

Turns out I was right the first time.


Cossette is a pretty simple story at its base; guy who works in an antique store falls for a ghost, then discovers why those romances tend to end badly. It probably could have been condensed from three episodes to one without losing any actual story, but this gives Shinbo and crew an opportunity to go mad with the visuals... to the overall detriment of the show, I'd argue.

Case in point; the opening of the very first episode was like the director sticking his finger into my eye. The show basically dares you to make sense of a very uncomplicated scene among friends in a diner, by opening cold into the middle of a conversation in progress, constantly cutting between extreme close-ups of four different speakers, only one of whom gets named. The direction is less chaotic after that scene, but front-loading the most aggressive visual editing right when the viewer most needs to be eased into and sold on your world is a questionable decision; it certainly didn't add any information or texture to the scene.

The rest of the show alternates curiously between gothic lolita moetry and B-movie grotesquerie; the lead spends a lot of time hallucinating idle conversations with his dream lover, who occasionally transfers him to an alternate dimension of heavy-metal-album-cover torment where he gets tortured, shoots out hilariously excessive blood geysers, and turns into Devilman, a visual metaphor that is only explained, like, halfway through the third episode.


There are seeds of an interesting plot in Petite Cossette, but the relentless visual chrome actively prevents me from spending enough time with one idea or image to really engage with it. It's to the point where I can't even appreciate the visual composition, it's all so anarchically busy. It seems like half the time this stuff doesn't even signify anything, so it literally only exists to clutter up the shot. I mean, can anyone explain why there are a bunch of laser tripwires here?


Still, there are a couple small bits that even I enjoyed; I really liked the local psychic consulting with a doctor to figure out if the lead's malaise was physical or spiritual, and I can't bring myself to entirely hate any show gonzo enough to reduce a fight scene between an exorcist and an evil lightning-shooting grandfather clock to background color. This is also a pretty distinctively Japanese ghost story, despite the French-loli trappings; the whole Shinto-animism-Buddhist-doll-burnings thing is key to later goings-on, and I can't actually recall any Japanese myths or traditional stories about a beloved dead person coming back as anything other than a monster.
On the other hand, the show kind of lost me at the very end, for reasons I will heavily spoil, so anyone who cares should stop reading until they see little fluffy clouds.

Maybe it's just me, but I fail to perceive a real difference between falling in love with a ghost (by definition, a pale imitation of the living original), and loving the embodied spirit of a portrait depicting that same person. The lead does justify his preference for one over the other as rejecting the art of an evil man, but it still seems like a pointlessly fine philosophical point to quibble over if we're going to accept the premise at all.


So I was right: it's not that I've gotten used to Shinbo's directorial style, but that he's calmed the hell down over the years and actually cares about conveying information to his viewers. Or maybe there are some external factors; I can't help but note that he no longer works with the screenwriter that did Cossette and his other early eyesore, SoulTaker.

France still crazy

And by crazy I am being literal. What the fuck is up with any of this? Particularly the audio, which is so jumbled I actually stopped the trailer to see if I'd left my mp3 player running in the background.

Miike's 13 Assassins

Looks really boring.
Last thing I want to see him waste his time on is Generic Samurai Epic 101.
I mean...this might well be a solid film, with stirring action scenes and intently mannered drama delivered by competent actors, but ANY director in Japan could make this movie in their sleep. No sense in wasting Miike's time with it.

Evangelion 2.22

I watched this, and spent two hours blithering about it to anyone who would listen, eventually bending some poor guy's ear with a long rant about how sad it is that nobody has managed to live up to Eva except Eva again. It's become one of those projects that should have been a gamechanger but instead becomes sort of a roadblock, and everything splinters around it.

Apparently Kitoh Mohiro worked on this.
It's fucking great. I barely have anything else to say about it, or possibly too much to say and no idea where to begin.
But that bum bum bum bum BUM BUM music is on the same level as the Doctor Who theme when it comes to reducing me to a quivering heap.

Behold the devil

I would looooove to find out how Devil was conceived. A cops vs vampires action manga, credited to the anime studio Madhouse, with no translator listed (though I'd guess that's why Alex Yeh gets "Special Thanks"), written and drawn by someone whose only previous US release is porn, and perhaps strangest of all, released in the US single-issue format and read left-to-right Western-style, which even Dark Horse finally gave up on a couple years ago. I don't even think this has a Japanese release! Craziness.

Actually, Devil's mysterious origins kind of overshadow the actual content. Fifteen minutes into the future, there are vampires (allegedly... they drink blood, but aside from that they're generic demon mutant shapeshifty things), and it is the job of a mismatched pair of buddy cops to shoot those vampires. That's basically it; these four issues come off as a pitch for a longer series (presumably an anime, given the Madhouse connection), introducing the world and three main characters. Nobody learns anything, nothing important gets resolved, and nobody changes. The dialogue is inconsistent, sometimes managing decent '80s action flick patter, and sometimes just clumsily trailing off into half-baked philosophical meanderings like so many other indifferently translated books.

The main appeal is in Torajiro Kishi's art. I think Brandon Graham said something once about doing porn comics making you think about body language and figure drawing, and that's pretty much the draw here. It gets a tad sketchy in places, but the characters are nicely expressive in a way you don't see too often, like the crazy albino patient-zero vampire flailing around and tugging her hair in fits of pique.


I'm more fascinated by Devil's unlikely existence than anything in it, but it's perfectly adequate, if you enjoy gory comics about hard-boiled cops emptying bullpup submachineguns into glowing mutant vampire ogres who spin kick cop cars at them. It's really kind of an '80s/'90s anime OVA on paper, including the less than respectful treatment of women, so be warned.

Secret of Kells

In limited release around the country now. Absolutely amazing; so absurdly beautiful I came out angry with reality for not looking as nice.

High Kick Girl

Ladies and gentlemen, I have discovered the Ed Wood of kung fu movie directors. High Kick Girl is such a stunningly inept movie I simply could not take my eyes off it. I refused to believe it had actually been allowed to exist.

I think I may have gone into this with a number of false assumptions. I had assumed that this was a professional studio film intended to make a star out of Rina Takeda. Instead, it appears to have been a show reel a couple of over the hill martial artists put together, one with delusions of being a movie star, and the other with delusions of being a writer-director. They seem to have filmed a bunch of fights, retconned in a narrative about a heroic karate teacher saving his student from a group of people you can tell are evil because they only wear black, and then stumbled across a cute girl in one of the auditions, and realized they could actually land distribution if they pulled a con job on audiences and studios and pretended like she was the star of the movie and the movie was in any way about her.

So we get her in two big action scenes early on before the movie abruptly becomes entirely about her teacher, played with one facial expression by a guy who clearly can fight, but makes Sam Worthington look like Peter O'Toole. Presumably after a rough cut was screened they realized the audience might be mad if the heroine spent the rest of the movie as a damsel in distress, so they give her a particularly terrible extra fight, and then reshoot the final fight a little bit so she can finish off the main bad guy after the teacher has already finished him off once.

River City Ransom had a less obviously ad libbed story. Fucking Double Dragon was The Wire compared with this shit. There are literally entire scenes with several minutes of everyone standing around apparently waiting for somebody to figure out a way to advance the completely arbitrary plot. In awesomely unspecific fashion, the entire plot is driven by something the teacher did fifteen years ago, which the evil black clothed karate faction has been angry about for all the time. Apparently too lazy to look in the yellow pages.

I'm unsure if the director was also the choreographer, but he might be a halfway decent one if he had the slightest idea how to direct or edit. I will grant he avoids being astoundingly incoherent (see Donnie Yen's unwatchable directorial efforts) but he does this by filming everything in extreme slow motion, occasionally replaying not particularly great shots in even slower motion. I presume the intention was to show us that he's a fucking idiot and did everything full contact even though we have a hundred years of figuring out how to make fights look like they're real even though they aren't to avoid filling hospitals with battered stunt men. (I seem to recall a Twitch article about angry stunt men complaining about this, the first sign that the trailers were a lie.) But the actual effect is to make everything look really staged, since shit moves so slow you can see dudes waiting for a hit, or just standing around waiting for their cue. Special shout out to the baffling editing, which often doesn't bother cutting away from slow motion footage of nothing happening at all -- maybe at the beginning of the shot someone falls down, and at the end, that person gets kicked in the head, but in between is a full minute of them lying on the floor doing absolutely nothing in slow motion! Jesus Christ! Coupled with such astounding cinematic techniques as long shots of clouds or stock footage of city exteriors to indicate transitions between scenes, and you have a non-stop laugh riot!

I do hope a lot of these fighters manage to land further work in decent movies. Even the world's worst karate teacher -- the entire plot hinges on him being such a terrible fucking teacher he couldn't control his hotheaded student or even be fucked to explain what the point of the shit he was teaching her was -- would probably be an effective stunt double. Everyone involved deserves better than to be in this heap of shit. Good god, I hope the director never works again. But he's so singularly clueless is it almost inevitable, even if he films it himself with the camera he bought from whatever misguided foreign licensing deal led to this showing up on Netflix streaming.

Tatami Galaxy 4

I am officially bored. I said the show was going to have to figure out a way to vary the formula and keep things interesting, but it has absolutely failed to do this. There are moments of insane, beautiful genius peppered liberally throughout it:

...but I just don't give a shit.
I basically think exactly the same thing as I did with Trapeze -- taking insanely talented directors like Yuasa and Kenji Nakamura and forcing them to fritter away their talent on third-rate books not worth filming by authors not worthy of licking the boots of these creative giants is doing both the bootlickers and the visionary directors and the Noitamina audience a huge disservice. Let these people make their own shows! Stop wasting them on adaptions of books that don't bring in an audience anyway!

Today's moment of magnificent tackiness

Courtesy of the second volume of Raiders, which is probably best described as Da Vinci Code meets 3x3 Eyes.

Apple's Medieval Moral Screening Destroying the Future of Manga

I generally stay away from political stories, since I can't stop myself from taking a propagandistic turn of phrase. Like the headline.
This interview with Voyager's company president, Masaaki Hagino, is about the challenges manga faces as it moves into the digital age. One section was particularly upsetting:
"About 30% of the Kodansha comics Voyager has submitted to the iTunes Store as iPhone apps have been rejected. For a ten volume series, the first four might be okay, but volume five on we can't publish. A scene where a character is bleeding not because of violence, but because of a disease might be labeled as excessive cruelty.
Hataraki Man (A decidedly not pornographic manga about a female editor, by Moyoko Anno) was rejected for a scene where the main character gets a massage to help her relax, and while stretching accidentally exposes her breasts. Basically all manga with OLs as main characters have bathing scenes. They can't be shown taking showers. Not even baths -- they're still topless."
The only way this is going to change is if there is a real outcry against it.

Zerozaki Hitoshiki no Ningen Kankei: Zaregoto Tsukai to no Kankei

Nanananami Nanami may have been listed as a Witch in several volumes without actually appearing, but it turns out that's just the name of her doujinshi circle, and she's a fujoshi who spends most of her timing fantasizing about what Holmes really meant by, "My dear Watson." She does have a slightly skewed perspective on the world, which is probably why she thinks, "He's cute!" when she runs into Zerozaki Hitoshiki in the middle of the night, despite the giant knives in his hands.
For a book that purports to examine the relationship between Hitoshiki and Ii-chan, and to tell the true story of what Hitoshiki was up to in Strangulation Romanticist, this was sort of a disappointment. It's not actually a novel at all. Each chapter follows a different minor character, starting with an extremely meta analogy comparing their personal problems to their issues with mystery novels. Then they run into Zerozaki and he babbles at them for a bit before not killing them.
Emoto Tomoe and Kigamine Yaku fill this slot in the first two chapters, and I had to fucking go pull the Zaregoto series from my shelf to even identify which volume they were in. Neither one of them had a personality to begin with. Palindromically named Emoto Tomoe pretty much showed up and died; Kigamine had a funny catchphrase but largely served as a foil to the rest of the cast. Consequently, neither of these chapters really held my attention.
Nanananami Nanami's belated appearance was certainly welcome, but since she doesn't actually fucking say much of anything, I remain far more interested in her famously antagonistic relationship with Ii-chan, which we may well never see at this point.
Sasa Sasaki's chapter works better, if only for the section which recounts her first encounter with Ii-chan from her perspective.
And Aikawa Jun's chapter is the only one that contains any actual plot, and a rather belabored explanation of the truth behind Zerozaki's killings...which like basically everything in the volume and a lot of Nisio Isin's later writing violates the crap out of "Show, don't tell" and ultimately doesn't add up to much.
Suzunashi Neon's brief appearance contained a few fascinating nuggets, but overall, this was far and away the most disposable of the four books. The first three went a long way towards restoring my faith in Nisio, so it's a shame he wrapped things up by indulging in a lot of his recent flaws. Still, there was more than enough interesting stuff in here to make me glad I read it; I just can't help wishing he'd managed to stitch that stuff onto a narrative instead of a contrivance.

Zerozaki Hitoshiki no Ningen Kankei: Zerozaki Soushiki to no Kankei

This is the one I was least looking forward to, since the relationship with Soushiki is already pretty well defined, and there didn't seem to be much left to explore. In fact, there wasn't! Hitoshiki spends the entire book mistaken for Soushiki by the Betrayal Union, a group that consists of one member from each of the cursing families. A couple of the cursing families have briefly played roles before, but this is the first time the spotlight has ever really focused on them. We get a decent look at five of the families, but Toganari Togari gets killed offscreen without ever showing up, and Tokinomiya Shigure goes down surprisingly easily, so both of those families are still more or less a complete mystery.
Over the rest of the volume we have Hitoshiki engaged in a series of very Jojotastic battles with the Kino, Tsumiguchi, Nukumori and Shibuki representatives; each of them has strange powers, and is defeated once Hitoshiki works out what the power is and uses his brain to flip the situation. Or just wins by sheer luck.
While the epilogue does briefly wrap up a thread about Soushiki and Hagihara Shiogi, as a whole the book is pretty insubstantial; I love the Jojo formula, but it doesn't really make for the deepest of reads.