The Devil Asks 100 Questions

Virtually all of Kadono Kouhei's books have had a healthy dose of philosophical meandering buried somewhere between the supernatural stuff. It was only natural he'd eventually find the time to explore that side of his writing in a little more depth, but I'm a little bit shocked how well the book turned out.
Kuzuha Momiji becomes internet famous for basically no reason -- her corrupt businesswoman mother is being hounded by the press after a particularly splashy failure, and Momiji happens to snap at the reports on live television. Shortly after, her mother comes to her with an offer -- they've got the best fixer in the business ready to bail her out, but only if Momiji agrees to talk to him. A man they all call The Devil -- Shaman Simpleheart. Who never once speaks to Momiji, or even seems aware that she is there. All interactions she has with The Devil are through a marionette named Hazure-kun -- a marionette who it is increasingly hard to believe is really being controlled by the man.
Hazure-kun insists he doesn't want to talk to her at all. He's being forced to do so by his masters. He doesn't expect much out of her, really; he just wants her to be stupid, to be the kind of useful idiot who can ask a simple question that inadvertently leads a genius like him to a breakthrough that can change the course of human history. For the rest of the book, he peppers her with questions -- one hundred in all, helpfully laid out for us in the table of contents -- and she tries to answer some of them, is utterly baffled by others, and angrily ignores even more. Sure, occasionally buildings catch fire, drug dealers are beaten half to death, and Momiji accidentally stops a madman from turning a wedding into a bloodbath, catapulting herself from internet famous to actually appearing on TV regularly, and a few guest characters from other Kadono series pop in to make the ending totally batshit for anyone who read this book first, but the core of the book is two people attempting to discuss the nature of the universe, and more often than not failing to understand a thing the other says. Yet this is somehow fascinating.
It's easy to talk about the slightly off-kilter sensibilities that make Kadono such a unique writer; occasionally it's nice to be reminded that there's quite a bit of craft supporting that.

Guardian of a God/Nekomonogatari

Double volume double review time.
The fifth and sixth volumes in the Moribito series, Kami no Moribito sort of flips the first novel, with Balsa looking after a girl possessed by a spirit that actually is evil, and pursued by people who want to kill the kid for it. While the Balsa bits were as gripping as ever, the cut-aways to the court brought the novel to a screeching halt and it wound up not really justifying the double length...and she never quite conquered the been there, done that feeling revisiting her earlier storyline brought. This isn't to say the books aren't pretty damn good anyway; they're only disappointing in light of what she'd accomplished before this.
Nekomonogatari may be more of a test of Nisio Isin's powers than additional volumes prompted by the blinding success of the anime really should have been; Nisemonogatari, while fun, was significantly less substantial than the first three books, and the more he insisted he was just having fun with them the more they felt like a cheap cash in. Nekomonogatari Black, like Kizumonogatari, is a prequel, revealing the events of Hanekawa's first encounter with the cat over Golden Week -- which have been hinted at from like, page five of the original novel. So you'd think he'd have had more of a plan.
Nekomonogatari Black is sort of a trainwreck, though; the entire first third of the book is wacky comedy hijinks with Araragi and his sister discussing the pros and cons of different underwear colors; it has its moments, and Araragi's attempts to figure out if he was actually in love with Hanekawa were the one moment in this volume that felt genuine. Once Hanekawa herself shows up things just fall apart completely. Nisio clearly decided he'd run out of things to say about her, and decided to get meta and explode the doormat archetype. This leads to a somewhat unconvincing series of tiresome speeches about how her perfect niceness is actually deeply terrifying, instead of merely really dull. The spectacular ending, where Araragi wins by hiding a fucking sword inside his own body so she cuts herself when she chops him in half, almost redeems it, but it's objectively the weakest book in the series.
So I started Nekomonogatari White with fear in my heart, but the first damn line proved singularly reassuring -- Hanekawa narrates. By moving things away from Araragi's increasingly cartoonish point of view, he manages to make Hanekawa into a real character again, and actually SHOW us all the things he was vainly trying to tell us in Black. He very smoothly fleshes out her character in ways we haven't seen, and then makes the plot of the book hang on her finally coming to terms with her own fractured personality. Having this narrative happen at the same time as the next few books in the series while cheerily omitting several dozen chapter numbers that cover events from those books is a neat conceit; hopefully he hasn't written himself into a corner. Having a decent chunk of the book narrated by the fucking cat was definitely on the painful side (meow) and Hanekawa's baffling decision to write a twenty page letter of rambling exposition right when the story seems ready to take off was definitely him showing the weaker side of his style, but for making me like the least interesting character in the series again, and for totally nailing the ending, I wound up really happy with White, and extremely hopeful for the remaining five books.

Gosick trailer released

So a trailer for Gosick has been released on the webbertubes:



It... kinda makes it look like boring crap. I hear Gosick's supposed to be great, though. Andrew had lots of good things to say about it, so maybe he can predict whether the trailer just sucks (like most Japanese trailers do) or if the anime seems to be missing the point.

Stabbing, shooting, and carving turkeys

Welcome to Round Two of Funimation x Yoshihiro Nishimura, this time reunited with Machine Girl director Noboru Iguchi to tell a story of arts, dance, tengu ninja squads, cybernetic sibling rivalry, and buildings full of blood.



(I love that they used part of the temp voiceover on the title drop)

Like most of their movies, RoboGeisha is kind of review-proof; you probably know if you're in the target audience after seeing the trailer, although it is worth noting it's much less malevolently warped than other Nishimura posse joints. This is a definitely a camp comedy with oddball special effects, as opposed to a full-on fake-blood extravaganza, and the over-the-top inane dialogue is usually as or more bizarre than the SFX work.


I admit I was hoping for another full-on brain-buster like Tokyo Gore Police, but taken on its own merits RoboGeisha's Inspector Gadget vs Terminator vibe is fun too, and I think stronger overall than Vampire Girl, or at least odder, which is really what I'm looking for. Joe Bob says check it out.

(though if you are are looking for something that will befuddle and revolt you, I recommend Bad Biology.)

Several Layers of: Wait - What?

Apparently Battle Royale is getting a 3D make-over for it's 10th anniversary, and it's finally being licensed for the US.

It hadn't been released already? Even the book came out here.

3D? Really? How is after-market 3D going to be anything other than an excuse for a re-release?

And holy shit, it's been 10 years already? Insane. I still remember how excited we all were when we first saw the original movie. It really was incredible...

Now I just feel old.

Twitch Film

Revenge of the filler post

Ugh.

Another luscious-looking film from Makoto Shinkai

Makoto Shinkai (of Voices of a Distant Star and Place Promised in Our Early Days fame) has a new film coming out and a trailer's been released:


As expected, Hoshi o Ou Kodomo (Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below) looks gorgeous. The backgrounds and environments are alway stunning on his projects.

He's also a master of atmosphere, but can sometimes be a bit lacking in an actual plot. The trailer hints are more action than is typical for his work, and the character designs seem much more polished, moving past his sometimes-charming amateurish style.

I'm hoping that suggests this one will be a bit more of a complete package, instead of just an incredible and immersive atmosphere with a very thin story.

Anime News Network : YouTube

Raging Phoenix

Most of us here were pretty big fans of Chocolate, so the second starring vehicle for that actress (they should really settle on a name for her one of these days) has been on our radar for a while.
This is very much a movie of two halves. The first half is a highly entertaining plotless drunken capioera/break-dancing kung fu show reel, and the second half is the most embarrassing implosion into nightmarish suck since Dog Bite Dog.
They had a good thing going with the minimalist plot; after being targeted by kidnappers, a girl reinvents her ruin of a life by joining forces with a group of drunken fu dancers who are out for revenge. Had enough of a character arc on her to make us buy in; a touch of comedy, a touch of backstory for the guys, and a lot of really entertaining fighting.
Then the plot demons set in, and it turns out some women give off a pheromone so powerful it makes people obsessed with sex and the kidnappers have sniffers on the street to target women with this pheromone so they can make them really sad and harvest their tears to turn into perfume. Sex perfume.
Not content with jumping the shark the movie then gets eaten by the shark, in a dizzying whirlwind of CG brick slides, sets from National Treasure that make no sense and don't even work well as settings for increasingly boring and incomprehensible fu fights, and a villain doing her best Grace Jones imitation, in tights that make it painfully obvious when her stuntmen take hits for her.
At one point during the meltdown I yelled, "Fuck you, Thailand" at the screen, and meant it. Fuckers didn't even have the courtesy to include a god damn outtake reel.

Fuck it, let's just make the entire stunt team movie stars

Filler post

I try not to do these too often, but JP Meyer is always pretty great when he gets going.

Here, here! It is the buckling of these hideous pants!

I have no idea why this character's first appearance on the blog is still getting hits to this day, but let's see if she works her magic again.

This time out, Princess Resurrection takes a bit of a break from the Universal/Hammer motifs as they encounter a Shinto god, pay tribute to "unstuck in time" flicks like The Day Time Ended, and make a detour into giant robot vs Godzilla-alike.

The overplot advances incrementally once again, but on top of that Mitsunaga's developed a habit of glossing over the actual fighting; his interest seems more in the weird set-piece/homages rather than turning the book into a dedicated battle manga. It doesn't do any special harm to this volume, but we may not get any kind of payoff at all; this seems to be the last English-language installment for the foreseeable future, since this came out about a year ago and future releases appear to be caught up in Del Rey's closing down/relocating their manga operations. Here's a provisional eulogy, then, in case we never see another volume: Princess Resurrection peaked early (volume 3 was definitely the best) and never quite lived up to the "invincible corpse-fighter" legacy of 3x3 Eyes or Hellsing, but it was always an amusing, cheesecakey trifle. I'll miss it.

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.