Category Archives: review

Summer Days with Coo: The Actual Review

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A feature-length children’s animation, Summer Days with Coo follows the titular Kappa who finds himself orphaned and displaced 200 years from his time. His father, shortly before dying at the hands of a samurai in the Edo period, warned him to never become friends with humans, so when Coo is found by a young boy and adopted into his family, the transition is difficult for everyone. Human development for the past two centuries has replaced the traditional Kappa habitat of swamps and rivers with concrete and buildings. The hardship of realizing that he may very well be the last of his kind pushes Coo and his human family to change each other for the better, and despite the bitter sadness leaves everyone better off in the end. After the starkly depressing nature of 5cm per Second last week, Summer Days with Coo is a remarkably uplifting tale of a young child who, despite the difficulties presented to him, is able to make strides that his ancestors never did.

As one might expect, Summer Days with Coo has a strong environmental message concerning human interaction with nature. The movie’s stance on environmentalism can be summed up in the following quote from the movie: “Humans control the land, and they control the sea, and they will some day control the sky as well, but in exchange they will lose their souls.” Coo’s transition into our modern era, combined with his pursuit of other Kappa who may still be alive, is a reminder that we as humans must take careful considerations about our actions towards not just the environment but each other.

That’s not to say that Summer Days with Coo is entirely a tale of the environment. Each of the family members have their own distinct wants, needs, and ways of interacting with others. The father is a salaryman working for a television company, but is a child at heart who is even more excited than his son who found Coo in the first place. The mother is a housewife who runs her home with both humor and dignity, knowing all of her family members better than perhaps they know her. The daughter, only a few years old, is a bratty girl whose genuine approach to life and endearing immature selfishness are expected and yet still easily accepted. Finally, the boy finds himself having a crush on a quiet classmate who is being picked on by other girls. His inability to handle his own feelings leads him to make fun of her as well. One of the side-plots of this movie concerns their interactions and the progress they make as friends.

Overall, this movie was simply very pleasant to watch. The only flaws I’ve seen is that occasionally the acting and dialogue seemed very stilted, and there were moments where the artwork had a somewhat noticeable drop in quality, though nothing that really detracts from the movie all too much. As a children’s movie and more, it is a very engaging piece of fiction, as its roughly 150 minute run time did not phase me at all. More importantly, it did not bother the children watching the movie either, which I think is the best seal of approval for it.

Lena Sayers Love Fest: My-Otome 0 ~S.ifr~ OVA 1

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It is no small secret that the character designer of the HiME series, Hisayuki Hirokazu, loves loves loves the character of Lena Sayers. She is like his personal mascot, equivalent to how the creator of Shaman King feels about Kyouyama Anna.

So watching S.ifr OVA 1 and seeing just how much detail and emphasis has been put on making her as awesome as possible leads me to believe that he’s having a lot of influence on this particular series.

My-Otome 0 ~S.ifr~ is a prequel to My-Otome detailing the adventures of Lena Sayers Yumemiya, mother of Otome heroine Arika. There’s a few surprises, mainly that Lena is using an activation gem completely different from the one we’re familiar with. We also get to see the previous owner of the gem that Sara Gallagher uses in Otome proper. The animation is quite good, the character designs are strong and sexy, and it’s pretty much everything you’d expect from the HiME series at this point, only with tons of Lena love being poured in.

The other adjective I would use to describe it is “Boobariffic.” Lena has quite a pair of assistants, and it’s easy to see why Arika herself developed so much between Otome and Otome Zwei.

Genetics.

Persepolis and Japanese Animation

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I saw the french animated film Persepolis today. Based off a comic book of the same name, Persepolis is the tale of a young girl named Marjane living in war-torn Iran and its religious transformation during the 1980s. We as the audience get to see Marjane grow from girl into woman, making mistakes along the way, and constantly re-evaluating what’s important in her life. It’s a really powerful film and I recommend anyone who has the opportunity to watch it to do so.

I came out of Persepolis with one prominent thought in my mind: It’s been a long long time since I’ve seen a Japanese animation like it.

Stylistically, there’s no anime like Persepolis, but that’s not what I’m focusing on (though I might in a later time. It’s really quite powerful visually). What I’m talking about is how Persepolis addresses the small scale issues regarding relationships and emotions, as well the large scale issues with the backdrop of warfare. Recent anime, when it’s good, tends to be very good at one or the other, but not both. On the occasions that it does manage to address both, it tends to add a certain fantastic element to it which pushes the whole animation slightly to the left of reality, as in the case of Gundam 00.

Now this is hardly the case for the history of anime. Japanese animation and manga rose out of World War II, and many people have tackled and re-tackled the setting. Grave of the Fireflies, Barefoot Gen, even more romantic series such as Rose of Versailles all manage to portray the large and small stuff with a great deal of poignancy.

So what’s happened? Has anime become too much of a comfort zone, perhaps?

Now, I realize that I’m comparing a ton of Japanese animation to just one French animation, and that Persepolis may very well be an exception to the rule even in French animation, but this is the feeling I got from seeing this movie as it pertains to the thing I love called anime.

What the Fu: Fujoshi Deka

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This show is weird.

It’s about fujoshi detectives who solve crimes by using their fujoshi logic and going to a butler cafe.   The fujoshi are simply caricatures, characters whose only purposes are dropping fujoshi-centric words and gasping a whole lot.  It is far stranger than any anime I’ve ever seen.

For the sake of my Fujoshi Files, I may watch more of it, just to get a more accurate profile, but I don’t know man.

205 Days Left Until Earth’s Destruction: Space Battleship Yamato Episodes 9-14

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“Why it was just different lighting all along!”

Another 6 episodes of Space Battleship Yamato and man, those slow episodes from early on seem like a thing of the past. The biggest step forward by far though is the introduction of Lord Desslar. I mean, he was introduced before in around episode 3 or 4, but at that point he was just Some Guy, and it’s not until episode 11 that I began to see why Desslar is so beloved, and why many consider him to be such a tremendously good villain. His plans to destroy the Yamato amount to more than just “totally shoot it until it blows up.” He has multiple contingencies and works to create situations where you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Also, watching him open up a trap door underneath an uncouth soldier with no respect for the enemy and saying, “We don’t need such barbaric thinking in the Gamilus Empire” defines his character so very well. Highly intelligent and ruthless, but with a sense of honor befitting his title as ruler of Gamilus.

Desslar is just smooth.

But this isn’t the Desslar fan club. This is a Yamato review. And there’s plenty of characters to talk about. Kodai and Okita in particular get some powerful development. The revelation of Okita’s (space) radiation sickness and the quiet loneliness of his existence begins to show the real depth of the Yamato captain. Knowing that Kodai used to hate fighting shows how much the death of his family at the hands of Gamilus has driven him to take revenge. Just seeing every character say good bye to their families before leaving the Solar System, and all of them feeling that the 5 minutes allotted to each person was simply not enough time, that episode was probably the one that affected me the most so far.

Keep at it Yamato. You are deserving your reputation.

PS: Why is Yuki the only girl on board. They did not think this through very well, aside from the possibility that they need to keep the women at home to give birth and raise children for the sake of humanity’s future.

I Love Nostle Orunch: Baccano!

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Baccano! takes place in early 1930s New York City and follows various Italian mafias in this era. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill story about gangs with tommy guns, though, as Baccano! adds an element of the supernatural to its setting and characters. The catch is, the series blurs the line between the two so that supernatural and natural abilities don’t seem that far off from each other. Being a hero or a monster is determined by the individual, and even then some characters can be considered both.

Baccano! has a large cast of characters, and they are incredible. And wonderful. Wondercredible. The story has no true main character, or should I say that every character is like a main character. You have Firo Prochainezo, a young baby-faced guy with a penchant for fisticuffs and a good heart. You have Ladd Russo, the sociopath whose only joy is to kill anyone who thinks that they’re completely safe. Then there’s Jacuzzi Splot, a man Kenshiro would be proud of, who manages to do the manliest things possible while crying like a girl. And not last (I told you that this cast was large), and certainly not least, are Isaac Dian and Miria Harvent, two skilled, yet bumbling honorable thieves who like to dress up for their various crimes and use the most distorted logic possible and happen to end up doing good as a result. They’re probably my favorites but it’s not like any of the other characters are far behind.

Wondercredible, indeed. And there’s so many more I haven’t even talked about.

Baccano! tells its story out of chronological order, so the events in each episode jump back and forth between 1930, 1931, and 1932. And you know what? I don’t care. I have no great desire to watch the series in “proper” chronological order, I have no motivation to see just exactly how all the dots connect. Baccano! is that engaging and entertaining that I did not feel like I was missing anything by having the story jump around so much. Events are grouped thematically, and it works very, very well.

So in summary, Baccano! hits it out of the park.

Gachiiiin!

2005’s Forgotten Anime: Glass Mask

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Glass Mask, based on a long, long-running manga series, is one of my favorite anime from 2005 and 2006, and that’s no easy task with Eureka Seven in that running. It’s the tale of a plain girl named Kitajima Maya who is discovered to have an incrediblly innate ability for acting. At first, Maya is seemingly oblivious to everything except acting. She can recite a 3-hour play perfectly after having only watched it once. She can bring an uncanny realism to any role she plays, being naturally adept at pantomime. However, her greatest talent is her ability to fully take on any character, to literally become the role that she’s playing. Under the guidance of renowned former actress Tsukikage Chigusa, Maya engages in a friendly yet fierce rivalry with the prodigy Himekawa Ayumi while being watched over by the mysterious “Man of the Purple Roses. It’s old-fashioned shoujo at its finest, and I would implore everyone to watch it, except for one problem.

The subtitles never got past episode 5 or so, and this is a roughly 50 episode series.

I can only imagine that all of the acting terms and the settings of the plays in Glass Mask present a daunting task for any translator, as it requires not just knowledge of Japanese but also some French, Russian, and other languages. I’m certainly not confident enough in my translation abilities to start tackling other languages beyond Japanese, but if anyone is willing to heed the call, you will have done the anime community a good favor.

If you really want to see what Glass Mask is about, though, you can also check out the manga, which is available in all the places you expect (besides an actual bookstore). Watch out, it’s been around since the 70s and still has not finished.

By the way, my favorite scene in the show is during a play where Maya is playing the role of a queen. Another girl, jealous of Maya, tries to sabotage Maya by stepping on her dress as she walks outside so that Maya will trip. Maya is normally a very clumsy girl so this isn’t an unreasonable plan, but Maya senses the tug of her dress immediately, stops, and tells the girl to get off of her dress.

Standing there wasn’t Kitajima Maya, but the queen.

True Understanding of the Unity of Everything that Exists: Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei

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In a previous post about Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, I explained that I considered the characters to be basically concentrated versions of existing character types, not unlike boiling a stew until all that’s left is a thick muck.  It’s a crazy wonderful show.

After two episodes, I have to say that Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is basically boiling down the entire first series until it becomes a thick gravy of pure entertainment.  Plot, characters, humor, and metahumor all exist as a singularity from which none can gain a true separate identity from the others.

It’s like injecting anime right into your eyes.

354 Days Left Until Earth’s Destruction: Space Battleship Yamato 1-8

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I have finally begun watching one of the most enduring classics of anime, Space Battleship Yamato, localized in the US as Star Blazers. It is the epic tale of an old World War II battleship which has been revived as a space-faring vessel.  Its purpose: to traverse 148,000 light years to the planet Iscandar in order to obtain a device which can save the Earth from a radioactive death, and it has a little over a year to obtain the device and make it back to Earth.  Meanwhile, the dreaded Gamilus Empire, the ones responsible for turning the Earth into a wasteland in the first place, are doing everything they can to stop the Yamato.

Space Battleship Yamato, like all of Matsumoto Leiji’s works, feels like it comes straight out of the 1970s, and, well, it did. The show displays a sheer sense of wonder and imagination as to what awaits humanity.  Combined with the harsh setting of desperately trying to save a dying Earth, an Earth ravaged by war and destruction, and it begins to invoke the teachings of famed astronomer Carl Sagan, who warned that if humans do not go past the sentient “adolescence” of technology that we are all doomed to die.

Yamato is the first anime to build a true fanbase, and it is very, very easy to see why this show captivated so many people in Japan and the rest of the world. It’s a race against time, with the weight of humanity itself on the shoulders of the crew of the Yamato.  Nothing can be considered filler because there is no way to reset everything back to a status quo. No matter how many repairs are made, the 366-day countdown to Earth’s demise draws closer to zero.  The show has a large cast of likable characters, from the wise captain Okita to the beautiful Yuki, from the smarmy robot Analyzer to the daring Kodai, it is remarkably easy to slip into the world of Yamato as a sort of wish-fulfillment scenario, where the viewer is also a part of the quest to Iscandar.

One humorous aspect of the show is the way it overuses the word “space” as a descriptor. The Yamato travels in space knots.  It’ll be five hundred space seconds before they reach the next point. Oh no, space tanks!  Space space space space space. I’ll chalk it up to being from the 70s.  In this respect, it’s not much different from, say, Star Trek or Star Wars.  Another thing is the amount of fanservice Yuki provides.  Nothing wrong with fanservice, I just find it odd that no one ever told me about it.  It might just be that it all got removed from Star Blazers, so no one ever even knew about the Yuki panty shots.

I’m definitely going to keep watching.  For the historian and anime fan in me, Yamato is vitally important, but those pale in comparison to the way it appeals to the basic humanity in me and the desire to go forth into the universe with a noble cause at heart.

Aum Shinrikyo the Animation

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DUN DUN DUUUNNNN DADADADUNDUNDUNNNN…

In the future, man discovers the Shinrikyou Drive, bringing limitless prosperity.

CRUSH THEM, GIANT SHOKO!

Yes, this is a review of an Aum Shinrikyou anime. The Aum Shinrikyou, currently known as Aleph, was the religious cult/organization responsible for the nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo Subway in 1995. During their heyday in the 80s and 90s, Aum, well aware of fiction’s power over men and women, produced their own anime and manga to try and persuade people to join. Fred Schodt’s book, Dreamland Japan, has a section concerning the manga side of things. So here we have this delightful 15 minute piece, entitled Chouetsu Sekai, or Transcendental World.


This is just the name and title of Aum founder, Asahara Shoukou, but I don’t really want to translate it so I can maintain the illusion that it’s an attack in Hokuto no Ken. Pretend it says “Hokuto Ujou Haganken.”

This anime starts off like so many anime with an opening theme. Except it’s clearly sung by someone with no real singing ability or even ability to modify his voice in post-production so he can pretend to sound good. The song is about how all great and wonderful Aum and Asahara are, and I would give details but I didn’t want to expend too much effort watching it.

The main focus of this anime is, of course, Asahara Shoukou, and his benevolent nature and awesome power. Asahara’s primary abilities appear to be levitation, astral projection, levitating while doing astral projection, and having soft anime eyes so he can seem like an upstanding guy. Naturally, his voice actor mumbles a whole lot and you can’t really tell what he’s saying.

Two other important characters are two Aum members who are dating each other. By far the defining moment of this 15 minute extravaganza is when Asahara astral projects himself into an Aum class and notices that the two of them are sitting together with two others and making sure no one knows about their relationship. Later, the girl receives a phone call directly from Asahara and gasps as soon as he says, “You’re seeing that guy aren’t you.” But he says it’s fine and people are made up of their experiences.

Then he goes astral projecting through office buildings.

I can’t quite describe how uniquely terrible this all is. Or maybe I can. Imagine a man with no limbs trying to convince you of the greatness of arm wrestling matches where the prize is getting kicked in the balls by Kenyan marathon runners.

So yes, wonderful. Exactly.