I’ve wanted for a while to do more with manga on this blog, but the manga I typically read are weekly things, and it’s hard to come up with something to say about every chapter of them. Instead, I’m going to borrow from my time at shonenbeam again and simply do manga entries abut the best chapter of manga I happened to read this week. This week’s main dish is a spectacular chapter from a delicious manga, Tetsuji Sekiya’s Bambino.
The decision to add complexity to a character is a tricky one; there are as many ways to do it wrong and make a character flat as there are to do it right and make a character deeper. Arata Kangatari made some missteps this week, but is moving forward regardless.
I was worried about whether this show was going to fall off a cliff by resorting to cheap boob humor and forgetting to be actually funny. Fortunately, Muromi-san showed itself to be made of sterner stuff.
You know you’ve made a good point when Nanba Mutta repeats the statement almost word for word on an episode of Space Brothers airing two days later. This episode was great, and it was great because it built around dialogue that established Pico and Mutta as serious-business engineers.
Previously, I had Devil Survivor 2 pegged as a grey vs. grey morality show, the type that seems to show up a lot these days. This episode pretty much turned that assumption on its head; it’s much less of a moral conundrum and much more of a clear case of the large organization being a different kind of evil from the demons, while the rebel faction is, in the absolute worst case, lacking knowledge about the situation. This story choice leads to a show that holds more of a “protect the civilians” ethic, something I’m perfectly happy with. Too, It’s more fun to watch a protagonist proactively picking a side.
How do you create the ultimate anime? Buy the best director and the best writer and give them infinite time and infinite money? Seems like that’d be obvious, right? Obvious, but wrong.
Leaving aside auxiliary questions like how one can actually judge who the best director and best writer are, there’s a much more fundamental problem with that idea. It’s an thought I often find expressed in critical circles, that the best successes come simply from good talents being able to do what they really want, free of any constraints. It’s the ideal of creative freedom unchained and free to race around the world with gumption and gusto.
The problem with this idea is that it’s too much yang and not enough yin, and it neglects the fact that a lot of the most creative ideas of our time have only come about because people didn’t have the materials or editorial approval to try their first choice and ended up doing something totally new. And how the choice that spends the most money isn’t always the choice that’s best for a particular show. Creative constraint is the polar opposite of creative freedom, but almost as vital in the production of powerful anime.
So a while ago I wrote about veteran Sound Director Katsuyoshi Kobayashi’s wizardly handling of Space Brothers’ audio. At the time, I had to look up his name on ann, but I didn’t check his specific creator page. The other day, I went back and finally did. It turns out this isn’t the only anime-of-the-decade candidate* he’s worked on with a director named Watanabe. In celebration of this individual who’s handled a number of sublime auditory anime experiences and yet has to date zero comments or favorites on his myanimelist page, I’m going to spend this column by talking about the musically crafted battle sequence to trump (almost) all others, the last 6 minutes of Cowboy Bebop.
(This post contains obvious ending spoilers for a 15-year-old show that you either have watched or will find yourself watching the moment you inform someone who has that you haven’t. So there.) Continue reading
It’s not exactly uncommon in an anime for the main character to be the most interesting one, but it is more of a rarity to have one who’s as chronically underconfident as Arata is in an action show. It surprises me that I’m actually enjoying the resulting contrast.
I recently finished a mission that’s taken me combing through mountains of data grains and getting them all lined up in neat sacks. After writing this article, I’ve wanted to do more large-scale data/stats work with anime. But pulling up the stats I need for each anime every time I need it is a huge pain. So, over the past couple of days, I took the data I needed for all (closer to 85-90%, in actuality) of the anime that aired over the past eight years. If you want more details, or a look at the spreadsheets, they’re available in the relevant tab. Suffice to say that, for me, this database is more valuable than a giant toybox full of gold.
The first thing I want to use this data to address is the idea of “churn” in the English-speaking anime fandom; the idea that most anime fans are fairly young, old fans tend to be less involved in the community, and some old classics can get lost as a result. A more thorough expression of the idea can be found on this podcast, the major impetuous for this article.
So what’s my take on the idea that English-speaking fandom is mercilessly churning out the old and frail? Read on to find out.
There are a lot of mecha anime out there, and while I haven’t seen too many of them, I tend to really enjoy the self-aware mecha shows that take unique takes on the implications of the genre; stuff like Dai-Guard, where the focus is a hot-blooded protagonist dealing with various impracticalities of the genre, or Fist Planet, where the mech pilot just clowns around to pass the time in his dull job, or Gad Guard, which is all about the downsides of having a robot minion that does whatever you want.
One day, I had heard a certain 90s mecha by the name of Gasaraki mentioned in this context enough times that I had to give it a look. Suffice to say it’s a lot less in the style of Ishikawa Ken (Getter Robo) and a lot more in the style of Kaiji Kawaguchi (Zipang, A Spirit of the Sun), a gripping political thriller.
Animetics 