Fol­low­ing up the crit­ic­ally acclaimed and astound­ingly bril­liant The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was never going to be an easy pro­spect but with a timbre shift sure to cement Mamoru Hosoda’s role as a world-class dir­ector, Sum­mer Wars proves to be a worthy suc­cessor both cre­at­ively and aes­thet­ic­ally. Tak­ing the fluid­ity Mad­house gif­ted his pre­vi­ous film with, the anim­a­tion is dialled up until innu­mer­able char­ac­ters are all rauc­ously mov­ing at once — breath­ing, laugh­ing, talk­ing and liv­ing on screen. Pomp and flair help avoid the ste­reo­types that so often go with virtual-world stor­ies and though it still degen­er­ates into a touch typ­ing mara­thon, the excit­able charm it dis­plays through­out elev­ates it from the stand­ard, tepid block­buster fare.

“a blend of vir­tual worlds, rogue AIs, ques­tion­able math­em­at­ics and enforced time limits”

Kenji is asked by one of the pret­ti­est girls in school, Nat­suki, to help with a sum­mer job; unbe­knownst to him how­ever is that her grand­mother is soon to be turn­ing ninety and Nat­suki has told her fam­ily about a fic­tional fiancé that he must now assume the role of. Trav­el­ling out into the coun­tryside around Ueda, he is intro­duced to the bust­ling, var­ied per­son­al­it­ies of Natsuki’s exten­ded fam­ily and the pala­tial house and grounds that have belonged to the Shino­hara clan for gen­er­a­tions. In the vir­tual world of OZ how­ever, a malevol­ent entity is wreak­ing untold havoc — shut­ting down vital util­it­ies and gob­bling up user accounts with nobody able to stop it. Incon­veni­ence is only the start when it tran­spires the entity has a close link with the Shino­haras and it may only be Kenji, Nat­suki and other mem­bers of the fam­ily who can stop real world dev­ast­a­tion from occur­ring. Read the rest of this entry

Photo by xahl­dera and used under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

Tak­ing place in Glas­gow in the week lead­ing up to the Glas­gow Film Fest­ival, the premiere was pre­ceded by the air­ing of the first movie in the Rebuild series: Evan­gelion 1.0. Bookended by an inform­at­ive talk by Emily Fus­sell of the BBFC, and an intro­duc­tion by the effus­ive Jonathan Cle­m­ents. Kick­ing off a series of anim­ated shenanigans dubbed “Scot­land Loves Anim­a­tion” and suc­ceed­ing the Scot­tish anime con­ven­tion “Auch­inawa”, Scot­land and Glas­gow in par­tic­u­lar is becom­ing one of the prime places to catch anime and Japan­ese goings on.

Begin­ning shortly before half three in the after­noon, tick­ets had been pur­chased online for the double bill and sold out in short order. The line for enter­ing the cinema stretched out of the build­ing and it was imme­di­ately obvi­ous by the dress of the pat­rons what they were queuing for. After a short wait and fil­ing into the sur­pris­ingly spa­cious cinema one of the Glas­gow Film Theatre, the pro­ceed­ings were kicked off by Emily Fus­sell, a media clas­si­fier for the BBFC, with a talk focus­ing on the tribu­la­tions in clas­si­fy­ing anime for release in the UK. Read the rest of this entry

There is a spa­cious fifty minutes to each epis­ode of Katanagatari — enough time for sweep­ing, epic tales befit­ting of the pecu­liar art style and set­ting within feudal Japan. Dis­ap­point­ing then that each epis­ode has enough con­tent for ten minutes which is writ­ten for twenty four then stretched tor­tur­ously out to fifty. Util­ising every pos­sible means to extend and pro­tract res­ults in great swathes of time ded­ic­ated to cease­less banter between the two prot­ag­on­ists. The script may be sharp enough to pre­vent abject bore­dom and the char­ac­ters just shy of cari­ca­tures, but like the recent Bake­monogatari, this isn’t enough to hide defi­cien­cies in key areas such as storyline and pacing.

“this is one of the purest inter­pret­a­tions of what some view as the anime ethos”

Based upon a light novel series, Katanagatari fol­lows the reclus­ive martial-artist Shichika Yas­uri and the white haired strategist Togame as they search for twelve legendary swords forged by the mas­ter crafts­man Shikizaki Kiki. After trav­el­ling to the island where Shichika has stayed all of his life, Togame explains her pre­dic­a­ment and man­ages to enlist his help after one of the twelve sword’s cur­rent own­ers attacked, endan­ger­ing both her life and that of Shichika’s sis­ter. Jour­ney­ing to Kyoto then to Inaba (now Tot­tori Pre­fec­ture) they track down the second sword, wiel­ded by an proud swords­man still cling­ing to his ancestor’s leg­acy. Des­pite Shichika’s naiv­ete, he and Togame begin to bond through their tribu­la­tions and a reti­cent respect for each other’s role and spe­ci­al­it­ies is born. Read the rest of this entry

Leav­ing little to the ima­gin­a­tion, Baka to Test to Shokanju fea­tures pre­cisely what the title spe­cifies. The first three epis­odes are a grab bag of dif­fer­ent influ­ences that run the gamut from the quick fire rowdi­ness of Excel Saga to the fantasy-high school blend of Maburaho, suc­cess­fully mix­ing them all into a com­edy that hits more than it misses. It may have a tend­ency to grind some of its more luke­warm jokes into the ground, and many ele­ments of the paper-thin plot are obvi­ous to all those pay­ing atten­tion, how­ever it elev­ates itself above these faults with diversity and a pleas­ing cheer­ful­ness befit­ting its presentation.

“the tit­u­lar idiot Aki­hisa whose propensity for dim­wit­ted­ness keeps the entire affair tol­er­able if not predictable”

On the day of Fum­izuki Academy’s place­ment test, Aki­hisa isn’t doing well; one of the other stu­dents, Mizuki, how­ever is struck down with a fever and des­pite his prot­est­a­tions, she is awar­ded a zero for the test. Dropped into the worst graded class of the school, she joins Aki­hisa and fel­low under­achiev­ers Min­ami, an aggress­ive tom­boy who recently returned from Ger­many; Yuuji, one of Akihisa’s child­hood friends and sur­pris­ingly cha­ris­matic given his place­ment in class F; Hidey­oshi, an beau­ti­ful male stu­dent con­stantly mis­taken for a girl; and Kota, a serial per­vert who repeatedly tries to pho­to­graph under girls’ skirts. Together they try to elev­ate class F using the school’s unique sys­tem of com­pet­i­tion by bat­tling diminu­it­ive avatars whose strength is determ­ined by their summoner’s test scores. Read the rest of this entry

Another series another las­ci­vi­ous story seed, this time with the form­a­tion of a high school under­wear club by a girl smit­ten with all things under­wear. Rolling one’s eyes and plough­ing into the first three epis­odes of Chu-Bra!! it becomes increas­ingly appar­ent that this isn’t the naughty teen­age giggle parade that is expec­ted from such a premise. Instead it is a charm­ingly sex­less cel­eb­ra­tion of a girl whose pas­sion is looked upon with dis­dain by the prudish or ant­ag­on­istic stu­dents of a school that is all but aligned against her, a situ­ation easy to relate to in prin­ciple if not in implementation.

“Hiroki, who suf­fers from a rare form of under­wear paralysis”

At the entrance cere­mony of middle school, Nayu embar­rasses her­self by trip­ping up when called to give the open­ing speech; this also inad­vert­ently exposes her adult under­wear to an unsus­pect­ing stu­dent body who begin to cir­cu­late rumours about her par­tak­ing of com­pensated dat­ing and other less whole­some activ­it­ies. In real­ity how­ever Nayu simply loves under­wear, des­pite her ador­a­tion res­ult­ing in her being a pariah since junior school, it takes some invest­ig­a­tion but two class­mates, Yako and Haruka, dis­cover the truth behind Nayu and become fast friends with her. As Nayu’s con­fid­ence grows she sug­gests the form­a­tion of an under­wear club, how­ever this is met with res­ist­ance from the uptight head of the more gen­eric han­di­crafts club and find­ing mem­bers proves an uphill struggle, even if she is wear­ing the brassier and panties her grand­mother gif­ted her. Read the rest of this entry