A lot can be said for a good story well told. Ano Natsu de Matteru rockets into the romance genre with a concept that by all rights should be weary from overuse, but is instead energised by likeable characters and a story that is impassioned and dramatic with little triteness.
“Crowbarring five teenagers onto a sub-tropical island was suspect enough but meeting up with a childhood friend…”
Not surprising really given the talent behind almost every facet: the director has past triumphs with Toradora!, Ano Hi Mita Hana and A Certain Scientific Railgun, the writer is the same person responsible for Please! Teacher and music is provided by the imitable I’VE SOUND group including opening lyrics penned by none other than alumni KOTOKO – it’s like getting the band back together. The creators indelible fingerprints are everywhere, whether it’s the cerulean skies and over-saturated greenery encapsulating a youthful summer or the skilful manipulation of character affections and steady meting out of drama; to say it was well produced would be doing it a disservice. Read the rest of this entry
There is no way of reviewing humour. It’s always personal and at the mercy of such fickleness as “I wasn’t in the mood”. Enough then to say that Baka Test is my kind of humour; the kind where the jokes are obvious from the setup but the punchline is so much more over-the-top than expected. The kind where the minute-to-minute plot is irrelevant as long as the laughs keep on coming. The kind where with all the rules established, it’s just a case of exploiting the environment.
“laugh along at the absurdity, embrace the archetypes and accept the obvious but still giggle at the outcome”
I called the first series a “thigh-slappingly hilarious comedy” and the second is no different, primarily because there is nothing new here. No great switch-ups or new characters only more of the same but tweaked and intensified. The reliance upon Hideyoshi’s effeminate appearance is dialled down and tertiary characters such as Akihisa’s and Minami’s siblings are sidelined for a greater focus on the core love triangle. It’s here it’s at its weakest with a lengthy foray into Minami’s move from Germany and then a confession that leads to confusion that leads to drama that eventually leads to a reset. Lacklustre and bereft of the sharp eye that makes the comedy so great, it’s dead weight when compared with the homosexual overtures from Miharu and Toshimitsu that manage to be more genuine despite being played for laughs. Read the rest of this entry
Sometimes a specific element of a series becomes notorious, the murderous end to School Days for instance, and Yosuga no Sora (Sky of Connection) has its own as an epilogue to the first episode. Female masturbation isn’t something certain facets of anime have shied away from but it poses the question of whether or not it’s in good taste. Short answer: no. What puts the series into a different category of lewdness than other tasteless series such as Ikkitousen, Queen’s Blade and Kanokon is that here the series makes a desperate attempt to tell a meaningful story of emotion and heartbreak the likes of which visual novels are renowned for.
It’s all been done before though, and done better. The beige-grey palette will be familiar from Futakoi Alternative and though the characters avoid the most egregious archetypes, their motivations and reactions feel all too commonplace. That black undercurrent though, with plot threads such as the sister’s incestuous obsession with her brother, feel far too forced. Their taboo nature magnified when the characters are still schoolchildren of indeterminate ages and maturity. More succinctly: it crosses the line between the self-knowing, head-shaking titillation of Ladies versus Butlers and into deviant fetishism and disquieting sexual territory. Read the rest of this entry
Playing fast and loose with fairy tales, Ookami-san to Shichinin no Nakamatachi is a surprising comedy that straddles the line between familiar and fresh, whimsically mashing up elements pluck from its contemporaries. Certainly the protagonist’s hair colour and demeanour could have been lifted wholesale from Toradora, her pugilistic attitude and deviant sidekick are another matter. So it is with the rest of the cast, just when the measure of a character seems to be had, a tangential quirk is revealed turning them on their head. The strength of the show then is defying expectation and in three episodes it proves it has the legs and the occasional comedic timing to pull off its crazy take on well loved stories, but whether it will be able to maintain that for a further ten is up for debate.
“though the outcome is predictable, this is definitely a case where the telling is more important than the ending”
Otogi High School has its share of interesting clubs, the “bank” though is different and specialises in doing favours for people in times of need. The only catch is that person owes them a favour to be collected at a later time. So it is that Ryouko, the eponymous Ookami, and her diminutive companion Ringo become part of the bank and carry out some of the more physical jobs they have to deal with. Surrounded by other oddballs such as the cross-dressing president, a bespectacled and thoroughly bonkers scientist, and a boy with social anxiety disorder who wields a mean slingshot. Together they deal with the variety of cases that come to the attention of the bank: from a girl who doesn’t want her senior in the tennis club to leave to someone who wants desperately to win the school’s beauty pageant; regardless of the problem, Ryouko often needs to brandish her iconic cat-shaped boxing gloves to achieve a solution. Read the rest of this entry
Amagami SS parades hollow, vacuous simpletons around in a grotesque approximation of a romance plot; cretins drawn with all the grace of a gorilla with a crayon shoved up its nose, splattered wholesale into a story that is as if the plot of a romance novel were faxed to the writers but was horribly smeared and distorted in the process, leaving just a grim and disfigured estimate as to what was intended. These are not even characters but amalgamations of the most tired, staid and all-round tedious aspects of archetypes that have mutated into a hideous, cringeworthy diorama of what sociopaths believe realistic or dramatically engaging human interaction is. There is no merciful release from these mannequins pretending to be people, only the grim realisation that there are twenty four episodes of uninspired, stupidity inducing drivel to come.
“delights in emasculating her sycophantic barely-male toy that one day latched onto her like an unwelcome parasite”
The plot as it stands concerns Junichi who after being slighted by an as yet nameless girl doesn’t take the honourable and budget saving route of giving himself over to a psychiatric ward and instead constructs a pithy home made planetarium in his cupboard out of marker pen and tears of rejection. Through the abject failure of natural selection, the doddering halfwits he associates himself with haven’t murdered him out of boredom or compassion and continue to potter about their own superficial lives. His hormones eventually determine he should pursue a girl one year his senior but whose mind is the colour of bitumen and has all the personality of a long deceased lemming. While he kowtows to her every whimsical desire, humiliating himself in front of his sole male acquaintance in the process, she remains fickle and obtuse and, with any luck, is plotting a gory end to his pathetic existence. Read the rest of this entry
