There’s a point about two thirds of the way through Hal (Haru) where, during a festival, two fan-bearers are just out of sync with one another during their routine. It’s obviously intentional and though a small touch, it’s indicative of this short, one hour, film as a whole: detail orientated.
Set in the near future, Hal’s plot concerns a care robot taking on the guise of a deceased person in order to help their partner overcome their all-encompassing grief at their passing. The detail then is not only in the sumptuous backgrounds and animation work by Production I.G. but also in the very subtle portrayals of the characters. So every furtive look, every motion is crafted to be as effortless and as natural as possible and to ensure that you’re never drawn out of the delicate story being told.
Please note: the remainder of this post contains very small spoilers for the film.
If you were in a hurry you could easily mistake Mondaiji-tachi’s premise for No Game No Life’s: bored children get transported to an alternate world where they join an underdog group and take part in sanctioned games to win glory and territory. Even though, it give it it’s full title, Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai Kara Kuru Sou Desu yo? (Problem Children are Coming from Another World, aren’t they?) starts with the same kind of torturous lateral thinking that typifies NGNL, their core difference is that series’ reliance on the “games” is all-encompassing and its fantasy-tinged world is a lot more cohesive than the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach taken here.
one of them got to punch a dragon while another shoulder-locked a lycanthrope
Its poster child, Black Rabbit (who is for some reason primarily blue as well as sometimes pink), is a prime example of this. Bunny girls are few and far between in anime in general, far more often it’s cat girls and fox girls who steal the limelight, yet here, just in case bunny girls aren’t your thing, there are also cat girls. And dog girls. And vampires. And fairies. And lizard people. And weretigers. You get the idea. Coherence or even a united vision for the series’ world isn’t high on the list of priorities and it prefers to throw enough at you in the hope that some of it sticks.
Just try all the keys in the bloody pendant. I don’t care whether it’s a metaphor for sex anymore or who out of the numerous girls you made the promise to when you were a toddler, this kind of tomfoolery has gone on long enough. Based on a lot of anime, Nisekoi (False Love) especially, if I ever have children I will impress upon them the perils of making promises to childhood friends because from the evidence, all it causes is trauma further down the line.
Nisekoi’s initial hook is standard “only in anime” fare: the son of a Yakuza boss, Raku, is forced to pretend he’s romantically involved with the daughter, Chitoge, of another gang boss. The two obviously fight like cats and dogs yet must maintain the facade of a couple in love lest hostilities between the two criminal enterprises escalate into a full on street war. I say “initial” hook because although that’s all covered in the first episode, the storyline the series is more interested in telling is about the promise Raku made with an unknown girl when he was younger, a girl who holds the literal key to his figurative heart / literal pendant.
I have this silly rule that when I create a folder for an anime (in an imaginatively titled “Watching” parent folder) I have to watch it to completion. This is why, eventually, I’ll have to finish Samurai Flamenco but is also why I recently powered through Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Bride, the sequel to Samurai Girls. The folder itself was created when the series was first airing in April 2013, and even now I have no idea why given that I’d abandoned that first series when it became readily apparent that it was by some margin, an objectively worse series than Queen’s Blade. And that’s saying quite a bit.
We’ve run out of samurai outfits, why not just put a pirate in there? Why the hell not.
The comparison is expected because both series opt for the “we don’t have much story, let’s throw a whole load of nudity on screen instead” school of thought. Unlike Queen’s Blade though which tempered it’s theatre of flesh with some half-way decent characters, Hyakka is populated unlikable twits. Sure for the former you got utter cretins like Nanael (voiced by Aya Hirano, no comment on the connection) but others like Tomoe and Leina almost made you forget you were watching a series that was spawned from lascivious gamebooks. Hyakka has none of these illusions and presents you with a cast of characters that have all of the charm, wit and pathos of a group of over-sugared four year olds.
Maoyuu Maou Yuusha (Demon King and the Hero) was nothing like what I expected. My ill-advised method of choosing anime to watch based on animated GIFs that I find on Tumblr led me to believe it was going to be just another medieval fan-service series; sharpen claws, commence slating. How wrong I was. I had seen the first episode when the series first aired and didn’t continue watching for some unknown fickle reason but frequently heard it compared to Spice and Wolf. In that series, wolf spirit Holo wanders around naked for a not insignificant amount of time which is likely where I assumed the comparison came from.
“I’m here to kill you!” “You want some tea?” “...” “...” “Sure”
In actuality it’s from the pointed approach to medieval affairs than chest out fan-service; so whereas Spice and Wolf busies itself with the minutiae of trade economics, Maoyuu Maou Yuusha goes for a more nuts-and-bolts cultural approach, dragging in some good old fashion politicking to go with it. You have the Demon King, the red haired poster child of the series, who makes a deal with the Hero, Generic McBlandpants, to set aside their racial and ideological differences in order to build a better world.
