I’M FINALLY DONE – no, Arcane, hold the victory lap, you’ve got one more write-up to do.
Okay. Game-face.
I got to watch the premiere episode of Dragon Pilot at Anime Central 2018, long before it would ever see the light of day on Netflix, and I was pretty much stunned by Mari Okada’s newest vision. I’ll say that Dragon Pilot ultimately didn’t materialize into the So Ra No Wo To-esque war story I was kind of hoping for, but it did still manage to turn in one of the most well-done animal bonding stories this side of How to Train Your Dragon.
I’m gonna start with the visuals, because they are not gonna be everyone’s cup of tea. Studio Bones took a big risk with the aesthetic of this show, but I think it paid off beautifully, trading detail for very expressive animation in a fashion not too far removed from Ping Pong, though not nearly as stylized or alienating. That being said, a lot of still shots come off very wonky, so if you’re not able to fully get into the visual experience of the show, it’s gonna be a little weird. That being said, the dragon designs are delightful, and the hybrid plane armor looks cool as heck even on the adorable rubbery dragons we’re here for.
I’m also kind of stunned at how very fetish-y this show is without ever becoming trashy – all the girls involved are grown adults, the only time we see them in any state of undress is when it would make sense for them to not be wearing much, and yet this will always be known as a fetish show for an entirely different reason. We’re not gonna get into the vore thing, mostly because I don’t know if Okada is fully aware of it and I’ll admit that piloting a dragon from the inside by having it eat you makes more sense than anything else I can come up with, not to mention that it gets mined for a lot of good comedy.
Basically the big gripe I had with Hisone to Masotan was that, in its final third, it gets a little bit too bogged down in its A-plot without giving the subplots room to resolve naturally, and some of the story decisions feel kind of arbitrary. A lot of it has to do with Shinto spirituality (on which I am not an expert), but the whole virgin-maiden trope is definitely here in full-force, despite the fact that there are romantic elements of the show – it has the effect of essentially declaring the two budding relationships in the show to be plot tumors without letting the audience decide for themselves, while introducing a love triangle that continues past the point where it’s narratively needed and just endsup as an actual (if minor) plot tumor.
All in all though, compared to something like Sirius, Dragon Pilot just has so much more thought and creativity put into it that I have to award it at least an 8/10, even if I don’t think it quite reaches the Hall of Fame.
Final Thoughts – Sirius the Jaeger
It was going fine, right up until it got stupid.
The first half of Sirius is a well-produced action romp that competently executes a lot of well-worn genre tropes enough to make it at least cool fun, but about two-thirds of the way through, a major plot beat happens and pretty much everything following is just a downhill ride to a dumb and predictable ending.
That’s not to say that it’s irredeemable – the atmosphere and high production value of the first few episodes doesn’t peter out completely by the end, but it loses whatever originality it had along the way and looks noticeably worse as it goes on.
My problem ultimately becomes that it’s such a rote regurgitation of tropes that every single element introduced is resolved exactly how you would expect – I spent a lot of the first half joking around with my boyfriend about how “oh, look, it’s this trope, I guess this thing is gonna happen later” and every single one of my predictions came true.
It wouldn’t be a bad show for someone just getting into anime, but for someone who’s been watching for years, it’s just crushingly standard.
Netflix threw around a lot of money last year in directly helping to produce several shows, like B: The Beginning, Devilman Crybaby, and least of all, A.I.C.O., which launched with such a disastrously bad dub that they wound up re-doing the entire thing.
Of course the dub isn’t really my issue with A.I.C.O.. My problem lies more in the fact that it’s a little bit of a ripoff of Parasite Eve, only handled with a lot more tonal inconsistencies and with a 3rd Birthday-era level of stupid plotting. I only got halfway through and I could predict all the twists I wound up looking up, and none of them are even all that meaningful, up to and including sharing an entire Tomato Reveal with said 3rd Birthday. A.I.C.O. is just dull and lacking in substance or even a decent production value, as aside from a couple of moments of fluid motion, this is easily the worst looking Netflix-financed show of 2018. When you consider that A) this is Bones, who apparently spent much more on making My Hero Academia and B) that unlike B or Devilman Crybaby, this is a direct adaptation of source material – meaning a great deal of the work was already half-done – I don’t get where the money went here. It’s not the worst-looking show of the year by any means (not in a world where we had Master of Ragnarok and My Sister My Writer) but it just doesn’t live up to Bones’ standard at all. I’m really hoping that they can give the upcoming Fire Force adaptation the same love they give MHA.
While it had the advantage over B because the plot actually makes sense, it loses way too many points for the plot being stupid – again, it’s a near-direct ripoff of Parasite Eve, down to the biological catastrophe being caused by a medical procedure gone wrong, but without any of the thought that went into most of Eve – and six episodes in, I didn’t have much of a desire to see it through.
I’ll start with the easily observable: B: The Beginning is a gorgeous production from Production I.G. Three episodes in, I’ve seen some very good looking, well-directed fight scenes that I wish were in a better show, and the setting – while not particularly original – is at least rendered beautifully.
But wow, is this show incomprehensible. I feel like we’ve made some vague plot direction by the end of the third episode, but I have no clue what’s going on with the title character because he has only barely appeared, and the only thing I’ve really come away with is that a) I’m not even slightly invested in what’s happening, and b) this show really wants to be Death Note. And I’m not the biggest fan of Death Note but at least you had some understanding of what was going on. B: The Beginning seems to be trying to jam together Death Note and Psycho-Pass but has failed to tie anything together and feels more like two shows jammed together into one runtime without consideration for cohesion.
This is all the vision of Original Creator Kazuto Nakazawa, whom I’ve never heard of and seems to have very few directorial credits on anything I’ve ever heard of – he’s worked on episodes for quite a few good shows, including Digimon Adventure, Kids on the Slope, and Samurai Champloo, but seems to have no idea what to do when given the reins to his own project and a Netflix budget to work with, leading to the aforementioned fun fight scenes but nothing meaningful to tie them together, since the supernatural fight scenes just feel completely separated from the police drama and they have nothing to do with each other.
I’ll give it a 4 just for the great animation, but I have no emotional investment to speak of and won’t be watching any further.
I know I sat on this one for almost a year but the wait was worth it.
Violet Evergarden is a show I was not expecting to be especially impressed with. I saw headlines about how astounding it looked (which, yes, I will happily give it, but it’s not difficult to make sakuga out of a show with very few action scenes to have to budget out and the assistance of the biggest streaming platform on the planet) and heard about what a tear jerker it was, and that was about it.
And Evergarden is definitely a scientifically engineered tear jerker, in fact, it might be the first show I’ve seen try to make the audience cry in every single episode, and while it didn’t always quite get the tears rolling, I fully admit that I was putty in this show’s hands from the first episode. Violet Evergarden has a great many themes – that of memories, of feelings that need to be shared, and of how society handles war – but central is that of a girl who has recently lost the closest thing she’s ever had to a parent, and her complicated relationship with this man who died to protect her. He wasn’t her father, but her commander who was forced to take her into lethal battles in the recently-passed war when all he had ever wanted was to send her home to live a normal life. Her insane proficiency in combat and ability to strike fear into her enemies just by the mere sight of her was too indispensable a tool for the higher-ups in this war, and so he had to take her to the battlefield and watch as she became a killing machine that depended entirely on him and his commands – and then, he died, the war ended, and a fourteen year old girl who had only ever known life as a soldier was forced out into the world, told by his dying words to “live”, and three words she didn’t know the meaning of:
“I love you.”
So, in her desire to understand what his last message meant, Violet takes up a job as a proxy letter writer – an Auto Memory Doll – to try to better understand the emotions of others so she may better know her own. This leads to a string of incredibly well-done episodic stories of Violet travelling around the country and meeting people – some affected by the war she fought in, some less so – and briefly experiencing life through their feelings. A lot of these stories are somewhat predictable, given the overall tone of the show, but I want to specifically highlight episode 10, the first time one of the short stories (those unrelated to the main plot) really broke open the floodgates for me. Full spoilers for that episode, by the way, but considering the show came out a year ago I feel less cautious about such things.
***EPISODE 10 SPOILERS AHEAD***
So, episode ten sees Violet travelling for a week to a mansion in the countryside, having been summoned by the lady of the house, to whom we are introduced in bed, surrounded by well-dressed people. This is instant and simple shorthand – the woman is dying and the people around her are trying to get her to put her affairs in order. Knowing Violet will be here for some time, this sets up the expectation that Violet is working on what will essentially be this woman’s last will, which would also explain why she won’t allow her young daughter to be in the room where the writing is taking place. Over the course of a week, the daughter Ann befriends Violet, believing her to be a literal doll come to life, and we watch as she becomes more and more frustrated with how much of her mother’s time is being taken up by Violet and the letters they are writing together because she wants her mom to play with her, until we finally learn that Ann is very aware that her mother is dying and is angry that these letters are taking precedent over spending the last few days they have together.
This episode sets up a lot of well-worn dominoes – since we’re introduced to the mother sick in bed, she’s not going to be alive by the time the episode ends, and we expect a lot of really sad, upsetting time to be spent at the funeral where we’ll watch Ann react to her mom’s death and find out what was ultimately in her last will.
That is not what happens.
Violet leaves, and we see a montage of the mother disappearing from all of the places she used to play with her daughter, until we’re given a silhouette shot of the funeral where everyone but Ann slowly vanishes from the scene.
And then a small time skip, and we find out what her mother was really doing with Violet: preparing fifty letters to be delivered to her daughter each year on her birthday, a series of messages and kind words from a mother who knows she will not see her daughter grow up but intends to remain an important, guiding presence as Ann grows into a woman.
This subversion of my expectations was so beautiful that I’m almost crying again just talking about it. The source material for Violet Evergarden is one of the most lovingly crafted tales that I’ve ever seen adapted, and though I’m not sure I want to see a sequel (knowing that one is definitely happening and also knowing the implications of the final shot), I’m happy to say that I have absolutely no complaints or problems with giving Violet Evergarden a 10/10.The complex world and characters will pull you in, but the masterful writing will keep you completely hooked.
Not an especially interesting offering from KyoAni.
Their big project this year, Violet Evergarden, makes Tsurune look so pedestrian by comparison that I can’t even put it into words. It’s not bad, the execution is alright, but it’s not memorable at all, and it’s because I’ve seen this show before. A kid who returns to his sport of choice after being absent due to some kind of mental hangup and is faced with a hostile teammate and a coach with a weird way of teaching?
I’m hardly the first person to say that Kyoto Animation themselves have made this show already, and it also got a third season this year (which I haven’t seen yet, for the record). And in a year with a lot of more interesting sports shows (to name a few, Major 2nd, Umamusume, Harukana Receive, hell, fucking Megalobox) I am feeling a lot less forgiving towards this one just phoning in an easy B-.
I’m also not finishing it, a decision I should have made long before it finished airing (three weeks late, I might add, a decision which baffles me). I’m willing to give it a 6/10, but not more of my time when I have other things I need to finish and it’s the very last Fall show on my list.
I would have regretted following my instincts here.
I almost dropped High Score Girl after the first episode simply because I didn’t find it all that interesting, but the buzz around MAL wound up getting to me and I went back and finished it all, and I was surprised by how invested I got.
High Score Girl is a romantic comedy focused around a boy who meets the titular character in an arcade and learns that she’s a fighting game prodigy, despite her classy upbringing and lack of a home game console. She never says a single word in the entire series, so the two of them most often communicate their feelings through video games (and, in her case, violence). I thought this was all I needed to know, but going back and finishing it was a worthwhile experience, because it evolves into a compelling story about the girl – Akira Ono – and her incredibly stressful home life, as well as about main character Yaguchi’s classmate Hidaka, who finds herself drawn to him, and then drawn to video games, finding herself to be a natural talent. We wind up with a pretty classic love triangle, and while normally that’s one of my least favorite tropes of all time, it winds up working here because Hidaka has the emotional maturity to understand that Yaguchi doesn’t see her as a girl, just as a friend he plays games with, and that’s something she has to work to overcome.
I don’t really have much to say about the video game elements of the story other than that they are effectively used as character motivations, but I do want to mention the show’s unique aesthetic. It’s entirely rendered in CGI and sticks as closely to the style of the source manga as possible, which results in a look that takes some getting used to. Basically, the characters’ faces are rendered in 2-D manga style on top of the 3-D models rather than trying to animate faces, and while by the end it was working pretty well for me, it can make them look like dolls for a while.
I’m also not thrilled by the ending, because it seems like the last episode is almost entirely setup for the three-episode OVA airing this season (which, Netflix being Netflix, we won’t get for a while) rather than resolving any narrative threads. While getting three more episodes is fine, I really have to wonder the point of doing things this way instead of just adding a thirteenth episode to this season and leaving the rest of the story to be adapted in a second season at some point, because it’s pretty unsatisfying to end on a cliffhanger, even if a continuation is guaranteed.
Overall, though, this was much more exciting than I thought it would be. I wouldn’t say it was amazing like some of the reviews I’ve seen – the American perspective on Ono’s upbringing seems to be one of abuse, even though this is pretty normal for girls of such high-standing families, and it’s not examined in all that much detail, instead being very suddenly a problem near the end of the show. I also barely noticed the music, which is surprising given that Yoko freaking Shimamura composed the score for this – I sort of wonder if it was a warm-up (or warm-down) from composing for Kingdom Hearts III.
Let’s see if it manages to wrap things up a little better in the Extra Stage OVA.
And in Fall, they began an answer to a question. That question is: “What if we threw Haruhi Suzumiya and Neon Genesis Evangelion into a blender, hit puree, didn’t put the lid on, and dumped a shitload of Gurren Lagann into the mix?” While Gridman is already a developed “franchise”, SSSS is just so uniquely TRIGGER-flavored that I really can’t compare it to its source material other than saying that it’s definitely my favorite show of its kind.
Like I said before, watching Tokusatsu shows is pretty tiring by yourself because they take a very long time to tell what is usually not a very complicated story, so distilling one down into a single season and pacing it perfectly is enough to really pique my interest all on its own, but in a year where this exact studio already collaborated on a different robot-themed show that made my want to tear my hair out, and a year where Gundam Build Divers let me down, Gridman was such a breath of fresh air that I found it compulsively watchable and very deliberately saved it for (almost) the last show I finished this season.
It looks how you’d expect from a TRIGGER production – that is to say, cool as hell – and this is probably the best integration of CG and traditional animation that I’ve seen in a TV production, and without spoiling too much, the story really seriously manipulates the viewer into thinking they can predict what happens next, just to keep the Holy Shit Quotient healthy when it starts sprinting in the opposite direction.
This really sounds like I’m about to give it a perfect score, but I’m not, and it’s because of what happens in episode six, which I’ve already discussed – namely, that the main character gets the crux of the plot essentially infodumped at him by a character who then vanishes for the rest of the story. I hate so much that this happens, even though it is basically the last time any sort of exposition dump happens in the story, because it forced me to compare it to Another, which is utterly heinous in comparison to Gridman. Blech.
Still though, it’s easily the best “mech” show I saw all year, and it’s sitting at a ridiculously low 7.48 on MAL, and that’s a damn shame, because this one’s going in the Hall of Fame.
Strap in, because this one gets complicated. Also, spoiler alert for both this and for 91 Days, because I can’t just talk about one thing, I have to swerve way out of my lane. If you don’t want to be spoiled or read a lot of rambling, I’m giving it a recommendation.
Let me start by throwing in some context. Summer 2016 saw the release of an original show by Studio Shuka (best known for the sequel seasons of Durarara!!) called 91 Days, a mob story with very deep homoerotic subtext about a boy taking revenge for the murder of his family by a crime family by infiltrating said family and becoming a close confidant to their leader, who also happens to be the insanely attractive Nero. His hotness isn’t especially relevant to my criticism, but like…
Woof.
Anyway, mob stories as a rule do not have happy endings – they usually involve villainous protagonists that have to do very bad things in order to accomplish their goals, which are also often not very noble in intention. If they happen to accomplish something good, it’s a side effect. In the end, Nero becomes very aware that his new friend has been systematically destroying his family since the moment they met, and after a lot of bloody violence, the show ends with the two of them walking alone down a beach on an overcast day. They talk about their experience, and both of them know that despite genuinely growing to like one another, it’s far, far too late for this to end well. Nero pulls out his gun, and the screen cuts to black a moment before he pulls the trigger.
It’s fucking powerful, and the entire time I watched Banana Fish, I was thinking about that ending. While Banana Fish is a very different show, if you really boil it down, it’s also a mob story about taking revenge for the loss of your family, and the things you have to do in order to achieve such a selfish goal as vengeance.
Banana Fish ends up swinging a lot wider than 91 Days, ultimately, because it brings in a lot of even more adult concepts and handles them with varying results. Rape, for instance, is mentioned a lot as something that happened in the backstory of several characters (all of whom are male, though they weren’t always the actual victims), and it’s neither handled carefully nor is it glamorized. The main character Ash actually seems to have developed a complete lack of caring about his own sexual well-being from having been involved in a lot of child pornography, and many times over the course of the story he uses his body to seduce men he needs things from because his good looks and experience are enough to make basically the entire cast want him.
But the only one he wants is the Japanese college student who suddenly got caught up in his plans, and becomes magnetized to in a way he’s completely unable to handle.
Banana Fish is the single most queer-coded show I’ve ever seen that never has the subtext rise to become pure text. The author herself has stated that in all the time Eiji and Ash spent together, they felt as lovers, but never consummated that feeling. They do embrace intimately whenever they see each other after a period of absence, but even when they share a room, they have separate beds divided by a nightstand. It’s almost strange how sudden the stop on this relationship is, like after displaying a lot of male affection and even kissing at one point (as part of a ruse), the two of them suddenly no-homoed.
I think this is probably a result of the time period the story was originally written in – like I said in my premiere review, Banana Fish as a manga was published from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, in a time where the U.S. was facing the AIDS crisis (so media endorsing gay relationships between men were generally not widely accepted due to the massive stigma) and Japan was…well, Japan has pretty much been “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for a very long time. So writing a story that goes right up to the line for readers that seek such things out (who were certainly there, BL as a genre is now a staple in Japan, particularly among women, whom Banana Fish was targeting since it was in a shoujo magazine) but doesn’t step over it was probably ideal for the time period.
However, I really question whether the author in question (Akimi Yoshida, just to get her name in here) was opposed to changing this position, or if director Hiroko Utsumi ever considered asking her for her input, because the story has been updated to take place in the present day, when being gay in America is not a particularly big deal, especially in New York City. I’m really afraid that it’s going to be a while before we get explicitly queer shows in Japan that don’t involve the tired aggressive, rapey seme archetype like DAKAICHI or even Bloom Into You, because this would have been a pretty good chance to try that out, given that MAPPA already made a show two years ago that also toed the line without ever actually showing Yuri and Victor being together on camera (and no, even the kiss doesn’t count, they deliberately cut away from it).
We also have to deal with the fact that these stories don’t have happy endings.
After the conflict is over, and after resolving to never see Eiji again for his safety, Ash is given a letter from him that contains a plane ticket and a heartfelt plea to understand that Eiji was never afraid of his partner despite all of the violence he had been involved in, Ash begins to run to the airport, towards his happy ending…and is murdered, because cosmically that’s what he had earned. While I fully approve of this as an ending, it is still pretty firmly an example of Burying Your Gays, and warrants a lot of scrutiny because of that.
Basically, I’m not sure how I feel about it and I don’t know that I ever will be.
But now that I’ve gotten all of that off of my chest, Banana Fish is a terrifically-plotted mob action story that seems to have gotten a lot of love and passion out of studio MAPPA, easily comparable to Yuri On Ice!!! from 2016. The action is brutal and satisfying, the twists are fantastic and kept me guessing right till the end, and the entire thing plays out much like a Shakespearean tragedy. I just wanted to express my disappointment that in a show as well-written as this one, with critically acclaimed source material, Banana Fish couldn’t take the one extra step that would have made its finale that much more meaningful, because I was sick to death by the end by all the emphasis on what good friends its leads were.
It’s a very cute show, but there’s a reason I didn’t do an Update post on Merc StoriA, and it’s because I’ve just had little desire to go back to it. I did manage to go back and finish two more episodes, but the very lackluster animation and meandering plot makes it pretty unable to hold my attention, I can’t really stop myself from pulling out my phone while I have it on. That unfortunately means that I don’t have much else to say regarding its quality – I do still like the kid-friendly art style, but ultimately I don’t remember very much of what happens in this show and I think that says a lot considering that I just finished the third episode a few minutes ago. It leaves very little impression, but I might just not be the right audience for it.
The Arcane Archive 