Sometimes an anime reviewer goes to an anime con. At those times, it seems prudent to report on some of what was seen. Today, I have impressions of Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers, Shoshimin: How to Become Ordinary, Witch Hat Atelier, and The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to be Archenemies, based on their panels.
Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers (PV)
The Guilty Gear franchise was not really known to me, and I don’t know a lot more coming out of the panel on the first anime project for the fighting game long runner. I get that Gears are magic users in some kind of future Earth, that we’re following a couple of super macho guys, and that there’s some apparently new girl who wants to wipe all gears out. Given how she was talked about, even dancing around spoilers, I’m guessing that she’s misguided with a compelling reason for her desired killings
Shoshimin: How to Become Ordinary (10 Minutes of Episode 1)
I loved Hyouka. Shoshimin is based on a novel by the same author as Hyouka, and has a pitch that’s similar enough that you know the person behind it is in their wheelhouse, but a tone that’s more bitter and jaded. Its leading couple have a goal of being ordinary, uninvolved in anything. But they seem to be rather non-ordinary sorts. The boy of the pair has a sharp analytical mind (much like Oreki), while the girl… loves sweets. Or so we’re told at first but there are shots in the promotional material that frame her in such a way that I came out of this thinking that she’s probably dangerous. The presenters mentioned a “darker side” to the superficially cute character that will come out, and I have the sneaking suspicion that the darkness involved is as a perpetrator rather than a victim. It’s also notable to me that the presenters seemed to dance around the term “Mysteries” for the plots that the couple get entangled with. There’s a subtitle (whether for the first arc or the whole first season) “The Strawberry Tart Case”, which has a mystery flair for it, but other than maybe a slip or two they strongly preferred “Misfortunes” or “Incidents”… which again makes me think this is going to a more dangerous place that Hyouka did. There’s a 100% chance I’ll get to this anime in short order, and it may even turn out to be the blog’s summer seasonal.
Witch Hat Atelier (PV)
Speaking of Hyouka, a bit of an anecdote: in Hyouka (for those who don’t care to read my full review) there’s a subplot about a couple of girls arguing about what makes a manga a masterpiece or not. After watching this with my family, the discussion came up: of the manga on our shelves, which one would be most comfortably called a Masterpiece? Or at least, which would be closest to claiming the title. The answer was clear, such that it required no real thought… Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. But when the question was reframed and focused on ongoing manga, rather than finished and respected staples, the answer I came up at the time was Witch Hat Atelier. So suffice to say I deeply respected this property going in. That did not, however, mean that the anime turning out well was a foregone conclusion. Having seen the work so far, though, I think the anime of Witch Hat can go the distance. Brought to us by essentially the same people behind Summertime Render and Komi Can’t Communicate (which I apparently haven’t reviewed), the visuals given for Witch Hat are absolutely stunning. They don’t simply “bring the manga to life”, they evoke even more detail and wonder. It looks and feels, at least in this small taste, like something you would see out of Makoto Shinkai or Hayao Miyazaki. When this PV becomes public, do yourself a favor and check it out.
The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to be Archenemies (Episodes 1-3)
This is an odd one. The first three episodes of this show (pitched as a romcom about a ranking lieutenant in the nebulous forces of evil falling for the magical girl he’s supposed to defeat) were screened… but each episode is only about half the length of the episodes in a normal show. This is probably due to the nature of the comedy which, being adapted from a 4-koma (4-panel comic, usually somewhere between a newspaper strip and manga page in density) rather than a more narrative manga (like the otherwise close Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle), is very much short-form. The majority of the scenes are the two leading characters having tea, and the Evil Lieutenant being intermittently stunned by how astoundingly cute his crush (not that he realizes he’s feeling that fuzzy and not-evil emotion called love) is, and stunned in a different way about the circumstances she has to endure.
The comedy in this is, I would say, just mean-spirited enough. Some jokes, like those perpetrated by the Lieutenant’s incomprehension of his own condition, or the fact that he’s served by generic evil minions that only vocalize screams of “EEEEE!” in various inflections (yet are subtitled to perfectly reasonable lines) are more surreal. Others, like how the magical girl’s white cat mascot critter is a hard-drinking, chain-smoking scumbag who forces her to work both way too many and increasingly skeevy part time jobs so he can embezzle the money (leaving her with none for food, not that she consistently remembers she needs to eat), have the edge of meanness to them that works really well because Ms. Magical Girl is weird enough to not understand how she’s being exploited and the Lieutenant doesn’t comprehend why he cares. The cat gets axed in episode 3 but it’s strongly implied he’ll be back in some form, so maybe that’s a running gag.
As for plot, there’s not a lot. Right at the end of the screened episodes we start to introduce another significant character (a fellow Lieutenant who will start “helping” our besotted lead) but only further viewing would tell whether that’s a one-episode gag, or the seeds of something more. On one hand, a 4-koma is not usually the format for telling a heavy story or even one with much focus, and the bite-sized episodes kind of lean into that. On the other hand, this one was selected to be animated, and gorgeously at that, so maybe there’s more to it.