An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

You Are What You Eat, and the Menu is Evil – Earth Maiden Arjuna Spoiler Review

If you’ve been around the blog a little, you might have an inkling of how I feel about message fiction.

Now, I’m no enemy of messages in fiction. Some of the true all-time greats in anime, as well as genre fiction in general have had, if not a dedicated message they were trying to get out, at least a distinctly message-like slant to their existences. These are pieces that know the best way to convey the message is to let the fiction shine, delivering a compelling story with interesting characters colored by the lens through which the world is seen in order to communicate on a deep level. In some cases you might not even realize you’re looking at message fiction until you find yourself introspecting on the topics of what you just watched or read.

But then you get the other and all too common sort of message fiction, that sees the fiction as the vehicle for the message, that treats the viewing experience as a school lecture, and the author is the “teacher” attempting to hammer some lesson home to students because it will be on the final exam. These can come in many forms from the obnoxiously preachy to the hopelessly saccharine to the “scare ’em straight” comical absolutism of hellfire preachers and those annoying D.A.R.E. rallies that most Americans my age had to sit through.

I don’t hate message fiction absolutely. But I do hate when the message decides to stretch the fiction on the rack until its limbs look like something Junji Ito would have night terrors of, ties the writhing and tormented fiction into knots to hold millstones of judgmental morality in place, rides the fiction and its millstones down a hill of broken Aesop summations like some stone-wheeled go-kart, and cheers at its first place finish over a field of inanimate straw men while the tortured fiction unmercifully expires beneath the weight of the message’s arrogant grandstanding. When message fiction is bad, it’s pretty much the worst, and it doesn’t matter what the message actually is.

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Give me a moment… – Kokkoku Spoiler Review

Not enough time for a review? ZA WARUDO!

… For those of you who don’t speak meme, we’re going to be talking about a show centered around the supernatural power of stopping time. As the title indicates, this one is Kokkoku, sometimes with a subtitle as Kokkoku: Moment by Moment.

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Somebody Give This Show A Hand – Hand Shakers Spoiler Review

One of the things I love about anime is that, despite having it’s own hellishly overused setups, the medium in general doesn’t seem to be afraid to turn out the occasional piece with an absolutely insane concept. Nothing is too specific or too stupid… and with creativity and effort, a lot of studios can make it work. We’ve seen shows where clothing is an evil alien plot, a show where teenagers body swap via kiss, a show where Earth is overrun by gribbly black monsters that can only be fought by incarnate musical scores, a show that somehow manages twelve episodes of a kidnapped princess trying to get better sleep, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

But just because way more crazy ideas do work than some folks would expect doesn’t mean that they all work; that creativity and effort are key; throwing some bland idiot into a fantasy universe with a modern smartphone adapted to the setting?  That didn’t pan out. Super-teenagers who power up by getting horny to fight lust-eating bug monsters?  About as awkward as it sounds and somehow even less amusing. Stuffing a tecnophobe’s brain into a weird black-box ultratech device, giving him super hacking powers? Worst. Anime. Ever. And I don’t think I can even summarize half the madness that went into Penguindrum, but suffice to say it didn’t stick the landing in my eyes.

What I’m getting at here is that Hand Shakers – a show that forces our lead pair to have mystical death battles while also forcing them to continuously hold hands – was not, I repeat not, dead on arrival. No, Hand Shakers was murdered. Let’s try to find the culprit, shall we?

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The One Only For… – Chobits Spoiler Review

Boy meets girl. Man meets machine. Sixteen years before Beatless there was another show about a boy pretty much stumbling across a robot girl, falling in love with her, and discovering that even among robots she’s something special. That show is Chobits, and it’s based on a manga by CLAMP, a group with several notorious winners including (that I’ve reviewed) Cardcaptor Sakura and Angelic Layer.

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