An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

What if God Were a Bratty Teenage Girl? – The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Seasons 1 & 2) Spoiler Review

(In the voice of Rod Serling) “Picture of a boy, Kyon by name, starting his first day of High School and looking forward to an uneventful and unremarkable academic career. But this young man is about to make a very particular acquaintance: Haruhi Suzumiya isn’t interested in the mundane goings-on of an average high school but rather in the strange and fantastical. Aliens, Espers, and Future Men are her bread and butter. Impossible things? Perhaps. But as Kyon is about to find out, what Haruhi wants, Haruhi gets. Kyon’s school life is going to become very eventful and remarkable indeed, as he’s all set to join a new club with its meeting room… in the Twilight Zone.”

Ah, yes, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya – a colorful comedy with a premise that is, in fact, like something right out of a classic Twilight Zone episode. Somehow, it’s simultaneously one of the most unique shows I’ve seen and also one of the most cliched. That alone is an accomplishment, but accomplishments don’t always mean something good. Let’s take a look.

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Jerk Comedy and Isekai Redeem Each Other – KonoSuba (Seasons 1 & 2) Spoiler Review

I’ve got trouble with “Jerk” Comedy. That is, comedy predicated on all the main characters being not just crazy or foolish but outright terrible people. A jerk can be funny used in the right way at the right time, but they often don’t hold up as main characters or whole casts.

I’ve also got trouble with Isekai. I used to think that, as a genre, it was perhaps overly maligned; the basic conceit of travel from the mundane world to one of fantastical remoteness is the backbone of countless works of literature, many of which (like “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Chronicles of Narnia”) are considered classics. That was before I realized just how prolific the genre really is in anime, just how reprocessed and regurgitated its tropes are, and just how frustrating it is when you find yourself trapped between the failure state in which the world revolves utterly around the main character’s quest and the one in which you would much rather have a native character who was germane to the setting instead. There is such a thing as good Isekai, but Sturgeon’s Law really does apply.

So why do I enjoy KonoSuba so darn much?

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Ghost Stories Are What You Make Of Them – Dusk Maiden of Amnesia Spoiler Review

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a sweet, funny romance between Niiya Teiichi and Yuuko Kanoe, complicated by the fact that the latter just happens to be a ghost. Wait, that’s not it…

What I meant to say is that Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a character-driven mystery, following the ghost girl Yuuko-san as she and the members of the Paranormal Investigation Club attempt to discover the truth behind her death. Hm, that’s not quite right either…

The truth is that Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a dark and twisted, heavily psychological ghost story, exploring both the past and present of the haunting of a certain school, delving into sordid tales and dangerous manifestations of supernatural vengeance. Er, you know the drill by now…

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is all those things, held together by some brilliant avant-garde cinematography, a beautiful palette of fall colors and deep shadows, and a wealth of engaging characters in what would normally be considered a very small cast.

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Mafia is Not a Good Game to LARP – “Another” Spoiler Review

Another is a slow-burn Mystery/Horror type of show. It’s somewhat similar to the Final Destination series (at least as far as I know the series, which is getting the premise and having seen one film out of it) in that the horror comes not from any sort of monster or serial killer, but rather from fate conspiring to cause deaths. Where it meets success or failure is the fact that once the horror really turns on, it goes all the way with the gore. On one hand, Another does have its fundamentals down better than some other shows I could name. On the other hand, the over-the-top Rube Goldberg demises could easily come across as unintentional comedy. Where on the spectrum does Another fall?

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Psychics, Robots, and Ninjas, oh my! – Blackfox Spoiler Review

Let’s get this out of the way: Blackfox is a movie, not a series, and I’ll be analyzing it as its own thing. The basic premise involves a girl (young woman? Coming-of-age narratives can make that hard to place) who is the heir of a ninja clan in the vaguely cyberpunk-lite techno future on a mission to avenge the murder of her family with the help of a trio of artificially intelligent animal robots her dad made. Opposing her are a mad scientist who was her father’s rival and the mad scientist’s daughter who has powerful psychokinetic abilities.

I’ll be honest, when I first heard the basis of the plot, I was interested not because it necessarily sounded like it would be good (though it didn’t sound bad), but because in some ways it didn’t even sound real. If you asked someone who had only a tangential understanding of anime – the sort gained by pop-culture osmosis in geeky or speculative fiction circles and not actual experience – to make up an anime plot synopsis, I think there’s a good chance they’d come up with something pretty close to the pitch for Blackfox: ninjas, psychic powers, robots, and revenge. Blackfox, however, isn’t something just made up off the cuff; it’s very much real. The question is, is it any good?

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For My Next Trick, The Inverting Frown! – Magical Sempai Spoiler Review

Magical Sempai (and that is the romanization they go with. I’ll try to stick to it.) is a mildly ecchi comedy about high school students populating a club dedicated to stage magic. The show mostly follows the point of view of Assistant (he doesn’t get a name) as he deals with Sempai (she doesn’t get a name either) and her attempts to put on various magic tricks despite her many failings. These failures are always embarrassing in some manner, often involve a self-inflicted wardrobe malfunction, and I’d be lying if I said they weren’t at least a little bit funny some of the time.

The center of pretty much all the show’s comedy is Sempai. She’s the only member of the Magic Club at the start of the show and… they say she has crippling stage fright, but it’s more often treated just like she has crippling incompetence since she has no problems getting up in front of audiences, whether just Assistant or actual crowds, to fail time and time again. Whatever the cause, the effect is that Sempai screws up every trick she attempts, usually in an overwhelmingly pathetic manner. For instance, she can attempt a rope escape only to end up more securely hog tied than she started out, throw the coin she wants to make disappear (at which point she falls over herself trying to get it back), forget her marked envelopes for a ‘mind reading’ trick, and the rest of the cast quickly learns to not lend her any money for bill cuts. When it comes to putting on a really wonderful magic show, Shiny Chariot she ain’t.

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A Calm Little Slice of Magic – Flying Witch “Spoiler” Review

Let me get the spoiler out of the way first: there is nothing that happens in this show that could really be considered a spoiler.

Flying Witch is, in a way, Slice of Life in its purest genre form. There isn’t really a plot, or a sense of progress, or even much of an overarching theme the way some shows that get tagged ‘Slice of Life’ have some other genre. And when it comes to storytelling genres, rather than world genres (of which “urban fantasy” applies here), I don’t think any others really apply to Flying Witch. I’ve heard this sort of Slice of Life referred to as ‘Slice of Nothing’ and I think that’s accurate, with a couple of caveats. First of all, it’s not a strict and absolute nothing. The characters, at least, do grow over the episodes, and that’s fine. Second, it should be stressed that even if the term sounds somewhat negative, there’s really nothing wrong with it.

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Summoning Rituals Make Poor(?) Matchmakers – Familiar of Zero Spoiler Review

Familiar of Zero is an action-comedy about a teenage boy, Saito, who is summoned as the familiar of a young mage girl from another world, Louise.

Louise is voiced by Rie Kugimiya. If you don’t know who that is, that’s fine; I myself am not usually one to follow actors or voice actors; I’d rather see/hear the character. She is, however, very prolific and very talented. I first heard her work (though I didn’t know there was any significance to it at the time) as Alphonse Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist, but she is perhaps best known for her Tsundere voice roles. And more than that, her short, flat-chested, loud-mouthed Tsunderes with firecracker tempers. Louise is exactly one of those roles. That is, in fact, how and why I found this show. I liked Shana (Shakugan no Shana) and Taiga Aisaka (Toradora!) and was in the mood for another enjoyable character in the same vein.

What I got was Familiar of Zero. What does that mean? Allow me to explain.

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Surveying the Damage One Character can do to a Show – Kaze no Stigma Spoiler Review

Kaze no Stigma is a show that started out with a lot of potential, but squandered it by making some very basic mistakes. The setup involves a society of magic users that exist secretly in what is essentially our regular mundane world – the backbone of at least a sizeable subset of the broad genre of “Urban Fantasy” that combines magic and monsters with the trappings of the mundane world. Good so far. Our main character is Kazuma, the scion of a house of fire magic wielders who was kicked out of his family because he was, himself, incapable… and who returns with a new mastery of a different element, Air. That’s a pretty good setup for a character. The show puts him in a position to help his former family in their time of need, but of course he should have some conflicted opinions about that, considering that he was bitterly mistreated. A good treatment would let us learn more about the character through his struggles, understanding what happened to him in the interval to lead him to this new power and how his trials shaped him and will continue to shape him going forward.

Kaze no Stigma… does not deliver a good treatment of this material. There’s more to worry about outside of Kazuma, but I’m going start with him because his problems are the most numerous and varied and his waste of potential the most striking.

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