If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, call a horse a horse.

The beauty of a human-emotion based story is that it’s context-irrelevant. Mizuhito Akiyama, the writer of the light novel Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu (Iriya’s Sky, Summer of the UFOs) managed to create a tale of intense pathos and understated love can live inside a saga of manipulation, secrecy, and conspiracy.

I spent a bit of time early on worrying about how Iriya is not a sci-fi story: science (speculative) fiction generally means creating some sort of technology or alien-based situation — plausible or not — and speculating what might happen to humanity in that situation. Iriya, however, follows the pattern of moe-based bishoujo series and eroge: create a cute girl with a terrible backstory and portray the simple inevitability of what will happen. In this case, rather than some vague but potentially girl-killing disease, it’s a potentially girl-killing war between aliens and earth. Or is it?

It’s appropriate then, with this downward path to tragedy, that Toei’s OVA adaptation of the light novels was helmed by Naoyuki Itou, the director of their Kanon adaptation. The sickening sense of the inevitable that Iriya no Sora pushes in its second half is pretty similar to the Makoto arc of Kanon (though I didn’t see that adapation — I’m going by the Kyoto ’06 version).

But it’s pointless to bemoan what something isn’t. Regardless of your opinion of the bishoujo meta-genre and whether it has any place in your precious science fiction fandom, the OVA has its own merits and faults. Aaaaaand… the faults are many.

For one, Toei is not who you look to for balls-out great animation. Their heyday is long past, and even footage of Kenshiro was recycled quite a bit. It’s not awful, not by a longshot, but the CG is uninspired and character designs just aren’t that appealing. Newer guys like Kyoto and SHAFT can make a prettier heroine and a less irritating-looking male lead these days, and Toei’s generic shocks of hair in the front just aren’t doing it anymore.

The bigger problems, which probably stem from the short length of the OVA, are the baffling pacing and forced situations. The events of episode 5 are a bit of an enigma, not so much in the “what?” department, but the “why?” one. If you want to be an apologist, you can just let it be — the story is simple and you probably won’t have an issue following it. But if you really expect events to flow naturally, you’ll feel pretty jarred by a sudden change of heart that just as inexplicably changes right back. Ultimately, these events are water under the bridge in the overarching plot, but taking up a whole 6th of the series with badly conceived plot development makes for a bad ratio.

The good stuff is a little more sparse, and mostly comes from the strength of the original story. It’s nothing new (did I mention Makoto, or maybe inevitability?) but it tugs at the heartstrings at just the right times, and the characters have just enough guts to elevate them above the noncommittal Key-types. Punching, slicing out tracking implants from your own neck with a box cutter, even killing are all possible in Iriya’s world of love conquering all.

In the end, tragedy is inevitable, but it’s not quite that manipulative kind of tragedy from the “cry game” VNs. It’s still rich in moe, an attribute which in my mind will keep this from being completely sci-fi. And with all that pathos and cute-girl factor, I wish the character design was a little more appealing. But overall, you could do a lot worse than Irya No Sora, considering its small time investment and fairly consistent level of enjoyability.

Yesterday I mentioned one of the going theories about Bakemonogatari: that either in Nisoisin’s original story or in the mind of Wackiyuki Shinbo, protagonist Ararararararagi became a parody and an indictment of the spineless nice-guy semi-lolicon tendencies of the viewer. It’s potent stuff; after all, we love to be talked to directly, don’t we? And most movies, books, and anime would just as soon preach at you or humor your worst qualities, so it’s almost refreshing to be sneakily made fun of.

But Bakemonogatari isn’t the first time people have thought about this. IKnight, despite claiming to reach no definite conclusion, ruined pretty much anyone’s ability to write about Gundam 0080: War In The Pocket with his breakdown of the typical “war sucks” standard that most Gundam (supposedly) carries. But despite the excellent case he makes that it’s not always as simple as that, what little Gundam I’ve seen and enjoyed is at its best when it’s making that point. War does suck, especially in a world where even the basic movement of the military devices creates huge collateral damage. And while 0080’s Al might have managed to float through a lot of serious events without grasping the full weight of that, one moment stopped him cold, and probably did the same for you.

I’m talking of course about the harrowing scene after Bernie and Chris’s battle, in which Al finally realizes who’s inside that mean old Feddie mobile suit — and what she’s done to his friend. Al’s temporary catatonia paired nicely with my own shock at the brutality of execution of that scene. It was coming since the moment Chris first entered the Gundam, but I just didn’t expect it to be so intense when it happened.

You can say what you want about war-machine fanatics making the Gundam “war sucks” experience a big ourobouros of irony, and you’d be right. But in moments like this, it’s still the king of hammering home its grim message.

That’s the name of the 14th episode of Planetes and it means what it says in more than one way, some of which will spoil you if you haven’t seen this marvelous show, so don’t read on if that’s the case.

The first half of Planetes is basically a slice of life of orbital garbage collectors, set in a marvelously intricate sci-fi near future. There’s workplace drama, issues of ambition and social status, and even some office romance. It’s actually the culmination of that workplace fraternizing that provides the turning point. Hachimaki’s forced to reexamine his priorities in light of his relationship with Tanabe and his opportunity to make it to Jupiter. Not only that, the tone of the show starts changing dramatically from that point.

Really, the sad truth is that it never got any better for Tanabe and Hachimaki than their first kiss. It was all downhill from there.

Ghostlightning became briefly obsessed with the concept of what happens after the climactic hookup, and who can blame him — anime so often gives us a “chase is better than the catch” feeling by focusing 13-50 (or more) episodes on getting to the culmination of a schoolkid’s crush and showing us nothing of what happens after. Of course, that implies that everything is idyllic and wonderful, and that there’s no possible drama in two people who admit that they’re in love with one another. How incredibly unlike real life that is.

In the end, Hachimaki righted his wrongs and realized that his dreams could coexist with the more mundane aspects of his life (as long as they were willing to wait seven years…), and he tied it up in a really romantic and cute kinda way. But in the context of both the series and anime as a whole, episode 14’s “turning point” was a hard moment to top.

What was it Def Leppard said? It’s better to burn out than to fade away, right? I suppose the going theory would be that going down in flames makes for a much better story. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, then, is defying conventional heavy metal wisdom. Because although it takes place at the end of the world, this is not the end from some nuclear disaster or a zombie apocalypse movie. In fact, who knows exactly what happened? I suppose you could guess that global warming finally got the best of us, the seas rose, and the bulk of the earth drowned, leaving a few survivors in a simple life on high ground.

It’s that simplicity that makes YKK what it is. The easy-breezy pace of life, the high technology of humanlike robots mingling with old scooters and street markets, the weird plants and creatures that resemble man-made items of yore… it’s fundamentally weird, but only when you step back and look at it as such.

What’s pervasive in your mind throughout YKK is an almost-overwhelming sense of melancholy, of sad nostalgia. The earth itself seems to long for the glory days of humanity, even as it’s in the last phase of reclaiming itself from them. As 2DT mentions, it seems very Japanese to quietly accept the end of the world like this; after all, we don’t see what anyone’s doing elsewhere on earth, but something in YKK does give the impression that this is… just how it is. After all, what can you do? Nothing. It’s over. This is the twilight of humanity, and I only hope that we go with such grace and poise.

2009 was a big year for anime for one solid reason: Haruhi returned. Long baited, teased, and ridiculed, fans of the 2000s’ biggest series were finally rewarded for their patience. Turns out, they weren’t rewarded all that well, but at least we got the wonderfully entertaining Haruhi-chan and Nyoron Churuya-san.

Of the things that made the return noteworthy — drops in animation quality, the near-punching of the titular (anti-)heroine, or the introduction of the book series’ central time-travel themes — one stands above: Endless Eight. Is it another troll on the fans? They certainly have reason to think that way after their treatment by Vengeful God Kadokawa. Is it a failed attempt to be clever? Who knows. It’s almost avant-garde when you think about it. No one’s ever done anything like it. But in the end, I think it was brilliant. Not just the fact that it was done, but in its execution.

See, by the close of Endless Eight (which did, in fact have an end, and that’s what makes it a ripoff), viewers were micro-focused on changes in outfits, slight variations on the dialog, and Kyon’s minute advances. So when the brain-snapping end finally came, the force of your fist in the air was enough to raise you out of your seat.

Was it, in combination with the “Sighs of Haruhi Suzumiya” story, enough to gain back the goodwill lost during the most experimental anime arc of the century? Doesn’t seem that way. Maybe the movie version of Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, one of the most well-liked stories, will fix that. Hard to say. But love Endless Eight or hate it, at least it gave us this moment.

The issue with cutting a small day-in-the-life “slice” from the fictional existences of characters is that there is nothing else inherent to the genre that makes it potentially interesting to watch. If someone sliced your life, chances are the audience would slice their wrists from boredom (sex scenes notwithstanding).

But that’s not to say “slice of life” has to be boring. It’s just that you have to rely on “life” itself to be interesting rather than contrived external circumstances.

What if your life was an exciting one? What if you were… I dunno, say, an astronaut? That might help. What if said life involved great danger, wonderful science, and scads of Engrish passed back and forth across crackly radios? Sounds, maybe… too exciting for a slice of life. Then ratchet it back down: you’re a garbage collector, and it’s all in a day’s work.

The first half of Goro Taniguchi’s (Code Geass, S-CRY-Ed) wonderful Planetes plays very much as slice of life, and I’m not saying that because I find that it does nothing else particularly well. In fact, it’s got exciting close shaves, satisfying romance, more than a few laughs, and sci-fi with a capital Science. But none feel out of place in the lives of the characters. When picking up space garbage — as Ai, Hachimaki, Fee, and the gang do — you might have to ram a satellite while in a fit of nicotine withdrawal. You might see people die. You might learn something new about your friends. And you might fall in love. That’s life.

What I’m talking about really only applies to the first half of the series, because I can’t keep calling an anime “slice of life” when it develops an over-arching plot structure with big character development, goals and traditional narrative conflict. Heaviness sets in somewhere around episode 17 or 18, but until that point Taniguchi (along with original mangaka Makoto Yukimura) has already cut a tasty slice that he uses to make us more personally invested in the later events.

And why does it work, even with spacemen?

We all live, uh… lives. Each boring day, each hour spent at a desk at work, each tiny little drama that doesn’t alter the fate of the world is a slice in our lives. And it’s pretty neat to see people in this near-future that’s neither dystopian nor utopian, just our potential future, going through those same slices. There’s no war, supernatural experience, or other crazy thing to make life stop or change drastically. Just regular people holding down a job and doing their best (it is Japanese after all). Thanks to some incredibly well-written/well-acted characters and a tendency to never portray anything as overly fantastic or glamorous, we can find the common points between their slices and ours.

Did I go anywhere with this? Short version, I really dig Planetes a lot. I’m not done though, so please no spoilers for me. I’m sure I’ll do another post when it’s over.

Darker Than Black

However, there is Darker than Black, and my illness conveniently laid me up in bed to finish the original series. Have to say, it was, uh, “better than it should be.” Light chuckle here because, putting the ridiculousness of that statement aside, it was just about as good as it should be. Tensai Okamura and Bones created something that is, in a way, very typically Bones — think RahXephon,  Eureka Seven and its red-headed stepsister Xam’d — in the way that the story was put together. The method: Create a compelling but mysterious world, and don’t reveal too much about its nature until near the climax. In some ways, it’s a cheap way of keeping the viewer hooked, but I can’t say I don’t prefer it to A Certain Expositional Infodump that a large amount of anime is guilty of to some degree.

It’s not typically Bones in that its characters are distant, sort of unknowable. The warmth you can feel in Xamdou’s most aloof character Nakiami, for example, is far stronger than what I got from DtB’s Hei or even the human Misaki. I suppose part of it comes from the fact that Contractors aren’t supposed to feel emotion (though Hei’s case is a little more complicated). This makes them distant from anyone, so the viewer should be no different. All in all, I liked the story, I liked the action, I liked almost all of the characters, and the “cool” factor was in place. I’m skeptical of the new season, with its lack of Yoko Kanno, but I enjoyed the first enough to make this a no-brainer.

Cowboy Bebop

Speaking of Yoko Kanno and Fonz Factor, I also spent some time re-watching Cowboy Bebop. It’s been a lot of years since I saw it, and my subsequent re-education in anime allowed me to view it with new eyes — which is what second and third viewings are all about. It hasn’t diminished in my eyes; if anything I have even more respect, plus I watched it in Japanese for the first time and was delighted to hear Coach Emperor Wakamoto as Vicious. I’m not going to go on about Cowboy Bebop too much, you could fill a library with what’s already been said. It did get me thinking about something Zaitcev mused a while back about Honey & Clover: “What is particularly ‘anime’ about this anime?” In the case of H&C, I disagree, there’s plenty there to keep it in the realm, but with Bebop, I’m less certain.

For one, romantic drama is kept to a minimum. A mixed-gender spaceship in most anime, at the least, would create some sexual tension or maybe a Naked Misunderstanding or two. But for the crew of the Bebop, romance is a thing that happened in the past. Each of the three majors gets a “past coming back to haunt them” episode chronicling their turbulent experience with the opposite sex, most notably Spike. The present is a time for work — dangerous work with no room for such distractions. There’s only one “baka” from Faye that really carries the typical meaning, and it’s very late in the series.

Secondly… everything else. Really. Why break that out into bullets? Cowboy Bebop skips over almost everything. Teenage characters: One, briefly. Something to protect: Sorry, not really, unless you count cash. Tsunderes, seifukus, people crying a lot, techno-babble, mecha, evocation of moe, forget them all.

What it does have, of course, is an obsession with music and an amazing soundtrack to match. Both the anime and its Kanno music seem overflowing with ideas and hooks, a feeling that’s rare in something as polished and tightly executed as this. But that’s another tired subject when it comes to Bebop. If the series has a significant fault, it’s that we’re asked to take the story’s word on a great deal of things that happened in the past, rather than made to feel their significance. And that can lessen the impact of the otherwise astounding end.

At any rate, if for some bizarre reason you’ve never seen it, you’re missing out on one great example of what happens when some talented people get together and treat anime as a medium rather than a genre.

Planetes

I’ve watched 4 episodes of Goro Taniguchi’s space-junk saga so far, and the jury’s still out, but it’s an interesting take on near-ish future Sci-Fi. I wouldn’t exactly call it “hard” SF but the notion of space garbage getting in the way of progress is a realistic-sounding one anyway, and a lot of attention is given to the technological details and the mechanics of zero-G. A future where astronauts are skilled but un-amazing laborers and the whole of space is mired in bureaucracy, politics, and nepotism is a depressing future, but of course our idealistic naïve lead shoujo is here to brighten the picture.

Oddly, I see parallels to a more recent series, Production IG’s Library War: Cute, short-haired underachiever joins an exotic but ultimately unglamorous job that isn’t quite what she thought it would be, is beset by a tsun-tsun coworker, and tries to foist her wide-eyed idealism onto the world. I’m sure the comparison will pretty much end there, but it’s the kind of story that’s not hard to get behind, even if Ai can be a little shrill at time.

That about covers my recent viewing, aside from Utena and the various things I occasionally watch but will never finish, like Harlock and Legend of the Galactic Large Amount of Episodes. You should expect to see more on that soon as well. As of Fall ‘09 week 2, do you agree with my “alternative” choices or is there anything this season I’m missing?

Neo-Venezia

Cropped. Click for full size on pixiv.

It probably won’t surprise any Aria viewer that this one would go at the top of the list. Yes, there are cute gondoliers and suteki~ oneesamas like Alicia, but the lead character of Aria is not the titular cat, but Aqua — and its fake Italian city. Built by human hands, and mostly as a tourist destination, but not to be a gaudy Vegas/Cancun/Dubai statement of “look what we can do” or a faux-experience Disneyland. Instead, Neo-Venezia is an authentic locale born from the dedication of a few intrepid souls to recreating a simpler time and place. It’s the best kind of future, really: Technology ensures that all of the wonderful baked goods and none of the diseases of the past live on in a pleasant and welcoming place that neither gets you too dirty nor reeks of touristy “plastic”-ness.

Glie

If any anime gives off a similar vibe to Aria, it’s Haibane Renmei. I don’t mean in the sense of stories, characters, or even mood (Haibane actually has a story, which doesn’t make it superior to Aria necessarily, but different for sure). It’s that indescribable something special that makes you feel like you’re the only person who’s ever watched this, regardless of how many other people you know who find it wonderful. And like Aqua, Glie is a place that affects the story as strongly as any of its residents. Unlike Aqua, it has a complex set of rules and physics that separate it from the rest of the universe — at least, people assume that, but seeing as how they can’t freaking leave, it’s hard to prove anything about the outside world. Glie provides a wonderful mirror to the characters’ minds. Rakka loves it at first, but mistrusts its intentions more and more as she comes to empathize with Reki, who finds the town to be a comfortable cage from which she can’t escape.

Mayan

Leave it to Kawamori to name his island ode to vanishing culture and environment so plainly after a nearly-decimated American culture. Obvious message is obvious. Mayan serves two main purposes: it inspires a desire in Shin, Roy, and the viewer to protect it (wait… geographical moe?), and it provides a unique perspective on the story of the final world war on Earth. So it’s not the most well-developed location, but it does what it does well. In Macross Zero’s pre-SDF timeline, the world has yet to unite behind the giant ship to fight the Zentraedi, and is instead fighting itself. Honestly, it’s probably a more compelling story, and that’s largely because it’s told from the perspective of the Mayan Islanders — the collateral damage who can understand neither the motivations nor the sophisticated weapons of the mainlanders. The low-tech, spiritual world that they inhabit lends a mysterious new meaning to the Protoculture for fans of Macross, and their mythology does more to explain exactly what the Protoculture is (and means) than Exedol’s visit to the edge of the universe in Macross 7.

There are more, many more…

Even a completely real place (like Tokyo) can be an effective focus of a story, especially if, like other fictional characters, it’s put in a unique situation or circumstance (a massive earthquake). The question of place is often what elevates an otherwise ho-hum anime beyond average, whether it’s a school life or post-apocalypse setting. So what are your favorite anime places? Is there anywhere that’s crucial to a plot, fascinating to think about, or just well-drawn enough that it catches your brain as much as the characters and story? I, for one, would like to watch it, so I can take another vacation without having to get the days off work.

At least, that’s what happened in the animated world.

In the third dimension, something somewhat less earth-shattering happened: I was born.

Fast forward thirty years. Gundam celebrates its anniversary with a new series announcement, international Tomino appearances, and of course a giant life-size Gundam in Tokyo, while my birthday goes by without so much as an whining post.

I have, however, set out to celebrate my thirtieth year in a truly Gundam-tastic way by finally starting my journey into the grandaddy real robot franchise. I am beginning, appropriately, with the 0079 movies.

Fifty episodes for the series is a bit of a stretch for me these days, and besides — mechafetish and ghostlightning pointed me to the movies with their helpful Gateway Gundam Chooser®.

I’m partially through the second movie, but rather than keep waiting to post, I thought I’d get out my impressions of the first.

War Sucks

The big thing that sticks out in my mind is the grim, unending portrait of war: Even in the spacefaring future, war is a bleak proposition that kills families, keeps you from sleep, and conscripts unwilling civilians by virtue of the the simple fact that everyone else is fucking dead.

Kawamori, as big a hippie as he is, has always been just goofy enough in Macross’s execution that he couldn’t dream of getting his anti-war message across as effectively as Tomino (I’m thinking of Super Dimension Fortress’s portrait of the scorched earth and Macross Zero’s valkyrie attack on Mayan island). Then again, that’s likely the intent — it’s understandable that he’d want to make something of an antidote to Gundam’s incessant darkness.

The power behind Gundam’s “war is hell” message is in how it tests of your endurance. Like Amuro, you’re never given a break from White Base’s endless assault. It is a tiring, interminable thing. That’s not to say it’s repetitious, like a monster-of-the-week thing. The monotony of the fight actually adds to the intensity of viewing.

Sound effects (of war sucking)

Have you ever paid attention to the sound effects in Gundam?

The grinding and creaking of metal on metal, the clink of spent shells falling to the ground, the endless sounds of gunfire and cannon explosions: this too contributes to the grimness of the viewer’s insertion into the middle of a war. Sound effects are an aspect of anime that’s often pushed aside in favor of the more “glamorous” parts of audio, like voice acting or background score. But here, the reality of the sounds (exact opposite would be Macross 7’s awful sound effects which were obviously created on a single synthesizer by a drunken panda, or any anime that uses energy weapons instead of rattling bullets) immerses you further, and helps put the “real” in “real robot.”

Sophistication (with caveats)

Those are only two of Gundam’s traits that, along with superior script, animation, and acting, lead to its status as a truly sophisticated anime. Take a step back: what does sci-fi anime mean pre-Gundam? It means super robots and Leiji Matusumoto. I love both of these, but at their heart they are simple boyish fantasies of running around with pirates or giant robots and saving the world. Sunrise’s animation (which still tends to rise above most others) brings Tomino’s story to life in a way that Yamato and Harlock couldn’t have dreamed of, and when you plop the hard-ass script in there, you have a new generation of animation.

That said, it still feels transitional in a lot of ways, and the biggest is Char. The Red Comet, brilliant as he is in his Don Johnson leisure suit and shades, is basically a super villain, and as a result he undermines the “realities of war” aspect. He’s less one-dimensional than say, Dr. Hell or the Burning Legion of Matsumoto’s Misogyny, but he remains a single Cobra Commander-like target when a more appropriate message would be that there is no head to the beast you fight in a war.

Scope of influence

Well, duh. I knew. To say Gundam is influential is probably the understatement of thirty years. But to really see it in action — the real robots, the unwilling mecha pilot, the works — is to know where the things you love came from.

SLAP

I don’t think there’s much I need to say about Gundam’s face-slap fetish, either. It’s not just the legendary Brightslap. It starts with Amuro backhanding Fraw Bow and doesn’t stop until war suddenly becomes pleasant.

Here’s a further visual aid (courtesy ghostlightning).

Moving on

Complaints aside, the first movie was a riveting watch, and I’ve been more than pleased that I don’t have to watch it as a “well, that’s cool for its time” academic exercise. It’s well-animated (not exactly Do You Remember Love?, but what is?) and sufficiently exciting to watch on its own merits nowadays. I’m stoked to continue on with these movies, and from there, who knows?

It really has everything you need from an anime:  Mecha, angst, a girl in a China dress, exploding heads, amnesia, revenge, Masumune-Shirowism, an Itano circus… Moe.

Don't say it... Don't say it...

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck

Did you ever hear the phrase “greater than the sum of its parts?” Probably have.

How about “lesser than the sum of its parts?”

There you go.

That about sums up Baldr Force EXE, a 2007 4-episode OVA by Satelight (no Kawamori connection here). It’s a somewhat generic story about a future where people spend most of their time living inside the virtual internet world of the Wired while somehow mysteriously not degenerating into fat slobs in the real world (thus the Shirow-ism). Hackers and security professionals drive around virtual mechas called Simulacrum, and for some reason dying in the Wired kills you in the real world. Not sure what the upside is.

Hacker Tohru is recruited by the other side, as will occasionally happen to hackers. He accepts the job to exact revenge for his slain bro, but of course everything isn’t quite what it seems.

The animation is typical of Satelight (Noein, Macross Zero and Frontier): well executed and computer assisted, but with massive failures of anatomy and off-model characters occasionally presenting themselves. The exploding heads, mecha battles, and one motorcycle chase are easily the highlights here.

The characters are totally forgettable, and the story mostly so, but while you’re watching it’s good fun. Somewhat 90s-esque, (also somewhat Gonzo-like, but the two go hand in hand), overall not a bad way to spend about 80 minutes.

OH YEAH — it does have one horrible plot device in it, though.

horrible.

11 virtual rapes a second. Anyway, go check it out, the internet security experts over at Funimation have it up for free on YouTube shows.