They did that by taking a very roundabout approach. No one expected a school-life story, completely separate from the abstract checkerboard world of huke’s imagination, with only a tangential (or at least only metaphorical) relationship to it. And with a sub-60-minute runtime, as a bonus packaged with a toy, they didn’t have to do more than that. Intrigue the folks, whet the whistle, stay true to the atmosphere.

The problem with mysterious and intriguing things is that the more we think about them, and the more we explore them, the less mysterious they’re going to be. That’s what mystery is: the unknown. Duh. So what happens when you take that roundabout approach and try to expand it into an eight-episode TV anime? You’re probably going to destroy some of what makes your source material appealing.

As Yoji Enokido could probably tell you, keeping a healthy amount of content relatively unexplored will make the viewer fill in the gaps, and often with a great deal more profundity than the writer could dream up himself. The OVA wasn’t exactly masterful at that, but it was certainly capable. Mari “In the future, every anime will be written by me” Okada has her work cut out for her in somehow expanding that into a watchable plot while maintaining some form of atmosphere.

Already there’s an apparent change in philosophy: Mato and Yomi’s huke-world battle scenes were only marginally connected, and mostly in feeling, to their real-world scenarios. Here in the TV series, we’ve already seen a great deal of correlation in the titular character’s one primary scene. Kagari and her macaroons make an appearance, and her steamrolling attack parallels the real world in both its surprise (tell me you didn’t jump at that scene!) and its helpless, defeated feeling.

So what we’ve seen so far at this early point is a more literal approach to the huke-world vs. real-world parallel. Rather than a voiceless enemy whose motives are probably based in a discomfort over affectionate feelings (the OVA Yomi) it appears that we have someone who’s been made a prisoner of another character, perhaps even forced to fight Mato (the TV Yomi). There also appears to be an effort to wedge more characters into the story, and with them some corresponding colors, which I find a little silly. But probably infinitely more sustainable.

You get a plus and a minus from the sustainability. On the upside, any mundane events and people in the real world — which, let’s face it, are not entirely mundane, just look at Kagari — are able to be translated into dramatically surreal battle scenes in the huke-world. That lets the plot keep going for a while. Even the scenery seems to be a part of this, and I look forward to those intriguing connections. The downside is the death of all those little unexplored gaps in our imagination.

And with a franchise like Black Rock Shooter, I think that isn’t something to just discount. Like Touhou, a more complete world about which I know pretty much nothing, the gaps allow fan-generated interpretation and inspiration, which will disappear and leave BRS as a mundane and standard anime franchise. So… I guess this shit better be good.

Bonus: lol butts

Mirai Nikki.

God, it’s dumb. It really is. A little bit of everything we once thought anime was, with a little bit of Death Note/Geass style human chess, and a little bit of 21st century cuteness. It all adds up to something that consistently insults your intelligence but manages to rope you back in with a nice “OH NO SHE DI’INT!!” kind of fun.

Key appeal: Murder Moe

Guilty Crown.

Still maligned, I think it’s going to drop off a lot more people’s radars as the new season rolls along, which is sad for my Sea Slugs blogging but whatever — I’m still enjoying this thing. Say what you will about Shu (somewhat more likable than a lot of people give him credit for, and infinitely better-written), or about the truck-sized logic holes (which are nothing compared to some of Mirai Nikki’s), but it’s never a snoozefest and it always looks good.

Key appeal: Battle outfits

Nisemonogatari.

Nisioisin, Captain Cleverpants of the Clever Brigade, writes up some clever dialog and has two “characters” at a time speak it to each other while they lean against metaphorical settings; meanwhile, Wackiyuki Shinbo eats it up because everything can be simultaneously symbolic, surreal, and cheaply animated. Well, maybe there’s a little more money to throw around here. Certainly all the characters are loaded, did you see Ararararagi’s house? This is otakubait of the highest caliber, and of course it works. There are a couple panty shots and a lot of talk about panty shots, and some dialog that’s actually so meta it involves the gang making fun of themselves for participating in the act of meta comedy. Breaking the 5th wall, if you will. Some will find that deliciously sharp and witty, but if it’s just a little too painfully clever for you, I wouldn’t blame you. Production values are good so far; I interpret that as either “Bakemonogatari and Madoka made us enough money to do this right” or “expect a lot of black screens by episode 11.”

Key appeal: Word Pong
Squick factor: potentially high

Poyopoyo.

Eventually if people yell about something enough, and that thing is only 3 minutes long, you’ll watch it. And it was cute, I suppose. It also has Kenshiro. The titular cat is completely spherical, which makes it the ideal shape for lots of tasks that can’t be accomplished using conventional cats, but it remains to be seen whether that will elevate Poyopoyo beyond the usual (very low) level of usefulness you see from cats.

Key appeal: Uniform geometry

Recorder and Randsell.

Another short one, I expected to hate it based on the silly premise, but rather than trying to eke some kind of story or otakubait fetish out of this one, it’s purely a contrivance set up to make a joke. And you know what? I laughed. Pacing and joke-timing was solid, and it ended at just the right time. Second episode? Well, it already tried for something a little more heartwarming. Would prefer some more decent jokes first.

Key appeal: Child molester jokes, ha ha!
Squick factor: legal pedophilia 

Another.

I see a lot of complaints that the first episode broadcasted its intended spooky factor far too strongly, but until I start seeing the quick cuts, soundtrack stabs, and gratuitous zooms on dilating eyes (yes I know there was one) that are the hallmarks of anime’s least-properly-executed genre, I’m going to hang for a while. I’ve watched a lot of horror, I’ve worked on horror films, I’ve seen a zillion crappy midnight shows, and the side effects are contradictory: I know something about what constitutes good and bad horror, and I like shitty horror anyway. At any rate, it’s very good-looking, as with most PA Works productions, but of course that hasn’t saved them all (insert your own reference here because everyone hates a different PA Works series). Someone proposed on Sea Slugs, what if the girl is actually alive and the kids are all just really mean to her? I like this.

Key appeal: Eyepatch moe, backgrounds, crows

Rinne No Lagrange.

If I can only keep one of Tatsuo Sato’s shows this season, it’s probably gonna be Pirates, but it should be noted that Viz is streaming this thing in HD on Hulu, and aside from the Hulu app having a penchant for crashing my Roku, it’s a really nice trend that I look forward to Crunchyroll finally managing to get right. I mean, the clarity with which you can see the skirts come off is… well, it’s astounding, really. As a robot anime, I’m not sure I’m sold but I don’t have a robot anime this season unless you count Guilty Crown‘s sometimes-incidental Endlave content. So we’ll see. For a vapid fanservice-heavy romp, it was charming.

Key appeal: Sweatpants moe

Shana.

I’m having a really hard time keeping up. I just… I just don’t care that much.

Key appeal: Marjorie gets some

Bodacious Space Pirates.

Maybe it helps that I was watching on Saturday morning, the time when you watch cartoons, but it worked for me. It seems like an unlikely recipe all around. Imagine the drunken scenario planning: “Two words guys… Moe Harlock!” Kawamori’s Satelight, who always seem to lean toward “colorful but terribly flat” in their animation, do a fine job of making some very cute character designs come to life in a less-flat fashion, even if the thing still suffers from their trademark HEY GUYS THIS CG BLENDS IN FINE RIGHT? RIGHT?

Other thoughts:

• Check out animekritik’s blog for some Japanese reactions, mostly summed up as “old-fashioned.” Personally, an old-fashioned retro style adventure with a modern moe edge seems like a better idea for sustainable anime than any of Yamakan’s highfalutin notions about saving it.
• The Harlock theme song.
• Schneider mentioned a 2ch line re: the novel, something to the effect of “there is no sexual fanservice, only long descriptions about the ships.” And suddenly the boners transfer from one crowd to another.
• Digiboy seemed to hate it, which has to count for something too.

Bonus: Escaflowne.

Never finished it. Not sure why. About halfway through, and so far so good. It’s pretty much the ideal combination of classic shoujo, fantasy, unique mecha, intrigue, and level-up action. More on Escaflowne later, but short story is I’m enjoying it quite a bit.

Anything I’m missing? I’ll probably ignore it, whatever it is, since I can’t even sustain this many shows as it is and I’ll probably want to watch Black Rock Shooter (sue me). If I don’t conscript my wife into watching at least one more thing with me (currently Mirai Nikki and Guilty Crown) I’ll never make it. But I’m always interested in hearing what everyone else likes.

Hope I stuck the landing...

Like every comedy ever, Kill Me Baby will only appeal to some, and I’m one of them, which is unexpected. Spastic boke-tsukkomi acts are my least favorite brand of anime comedy—but this isn’t really that. It’s more like boke-boke(-boke), since Oribe is an idiot and Sonya is an assassin. (The ninja girls is obviously boke-tacular as well.) Regardless of what it’s called, I laughed quite a bit throughout this episode (which felt very god damn long) and enjoyed it all the way.

I think the show’s strong suit is the art/animation direction (I honestly don’t know how to credit this). Not the animation itself—the show has very little movement, and several times when movement couldn’t be avoided, it was done at an Astro Boy framerate. However, basically following that “moving manga” principal, a lot of attention is given to what each individual shot looks like. I felt the show had constant visual comedy going on in the facial expressions and other happenings, which is what garnered most of my laughs. The character designs lend easily to all sorts of fun morphing, which also helps.

I would've killed myself on the spot, had I a gun on me like she does.

Its cast is mostly n00b seiyuu, with mixed results. Sonya’s voice was excellent, Oribe’s bordered heavily on grating (and she never shuts the fuck up), and Goshiki’s is funny but overdone. It would be nice if the acting simply improves throughout the show, since Oribe’s voice is currently my biggest complaint going into it. That might be totally made up for soon, though, since the only other character listed on MAL is played by Kugimiya Rie.

The ending song is addicting, too.

A main character, beloved to some, hated by many, prone to monologues, has lost hope. That character’s memories remain, though a most treasured and precious friend is gone, along with everyone else’s memories of that friend — the character barely had time to realize the friend’s importance before it happened. Perhaps there’s love there. No; there almost certainly is love, even if we the viewers are the only ones who truly know for sure.

Imagine, if you will. One of these anime presents the opening bout of despair with a slow, relentless, almost Jarmusch-esque slog through the places that hold memories. The question asked is, “what can he do now?”

That anime is The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Imagine further. The other anime presents the same basic scenario, but with artificially ramped-up desperation and… a bath scene.

The question asked is, “With that sort of cat thing on her panties, does that make me some kind of closet lolicon?”

That anime is Shakugan No Shana III (Final), and it has begun, people.

What I’m about to say has nothing to do with the Usagi Drop manga, about which I give no shits, and which I haven’t read: I wish Usagi Drop would’ve been 22 episodes long instead of eleven. I think the plot was truncated by the factors of being based on a manga that it may not necessarily have wanted to follow, and by being only eleven episodes long.

I want to see what becomes of Daikichi’s relationship with Kouki’s mom instead of just ship-baiting by showing us how good they are together. I want some closure in the Rin’s mom situation. And really, I could watch the adventures of Daikichi’s fatherhood and the childhood of Rin for as many episodes as possible.

What Usagi Drop gives us is the tip of an iceburg. It gives us some heartwarming stories that begin a sequence of ideas. It gives us just enough material to imagine how the rest of the story might play out, which is enough to be an entertaining and thoughtful show. But if it followed through and actually told the rest of the story, I think it could’ve been something truly fantastic.

Alas, it’s hardly the first time a great story was truncated by length (much less a great noitaminA show). All in all, I enjoyed Usagi Drop a lot.

I only recently discovered interesting shows like Star Driver, No. 6, and The Mystic Archives of Dantalian (admittedly only 1 episode in). I managed to plow through all 3 episodes (or what seemed like 3) of Deadman Wonderland recently, and I’ve been taking bites out of Blue Exorcist, Hanasaku Iroha, and A Dark Rabbit has Seven Lives. Along with those, I’ve been watching the living hell out of One Piece and the occasional random episode off of Netflix.

[I'll save thoughts on the aforementioned anime for a later post.]

But honestly, these days I have no idea what is going on in the anime world. I’m about 2.5 years behind in everything that’s come out, what was good and what wasn’t….hell, I JUST finished watching Soul Eater (which I used to blog when it was coming out years ago) last month.

So…what have I missed?

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s superbly done. However, I feel like this show has reached the masturbatory heights of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, not quite a bad thing given how much I love that show, but something’s not clicking with me. I mean, on paper it should absolutely floor me about the kind of balls it takes to make the protagonist of the majority of the first 8 episodes a disgusting, warped-in-the-head stalker. Balls, I tell you.

But I already knew that about Ikuhara. This show has become for me about how he’s back, how he’s up to his old tricks only new, less sparkly, and now darker. When the creator has overtaken the narrative, I know something’s not working for me. Again don’t get me wrong – I love Ikuhara and his merry band that was Be Papas. But I’m here to enjoy anime, not creator mythology.

So what do I get? Apart from an intriguing game of interpretation and chasing herrings of different colors, I get to see the unraveling of Ringo and the utter helplessness of Shouma in the face of things. The cool bro barely gets screen time and doesn’t even get to bone any of the hawt tail being thrown his way. All that incestual kiss did was to raise controversy.Like it’s playfulness with all the panty non-shots, the show is a tease.

Maybe project M leads to actual action instead of aggravatingly deviant, yet harmless behavior. I need something meaty to sink my teeth in this show. One cannot live on remembering love alone – for that in itself is just another kind of fanservice.

What I want to see (I don’t mind surprises, but I’ve been surprised for 7 episodes straight so I don’t mind not going for an eight):

Actual consequences: death, sex, pregnancy, etc.

• Kanba doing stuff: killing, sexing, knocking girls up, etc.
• No Shoma.
• Dark Himari doing stuff: killing, sexing, getting knocked up, etc.
• Ringo getting stuff done and not just relentlessly frustrated: getting killed, getting sexed, getting knocked up, etc.

/rant

Kriem was love at first sight, and I thought “oh, it’s a Harley Quinn expy,” which became a ridiculously accurate statement when Jake proved to be the Joker. Perhaps uncoincidentally, Kotetsu catches him with his most Batman-like tool (of the few tools he uses, being a powered hero). The interactions between Jake and Kriem (actually, all the scenes with Kriem) were a lot of fun, but were sadly few in number, what with the plot chugging along at a good pace (not at all complaining). My favorite thing about them, though, was their voices, played by Fujiwara Keiji in one of his most deliciously insane roles and Neya Michiko sounding hot—but more importantly being the voice of Talho to Fujiwara’s Holland in Eureka Seven.

I won’t say anything else because it feels like trying to explain how I feel about this show at this point, is useless and will read like high-brow elitist posturing. Yes, it has all those things going for it.

I’ve seen better-executed melodrama and comedy concerning life, death, fate, family in the first half of the pilot episode than anything a show like AnoHana can ever possibly hope for. So it’s time to recalibrate our expectations of what anime can do again. Because this is incredible.

With that, we also must prepare to be incredibly disappointed. But I like this kind of bet. Watch this show.

First, there’s the unique visual style. While A-1, Sony’s anime-original “boutique” wing, didn’t have a unique-looking manga on which to base the series’ look, could you really call that a limitation? Isn’t it just a greater freedom to do pretty much whatever you want stylistically? Hard to say. Limitations are a great creative aid, and Wandering Son‘s watercolory animation is a great case in point for the benefits of adapting a unique manga style. That said, AnoHana is hardly a bad-looking anime; it falls on the high side of A-1′s output (on the opposite side from Birdy: Decode, yeeesh). And the character designs were, of course, great. You know who you are, Anaru fans. But what’s more memorable: a great-looking anime or a great- and unique-looking anime?

Then, there’s the characters’ ages. With the seinen target demographic, is there really a compelling reason to populate your story with school-aged characters? Wandering Son of course answered that positively. But school was almost totally incidental to AnoHana‘s story, with Anaru being the only real exception. Too often, I feel like anime asks me to indulge in the hangups and nostalgias of characters who haven’t lived long enough to experience real regret. And since AnoHana is pretty much completely about regret over something in the past, I can’t help but think it would’ve been more poignant had the characters been a little bit older. I didn’t find their separation and growing apart all that believable, but a few years of in-universe time would have been a great shortcut to my suspension of disbelief.

But most of all, what the most successful anime dramas have had that AnoHana swung at but missed: Understatement. Sure, the opening was strong: it was quiet, it didn’t insult your intelligence, and everyone felt just real enough that you could identify with them. But as the characters grew closer to each other again and their hangups started presenting more often and more overtly, I started to get those reminders that this is, after all, anime. It might be belittling to some fans to call their anime “cartoons,” but we have to face that sometimes anime tackles real issues in really “cartoony” ways. And human drama is one of those. Everything is amped up to the level of Gurren Lagann, tossing spiral galaxies around like tennis balls. That can work. Hell, even live-action Japanese dramas do the same, and some will squeeze those (liters of) tears out of you. But there’s a fine line between successful melodrama and over-the-top ridiculous embarrassment.

So… which side of the line was AnoHana on for you?