Shameful Otaku Secret!

A Problematic Matter / 3 on 3

Like I said, I’m really pretty glad the Kotomi storyline has drawn to a close. I’m also glad they did it with a minimum of teary-eyed horror, though the resolution still seemed somewhat less than satisfying to me. Now Kotomi is a regular blue-haired companion to the Fujibayashi twins, nearly indistinguishable save for her little round hair ties. Two episodes went by while I was traveling for work, and look what they’ve done. Some of my expectations for this show have been turned on their head, and that really pleases me.

Heretofore-incidental character Youhei Sunohara, ostensibly Tomoya’s best friend, drives these two episodes with a visiting little sister and a crazy-ass plan to get Nagisa’s theatre club hopes rejuvenated by playing basketball. Is it really important why? I suppose maybe a little, though it is an obvious plot contrivance. See, there’s only one advisor, and I guess he’s not allowed to endorse two clubs, and the (erstwhile) music club is hoping for him to sponsor a choir club because this girl Rie can’t hold a violin bow after a car crash, so they’re putting threatening notes in Nagisa’s desk.

Really?

That’s what I mean by plot contrivance. However, it does allow Sunohara to get indignant about the girl taking advantage of her “handicap” for pity. And that drives him to prove that a handicap means nothing. Hence, a basketball game featuring a player who’s unable to lift his shooting arm.

Of course, this leads to trouble with Tomoya, who not only doesn’t want to do it, he doesn’t want the girls (including Sunohara’s sister, who doesn’t really think her older brother is that cool) to know about his little issue.

Can I just say, while I have this opportunity, that it’s the dumbest problem I’ve ever heard of? For something that causes Tomoya to pretty much pack it in and give up on life, why can’t they even animate it? Because it would just look as dumb as it sounds. Seriously, is there no other injury that could hinder his basketball forever and still be hidden from Nagisa? Bone spur? Scoliosis? Herpes?

I digress. Usually.

In addition to the charge toward Tomoya’s self-evaluating of his aimless life, an awful lot of developments went down. First, he stands up to the judo club bullying the younger but all-too-similarly named Tomoyo into joining, and that makes her think that maybe he’s not all that bad after all. In fact, she’s… interested.

And she’s not the only one. Kyou, exasperated with the sheer number of girls around Tomoya, uses her trademark bossiness to not only question his heterosexuality (it’s about time), but throttle him into eating lunch with her and her sister. She even gets the beginnings of a girl-fight going with Tomoyo. But is it for her own sake, or is it the personality-challenged Ryou who digs the delinquent? Who knows, but Kyou has gone from intolerable bitch to kind of cute in a single episode, so there’s a development for you.

In one of the few genuinely funny situations up to this point, Sunohara spent a whole episode thinking that Nagisa and Tomoya were dating, while Nagisa spent that same time thinking that Sunohara was gay for Tomoya. More importantly than its humor though, that was really the first time I can think of Tomoya actually acting in a way that I’d imagine a so-called “delinquent” might: his best friend has a crush on a girl so he tells the girl said friend is gay? Snap! And to shamelessly freak out Nagisa, to the point where she explodes her feelings (albeit in a strange way)?

Add to that his endless fucking with Sunohara and his sister, and you get a guy who appears to have a real hobby in social engineering of sitcom mishaps. I like this cold-ass Tomoya much more than the endlessly helpful one. Or at the very least, I believe him more.

To sum up the basketball match, for all intents and purpose a time filler until the very end: Kyou, Sunohara, and Tomoya take on the freshmen team until it becomes apparent they’re not bad. Then the varsity players, who know Tomoya’s secret, come out and proceed to clean house. Tomoya, while being knocked to the floor, sinks a miracle game-winning desperation basket while bouncing around an internal monologue on what a pathetic failure he is. But does it net them the advisor? We don’t know.

What We’ve Learned

I think the most important thing that’s happened in these two episodes has been the development of Tomoya as a character. While it’s getting late in the game, I’m glad he’s not just another empty vessel like Yuichi from Kanon, and it’s nice to see him act like a fuckup instead of just having to trust the shorthand of untucked shirt and habitual tardiness. And when actually called out about the girl thing, he seems to think about it a little. Could it be that he’s that much of a drag-ass that he can’t be bothered to like a girl? Who knows. Next episode’s preview looks to go even further into the what’s-eating-Tomoya subject, and I for one look forward to it.

Animation

Episode 15 starts with the robot and girl in the empty world, something we haven’t seen for quite a few episodes. And if you’re like me, it reminded you why the people animating this show are hot shit. I’ve been trying to catch up on Shakugan No Shana Second (by JC Staff), and it’s a really great-looking show that has consistently impressed, but five seconds of Kyoto’s Clannad pretty well dropped my jaw. That carried through to the rest of the episode, where I noticed that these guys never bounce a static image up and down for walking, and really don’t take many other shortcuts either. They almost animate too much hair and clothes. It’s like they’re showing off. High-class problems to have, eh?

If the story continues to deepen like it has these couple episodes (and it better, there’s really not that much of the show left), then we’re in for a show that finally matches its animation with great character development. Better late than never.

This Post Was Warmed By My Body Heat

It shouldn’t be a surprise if you’ve seen Girls High or even read what I had to say about it that the high school comedy genre is not highest on my hot list, and slipped even further after that crap series. I think OCD alone caused me to finish watching that one. Face it, you’re either Azumanga Daioh! or you’re not. But some good reviews prompted me to check out Pani Poni Dash!, a show with a ridiculous premise that stands out even in a medium filled with them.

Story

As the narration dramatically begins the first few episodes of the show, “Rebecca Miyamoto was born to a Japanese father and American mother, educated in the US and became MIT’s youngest graduate ever. She returned to Japan to become a school teacher… but she was only 11 years old!”

That’s where the willful suspension of disbelief must start. How can this plot hook possibly work? Well, it’s never a sappy coming-of-age thing, it’s never creepy, and the phrase “little kid teacher” is inexplicably funny. Plus, the random madcap craziness of Pani Poni’s humor keeps you distracted from pretty much everything else, including its numerous shortcomings.

The jokes are key, and they’re all over the place. Usually watching anime attempt to be humorous is a painful exercise in pratfalls and Giant Sweat Beads. Again, unless you’re Azumanga Daioh. But Pani Poni gives the viewer something more akin to early Zucker Brothers flicks like Airplane!, where paying too much attention to the joke in the foreground will leave you missing another in the background. The chalkboards in classes are constantly changing, and while you might miss a lot of references as an English-speaker, you’ll get just as many. Most of the obscure references are visual jokes, where the traditionally delivered jokes are more conventional slapstick fare. But the overriding style of humor comes in the form of random non sequiturs.

Characters

The characters are purposely walking anime stereotypes, to the point where Becky starts her school year off by calling them “class rep,” “bully,” “bookworm,” and “boring.” That’s not even counting the other classes, who feature a cosplay girl, a magical girl, and a klutz… the list goes on. But for the most part, they do have their charm, especially the ditzy cowlicked spazz Himeko (complete with nonsensical catchphrase), bizarre ninja class rep Ichijo, and resident cute-voice Number 6. A running sight gag in the entire series finds the rest of the school reduced to copy-pasted templates — sometimes boring-looking kid, sometimes fat girl, sometimes flower pots.

Pani Poni treads a thin line of sweet sincerity much of the time, and manages to get away with it by being understated and never letting the minimal character development get in the way of the rapid-fire jokes.

Inexplicably, there is a rabbit mascot called Mesousa that serves as the parody for all animal mascot characters ever. He’s ignored, mistreated, and used like furniture by his human companions, plagued by the ignorance of other non-sentient rabbits, and constantly stalked by a hyper-creepy cat who claims to be a god and lives inside vending machines. Getting a cold soda on Pani Poni is an impossible task thanks to the Cat God’s practice of warming them to room temperature with his body heat. Weird, yes. Funny, also yes.

Animation

Shaft (who worked with Gainax on This Ugly Yet Beautiful World) hasn’t really done anything impressive here, but I don’t suppose impressive is really necessary. The style switches as fast as the jokes fire off — the characters may be rendered traditional, super-deformed, or as cardboard cutouts or puppets from one minute to the next. There are plenty of tricks used to get away with lazy animation that actually further the jokes, so there’s not a lot I can complain about. And some of anime’s finest hide-the-fanservice visual jokes are here. Character designs are competent and get the job done — none of the characters are very fantastic-looking, but they’re distinguished from each other. Mesousa again wins with his great design, followed closely by the endangered salamander and disturbingly vacant-eyed Cat God (like the evil bizarro version of Chiyo-chan’s “dad”).

Dub

There are a lot of episodes to this show and virtually no continuing storyline from one episode to the other, so I switched back and forth a lot. Strangely, I think this has lengthened the show’s life span for me. Just when it gets old and repetitive, as it kinda does, I switch again. But the dub really isn’t bad at all. The squeaky factor of the girls’ voices isn’t too bad, and Becky’s (Hilary Haag of Super Milk-Chan) occasional temper flare-ups aren’t too grating. I’ll say it the final time, though, Mesousa steals the show with Christine Auten’s hilariously pathetic reading.

Music & Credits

There are two opening themes and quite a few closers, most of which are pretty enjoyable. The first season’s closers are the best, with one of those ultra-cute rainbow fart songs playing over a kind of fun animation that features different characters’ super-deformed alter egos parading around. Incidental music is good, at least I think so. I don’t really recall any of it, so at the very least it must not have gotten in the way much.

Bottom Line

The primary strength of Pani Poni Dash! — its machine gun delivery of jokes — is also its primary failing, since about 10 episodes in you start to see it running out of ammo, where a show more reliant on setup and timing like Azumanga Daioh could continue to succeed. It can also be a little tiring to endure the fast-paced assault on your senses, but overall it’s one of the funnier high school comedies in anime. It doesn’t insult your intelligence or sensibilities like Girls High, and lacks that overbearing sweetness that Azumanga Daioh slaps you around with sometimes — but you won’t get attached to it as much either, and you won’t find yourself tearing up at the end.

Garden of Memories

For the lowdown on Clannad and my masochistic following of it, I provide this overview link.

We’re currently wallowing in the late-middle of Kotomi the teenage genius’s storyline. Her birthday is coming, and while Fuku the coma child mysteriously appeared at an action claw machine, she failed to win Kotomi the giant stuffed aardvark from Kanon. Obviously a major disappointment — Kotomi is clearly the equivalent of Kanon’s Mai, who is one up on her for having actually received that aardvark in a bloody demonic showdown. If you haven’t seen Kanon, trust me, it sounds more interesting than it was, regardless of the inclusion of a giant stuffed aardvark.

Story

The flashbacks to Kotomi’s childhood continue, leading to her super-genius parents dying in either a plane crash or a time-travel accident made to look like a plane crash or something to that effect. Turns out her only friend as a kid was Tomoya, and he didn’t even remember that.

Man. This is where Key’s male characters’ detachment always gets them: they never remember their childhood, making reality a miracle parcel of tragedy tied up with the string of repression, just waiting to be opened around say episode 23.

But that’s not all he did wrong: after her parents died, Kotomi was forced to spend her birthday alone thanks to Tomoya’s conspicuous absence. I’m guessing we’re not going to learn what kept him until we learn what that catastrophe in his past might have been.

To fix things in the present, where Kotomi is so depressed with her life she’s fleeing to the USA to sell herself into prostitution, Tomoya launches a genius plan to keep her suffering in Japan: he’s doing her gardening. Fucking brilliant, kiddo. Nagisa and the twins come up with their own plan to give her the violin from Episode 11’s ear-shattering recital, but are run over by a motorcycle in the process, which breaks the thing into three pieces and one more-than-obvious symbol of Kotomi’s jacked-up life. I swear I only made up one part of that paragraph.

Technical Breakdown

Not much to say, the quality has been maintained. Kyoto continues to prove that they are the ultimate new-school bad-asses in TV anime, even if they are currently on my shit list for removing most of the staff from series two of Haruhi Suzumiya in order to churn out this drivel.

Clannad seems to have the biggest heads and the biggest eyes in the whole of the medium, and seriously the shortest school skirts ever to deny fanservice in history (not that I’m really complaining, it just defies physics). However, after going away for a while, I find the character design to be a little anonymous and overly reliant on hairdos.

What We’ve Learned

We now know that Tomoya is more like Kanon’s Yuuichi than previously thought, and that something terrible must lurk in his past. We know that Kotomi could actually play the violin when she was little, which is why I say that all comic relief in this show (like her horrible recital) is really just the harbinger of more pain.

I for one have also realized that Nagisa is far more integral to the good Samaritan process than most people are going to give her credit for, especially Tomoya. He thinks he can and should do everything for everyone on his own, but he can’t. And ironically, it’s her painfully pathetic and unrequited romantic feelings for him that enable him to proceed on his Life’s Platonic Purpose. I think Nagisa is the one who needs to grow balls in this series because obviously Tomoya has none.

So what’s next: Can Tomoya fix the garden in time? Will the violin be repaired? Can a birthday party keep Kotomi in Japan? And most importantly, can we resolve this wholly uninteresting storyline quickly and move on?