Shameful Otaku Secret!

[Clannad has a landing page now]

As much as I make fun, I should clarify that I do indeed enjoy the cavalcade-of-tragedy series that come from Key/Visual Art’s and Kyoto Animation. Air especially was great, and if you can stomach all that syrupy sadness, Kanon isn’t bad either. But as much as it’s fascinating to witness their ability to manipulate you into an emotional reaction, it’s also infuriating at times — especially when it works.

I place Kanon neatly in the emotional pornography genre: like those single-syllable-titled rags you see at the store when you go to buy booze, Kanon exists to create a particular response and then makes you feel dirty after you’ve achieved said response. And unfortunately, unlike Juggs, Kanon only works once.

So what does this have to do with Clannad? Pretty much everything. After being so transparently manipulated twice, you’d be hard pressed to come into a third Key/Kyoto “moe soap opera” series without some sort of skepticism and emotional hardening against the coming assault of tragedy, even if you want to be moved by it.

It didn’t help that Clannad’s first story arc involved the exact same coma trick that helped resolve Kanon’s final arc — and combined it with the drawn-out inevitability of the Makoto storyline.

So Clannad had a hard row to hoe to begin with, and deservedly so. You want me to tear up like a little girl again? Work for it, bitches.

However, Clannad has tried to assert its own identity by being a more light-hearted counterpart to Kanon that eases up on the never-ending pain, and even some later episodes have been purely funny rather than tragic.

To bring this boat up to speed, I’ll attempt to sum up episodes 1-12: Tomoya Okazaki is a lovable delinquent-slacker, and his current mission in life is to help the ultra-moe Nagisa restart the theater club in their final year of high school. Well, that’s really about all you need to know.

Nagisa’s parents provide great comic relief, but if we again follow the pattern, most comic relief will become hollow laughter once we discover the rape or cancer or grizzly attack that caused them to be that way.

The Tomoya-Nagisa pairing provides a bit more of a tag-team effect in the established methodology of helping one fucked-up girl at a time, and that would provide welcome relief if Tomoya didn’t basically ignore Nagisa in order to achieve his happy-bunny goals. A real girl would understandably become insanely jealous and feel completely unimportant, but Nagisa obviously has problems. Well. Everyone in these shows has problems.

Moving on to the not-quite-real-time blog of damnation…

Guilty Pleasure without all that bothersome pleasure.

Let me preface this whole thing by saying that Girl’s High is a dumb series and I didn’t care one iota when it ended. It’s dreck, for the most part, and if they bring it back for a second series I’m not sure I’ll care enough to watch. So, if you don’t want to hear me talk about how much it sucked, stop now.

Story & Characters

Girl’s High is kind of what it sounds like — it’s a slice of life “comedy” about six girls in high school. The supposed appeal of the premise is that the show subverts your given notions about sweet young girls, the kind perpetuated by this very medium much of the time. And that, to me, is great. Fighting, scheming, menstruation talk, inappropriate places to leave pubic hairs, and more than a couple f-bombs make for an atypical experience. But it’s all a pretty transparent picture painted on a terribly empty canvas. The problem is, rather than go with the time-honored practice of short-cutting characters by giving them usual anime archetypes, the writers elected to leave personalities out of the equation altogether. Who are these girls again? There’s the regular one, the short one, the other regular one, and one has glasses. Wait. No, that was the regular one.

On second thought, the problem is that the humor just isn’t raunchy enough most of the time. I don’t know if it’s cultural, if something’s lost in translation, or if most people don’t hang out with the kind of females I know, but this shit was tame as baby kitties most of the time (I’ll reiterate most of the time because it has its moments, like the wrong-as-hell final episode, but that was just too little too late).

No, think again, maybe the problem is that just when they’re onto something funny, the writers think they have to drop a serious drama-bomb on the series and prove that they couldn’t write their way out of a bento box. The biggest problem with the “serious” stuff is that the girls get themselves into difficult situations because they’re apparently too stupid to see around blatant attempts to get raped or manipulated. Better writers could have easily made these situations possible and thus watchable, but these writers know tit jokes and not much else.

There are at least three episodes where something made me laugh out loud, and those were all well-written payoffs to fairly long jokes (the singing of the school anthem at Kouda’s “death party” is really one of the moments the show exists for). But they’re too far between.

Animation

Wow. I mean, I know comedic anime neither gets nor requires big budgets like robot or sword shows, but seriously. These producers whipped out every cheap trick in the book (bouncing a waist-up still picture up and down to illustrate walking, that sort of thing) and still can’t manage to get smooth movement or worse, consistent character design.

I’ve been trying to raise the fan service issues in most reviews, but it’s really a special case here. I can’t figure out if this show is actually for girls or boys. It seems like it should be girl-focused, and in the really lame world of anime aimed at girls, it should be a step in the right direction. But Jesus fuck, there are just so many panty shots I can’t quite keep my mind around that theory. Yes, they use their feminine wiles to get ahead with teachers and boys, who are all portrayed as complete tools, but still… I think the only time that any care went into the drawing was when panties were on screen.

Credits & Music

The opening music is inoffensive, the opening animation is boring. The closing animation is one of the best parts, and not just because you know you’re closer to the series being over: a very sweet J-pop tune bounces along behind individual animations of all the girls doing little dances. It’s actually really cute and seems somehow more “real” than the show itself. For me, it’s suddenly become one of anime’s great mysteries how this great closer ended up on this mostly-lousy show.

Incidental music is of the worst kind: you know those shows where they seem to have one little tune to fit any particular mood? InuYasha comes to mind. There’s the action theme, the comic relief theme, the traveling music, and the foreboding ominous whatever. It’s like that, except every type of music is goofy. Rumbling tuba sounds, honks, and even fart noises permeate nearly every intolerable second of the irritating soundtrack. To top it off, the voice actors lack personality to the point where I can’t always tell who’s talking. There’s no dub in existence, and thank God for that: the voice actor unfortunate enough to be the second person to utter any of these lines is a sucker.

Bottom Line

I don’t know what more I need to sum up. If you’re really itching to see this show, go for it, but if other reviews have made it sound entertainingly raunchy and shockingly crass, it’s not. It’s lame, tepid humor loaded down with bad slapstick and bodily function stuff. And while I can appreciate that when it’s done well, it’s just not. You want a genuinely funny high school anime show? Try the deservingly-hyped Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya instead.

Come out from that rock

I’ve updated this post over time, to reflect re-watchings and other perspective alterations.

If you haven’t heard about it by now, you’re living under a larger rock than me.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is one of the most popular animes in recent years, and rightly so, it’s an absolute blast. It does give a nagging feeling that if you’re getting the joke, the joke might just be on you. But it’s a fun joke. Haruhi was also manufactured in a laboratory specifically to be loved by otaku.

Story

In this series, ostensibly a high school comedy, Kyon is a bored slacker who maligns the day he truly acknowledged to himself that aliens, superheroes, and anime robot pilots weren’t real. On his first day of high school, he winds up sitting in front of Haruhi Suzumiya, a hottie by any estimation — and perhaps the world’s youngest iconoclast. She announces boldly to the class that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with anyone who isn’t an alien, time traveler, or esper. Soon he somehow finds himself the first member of her new club, the “SOS Brigade.”

Of course, not all is as it seems, and the four members of the SOS Brigade turn out to be more than just dead-on anime stereotypes: There’s Yuki Nagato, the always-reading blue-haired Rei Ayanami fill-in (an android built by alien intelligence), Itsuki Koizumi, the mysterious transfer student of suspect sexual preferences (an esper), and the older and bustier Mikuru Asahina, doomed to a teary-eyed life of fulfilling Haruhi’s moe fantasies in humiliating cosplay outfits and psychologically scarring situations (also, from the future). And they’re all there for one reason: Haruhi. In fact, she made it happen, although she knows none of it. Through it all, Kyon wants to know — why him?

The ordering problem

It’s a great story, and one that was originally told on TV in an unconventional way. The episodes were shown out of order, with the “next episode” previews featuring Kyon and Haruhi arguing over what comes next. The American release DVDs, however, play everything in chronological order. This is a mixed bag: the story makes more sense in order, but the television order has a more standard narrative arc and anime style. In DVD order, the climax comes at episode 6, making the second half of the series a little flatter.

Characters

It’s not the story as much as the characters that make this such a lovable blast. The SOS Brigade are a fun bunch who poke fun at anime stereotypes but also take them a couple steps further. Haruhi herself is the star, of course, and the first of her kind that I can think of: she’s aggressive, domineering, severely ADHD, occasionally violent and openly perverted. But unlike other strong/loud tsundere female anime characters, she’s smart, good at everything, not overcompensating, and totally sane. She’s just the most bored person alive. And she’s not only somewhat believable, she’s charming.

Kyon drives the show, hilarious with his sarcastic running voice-over commentary. In a great inversion of a lazy animator technique, his mouth is often hidden for some key barbs, so you can’t be sure whether he’s narrating or actually speaking. He compares himself to Sisyphus as he fills the self-described role of the conscience of the SOS.

Animation

Kyoto Animation is the studio responsible for the unholy trinity of Key eroges-come-to-TV dramas (Air, Kanon ‘06, Clannad), as well as Fullmetal Panic! The Second Raid and Fumoffu. The difference between Haruhi and anything else of its kind is way more pronounced than the difference between The Second Raid and Gonzo’s original series. It’s hard to talk about the animation without mentioning the “Live Alive” episode. Be sure and turn your channel to Japanese if you’re watching the dub, for a movie-quality animation experince. There’s lip-synching, matching drum and guitar solos, and even realistic sweating. It’s no wonder this episode was the talk of the town even past the week it aired.

You’ll see fan service, but I can almost guarantee you it’s not what you’ll expect, and just as many times there’s a conceal-the-fanservice joke that even Pani Poni Dash! would be proud of.

Dub

This was a much-anticipated release, due to its huge popularity in Japan, so the English dub is loaded with a who’s-who of voice actors. As far as I know, Haruhi is the role that made Aya Hirano a seiyuu star. Of course the dub’s Wendee Lee delivers a typical female anime dub performance, i.e., kind of grating, so there’s no contest there. But one of the few dub actors that I’ve ever considered to be near the caliber of his Japanese counterparts, Crispin Freeman, delivers. He actually captures Tomokazu Sugita’s cynical agitation in the running Kyon commentary. Overall, the dub is far more passable than the average if you can get around Haruhi herself.

Music & Credits

The opening and closing music is fairly standard-fare J-Pop stuff about farting rainbows or hugging pandas or something, but it doesn’t annoy me. The incidental music is varied enough and keeps the energy up. The climactic sixth episode uses great space opera type stuff to give it an awesomely epic feel.

The closing animation is actually one of the show’s selling points. The characters all do a goofy dance, and though they’re in sync, their personalities all come through. Some stills and pans fill things out, but overall it’s the best piece of original animation for a closer I’ve ever seen. It’s also a dance phenomenon at conventions and such.

Episode Highlights

Episode Zero, shown first on both TV and the DVD, is a hilariously bad film (”The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina”) made by the SOS Brigade. It’s an unconventional episode not just because of the format, but because Haruhi, the film’s director, barely appears in the first episode of her own show. It’s brilliantly funny, but be warned: it’ll taint almost every subsequent anime viewing experience you have. Every time a writer “throws those moe situations at you,” every time a scene ends by panning up to the sky, every time you’re forced to begin a series by just accepting some elements of its plot… you’ll think of Haruhi. Episode Zero gains layers of meaning beyond the straight laughs as the series goes on, proof of just how well-written this show is.

Verdict

The bottom line here is fun — parodic, ironic, but sweet and totally non-cynical fun. Yes, it’s fun for people who know a little something about anime already, but that’s not to say newbs won’t enjoy it. You will get more out of it if you’re spotting more stuff, but it’s not like say, Project A-KO which requires an encyclopedia (and flew right the hell over my head).

Series two is apparently coming, but Kyoto is frustratingly making us wait until Fall while they finish slinging buckets of moe and tears around with the second half of Clannad.