Shameful Otaku Secret!

Report from the halfway point

Somehow, amidst all the fall anime I’ve started (some of it’s gonna get dropped like a shitty potato) and extra blog work I’ve taken on, I found time to watch some more cartoons. The time I’m able to watch anime comes in bursts, so I tend to take full advantage of it when I can.

I’m not sure what possessed me to go after Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha at this particular juncture. Maybe it was just… there. I didn’t even know this was an Akiyuki Shinbo thing until some of episode one’s strange angles and techniques made me wonder who the hell directed it enough to look that up.

Set up.

First off, Nanoha is not quite what I expected. Like I said, I didn’t expect some strange Shinbo shit to be going on, and I certainly didn’t expect fanservice, which to be honest is a little weird. But I knew enough to know that there would be some things I didn’t expect. I’d heard talk of things getting dark after a certain point, and I knew that later seasons focused on the characters as they aged beyond typical magical girl years.

To me, the very idea of what happens to a magical girl after she grows up is fascinating (as fascinating as anything in the genre could be), and I’m watching as much in anticipation of those later seasons as I am for the first series. But as a whole, I’ve found that even in season one there is a lot more in-depth exploration of the “realities” of the mahou shoujo life. If, indeed, a magical girl were real, it’s unlikely life would be a walk in the park for her. While others have delved into that a little bit, Nanoha gets (relatively) weighty at times. Granted, it’s no Citizen Kane, but it’s more serious than I expected.

That’s just the tip of the magic wand, though — Nanoha seems to approach almost every aspect of its story in a more “adult” way than you’d expect from a genre usually aimed at little girls. That can be both interesting, as with Shinbo’s Tourette’s-like explosions of visual craziness, or kind of icky, as with fanservice.

Random thoughts:

• Shinbo has marked his territory here, no matter what anyone says to the contrary. Fisheyes, fast clouds, silhouettes, and of course the ol’ off-center scene composition all make their way into Nanoha on a regular basis.
• Characterization is not so good. Instead of straight-up explaining the characters’ motivations, I’d like to see something less lazy.
• I can’t say that Nanoha is the first anime where I’ve seen a huge shock of hair migrate from one side of the head to the other, depending on which way a character faces. But I think it’s the first one I’ve seen from the 21st century.
• It’s a given that the transformation scene will be shoved in your face over and over again, so I always hope for cool but short. Nanoha’s has a couple neat little head-trips, but also some barbie-doll nudity, and it lasts a full minute and a half. You don’t always see the whole thing, but holy hell. Beats Sailor Moon, I guess, but that’s not saying a lot.
• Nanoha and Fate’s “magic” is actually sufficiently advanced technology, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, which I didn’t expect to crop up in a magical girl cartoon.

Anyway

I’ll get back to it eventually, and watch the second half when I have some time again. So far, I can’t say I’m impressed with the basic Sakura-meets-Inuyasha plot or the lazy characterization, but it has some charm and the visuals are cool more often than not.

Let’s get girly

The last time I random-sampled something, it was Komodo No Jikan, which scarred me for a while, so it took some time for me to close my eyes and point my finger and the virtual phone book of anime again. But here’s what I got:

• Series: Shugo Chara!
• Genre: Magical Girl?
• Episode: 12 (and 1)

Story

Amu’s classmates and even her own parents think she’s quite the “cool and spicy” girl: fashionable, slightly aloof, fine being by herself. But in reality she’s just a shy girl who can’t ever think of something to say. One day she prays to her guardian angel (who she only believes in secretly) to help her out, and said angel delivers three eggs. Those eggs hatch into Shugo Chara (guardian characters) who let her unleash different facets of her personality, hopefully in order to facilitate her “true self.” Somwhere in there, characters with “X Eggs” seem to be able to suppress peoples’ true selves. Maybe.

What’s it got?

• An appealing lead character. Amu seems about as “real” as a magical girl series can actually handle. Her cool-exterior / frilly-girl-interior contrast is fun too.
• Neat art style derived from Peach-Pit’s original manga. Amu is cute and stylish — her clothes and hair change a lot, which shows that someone’s actually putting effort into the look of the series. And plaid? Mesmerizing.
• Yuuichi Nakamura playing against type as a pretty blue-haired kid with a bad attitude.
  

  Uhhh... yeah.

• A different romantic angle. I think. I’m not sure from ep. 12 where that’s going to focus, but it clearly involves the president of the school’s “Special A”-like club (who all also have Charas), the Nakamura character, and a pop idol who looks like something out of ef.

Potential shitters

• Thin basic concept. I’m not sure if this egg business can hold up for 50 episodes, even if it’s just a pretext for character development. Overall, the series doesn’t seem very meaty. If that’s true, it could be enough to shit-can the show off the bat.

Evaluation

I’m interested enough to go on. I was intrigued (or at least confused) enough to check out the origin episode after seeing one bit, so that’s promising. The big thing Shugo Chara! seems to have going for it based on my tiny sample is Amu herself, a winning character who resists the standard anime stereotypes. That’s good, since the theme of the show is her developing her personality — if it wasn’t a compelling personality, there wouldn’t be much reason to watch.

This series has been going on for a while. Anyone who’s seen it care to recommend? Should I stay or should I go?

Otoha

Really? You’re really going to do this to us? I only started watching H2O in earnest because I was couch-bound with the flu and had nothing else to watch (yes, I know, Shigufumi, but hindsight is 20/20), and it hasn’t really struck me since. Like I said, I don’t hate it. I just haven’t found a great reason to get attached to it either. Takuma’s a decent protagonist but kind of flat, and the two main girls aren’t exactly brimming with personality either. But now, just when I start to think I can handle sticking with this show until the end, they whip out a bizarrely random but mostly unfunny self-parody episode. Why kill what little flow you had up until now?

Something is wrong.

Story

Well, there isn’t much of one here. Takuma wakes up one morning to find that Hotaru and Hayami are his sisters, and his uncle is his “mother” aka a cross-dressing vehicle for typically Japanese homophobia.

Very wrong.

I mean Wrong within the context of the show, but also on multiple other levels.

School turns out to be no better, with Otoha appearing as a both a transfer student from the spirit world and his fiancee; and Yui as “Magical Farm Girl Yui,” who plans to turn the school into a farm. Otoha herself transforms into a magical girl and we get some half-baked Sailor Moon parody action for a while. The halfway point has a new, fake OP, and I must admit I had a chuckle. Other parodies (some I caught and some I didn’t) wind their way through this wholly random and spastic excuse for sweat beads and fanservice as Takuma is forced to whack people with the nearest object until he can make sense of the world again (Best line, as he smacks Hamaji: “When you came out of the closet it was shocking, but it moved my heart a little!”).

Nope. Not OK. Still wrong.

In the end, the entire debacle was actually last week’s storybook brought to life by Otoha, which I don’t consider a spoiler because it’s barely important. There is one other major development that takes place in the final minutes as reality comes back together, and it’s kind of sad but I have very little emotional attachment to this show to begin with.

What We’ve Learned

Not much: this whole thing seems conceived as some kind of break or respite from regular progress, or at least an explosion of fanservice.

Thankfully, all television anime scriptwriters aren’t this predictable.

However, we see a major character supposedly bowing out for good, so our one development is a biggie. What’s this going to do for the plot? I’m guessing Takuma’s time with eyesight is going to be running out soon, but I don’t know what else.

We also learned that someone both wrote and recorded a “Magical Girl Otoha” theme for this episode. I have pity, I do. But like I said, it was my one real laugh.

And most importantly, we learned that the beach episode wasn’t the worst this show could do.

Thoughts

Like a trip to visit dying Uncle Bobo in the clown hospital, a bittersweet end to a random-ass experience.

There hasn’t been a major push in any particular direction, so I really don’t understand what’s supposed to be developing or what’s supposed to be driving me to watch the show anymore. That mysterious carrot on a stick is farther away and smaller looking than ever. And for a show with such thin developments to suddenly drop in a sidestep like this when every other series is making great strides, I hope they have something in mind.