Shameful Otaku Secret!

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?

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.

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!”).

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.

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

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.

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.

There is no tagline random enough to be appropriate here

First off, thanks to Adult Swim, who shows this thing often enough I’ve rewatched plenty of times without actually buying it. It’s on right now, in fact.

A couple years after the end of the magnum opus Evangelion and its subsequent movie sequels, Gainax teamed up with Production IG to put together another “tour de force,” as some people are wont to call such things. It’s no Eva, that’s for sure. But it’s hard to compare the two, or to compare to anything else. But if you’re ready to stop fucking around and have your mind blown, you should try out FLCL, aka Furikuri, aka Fooly Cooly.

Story

Any two people might disagree on what the story is actually about, but you can definitely say this: It concerns Naota, a 12-year-old boy who lives in a town where “nothing interesting ever happens” but for some reason has a giant iron in the middle of it. His older brother is a baseball player living in the USA, and his brother’s possibly-pyromaniac homeless girlfriend Mamimi has projected her misplaced feelings onto him. He seems to lack any real connection to his friends at school his own age, or to his father, a baker and sometime-publisher of subversive political pamphlets. One day, he’s run over by a girl on a Vespa carrying a Rickenbacker bass guitar with what appears to be a chainsaw motor in it, and then robots start coming out of his head.

What?

Exactly.

It’s not incredibly important what the superficial elements of the highly elastic “plot” are. The story works on three levels: One, the surface sci-fi story of space pirates, giant robots, and conspiracies. Two, a brilliant parody of not only Evangelion’s thick and twisted plot, but epic anime as a whole. And three, the primary story that’s not so much a coming-of-age tale as an honest take on the uncomfortable process of puberty.

FLCL switches its tone as often as it switches scenes. After laughing out loud or just reeling in confusion or excitement, you can just as easily find yourself touched by a sad moment or weirded out by incredibly dark surrealism.

Peppered throughout are tons of references to pop culture, other animes (from Eva to Lupin III), John Woo movies, DVD commentary tracks, and who knows what else. You’ll miss a lot of it the first time as you try desperately to get a hold of the plot.

Characters

The one thing that stands out to me about the characters is the complete lack of anime archetypes. Eva bent those to their breaking point, FLCL just tossed them out the window to begin with. While early on you might expect the surly Naota to resemble his corresponding Eva character Shinji, or other young giant-robot protagonists like Eureka 7’s Renton, he’ll consistently surprise you with his realistic mix of maturity and childishness. Gainax cleverly uses the show’s near-constant warping of reality to make him that much more believable as the point of sanity in the middle.

Mamimi is a weird girl who seems to wander through life in a Mister-Magoo haze, sometimes requiring Naota’s protection but never slipping into that traditional role. Haruko Haruhara is appropriately crazy but deeper than she seems at first. Her motivations are unclear, and maybe she has her own problems, but it’s all part of the series’ delicious mindfuck. Even characters that seem incidental at first (and by that I mean the first viewing of the series), like the mayor’s daughter Ninamori or the eyebrow-obsessed space captain, are complex creations — all revealed to be in various stages of immaturity.

Animation

Did Gainax and Production I.G. set out to make the most stylish and technically advanced anime ever produced? Some interviews I’ve seen suggest so, but I think the likely motivation for that has something to do with Gainax’s unending dedication to fanservice. Remember — it’s not necessarily all panty shots (although there’s no shortage…). Think overblown action, extended transformation scenes, etc. In other words, eye candy, and this show is full of it. You can easily watch any given episode 3 or 4 times before catching everything that happens, and I’m not even talking details. It’s a fast paced, all-out visual assault that leaves you confused, hopped up, and giddy.

The visual style, much like the narrative, varies widely even from second to nerve-shattering second. There’s standard high-quality action-anime style, “super-deformed” comedic caricatures, and even whole scenes made to look like moving manga pages. One scene even borrows the South Park cut-paper style uncannily. At least half of every episode is a “camera” angle you’ve probably never seen before. The complete abandonment of expectations is part of what makes this show such a jaw-dropper.

Dub

I’ve never really thought of a dub as a “make or break” point for a show. Especially in this day and age. If you don’t like it, switch your DVD audio to Japanese and read away. But in such a visually rich show, I’d hate to be reading subtitles. Not to mention the dialog rushes by at the same frantic pace as the animation, and depends greatly on wordplay and even the sound of the words. So a dub is not only a challenge (un-dub-able, you could almost say), it’s an art in itself. Fortunately, FLCL’s dub is far and away one of the best ever made. It’s dead-on, it retains the bizarro-world sense of humor, and it flies by at rapid pace. Just check out the “explanation” of the series’ name in episode one’s manga dinner scene for evidence.

Music & Credits

FLCL has no opening credits, and thankfully so. It works for some shows, and this is one of them. I just can’t imagine it with some overblown animation with the characters zooming by and posing. What it does have is both end credit and in-show (you can hardly call it “incidental”) music by veteran Japanese indie-pop group The Pillows. Their music is so tightly integrated with the show it’s inextricable, creating a crazed rock and roll aesthetic. It doesn’t hurt that their songs are fantastic, somewhere in the neighborhood of Cheap Trick, Guided By Voices, Big Star, and early REM. You’ll never hear a presentation quite like this one, and you’ll never see closing credits quite like the stop-motion scooter either.

Episode Highlights

I think “Marquis de Carabas” (Episode 4 if I’m not mistaken), from the beginning to the final line, is one of the real triumphs of the show. Other than Episode 5’s constant references to “swinging the bat,” which is a lot more obvious, Fooly Cooly’s wild doublespeak is at its apex here. It’s also the only time that Haruko “happens” to someone other than Naota — in this case, the mayor’s daughter. Naota’s dad is a priceless pile of doubletakes.

“She ran her over? The mayor’s daughter?”

“That’s when she started feeling sick.”

“Oh nooooooooo!”

Ninamori and Naota’s aching climactic argument in school makes me think that the writers really have a handle on (or at least a solid memory of) what it’s like to grow up.

Bottom Line

Almost 8 years after the fact, not only is FLCL still a unique animal, it hasn’t been touched technically either. There’s nothing else remotely like it in terms of animation, storytelling methods, or sheer force of personality. It’s one of my all-time favorites, and I seem incapable of getting tired of re-watching it. So once again, hats off to Adult Swim for letting me do just that again.