PinkuBentoBox

This update is about a week later than it should be. I’ve been pretty much worked off my feet over the last week at work. In fact, up until last night I had barely watched a thing - I went three days straight without watching any anime at all. Though my copy of Volume 1 of Robot did arrive and I’ve read through that twice now. Incredible book, if you get a chance, you should definitely pick it up. Anyway, in this update I’ll have a chat about the remaining series from the ones I announced my intentions to view - Himawari, Yume Tsukai, xxxHolic, .hack//ROOTS, Zegapain and Nana.

Himawari mainly interested me because of the artwork on the website (and the character designs) being by Okama, who is one of my personal favourite artists (though nowhere near the level of Range Murata or Yoshitoshi ABe, neither of which have done anime work years. ). Essentially, Himawari is a comedy about ninjas. Unlike 2×2=Shinobuden, it’s not side-splittingly hillarious, and unlike Kage Kara Mamoru, it’s actually set in a ninja village and whatnot. To be honest, the series is pretty flawed. I’m not going to write it off just yet though, since it has the potential to really improve. The main turn-off for me is that Himawari’s voice is absolutely fucking hideous. This is her first anime, and I just don’t think she has the right sort of voice for a lead character. Something about her tone was like nails on a chalkboard for me. Still, I’ll probably give it another episode or two, because as I said it could still improve.

xxxHolic is a huge annoyance to me. It’s Clamp, and I like Clamp. The manga art is awesome, and the plot is apparently one of their better efforts in the last few years. I can tell that if I could get into it, I would really enjoy the story and characters. Really, on paper it should be an excellent series. There’s just one huge, gaping, rape-your-eyes issue with it. Chaotic Dance. If you read Nagi’s entry on the movie, you probably saw the Chaotic Dance Flash specifically the spindly-legged Kira and Athrun dancing. The sad fact of the matter is that xxxHolic’s TV adaption has the exact same animation style as the movie, only even more exaggerated and awful. I swear that Watanuki was actually getting taller as ep 1 progressed. This whole super-long limbs thing is clearly a stylistic choice and it might have even worked had they not gone to such extremes. Tsubasa also has quite elongated characters (in keeping with Clamp’s current style) but they don’t exaggerate it at all. What really pisses me off is that when they do closeups of the characters they look fine - it’s just these long shots that make everyone, especially Watanuki, look like they used a five-year-old’s drawings of their stick insect collection as key animation. Huge disappointment. I just can’t watch this.

If this whole post seems overly negative, I’m sorry. It’s pretty much all disappointment though. I was kind of expecting that .hack//ROOTS would bomb from the instant I heard it didn’t have a Yuki Kajiura soundtrack any more. What they didn’t tell us is that it also no longer has Yoshiyuki Sadamoto character designs. Certainly his legacy is still there, but the show’s character look has a lot more in common with Madlax than it does with .hack//SIGN. This also has expanded to the backgrounds, sadly. I absolutely loved .hack//SIGN because of the incredible, evocative atmosphere that it creates with its combination of music and visuals. ROOTS fails on this. Ali Project are a great group, but their music doesn’t suit the purpose it’s been put to here. Just like Avenger, the music is misused - there were a few spots where they got things right, such as the scene with Shino and Ovan standing near an elaborate waterfall, but this is easily offset by the number of times that Ali Project’s signature ’satanic carnival music’ vocal style was used during bits of dialogue, totally clashing and making it impossible to hear what was going on properly. Not that you really wanted to because the main character is a fucking tool. Even the OP/ED is disappointing. On the upside, it’s presented in 720p High-Def which is really nice. I might pick this up when it’s done, but if the feel of ROOTS is an indication of what to expect of the games, .hack//G.U. is not on my to-buy list any more.

Predictably, Zegapain also sucks. This is unfortunate because it includes Ayako Kawasumi in a major role, and this usually would make me want to watch it. It’s pretty much a poorly-concieved mecha show that makes very little sense. The characters are uninteresting and the mecha component is all done with low-budget CG animation. This stuff wouldn’t have looked out of place in stuff like Vandread several years ago. The difference being that Vandread didn’t have horribly pixellated explosions everywhere. These things look like a scaled up explosion animation rendered into a camera-aligned quad. If you don’t know what that means, it essentially means they look completely flat, pixellated and unrealistic. The whole thing looks like a glorified computer game, and that’s probably because it essentially is little more than an advertisement for one - Bandai are producing an X360 game, and this is essentially an anime tie-in. I don’t mind game tie-ins to anime, but when the anime is a blatant attempt to legitimise a bad game, I couldn’t care less. Won’t be watching more.

Previously I had posited that Yume Tsukai could be a big sleeper hit this season. Unfortunately it isn’t. Still, unlike the previous four, it’s not bad at all. That said, I’m told that if you’ve read the manga then the anime will be extremely disappointing to you, because apparently the manga is orders of magnitude better (isn’t this usually the case?). The vocal cast in this one is excellent - Ayako Kawasumi, Aya Hisakawa, Mamiko Noto and Tomokazu Seki. Kei Shindou almost seems out of place with an experienced cast like this, but she is also very good in her role. The first episode was an entertaining one, though not quite as wacky as I was lead to expect. Art-wise it’s quite nice, though I can’t help but feel that the girls’ eyes are just a little too small. That’s a purely subjective stylistic complaint though. Unfortunately no groups have showed any interest at all in subbing this show, though this may be because the raws for the first episode were terrible. I’m hoping someone hops on.

The final series on my list is Nana. Nana is the anime adaption of what is apparently the most popular shoujo manga in Japan at the moment. There is also a Live-action movie which has been subbed quite recently. The plot is reasonably simple. Nana “Hachi” Komatsu is a simple 20-year old country girl who is moving to Tokyo to meet her boyfriend, Shouji. On the train, she meets Nana Osaki, who is also 20 years old and is travelling to Tokyo to pursue her dream of becoming a professional musician. The girls basically strike up a friendship based around the huge coincidence - two people going to the same place that are the same age and even have the same name. The original manga is by Ai Yazawa, who some of you may remember from Paradise Kiss. The difference being of course that this looks to be heaps better (dare I say best series of the season?) This is very much intended for a similar audience to Paradise Kiss and Honey & Clover. In other words, it’s not your bog standard kiddy shoujo. Really, there’s not much more to say. Probably a lot of the people that will be interested in this are already aware of it. Live-evil have subbed the first episode and they’ve also done the Live-action film. I’m told the film is hard to follow if you haven’t read the manga though, so I’m holding off on that for now.

Well, that’s basically it. I’ll be making a third update some time in the next few days with my opinions on a few other series that weren’t on my list, such as The Third, Black Lagoon and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.