PinkuBentoBox

It’s been a little more than a week since my last update, and I still haven’t touched Kanon. I have started on Gurren Lagann (lovin’ it), Lucky Star (lovin’ it), and Nanoha StrikerS (grown up Fate-chan~) as promised, but that I’m saving for another entry. I have an excuse for all this, though. As I was making some rounds about town last weekend, my girlfriend and I happened upon a new anime shop just thirty minutes from my house, and we figured we’d check it out. Since I had money to spare, I opened an account, browsed their stock, and rented a couple titles out of curiosity. The results were…poor. About as poor as my opinion on the shop itself.

Okay, little bit of background. A few years ago, there was this awesome anime shop just down the street from the current one, called House of Anime. It was a bit cramped, but it had a shit-ton of merchandise (a whole frickin’ wall of Gunpla, and not all SEED, either), and a nice selection of rental titles. Best of all, its staff and the regular patrons were all incredibly lively, social, intelligent, generally awesome individuals who were fun to hang out with, and a quick five-minute trip to pick up the latest volume of .hack//SIGN would turn into two hours watching random anime and being jovial, jovial nerds. Unfortunately, a couple years ago Bandai caught them peddling Hong Kong bootlegs of licensed shows and they folded. They had it coming, I suppose, but I was sad to see them go, as seeing shitty Region 0s lying around was a small price to pay for the amazing atmosphere of the place and its wide selection of legal, Region 1 rentals.

Cut to now, and this new place, Anime Plus. Apparently it was started by a few of House of Anime’s alumni, but you could never tell from looking at it. Gone is the incredible merchandise; the only things left of that little treasure trove are a small cabinet of gashapon and a cork board with a few Bleach pins in it. Gone is the loyal crowd of awesome nerds to shoot the shit with; the place was empty the couple times I stopped in, and the people at the counter just prefer not to socialize, period. Worst of all, though the selection of rental titles is bigger, there’s also a proportionally larger stock of fucking bootlegs. Now, for all of House of Anime’s bootleg peddling, I could at least respect that they’d replace their boots with the legal DVDs as soon as said DVDs started coming out. But Anime Plus continues pushing shitty, unintelligible boots of things that have been out here for years. They had Chobits in bootleg form. They had Gundam F91 in bootleg form. This is unacceptable. Short of Victory Gundam (which I just want to grit my teeth and forge through as quickly and painlessly as possible), I’d made it a point to just rent Region 1s from these people, but with the proportion of bootlegs to legal releases, that ultimately limited my selection to maybe about fifteen possible titles that I hadn’t already seen. All in all, the place is incredibly seedy compared to the House of Anime of days gone by, and I can’t foresee myself using them much except for shows I’m just trying to quietly wrap up and get out of the way just to say I’ve finished them. If Bandai or Geneon or someone comes down on these people, I honestly couldn’t care less.

So, onto the shows I’ve actually rented from them.

Now, as anyone who knows my taste in anime is aware, I worship Leiji Matsumoto as a high holy icon of Japanese animation. Unfortunately, nobody is perfect it seems, and the six episode Harlock Saga OVA serves as a grim reminder of that sad fact of life. As an anime adaptation of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelung opera, Harlock Saga’s first failing is that it sucks as even a liberal interpretation of the source, only making it through about half of the opera before imagining up some bizarre ending about a pink space goop dragon thing and psychedelic video effects. Its second failing is its awful animation. This thing was made in 1999, yet it looks like something more in the range of 1989 or earlier. I honestly had to check the box and ANN’s encyclopedia entry about five times to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. The animation is stiff, the characters look hideously off-model in virtually every shot (giving Mimeh’s random man-chins and giving Tadashi hair the color and texture of a mud-pie), and the few attempts at CG animation and video special effects are just embarassing. A 3D-modeled Arcadia where you can see the individual polygons and the sort of flashing lights Pokemon would envy are just a few highlights.

The third main failing of Harlock Saga is the fact that it is a complete and utter bastardization of every Matsumoto creation it touches. Every one of them. Most prominent is Mimeh, who is no longer an alien woman serving as Harlock’s lifelong companion and confidant, but rather is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Norse demigod that spends the series wailing lame prophecies and mooching free rides off the Arcadia. Tadashi Daiba, the temperamental youth who is taken under Harlock’s wing in other Matsumoto titles to learn about what it means to be a man, is now some goody-goody rocket scientist who has one moment of importance in the second episode before becoming insignificant background dressing for the rest of the series. Emeraldas and Maetel—two of Matsumoto’s most popular and enduring characters—get about ten minutes’ screen time each at the very start before inexplicably disappearing for the remainder of the series (Emeraldas barely gets any relevant dialogue beyond parroting Tochiro, as a matter of fact). The rest of the Arcadia’s crew beyond first mate Yattaran are just fucking GONE—no Kei, no Doctor Zero, no anybody—while the ship’s lead technician, Maji, is somehow recast as Tadashi’s deceased father. Lastly, there are Harlock and Tochiro, the two most central characters to just about the entire Leijiverse. And beyond the first two episodes, they’re largely irrelevant in their own series. Harlock is little more than a chauffeur through this entire OVA, giving people free rides on the Arcadia while every other character moves the plot. He only becomes genuinely relevant in the last ten minutes of the series, and even then we get none of the bold justice and desire for freedom that typify him in every other story. Tochiro, in one of his few appearances alive, similarly does little beyond spout expositional and narrational dialogue.

So instead of having Matsumoto’s biggest and brightest take starring roles in their own show, Harlock Saga spends the vast bulk of its time focusing on the whiniest, pettiest interpretations of Norse gods I have ever seen. When I watch a Harlock anime, I don’t want four episodes of Odin crying about his crinkled hands and pissing himself doing some Chicken Little act. I want to see Harlock and his allies going on outlandish, swashbuckling adventures in order to preserve absolute freedom for societies smothered by their own self-imposed ignorance and indifference. But no, all we get in Harlock Saga are spineless gods and incredibly dull, uninspired, and outright mangled versions of Harlock, Maetel, and Co. Really, if I were to draw any sort of proper comparison, I would say that Harlock Saga is the Gundam SEED Destiny of Leiji Matsumoto’s body of work. A truly, uncharacteristically bad series that stains a legendary franchise by taking it out of every possible context and failing to provide any sort of coherent, enjoyable story. If you want a Harlock fix, stick to the original TV series. Or the Endless Odyssey OVA. Or the Arcadia of My Youth film. Even the Galaxy Express 999 films, where Harlock as a supporting character plays a bigger role than he does here. Anything but this stinker.

The next anime I rented was so unremarkable, I almost forgot I even rented it: Miyuki-chan in Wonderland. A short, two episode OVA based on a CLAMP manga about lesbianized romps in various Lewis Carroll works, most notably Alice in Wonderland. Now I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking the same thing. Sexy CLAMP women? Comedic lesbian antics? Shameless fanservice from slutty catgirls and queens in S&M gear? Sign me up! But alas, it’s not quite all it’s cracked up to be. It fast-forwards through Carroll’s stories so fast that no character beyond the titular Miyuki gets more than a minute on-screen, effectively doing away with any chance of building up any decent gags, or getting any good, pervy quality time with the sapphic remakes of Wonderland’s denizens, or providing any good reason to really care, period. It’s a cute, novel idea, but perhaps needed a bit more time to live up to its potential.

No, this banner is not a joke. In fact, I feel it perfectly represents this next show.

Next on the chopping block is a DVD that didn’t even work! It got two episodes in and crashed. But then, should I really have expected anything more from a bootleg? I’m talking about Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, the last and (so far) worst in the Universal Century timeline. You see, I told myself a while back that, for better or for worse, I would watch every Gundam anime out there just so I could experience everything the franchise has to offer. Now, while this leads to me picking up oft-overlooked gems like Gundam X and Turn-A Gundam, it also leads to having to sit through shit, like Gundam SEED Destiny and Victory Gundam. What amazes me is that Victory actually has a lot of favor among hardcore Gundam fans, though from what I’ve seen, I have no idea why.

I haven’t seen enough of the actual show to pass a really valid judgment, I’ll admit. But the episodes I’ve seen, what I know of the plot, and knowing that the show contains some supremely retarded things throughout, like a bikini bazooka anti-Gundam team, I honestly can’t see this show as being very good at all. In terms of what I have seen, things seem incredibly dull and derivative thus far. Psychotic, fanatical political body, unwilling Federation, scrappy rebellion made up of ragtag orphans and old fogey military types…it’s Zeta Gundam. It’s the same setup as Zeta Gundam. But it lacks the charismatic characters and genuinely stirring imagery of Zeta Gundam. The cast is either boring or stupid, as main character Uso is about as bland as they come, and rival Chronicle is an embarassment. How in the hell does an elite military officer get his ass handed to him by a podunk, backwater runt half his age? The mobile suits thus far look like soft plastic Playskool toys with their bright colors, rounded edges, and big bug eyes. Even the Gundams look like rounded off toys to keep tots from cutting themselves while playing. And had the production team not heard of staging at all? A kid falling out of the sky with a shredded parachute falls down. He does not fall to tree level, then randomly appear a hundred meters above the trees, just so he can conveniently fly in front of every mobile suit on the battlefield. Gravity doesn’t work that way, and no space colony Newtype Minovsky physics retardation is going to change that.

Luckily I’ve found a site that streams Victory subs. Decent fansubs, too, not Hong Kong Engrish. So I’ll give the show a second chance, but I don’t expect my opinion to change much. Having read spoilers, and knowing what to expect, the sky ahead looks grim.

Finally, to end on a positive note, is the one anime I rented that I actually, thoroughly enjoyed: Otaku no Video. Before there was Genshiken, before there was Comic Party, there was Otaku no Video, the original otaku mockumentary, and the fictional account of Gainax’s rise to fame according to Gainax itself. Watching it, I was actually quite surprised, as it was really much less of a comedy than I’d expected it to be based on the comparisons drawn by others between it and its more recent counterparts. It’s comedic, to be sure, but it wasn’t as dedicated to gags as to celebrating the early 90s otaku lifestyle, and what it lacked in laughs, it made up for in this fascinating (albeit brief) look into various Japanese nerddoms of the past decade. The ending got a bit corny, with the Otaku Land or whatever, and the otaku-based world culture, but the events leading up to it made for a reasonably fun show with some enlightening bits scattered throughout.

What really surprised me most about Otaku no Video, though, were the live-action bits, the interviews with then-Gainax staffers about their otaku days. It was interesting seeing how many were vehemently ashamed of their younger days, and how many still celebrated them, even to the point of casting aside things like a social life. The fact that at least a few of the interviews were completely unscripted makes them all the more fascinating, as these people are not merely making up nonsense based on stereotypes, but are really living the stereotypes at times (which becomes quite unsettling when it comes to things like the guy utterly obsessed with the hentai game character). I have to say, however, that I found the interview with the American ex-Gainax employee more than a bit suspicious. Given that this guy was allegedly screwed over by Gainax, and remained in the country to do missionary work according to his profile, the glossy Japanese nationalism and references to “beautiful devils” that the voice-over and subtitles put into his mouth seem awfully fake.

So, that’s it. Four rentals from that scum hole and only one was worthwhile. Honestly, I can’t see myself going back there. Ever. Especially considering that they hardly have any legal DVDs I haven’t seen that I really have an interest in, and the stale air in the place just makes it seem dirty and shifty. Ah well. If I can manage it, later this weekend I’ll have another blog entry up with my first impressions on Nanoha StrikerS, Lucky Star, and Gurren Lagann. Expect some more positive commentary on those titles. ‘Til then!

—Nagi