PinkuBentoBox

First off, sorry about the delay. Graduation hassles (I’m now officially an honors grad with a BFA in Animation), vacations, the job search (someone hire me!), and various other things have all conspired to take up a lot of my time, and as a result I couldn’t quite get back into the swing of watching animu on a regular basis. But, with only the job search left to worry about (no, seriously, somebody give me work), I’m now in the process of resolving that, and have actually gotten pretty far into a couple shows in the past few days. Unfortunately, the one I enjoyed I’m currently unable to watch any more of, and the one that sucks is the only one I have full access to. More on that in a minute.

Secondly, I’d like to direct your collective attentions to a new blog on the scene, TsunTsun, run by a very dear person to me, Marmot. She’s doing a great job so far, and I hope you give her as much support as you’ve given us.

Okay, on to it.

As those of you who followed my last few bloggings remember, I hate Victory Gundam. It’s more like Failure Gundam. Nonetheless, because it’s Gundam, and because I told myself I’d watch all the Gundam anime out there eventually, I’m stuck having to sit through it. Luckily, streaming media site Crunchyroll has the whole thing up for viewing, so finding it hasn’t been too much of a hassle, and I’ll be able to get through it quickly and not have it take up any harddrive space in the process.

So far I’m up to episode eight, and so far it’s actually worse than I thought it’d be, amazingly enough. Victory’s opening episodes are like that stretch in Gundam SEED Destiny where the Minerva sat in the Indian Ocean for 10-12 episodes and did jack shit, while the same battle between the Minerva, Orb, and Freedom was repeated two or three times almost exactly. It’s dull, repetitive, and we’re given little reason why it just keeps happening. Only at least Destiny did something cool beforehand with the colony drop and all, Victory started this way. Zanscare sends a fucking ugly mobile suit with a supposed “ace pilot” at the controls, the League Militaire fights it off in a hilariously inept manner, Usso and Shakti bitch and moan and threaten to desert, they desert, they come back when the League Militaire prove to be just too fucking incompetent to do anything without them, and then we come right back to another fucking ugly enemy mobile suit with a supposed “ace pilot” at the controls. Add in a bunch of asinine asides with this Fuala Griffon woman scheming to get those meddling kids in the League Militaire, and we have a recipe for pointlessness playing out in an infinite loop of sheer crap.

And what’s worse is we’re never told why any of this is happening. Just what the fuck is the plot here? Why the fuck are these factions fighting? You’d think we’d be told something eight full episodes into the series, but so far it’s just some whining farmboy and his meek, babysitter girlfriend constantly bailing out an utter failure of a rebellion against some equally incapable military goons. Nothing more. I mean yeah, you could say that some shows I’ve enjoyed, like Eureka Seven, did the same “hide the plot from the audience” act, but at least Eureka Seven threw you a fucking bone once in a while and rather fairly spaced out hints to the plot throughout the show before finally spilling it. And at least Eureka Seven had some compelling character development to tide you over. Victory hasn’t given so much as a single Milkbone crumb about the plot, and the characters are beyond bland.

Oh, but they’re not just bland, but they’re complete fucking idiots. Good to know “elite ace team” in the year UC0153 translates to insubordinate twats who’d sooner kill each other in petty squabbles than actually use any real military expertise to take down the single fucking amateur enemy that they have ridiculously outnumbered. And when the fuck will Usso make up his damn mind about whether he’s staying to pilot the Victory or going home to Casserole-town? Every episode he changes his mind. And where the hell is Shakti getting this notion that Usso’s become a bloodthirsty murderer after all of two or three battles, despite the fact that he continues to act like a bumblefucking backwater buffoon to the audience? And who the hell is dumb enough to capture the highest-ranking member of the enemy faction—the guy that knows more than anyone else about the forces he commands—and then executes him after spending maybe two minutes lobbing softball questions at him during his “interrogation?” No drugs? No torture? Just ask him two or three questions and toss him to the guillotine?

Speaking of the guillotine, that whole bit just looked silly and overdone. With the characters being as bland as they are, and with the only ones the audience knows so far being Usso, Katejina, Shakti, Marvet, & Chronicle, how the fuck are we really expected to care enough about this old codger to make his beheading anything more than ridiculous, clunky, melodramatic drivel? I mean honestly, this has to be the most faceless, unremarkable anime cast I’ve seen yet. Nobody stands out as even remotely interesting, and I’ve had a harder time remembering character names here than in anything else I’ve seen in recent memory because I just don’t give a shit about a single damn one of them. The worst part is that I know it gets worse. I know the Shrike Team are coming in the next few episodes, and the whole point behind them is to have more fresh meat with names attached to them to kill off to sate Tomino’s sick murder fetish. I just hope that the plot magically appears before then, or else I just may have to give this steaming pile of shit the boot a little early.

On a brighter note is a grim little show I wish I could see the rest of. A while back, Marmot loaned me the first two volumes of Requiem from the Darkness, known as Hundred Stories in its native Japanland, and I only recently got around to actually watching them. Basic premise behind the show is that Sanae Kobayashi voices a sexy, fiery-tempered ghost chick with big tits who can barely keep her clothes on. She wanders the feudal Japanese countryside being coy and doing ghosty sorts of things while her kimono just barely covers up her enormous breasts and shapely ass. Yeah. But seriously, there’s a lot more to it than just that. It’s also a fun, nonchalant horror romp where a putz of an aspiring writer follows around a trio of ghosts as they commit elaborate punishments on various evil people with some similarity to classic Japanese horror stories.

The whole thing is told in a vaguely nonlinear fashion somewhat akin to Boogiepop Phantom, and animated in a visual style somewhere between Soultaker’s extreme camera angles and Gankutsuou’s Photoshop filter colors, and it’s all pretty fun to watch. There’s a twist in every episode, and the order of events actually challenges the audience to try and piece everything together alongside main character Momosuke. Still, everything isn’t quite perfect. Sometimes the writers make the story a little too convoluted, and the whole episode just becomes a pain to drudge through until the big reveal at the end when it’s all actually explained (the episode with the mass-murdering tanuki springs to mind). And, being a late-night TV series for insomniac college students back in Japan, the slim animation budget still peeks through the unique stylistic approach from time to time. But these are really minor complaints, when all’s said and done.

Beyond the fun visuals and backwards storytelling, though, the characters really sell the series. Momosuke, the writer, is a bit of a wimp, but unlike most wimpy anime protagonists, he’s a wimp within reason, what with being witness to (and even unwitting pawn in) things like ghost horses beheading inn patrons and cross-dressing samurai posing as willow trees murdering pregnant wives. He’s a likable dork and slacker with an endearing side to him. Mataichi, the leader of the ghost trio, proves to be sufficiently menacing when he wants to be, but what really makes him shine is his blasé attitude and the perpetual expression he carries through most of the series. Seeing him constantly irritate everyone around him and barely batting an eye at it is pure fun in and of itself. The giant shapeshifter Nagamimi, voiced by Norio Wakamoto, is…voiced by Norio Wakamoto. What character of his hasn’t been a lovable show-stealer? And then, of course, there’s Ogin, the aforementioned Sanae Kobayashi eye candy, who’s as fun to watch for her interactions with Momosuke and Mataichi as for her assets (oh God, her assets!). The interactions between the four and the way they go about their tasks in each episode makes for a jolly fun show, and really I have a hard time recalling very many other protagonist quartets in anime with as much chemistry between them as these four.

The real shame of it all is that these two volumes are all Marmot has at the moment, and neither of us can really afford to go out and buy the rest, so we’re both kinda stuck at episode seven for the foreseeable future. I’d like to see this series through to the end, because it seems like a really nice, underrated gem, and hopefully the opportunity will arise sooner than later.

So, that’s all I have to report on at the moment. Some pretty good and some reeeeeally bad. There are about ten separate shows I plan to dive into (or back into in some cases) here at the moment, and while I can’t guarantee which ones you’ll hear about next (yes, I’ve given up on predicting what I’ll watch next after still not getting to that Kanon and Nanoha StrikerS I promised in previous bloggings), I can tell you you’ll hear a little something about each of them at some point. ‘Til then!

—Nagi