Madlax aka What’s wrong with the anime industry

Posted on January 26, 2012 by dengar

Young women with gun skills? Check. Mysterious organization that runs the world? Check. Quasi-religious mysticism? Check. Noir only lasted one season, but if you started watching Madlax and thought it was Noir Season 2 I wouldn’t blame you. Madlax isn’t a complete copy of Noir, it does tread new ground after about 20 episodes or so. And the new material is innovative in its own way. What ultimately holds it back, what has held many other shows back over time, is that it still feels too much like a rehash of what came before, rather than something fresh and entertaining.

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Don’t forget the side characters

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Celeste

In alot of ways, what keeps a longer manga engaging isn’t its main characters, but the side characters. Though our initial emotional investments as readers are in the main characters, the supporting cast and their links with those main characters are what keeps the story fresh.

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Because you need a little violence in your life: Dr. Mohiro Kitoh’s fabulous depression

Posted on January 14, 2012 by bateszi

One thing we may deduce about author Mohiro Kitoh from Bokurano and Narutaru is that he probably had a few bad experiences growing up.

It’s otherwise very difficult to understand why his stories about children are quite so fucked-up. Case in post, Narutaru, of which I just finished watching the anime adaptation.

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Does Bandai know something Netflix doesn’t?

Posted on January 7, 2012 by dengar

About a week ago I posted that 2011, for all its problems, was a stable year for anime. It turns out that stability was short lived. In an interview with Justin Sevakis and Chris Macdonald on AnimeNewsNetwork, Bandai Entertainment President and CEO Ken Iyadomi announced Bandai’s decision to stop licensing and releasing shows. Some bloggers (including Charlie Maib from Kotaku via Japanator) have suggested that piracy killed Bandai. But if you look at what Iyadomi said, I think it’s more likely that Bandai Japan is to blame. And not blame in a bad way, blame in the sense that Bandai Japan (full name: Namco Bandai Holdings) made a rational business decision. It decided, maybe prematurely, to protect its profits and let mainstream fans get anime digitally.

We'll miss you Bandai

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Anime Trends 2011: At least no one (of note) went bankrupt

Posted on December 30, 2011 by dengar

All told, 2011 was a stable year in the anime business. No anime company of any worth (so 4Kids doesn’t count) went bankrupt, although over in the manga world TokyoPop bit the bullet. The tsunami and resulting nuclear incident will unfortunately overshadow anything else that happened with anime this year. While there were no dramatic changes in the industry, a number of trends began or picked up steam in 2011. It is these trends, more than any anime production, that will be this year’s industry legacy.

Trend #1: Lawsuits

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Lost Along the Way from Utena to Star Driver

Posted on December 26, 2011 by dengar

bateszi has already ruminated on the connection between Star Driver and Utena and while I’m a bit late to the party, I wanted to add my own reflections. Right now I’m watching Utena for the first time while finishing Star Driver on Crunchyroll. Fortuitously, I just finished Episode 4 of Utena a few hours after watching Episode 21 of Star Driver. The scenes below are from these episodes.

First in Utena:

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Darker than Black is the new black

Posted on December 19, 2011 by dengar

Darker than Black is an enigma. The more I watch it, the less I understand how I feel about it. I wanted to write an article extolling its virtues, for example its deep characters and beautiful art. Then I went back and re-watched season 1 and did a double take, was this the same show I remembered? It was like I was back in the 90s when it was okay for a main character to waste half an episode being introspective instead of advancing the plot. I’d still recommend that people watch it, but be aware that this isn’t the second coming of Cowboy Bebop.

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An odyssey in Haruhi Suzumiya

Posted on December 12, 2011 by bateszi

I sat through all of Endless Eight, or rather, I nearly did. I fully intended to, which is the important thing.

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On Wolf’s Rain

Posted on November 26, 2011 by bateszi

I first watched Wolf’s Rain in 2003, just as I was beginning to ramp up my interest in anime. I remember a few things about it: being absolutely traumatised by its ending and being spell-bound by Yoko Kanno’s music. Following on from the similarly fondly remembered RahXephon, it made a fan of Studio Bones out of me, too. Which is to say, Wolf’s Rain became one of my favourites and just last week, nearly 10 years on(!), I finally re-watched it.

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12 Comments Posted in Anime, Reviews | Tagged , , , , ,

Dear anime industry, think before you tweet

Posted on November 24, 2011 by dengar

My name is Dengar and I have a problem. My problem has a name, Twitter. Ever since I joined, I’ve been addicted to getting rapid news updates. It’s particularly convenient as a way to track anime news from companies like Funimation, Aniplex and Viz. Most of the tweets from the companies are acceptable, if not exactly groundbreaking. But some (like the one pictured below) are blatantly commercial in a thoughtless way.

How not to tweet

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An anatomy of a gaze

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Celeste

Though I suppose anatomy of a pose might be a better title for this post.

I’m in love with by this image of Himari. Rather, boushi-san, or hat-san, as Shouma calls Himari’s possessed form. This image, seen in Mawaru Penguindrum’s second opening, Shounen yo, Ware ni Kaere, has been captivating me for some weeks now.

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36 hours wasn’t enough? Yet another Hunter x Hunter

Posted on November 16, 2011 by dengar

Why base your new show, video game, or movie on an innovative new idea when you can instead re-release a 10 year old one? That is the logic behind making endless sequels. It’s the thinking that brought us Call of Duty 8, Super Mario 10 and now a reboot of Hunter x Hunter.

The original Hunter x Hunter wasn’t awful. Overall, it was a bland action show (note: you can read bateszi’s more positive impression here) that surprised me at times. It had a number of dark and edgy scenes, like when out of nowhere a ten-year-old ripped out his enemy’s heart. The show’s blandness is understandable given that it came out in the late 90s. What is surprising is why Madhouse would decide, ten years later, to reboot a show that already ran 92 mediocre episodes.

I am as confused as the main characters about why this show is airing

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We offer up our heart’s blood: Courage and spirit in Shingeki no Kyojin

Posted on November 12, 2011 by bateszi

Since writing my first post on the manga series Shingeki no Kyojin (the official English title is apparently Attack on Titan,) it’s been licensed for an English-language release by Kodansha USA, whilst a Japanese live-action movie has also been announced for 2013. With the inevitably small film-budget it’ll receive, I’m not convinced it’ll look good enough , but then again, it still sounds better than the forthcoming Akira film!

Last night I finally caught up to volume 5 of the series and, man, I just want to keep going. For those that haven’t read my first post on it, Shingeki no Kyojin is a large-scale survival-horror manga about a future-Earth dominated by man-eating giants (known in the series as Titans.) With humanity on the brink and walled up in one last city, the series begins as the Titans break through the city’s first line of defence.

Imagine any zombie film you’ve ever seen, and then replace the zombies with giants. Mankind’s fucked, right? It’s lucky then that the main character, Eren, can transform into a Titan, too!

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5 Comments Posted in Manga, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , ,

The eyes of a wolf: Ben-To’s awesome

Posted on November 1, 2011 by bateszi

There’s a few different tactics one can employ when approaching a new season of anime. You can either jump straight in during the first week or wait a while longer for the dust to settle; neither choice is perfect, but for this season at least, I decided to wait for 3 episodes to be released before getting my hands dirty with any new series.

If 3 episodes seems an arbitrary amount, that’s because it is. My only logic here is that since I want a decently informed opinion on anime, 3 episodes are better than 1. Any given episode of a series can be misleading, but 3 are more likely to betray a consistent sense of story-telling and quality. Alas, they also take more time to watch, but for the most part, I enjoy watching anime, so that’s not such a drag!

(I say for the most part because Guilty Crown proved so atrocious that I had to quit barely 5 minutes into the 3rd episode amidst a growing sense of vertigo. So, this is what passes for noitaminA now?)

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Sorry women, distributors don’t like you

Posted on October 29, 2011 by dengar

I love when the mainstream media tackles anime. Tomorrow’s New York Times’ features a story about the business opportunities in streaming anime. In its discussion of what shows work, the articles drops this great quote: “The small but avid audience is made up of mostly male viewers aged 18 to 34. Distributors said comedies, sports shows and anything aimed at women tend to not work.”

Hetalia apparently doesn't count

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15 Comments Posted in Anime, Editorials | Tagged , , , ,

How many lawyers does it take to screw up an anime series?

Posted on October 19, 2011 by dengar

Licensing agreements are usually kept top secret for business reasons. That is, until one company (allegedly) breaches the agreement and then goes bankrupt. At that point the court system takes over and the dirty laundry become public. That is exactly what happened when 4Kids got Yu-Gi-Oh! from TV Tokyo.

The upshot of the fighting is that anime fans get a backstage pass to see what an important license contract says. The language of this contract helps explain why, how, and in what form anime is released outside of Japan. Here I’ll discuss form, namely why 4Kids had the right to butcher Yu-Gi-Oh!. The short answer: TV Tokyo said they could.

This anime fan was forced to watch 4Kids' Yu-Gi-Oh! dub

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Blood-C: one long descent into chaos

Posted on October 16, 2011 by bateszi

Series like Blood-C catch my eye. At some point during its airing, I got the impression it was bad: the weekly reviews at Sea Slugs and Moe Sucks say as much and more, but since finishing, I’ve also read takes at chaostangent and S01E01 that say the opposite. Having now seen it for myself over the last week, I agree more with the latter blogs. Like all series that seem to require a little patience, Blood-C has ended up being quite underrated.

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Quantum is .hack as it should have been, albeit now too late

Posted on October 11, 2011 by dengar

.hack//SIGN was one of the first anime shown by Cartoon Network and it left a lasting, negative impression on me: an otherwise brilliant show with a plot that went nowhere.  .Hack//Quantum is the latest iteration of the series.  It is .hack//SIGN as it should have been.  It’s not a remake, just a three episode version with a similar story.  It’s not perfect, but if it had come out eight years ago it could have provided a foundation for subsequent stories.  But this late in the game it is underwhelming.

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