Let’s take this Dai Sato discussion for another spin, shall we?

The above image is from the film My Beautiful Girl Mari. It was released in 2001, and is being distributed in the US by ADV films. Moreover, you can stream it for free courtesy of the Anime News Network. It centers around a dream the protagonist has, as a young boy, while staring at a cat’s eye marble. The film is atomospheric, intense, visually pleasing in the extreme and experimental.

If you didn’t notice already, it’s also Korean.

He even accused people in the anime industry of refusing to teach Asian subcontractors special skills or how to craft stories because that would undermine the position of Japan in the production of anime. Non-Japanese are reduced to cheap mechanical labor, and aren’t invested in the work at all. Sato identified this as a major underlying problem with anime today. — Quote from the article in question.

If we’re to believe Sato’s argument, there shouldn’t be any Korean animation. The only animation occurring outside of Japan (aside from Disney and the West, but we’ll get to that later) should be in the studios Japanese animators outsource to. So how is it that My Beautiful Girl Mari, let alone something like the almost too gross to sit through Aachi & Ssipak exist?

What Sato fails to realize is the greater socio-economic implication of outsourcing: the transfer of skills. In continually outsoucring their inbetweening and background art work to Korean studios like DR MOVIE and their Chinese counterparts, they’ve indirectly taught them the art of animation, in the Japanese style. Where did this “Japanese style” come from? From the times when it was cheap to outsource to Japan, and Disney did it, in the same way that Japan is doing it to Korea and China currently. Put in some skill, throw in a different environment, and leave to ferment for long enough, and creative output will inevitably arise. Anime as we know it is a reverberation of outsourcing.

What Sato is predicting isn’t the end of the anime industry, just the end of Japan’s dominance over it. It’s been around two decades since DR MOVIE and its contemporaries in Korea were established, and well over that since the Macross outsourcing that earned Sato’s ire occurred. And only in the last ten years are we seeing original, imaginative Korean animation. Creative people are everywhere, irreverent of political or economic concerns. And, when given the skills, they will create. My Beautiful Girl Mari has some rough edges, but it also has heart, and a willingness to experiment that seem hard to come by in Japan lately. It’s only a matter of time until Korea finds the stories it wants to tell via animation, and the way they want to do it, and then they’ll set off to impress the world.

And so the question arises: is My Beautiful Girl Mari “anime”? Does “anime” belong to Japan alone? I tumblr’ed about this a while back, but things like Avatar: The Last Airbender, while being American in its origins, is undoubtedly inspired by, and draws from the anime tradition, both in its visual and narrative execution.

Sato’s concern is right, and merited. With countries like Korea, and American-born anime like Avatar are increasingly coming onto the market, what does Japan have to offer? When, despite the angry whinging of  hardcore fans (and undoubtedly, Japanese executives), when things like Avatar are referred to by non-fans as “anime”, what does that leave Japan with? What about the Animatrix? Or before that, Disney’s 1982 The Last Unicorn, animated in Japan by what would become Studio Ghibli? People like Michael Arias, director of Tekkonkinkreet and elephant-in-the-room foreigner? Does it still count as anime if it’s directed by a white man, even if they’re in Japan?

Anime is changing, and it’s doing it in two ways: the kuukei-kei, or airy/atmospheric (the term lines up best with “slice of life”) anime which seems to be getting more air time is a representation of a commoditization of anime. After nearly 50 years, they’ve found the formula that works. And there’s nothing wrong with that – anime is a business too. It’s also becoming more experimental, however. It’s just that said experimentation may not be occurring inside Japan. For every Tatami Galaxy made in Japan, there’s at least one My Beautiful Girl Mari. As Sato says, “Anime has become a “super establishment system,” where nothing can be changed.” That doesn’t mean they’ll be no creativity within anime, it’s just that the term anime either needs to expand beyond the boarders of Japan, or that creativity in animation will find a home in other countries, and Japan, like America, will be left to produce bad cartoons ad infinitum, until something like Avatar comes along, years later, to liven things up again. The future of anime is brighter than Sato prophecizes, but it may not be anime as we know it.

Sato‘s complaints hone in on two separate areas, the first of which concerns how the production of anime is being increasingly out-sourced to cheap labour in neighbouring Asian countries, but more fascinating to me are his latter comments on the quality of story-telling in anime (or, indeed, the lack there-of.)

“Sato was upset with the lack of respect for stories in Japan. He pointed out that “Ergo Proxy,” for which he wrote the story, had DVD box sets around the world, but not in Japan. He also said that many anime fans dismissed “Eureka Seven” as a “Neon Genesis Evangelion” clone without even watching it. The story, setting and characters are totally different, but snap judgments were made based on images of a mysterious blue-haired girl with red eyes piloting a giant robot (both Ayanami Rei and Eureka fit the description). He wondered how much anime fans really are interested in close readings to generate information…” — Quote from the article in question.

Going into this, one should frame Sato‘s comments in the context that his two creations, Eureka Seven and Ergo Proxy, failed to capture large audiences in Japan; note that he compares Eureka Seven to Evangelion, as that is telling of the high hopes he had for it. As such, when he admits that “guys like him get no work,” one should keep in mind that Sato has already had chances to create anime in the past and is probably feeling a little bitter about those experiences. People are not going to keep throwing money at him, but that’s not to say it isn’t being put to good use elsewhere. Studio Bones produced a very (good) Eureka Seven-esque series in Xam’d: Lost Memories in 2008, while Ergo Proxy‘s animation studio, Manglobe, have animated both House of Five Leaves and Michiko to Hatchin in recent years, both of which are idiosyncratic and, well…, artistic and interesting.

It’s not my intention to discredit Sato‘s comments (I’m a big fan of almost everything he’s ever worked on,) but when he’s quoted as saying something like “anime will die out in Japan in a few decades,” it’s important to question any potential biases in his arguments. I’d love to know if he still watches anime? And, if so, what he made of The Tatami Galaxy and Durarara!!? (Questions likely to go unanswered.) He points to “atmosphere type” (kuuki-kei) anime (with K-On! specifically mentioned, as it so often is) as being the problem, but there’s no acknowledgement of the “difficult-type” (muzukashii-kei) work being done elsewhere.

Anyway, does he have a point? A cursory glance at this summer’s selection hardly inspires one’s confidence in the future of anime, but then, the summer and winter seasons have always seemed a waste land in comparison to the fertile crop of autumn and spring. Comparing anime from ten years ago to now reveals a very clear shift towards cute, slice of life escapism, but more of a concern for me is the continuing decline of the male role-model, the lack of which is a telling sign that something’s a little off, and, indeed, tells of an unhealthy lack of diversity in anime right now.

Will the people inspired to create the anime of tomorrow want to create another K-ON? Or another Cowboy Bebop? The former, I suspect, is what many young Japanese animators would kop to, and that’s what worries me most of all. When I look at these seasonal charts, I’m not looking for girls that look cute, but rather, for characters that look cool. I don’t want cute images to idolise; I want characters that inspire me with their actions. Holland, Renton and Eureka inspired me in Eureka Seven; Jet, Spike, Faye and Ed (plus Ein) inspired me in Cowboy Bebop. It will be the death of anime, for me, personally, when people like Dai Sato can’t get any work, but I’m still enjoying anime enough right now to know we’ve not hit rock bottom just yet.

What do you think?

Does Masashi Kishimoto think about how children are depicted in Naruto? Ninja are tools of war, after all, and Konoha trains its children to become ninja; isn’t that wrong? On a base, moral level? Of course, Naruto is intended as entertainment and, as such, there’s a certain amount of distance one feels between it and the real world, but to compare it to another boys-orientated action anime, like One Piece, reveals just how dark a world Kishimoto’s characters are born into, a place where children are trained to fight almost as soon as they can walk.

Kakashi Gaiden is one of the series’ most interesting arcs for precisely this reason. A much younger, school-aged Kakashi and his equally as young team-mates, Obito Uchiha and Rin, are sent to the front-lines of the Third Great Shinobi World War, to fight against (and kill, presumably) another country’s blood-thirsty adult ninja. What’s so surprising is just how fierce and cut-throat the various skirmishes become, not least of all when Kakashi loses an eye to the unseen slash of some heartless bastard’s knife. His comrade Obito, still just a naive boy, cries tears of fear when faced with the enemy, his reaction still one of a child (and a perfectly understandable one at that,) and even though he develops bravery enough to fight back, he still loses his life, caught out by the trick of a more experienced warrior.

Obito, the boy, dies. His left eye, with its newly developed Sharingan, is transplanted into Kakashi’s own damaged eye-socket. And so born is the famous Copy Ninja.

There are larger action scenes in Naruto, bigger pay-offs, more dramatic sacrifices, but Kakashi Gaiden is ferocious and exhilarating because it depicts ninja not as super-heroes, but as real people and children, clashing in battle, where there’s no time to stand still and trade philosophies, but merely the quick and the dead. There’s a moral ambiguity at its core, feelings torn between the vicarious thrill of watching a series of awesome encounters with heroic characters, and the reality of seeing these children maimed and killed by a bunch of hardened, heartless soldiers. It’s thrilling in its triumph, but thoroughly sad, too, which is just the way it should be for such a dark premise.

When faced with the latest offering in the project, Occult Academy, I was determined not to be sucked in. I would watch it, but the cool-looking opening wouldn’t sway me, nor would the conversation with the cab driver in its opening minutes pique my interest. I was a woman not scorned, but bored – and I would not have it happen again. I sat on my throne of good taste, and prepared to get back to waxing poetic about The Tatami Galaxy.

Then the female lead decked her father’s corpse with a chair, wrestler-style, and all of a sudden, I was more than willing to give things a second chance.

Cast beside Shiki and Highschool of the Dead, Summer 2010 has turned out to be zombie-filled good times. Occult Academy starts us in medias res.. twice. Firstly, we are introduced to a man, pleading for a teleport. A column of light appears in front of him, and soon thereafter he is killed.

In the next cut, we’re informed that it is July 1999, and that we are in Nagano. Shortly thereafter, we meet Maya: our classically tsundere, old-school cellphone-wielding leading lady, sporting a short white dress and – pull out your fetish glasses, boys (and girls) – thigh-high black socks. She gets in a taxi cab. To her father’s funeral. In a white dress. Where she proceeds to fight off her father’s risen-from-the-coffin, zombie-ifed corpse. All the while, Maya pronounces the entire event as a hoax to the student body of the Academy. She is powerful, miserly, and a little bit crazy.

Maya has a sharp tongue (she refers to a larger male character as “Porco Rosso” at one point) and a sharp mind, though she hates the occult. In true tsundere form, she hates it due to it breaking her family apart. As she starts her monologue, I readied myself to write Occult Academy off as a failed “comedy with darker undertones”. Then, column of light appears in front of her, landing a naked man straight in front of her horrified, disgusted face. Should you choose to watch this, note the shadows in this scene closely – thumbs up to the animators for sneaking that in. There’s a reason this airs at 1:30am, I suppose.

Occult Academy pulls no punches. It aims to be a feel-good comedy anime about supernatural occurrences in high-school. And frankly – it succeeds. Wthin the first episode it makes jabs at no less than three anime/manga (Porco Rosso, Dengeki Daisy, and 666 Satan), all while set in a scenario that might make J.K. Rowling worry about her intellectual property rights. Should it continue on its current course, Occult Academy is everything a comedy anime should be: and able to poke fun at its own place in the anime world, as well as the larger world of onscreen entertainment.

One Piece. Oh, man. Where do I start.

I had it on hold for nearly a year but my conscience was nagging at me that whole time.

Get back to watching One Piece.

Get back to watching One Piece.

This isn’t a series I can just breeze through, though. I care about these characters. I’m fascinated by this story. When I’m watching One Piece, it basically takes over my life. I have to stop watching everything else because I can’t stop thinking about it.

It’s my favourite anime.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy and admire a lot of other series, but very few of them have this impact on me. I really, honestly, love this show, and I’m glad to have it back.

400 episodes in and it just keeps getting better. Writing this now, I can’t believe that I’ve actually managed to watch 400 episodes of the same flipping show. It hardly feels that long.

Episode 405 is what brought us here, again. Luffy sees his whole crew, his best friends, ostensibly killed in front of his very own eyes. Rendered impotent by Bartholomew Kuma’s power, all he can do is despair as his friends are whipped away from him, one by one.

One Piece is a desperate story. In scenes like these, I always think back to Nami’s struggle against Arlong. Her body language in that scene when she breaks down, when she’s screaming at Luffy to leave her alone, scraping her nails along the ground, trying to push him away. It’s one of the most painful, visceral moments of anime I can remember.

When the Straw Hats lose something, they are not dignified. They care too much to take it lying down. They cry, they scrape, they scream. Luffy is not a calm person. He loses almost everything he loves in this episode and he fights against it with every ounce of his waining strength.

No matter that things seem to be going badly wrong, what one gets from this episode, above all else, is that it would be great to have a friend like him.

Yeah, I’m glad to be back watching One Piece.

This story begins with Kenji Koiso, an awkward high school student who works part-time as an admin for OZ.  Kenji’s otherwise boring summer doing grunt work is interrupted when Natsuki Shinohara, Kenji’s secret love and the most popular girl in school, asks Kenji’s help with an errand.  Kenji agrees and finds himself dragged off to Ueda to bring presents to  Natsuki’s great-grandmother’s 90th birthday.  Kenji arrives at the great-grandmother’s house and learns that Natsuki’s family is rich, huge and eccentric, and that Natsuki wants Kenji to pretend that the two of them are engaged.

Kenji gamely goes along with Natsuki’s plan but his shyness makes it difficult for him to feel comfortable with Natsuki’s family.  He muddles through as best he can, dodging young children and energetic baseball-loving mothers.  Just as Kenji is hitting his stride, a virus hijacks his OZ account and starts destroying the virtual world.  Since this is the future, destroying the virtual world means the real world starts to fall apart as well.  Kenji has to join forces with the Natsuki family to fight the virus and save the world.

If this sounds familiar, a virus attacking the real world by taking over the virtual one, it is also the plot for the movie Digimon Adventure: Our War Game, directed by Hosoda and released in March of 2000.  If you were like me and avoided everything Digimon/Pokemon and didn’t catch this movie (notwithstanding that my interest in Dragon Ball Z at the time hardly redeems me) you can catch up on YouTube.  Still I’d watch Summer Wars before taking the time to watch Our War Game. If you find you really like Summer Wars and you want to see an earlier, rougher, Digimon version, then Our War Game is waiting for you on YouTube.

Now, ranking Summer Wars as better than a Digimon movie may not motivate you to actually see the movie.  What should get you to tune in is the OZ virtual world.  Hosoda stuffed OZ full of a little bit of everything whimsical. There are brightly colored creatures of all shapes and sizes, including two guardian whales, aptly named John and Yoko.  The result is that Oz is one of the most beautiful virtual worlds I have ever seen.  All of the objects stand out in stark contrast to the white, blank backgrounds.  You can get a sense of what OZ looks like by watching a short film that Hosoda directed for Louis Vuitton, called Superflat Monogram, linked below.  Good anime about saving the world needs good fight scenes and those in OZ were my favorite part of the film.  The fight scenes in OZ are a pleasure to watch, full of kicks, counters, flips and feints.

I understood Summer Wars as a reflection on a world that is increasingly virtual.  The risk of a purely digital-based life is that it serves to isolate us and encourages us to hide behind barriers such as avatars.  These guises are convenient and comfortable and they protect us from having to open up and reveal our true selves to others online.  This makes it easier to function because anonymity means that we don’t have to worry about what people think of us.  Relationships in the real world are more difficult, and sometimes more frustrating to develop, but ultimately they are more rewarding, something Hosoda experience, and related to ANN, when he had began forming relationships with members of his wife’s family.  By creating connections with family members, friends and strangers, we are more capable of getting things done.  Of course there is still value in online relationships, the characters achieve victory in many of Hosoda’s by joining forces with a large number of online counterparts.  I also recognize the irony in making these judgments while hiding behind my own avatar.  But I think that it in the end it is the personal, rather than anonymous, relationships that are the most valuable.

(title shamelessly stolen from steampowered…)

One Piece begins with the execution of the Pirate King, Gol D. Roger. His death was intended to symbolize the power of the World Government, but had the opposite effect instead, conceiving the Golden Age of Pirates!

One Piece is full of mythology. What happened in the Void Century, anyway? What about the meaning behind the Poneglyphs? Gol D. Roger plays a massive role in this same mythology and is regarded more as a deity than as the fallible man he actually was. His first mate (Silvers Rayleigh, in episode 400 of the anime) provides us with a differing account of the Pirate King, a perspective not as much concerned with the legend as the man himself.

We learn that Gol D. Roger was dying of an untreatable disease at the time of his execution. He wasn’t caught in the prime of his life, but rather, just wanted to go out with a bang, in the words of Rayleigh, “In the last moment of his life, he (Gol D. Roger) turned his fading “flame of life” into a huge fire that enveloped the world.”

When Sanji asks Rayleigh what happened after they (Gol D. Roger’s crew) conquered the sea, his answer is blunt. They parted ways. The underlying sentiment here is that life goes on, and people come and go. This is said in the presence of the Straw Hats and it’s hard (and heart-breaking) to contemplate them ever separating, but it’s also affective in the way that it highlights fragility of the bonds that tie them (and, by extension, us to our friends) together, and how quickly those bonds can be severed.

Usopp excitedly butts in and tries to ask Rayleigh about Gol D. Roger’s famous treasure (the One Piece,) but Luffy jumps in before Rayleigh can give his answer, screaming that if he’s ever told such a thing, the Straw Hats may as well just break-up there and then, because their enthusiasm for adventure would be lost if they knew exactly where to look.

Usopp’s question might as well be “What is the meaning of life?” Just think, if some one provided you with an irrefutable, specific answer to that question, how would you feel? And how would you feel having finally fulfilled that meaning, too? From that point on, life would be pretty empty, surely? One wonders, how did Gol D. Roger feel at the end of his adventure?

If Luffy ever finds that treasure, One Piece is finished. Quite frankly, I hope he’s searching forever.

Watching anime for a long time (I’m talking years, really,) one can fall into certain patterns of viewing. I’ve grown accustomed to knowing what I like, and what I don’t, and picking the anime I watch according to my own tastes. There’s nothing wrong with this, it fundamentally makes sense, but it also leads one to miss out on certain shows that don’t immediately conform to my personal set of ‘requirements’; not every series is as easy to dismiss as I would like to believe (thank god,) therefore, I have devised a cunning plan.

Every one cour TV series released in the last 10 years (that’s rated over 7.5 (out of 10) on MyAnimeList) is pasted into a numbered list of my own making, from which I’ll then choose what to watch by using a random number generator.

That may sound like a really crazy way of doing things, but it’s actually liberating in the sense that it removes any innate biases from the process and just gets me watching the type of highly-rated anime I’d otherwise never bothered to look at twice. In Maria+Holic, I’ve finally seen my first ever Akiyuki Shinbo (plus SHAFT) series, and then, immediately after that, fate saw fit to point me in the direction of Kannagi.

For a time in 2008, this was the show the anime community was talking about the most, but for me, it looked like just another in a long line of cute-looking harem romances. That’s hardly my favourite genre, and having now seen the whole series, I can’t lie, Kannagi is exactly what I just described, which is no judgment on the quality of the show itself, but you’ll be pretty disappointed if you go into this expecting anything other than a bunch of high-school kids having fun and getting into shouting fights with each other. It’s not subversive in that sense, it won’t surprise you by being something it obviously isn’t, yet it’s crafted with enough care and nuance to suggest that the people working on it are enjoying making anime, loved these characters and wanted to do something with them; a combination that invariably makes for good anime, and, indeed, the last four episodes of Kannagi are great.

Following on from a delightfully uncomfortable (episode-long) adventure into a karaoke bar, the plot comes to the fore and takes a sudden existential twist as Nagi (the girl with the blue hair) is forced to question her forgotten past and fathom her purpose in life (after all, she’s supposed to be a Shinto god incarnate.) When she suddenly disappears, life becomes bleak for the others; nerves are frayed and the veil of good humour is lost to sleepless nights and a sense of complete and utter helplessness. It’s absorbing and I just wish the rest of Kannagi was as focussed.

Those last four episodes could make for a great drama in the same way that The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was a great drama, alas, the preceding 8 episodes are kind of empty. At the highest points of these earlier episodes, the series recalls the geeky comedy and pathos of Genshiken, especially when the characters visit places like a maid café, dress up and act all embarrassed, but mostly, it’s just long stretches of zany comedy and risqué school antics with the minimum of plot and character development tacked on at the end of each episode.

It’s frustrating because Kannagi’s spiritual side is fascinating. One of things that initially kept me coming back was the ending theme, a really beautiful, soulful song that hints at the magical depths of a story we only snatch glimpses of until the finale kicks in. The images I’ve chosen for this review will, I hope, reflect that mystical, darker side of the series, for they are the moments I loved the most.

The thing is like a wolf.

The thing is a wolf.

Thus, it is a thing to be banished.

I’ve been an anime fan for a long time. At 22, the portion of my life in which I’ve been a fan is already half of that; and the period of time in which I’d been exposed to anime is closer to three-quarters that timespan. As such, good titles often fall by the wayside.Such was the case with Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. Produced in 1998, it was relatively new when I was first getting regular access to anime. Needless to say, at 11, dubs of Sailor Moon and Pokemon were infinitely more interesting. And so, without ever making it onto so much as a To-watch list, Jin-Roh left my consciousness for the next nine years. And like all good things, it was not only worth the wait, but indeed, a wait I needed. I don’t think I could have appreciated the movie to the extent that I did even five years ago, let alone ten.

Though he had little to do besides write the screenplay, Mamoru Oshii‘s touch is evident throughout Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. The movie continually threatens to pull the rug out from under your feet, all while providing a structure as organized as latticework. Directed by Oshii’s right-hand man and key animator, Hiroyuki Okiura (after he apparently kicked up a fuss about Oishii‘s handling of some scenes during Ghost in the Shell!) the film begins with a death: a “little red riding hood” delivering bombs to a resistance faction. What follows is a multifaceted account of a country, a man, and an organization. Jin-Roh is a dark film, but one continually punctuated by the light from molotov cocktails. Something’s better than nothing, I suppose.

The introduction to Jin-Roh must be one of the most stupefying experiences I’ve ever had. It starts as a factitious account of postwar Japan, and through a constant series of images, some sad violin notes, and steady narration, somehow warps into something different; all of a sudden we’re unsure of where the history ended and the fiction began. Police dressed like Storm Troopers are pictured marching through Tokyo, fighting a rebellious force of young, angry people who come to be known as “The Sect”. The transition from these still photos to animation comes through a series of images: one depicting a man being gunned down, the second depicting the Special Armored Police turning around, slow and alien.

Immediately after this, we cut to a scene of  a riot. The noise deafens; in contrast with the silence of the preceding images, the continual yelling of the crowd, the sound of brick and bottles hitting the police’s riot gear is cacophonous. A girl silently walks through the chaos, escapes through the gutters, only to be found by members of Armored Police. Fuse, our protagonist and a member of this unit asks her “why?” to which she shakes her head, silently, and pulls the cord out of the explosive she carries. Fuse spends the rest of the movie contemplating this question, and wondering why he receives no blame, all while repeatedly meeting with a girl that is her exact likeness.

The introduction’s fact-into-fiction transition is mirrored in the copy of Little Red Riding Hood received by the deceased girl’s would-be sister: in this case, the story begins with Little Red Riding Hood scraping her skin raw to escape clothing made of metal, then setting off into the woods, where she is forced to choose between the path of pins or the path of needles. For most, this is an unfamilliar permutation of the tale. The beastly, though elegant Fuse narrates the wolf’s lines near the end, in a ghastly way.

Fuse spends the entire movie in a kind of half-light: he reenters training on the behest of his superiors, meets with but never seems to advance very far with the female lead, Nanami, and on a metaphorical level flickers between being a beast and a human. The scenes involving Fuse almost perfectly flip from day to night abruptly, from light to pitch dark. The “beast” to be banished is the secret unit within the Special Armored Police itself, as other factions within the government seek either to absorb or slander its name. Either way, as a  time of peace seems to be settling on the nation, the era of a heavily-armed super-elite police force is drawing quickly to a close.

On the whole, Jin-Roh is presented with a pragmatism and verisimilitude which Oshii seems to have moved away from as his career progressed – the sky-high glittering church scene from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence comes to mind. In Jin-Roh, There are jurisdictions to be dealt with, and the guerilla warfare the movie deals with is a clear nod towards Vietnam’s political and military strife decades earlier, moreover Japan’s own political situation at the time. It is cinematic in its execution, crystalline in structure, and atmospheric in the extreme, and well worth the watch.

If just because there’s something exciting about proving yourself wrong every now and then, I’m trying to watch a bunch of recent series that I’ve snubbed or otherwise ignored in past. This all started when, on a whim, I began watching the kendo anime Bamboo Blade and felt stupid for ignoring it for so long.

Ga-Rei -Zero- is another amongst those I’d passed over in recent years, and, well, it’s a violent story about monsters and stuff, too! If nothing else, I knew I’d get to see some weird creatures breathing fire and crushing people underfoot!

Having now seen the whole lot, though, I will freely admit that it’s also quite good, let down only by the occasional lapses into weak humour and illogical, frustrating angst. It’s the kind of show where the lead character, Kagura, is forced to kill her demoniacally possessed (now-cannibal) school nurse, only to be guilt-tripped by her dumb class-mates for having done the deed, the very same weepy girls the school nurse had been trying to bash to death just seconds earlier. It’s also a show where Norio Wakamoto is voicing one of his non- Mechazawa funny characters and, sadly, isn’t very funny at all.

Alas, I’m only complaining because, as a whole, Ga-Rei -Zero- is like Natsume Yuujinchou’s evil twin. At the centre of both are characters in contact with the ‘spirit world’, but where Natsume’s spirits are fundamentally well meaning (if just a little misunderstood,) Ga-Rei -Zero-’s are snarling, fanged hell-beasts. As is evident in the first two episodes in particular, the show takes no prisoners; characters are painfully maimed or outright murdered, many of them good guys trying to do the right thing but just in way over their heads.

At its best, Ga-Rei -Zero- is completely unpredictable. Swords are mechanically propelled through the air, as the gradual fall of Yomi, the series’ truest villain, culminates in a number of deliciously cold, over the top face-offs versus dear fiancés and best friends (no sympathy is spared.) The craziest of all has to be when (a recently-turned-evil) Yomi fights her wheel-chair bound chief, the wheels spiked and zooming around at a crazy rate of knots; one of her legs, it emerges, is prosthetic and sheaths a machine gun (attached to the stump, of course.) I’ll admit it, I laughed.

It’s a series at its most infectious and fun when chaos abounds and heads roll, so much so that it’s a shame when it inevitably slows down and delves into episode long bouts of guilty consciences and high-school hijinks (all in the name of ‘character development’ (yawn,)) but with only 12 episodes to spare, that’s hardly enough to ruin what is an exciting and bloody spectacle.