What Aniplex needs

The recent news concerning the demise of Bandai in the United States should sadden anime fans living in Region 1 but it was hardly unexpected news. Instead, the reason why Bandai is shutting down now is the surprising part. The Japanese puppet masters behind the American subsidiary decided that if the American consumer would not adhere to a similar model as the Japanese consumer then they would just close the American subsidiary down and try to entice the American hard-core anime fans into importing Japanese media at Japanese market prices because the alternative – anime at a reasonable price that could be reverse imported – would threaten the stability of the Japanese market.

While perusing the articles about Bandai I had a light bulb moment concerning the impending English adaptation of Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Those reading can probably guess where this is heading but before I get to discussing the recently released English trailer I have to establish something first.

I am not an elitist anime fan who only watches anime subtitled since it’s the “purer”, innately “better” way to do it – I mainly watch anime subtitled because, in general, the quality of vocal acting is higher from the Japanese.  That’s not say there are no good English dubs; for example: FLCL, Ghost in the Shell:SAC, all Studio Ghibli movies, Baccano, Yu Yu Hakusho all come quickly to mind. To hear what a good dub sounds like here’s a few videos.

This one’s a bit old-school

This one’s a bit NSFW

This one’s a bit violent

This one’s a bit awesome

The plan that Aniplex is using for the Region 1 (aka Canada and the United States aka R1) release of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (PM3) is three volumes of 4 episodes each in 3 different options – bare-bones DVD, bare-bones Blu-Ray, special edition DVD/Blu-Ray combo. Assuming an actual price of $25/volume, $35/volume, and $65/volume, respectively, for the three options that works out to $75, $105, $195 to purchase PM3.

From a personal standpoint it doesn’t bother me much that Aniplex is using an outdated and pricier sales plan for PM3 in view of the fact that I’ve already seen PM3 and know if there is one show that is theoretically worth paying that much more for, it’s this one. The problem comes from the personal desire to see PM3 do well over here and realizing that it probably won’t.

Oh sure, PM3 will sell well for a “niche” title (fans who watched it already through non-official means will see to that) but it’s the type of anime that could take the entire R1 anime fandom by storm and be talked about and watched in the future like Cowboy Bebop or Evangelion or FLCL are now. Which is what I mean when I say PM3 will fail in America; it will never remotely approach the impact in R1 it could have and the anime industry will have missed yet another the chance to reinvigorate and grow the market here.

The first step in this failure is the higher price point. To pretend that offering a series at a much higher cost won’t present a significant hurdle in selling PM3 to the large base of casual anime fans is to live in a fantasy world. How many people unfamiliar with PM3 will jump at the chance to pay a minimum of $75 dollars for a 12 episode series when for $8 they could buy AIR, $18 to purchase Bamboo Blade, and $35 to get both seasons of Birdy the Mighty Decode in one box set?  This is just a first step; it’s still possible to overcome this pricing structure and convince the multitudes to watch and buy PM3 if Aniplex is sufficiently savvy. However, judging from the English trailer this does not seem to be the case; I count three big problems of this trailer whose job is to convince people unfamiliar with Puella Magi Madoka Magica into buying it.

Trailer needed some of this in it.

The first problem is that the English dub is atrocious and will actively turn off potential viewers. How will someone who has grown up surrounded by books, magazines, television shows, movies, and music that – no matter how vapid or deep – are all well-produced react to a trailer that contains so many cringe-worthy moments? Here’s a hint, it’s not going to be rushing out to purchase PM3. I’d be surprised if these potential buyers even get to the point when they see how much it’s going to cost to buy the series and compare it what could be bought for the same price.  There was one comment I saw at Anime News Network that I loved. The person wrote saying that after listening to the trailer for a third time he thought the dub sounded good. Think about that. Here’s someone who actively wants to like the dub and it still took three tries for him/her/it to succeed in drinking the kool-aid. This was an easy task to complete for this viewer and the trailer almost failed at it. Imagine a normal consumer; this dub won’t get do-overs and mulligans to convince that person into buying Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

(As an aside, the argument that the dub is good in the actual show is not a valid counter argument. If the trailer fails to convince a potential buyer into purchasing PM3 then there’s nothing to watch and discover that the “dub wasn’t that bad after-all”. )

Before moving on, I wanted to post a clip that does a much better job with it’s English dub so one could do a bit of comparing and contrasting. The clip in question is for the excellent series Bamboo Blade, another anime full of teenage girls (which normally seem like the English dubbers kryptonite).

The second problem is the reliance on the assumption that anime fandom in R1 is on a similar page as Japanese fandom. This a bad assumption to make and yet another nail in the coffin for PM3.  Even in this age of streaming anime, the R1 anime fan that sticks to official sources to watch anime is still only getting a skewed, partial picture of what “anime” encompasses. In Japan PM3 proves it’s possible to successfully sell a series just by saying that Shaft will be animating, Akiyuki Shinbou will be directing, Ume Aoki will design the characters, and Gen Urobuchi will be writing the script. These names mean something over there but that’s not really the case over here (exceptions include well-informed fans and fans that pick stuff up from fansub-watching friends). For these names to mean something, numerous anime in various genres over the past decade would have needed to get licensed and dubbed first to build up the needed groups of fans to mirror their Japanese counterparts.

By relying on the star power of the staff to sell PM3 and hiding the true nature of the series, the second problem of the trailer gives rise to the third problem; namely, it does not explain, excite, and entice prospective buyers. On a fundamental level people expect a trailer to be representative of the show and the trailer of PM3 is for a completely different show then what PM3 actually is. This bait-n-switch was very similar to the Japanese trailer but does anyone at Aniplex realize that there’s a difference between tricking people who are watching a TV program and tricking people paying a not insignificant amount of money for a DVD or Blu-Ray? There are going to be people who won’t get turned off by the high prices or the bad acting and actually found the trailer convincing enough to buy Puella Magi Madoka Magica who will then feel betrayed when what looked like a cute magic-girl anime turns out to be everything but cute. Will this turn these people into bigger anime fans or will this turn them into more cautious fans? Perhaps, the types of fans that won’t mind going through not-official channels to ensure they never get duped out of their money again?

And don’t think this won’t happen. Who else is going to buy PM3 – remember, we’re not talking about those fans that have already seen it but the large number of more casual anime fans – when those who’d enjoy where the story goes have no clue that PM3 has higher aspirations? I’m not saying the trailer should spoil the series but there were several scenes early in the show that made Kyubey’s offer seem a bit suspicious and signaled to the viewers that something more was going on. These scenes would draw potential buyers in because they’d want to unravel the mystery of Kyubey and to find out what happens when you “make a contract” with Kyubey. Of course, decent acting would help; for starters, Kyubey’s English voice has none of that slightly creepy edge his Japanese voice had.

To see a trailer that successfully explains, excites, and entices check out this trailer for Jellyfish Princess.

This trailer does the near-Herculean task of getting my hyped for an anime I’ve already seen twice and has an ending I find less-then satisfying. I’m definitely buying this anime when it comes out.

Here’s another example:

I realize I’ve written near 1600 words when I could have just said the trailer “sucks” and used the hours I spent over the last week writing this to instead cover the new Winter season anime (which pretty much rocks in comparison to the Fall season) but Puella Magi Madoka Magica deserves better and the anime fans in Region 1 deserve better as well. Which leads me back to why Bandai’s demise reminded me of Aniplex’s R1 plan Puella Magi Madoka Magica – it truly does take a R1 company to understand how to sell anime to those fans living in Region 1.

Almost forget here’s a the trailer in question:

Surprisingly, it’s not this show.

Implicitly stated at the start of any show, anime or otherwise, is a promise of some sort to the viewers about what they can expect to see accomplished by the show. It might be a spectacular CG explosion, an opening monologue by one of the main characters, or an opening theme song with a montage of the various characters of the show doing a variety of things but, whatever it is, it’s there.  If the viewer is amicable towards this promise then, chances are, the viewer will decide to continue watching the show with this promise morphing into what’s expected of the show.

Savvy creators use the formation of the show’s promise to apply spin to the viewing experience. At times only promising a little is the way to go: it’s not a shallow, failed romantic comedy but merely a well-animated fan service anime or it’s not an anime with a train wreck of a plot, so poorly constructed that a four-year old could do better but merely a fun romp that’s designed to get licensed as a kids show overseas. Other times it’s best to promise too much: that high-concept, big budget anime isn’t a failure even with it’s poor pacing, plot, characters, and characterization because it was ambitious or that anime that promises funny comedy, serious drama, and tasteful fan service isn’t a failure even when it delivers none of that because it’s fun to watch a train wreck.

Of course, promising too little or too much might backfire on the creator. The viewers might decide to move to an anime promising more or the viewers decide watching one series that fails as hard as Fractale did is enough. So, it’s really a two-edged sword for creators and in lesser hands, a recipe for disaster. This season, one anime in particular stuck out as so completely and utterly failing at what it promised to do without providing so much as a decent excuse.

That anime is Kamisama no Memo-chou (God’s Memo Pad).

The biggest, most energetic promise of Kamisama no Memo-chou is it’s an empowering manifesto for NEET’s (people not in Education, Employment, or Training) and their worth in society. It’s mentioned everywhere; it’s even specifically expounded upon by the characters in the anime – Alice repeatedly says that she follows a NEET code and that she’s a NEET detective, for example. So it’s all the more baffling to realize that the creators take great pains to actively work completely contrary to this vocal promise. Take Alice, the genius hikikomori detective, she’s not actually a NEET. She’s a self-employed detective that has an office and accepts paying clients (even the clients that don’t pay in money will render some service to her). She’s not even a hikikomori; it’s more like she’s just lazy and doesn’t like to go outside but even then she still goes outside every other episode or so. (Much more often than the woman who runs the ramen shop appears to.) Then there’s the main character; he’s so generic I can’t remember his name, but, he’s a high school student and works part-time at the ramen shop and is in training to be a yakuza gangster. He’s like an anti-NEET.

This wasn’t a hard promise to keep; look at Scooby-Doo, it fits the bill perfectly for a show about NEET detectives.

The other big promise of Kamisama no Memo-chou is the idea of Alice being a genius detective that uses the latest technology to get the information needed to solve any case from the comfort of her bed. This idea is reinforced by her impressive computer with it’s dozens of monitors but again the creators seem to actively work against this promise  the moment it’s formulated. The final story arc is freshest in my mind so let’s use it. When the time comes for our intrepid detectives to find the hideout of the people behind the drug Angel Fix, what do they do? What does Alice and all her intelligence and supposed computer prowess do? If your answer starts with either Alice doing something with a computer or putting on her thinking cap than you’d be wrong. Apparently, the right answer is you need an assistant willing to take the drug himself and someone to tail him to see where he walks off to.

Asinine. Even if Alice wasn’t supposed to be genius and a computer geek, the creators of Kamisama no Memo-chou are truly and completely dimwitted.

There are so many ways our heroes could have discovered where the hideout is without anyone taking the drug. For instance, if Angel Fix was such an epidemic then there should have been a large amount of people wildly walking towards the drug hideout that there should be multiple ways to track where they go. Check and collate police reports of where they arrest people under the effect of Angel Fix; look for them on security camera footage; trawl Twitter for people who mention people acting funny in public and cross-reference their GPS data; search the backgrounds of pictures uploaded for people under the influence. I’m not even sure that Alice would need a computer A.I. to help; she might just need a moderately clever computer program. Heck, a slightly less high-tech solution would involve implanting a GPS tracker in both drug dealers and monitoring where they go. There was really no legitimate reason for the assistant to take the drug. (Even if they were so hell-bent on having someone take the drug, why not administer it one of the drug dealers they captured?)

Like I said earlier, if Kamisama no Memo-chou had a good excuse like interesting and thrilling mysteries then it would have gone a long way to excusing the complete failure to live up to either of these two major promises; however, the mysteries were barely adequate. I’ll give them a little credit for being better than the mysteries found in Gosick but Sherlock they ain’t. (Check out the new Sherlock series from the BBC to see what good writing makes possible in mysteries set in modern times.)

Kamisama no Memo-chou wasn’t the worse anime of the season but it was worst self-declared failure. If only it would have better met what it promised to be or better tailored what it promised to it’s actual content then it might not have felt like such a colossal waste of time and potential.

With Gonzo’s gamble for resurrection centered on returning to one of their best series, Last Exile, with a new series called Last Exile: Ginyoku no Fam coming out this Fall, a rewatch of the first Last Exile seemed in order except I was very leery of doing so. Old favorites from when I was first becoming an anime fan haven’t faired that well recently. Paranoia Agent was still as awesome as I remember it (thanks to being done by Satoshi Kon) but I outright hated Witch Hunter Robin and found Kenshin a chore to get through. I didn’t want to lose another one and Gonzo’s later “quality” anime wasn’t reassuring me.

Popping the first episode in, I found myself cringing at the dub and then snickering at it. Did I really once think this was a good dub? Keanu Reeves has more life in his performances then what this dub displayed. A switch to subs was quickly implemented but I worried that this was just the first step to Last Exile’s demise. I watched a few episodes looking for the spiral down to begin but it didn’t and then I watched a few more episodes and then a few more. Last Exile was holding its ground; it wasn’t as good as I remember it but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it could be.

This was a qualified win as far as I was concerned.

The animation still looked pretty good, not bad for an anime that’s eight years old. About half of the CG actually worked with the animation, a far higher percentage that I’m used to seeing from anime of that vintage. (It’s still common to find anime that the CG elements stick out.) The characters were developed competently for the roles they had to play. The plot remained interesting, even when knowing the big reveals at the end. The storytelling was adequate. If I was writing a series review it would start like this:

Last Exile

Final Series Score: 8/12 B+
Rewatchablity: 2/5 – Below Average
Ending: 2.5/5 – Average
Animation: 3/5 – Average to Medium
Pros: Interesting world building, good production values – the animation still looks good and the music is still memorable, competent plotting and storytelling that doesn’t over-reach or under-reach
Cons: Ending could have been improved, the middle part of the series bogs down a bit, the side characters are more interesting than the main characters, could have explained the world and why the characters needed to do what they did more

As a side note, one thing that didn’t surprise me about rewatching Last Exile was that my favorite character has changed. This has happened with other older series when I rewatch them. The biggest example of this was in Kenshin; originally, Kenshin was my favorite by a wide margin but when I rewatched the series last year I found Megumi (the female doctor) to be my clear favorite. For this Last Exile rewatch, I found myself shifting from Alex Row as my favorite to Dio. This change helps the new series because I’m now extremely happy to see that Dio’s coming back for the new series.

So, my fond memories of Last Exile were battered but at the end they were still standing. Knowing how the plot unfolds takes some of the enjoyment out of the series but I most definitely recommend watching Last Exile to anyone that hasn’t seen it before. I’m not sure how important watching this series is to the enjoyment of the new series but there’s still time to finish Last Exile and there’s no reason to miss it.

I’ll leave you with a bit of trivia I thought very interesting. As a novice follower of the vocal actors in Japan, I know that sadly many seiyuu don’t have long careers because agencies want to push their newest stars. Therefore, I wasn’t expecting to recognize the Japanese cast to Last Exile because the anime was eight years old but imagine my surprise when I saw three names that even this novice knows: Chiwa Saitou, Eri Kitamura, and Kana Hanazawa. If the names don’t ring a bell – Chiwa Saitou is probably best known today for voicing Homura from Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Senjougahara from Bakemonogatari, Eri Kitamura for voicing Yui from Angel Beats and Sayaka from PM3 and Kanade Suzutsuki from Mayo Chiki!, and Kana Hanazawa for Kobato Hanato from Kobato and Kuroneko from Ore no Imouto and Tsukimi from Jellyfish Princess and a ton of other anime. The piece of trivia comes from looking at their histories as seiyuu. Last Exile was the very first anime Eri Kitamura and Kana Hanazawa worked on and nearly the first for Chiwa Saitou. Interesting, no? Well I thought so, I wonder where these three would be if it wasn’t for Last Exile.

And what was up with the one guy that looks Asian?!? He is literally the only Asian person in the entire anime and, really, does he need to look that Asian? If an American drew him like that it would probably be considered racist.

Filed under: anime, anime rants/views, series review

I’m starting to look over the upcoming fall anime series and show I’d most want to see is the one I don’t think will be (at least for right now) – namely, a fourth Lupin the Third series. Scamp, over at The Cart Driver, reminded me that it was announced that this fall’s Lupin project was going to be yet another TV special but I had already decided that the lack of publicity that would surround a new Lupin series meant we still weren’t getting a TV series. They could still surprise us and pull a Kyoto Animation but I’m not sure how fans would take watching Lupin commit the same crime 8 times over with the only difference between the eight being what Fujiko wears.

Which is disappointing but so is the thought that even if we would get a new Lupin TV series, the people creating it would be the same people who do such a sub-par job on the yearly TV specials/movies that we’ve been subjected too over the years. What the Lupin franchise really needs is a reboot and I feel the need to display my limited understanding of how anime operates so here’s my idea . Constructive dissenting opinions are always welcome .

For me, the first step in a Lupin reboot is picking the right animation studio to handle it; every studio has its strengths and weaknesses that would shade the resultant product. For example, a Bones Lupin would bring serious animation quality but they’d also pace the show poorly and make a mess of the ending. A Kyoto Animation Lupin would be even better animated but there’d be no fan service involved which for a womanizer like Lupin would lessen the characters in the anime. A ZEXCS Lupin would be completely average and forgettable. A Sunrise Lupin would somehow involve lots of mecha and pretty much be a train wreck with a slight chance of being awesome anyways. A Shaft Lupin would be an interesting visual exercise but it would only be 90% done when aired on TV and Lupin isn’t the type of character that I think they could get right. Let’s not even imagine what Studio Deen would do with Lupin. A Gainax Lupin would be awesome because they understand the importance of over-the-top absurdness needed for Lupin and there’d be great animation but Gainax seems to only really shine with original material with it’s poor history of adapting material vs. anime like Gurren Lagann, Panty and Stocking, FLCL, etc..

The choice is actually pretty clear, especially with their recent adaptation of Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera – it’s Brain’s Base. They can do a wide variety of series types from the slow, contemplative Natsume Yuujinchou to the bloody, action-packed Baccano to the fast-paced, gleefully fan servicey comedy of Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera. Their stuff always has high production values and picking Brain’s Base means getting their number one director – Takahiro Oomori – to direct.

As for the rest of the staff, I just don’t know enough to make a pick/educated guess at who’d best be writer, animation director, music, series composition, etc. so let’s move on to voice actors. I do think it’s time to get newer, younger seiyuu to voice the main characters in Lupin. For, one, because the current ones that have been doing the voices since the beginning will eventually reach a point where they can’t work anymore and,  two, because if Dr. Who can switch it’s main character every couple of years – anyone can – and, three, new actors would bring new quirks to their characters.

For the role of Lupin I can think of two choices: Daisuke Ono and Mamoru Miyano with Mamoru Miyano being my first choice. He’s currently voicing Okabe aka the Mad Scientist in Steins;Gate and he also recently voiced Takuto in Star Driver. Both of these roles showcase the energy, the Sauvé, and the range of emotions needed to bring Lupin to life. Daisuke Ono would give Lupin an interesting new twist and he’d be convincing as a lady’s magnet but he’d probably end up making Lupin too much of a smarmy basterd (think Itsuki from Haruhi).

Behind Lupin the most important vocal role of Lupin is arguably that of Zenigata, Lupin’s nemesis. Zenigata has to sound like a manly, tough-as-nails police detective, be able to do comedy, must have the ability to make his “LUPIN” scream memorable and needs to be loveable. Best known as voicing Zoro from One Piece, Date from Sengoku Basara, and Mugen from Samurai Champloo –  Kazuya Nakai would be my first choice. My second pick would be Katsuyuki Konishi whose best known as voicing Kamina from Gurren Lagann but also was a treat as the kendo teacher in Bamboo Blade.

Of nearly the same importance as Zenigata is Fujiko – female thief, sometimes ally and sometimes enemy of Lupin and the sole major female role in the franchise. For this role I had two names that instantly jumped out as possible choices. The first was Aya Hirano. I follow seiyuu news enough to know there’s a lot of drama surrounding Aya Hirano but she remains a stellar seiyuu. She’s best known for her role as Haruhi in Haruhi and also probably as Katja, the sadist ojousama in Seikon no Qwaser. She’d be perfect in the role of wrapping Lupin around her finger. The second name I thought of was Chiwa Saito. Her signature roles are Hitagi from Bakemonogatari and Homura from Puella Magi Madoka Magica but she’s done everything from Tama the talking cat from Kamichu to Stella from Arakawa Under the Bridge to Lavie from Last Exile. She really displays a wide range to her vocal talent and could infuse Fujiko with any emotion or wile she needs to the successful female thief.

The final two reoccurring roles, Jigen and Goemon, were tougher picks to nail down since in Jigen’s case I couldn’t get the English dubbed version of Jigen out of my head and Goemon just doesn’t talk enough. It was tough but I eventually decided on Tooru Ookawa as Jigen. He’s currently voicing the only redeeming feature of Sacred Seven – Hellbrick and has voiced Dr. Ozaki from Shiki, Gedächtnis from Fireball (Charming), Brian Roscoe from Gosick, and Arawn from Tears to Tiara. As for Goemon, I had to go with Keiji Fujiwara. He’s voiced the Kappa from Arakawa Under the Bridge, Ladd Russo from Baccano, Maes Hughes from FMA(B), and Jake Martinez from Tiger & Bunny.

Okay, we’ve got the animators, staff and vocal actors, now it’s time to look at the show itself.

I’m not actually familiar with the source manga so I can’t comment on how important it is to stick to source material but there are several things that one can infer upon watching a fair amount of the animated Lupin franchise. For starters, even though the newer Lupin specials appear to take place in modern times, it’s really just a whitewash over the older, original 60’s – 70’s time period. So the question is whether Lupin should be left in 1970’s or should to be fully brought forward to contemporary times.

With Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera Brain’s Base kept the show in the 1970’s and it worked for that anime. Then again, that show seems deeply intertwined with that time period and I’m not sure they could have brought the show forward and kept it’s comedy intact. For a Lupin reboot, keeping the show in the 1970’s would be a possibility as well. It’d have the nostalgia factor and it would easier to explain why Lupin never gets caught in the era before today’s omnipresent security/surveillance state but I think doing that would sell Lupin short. He’s Lupin, the international gentleman thief; I don’t think the Department of Homeland Security would scare him or stop him. So, I definitely think Lupin should fully update itself into contemporary times.

Another point that assuredly starts with the source material of Lupin is it’s fast-paced, over-the-top absurd action. This most definitely needs to be kept in a Lupin reboot since it’s a hallmark to the series but that’s not to say a new TV series should follow the caper-of-the-week setup that was the norm in the older series (at least from what I’ve seen). Assuming a reboot would be 26 episodes long (with future sequels if the sales warrant) the series should focus on maybe 5-8 distinct heists and introduce a wider variance between the arcs. Maybe they could develop a reoccurring criminal nemesis to Lupin or have the various organized crime groups that Lupin has stolen from in the past band together and hire an assassin to kill Lupin or maybe have Zenigata finally capture Lupin and Lupin is employed in cases like freeing hostages from a tin-pot dictator instead of being imprisoned or he can match wits with international secret organizations like Nazi groups still hidden in the jungles of South America or we could get some back-story and deeper characterization on the main characters. It probably would be a blast to see a flashback to Lupin’s first job. The resultant additions need to be carefully done so the overall show isn’t bogged down but it’s entirely possible to balance the two sides with the right group of staff.

I’d also keep the “spirit” of the show the same. I wouldn’t monkey with Lupin and do something drastic like dropping the age of the main characters and shifting the show into a high school setting. Nor would I sanitize the show; that means keeping the smoking, the gun play, and the fan service.

And the final piece to my Lupin reboot would have Lupin wear the red jacket – he just looks the best in red. Now if you’ll excuse me, all this talk of Lupin makes me want to rewatch some Lupin.

In Japan, they keep their changing booths very clean:

In Japan, their cows are alien creatures:

In Japan, they take the saying “Eyes are the window of the soul,” literally:

In Japan, shark beats paper, rock, and scissors:

In Japan, they learn a version of English known as Engrish. Seldom correct, it’s still more coherent then Charlie Sheen:

In Japan, they expect physics to apply in their cartoons:

In Japan, all young girls are geniuses and can build robots that can pass the Turing Test:

In Japan, they still like Snoopy:

And finally, in Japan, they believe less skin equals more win. (Not that I really blame them in this case.) :

Even thought we’re barely past the halfway point, I can already see Puella Magi Madoka Magica (PM3) easily winning best anime of the season and almost assuredly winning best anime of 2011 – though, Brain’s Base recently brought out their big guns by announcing the third season of Natsume’s Book of Friends – mainly because I have faith Shaft/Shinbou won’t pooch the ending in light of past series like Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru, Bakemonogatari and even Hidamari Sketch S.3. That hasn’t stopped me wondering how PM3 will end nor has it stopped many in the anime blogosphere either.

I’m seeing certain assumptions being made by some people about the ending that I think are premature at this point and could lead to disappointment when the ending doesn’t go the way it appears to be going. It certainly could go that way but I still see room for PM3 to end happily (or moderately happily).

(Note: I tried to get this done before episode 8 but it looks like I came up a bit short. Since I took so much time writing this I didn’t want to not post it in light of whatever happens in episode 8 but there’s probably more than one idea that no longer is possible. Either way, I’m pretty sure I want Kyubey Barbeque.)

In school, and even now, my talents lay more in the science/math direction so I never really studied the concepts behind creative writing creation and formal critic techniques but the Internet means I can learn just enough to be dangerous. One such item I’ve learned is something known as Chekhov’s Gun which is a concept in writing that basically says that if you mention a gun in the beginning of a story, it must go off before the end of the story. This maxim makes sense to me, especially if you flip it around and think of a story where a character uses a gun at the end of a story when no mention of that gun’s existence occurred before that point – that’s where your deus ex machina endings come from and everyone hates those endings. The ending of the Avatar animated series is a very egregious example of this.

The gun – or more accurately, a BFG – that’s introduced in PM3 during episode 1 was the concept of someone gaining a wish in return for becoming a Puella Magi (magic girl). This BFG will get fired before the end of the series. We know it, Kyubey knows it, Madoka knows it and Homura knows it as well. And that’s okay because Sayaka’s wish shows that Kyubey, for all his creepiness, will legitimately grant a person’s wish without twisting it around. If Madoka picks the correct thing to wish for, as I think she will eventually figure out, than we can get the happy ending that seems nearly impossible at this point. As far as we know, she already has more knowledge of what she’s getting into then any of the other Puella Magi we’ve met so far and not needing anything for herself will allow her a greater degree of freedom in making that wish. (What Homura knew before making her wish and what her wish is unknown at this point.)

I’d love to see what Kyubey would do if Madoka wished for him to kill himself and turn himself into a tasty, slow-roasted barbecue meal. I bet Madoka would learn loads of interesting information about what’s really going on. Like if there’s other Kyubey’s to complete the contract when this Kyubey is dead and what Kyubey actually does with those full grief seeds (i.e. why he needs to live).

Going back to Homura, initially I thought she was just a jaded Puella Magi that made a wish that she regretted later and merely wanted to stop Madoka from making the same mistake. That idea no longer fits and the more I think about, the more I think Homura is the key to everything. What if Homura knew another Puella Magi that was killed before becoming one herself and so she wished that when she was about to get killed as a Puella Magi that a message would get sent back in time for Kyubey to find the person that could/would save her and for her past self to know who this person is and for Kyubey to forget about her since everyone finds this guy creepy.

That’s probably not it but I keep going back to the dream Madoka has in the first episode. It felt like a prophetic dream, even down to the color of ribbons, but it was also instrumental in getting Madoka to accept Homura; Sayaka never had that dream and continues to be suspicious of Homura. Also, watching Homura fight leads me to think that Kyubey wouldn’t stand a chance against her. She could have made road kill Kyubey delight before Madoka/Sayaka had the chance to intervene if she wanted to but didn’t. Then there’s the strategy of Homura’s to keep Madoka from becoming a Puella Magi, it’s really a lousy one because by befriending Madoka it gives Madoka twice the reasons to decide she needs to become a Puella Magi. It’s more like Homura is managing the point when Madoka makes the contract with Kyubey.

The introduction of grief seeds and how they worked is probably the most unsettling idea that PM3 introduced (I’ll get to why shortly). It also reminded me of another anime – Umi Monogatari (Sea Story).  In this anime an island is threatened to be swallowed into darkness by an evil entity known as Sedna that was reawakened when a magic seal was broken by accident. Towards the end of the show it was revealed that the islander’s tradition of “infusing” a pebble with one’s pain, suffering and despair and then tossing it into the ocean at a seaside shrine caused that spot of the ocean to eventually physically manifest the amalgamation of all those sorrows and troubles into the being Sedna. Once our heroes figure this out they realize that if the islanders accept their small pieces of darkness back then Sedna would dissipate and the crisis would be averted.

I’m reminded of Umi Monogatari because of the similarities between it and how grief seeds work which also leads to why I find grief seeds so unsettling; namely, that being a Puella Magi is implied to be evil.

When Kyubey takes the full grief seed from Sayaka he mentions that adding anymore darkness to it might make a witch appear yet when a witch is defeated there’s a certain level of clearness left to it’s grief seed for the use of the Puella Magi. It’s like, as the witch uses it’s powers to spread despair, it’s own soul is being cleansed. I wonder then, if a witches’ grief was split up into small enough pieces and parceled out to many people, would this end the problem of familiars and witches causing people to kill themselves and other such large-scale acts of despair. This by itself doesn’t make Puella Magi evil but when we add in that using one’s powers as a Puella Magi to defeat familiars and witches causes one’s Soul Gem to darken, we’re getting somewhere. This shouldn’t cause a Soul Gem to darken if what the Puella Magi is doing is good. Unless one wants to argue that the ends justify the means.

Speaking of Kyubey, it would be very easy to dismiss him as an evil being at this point but I think it’s a little more complicated than that. If/When we finally meet sentient aliens the chances that we both look at the world the same way is extremely slim. This will make communication and understanding each other quite difficult and the probability of accidentally creating an interstellar incident is frightfully high. Kyubey is an alien in the truest sense of the word and so it’s difficult to use human standards to judge him without some consideration. I’m willing to let some things slide with Kyubey; however, I fault Kyubey for his apparent lack of effort to understand humans and his choice of prying upon young girls who generally lack the cynicism of adults, the ability to understand consequences like adults and having an emotional delicacy that makes it easy for someone to manipulate them. I can just imagine Madoka’s mom bringing a 200 page legal document to Kyubey outlining her terms and conditions upon becoming a Puella Magi.

I also fault him for not mentioning at least something about the importance of a Soul Gem to the Puella Magi. He wouldn’t necessarily have to say they are now essentially the Soul Gem but just that it’s very important nothing happens to their Soul Gem. Mami might not have put her Soul Gem in such a conspicuous location if she had known.

I wonder if Kyubey has a Soul Gem and if he does, where is it?

Before Madoka makes her wish she needs to find out Kyubey’s motivation for finding Puella Magi to hunt witches. I’d be willing to bet that his reasons aren’t that high on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maybe he’s a pedophile that likes to grope young girls or maybe it’s because Kyubey eats the full grief seeds that the Puella Magi have topped off with their own darkness. In either case, Kyubey would prefer a continuation of the current situation with no interest in finding a final solution about the witches and familiars. He might even be instrumental in insuring the next generation of familiars and witches are set in motion after feeding on a grief seed.

Or maybe it’s the wish granting that creates witches and familiars. Kyouko mentions that an equivalent amount of despair is created when a person wishes for hope but looking at what happened with her, it seems like the hope was repaid with a steep percentage of despair as interest. This would explain why there only appears to be a single Kyubey; as evidenced by Kyouko assuming Homura makes her contract with Kyubey and Kyubey seems unconcerned about finding Puella Magi for the rest of the world. If this idea is correct and Madoka remembers Kyubey’s statement that one’s wish influences the power of the Puella Magi – maybe Madoka has to flip the wish around. If she’d wish for a great amount despair to shoulder herself then she could become the ultimate Puella Magi and an even greater amount of hope is created from her despair.

In closing, if we step back and consider the show I’m curious what people think are the chances of Puella Magi Madoka Magica will outsell Bakemonogatari on a per volume basis and K-On! on an overall sales amount in Japan and will PM3 (or Bakemonogatari) ever get licensed for North America.

It’s been almost five years since I’ve last seen the anime blogosphere go so completely head-over-heals for an anime like what’s currently happening for Puella Magi Madoka Magica. That last time was for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya and it pole vaulted everything from it’s voice actors to it’s animation studio into instant super-stardom. This time it’s the well-known combination of the Shaft animation studio and it’s super-director Akiyuki Shinbou. Which is a bit surprising, given the prolific nature of Shaft/Shinbou; there isn’t that blank slate to work their magic on which KyoAni had with Haruhi.

And much like Haruhi, the PM3 fascination is well warranted; even for this long time Shaft/Shinbou fan, I was astonished how quickly this anime become special. The logical next step for a blogger would to blog about it but did I really want to be the 89th person that pointed how just how creepy Kyubey is or how dark and twisted this world is or how Shinbou was deconstructing the magical girl genre. The answer probably should have been yes since the alternative – coming up with something slightly more unique – took more work.

I eventually thought of something and all I needed was to call on the power of graphing and Gurren Lagann and an idea that’s been bouncing around in my brain for awhile.

The idea started out awhile ago when I realized, when doing my weekly anime review posts, that splitting an anime series into smaller intervals (individual episodes) and focusing only on those smaller intervals it gave an incomplete picture of the series as a whole. I needed the equivalent of calculus to find the area under a curve when all I had was a handful of rectangles to use.

Conversely, looking at just the final grade for an anime series was helpful in a different way but so much was hidden behind that number. A series that started out great but then coasted could get the same grade as a series that tried to be ambitious and missed the mark by just a little or a series that was mediocre at the start but built up to a thrilling conclusion.

I had a half-formed thought about using some sort of graphing but when my weekly anime posts stopped, I stopped really worrying about implementing a new system. For Puella Magi Madoka Magica, I dusted off these ideas with the view of that I needed a good way to quantify how good I thought PM3 was and how quickly it had gotten good.

The result is the graph below. It’s still not perfect but it’s much closer to what I want then just saying the first four episodes of PM3 have all been 12/12 perfect episodes. Basically, the colored areas overlay my numeric grading system and correspond to levels of achievement that are possible once an anime displays a certain level of quality. These levels are progressively harder to attain and are a reflection of watching enough anime that I can accurately grade an anime. A note for clarification, the stripped triangles for each anime series shows my guess at the future potential of the show.

Photoshop is helpful when trying to make a graph look pretty but it makes generating the graph difficult.

I used Gurren Lagann to compare the new series to because it is my number 1 show and the yard stick to compare all other anime series; though, the path Gurren Lagann took to reach number 1 is very interesting by itself. For instance, the big jump it took at the very end where it goes from being a fringe Top 10 anime to being my favorite anime corresponds to episode 26, aka the best episode of anime ever.

I put Puella Magi Madoka Magica into the “High Quality” level right away. It was during episode 1’s conversation between Madoka and her mom in the bathroom that I just knew. When the second episode showed no signs of letdown but only continued to impress me, it was upgraded to probably one of the best shows of the season (as measured against a “normal” season). The surprise at the end of episode 3 pushed the show into most likely earning the top spot for the winter season, assuming the rest of the series didn’t see a decline in quality, and moved it very close into earning a spot as one of the best series of 2011. (Again assuming a “normal” year, with this being just the beginning of the year, I’m using the past seasons and years as a guide in estimating.) The fourth episode didn’t disappoint either and Shaft/Shinbou made it clear that it had plenty of tricks left to play; meaning, PM3 is now all but guaranteed a spot on my top anime of 2011 list.

In picking the upper and lower bounds for how PM3 potentially turns out I decided even though it’s currently far surpassing where Gurren Lagann was at this point in time – it probably doesn’t have the spiral power to beat out Gurren Lagann in the end. Instead, I used the highest position of a Shaft/Shinbou anime series (Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei) as the probable cap. I could be wrong and it could go higher but I think PM3’s episode count being only half will limit it. For the low end, I just don’t see the show imploding and finishing any lower then maybe #3 for the winter season. My guess as to it’s most probably course would be for Puella Magi Madoka Magica to land in the top 5 – maybe 3 – of 2011 and just outside of my top 10.

I could have stopped here but there was plenty of space to graph several other new shows of the winter season.

The most talked about show behind PM3 is Fractale, the latest creation from disgraced anime director, Yutaka Yamamoto. Some have loved it, some have panned it, some just note the high degree of similarities it has with other well-known anime works. I see it’s potential but it hasn’t impressed me in the slightest, especially since I don’t think Mr. Yamamoto has learned from his previous disappointing efforts. I don’t mind the recycling of ideas used elsewhere if Fractale was going to do something interesting with them. And I don’t mean – “hey lets do a Miyazaki movie but add in fan-service and potty humor”. Better story-telling would help it’s chances, like getting us to like a character before the director kills him off. The result is, unsurprisingly, that it’s been hovering around my drop line (anything below a 6/12 B- is in real danger of getting dropped) and I don’t see Fractale ending that high. Maybe if it does everything right then it might just creep up to around a 9/12 A- level but I don’t think so. It’s more likely to finish in the 5/12 C+ to 6/12 B- range.

Currently keeping Fractale company is the “comedy” Rio –Rainbow Gate– from Xebec. The mere possibility that Rio could finish higher then Fractale is mind-boggling. I don’t think that’s going to happen; I thought the latest episode of Rio signaled that the creators were fast running out of entertaining ideas (the gate battle in this episode was so boring) but the possibility still exists. The problem is that it’s too difficult being unintentionally hilarious week-in and week-out; eventually the animators figure out how to just be generic and that ruins all the fun. Which is a shame because having visited Las Vegas twice, I sort of wanted this anime to be a success.

Another show I wanted to succeed was Mitsudomoe 2. The first season was inconsistent but ended strongly and I had a feeling that a second season would be awesome. So far that’s been pretty much the case but it has a problem as well – it’s only going to be 8 episodes long and I’ve already seen half of them. That makes Mitsudomoe have to work much harder just to keep up with shows like PM3 and Level E when there’s such a difference in episode count. The last episode, in particular, seemed to display the animators at the top of their game and it reminded me of the splendid work they did on Minami-ke S1. If the remaining four episode can stay at that level, Mitsudomoe 2 might just land near the top this season.

The final show I graphed was the anime that most astounded me this season for being actually good – Level E – and the only anime that I think that has a shot at beating PM3. Not a great chance but it’s not zero, which would be enough for Simon from Gurren Lagann.  It should be mentioned that it bears no connection to any other anime that has “something E” in the title, which was why I initially passed it over – I thought it was a sequel. Nor does it rip-off the central idea to Men in Black because the manga actually predates the movie by a couple of years. It’s a SF/comedy series from the pen of the author that wrote Yu Yu Hakusho (which really deserves a new adaptation itself) and it’s refreshingly entertaining. Level E also has the largest potential range because I’m torn between how good it’s been so far and worrying about things that could drag it down. I wonder why this hasn’t been adapted in the 13+ years since it originally came out and if it’s short length (only 16 chapters) means that it doesn’t have a good ending and will the comedy hold up.

At this point, I figure putting any more series on this graph would just be overly messy looking so this is were I’m going to stop for now. I might revisit this graph with different series in the future but we’ll have to see. And in closing, I’ll say it again – Kyubey is freakishly creepy; though, I wonder if Kyubey barbecue tastes good.

It started with what I initially thought was a Dilbert comic come tragically to life before quickly shifting into a case of manufactured dorama for publicity before turning into a case of “Anime is Serious Business”. I’m speaking, of course, about the events involving Funimation over the last week-and-a-half; if you’ve missed the story so far, check out here, here, and here from ANN – the most trusted name in anime news (except when they themselves screw something up) – before reading further.

I’m typically too busy actually enjoying anime to bother writing about anime “piracy” by Americans when it’s always the same old arguments anyways. I’d’ve passed this story over without commenting until I read this entry on Funimation’s blog and realized I did have something I can add to this debate.

Mr. Heiskell made the case for the importance of territorial rights in ensuring the efficient delivery of anime around the world. The big problem in this argument is that it relies on an assumption that is so prevalent in America that I can’t really blame Mr. Heiskell in making it. The truth is that North America is not the center of the English-speaking anime fandom population; it’s not even the majority. This truth would have greatly shocked me several years ago when I was just a very casual anime fan. Even when I started visiting anime blogs and forums, I would have still been surprised that what I thought was a sizable minority of fans living outside of North America was actually the majority. I didn’t realize this truth until I started anime blogging myself and decided I was curious about which far-off countries people came from to visit The Null Set.

North America didn’t make up 75% of my audience like I thought it would; that number was consistently in the 35 – 40% range. If I extend it out to all English as the first language countries, I’m still short of a majority. I embedded a second tracker to see if the results I got were in error and the second tracker yielded almost exactly the same results. I found this to be a much cooler result because that meant I got to interact with tons of people living from a diverse set of backgrounds from around the globe without trying to learn a myriad of foreign languages (3 years of Spanish in high school taught me that I suck at learning a foreign language).

Up until now I’ve only used this knowledge when I’m thinking about the audience I’m writing to; for example, it’s easier for me to not write about politics when I know roughly 2 out 3 readers will not care because they live in a different country than me. However, this fact greatly influences the environment surrounding Mr. Heiskell’s argument and the recent events connected to Funimation.

I realize it was possible that my blog was atypical so for this post I decided to examine other anime blogs to see if this pattern would hold up. I found three other blogs that linked to the information I needed – one was a much more popular blog then mine, the second one is about the same size as mine and the third one is a blog that’s gone dormant but still gets a fair amount of traffic. All three blogs displayed a very similar pattern to mine; which I’ve averaged and will summarize now.

The Top 10 Readerships of English Language Anime Blogs by Country:

The North American share (US and Canada) is only 38.1%, the UK and Australia add another 6.9% for a total of 45.0%. That means 55.0% of the market for English language anime comes from countries that don’t speak English as a first language and it’s not just a few countries that make up that 55% as the next table shows.

Readerships of English Language Anime Blogs

If you apply this knowledge to Mr. Heiskell’s argument, it quickly becomes apparent why licensing anime titles by country/territory is never going to work. There are just too many countries to cover and there’s also the question of offering English dubbed/subbed anime in countries like France, Germany, Brazil and Malaysia where there might already be a native language anime publisher that might not take kindly to an outside company poaching fans.

Then again, the nature of the internet makes thinking about problems using physical geography seem very antiquated and doomed to failure. A much better approach would be by language since that’s closer to how the internet is actually split-up. It would be a titanic shift from how it’s done now which means as long as the old ways make money, new methods will not be tested. Which makes it sound like it’s up to the anime “pirates” – once again – to get these obsolete business practices eliminated and get better ones put into place. After all, it was anime “pirates” that have historically driven the advancement and innovation of offering anime/manga from creating the market to pushing publishers into releasing anime by the box set and to offer anime online. (I’ve yet to come across a piracy-hating anime fan that wishes companies would go back offering anime a couple of episodes at time for ~$25 or wanting them to stop streaming anime online.)

Looking at the breakdown of where the fans actually live that would be interested in English language anime also shows why streaming anime (by territory) will only have a limited impact on anime “piracy”. That’s not to say streaming anime hasn’t cut down on anime “piracy” but there is just so much Funimation can do when they only control 38.1% of the market. Proof of this, I believe, appears in the documents that Funimation filed to sue 1337 downloaders of episode 481 of One Piece subbed by yibis.

The number 1337 is not just a random number to internet users which lead me, and just about everyone else, to believe Funimation picked that number of people to sue on purpose. I initially assumed that Funimation could have sued many, many more but stopped at that number but a funny thing happened when I looked over the people Funimation was suing. I saw a great number of obvious duplicates. For example, the very first person, “Doe 1”, was identified as using Verizon Internet Services to download the episode in question at 1/9/11 3:27 AM with the IP of 71.172.24.89. The second person on the list, “Doe 2”, was identified using Verizon Internet Services to download the episode in question at 1/9/11 3:33 AM with the IP of 71.172.24.89. This is obviously the same person which got me curious, how many duplicates where there?

To answer that question took much more work then I initially thought. I attempted to copy the information in the 32 page PDF into a text document so I could import that into MS Excel but that proved impossible; even though the text was selectable and copyable in the PDF, I just got gibberish when I pasted it in WordPad, MS Word and Excel. I ended up having to turn each page of the PDF into a picture file and then use Acrobat’s ability to convert the picture file back into a document with selectable text, copying that into Excel and checking that no errors were made in this circuitous method.

Now that I had an Excel spreadsheet, the answer was very quick to find; I found 255 “Does” that appear to be duplicates. A quick check of the torrent in question, since Funimation doesn’t seem to want to take down the actual torrent file, shows that it’s been downloaded nearly 23,000 times. Why have 255 duplicates if there were plenty of people to sue?

The only answer that makes sense to me is that there aren’t 1337 people living in North America that illegally downloaded this episode of One Piece for Funimation to sue. This thought allows for a few interesting calculations. If the 255 duplicates are subtracted from the initial 1337 people, that leaves only 1082 people who had access to the Funimation stream that choose to download a fansub instead (which was a 720p fansub btw). Next, I don’t know the exact number of people out of the 23,000 that downloaded the episode in the first four days (which is the length of time covered by the 1337 names) but I’m going to assume the number was probably around 20,000 – based on how frontloaded torrents are. This means that just 5.4% of the people downloading this episode of One Piece lived in an area where they had access to Funimation’s free stream.

If we use the North American share of the English anime market that I calculated above, 38.1%, then seeing the share of North American downloaders at only 5.4% says to me that free streaming anime has significantly decreased the amount of “piracy” by North American anime fans. If Funimation would include some sort of download-to-own option for those that don’t like streaming or have computers that don’t do streaming well and throw 720p into the mix then they could shrink that number down even more. (Off the cuff, maybe offer streaming 720p for a small price and downloads at 360p for $1 per episode or 12 episodes for $10 dollars and 720p at $2 – $3 per episode or 12 episodes for $20 – $30 dollars.)

Looking at this list of “Does” was interesting in other ways. The top ISP’s of the offenders looked like this:

College students didn’t appear to be a problem at all; out of the 1082 actual “Does”, only 2 each came from The Pennsylvania State University and the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with 1 each coming from Ohio State University, Northeastern University and the California Institute of Technology. For a total of 7 “Does” or 0.6% of the total.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious where my sympathies lie but I can’t find myself mustering much anger towards Funimation like I have in the past for the MPAA and RIAA. I think it’s because Funimation is getting ground up between the incompatible wishes of the Japanese licensers and those of the anime fans from around the world and yet Funimation is still trying their absolute best. (Hence the picture at the top.) As such, I think this lawsuit that Funimation brought forth was the price they had to pay to get the stream of Fractale back – saying sorry and promising to do better next time wasn’t going to cut it a second time.

I say “price to pay” because I think Funimation knows this lawsuit is a bad idea all around. The RIAA gave up on their large-scale suing of normal consumers a couple of years ago because the lawsuits cost the record industry millions of dollars, were very bad publicity and galvanized people into continuing to download music illegally (no one likes a bully). No matter the thinking behind it, every dollar spent by Funimation on this lawsuit is a dollar that will now go to a lawyer and his/her quest for another new sports car/yacht/mansion instead of helping “support the industry” as the consumers buying a Funimation item most likely wanted.

I’m tempted at this point to launch into a discussion about how to fix anime but I’m already 2000 words into this post and I don’t want to muddle the central point – North America is not the center of English language anime fandom and thus any decision about anime distribution that doesn’t take this into account is practically doomed to failure from the very beginning.

By rights, the zombies should not have had the ability to cause the level of chaos we saw in Highschool of the Dead (HOTD). They lacked the chops needed to get the Zombie Apocalypse going without some serious help (maybe the manga explains this better) but once it got going, the zombies really increased the momentum of their undead revolution very quickly. I give humanity less than a 50/50 chance at pulling it out, which is the reason for this top 5 list – Why the zombies will win in the end.

Number 5

People should apply what they learn from zombie fiction

There are two ways for a piece of fiction set in current times to address the popular culture we know; it can pretend the popular culture doesn’t exist or assume the fictional characters know the same movies, music, and TV that we do. In HOTD, the characters reference several well-known zombie movies which establishes that they are living in a world that has access to the same popular culture that we do. Therefore, they should have known what to do when zombies actually show up one day instead of acting like they’ve never seen what a Zombie Apocalypse look like.

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Number 4

Catastrophes too often reveal the dark side of humanity

To effectively fight the zombie problem, people need to be at their best but troubling times will often bring out the worst in people as we saw at numerous times throughout the series. The rapid fall into tribalism shown in HOTD with it’s disregard of those people outside of the tribe have cost and will cost many human lives (for example, the father that tried to get a family to take in his daughter). The power-hungry people like the creepy teacher in the bus and whoever was in charge of the USA that launched the nukes care more about their power and keeping it then actually helping people. Then there’s the looters and those that have gone insane because of the catastrophe occurring around them. All these types of people give the zombies additional ways to attack and win.

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Number 3

The lack of long-range planning by everyone

I can understand that the characters are a little unnerved with the coming of the zombies but the characters time-and-again show that not a single one in HOTD ever really gives living more than a couple of days any thought. They leave behind weapons and vehicles that could be useful in the future like it’ll always be easy to find either at a moment’s notice. Stockpiling food, water, and medicine should be a no-brainer and one of the first things they do. Or how about letting a trained mechanic die when one’s survival might come down to if a group of people can keep their vehicle running or not. Zombies don’t need much to continue living but humans need many different things to have a shot against the zombies.

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Number 2

People only have to make a mistake once

This is more of a philosophical point. If a zombie fails to kill someone then there’s thousands or millions of other zombies that still have the chance to kill that person. If a human makes a mistake – a gun misfiring, overlooking a possible entry point for zombies, a slip at the wrong moment, being caught without a weapon, etc. – there’s a very good chance that that person will get killed by zombies.

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Number 1

No one knows how to fortify a position

Seriously. If only someone in that whole group of people hanging out in the compound had watched Lord of the Rings or some other movie that involved defending a fortified location from an invasion or served in the military or just had some common sense. The only way zombies where getting in that compound was through the gate and something should have been done about that possibility in the couple of days they had. Even their use of dynamite sucked. They could have strapped the dynamite to a barrel of gas and launched it over the gate (or positioned the barrels a short distance away from the gate beforehand and set up a means to light them from the inside) and gotten a lot more zombies than they did. I also find it incomprehensible that the USA is going through leaders so quickly, can’t anyone figure out how to fortify an area and keep the zombies out?

For what it aspired to be, Highschool of the Dead was a fairly successful anime and one that I mostly enjoyed. Every so often, though, it felt like I was being asked to accept a completely illogical piece of plot development or character decision because the author didn’t want to step up and make a better, more plausible story. I didn’t want these problems to get in the way of liking the show so I held off from my complaints till later but later has finally arrived with the end of the show.

I could have gone the tried-n-true way and just listed every problem I saw with the show but I decided to try something a little different and, so, the idea of doing a couple of top 5 lists came to be. These lists will just cover the anime, I’ve yet to read any of the manga so I can’t comment about the manga.

Number 5

Homemade Flamethrower

In episode 3 we saw that zombies could be killed with fire. This should have led someone to the idea of using a flamethrower. I did a quick look online which yielded a variety of easy ways to make a homemade flamethrower. My favorite was using a pump water gun but I also saw people use pump sprayers designed for fruit trees or even just an aerosol canister with a lighter. All very dangerous things to play with normally but in case of zombies, these could be a valuable weapon.

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Number 4

Stun gun

In a couple of places zombies were shown to be affected by electric fences.  Theoretically, then, this should work as a weapon. It would only be a weapon of last resort but it might just mean the difference between infection and life. Cattle prod or a Taser would fall under this category as well.

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Number 3

Duck Tape

I watched MacGyver growing up and Mythbusters; I know the awesome power of Duck Tape. I’ve seen it used to pick up cars and molded into a workable cannon. In the case of a Zombie Apocalypse the ways to use Duck Tape would be endless. One application could be to create lightweight armor that zombies couldn’t bite through.

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Number 2

Molotov Cocktail

I almost included this in with number 5 but the increased ranged capabilities of a Molotov cocktail are enough that it deserves it’s own spot. It’s a quiet delivery system for the humans and it increases the distance someone could burn the zombies to a crisp. Off the subject, but speaking of not giving your position away to the zombies, can anyone remember the characters using silencers on their guns?

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Number 1

Snowplow

We saw in episode 12 and elsewhere that the living used vehicles to mow down the zombies but they never took it to the next step. A snowplow is better designed at the task of zombie mover/killer. Assuming Japan isn’t that different, it should be relatively easy to find one without breaking into the local highway department. If the snowplow isn’t good enough at killing and a construction site was near-by, one could always augment the process by using a roller to squish the pile of zombies that the snowplow would create. Actually many construction/demolition machines would be great at zombie killing and I’ll include them here .

A hint about my top pick, and no, it's not as simple as it seems.

I was not planning on taking this long to finish this part of my top 10 anime but as I tried to write something for each anime, I found it increasingly difficult to do so. Some of the anime on this part I could write thousands of words about and still not get everything said I want to say about them which made writing only a paragraph or two about them extremely challenging. I finally finished, though, and present the second half of my top 10 anime of all-time now.

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Vintage: Summer 2005, OVA1 – Spring 2007, OVA2 – Winter 2009
Director: Takuya Sato
Studio: Daume
Times Watched: 4

It’s only been a year since I first watched Ichigo Mashimaro, aka Strawberry Marshmallow, which makes it the newest-to-me anime on this list. I avoided it for several years because it just didn’t look that interesting to me but I finally decided to give it a try after I realized it was made by the same studio that did the first season of Minami-ke, my favorite anime comedy. I realized almost immediately that, underneath the cute, slice-of-life feel to Ichigo Mashimaro, the characters and their roles in the show were deeply thought out and expertly put together allowing it to excel in many of the same ways that made Minami-ke so good. Miu, much like Kana in Minami-ke and Haruhi in the Melancholy of Haruhi, is the spark plug that directly or indirectly creates and drives the show; take her out, and there’s no show. Chika plays the straight-man, Ana and Matsuri play the victims (Ana wants to hide the fact that she no longer remembers English even though she was born in Cornwallis, England as well as her last name and Matsuri is an innocent soul willing to believe anything that’s told to her), and Nobue plays the lazy authority figure that allows everything to happen and sometimes is the facilitator of the action.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a show being cute, having a relaxing slice-of-life feel to it, or the ability to lighten the viewer’s mood. Last fall, after my younger sister’s guinea pig died, I used Ichigo Mashimaro to get her to smile again after days of crying and being completely crushed. And I used Ichigo Mashimaro to help get through this past February when it snowed practically every day and the sun totally disappeared for the month.

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Vintage: Fall 2007
Director: Masahiko Ohta
Studio: Daume
Times Watched: 4

Squeaking past Ichigo Mashimaro is Minami-ke which I was just saying is my favorite anime comedy. As many of you know, the second and third seasons of Minami-ke were handled by a different animation studio and since those seasons were so glaringly deficient, I’m not including them here. The difference between them boils down, I think, to two key differences. The first was that Studio Daume was able to handle the large cast to Minami-ke, never spending too much or too little time with the various characters, and the second was Studio Daume had great comedic timing.

One of the reasons why Minami-ke is my favorite anime comedy and my number 4 top anime is because the show is built around three sisters and the family comedy on display here reminds me of my family growing up. I’m the oldest of 6 siblings but after me came 4 sisters and the first 3 younger sisters have personalities that the Minami sisters emulate pretty closely.

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Vintage: Summer 2000 – Spring 2001
Director: Kazuya Tsurumaki and others
Studio: Gainax
Times Watched: at least 9

FLCL was another series that Cartoon Network introduced to me but unlike Paranoia Agent I never stopped watching FLCL; it’s like an itch I need to scratch every so often. As a result, it’s been a constant companion as I’ve grown in my anime fandom and it seems like every time I watch it, there’s still something new to appreciate about it. I still remember the first time I actually got the Lupin references in FLCL and recently, the realization of how old South Park is dawned on me when I saw it referenced in FLCL.

When I first watched FLCL, I didn’t give much thought to it’s uniqueness; I thought it was a typical anime show and that I could find many more shows like it. I eventually learned otherwise; FLCL showcased Gainax at it’s creative best, with everything – story, plot, characters, animation, animation style, music, and voice work – working together perfectly and there’s almost no one that can come close to competing. Even having Gainax hitting that same level of perfection is exceedingly rare, by my count it’s only happened one other time, though the near perfect efforts by Gainax (like Magical Arcade Abenobashi) are still treats.

FLCL is unique to me in another way. It is, so far, the only anime that I enjoy the English and Japanese dubs equally as much.

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Vintage: Spring 2003
Director: Ryutaro Nakamura
Studio: Studio Wombat
Times Watched: 4

Outside of being one of my favorite shows, Kino’s Journey also became quite influential in turning me into the anime fan I am today and helped ensure that I would stay an anime fan. Before Kino’s Journey I had only watched and been exposed to shounen/action anime like Yu Yu Hakusho and Kenshin and I thought this was what anime was. If I would have continued to operate under this impression, eventually I would have grown tired of anime but I happened to give Kino’s Journey a shot and it opened my eyes to what’s possible with anime. From there, I started discovering the many various types of shows anime offered, especially if one removed the filtering agent known as R1 DVD companies, and now I’ve taken the search one step further and try to watch everything, relishing the moment when I find a great anime show in an unlikely place.

Kino’s Journey remains one of the shows I most want to see a sequel of, though I realize with each passing year it becomes less-and-less likely as are the chances of every getting to read the light novels that Kino’s Journey is based off of. I remain hopeful, maybe once the current crop of anime fans start getting tired of the current big action/shounen shows and start wanting something different there’ll be a chance to introduce a show like Kino’s Journey to them. Which reminds me of the most recent time I rewatched Kino’s Journey. It was with my youngest sister and I’d been waiting until she seemed old enough to appreciate the show. I wasn’t surprised that she really liked it; nor was I really surprised when she told me afterwards that she’d watched a couple of episodes over my shoulder, years ago, and didn’t like it one bit.

Kino’s Journey also remains, due to it’s ability to be very entertaining and very thought-provoking, part of my gold standard when evaluating new anime.

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Vintage: Spring 2007 – Summer 2007
Director: Hiroyuki Imaishi
Studio: Gainax
Times Watched: 5

Drilling through the past favorites and kicking all new competitors to the curb is my top anime – Gurren Lagann.

By rights, Gurren Lagann should have failed at some point; it took so many risks with it’s story (character deaths, characters being introduced late, time skips, plot twists, etc.) that it seems inconceivable that Gainax pulled every single one off. It made for a very thrilling and memorable viewing experience that first time because no one, except the Gainax staff, knew what was going to happen. Watching Gurren Lagann the first time the way I did, having to wait a week for the next episode to air and be fansubbed, also allowed me look at the series in a much deeper way then watching it on DVD ever could. I couldn’t marathon the whole series in a few days or even watch multiple episodes at one time or go read spoilers; instead, the only way to feed my desire for more Gurren Lagann was to watch the episode multiple times, pick it apart, and try to guess what was going to happen next. Of course I bought it when it came out on DVD but, much like Haruhi, if I hadn’t been a fan of Gurren Lagann before the DVDs came out I don’t think the reviews over here would have convinced me too.

One of the reasons I really liked Gurren Lagann and think it’s deeper than many people give it credit is it’s portrayal of heroism and the costs heroes have to pay to become heroes. It’s not something that’s seen too often on American television anymore or discussed about in society so I liked when Gurren Lagann focused on it.

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Did anyone figure out the hint? I used a screenshot from the latest Evangelion movie because it felt like Gurren Lagann was definitely on the minds of the creators of Evangelion when they put together the second movie. See also the screenshot below for another example.

Replace that missile with a giant drill and doesn't it remind you of a certain scene in Gurren Lagann?

Filed under: anime, anime rants/views

Everyone has one and there’s no surer way for other people to figure out loads of information about a person then from a person’s personal top 10 list. The genre of shows the person likes, the length the person has been a fan of anime, if the person is an elitist fan or a populist fan, what the person thinks about old anime being superior to new anime and vice-versa, if the person watches anime with fan-subs or dubs are just some of the things people can glean from a top 10 anime list. Even using some other number then 10 can be illuminating; a person doing their top 75 anime shows is saying something completely different then a person that only has a top 4 or top 6 list.

I knew this when I started blogging and I also knew that I didn’t have the breadth of knowledge needed to make such a list without being deeply embarrassed of it a year later. Therefore; I waited, read other people’s lists and consumed as much anime (current and old) as possible. I refused to rough out a list until I was done considering what important conditions I should set-up for the list because I didn’t want potential picks to influence my thought processes. The conditions that will constrain this list are three.

1. For an anime to be eligible, I needed to watch it at least two times.
2. No movies would be eligible.
3. For shows with multiple seasons, I could choose which seasons to include but no one show could be listed more than once.

The first constraint made a lot of sense to me. I’ve often encountered a show where the second time watching it yields a different response – either positively like Lucky Star or negatively like Azumanga Daioh or Witch Hunter Robin. Watching an anime that second time also reinforces the experience in my memory and helps ensure that imperfect recollections of a show don’t improperly help or hinder a show’s chances. The flip side of this constraint is that there’s a large number of shows that I can’t consider at this time that I’d love too. Kaiba, Natsume’s Book of Friends, Baccano, Cross Game, Clannad, Kanon, Kemono no Souja Erin, Spice & Wolf, Ga-Rei:Zero, Sora No Otoshimono, Hanamaru Kindergarten, Blue Literature, Hidemari Sketch, and Bakemonogatari are just some of the shows that I think could be competitive in making this list but have only been watched once.

The second constraint is there because I think series and movies are just too dissimilar to put into one list together; it would be like creating a top 10 list of the best cow and dog breeds. It might be possible but it wouldn’t be meaningful. And by carving movies off, I can make a companion list at some point of the my top ten anime movies.

Since most seasons (not cours) of anime are produced separately, I put in the third constraint in because it didn’t make sense to me to penalize an earlier season if future seasons stunk and were made just to bilk money from the fans or if later seasons improved from the earlier seasons.

Now with that out-of-the-way, let’s get to the list.

Vintage: Winter 2009
Director: Kazuki Akane
Studio: A-1 Pictures
Times Watched: 2

The first season of Birdy was a good show, one of the bright spots in a pretty weak summer season but there were weaknesses that prevented it from being great. I can be a very optimistic person so when the second season rolled around I had very rosy hopes. Imagine my shock when even these rosy hopes couldn’t match how good the second season was. The wooden characters from the first season were replaced with characters that oozed personality and depth. The story was grittier and more real; the building destroyed in the first season remained destroyed and the people who lost their homes were still homeless in the second season. No punches were pulled, the super-powered character with an understandable desire for revenge kills in a way you’d expect an angry individual out for revenge would. And I loved the animation style they switched to for the fights; if I had to describe it in one word that word would be “kinetic”. The characters looked like they actually weighed something and the sense of motion was unparalleled. It ended at a good point but one can just tell there’s still untapped potential with the bigger story so I’m still fervently hoping for a third season.

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Vintage: Summer 2007
Director: Takashi Ikehata
Studio: J.C. Staff
Times Watched: 4

The set-up for Potemayo (sentient unearthly creatures coming to life in a refrigerator) would have been the start of a horror film in probably every other country in the world but in the hands of J.C. Staff, we get a cute comedy/slice-of-life show with a very messed up sense of humor. Calling it unique would be an understatement and trying to make an accurate judgment about the show based solely on it’s animation style and characters is impossible.

I really didn’t expect Potemayo to make my top 10 list but the show holds up so well every-time I rewatch that I need to just accept that Potemayo is a great show.

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Vintage: Winter 2004
Director: Satoshi Kon
Studio: Madhouse
Times Watched: 3

I first watched Paranoia Agent when I was a freshly minted anime fan on Cartoon Network way back in the day when Cartoon Network ran animated stuff all day and wasn’t afraid to show anime before midnight. The realistic setting, the mystery behind Lil’ Slugger, the examination of the psychological effect Lil’ Slugger would have on the populace, the oddness that I’d later learn to be Satoshi Kon’s trademark and the interesting – often quite twisted – characters fascinated me and helped open my perception of what anime could do. Several years passed and I grew hesitant to watch Paranoia Agent again because I worried that it wouldn’t stand up. That had happened with Witch Hunter Robin and I didn’t want to lose another early anime favorite but my youngest sister stated bugging me about watching it. I pushed it off for a while but I eventually relented and we started watching Paranoia Agent. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have worried since I adore every other work of Satoshi Kon I ever watched and Paranoia Agent is no different. Many mystery type shows are only good the first time through but even knowing how Paranoia Agent ends doesn’t diminish how enthralled the show left me.

An interesting tidbit, Paranoia Agent is the only show on this countdown that I’ve never listened to the Japanese dub of it.

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Vintage: Summer 2007, Winter 2008, Summer 2009
Director: Akiyuki Shinbo
Studio: Shaft
Times Watched: 3, 3, 1

Having to bend my rules to include the whole series of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei has left me in despair!

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei really is an acquired taste. Looking back, I needed that first season and the months between it and the second season to really get the show and it’s sense of humor situated in my brain. And it eventually clicked because I instantly, and completely, fell for the second season and later rewatches of the first season left me with a better opinion of it. I’ve also learned the best way to watch Despair is to watch each episode twice; once with my finger posed over the pause button so I can read all the text in the background and the second time without pausing so I can focus on the foreground. This leads me into putting much more effort into getting this show than any other anime but I think it’s worth it.

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Vintage: Spring 2006
Director: Tatsuya Ishihara
Studio: Kyoto Animation
Times Watched: 6

At one time this would have been my #1 or #2 pick for top anime and seeing it drop this far makes me a bit sad even if I fully believe it deserves this diminished level. It’s very difficult to get into the old mind-frame for this show when the renewed Melancholy of Haruhi (2009) employed the Endless Eight stunt. It’s not that I particularly hated Endless Eight but back in 2006, I decided not to read the novels Haruhi were based on because I didn’t want to be spoiled before watching the future seasons of anime and I’ve been waiting for more of the story ever since and thought that time had finally come. I know this is a mend-able feeling, though, all I need is Kyoto Animation to animate a couple of seasons of Haruhi, reaching the quality level of the 2006 series,  and chances are I’d be pushing this back up.

One of the interesting things about The Melancholy of Haruhi (2006) was observing how hype effected fan reception. At the very beginning when there was no hype for the show, everyone (and I mean everyone) loved the show. I remember watching Haruhi work it’s way to number 1 on ANN’s top 10 anime list. As time and the hype increased, though, I noticed more and more new viewers react negatively towards it, wondering what the hype was all about. This trend continued and intensified when Haruhi was licensed in America and the non-fansub fans finally got to watch what the fansub fans had been incessantly talking about for over a year. Their reactions were even less positive and reading what these people thought of Haruhi made this fan’s blood boil on numerous occasions.

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That ends part 1. I’m curious if anyone can guess my top 5 before I post it in the next day or two.

With the timing of Al Gore and the intelligence of Joe Biden, the recent rant by Bang Zoom’s President about the impending death of anime is so sad, it’s hilarious. If it was a well-written piece I might feel like I needed to write a rebuttal but it wasn’t, not by a long shot, which leads one to ask – “Why are you bringing up Mr. Sherman’s rambling rant?” Well, I’d answer, there are some things I wanted to mention related to issue at hand and this is as good of a time as any.

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Where I Blame Mr. Sherman and Bang Zoom For Being 35% of the Problem Facing Anime In America

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I bought an anime DVD the other day.

Not a big surprise; I, like many people can be enticed to buy something even if we have access to it for free. That goes for my copy of the latest Dresden Files book and it goes for this DVD. What is this mysterious anime DVD that I, as a member of the dark underbelly of the internet bought? The complete box set of Baccano.

The big surprise to this purchase is that I bought the complete box set of Baccano for it’s dub. That’s right, I bought an anime DVD for it’s dub. Crazy, I know. Even more crazy when you start listing all the awesome Japanese voice work done for this series but here I am, giddy in anticipation over watching an anime dub.

Someone well acquainted with the past dub quality in anime might ask what makes this dub different from the years and years of mediocre dubs that American fans have had to put up with? Simply put, Funimation used voice actors that sounded right for their role, had genuine talent, and the drive to give a performance on par with their Japanese counterparts. I wouldn’t think it was possible but Funimation did it and if you don’t believe me, you can go to their website to watch the dub episodes for free.

Fine, someone might now say, why does a sublime dub convince me to buy the DVD? Another simple question , Baccano’s dub gives the DVD a much higher value in my eyes then a sub-only DVD or a lousy dub DVD would. For instance, I can now watch Baccano even when it’s not possible to read subs all the time like while I’m cooking or cleaning or eating or, in the case of my sister, when she wants to do a bit of knitting. Also, most Americans don’t like to read subs so having a quality dub of Baccano means I have an anime to show those people when I want to convince them that anime can be awesome (without having to worry about the voice acting souring my chances with these potential converts).

I can hear the question coming at this point – what does Baccano’s dub have to do with Bang Zoom and the problems facing anime in America. At the time of reading Mr. Sherman’s rant I knew Bang Zoom was a dubbing studio but I didn’t know of what shows so I went to the ever informative Anime News Network. And according to ANN, Bang Zoom had nothing to do with the Baccano dub but they did do the Haruhi (my #1 top anime of 2006), Lucky Star (my #2 top anime of 2007), and Gurren Lagann (my #1 top anime of 2007) dubs.  A light bulb clicks on at this point. I have the limited edition Haruhi DVDs and found the dub just slightly better then mediocre; Haruhi’s English voice actor totally failed to make Haruhi as awesome as Aya Hirano was able too and the whole show comes off as a much lower quality show because of it. I saw the trailer to Lucky Star and was so turned off by the dub that I refused to even consider paying money for such an inferior product. In the case of Gurren Lagann, I watched it dubbed on the Sci-fi channel and was so infuriated when a poorly picked English voice for Kamina was able to completely change his character for the worse.

In all three shows I sensed a common theme – Bang Zoom pumping out a mediocre dub which might have saved a couple bucks but hurt the show in the long run. Consider what an anime DVD is worth if the dub track will never be listened to and watching it subbed means putting up with that ugly yellow font and poor handling of signs and watching it as a DVD means having to settle for the resolution a DVD offers? Even Mr. Sherman must know, in his heart-of-hearts, that an anime DVD like that isn’t worth very much. If, however, that same DVD offered a great dub then it’s worth would be much higher and as a result, more DVDs would be sold because the consumers would be able to get something they like in return for spending money that could have gone to a dozen different diversions and hobbies.

As I looked at it more the more I became convinced that Bang Zoom and Mr. Sherman have been more detrimental to anime in America then fansubs have ever been. Consider the anime companies Mr. Sherman mentions in his rant as having closed or suffered massive trouble. Two of those four companies (Bandai and Geneon/Pioneer) use/used Bang Zoom extensively to do their dubs – coincidence? Could it be, those market forces of capitalism that work in so many other industries to keep prices down and quality up have shown up here as well? Could it be, American consumers aren’t quiet the dumb sheep that people like Mr. Sherman think they are?

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Where I Show Mr. Sherman’s Statement That Japan Is “struggling to bring out quality titles” As Another Symptom of The Problem Facing Anime In America

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Assuming, of course, Mr. Sherman wasn’t lying through his teeth and he knows that Japan isn’t struggling to bring out quality titles. Which is a possibility but if one looks at what types of shows that generally get licensed and brought over then his statement fits into an idea I have.

I was looking at the those wonderful charts that chartfag has been putting together and I noticed something when I compared the 2008 chart with the 2001 chart. Here’s the charts, can you see it too?

If you look at the 2001 chart, it looks like the TV stations and animators where targeting young boys with the overwhelming majority shows being action shounen shows and the secondary market seemed to be young girls with the cute shoujo shows. Now look at the 2008 chart and something strange has happened. There’s still those action shounen shows and cute shoujo shows but there’s all these new types of shows: Aria, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Spice and Wolf, Natsume Yuujinchou, Hidemari Sketch, Clannad, Natsu no Sora, and Kaiba to name just a few.

It’s almost like the audience watching anime in Japan is diversifying and getting older; shocking, I know. A look at the American anime market shows that, for the most part, it’s still a 2001 mindset. It’s very slowly getting better (thanks in part to fans refusing to accept business as usual from the DVD companies) but there’s still a wide gulf between how shows like Bleach and Naruto are treated in America as opposed to how Natsume Yuujinchou, Clannad, or Aria are. What must American anime company people like Mr. Sherman think when they see shows like Bakemonogatari as being top DVD/Blu-Ray sellers in Japan? Their years and years of relying and pushing action shounen titles must make it so they can’t comprehend how a show that’s hyper-stylized and spends all it’s time showing characters talking could ever possibly sell in America.

So these American anime companies pass on shows like Bakemonogatari and wait for the next Naruto and complain that fansubs are killing anime because their waiting for the next Naruto obviously means something is wrong with anime. The funny thing is they might be right about the difficulty in their ability to sell shows like Bakemonogatari to America but let’s remember that it’s these same company executive’s limited mindset that has stunted the ability for the mainstream anime fandom in America to grow with their Japanese counterparts, causing a near incompatibility between the two.

To further compound this problem, American anime companies sticking to a 2001 mindset also cause yet more problems. People, including anime fans, get bored of watching the same type of shows over-and-over again; look at the cyclical nature to American prime-time television as a great example of this. So what do these bored anime fans do when they get tired of watching anime that bores them? Either become former anime fans or head to the dark, dangerous underbelly of the internet and find all the titles they’ve been missing out on. And even if you can find anime fans that don’t tire of watching the same type of show over-and-over, by watching only those action shounen titles targeted towards the younger audience it’s very probable that these anime fans will decide one day that they’ve “outgrown” anime because it’s meant for kids and, unless someone steps in and shows them the wider possibilities found in anime, they will stop being anime fans.

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Where I Mention Another Market That Alarmists Have Said Will Die “If Something Isn’t Done!”

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Print science fiction. Except in the case of print SF, people have prognosticated it’s immanent death since at least the early 1980’s. Hasn’t happened yet and it probably never will, provided great SF books/stories are still being written. So, I put little stock in any statement about the immanent death of anime as long as great anime is still being made and a quick look shows that plenty of quality anime is still getting made.

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Where I Remind Mr. Sherman the Easiest Way To Get Rid Fansubs Is To Put Out a Superior Product

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I asked earlier how much is a DVD worth if the dub track will never be listened to and watching it subbed means putting up with that ugly yellow font and poor handling of signs and watching it as a DVD means having to settle for the resolution a DVD offers. The answer is not very much and it looks even sadder when compared to the standard fansub I can find in the dark recesses of the internet put out by unpaid amateurs.

If anime companies in America can come up with a better way to give anime fans their anime then fansubs would go the way of the horse & buggy, the record/8-track players, the canals, the walkie-talkies and the elevator operators. Until that happens though, the anime companies in America will be the ones in danger of disappearing and not fansubs.

And will anime die if every single American anime company shuts down? To answer, I’ll first have to assume this scenario is possible because if anime is anything like print SF then as companies close down, new people with new ideas start new companies and pick up where the old companies left off and there’s never a point when somebody isn’t producing anime/manga/ print SF. So, assuming this worst case scenario, would anime die if every single American anime company shuts down? I’d have to say no, I don’t think so.

For all the bluster that Mr. Sherman displays in his rant – America don’t actually make the anime, we’re only a secondary market to Japan. If we were truly important to them then we’d be able to leverage better treatment from them. Remember how in the case of Haruhi the overwhelming amount of fans in America wanted the DVDs released in TV order and the Japanese license holder would only allow the TV order as an “extra” for the limited edition DVDs and only as a subtitled release. Or the continued reluctance of the Japanese rights holders in allowing us Americans to release anime Blu-ray discs. They couldn’t let the remote possibility of reverse importation mess-up their true cash cow even if that makes fansubs all the more enticing to everyone else.

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Where I Write a Conclusion and Hope Someone Has Read This Entire 2300+ Word Blog Entry and Derived Something Positive From It

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Let’s Recap: Mr. Sherman, President and CEO of the dubbing studio Bang Zoom writes a rant about the impending death of anime and I find it funny for being so out-of-touch with reality. It didn’t rate a response until I realized this was a chance to talk about how unexpectantly awesome the Baccano dub was (thanks Funimation!) and to snub Bang Zoom for screwing up three recent great anime shows by providing poor to slightly better then mediocre dubs and to talk about how the worth of an anime DVD changes drastically depending on the quality of it’s dub. I also realize that I can take this opportunity to voice my displeasure about the history of licensing only certain types of shows for America and to point out how these studio executives are too short-sighted and/or dumb to realize the consequences of their licensing patterns. And I realized I can mention what I think about all these Chicken Littles who want to make us believe the sky is falling and also to remind Mr. Sherman (who probably won’t actually ever read this post) that the surest way to get rid of a product is to produce a superior product and watch capitalism work it’s magic and let the inferior product disappear.

So after realizing all this, I got to writing this blog entry and here we are, a dozen hours of writing from me and 2300+ words written. I hope at least one person out there enjoyed this post and got something from it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some anime to watch.

Along with this realization, I think I solved a question I’ve been pondering for years now – namely how can one best differentiate between a kid and an adult. The answer is that a kid thinks time does not go fast enough and an adult thinks time goes too fast. I fall into the latter category; I’m appalled that I haven’t posted anything in slightly over 2 months but it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s been 2 months. Where does the time go???

For those that are interested in why it’s been so long since I last wrote something, I’ll get to later down the page. First, let’s do some anime blogging and we might as well start with my thoughts on the new shows that made up the Winter 2010 season.

Sora No Woto

Status – Finished
Final Score –  8/12 B+
In Short – A-1 deserves praise for attempting a show of the caliber but it really needed to be a 24 episode series. It wasn’t, though, and as a result the pacing is too hurky-jerky, the story-telling is too compressed, and the characters are too flat for the viewer to really enjoy Sora no Woto as much as it should have been. Which is a shame because the world that A-1 created was a really interesting one that truly begged to be investigated more.

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Chuu Bra!!

Status – Dropped after 4 episodes
Interim Score –  2/12 F
In Short – I knew I shouldn’t have bothered with this show but there was so few shows this season I figured what was the harm in watching a couple of episodes. Mistake, I could live with a merely poorly constructed fan-service show but I was not ready for this show. It was a poorly constructed fan-service show with a quasi-realistic portrayal of young teenage girls as they grapple with self-image issues. Each episode left me feeling unclean and wondering who exactly thought animating this show was a good idea. Thankfully, I could legitimately drop Chuu Bra after 4 episodes when it became apparent that the show, even without accounting for the creep factor, was a lousy show.

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Katanagatari

Status – Waiting for the next episode
Interim Score –  8/12 B+
In Short – The first 3 episodes of Katanagatari aired this season and while it started off very shaky – each subsequent episode has shown a marked improvement over the previous. I think the key to liking this show is to not create the wrong expectations. This is a NisiOisiN story so even though it’s about sword fighters and medieval Japan – the emphasis is on the characters and their conversations and not on the blood/ gore/ action scenes that one might assume a show like this would focus on.

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Seikon no Qwaser

Status – 12 episodes watched and still reluctantly watching
Interim Score –  3/12 D
In Short – For a show that tries to push the envelope in terms of fan-service, you’d think the animators could come up with something that wasn’t so boring. Scenes that should shock or titillate more-often-then-not leave me yawning, wishing that I could bean some sense into the manga/anime creators that think T&A is all that’s needed to carry a show. Sometimes I think they forget that the internet exists. The sole saving grace to Seikon no Qwaser is that one character is being voiced by Aya Hirano (aka Haruhi) and she’s absolutely awesome – truly one of her best efforts to date. It’s not enough to make this show a worthwhile watch to the vast majority of anime watchers but it is something.

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Omamori Himari

Status – Dropped after 7 episodes
Interim Score –  5/12 C+
In Short – I continue to be weak against anime shows that feature the supernatural/Japanese religious elements so when a show like Omamori Himari comes along with it’s generic blandness and it happens to have a supernatural element to it – I end up watching it longer then it deserves and having a higher opinion of it then it deserves. It wasn’t a horrible show and I’d probably have finished watching it except that I decided one day that I was sick of the all the not-really-horrible but not-really-good shows I was watching and dropped it along with a few others.

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Ladies versus Butlers!

Status – Finished
Final Score –  4/12 C
In Short – And yet somehow I finished this show,  though in my defense this show did have some potential and I found the opening song catchy. If they had skipped the harem of girls with one-dimensional personalities and focused on the triangle of the main guy and the two girls – drill hair and childhood friend it might even had been a good show but this is Xebec were talking about so that was just wishful thinking. This was probably the least painful fan-service show to watch of the season so if you absolutely needed your fix this was your bet.

-

Durarara!!

Status – 13 episodes watched and impatient for more
Interim Score –  10.5/12 Strong A
In Short – One of the best new shows of the season. For those that wanted Durarara to be Baccano 2, this first half of the show was probably a big disappointment. The very minimal body count and focus on character/story development was just two ways Durarara felt unBaccano-like. I’ll admit that this desire clouded my feelings for a while but I eventually got over it when I realized that Durarara was going to be 24 episodes long and it had the time to develop it’s characters in ways that Baccano didn’t and because the animators started to reveal parts of the larger plot of Durarara and it became interesting in it’s own way. I totally psyched for the second half.

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Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu

Status – Dropped after 7 episodes
Interim Score –  6/12 B-
In Short – Another casualty along with Omamori Himari; I thought it started strong but it began to bog down in the middle and I wasn’t in the mood that day to put up with a show that could obviously being doing much better. Since then I’ve kinda felt bad about dropping it but I’ve yet to feel the urge to pick up where I left off so I guess it’s just best to let sleeping dogs lie.

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Dance In The Vampire Bund

Status – 9 episodes watched and a desire to finish
Interim Score –  6/12 B-
In Short – I really had high hopes for this and I thought the first episode was brilliant but my disappointment grew as I kept waiting for the show to settle down and start telling a story.  since I like the Shaft/Shinbou combo I didn’t want to give up on it so after the sixth episode I decided to put it aside till I had all the episodes and had the ability to watch them together. Some shows, I’ve realized, work better when marathoned and just the other day I watched episodes 7-9 together and I liked it more than I was expecting. I hope this bodes well for the rest of the series.

-

Ookami Kakushi

Status – Dropped after 7 episodes
Interim Score –  6/12 B-
In Short – Another not-really-bad but not-really-good show that I decided to drop. In it’s favor was the fact that a competent animation studio was animating this and not Studio Deen who had done the previous Ryuukishi07 shows (Higurashi, Umineko no Naku Koro ni). This positive is negated by the larger problem of the source material recycling so much of the show’s content from those previous Ryuukishi07 shows. Also, I’ve gotten tired of how all these shows are placed 25+ years ago – I’m starting to think Ryuukishi either lacks the will to figure out how to do a mystery/horror series where the characters have access to cell phones, GPS devices, and the internet or lacks the intelligence to write a new story that doesn’t rip off his/her/its one other story idea.

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Hanamaru Youchien

Status – Finished and Wishing for Season 2
Final Score –  12/12 Perfect
In Short – Saved the best for last. I can still remember how utterly stupefied I was when it was announced that Gainax’s next series was going to be Hanamaru Youchien. This series had J.C. Staff written all over it, why was Gainax doing this? I checked the manga out and was decidedly underwhelmed after reading the first 10 chapters. With absolutely no confidence that Hanamaru Youchien was going to be good, imagine my surprise when Gainax cranked this out of the stadium. Who knew the studio known for it’s hot-blooded action series could do such a warm, relaxing, cute, funny series. I think Gainax just became my preferred studio to do the anime for Yotsuba if/when the creator ever allows one to get made. Gainax also deserves tons of praise for having a different ending song/animation for each episode; I loved all the different songs and subjects. (Now if only KyoAni could do the same thing with K-On.)

—

I really should add one final show – Hidemari Sketch x ☆☆☆ (aka season 3) – since it aired this season as well but I’ve just seen the first couple of episodes and so I don’t have a firm opinion on it yet. After purging all the bad – mediocre shows of this season, I needed something to fill the space and decided it was time to catch myself up on this series and started with the first series. I plan on making a post about all the series I’ve been watching instead of the current crop of shows so look for my thoughts on this Shaft/Shinbou series soon.

And maybe I’ll even get around to doing my top shows of 2009 already and talking about the new spring 2010 shows as well. Now onto where I was for 2 months.

If it was just up to me, I’d probably just pretend nothing happened and keep blogging but I’m pretty sure there are at least a few people who were wondering what happened to me and so I’ll give a condensed version of the various reasons and we can go from there.

A normal February is a pretty depressing month already but this one was a bit harder to get through than most. The weather was truly atrocious; it wasn’t so much the almost unending amount of snow we got (about 45 inches) but the complete lack of sunlight we had. I checked online and for the entire month of February we had 7 hours of clear skies. It didn’t break down how much of those 7 hours occurred during daylight or at night but even in all 7 hours happened during daylight hours and I happened to be awake – it still essentially meant I went a month without seeing the sun.

Also weighing on my mind was that this February was the one year anniversary of my grandma passing. I’ll get myself wound up in anger if I think about it too much so I’ll just say that I consider my 3 aunts the reason why my grandma isn’t living today. Also, it’s very important for everyone to decide how much or how little medical care they want and get it in writing because you can’t rely on your family to have your best interests at heart – you could get admitted to the hospital for a serious but not life threatening reason and in the course of treatment your family could decide to remove your feeding tube and let you starve to death over the course of 3 weeks.

Factor in a really weak anime season and I just didn’t feel like talking about anime or do much of anything. March rolled around and almost like a switch the weather turned gorgeous. Temperatures shot up into the 60’s and 70’s and it was wall-to-wall sunny. I spent as much time as I could outside and the sight of the first flowers of the season  – crocuses – went a long way to improve my mood. I started to feel the urge to write again but I kept getting blocked.

I volunteered to be the Dungeon Master in a 6 part campaign for my sister, brother-in-law, and friends in Dungeons & Dragons. We were going to use a printed campaign but we were not satisfied with the quality of writing so I further volunteered to write one myself and it takes an amazingly large amount of time to create a halfway decent adventure. I also picked up a temporary job working for the census and it’s been leaving me really tuckered out when I get home at night. And of course to blog about anime I first need to watch anime. And I’ve also been slowly working on my top anime of 2009 posts because I’d like all the parts to be done or almost done when I start posting them. And once it got to be a long time between posts I felt reluctant to explain why it’s been a long time because I started a blog talk about anime and a little SF, not to be a personal blog.

As a result, even though I’ve been meaning to start writing again it’s been almost a month before I had the chance to sit down and write something I could publish. I guess at this point I should just listen to the wise words from Manabi Straight and say, “Forward, Go!!” and get back to blogging.

One guess on what's one of my favorite new shows.

Filed under: anime, anime rants/views, meta/office keeping, series review

The Most Awesome Thing I’ve Seen In a Very Long Time.

Number 1:

They don't mess with what worked from the series.

Number 2:

They tweaked scenes to add awesomeness and emotional punch.

Number 3:

More people lived.

Number 4:

Side characters get more chances to shine.

Number 5:

Completely reworked and new scenes.

Bonus:

It's Gurren Lagann.

Bonus #2:

It has one the best scenes in anime ever.

Filed under: anime, anime rants/views, general anime interst