So soon we’ll see the release of the 3rd episode of the massively (self) hyped work by Yutaka Yamamoto, Fractale. When the 1st episode came out, it receiveda a decidedly tepid response, and deservedly so. This was a Noitamina show. Yamamoto had staked his career on it. Yet there was pretty much nothing about it that was special. The 2nd episode only continued that trend. Indeed, this is a show we’ve already seen before.

By now, magical-girl-falls-into-boy’s-lap is a well established and rather overused genre in the world of anime. The girl isn’t always magical or even a real girl, and she doesn’t have to literally fall into the boy’s lap, of course, although she often does. But this is something that has gone way past being a mere trope and is a full-on cliche, not the good kind. And that’s exactly what Fractale is, with a dash of the bumbling-villain-trio for fun. The only thing that sets it apart is its interesting vision of the future, wherein people have all their needs taken care of and only interact through virtual avatars or surrogates of themselves from afar.

Or does it really set it apart? No, actually, it doesn’t, and not because the setting isn’t particularly original. In fact, the setting is quite compelling, if only for the fact that it’s one that’s unusual, even if it’s not new. The problem is, plenty of shows have already gone down this route. Anime, by its very nature of being animated, attracts settings that are fantastical. It’s no coincidence that the most popular franchises in anime – Evangelion, Gundam, Haruhi – are science fiction, or that fantasy is such an overrepresented genre in season after season of anime. You can make really cool, fascinating, compelling settings in anime.

But too often, these settings act as little more than backgrounds as the same interactions and stories that we’ve seen a thousand times before play out. At best, the settings serve as excuses to justify whatever magical powers the characters might have or encounter.

At least the official art lets us fantasize about what could have been...

For me, a recent perfect example of this problem is in the Index franchise. Academy City is a fascinating place, filled with neat bits of near futuristic technology and students studying and researching with academics the limits of supernatural power as set up in this science fiction world. The story, naturally, should play to the show’s unique strengths and explore this interesting concept, right?

No, the setting becomes an excuse to give people magical powers while Touma goes around shouting self righteous tripe while using his plothax fist against generic villains. Oh, and his superpower is to make everyone else normal. Throw in the magical-girl-falls-into-boy’s-lap cliche as well as a generic harem for good measure. The Railgun side show failed just as hard, except that it mainly consisted of a poorly conceived and executed story of friendship. These were just your typical harem and cute-girls-doing-cute-things shows, just with a neat science fiction fantasy setting behind them.

Why take this goldmine and insert the same old characters and cliches we’ve seen dozens of times before? Even in the same series, the MISAKA sisters and the Last Order arcs showed off that the show could be strong when it took its setting and ran with it. In those, the characters and their interactions weren’t just dropped in there but rather integral parts of the settings themselves. The plot actually went into some of the interesting details of the mechanics of the world and came out ahead thanks to it.

Why not make the protagonists a BADASS TOP LEVEL TELEKINETIC with a chip on his shoulder and a loli with (almost) 10,000 HIVEMIND SUPPORT instead of a boring self-righteous prick whose power is to make everyone else more boring, and a nun who's really good at remembering things and being hungry?

Another great example, perhaps a better one to which to compare Fractale due to their sharing the same studio as well as the type of setting, is last year’s Sora no Woto. The backdrop of the post-post-apocalyptic world, while not original, was certainly unusual, and provided plenty of potential for fun world building and exploration. Instead, what we got was cute girls doing cute things, punctuated by them saving nations from war through THE POWER OF LOVE AND MUSIC! Excuse me while I barf from merely remembering this horrible show.

Another example? Last year’s Ookami-san and Seven Companions. Funny and whimsical fantasy premise, torn down by being a typical boy-protects-tsundere story. While we’re piling on J.C. Staff, why not mention the 2nd season of Shakugan no Shana, which decided to eschew all the fun and exciting action from the 1st season and replace it with a typical run of the mill high school harem love comedy?

This is a problem that plagues even good shows. Katanagatari, for example, is a great show, the best of last year in the opinion of some, but the places where it faltered were those when Togame devolved into a typical tsundere moeblob, completely unfitting for the fantastical past setting. Thankfully, those times became less and less frequent as the show progressed, but when they happened, they distracted from the world of the show and reminded us of this stale, boring, and downright annoying character cliche that is so pervasive in anime today.

Here's a scifi/fantasy show that embraced its unique setting and built its story around it. It was pretty successful.

If I may anthropomorphize a bit, the way I see it is that these shows are not confident in themselves. They have these intriguing uncommon ideas, but they’re afraid of showing them off, lest they be rejected. So they put on their proverbial masks and instead of showing their true selves, they show what has been tried and true, dozens and dozens and dozens of times before ad nauseum, because that’s what people responded to in the past. Unfortunately, that’s how you create unoriginal, boring tripe like A Certain Magical Index or Sora no Woto.

A phrase I think of often is “ambitiously itself.” This refers to works that don’t fall into the traps mentioned above. They are confident about what they are, and, for better or for worse, they’ll go about doing their own thing without catering to what they think you want. Surely, this is a formula that can – and has, often – fail. It can create niche products that appeal to just a few. But it also has given rise to some of the greatest, most memorable works in anime. Look at a couple fairly recent huge science fiction successes The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. They each had a clear vision for what they wanted to do and executed on them, using their unique settings to full effect. That is how they ended up in such high stature, that is how they found success.

So, what am I trying to say here? Certainly, not every science fiction or fantasy work needs to fully exploit its setting. In fact, it can be a lot of fun to see an otherwise normal piece of work take place with something fantastical as the backdrop. What determines the work’s quality, then, is the execution of the narrative itself, regardless of the setting. And that’s something true for all works. Simply having a fascinating world such as the one in Fractale or A Certain Magical Index or Sora no Woto is not good enough. In fact, it’s nothing. The actual story that takes place within must be compelling as well, and for the setting not to go to waste, the story must use it to shine in a way other works can’t.

Don't even get me started on the militant-anti-pervert-girl cliche. How does that even make sense in this kind of world?

What is sure to lead to mediocrity is to shove cliches we’ve gotten sick of years ago into the setting and to call it a day. In the end, A Certain Magical Index is just another supernatural harem show despite the really cool city in which it takes place. Sora no Woto is just another cute-girls-doing-cute things show despite it taking place in a post-post-apocalyptic world. And so far, Fractale is just another (genki) magical-girl-falls-into-boy’s-lap show, despite the post-scarcity science fiction setting. I’ve seen this show before. So have you. And we both know that it’s not something worth watching again.

After much delay and, depending on where you hang around, much hype, the 50 minute OVA Black Rock Shooter was finally released yesterday, July 24. Despite the solid visuals and music, the poor pacing and storytelling make this an anime that I can’t recommend, even to die hard fans of Vocaloids or Supercell like myself. You’re better off just waiting for the soundtrack and seeing some of the highlights.

For those who don’t know that much about Vocaloids or Supercell, here’s a brief introduction to Black Rock Shooter. Ryo, the only musician in the now professional band Supercell, got his start uploading his songs sung by Hatsune Miku onto Nico Nico Douga. One of his most popular ones, perhaps second only to Melt, was Black Rock Shooter, a song that he had written based off of a picture drawn by an artist who goes by the name of Huke. It was uploaded in June of 2008. You can see the original video with English subtitles on Youtube.

Some time since then, anime studio Ordet decided to pick it up and to create a 50 minute OVA based on the song – which itself was based on a picture. It was originally supposed to be released in September 2009, but it got pushed to Spring 2010, then again to Summer 2010. And yesterday, on 7/24, it was finally released, for free on DVDs that came with the September issue of Hobby Japan. There are a couple other magazines will also have the DVDs packed for free.

An iconic shot from the original Nico Nico Douga animation, rendered in the anime.

One of the biggest questions I had going into this was what the story would be like. After all, the OVA is ultimately based on an image, and the lyrics to the song don’t exactly build up a cohesive world. Well, contrary to the more fantasy oriented images associated with this production, Black Rock Shooter tells the story of a middle school first year named Mato Kuroi (Kana Hanazawa) and her friendship with classmate Yomi Takanashi (Miyuki Sawashiro). The 2 become friends on their first day of school and grow closer throughout their first year despite their being in different sports clubs (basketball for Mato, volleyball for Yomi). About half way through, the basketball team manager Yuu (Kana Asumi) gets into the mix as well. The main conflict manifests itself as jealousy when Mato and Yuu get put into the same class for their second years while Yomi gets put into a different class, stuck outside looking in.

Interspersed in this story are brief scenes of the eponymous Black Rock Shooter – an obvious stand-in for Mato – chasing and fighting against Dead Master – Yomi’s stand-in – in the dark fantasy world most associated with the work. The action scenes are short and inserted fairly evenly throughout the OVA, and it’s only at the end when Yomi disappears that a clear connection between the 2 settings is shown.

Dead Master looks down at Black Rock Shooter, both about to fight.

The core problem with Black Rock Shooter lies with the storytelling. The pacing is horrid, with pretty much nothing happening in the first half. 50 minutes is longer than a TV show episode, but it’s still not a long time, and you simply can’t waste that much time with the set up. The more action packed fantasy scenes inserted throughout that half didn’t do anything to help the pace, because they felt unrelated – at best, only loosely connected – to the main story in the real world.

The first clear indication that the 2 worlds are connected, about 2/3 of the way into the OVA.

On that note, the story just doesn’t tie together. There is a fundamental disconnect between the scenes in the fantasy world and in the real world. There are hints at how the events in the two settings relate to each other, but it is only at the end that a clear connection is made, and even then, the explanation is unsatisfactory. Clearly, the fantasy scenes were meant to serve as a metaphor for the emotional conflict taking place in real life between Mato and Yomi, but the rest of the connections, including the reason for Yomi’s disappearance or her blank text to Mato at the end, are left as exercises for the viewer. Same goes for the opening fight between Dead Master and Black Rock Shooter, which clearly happened before the events of the show. Having an open ended story up to the viewer’s interpretation is one thing, but this is either laziness or ineptitude by the director.

The orange, yellow desert background contrasts with the dark green castle background of the other fantasy scenes when this character appears. That's about all this character does before she disappears.

Heck, there is even a 3rd character in the fantasy who never does anything. Perhaps the entire purpose of this OVA was to set up a series. At least, that’s what it feels like with its open threads and the cliffhanger-style ending.

Even the fantasy scenes, while containing entertaining, visceral action and beautiful art, suffers from the fact that nothing about these characters’ motivations is revealed until the very end. There were hints here and there at the bigger story, but the mismatching chronology – the fantasy scenes have no connection to the real life scenes being shown at the same time – meant that I was left wondering why Black Rock Shooter and Dead Master were fighting for most of the time. And fights in which you have nothing invested in the outcome just aren’t as fun to watch.

It doesn’t help that neither of the two show any emotion through most of the fight. As they get hit, thrown, shot at, and tied up, their faces rarely change from their monotone dead stares, as if they were both Terminators programmed to fight each other. The closest thing up until the climactic moment was Dead Master’s evil smirk. They don’t talk, and they barely even grunt as they fight. The brevity also hurt these fight scenes, as none of them lasted long enough for a real story to develop within the fights. Just as the fights started to get into their grooves and made me excited, the OVA would cut back to a plain real life scene. There are things that can be done with single long action scenes that can’t be done with many shorter ones. They need time to build a sort of rhythm, something that Black Rock Shooter never managed to do.

The action, while pretty, doesn't make for very good still shots. Hence why I'm showing shots from still scenes.

That being said, Black Rock Shooter is still a very pretty anime. The real life scenes have the level of detail you expect from an OVA, and the stylized animation of the action scenes work very well. Some of the backdrops in the fantasy scenes are obviously created using CG, but they almost never stand out. The use of the color and light, as well as the architecture in those scenes do a wonderful job of creating an oppressive, dark, almost depressing mood to the speechless fights. I’m a fan of the character designs as well. The purposeful contrast between Black Rock Shooter’s tall, lanky, unbalanced design with Dead Master’s curvaceous and symmetrical one was not lost on me. Heck, they even put scars on Black Rock Shooter’s stomach in order to emphasize the straightness of her design (ironically, Yomi is taller than Mato).

And the music was very enjoyable as well. No, there was no Hatsune Miku music; not even Black Rock Shooter was played. Instead, it was a largely classical score, fitting for a school story. In some scenes, the music really took center stage in communicating the emotion to the viewer. One of the first scenes, in which Mato climbs the hill near her house before going off to school, sticks in my mind. In the world of TV shows, where usually some plot has to be fit into a 24 minute less 1:30 OP less 1:30 ED slot, the background music almost always stays right there in the background. Without such limitations (in fact, one might argue that they didn’t even fill the pressure to fit a story into its 50 minute slot), the OVA was free to implement more movie-like usage of background music, to good effect. There were also call backs to Supercell’s Black Rock Shooter song as well, with some of the music, particularly at the beginning and end of the OVA, using themes pulled straight from that song.

This picture kind of summarizes Black Rock Shooter. So much badassery when free to act, but chained and restricted by the plot, unable to fulfill its potential.

Ultimately, Black Rock Shooter is two separate stories connected only loosely by theme and character design, with 80% of the time spent on a, though heartfelt, tragically generic story about friendship, and the other 20% dedicated to the good parts: the fun, even if meaningless, action scenes. The uneven pacing and storytelling unraveled a technically solid production, and as the credits rolled, I felt sorry for all the people whose hard work went into producing what amounted to essentially nothing.

The only way I can see this OVA being somewhat redeemed is if it turns out to be just the 1st part of a longer series, one which explores the fantasy world that this one only briefly touched upon. Both the pre-credits ending and post-credits ending tease a possible continuation. But as a stand alone work, it is incomplete and not worth the time to watch it.

This is when the story finally begins, right? It couldn't possibly be that the ending credits are about to start in less than a minute, right? Right?

Notes:

• As always, screenshots galore at Tenka Seiha and Random Curiosity.
• The free magazine-packed DVDs include 7 different languages of subtitles, including English. The other 6 are Japanese, Chinese, Italian, German, Spanish, and French.
• Other magazines that will have this DVD are Megami Magazine (7/30) and Monthly Animedia (8/10). (source: Anime News Network via Vocaloidism)
• The character Dead Master was never named in the OVA. I got her name from the figures of her they’re selling, such as this one.
• This is the 2nd anime for which Ryo of Supercell did the music. The other one was Cencoroll, and it also starred Kana Hanazawa as a leading role.
• Kana Asumi starred as Poplar in last season’s Working!!, in which one of the running gags was that she would always mispronounce the main character’s name “Takanashi” as “Katanashi.” Her character Yuu has no problem with that in Black Rock Shooter, however. The OVA also made the same pun as in Working!! regarding Takanashi’s name being able to be confused with “Kotori” (Takanashi’s name when he cross-dresses).
• At the point when Mato was giving Yomi the star cell phone strap, I started wondering if the fantasy world was far in the future, given the post-apocalyptic style of the setting. I was hoping that there was some falling out between the 2 that the OVA would show, before they somehow became Black Rock Shooter and Dead Master. I think that would’ve been a better twist than, “It’s a metaphor, lol.”