Roving Thoughts archives

Sound! Euphonium and sports shows

In reaction to my spring midway views on Euphonium, Author wrote:

When I mentioned that Euphonium was essentially a sports show with girls, a few folks were sceptical, but that classification seems even more apt now.

My view is that while Euphonium certainly has elements that also appear in sports shows, it is not one itself. A sports show like Ping Pong, Haikyuu!!, Yowamushi Pedal, or even Girls und Panzer strongly features the actual sport. Good characters and their stories are important, but in a normal sports show the overall story is in large part driven by the conflict inherent in the sports competition and actual 'games' feature prominently.

Sound! Euphonium's story is not structured like this. The actual band competition barely appears and there are none of the normal tropes of sports shows, like actual rival bands and rival performers in them; in fact we don't even see a competition performance from another band (we see one preparing to go on in the last episode, but that's quite different). This would be like a baseball sports show that entirely featured training, practice, and team selection and then didn't actually bother showing any baseball games. You could certainly do such a show but to me it wouldn't really feel like a sports show either.

(And in another example, although Cross Game was more about the people than sports, it featured plenty of baseball games and the climax saw a game actually being played out. See also Evirus on Cross Game, which features plenty of images of people actually playing baseball.)

So to me Sound! Euphonium is not a sports show but a show that is using competition as a setting to drive a character study and a meditation on the real costs of taking competition seriously. An actual sports show version of Sound! Euphonium would be structured quite differently (and likely would be less interesting).

Sidebar: Sports shows and nastiness

Author also wrote:

But I have a feeling, Euphonium would not be very welcome in any case. It’s almost a Yamakan or Shinbo show, stylistically and story-wise. Too nasty. I know a lot of people fall for it (see [me] above). They feel that it’s more real that way. [...]

One thing that distinguishes a classical sports show is that, to put it one way, the protagonists almost always win in the end (although they may have stumbles and setbacks on the way). In this sports shows are shows about just rewards; if you're a good, talented person and you work hard, you will get rewarded for it. Good people do not get cut from the team and they and the team do not in the end go down in defeat.

(This is complicated by noble, deserving opponents and rivals, but I wave my hands and restrict my focus to people around the protagonists.)

Real life does not work that way, of course. Real life is not that nice. But our stories do not have to be un-nice in that way and not all of them are. Really, it would be kind of a downer if a sports story did not feature people winning in the end.

In this sense, Euphonium is indeed 'nasty'. Deserving, hard working people do not necessarily get rewarded. Effort is no guarantee of success. Life can be unfair to you and snatch your dreams away (or force you to make harsh choices between a selfish dream and a selfless one). This is perfectly okay with me because I think of Euphonium as a character piece, not a sports show, and I am willing to see people fail in sympathetic ways in character pieces. But other people may not necessarily like that; they may want more strongly upbeat stories.

(That a number of people in Ping Pong do not get rewarded this way is one of the things that makes it an unusual and interesting sports show to me. Ping Pong is harsh in that; desire, work, and even some talent is not necessarily good enough to guarantee success. Note that Ping Pong explicitly admits that this is unfair.)

Checking in on the Spring 2015 anime season most of the way through

Once again it's time for the traditional 'midway' update on my initial impressions. You probably saw this one coming; I was overly optimistic in a number of my initial impressions.

Great:

• Sound! Euphonium: This has become the smash hit of the season for me and a strong contender for one of my shows of the year. It continues to be great in many ways; its collection of characters, its excellent directing, how willing it is to tell the story with small things and small gestures, and more. I'm not sure what the show is 'about' as such, which is one measure of (good) quality, but in part I've come to see it as an observation on what 'going for Nationals' really means for the people involved. In your typical sports show the narrative is basically all positive; here, we are seeing the cost spelled out, in strained relationships, crushed people, and so on.

  (Or perhaps I'm reading too much into the show. Who knows.)

  Have I mentioned yet that this show is plain beautiful to look at? Because it is. The animation and visual appearance is lovely and the directing is top notch.

Okay:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront: In my initial impressions I called this 'pretty great for a big action show' and that's still a fair assessment. It's just that BBB is not anything more than that. It's fun to watch, it has a bunch of genuine flair due to Rie Matsumoto's directing, the characters and humour are okay, but it's never going to be great in the way that eg Kyousougiga was.

Things I'm still watching:

• Knights of Sidonia - The Ninth Planet Crusade: When the second season is on, it's on. It's just that Sidonia has spent a bunch of its recent run exploring what you could pretty literally call Tanikaze's harem. This is not what Sidonia is good at and it's been kind of painful to watch.

  Hopefully we're now out of these boring doldrums and back into the stuff that Sidonia does so well. The omens are good, at least.

• Punchline: The quick summary of what happened here is that the show has turned down the mania level and is starting to explain things. I don't really expect this to end well; I'm just hoping for a fun ride on the way there.

  (To be fair, Punchline has a bunch of recent enjoyable twists too. They're just not as big as earlier ones. Possibly I'm too jumpy about how the end is going to go, but I do feel the show has slowed down overall.)

Why am I still watching this award:

• Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works: This has simply not been particularly good or particularly enjoyable, because it tried to hold forth on philosophy. Worse, it tried to be serious about it and then it drew the whole thing out across multiple painful episodes of Shirou and Archer talking vacuously at each other.

  But hey, when it could be bothered to have fights they were generally okay and reasonably pretty, and Lancer wound up being cool, and a few other okay things happened. I'm overly invested in this franchise, okay? Don't ask me to do the sensible thing at this point.

Still cannot rate:

• Ghost in the Shell Arise - Alternative Architecture: This has only just finished rerunning the four OVAs, which I enjoyed plenty but didn't really anticipate as such because I'd seen it already. I'm hoping that the couple of episodes of new material are going to be great, ie up to the usual Arise standards.

My view is that Sound! Euphonium makes this a great season by itself. Without it this would still be a good season; Blood Blockade Battlefront is perfectly good for what it is (I just wanted it to be more), Sidonia has often been excellent, and even Punchline is perfectly good fun with a bunch of enjoyable twists.

Brief 'early' impressions of the Spring 2015 anime season so far

It's time for my usual early impressions post for this season (as before). Every season I seem to be optimistic (I called last season 'strong' in my early impressions post, for example), but this time I think I might really be right. Which would be nice, because I'm enjoying everything I'm still watching (okay, almost everything).

Clear winners:

• Knights of Sidonia - The Ninth Planet Crusade: This is more of the same thing as we got a year ago and it's just as good as before (cf). Things from the manga are definitely getting chopped up and shuffled around, which is great to see; anime is not manga. Sidonia continues to nail real tension.

• Sound! Euphonium (aka Hibike! Euphonium): I didn't expect to enjoy this and in fact only picked it up late after it got a lot of praise. Now it's neck and neck with Sidonia in my regard this season. I called it well observed and I'll stand by that. KyoAni is really on their game here, including showing us things in piles of little moments and gestures (see also my APR comment here).

• Blood Blockade Battlefront aka Kekkai Sensen: This is pretty great for a big action show. Everyone is fun to watch, the whole show is fun to watch (it's directed by the director of Kyousougiga), and it's just plain enjoyable.

• Punchline: This is a polarizing show but I'm enjoying it, partly because of its continual mania and wild ride. The fanservice is becoming more and more perfunctory every week, the jokes are still funny, and I'm interested in what's going on. It's not particularly deep but I am finding it to be quite good simple entertainment.

• Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works: This is what it is. If I was smart I would drop it, but it's just pretty enough and I'm just invested enough in the characters to follow it through to the bitter end. It doesn't help that I know too much about what's going on, in part from having seen the movie version of UBW.

Cannot rate:

• Ghost in the Shell Arise - Alternative Architecture: My overall reaction to Arise is somewhere between liking it and loving it depending on the OVA episode, so the problem with this is that so far none of it is actually new. I'm seeing some of it for the third time and some for the second, and that inevitably robs it of excitement (and it's not so good that it's massively thrilling to rewatch it so soon). It is more than interesting enough to get me to rewatch it, but it's not something I'm on the edge of my seat to see the next episode.

Misses:

• Show By Rock!!: It's okay but it's not anything particularly special, and I feel that I'm watching enough really good stuff this season that I don't need padding.

• Arslan Senki aka The Heroic Legend of Arslan: After three episodes this was slow moving, bland, and relatively generic fantasy. There's nothing wrong with this as such, but I've already read a lot of relatively generic fantasy novels (much of them better written than Arslan). It doesn't help that the Arslan books still aren't finished yet, so the odds of this show having an actual conclusion are basically nil.

• Gunslinger Stratos: This is your typical light novel anime and as such I decided I had better things to do with my time.

• Etotama: This show is neither as funny nor as interesting as it thinks it is. The fourth wall humour didn't help; a show has to be much better than Etotama is in order for that to come off as funny instead of desperate and sad. (From twitter.)

Special down in flames award:

• Plastic Memories: The first episode was impressive, barring one little bit. The second episode was less so and then the third episode went down in flames. Evirus called it 'hot garbage' and I'm not going to disagree, although officially I have no opinion since I didn't even finish the episode.

  Since the show has flushed all of my goodwill down the drain, I am completely uninterested in what it does next even if that turns out to be great (which seems unlikely, to be honest). Episode 3 forever stains Plastic Memories beyond recovery for me.

Nothing else this season has seemed attractive enough to be worth checking out (at least among non-sequel series), and frankly I'm satisfied with my top five (I count Arise AA as one of them). All of them are at least solidly enjoyable shows, with some being excellent ones. It's nice not to be following a massive lot of shows this season, even if it leaves me permuting my top five for APR votes.

On a side note, Knights of Sidonia has clearly the best OP of the season based on my standard metric.

Looking back at the Winter 2015 anime season

Once again it's time for me to look back at the recently finished season to see how the shows I watched wound up, following on my early impressions and my midway views. The short version is that not much changed from my midway views, and especially nothing that was new this season pulled itself up.

Excellent:

• Shirobako: What a show and what a finish. The second last episode was amazing all the way through (especially at the end) and then the last episode brought us home with everything I could have asked for. I laughed helplessly one last time; I got sentimental with everyone. It was great. The whole show is many things, including a love letter to anime itself and an honest but ultimately cheerful look at work and adult life. How much do I love the show? Let me put it this way: it's guaranteed a spot on my 'best N in 2015' list and it may well take #1 (and if it doesn't, this will have been another very good year).

  See also: Author, NovaJinx, Bobduh's ending summary, The Cart Driver.

  (At this point I'm going to plug the Shirobako glossary at A&V if you're interested in the mechanics of animation production.)

Divided opinions:

• Yurikuma Arashi: This was interesting to watch right through the end but I never fully connected with it and with the characters. I feel as if I'm not qualified to really render a verdict on the show, but to the extent that I am I'd say that the symbolism and message overwhelmed the human story theoretically being told. Scamp's description of watching it in pleasant bemusement is basically my experience. It was pretty Ikuhara.

  (Part of it is that the entire setting never felt real; instead it felt overwhelmed by the needs of the symbolism involved.)

Good but falls a bit short:

• Garo - The Animation: Sometimes the show was amazing but all too often it wasn't (sadly including the final episode). I'm not sure how I feel about the whole mixture in the end; part of me wants to call it ordinary but then I remember how excellently it did some bits and I think it deserves bonus credit for that.

• Log Horizon S2 finished off relatively well, with a good final episode that set us up for more if the novels get far enough along and there's still funding for more. The ride this season was ultimately fun but somewhat bumpy, and for me wasn't quite up to the standard set by the first season (partly because the first season packed in so much big stuff about the setting and so on).

Okay:

• Aldnoah.Zero: I expected laughable craziness and spectacle and that's exactly what I got. The show knew how to throw a fun time all the way through right to the end, despite all of the stupidity involved in what was actually happening. AZ is a show where you'll get enraged if you actually think about what's going on, so it's best not to. On the whole this makes it not a particular good show, but it was entertaining for me to watch.

• Durarara!! X2: There was some nice stuff every so often but once the dust settled not very much in it felt terribly necessary and too many of the interesting new characters got sidelined almost immediately. If the whole thing really is going somewhere, it's moving too slowly and feels padded.

  (To be blunt, it feels like the show is spinning out a smash hit in order to milk it for all its worth.)

• Dog Days'' aka S3: I got what I expected and wanted from this, which was actual action and a reasonable running plotline. There was nothing particularly deep, but I wasn't expecting that; this was comfortable, reasonably charming watching.

• The Rolling Girls: This kind of collapsed at the end, promising more than it could deliver. It was enjoyable but far more for the periodic spectacle than the main cast (and some bits were kind of painful in retrospect). At its peak it was very anime in a good way and that gets me to feel reasonably fondly about the whole thing.

• Maria the Virgin Witch: Sometimes the show was sharp and great, but in the end it was just as I was afraid of in my midway views; the show couldn't come through with good answers for its big issues. Maria really dropped the ball in its ending and so undid basically all of its work in raising interesting questions and challenging things and so on.

• Yatterman Night: In the end the show took the easy way out and never recovered the sharp-edged bleakness that made it unusually interesting early on. It didn't help that it suffered a drastic production failure on the last episode, although even without that I'm not sure the ending really makes sense.

As you can see, I didn't wind up thinking all that highly of the shows that started in this season. Aldnoah.Zero was entertaining but not good, and most everything else wound up being relatively ordinary (at best). Yurikuma Arashi is just, well, Ikuhara.

PS: While Death Parade did not quite turn out to be what I was afraid of in my early impressions, it's still not something that I would have enjoyed watching (based on other people's summaries et al). Still, quite a number of people loved it quite a lot and I've seen some amazing clips from it. Call it probably the best show from the winter season that I didn't watch.

Checking in on the Winter 2015 anime season 'midway' through

Once again it's time for the traditional part way through update on my initial impressions, which I can't really call 'midway' any more. On the whole I have somewhat mixed feelings about this season; on the one hand there's a bunch of watchable shows but on the other hand there's relatively little that I feel really enthused about, especially among the new shows (as opposed to the ones continued from last season).

Enjoyable:

• The Rolling Girls: This has turned out to be more episodic stories about people the protagonists run into in their travels and less overall story and spectacular Best fights. The result is still enjoyable but it's far less impressive than the first two episodes, and the protagonists are not really good enough characters to carry the show. Still, the spectacular bits are pretty spectacular when they happen.

  (There's an overall story developing, but the whole thing has moved pretty slowly.)

Things I'm still watching:

• Durarara!! X2: In theory this ought to be exciting. In practice it doesn't feel particularly necessary and the actual goings on have not been all that engrossing much of the time. It's difficult to get really enthused about yet more peculiar, crazy, or violent people showing up in Ikebukuro, since the first season had plenty of those. Some episodes still wind up interesting and engrossing; others wind up flat (and some of the animation has been dire).

  (Things would be different if we were getting interesting answers about the new mysterious people, but we aren't. And some of them are over the top even for Durarara.)

• Yurikuma Arashi: In the other Ikuhara shows I've seen, it's been possible to feel that the characters were real people first and metaphors second. This is not the feeling that YKA gives me and the result robs the show of both investment and impact. If all of the characters are ultimately puppets dancing to the tune of symbolism, it's hard to really care about any of them even if they are interesting when taken in isolation. The show remains interesting for me to watch, but almost entirely at an intellectual level instead of an emotional one. It has managed some pretty nice episodes, though.

  (With that said, sometimes the characters click for me for a while. And I think that I would like them if things were less compressed and they had time to feel like people.)

• Aldnoah.Zero: The show knows how to throw a fun time even if what's going on is stupid, bad writing, or doesn't make any sense. I wholeheartedly applaud the show's decision to focus on Slaine and the action in space, because he's far more interesting than Inaho or anything going on on the Deucalion.

  (I even think Slaine's actions (still) make sense from a character perspective; see the short version.)

• Dog Days'' aka S3: This season has been delivering actual action and a running plotline, making it much more like the first season than the second one. That's enough to keep me watching and enjoying it. At this point I've watched enough that I'll probably finish it no matter what.

On the edge:

• Maria the Virgin Witch: Some jarring bits excepted, there's nothing that's really wrong about the show; I generally quite enjoy episodes when I watch them. But my gut spends a lot of time telling me that I'm not enthused about it and that I don't actively like it, I'm just passively watching it when I can get myself to do so.

  (Perhaps part of the problem is that I don't think I trust the show to give good answers to the serious questions and conflicts it's raising. It partly feels like it's trying to be serious and significant without the chops to carry it off.)

• Yatterman Night: The show oscillates back and forth between painful jokes, go-nowhere episodes, blatantly obvious foreshadowing, amusing developments and humour, and sharp-edged bleakness wrapped in a cute exterior. The good bits hurt in a good way, but there's a lot of bland ordinary things that I really wish weren't even there. The result is mixed and kind of weak overall.

Dropped:

• Soukyuu no Fafner Dead Aggressor - Exodus: In the end this simply had too little excitement mixed with far too many things I didn't care about. Part of the problem was that the show made basically no effort to catch people up on the background and the very large cast of characters, despite how long it's been since the last Fafner; this left me basically indifferent to the entire cast.

In shows that carried over from last season:

• Shirobako has remained excellent although not flawless; it's continued to deliver excellent drama and hard moments while being ultimately cheerful. One of the things the show is doing amazingly is creating characters that you love to hate while reluctantly coming to accept; it's managed at least three.

• Garo has really picked itself up lately from a string of genuinely painful episodes (some of which were just filler and others were Garo's usual awkward execution). See also. Garo has been in its 'on' phase a lot lately as it heads into the final plot arc.

• Log Horizon S2 has been variable; generally okay, sometimes a bit painful, but sometimes really good. We've just finished what's probably the last high point and so I expect we'll be winding down for the rest of the season; I'm just hoping for no goofy episodes that jump up and down on the show's weak point.

  (Apparently there's not enough of the light novels out to make a third season yet. After this season I find that I'm actually fine with that.)

On the whole this is a good season, even if I'm feeling disappointed that none of the new shows I'm watching even come close to Shirobako or even Garo (on its good days). After all, I'm still watching ten shows, which is very high for me (especially at this point in the season).

Why I like the first season of Mushishi much more than the second

When I look back at the first season of Mushishi, what really sticks in my memory is not the individual stories but the things we learn about the mushi, the mushishi, several recurring characters, and especially Ginko himself. In particular, learning more about Ginko over the course of the first season added special poignancy to any number of moments; for example, when Ginko turns down an attractive offer to stay longer with a family rather than venture out into the snowy winter, we already know that he can't accept because too many mushi will accumulate around him if he stays in one place. One of the joys of the first series for me is the slow illumination of who Ginko is and how the series quietly explores his character over the course of the show.

The second series is almost entirely lacking in this and many of its efforts in this direction seem half-hearted. I don't think this is the fault of the series itself as such, because the honest truth is that the first series already covered a great deal of ground as far as the mushi, the mushishi, and Ginko himself go. This leaves the second series with not that much extra it can say. But the unfortunate result is that the second series has wound up being far less about Ginko than the first series was and there are only a few moments that are amplified by what we know about Ginko.

For me, this creates a series that feels nice but not essential in the way the first series was. By the time it finished, the first series had pretty much given me all the answers I feel I needed about the world and Ginko and so on (although it didn't resolve some things as such). The second series then basically goes around in circles, doing nothing much new with the things I cared the most about in the first series. There's nothing in it that I can point to and say 'yes, that was necessary, that changed or deepened my view of things', even though there were plenty of nice things.

Assigning fault here is hard if not impossible. The first series did everything right in terms of pacing and story selection, especially given that people had no expectation that it would be continued. The second series then has to work with the (remaining) underlying material it has, which is probably generally episodic in the first place, and it likely isn't in any position to significantly evolve or change Ginko's situation (especially if the source material doesn't). That leaves it pretty much stuck, with little left to do except tell its episodic stories. It tells them very well (cf) and it's not anyone's fault that they're less entrancing and engaging to me than finding out more about Ginko and his world.

I expect that this is a quite personal take on Mushishi as a whole. My strong impression is that most people who watch the show are far more deeply touched by the individual stories in the episodes than I am.

(I do find the individual episode engaging and often powerful, for what it's worth; they're good observations on people and the human condition. But to me they're just not as memorable and powerful as the overall story of Ginko and his world.)

Brief not really early impressions of the Winter 2015 anime season

It's time for my usual early impressions post for this season (as before), which has been delayed mostly because I foolishly decided I'd write my best N in 2014 entry first and then didn't do that very fast. But hey, I've also been distracted by how strong this season is and how many shows I'm still watching.

Clear winners:

• Durarara!! X2: The first episode was bland, with too much reintroduction of characters and too little plot happening, but since then things have woken up and we're back to the good old Durarara that I have fond memories of.

• The Rolling Girls: Let's go for 'colourful' as the concise description of the show. The setting is colourful, the action is colourful, the actual look is colourful, and so on. It's got a real verve to it and I've been really enjoying watching. The third episode slowed down from the breakneck pace and verve of the first two episodes but I still enjoyed it. Also, the show's got a good sense of how to be funny, and better yet it lets funny things just be there and speak for themselves instead of hammering on you to get the point home.

  (I hope we get more Best fights because the first two episodes were really entertaining there. But I'm willing to believe that the show will do interesting things from now onwards, partly because the show's dropped plenty of hints about a real, serious plot going on underneath all of the shenanigans.)

• Yatterman Night: I don't know how to concisely describe this. It has a weird dystopian future setting, a bunch of heart and sentimentality, a good sense of humour, a periodic injection of black comedy and bleak reality, and a bunch of things going on. I'm enjoying it quite a bit even if I have no real idea where it's going to wind up. This is the show that I can most easily believe might become a really powerful and affecting show by the time it ends.

Things I'm enthused by:

• Yurikuma Arashi: This is Ikuhara so I'm predisposed to like it, but most of the episodes so far have been so stylized, dense with symbolism and mythology, and so devoid of actual characters for me to relate to that I'm mostly watching it passively and intellectually instead of getting emotionally involved. Episode four changed the pattern and was pretty good.

  In short, it's fun to watch this and speculate about what everything means but I can't say I actually care about anyone in it (yet).

Entertaining, at least so far:

• Aldnoah.Zero: What is going on makes me roll my eyes and laugh a bunch, but so far the show is actually delivering episodes that I like watching. As I put it, the show knows how to throw a fun time. Slaine is the best character because he does interesting things. I may be shaking my head at AZ, but I'm smiling while I do it. Oh, and this show has good production values, which helps for good action sequences.

  It really surprises me to say this, but I can see myself putting an AZ episode on my APR votes some time this season.

  (The charm may well wear off at some point.)

• Maria the Virgin Witch: This is a pretty decent show with a real grasp of action (the fight sequence in the second episode was genuinely well staged) and a good sense of humour that is only occasionally mean spirited and cringe inducing. In many ways it has the most interesting plot and conflicts of this season (and they're very thoroughly grounded ones; Maria may be a witch with magic, but what she cares about is very human). I say this as real praise: this show is plain well made.

  People who care about historical and theological accuracy in their anime may want to give this one a miss. I'm pretty sure that the author is using the medieval Catholic church (and medieval times in general) mostly as a convenient punching bag, with relatively little care for deep accuracy and sympathy.

• Dog Days'' aka S3: The first three episodes of this third season have been much more like the action oriented first season than the slice of life amblings of the second season. Since I liked the first season but found there to be nothing there for me in the second season, I like this and I expect to continue watching until this changes.

On the edge:

• Soukyuu no Fafner Dead Aggressor - Exodus: The first two episodes were pretty interesting (and the beginning of the first episode was very Fafner). The third and fourth episodes got rid of that in favour of a lot of not particularly interesting drama. The drama might be more involving if I remembered who all the original Fafner characters were and what happened in the original show. The whole decision to throw us in at the deep end in this continuation really puzzles me, seeing as the first season was ten years ago and even the movie (which I haven't seen) came out in 2010.

  (I'm probably dropping this.)

Misses:

• Kantai Collection: The characters are cardboard cutouts and the first episode gave me no reason to care about seeing any more of it.

• Military!: As comedy this was short but flat.

Not for me:

• Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love!: This is a comedy show and like almost all of them, it doesn't work for me; I smiled a bit during the first episode but not enough to be interested in watching any more.

• Death Parade: Everything I've read has made me believe that this show falls under my Hell Girl clause. I love the OP but I think I would throw the actual show through the nearest window if I watched it.

This season I made the smart decision to skip all of the LN action harem shows entirely, instead of letting myself be tempted to watch the first episodes of the most promising sounding ones. By all accounts this was the right decision and this season features an unusually dire crop of them. I've also consciously skipped Assassination Classroom because the reactions I've read have been too lukewarm to leave me enthused in a very busy season.

In continuing shows, Shirobako is still excellent, Log Horizon is going on as it is or has actually improved a bit, and I'm growing increasingly disenchanted with Garo. I'm disappointed by this disenchantment, but more and more Garo makes me wince, sigh at the lack of animation, and not want to watch the latest episode.

(Having written this and made my feelings clearer, I may actually drop Garo entirely.)

I'm currently following eleven shows (or nine if I drop Fafner and Garo right now), which I think means that something is going to start giving soon. Or maybe this just be one of my busiest seasons for a while. I'd honestly like it if everything stayed awesome and interesting, even if it means I spent an awful lot of time watching anime.

The best N anime that I saw in 2014

This is much like last year's best N, namely what I consider to be the best or most enjoyable N anime that I saw in calendar 2014 (regardless of when they were made or released). This year my ordering is biased towards how enjoyable the show is instead of how good I think it is in some absolute measure of quality. As in the past two years, my rule of thumb is that only shows that have actually ended count because you never know what unsatisfying or terrible things an unfinished show will do over the rest of its run. Overall 2014 was not the exceptional year that 2013 was, but it was pretty good.

(See also the winter, spring, summer, and fall retrospectives.)

More or less in order of my affections, except that the top two or three are very close to a tie:

• KILL la KILL: I'm an anime fan and in the end this is a glorious work of fanservice to everything that I like about a certain sort of anime. It's fun and exciting and loud and overflows with a sheer exuberant joy (and spectacle), even if it's not particularly deep or coherent or thematic. Episode 22 contains the single most spectacular moment of fanservice of the entire year.

  (By 'fanservice' I do not particular mean 'nearly naked people'; I mean 'giving the audience the spectacle it wants to see'. KLK's fanservice is all about giving us just what will make us cheer loudly.)

• Ping Pong: I didn't expect to love this anywhere near as much as I did and its twists and turns genuinely surprised me (although other people found it more predictable). For me it's a great story with great characters and full to bursting with little moments and gestures. The Christmas episode is a thing of beauty; it may well be the best single episode I watched all year. Don't let the animation style put you off; it really works well with the material and the presentation.

  This is both a drama that involves sports and a sports story, one that makes the sport itself interesting and compelling. And oh so physical as well; these people sweat and strain and push themselves to their physical limits, and Ping Pong's beautiful directing and animation makes that very visceral.

• Ghost in the Shell ARISE: When I first saw the second episode of ARISE I was rather down on it, but I rewatched both the first and second episodes at the end of the year and wound up with an improved impression of it (and the first is still great). As a whole the ARISE series is great and a fine GitS work. I'll probably always be fondest of the first episode because I think it's the best distillation of the essence of GitS (and anime cyberpunk in general) in a single piece that I've seen, but the other episodes are good in their own ways.

  (You should totally ignore anyone who gripes that ARISE is not exactly like GitS: Stand Alone Complex. That it's different is one of the things that makes it great, and frankly the second season of SAC showed us some of the hazards of trying to retrace SAC too closely.)

I enjoyed all of these three in different ways, so this year I'm going to wave my hands about their exact ordering. I think that Ping Pong is a more powerful show than the other two, but KILL la KILL is the most whoop it up show and ARISE is in many ways the most fascinating and interesting one (and it's certainly the best-made visually). Their current order is my feelings today, but next week I might change my mind. And in a year or three, who knows.

• Mushishi second season: The individual episodes are as excellent as in the first season, continuing to give us a whole string of quietly beautiful, poignant, and touching encounters with people. I just don't find it as engaging or powerful as the first season for reasons that deserve a separate entry. But it's still a great show that's well worth anyone's attention.

  (Some people will consider me a heretic for only ranking this #4 this year. For the record, had I first seen the original season this year I think it would easily be at the top of this list. Yeah, I'm a lot less fired up about this season.)

• Hanamonogatari: There's a lot about the Monogatari franchise that's not to like, but every so often it winds up and hits one out of the park. This is one of those times, partly because the show keeps most of its usual excesses under control. The core story is simple but the characters and their interplay carry the show and oh, the ending sequence. What could have been in another and perhaps better world.

  (Several of the best Monogatari stories break your heart. This is one of them.)

• Knights of Sidonia: The show has two strong things going for it. The first is that it nails a certain sense of claustrophobic atmosphere and ambivalence about what's happening; this is war and the future not as a pleasant thing. The second is that it's a gorgeously SF show in a way that's hard to put into words. See also my spring retrospective, where I wave my hands more. Far from detracting from the experience I think that the all-CGI nature generally added to it, although opinions differ a lot there.

• Shingeki no Bahamut - Genesis: In the end it was somewhat flawed, but for a while it was amazing and even afterwards it was pretty excellent with its Hollywood-style heroic action and collection of great moments. It was a lot of fun to watch in a way that's quite uncommon and I loved almost all of the characters (I just wish that Amira had stayed Amira). I waved my hands more in my fall retrospective.

• PuPiPo!: This is a little near-gem (it's a bit too short and thus simple to be a true gem) that's well worth your attention; it's quietly beautiful and touching while also being a rollicking adventure with quite a few really fun characters. The short runtime forces it to fiercely concentrate its focus and the result delivers a great run that covers an amazing amount of story and plot with some serious twists thrown in. Not many shows would have the ambition to even attempt some of the things it does, never mind execute them well (which it does).

  Look, just watch it, okay? The whole thing is no more than an hour long (and you can stop sooner than that if it turns you off, since each episode is about four minutes).

  (I owe my exposure to PuPiPo! to Author's praise of it. Thank you, Author, for getting me to watch this overlooked beauty.)

Special merit award for a show that normally would not qualify because it hasn't finished yet but I don't care, it's my best N and I can do what I want:

• Shirobako: The show's first half forms a strong arc that ends in a great conclusion, so I'm letting it sneak in here on a technicality. Contrary to what I expected when I started watching it, that it's about anime production is the least of its appeal. I started watching for a view into the industry; now I stay for the characters, for the humour, and for the painful moments of reality. And to hate Tarou, who is a great character. See also.

Shows that I consider good but not necessarily memorable over the long term:

• Witch Craft Works: Brilliantly entertaining through a parade of diversions and distractions, WCW never took itself seriously and that was a good thing. Everything great about the show is the things that made you laugh and smile, from Tanpopo's antics through Kagari's deadpan craziness; the plot served mostly to keep everything moving along.

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: This had heart, soul, intelligence, and plenty of charm but also ambitions that it couldn't quite deliver on. It tried hard and while it fell somewhat short (which was inevitably a bit disappointing), it fetched up pretty high anyways. The smoking episode may be the second greatest episode of the year. See also. I reserve my right to retrospectively increase my opinion of this in a few years, which happens sometimes.

• Log Horizon first season: Since the second season is ongoing, I can conveniently ignore it. The first season is both a great and thoughtful exploration of 'people translated into an MMO world' and full of really fun plotting, exploration, and characters. Watching Shiroe scheme was great, although Lenessia stole the show. In an odd way this is a very SF show, in that it's very concerned with logical extrapolations from its MMO starting point; what it means for MMO things to be actually real is repeatedly an important issue (and the answers are both interesting and feel right). It also really understands its characters, periodically surprising me with moments that were just right.

• Seitokai Yakuindomo second season: It reliably made me laugh, which is rare. The show is as the show was before, with all of the strengths and (for some people) weaknesses that that implies.

• Hitsugi no Chaika: While it went downhill over the course of its run, it was still a quite good adventure show of an old-fashioned sort that gave me plenty of fond memories. In retrospect the pacing was off in a number of places and maybe it would have been improved by being even shorter than the 22 episodes it was.

Special mention for the memories:

• Star Driver The Movie: The Star Driver movie is almost entirely a condensed version of the show. Since it has to leave plenty of things out it's not as good as the show, but what's left is a high power concentrate that hits plenty of right spots. Most importantly, it brought back a bunch of my fond memories of the show itself. Star Driver is one of the shows that have only gone up in my estimation since they finished (I would now give it a place above the fold in my best N of 2011), so it's great to return to it even in condensed form. See also my Twitter ramblings.

  (And I really liked the 'and life goes on' framing bits from the movie, because the ending of the series always felt a little bit ambivalent. The movie removes that ambivalence and I'm fannishly happy about that.)

Honorable mentions:

• Majokko Shimai no Yoyo to Nene: I didn't watch many movies this year, but this one was fun. It's fairly much a kid's movie but it still has plenty of excitement and interesting stuff, and I liked how it played against expectations and pulled off surprises several times. Don't expect tragedy; this is not that sort of movie.

Praised for good reasons but that I didn't or haven't watched (all of):

• Barakamon and Sabagebu: See here. I theoretically want to watch more of both and I think they'd rate in this entry if I had. But in the mean time you don't have to be a slacker like me.

• Space Dandy: In the end this turned out to be not for me; pure artistry in a show isn't enough for me. Lots of people love it and it did have plenty of amazing animation and even what are probably great episodes, even if they never really engaged me.

In the end I completed 24 shows, OVAs, and movies this year, more or less (there's some hand-waving around split season shows here); this is down from last year. In part that was because the summer season was pretty dire for me. I saw only three movies this year, none of them major ones, which means i have a number queued up to watch sometime (including the big one of Madoka: Rebellion).

Looking back at last year and comparing it to this year, I think that last year had better top shows but this year is more even (ie, the later ranked shows here mostly leave me more enthused than last year's later ranked shows). Don't ask me to be definite here, I'll just wave my hands. Ordered rankings are hard and my opinions keep changing.

(If you're wondering about JoJo's, I wound up dropping it because it didn't really work for me.)

PS: for an amusingly different take on my opinions, my year end APR vote. The moral here is that I change my mind on a regular basis.

Looking back at the Fall 2014 anime season

Once again it's time (and past time) for my usual retrospective look back at the season to see how shows wound up, following on my early impressions and my more solid midway views. The short summary is that fall was a good season (at least for me). As I sometimes do, I'm ranking shows a bit more by how much I enjoyed them than by how good I think they are.

Excellent:

• Shirobako: This has become the surprise hit of the season and in some ways of the year for me. The show has deftly mixed several levels of comedy with drama, tension, heartache, and in the end a deeply heart-warming climax for the first half. This show has heart and affection for all of its characters (yes, even Tarou) and it shows, even if the show is not perfect.

  (Some of the ways that the show is not perfect are probably authentic to the work environment it's portraying. By which I mean a certain amount of casual background sexism.)

• Mushishi second season: Mushishi is as good as it ever is, which is both excellent and in many ways on a completely different level than other shows; it continued to give us a whole string of quietly beautiful, poignant, and touching episodes. While it's probably objectively better than Shirobako (and it certainly has less flaws), I've come to see it as cool observation to Shirobako's warm passion and right now I simply connect with that passion better than with the observation.

  (One reason that Mushishi is so much observation instead of passion is that Ginko only rarely reacts to the situation; most often he's less a character and more an oracle. Sometimes this actively robs the show of impact, for example when it skips having Ginko react to the effects of his actions in episode 17.)

Good but falls a bit short:

• Shingeki no Bahamut - Genesis: This finished quite well, with lots of excitement and good moments, but in the end it couldn't quite live up to the promise of its first four or five episodes. Part of it is that things slowed down once the show got into the main plot and part of it is that the explanation of various events didn't entirely make sense. However, for me the show's largest eventual flaw is that it demoted Amira from an interesting active character who did interesting things down to a standard do-nothing damsel in distress. Losing what was the first or second most interesting character in the show made the show much more ordinary, even if it was still a well done adventure show.

  With that said, I had a lot of fun watching almost all episodes and there's plenty to like about it, including things most 'action' shows don't actually do well. It's an atypical show and I quite liked that. It just didn't wind up being amazing, which is what it could have been if it sustained the first few episodes all the way through.

• Garo - The Animation: In the end this season of Garo was frustratingly erratic. I've come around to the view that the show's writing is almost always standard but sometimes it can execute those stock scenarios in ways that are very powerful. When it doesn't manage that the episodes often come across as quite pedestrian and boring, even if the developments and themes in the episode are important in the long run. But the high points are very high and the show can be inventive. The other problem with the show is that often it just doesn't have the animation budget it needs and then it compounds the problem by deliberately filming fights very dark to cover up the problem.

Okay:

• Hitsugi no Chaika - Avenging Battle: In the end it ended decently but not excellently. In some ways the ending was surprisingly abrupt (although not in any way that would be easy to fix); in other ways I think the largest difference was just that the show didn't draw out things that other shows would have, although it didn't have anywhere near Bahamut's flare for the dramatic. While the show was decent it never entirely lived up to the promise of the very first few episodes.

• Log Horizon: The show is trucking along more or less as it always has been this season. Unfortunately this is not up to the relatively exciting standards of the first season (which was wall to wall with interesting developments and evil plots) and it has a noticeable flaw or two that keep irritating me. I've also wound up with the impression that the pacing has slowed down so it's drawing things out too much; I keep wanting it to do something and do it faster.

• Fate/Stay Night - Unlimited Blade Works: It looks pretty, the fights are generally good, it's nice to watch Rin and Archer bounce off each other, and the show is doing yeoman work to make things with Shirou be reasonably interesting. But after the dust settles it's still F/SN, which is why it's at the bottom of my list.

  (It did pick a much better moment to stop for three months than Fate/Zero did; it's a cliffhanger but it's not in the middle of the action.)

On the whole I think the season was somewhere between quite good and excellent for me, with plenty of stuff that I enjoyed on a week to week basis and the slow climb of Shirobako to amaze me.

(I say that Shirobako may be the surprise hit of the year for me over Ping Pong because the latter had Yuasa going for it from the start. Shirobako really came out of nowhere from my perspective and yes, I know the director has a track record. With a few extremely talked about exceptions, I don't pay much attention to directors because they in no way guarantee that something will be excellent or interesting.)

Log Horizon's weakest part is Minori's plotline

The most recent Log Horizon 2 episode has made me fully realize that the show's largest single flaw is how it's addressing Minori's romantic feelings for Shiroe, and unfortunately this is a serious flaw that significantly lessens the show for me; it actively makes things painful any time the storyline comes up. That the show focused almost all of episode 13 on the whole mess made the episode kind of unpleasant to watch.

The problem is not Minori's feelings as such; they're sort of vaguely realistic and if it wanted to, the show could do a decent plot handling the issues involved there in her mixture of hero worship and a crush. The problem is that the show insists on taking the situation seriously, with characters (starting with Akatsuki but not limited to her) taking Minori's would be romance as a realistic possibility. Various people clearly see what is going on, indulge Minori, and appear to see nothing wrong with the whole situation, when by all rights they should be either backing away quietly or taking her aside and saying 'um, look, you are 14 and he is a college graduate, no'.

In short, any actual materialization of Minori's intended romance would be deeply creepy and that the show strings along the possibility of this is itself not a comfortable thing. It doesn't help that this is a not particularly attractive anime cliche and/or trope in general, one that shows almost never handle well. As it is the whole thing feels very 'light novel', which is not praise.

The whole show would be much better off if it lost Minori's feelings down a well and then never referred to them again. I'm not particularly fond of Akatsuki's angst in general, but removing Minori as a nominal romantic rival and shifting things purely to gaining the courage to approach Shiroe would help a great deal (although not completely, since that particular trope is very shopworn).

(This comes from a recent Twitter conversation or two. To put it one way, I've decided not to do all of my blogging on Twitter.)