Roving Thoughts archives

My memorable anime from 2005

See the initial 2000 entry for the full background. I'm doing this based on the show's start date and memorable is not the same as either good or significant. Date information comes from Wikipedia and Anime-Planet. As before I'm mostly listing shows in alphabetical order instead of trying to come up with preference order.

Standouts (in order):

• Mushishi: Better people than me have written lyrical appreciations for this quiet and beautiful work. It is about a lot of things but most of all it's about people; it simply explores them through the marvelously fantastic.

• Honey and Clover: This is one of the handful of ordinary life shows that I like, and in fact I pretty much love it. It's the characters and their interactions that make Honey and Clover, but the art and the direction is pretty good too. One reason the show works so well is that it's set in university and has reasonably mature characters and even actual adults.

  (My heresy is that I've never finished watching the second season because I found the ending of Honey and Clover itself to be perfectly satisfying. Someday I'll fix that.)

• Noein: This had some great science fiction concepts and excellent animation mixed in with an art style that can sometimes be offputting, characters that sometimes irritate people (while at the same time often being great), and a complex series of events that can be hard to follow. I wave my hands. I loved it when I saw it and I remember it fondly even now. It has any number of stunning moments, including a number of fight scenes.

• Shakugan no Shana: Regardless of what came after it, the first season of Shana was an excellent show that I look back on fondly. It has all sorts of good characters, a collection of disturbing antagonists, a number of interesting and sometimes creepy concepts, and pretty good animation and action. It's also one of the few action shows with a girl as their primary protagonist, which is a refreshing change.

Ordinarily memorable (in alphabetical order):

• Air: This has the distinction of being the only Key-based show that I've ever liked, and at that I much preferred the odd modern age segments to the much more standard-fantasy ones set in the past. It's possible my opinion of it would drop if I ever rewatched it, so I'm unlikely to ever do so.

• Fairy Musketeers Akazukin OVA: This had an interesting concept with a bunch of kick-ass characters but unfortunately is not exactly a complete story. Although the subsequent TV show has more depth, I never really forgave it for turning Akazukin herself into basically a moe goof (the OVA Akazukin is competent and outright dangerous; the TV series one, not so much).

• Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid: TSR is basically the payoff for all of the character and plot development throughout FMP. We got to see any number of people flower and do cool things, especially Chidori.

• Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu: Bittersweet but touching, this was a quiet little OVA series that managed to be periodically spectacular, sometimes funny, and surprisingly realistic (in ways that are spoilers to discuss).

• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's: This is where the Nanoha series really hits its stride and becomes excellent. Everything clicks, from characters through the multi-layered plot.

  (Note that yes, it still has those questionable transformation sequences and it's still a magical girls show primarily aimed at otaku, not actual girls.)

• Sousei no Aquarion: Although it involves giant robots and sometimes they do crazy things, the show actually has a solid plot, story, setting, and even a set of characters that I rather like (because, among other things, they're interesting people going through interesting conflicts).

Honorable mentions for shows that were fun but nothing more:

• Black Cat: A decent adventure and action series with some nice characters. I am sort of underselling this show here, but.

• Gun x Sword: Underneath a bunch of other things I remember it as having some reasonably interesting things to say about people being driven by revenge. I don't think they were novel things, but at least it was trying.

• Zettai Shonen: This was, well, weird (and deliberately so, and successfully). I remember enjoying it and thinking it was good but in practice I can't really remember any details, which means that listing it here is sort of a guilty reaction.

As before this is not all of the 2005 shows that I've seen, but the other ones don't make this entry for various reasons. Also, I probably should include Jigoku Shoujo here since I have very vivid memories from trying to watch it.

Want to see:

• Eureka Seven: This has been repeatedly praised as the great show that Eureka Seven AO isn't in the end.

• Kamichu! (maybe): On the one hand I watched a few episodes of this and liked it quite a bit. On the other hand I've heard that it decays by the end.

At this point I will mention that Aria also aired in 2005. I've never watched it but a lot of people praise it highly.

Perfect Blue and the importance of genre

(This entry has spoilers for Perfect Blue that you should avoid if you haven't seen it already.)

Perfect Blue presents itself as a psychological thriller. That's what the advertising copy will tell you, that's what Wikipedia will tell you, that's how people tend to describe it, and that's the face that the film first puts forward when you see it, especially at the start. As a psychological thriller the film is powerful, affecting, and genuinely suspenseful and mysterious; almost right up until the end you're not sure what's going on and so on.

(The reveals themselves are powerful and clever and beautiful. Really, Perfect Blue is a great film. It's not too late to stop reading and see it yourself.)

This is how I saw Perfect Blue when I saw it and probably how most people see it. But in thinking about it shortly afterwards I realized that this is not the only way to see Perfect Blue, because it's also a murder mystery. And if it's watched as a murder mystery Perfect Blue is a quite different experience, one that's a lot less mysterious and in fact somewhat obvious. There are two reasons for this.

To start with, if you're told that Perfect Blue is a murder mystery you're going to put less weight on a bunch of the odd stuff that happens because you know it's just there to throw you off the scent and the real explanation is, say, someone hallucinating. You know it can't be real because the rules of the genre say that it isn't. Second, it's actually not that difficult to work out who the guilty party is fairly early on and figure out a fair amount of what's really going on. This isn't so much because the film directly scatters in-world clues around (although I think it does some of that) but because as a murder mystery Perfect Blue follows the rules of the genre and there are a number of spots where these genre rules draw your attention to something important and get you to interpret it in a particular way.

In general, if someone tells you that Perfect Blue is a murder mystery and you watch it that way you're probably going to be less affected by the psychological thriller aspects of it. Rather than being the core of the film they are more of an (interesting) distraction from the mystery that you already know is there. As you follow Mima's increasingly disturbing life there's likely to be a little voice in your head that's looking for whodunit and what they're doing and so on, a voice that's simply not there if you watch Perfect Blue as the psychological thriller that its publicity pushes you towards.

I'm not certain I've seen anything besides Perfect Blue where the genre I thought the work was in was so important; if someone had told me that Perfect Blue was a murder mystery I would have watched it in a quite different way and seen different things when I did so. But just the thought that perceived genre can significantly alter my perceptions of a work has stayed with me ever since, and sometimes I look at other works and wonder.

(Godannar is the closest I've come to this feeling. If I knew for sure that Godannar had been intended as straight up serious, I think my opinion of it would drop for reasons beyond this aside.)

Sidebar: Why I think Perfect Blue follows the genre rules

To put it simply, the genre rules exist in part to make the mystery comprehensible. We want things to have explanations so we want to be able to look backwards and see what actually happened and why (and to feel that the whole thing makes sense). That look backwards requires the basics of motives and opportunity and so on to be present from the start.

Sidebar: Genre rules and one bit in Perfect Blue

I mentioned above that mystery genre rules point some things out to you. For instance, in a murder mystery you pretty much don't have people who are simply upset at some early development. For good story reasons, their emotions are going to figure into the mystery later; either they'll show up as explicit red herrings to draw out the investigation or they've just acquired a motive to do something. The more that the work doesn't use them as a red herring, the more you suspect them.

The culprit in Perfect Blue basically jumps up and down at one point to show that they have a motive. Watching the movie as a psychological thriller I didn't think anything of it because it felt like a natural character reaction; thinking back through the lens of the mystery genre that moment stood out like a sore thumb and made the character suspect number one, especially since the movie didn't really give us any others.

(When you watch Perfect Blue as a psychological thriller you don't think about 'who did it' at all and so you don't think about things like the paucity of suspects, because the film doesn't need suspects. Mima is having some sort of increasing breakdown and that's sufficient explanation by itself, right up until the film reaches its climax.)