Roving Thoughts archives

Checking in on the Winter 2013 anime season 'midway' through

It's time for the traditional look back at my early impressions of this season. I've delayed this long enough that it's not really 'midway' any more, at least in time. Partly this is because I've been only watching shows slowly myself for various reasons.

This is in order:

• Sasami-san@Ganbaranai: This is the clear hit of the season for me. It's nothing like I was expecting at the start and as far as I'm concerned this is a good thing. (I like good surprises.)

  (Episode 8 has an unfortunate drastic drop in animation quality but episode 9 recovered.)

• Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai kara Kuru Sou Desu yo: This is full throttle, no excuses popcorn entertainment. I'm watching this to cheer as villains get beaten up and amusing things happen, and it's delivering those with no pretenses of any depth.

• Yama no Susume: This needs more focus on the characters doing interesting things instead of mountaineering gear. I feel a degree of affection for it and I like it when I bother to watch, but I don't feel any particular push to watch more most of the time.

• Hakkenden Touhou Hakken Ibun: While I'm still watching this I feel ambivalent about it. Some aspects are nice (especially some of the secondary characters) but other bits of it are alternately annoyingly predictable or just stuff that I'm not interested in. I've recently been watching this only in bursts of several episodes at once; I may well not watch any more.

  (I just looked this up and it's apparently only scheduled for 13 episodes, which means that there's no chance of it having a real conclusion. I think my motivation to watch more just took a major nosedive.)

• Vividred Operation: The longer this runs, the more soulless it feels and the less interested I feel in watching more; it very much lacks some sort of vital spark of life. If I was smart I would drop this and use my time for other things; as it stands I still haven't bothered to watch the latest episode. Part of the problem is that the show still hasn't made me really care about any of the characters (cf).

Dropped:

• Bakumatsu Gijinden Roman: In the end I just felt unmotivated to watch the third episode. I think that part of the problem is that the setup just feels too much like a kid's cartoon.

  (I may well be missing something good here, but lack of motivation is lack of motivation.)

• Senran Kagura: I dropped this almost immediately after my initial impressions post as too empty and boring, among other things, and then managed to forget about it so much that I left it out of the first version of this entry.

De facto suspended:

• Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo (#15): In the end I lost most of my interest and motivation for this when it turned into a love triangle. Actually, I think I'm going to admit things and call this dropped outright.

• Robotics;Notes (#12): Too slow and not focusing on things that interested me. In theory I might try to marathon a bunch of episodes at once to see if I like it better that way.

In (other) series carried over from last season, Shin Sekai Yori, Zetsuen no Tempest, and Psycho-Pass are all still being excellent. They rank ahead of everything from this season except perhaps Sasami-san. If it was not for them, this season would be basically a desert for me.

(I'm not convinced that that would have been a bad thing; if the season had been a total bust I might have dug into Chihayafuru and/or AKB0048, or even some other old shows that I have vaguely queued up.)

Updated: I forgot Senran Kagura. Now fixed.

The best N anime that I saw in 2012

This is much like last year's best N, namely what I consider to be the best or the most enjoyable N anime that I saw in calendar 2012 (regardless of when they were made or released). This is much more delayed than usual for various reasons, including that nothing that finished in calendar 2012 really set me on fire the way shows have in past years. I was also trying to make up my mind about how to handle the strong crop of fall 2012 shows that haven't finished yet. In the end I've decided to declare unfinished shows ineligible at least for 2012.

(This is a real pity as it takes out a number of strong shows, one of them (Girls und Panzer) only because they didn't manage to get two episodes finished in time to air them as scheduled.)

More or less in order, at least at the start:

• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita: Subtle and clever but also in your face obvious, biting yet with a heart, Jinrui is not really an accessible show but I love it anyways because in the end it made me think. I've written lots more that I'm not going to try to repeat.

• Wasurenagumo: This is a short bit of very well executed cute horror with a disturbing ending that only gets worse the more you think about it. If you squint at this carefully you can see a classical tragedy underneath. It has absolutely no blood and is by far the better for it.

• Lupin III - Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna: Ambitious, different, and not entirely successful but still a journey that was worth it; it helps that its high points were excellent. In the end it gave us the only answer to 'who is Mine Fujiko' that was really possible. (See also.)

• K: It's difficult for me to condense the appeal of K down to a few words. In the end I think I like it so much because it hits the mark so well and so often in its short run, and it makes everything fit together without feeling artificial. It's the rare show that is exactly the right length.

  I wrote a bunch more words about it in my fall retrospective.

• Giant Robo: This is a deserved classic that has a lot going for it. I think it's good and well worth your time, but in the end it didn't entirely click for me; I found myself questioning things about it that I shouldn't have been if it had fully swallowed me up in its magic. Perhaps I am too old and too cynical to really appreciate it.

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

• Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror: A nice movie in the general Ghibli line of 'kid has encounter with the supernatural'; you should not be put off by the use of basic 3-D rendering.

• Hotarubi no Mori e: Touching and bittersweet. I think it's just the right length for its story.

• Ano Natsu de Matteru: I enjoyed watching this and it's a worthy successor or sequel (depending on your views) to the old Onegai series. But I have no urge to rewatch either them or this.

• Campione!: I think that this is better than it was generally given credit for; it had several interesting novel aspects and things that we rarely see. But it was not so novel and so well executed as to lift it out of the 'good but not memorable' class. (See also.)

• Moretsu Pirates: This was enjoyable and good but in the end there it didn't have enough substance to make it really memorable. That it didn't really come to any sort of conclusion didn't really help. (See also and also.)

• Aquarion EVOL: Gonzo and crazy in the best way and it has an epic troll in episode 23. But everything else is a bit lacking, which means that it has no actual depth; the entire point is the crazyness. This may be worth watching once but I don't think there's anything there for a second visit. (See also.)

• Dantalian no Shoka OVA: As time goes by it becomes clearer and clearer that Dantalian has wormed its way into my heart somehow; I have an unreasonable affection for it and wish I could see more. Seeing this OVA tugged at my heartstrings and left me as wistful as I expected.

I wish that I could put Dog Days' into this list with a clear conscience, but I can't because nothing happened in it. I'm not so enamoured of the setting and characters that I was really happy to have watched thirteen episodes of nothing much.

Things that were enjoyable fun and that I want to throw into this entry for various reasons without saying very much about:

• Moyashimon Returns: This isn't as memorable as the original series but that's not because this isn't good, it's because the original series was so relatively crazy.

• The Princess and the Pilot: A good adventure movie with a bunch of interesting flying.

• Hoshi o Ou Kodomo: Movies are spectacles in a way that TV anime is often not. This doesn't have a really deep and complex story, but it does things well.

Although I saw A Letter to Momo this year I don't think it's good enough to make this list.

(I find it a bit hard to figure out where to place movies in this sort of end of year list. Movies are almost invariably much better made and more interesting than four or five episodes of TV anime, so how do I really evaluate their merits properly?)

In the end I completed 28 series and movies this year. To my surprise this is only slightly less than the 30 from last year; before I actually got these numbers I thought that my watching was way down. I do think that I watched more movies this year than usual (if I'm counting right, six).

Something I never made up my mind about with Initial D

When I was watching Initial D, one of the things I was never able to make up my mind about was whether Takumi's story was fundamentally egalitarian or fundamentally conservative. Explaining this is going to require both some words and some minor spoilers (nothing more than you'd get by reading the Wikipedia page, though).

Initial D is certainly very egalitarian on the surface. Takumi is a (street racing) outsider in an unimpressive car and he beats a whole series of established street racers driving much better cars. Takumi does this by being an excellent driver (and in the initial races by being utterly familiar with his home mountain), but he got his driving skills and local knowledge through literally years of incessant daily practice. Takumi is better because he has worked harder, whether his opponents realize this or not, and a better driver in a good enough car will smoke a not as good driver in a hot car.

(A number of Takumi's early opponents get fairly emotional about what they feel is a total upset to the natural order. How can this nobody in a dinky car be beating them? They're renowned street racers, they have the right car, how come they're not winning?)

But as the series goes on we discover that Bunta (Takumi's father) was himself an infamous street racer when he was Takumi's age. As this comes up in the story, we also have any number of people saying that of course Takumi is good, he's 'Crazy' Bunta's son. Blood will tell, after all. If you've been watching anime for long you've seen this theme before; 'blood will tell' is a fairly major trope (mostly in shonen fighting shows, I think). If we believe 'blood will tell' then Takumi was destined for greatness from the start and someone who practiced as much as Takumi but did not have his blood would always be his inferior. This is fundamentally conservative, not egalitarian; it says that Takumi is innately one of the nobility of street racing, forever beyond the reach of ordinary people.

Depending on where you look at it and what you pay attention to, the anime story goes both ways. As I mentioned, I never was able to make up my mind about what it really was at its heart.

(Of course I am thinking too much about this.)

A memorable moment from Initial D

Author has recently been watching Initial D with enthusiasm and reading his reactions has been giving me flashbacks to the days when one of the anime clubs here showed us the first three stages. Several bits and pieces from the series have stuck with me over the years since then. The most distinctly memorable one is a moment very early on in the first season and probably when I fell for the series, partly because it was surprisingly subtle for an anime.

(Based on the list of Initial D episodes, it's probably from the first episode.)

Initial D starts off with the familiar anime scenario of the hidden badass; in this case Takumi (our protagonist) is secretly a really good driver and racer but none of his peers know it. At one point, Iketani (the leader of the local street racers) takes Takumi and Itsuki (our comedy relief secondary character) for a fast drive up the mountain in his hot car to basically show off. Itsuki is in seventh heaven (he looks up to Iketani) but Takumi is visibly almost-terrified on the drive up, to the point where Itsuki ribs him about it when they get to the top.

What Initial D did really well was show and convince us that Iketani was actually not a good driver and his fast drive was pretty sloppy. Takumi was rightfully scared because he actually understood what was going on and how dangerous it was; Iketani was oblivious. The Initial D anime staged this scene well enough that a non-driver like me could really get Iketani's true skill level while at the same time it avoided making him so obviously terrible that Itsuki's ignorance would ring hollow. It was believable both that Iketani was not good and that he and Itsuki didn't understand it, and in the process the show reinforced Takumi as someone who did know what he was doing.

It would have been easy for the show to overplay this scene in a lot of directions (making Iketani's driving too bad, making Takumi's reactions to it too extreme, and so on). That the show didn't, that it played things reasonably subtly because it was confident that the audience would catch on, was a big point in its favour when I watched it way back when.

(I was reminded of this by Author's recent tweets about another bit of physical humor from the show.)

Brief impressions of the anime of the Winter 2013 season

As before it's time for my impressions of the new season's crop of shows, or at least the ones that I've bothered to try watching. I can't really call this 'early' any more since I've been kind of slow and unenthused about this and in fact a number of shows in the season. As a result I'm probably grading more harshly than usual.

(I'm not current on most of these shows; for some I've only seen one episode.)

Hits:

• Yama no Susume: It's only a few minutes an episode, it's fun, and it's surprisingly geeky about mountaineering. How could I not keep watching? Three minutes an episode is perfect for this, partly because it keeps the show tightly focused without room for meandering.

• Sasami-san@Ganbaranai: This is a questionable choice. The first three episodes were a fast moving example of SHAFT being SHAFT (which I'm fine with), but I have no idea where the show is going to go from here because the initial big question and conflict has now been resolved. If it can sustain the energy and interesting bits of the first few episodes I'll wind up really loving it. I do like that the show didn't drag the initial mystery out but instead went through it at a nice brisk pace (and did explain everything).

  (Okay, by 'interesting bits' I partly mean 'nicely done fight sequences'.)

Staying for now:

• Vividred Operation: First up, it's impossible to ignore the fact that this show is shoving teen girl rear ends in the viewer's face. VO is about butts in the same way that Strike Witches was about underwear and it's not going to let you forget that (if you had any doubt, the opening sequence is there to pointedly remind you).

  (This should not surprise anyone who paid attention to the promo materials (hint: butts, butts, and more butts) but is a little bit disappointing. I kind of hoped that the show would mostly get it out of the way after the first episode; I should have known better.)

  Ignoring the fanservice, VO ought to be a show that I quite like (after all, I fondly enjoyed Sky Girls). In practice I'm finding it kind of bland and lacking some vital spark of life for no particular reason that I can put my finger on. Maybe it's the cliched absurdity of the situation; maybe it's the generally paint by numbers nature of the characters. Maybe it's the fanservice getting to me. Despite this VO is technically good, its execution is competent, and it has some bits that are genuinely nice (eg, that the conventional military forces are actually important at one point).

  (In part VO feels like someone awkwardly stuffed a bunch of things into a blender and hit 'frappe'; various elements remind me of other shows, often pointedly and not to VO's benefit.)

• Bakumatsu Gijinden Roman: A perfectly competent execution of a reasonably interesting premise. Still, the whole thing feels a bit bland and fails to entirely fill me with enthusiasm; right now it's partly staying based on charm and charm often wears off fast.

• Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai kara Kuru Sou Desu yo: I am a sucker for shows with competent, reasonably powerful protagonists (as opposed to your usual collection of spuds). The actual setting and premise are kind of goofy; I just like watching people who know what they're doing. I may well get bored of this as the novelty wears off since it kind of smells like your typical shonen fighting anime in a nifty getup.

On the edge:

• Hakkenden Touhou Hakken Ibun: The first two episodes were actually interesting if sometimes cliched but the fight in the third episode kind of went downhill. I'm planning to watch another episode but this may be losing my interest soon.

• Senran Kagura: If you ignore the boatloads of fanservice this is a decently competent but generally bland show that's not doing anything we haven't seen many times before. Two years ago I would have found it perfectly good mindless entertainment. These days I'd kind of like to stop spending my time on stuff this ordinary, but we'll see.

  (The difference between this and Vividred Operation is partly the density of annoying fanservice and partly the quality of execution.)

Misses:

• Maoyuu Maou Yuusha: After one episode I see no reason not to just keep on reading the manga instead. Most of the (manga) story is either lectures or cheering on people as they cleverly use stuff they learned from the lectures to win, both of which go better and faster in the manga. I see why the anime did what it did in the first episode, but I'm afraid that it just showed the weakness of a straight adaptation; we spent most of an episode getting an unconvincing summary of what the manga covered in more convincing detail in a few pages. Also, the whole name thing is charming in the manga but irritating in the anime for some reason.

  (I'm glad for all of the people who were enthused about MMY before the show aired because they convinced me to read the manga. The manga is worth my time.)

  In short: if you want a well done, affecting anime about romance and economics, watch Spice and Wolf. If you find MMY's basic premise charming and don't mind manga, read the manga.

  (I may watch the second episode at some point to see if it changes my mind but the commentary I've seen suggests that it's not going to.)

• The Unlimited - Hyobu Kyosuke: After two episodes I decided that I had no interest in watching the titular villain slaughter people, even if they mostly didn't show the deaths directly and even if we're supposed to either sympathize with his cause or find him cool.

  If you have the spare time to watch this, watch Zettai Karen Children instead. Hyobu Kyosuke even appears in it every so often (and he might actually be cooler and creepier in ZKC than in this show).

• AMNESIA: I couldn't even make myself watch more than a few minutes of the first episode. I should have remembered my otome game rule.

• Senyuu: I'm not really enthused about being beaten over the head with a rapidfire barrage of RPG jokes, even for only three minutes at a time.

Not for me (probably, subject to revision):

• Tamako Market: I want to watch this to see if (against all odds) I turn out to like it and be charmed by the bird and so on, but I need to face facts; I've had the first episode for weeks and still haven't gotten around to watching it.

Things I have no opinion on because I haven't watched the first season (yet):

• Chihayafuru second season: I actually watched the first episode of the first season recently. It didn't set me on fire but it was good enough to make me queue up the second episode, which I just haven't gotten to in my general backlog.

• AKB0048 second season: everything I hear about AKB0048 sounds good (and gonzo in a good way) but I'd have to watch the first thirteen episodes and see if it works out in practice. Still, I'm getting more and more tempted.

  (Really I should just give the first episode a spin to see.)

Regretfully dropped from the Fall season:

• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: I've concluded that this is just not for me on the grounds that after watching three episode (10-12) I just feel no real interest in watching the next one. I could watch it, I would probably enjoy it decently, but if I'm not enthused about the idea the smart thing to do is spend my limited time on something else.

I'm carrying on with the remaining continuing shows from the end of the fall season, although Robotics;Notes is sliding closer and closer to the edge. I'll note that contrary to my concerns, Zetsuen no Tempest has not missed a beat in its post episode 12 changes.

My (heretical) view of A Letter to Momo

When I watched the widely praised A Letter to Momo earlier this year (well, earlier in 2012), I had a rather different experience than what seems to be the usual one; I found the film pleasant enough in an anodyne way but kind of uninspiring. I mulled over this for a while, worrying that I was just being a grumpy sourpuss old fart in my reaction just because Momo didn't set me on fire (and perhaps wasn't from Ghibli). Then by coincidence and good fortune I saw Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror at the end of 2012. And I loved it. Haruka overcame major drawbacks (such as rather basic 3-d animation) to be an absorbing and compelling experience, one that sucked me in and left me smiling. Haruka and Momo are not the same film or story, but they share quite a lot of core similarities and the differences between the two illuminates the problem with Momo.

Put simply, A Letter to Momo is at its heart a lazy film. Like every anime involving a young girl having a heartwarming encounter with the supernatural, it exists under the long shadow of Ghibli's work, but unfortunately Momo makes no real effort to escape that shadow and do something interesting and novel. A lot of the time it's quite predictable, sometimes painfully so, and not particularly exciting; it only genuinely surprised me a few times and it only has one interesting and well done action set piece (and even that seemed obligatory). A fair amount of the writing and plotting also felt, well, flabby in various ways.

(For the curious who've seen it, my largest moment of surprise can be summarized as 'wait, there actually are wild boars?' Note that I did not find the action set piece at the film's climax to be all that impressive.)

A Letter to Momo is technically well executed apart from all of this. It's not a bad film and it's genuinely good every so often, the characters are decently engaging, the situation is believable, it comes to a good and heartwarming resolution, in short it carefully pushes all of the necessary buttons in the expected order. You could do worse. People who haven't seen Ghibli films like Spirited Away or Kiki's Delivery Service will probably love it. People who have seen a lot of Ghibli films may, like me, find it kind of old hat and unimaginative.

(Ignoring the animation style, Haruka is not a film that you can easily imagine being made by Ghibli; it rapidly departs from any number of their usual tropes. Momo is, although if Ghibli had made it they would have figured out how to make it more interesting and more different from their existing work. Really this is the problem; A Letter to Momo feels like something turned out by a Ghibli alumnus who gets the forms but doesn't really understand the magic that makes them work so well (yes, I know that the director is not and earlier directed Jin-Roh, which I've seen, liked, and thought was well done; this was an analogy).)

Sidebar: a little bit on the pacing and the action set piece

It's difficult to put it coherently, but a certain amount of the pacing of A Letter to Momo felt not so much predictable as obligatory. The one nice action set piece was good, but as things were starting up towards it I found myself thinking that yep, it was about at the point where a Ghibli film would insert an exciting action sequence to stir things up. And right on schedule, there it was. Except, afterwards, it all felt somewhat pointless because the whole sequence hadn't moved the story much. It was like the sequence was there largely because it had to be there because the template said 'an action sequence goes here', not because the story demanded it.

And yes, I was thinking all of this while watching A Letter to Momo. It was not an absorbing experience.

Looking back at the Fall 2012 anime season

This season is atypical (or at least feels so) in that almost all of the series that I'm following are continuing into the new year (even if one of them, Girls und Panzer, has simply been postponed to March). This is going to make for an unusual retrospective but also gives me no reason (or excuse) to delay writing this. So, as before this is an attempt at an honest look back at the shows of the Fall 2012 season (as much as that's possible with most of them not finished yet), following on my early impressions and my midway views.

(The quick summary is that my midway views haven't changed much with two exceptions.)

In more or less the order of enjoyment and quality, shows that I finished or am still watching:

• Shin Sekai Yori: The show started out being a mystery, shifted for a bit to being horror, and now I feel that it's more or less become tragedy. With a lot of answers revealed from episode 10 onwards, what's going on has acquired the same sense of inevitability as an avalanche coming down a hill (and I think that poor Saki sees a lot of it coming, after what she's been told).

  SSY is (and remains) my favorite show of the season and, on the strength of the episodes so far, one of my favorite shows of the year. I'm not bothered by the sometimes odd art or the stylistic shifts and the more I see the ED sequence the more I like it.

  (Much like Star Driver, it could let me down during the remainder of its run and fall in my estimation. But the episodes so far are great.)

• K: I quite liked this in all of its oddity and peculiarity (and frequent use of colour filters and other tricks). It wrapped up with what I felt was an entirely satisfying conclusion. Yes, it doesn't answer all our questions and leaves things dangling, but then life is often like that. I'll be happy to watch the second season when it happens but at the same time I don't think a second season is necessary. K is a rare anime that said enough during its run and came to an actual conclusion.

  Many series would have stretched K's plot out over more episodes, focused on fewer characters, or explained things more; I feel that it's to K's benefit that it didn't make any of these missteps. The end result is something that feels like we're dropping in on the lives of these characters for a bit, even if it's a very eventful period for some of them; they all have pasts and futures that extend off the screen, ones that we are not magically privy to all of the important details of.

  (If you're watching K, this timeline (spoilers) (via) will help. See also and also.)

• Girls und Panzer: My midway views haven't changed; it remains great and a good sports anime. I just wish that it hadn't had scheduling problems so we could have gotten the last two episodes already; however, I'm confident that they'll be up to the standards of the rest of the show when they do show up.

• Zetsuen no Tempest: The show keeps surprising me and the characters remain great. I do wonder how it'll sustain all of this for another season but I feel fairly confidant that it's going to manage. I really liked the shock twist in episode 12 and how it now means that I've got no real idea of what's actually going on.

• Psycho-Pass: This has turned into a show that I can't tear myself away from without actually enjoying it (much like my experience with RideBack). It's wrenching, compelling watching without actually being, you know, pleasant; brutal things keep happening one after another and any successes that the protagonists have are very conditional and partial. It's almost horror and I suspect that people who have bad reactions to horror will actively hate it.

  I expect that at the end of Psycho-Pass I'll be happy that I watched it but also have absolutely no desire for a rewatch.

  (Psycho-Pass is probably a better constructed show than Tempest and Girls und Panzer, but for me it's clearly less enjoyable than either; given a choice I watch either of them before PP. Sometimes I'll watch anything else before PP, simply because PP is wrenching.)

• Robotics;Notes: It keeps moving slowly but getting places in the end. I have no idea what's really going on so I'm mostly watching to see the characters bounce off each other. I'm sure it's going to go all conspiracy theory and fate of the world on me at some point; I can only hope that it will be well executed when it happens.

• Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: The first 12 episodes prospered on the strengths of periodic sharp edges and characters being brutally honest. The end of the 12th episode clearly marks a sea change in the overall plot direction but I'm going to trust that the show's team will keep things edged even with the new direction.

  (Translation: I could easily get let down here.)

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure #10-#12: Although I bounced hard off the first episode because it was too over the top for me at the time, the ongoing praise for the show has gotten me to try jumping into JoJo's starting with the second arc since it has a mostly new cast, new setting, and a timeskip (I may backfill part of the first arc later, since I understand it has internal breakpoints). I honestly don't know yet how I feel about it. It definitely still has that MANLY SHONEN ACTION thing going on and it's still painting with a roller, but I can also see how it's EPIC in an all-caps way. For now I'm taking it episode by episode.

• Sword Art Online: It ended. It's flawed. For the rest, I will just quote my tweet:

  In the end, for all that I said grumpy things about #SAO it did know how to be enjoyable and to craft likeable, watchable characters.

  (Okay, see also Evirus's comments.)

Right at the end of December I also finished up two shows from earlier in the year that I feel are worth mentioning:

• Aquarion EVOL: My views about this compared to the original Aquarion didn't change; I like the original's characters and plot more, but EVOL is far more gonzo. EVOL maintains this right through the end and it gave me a smile throughout; as I put it on twitter, the ending was cheesy but it was good cheese. I think it helps that I knew a certain amount of spoilers when I watched eps 18 to 26, because I could enjoy noticing certain things.

  Andy and Mix remain the best EVOL couple. The drama only improved their status and I'm glad Mix got a happy ending.

  Also, episode 23 is an epic troll. As someone who watched the original Aquarion, I can assure you that the big revelations in episode 23 were definitely not so much as hinted at in the original (at least as far as you'd notice).

• Joshiraku: This was fun to watch (generally in a low key way) but generally not something that I actively found funny. I enjoyed following the games of verbal tennis and keeping track of the topic shifts even when it didn't make me laugh. To a certain extent I appreciate the chance to see something like Joshiraku simply because it's different and strange; it's a facet of Japanese anime and writing that I don't have much exposure to.

  (The translation notes for gg's Joshiraku subs were also quite helpful and definitely increased my ability to enjoy the show.)

Now declared a miss:

• Magi (#10): I realized that Morgiana was the only character I actually cared about and she's not the focus of the show. Alibaba is terminally naive and stupid in the finest shonen tradition and I got tired of Aladin's 'I'm an innocent and don't know anything' schtick.

Overall Fall 2012 has been my strongest season of the year, even if I can't call most of the shows in it because they're only half over. Looking back at the other seasons of this year, there are only a handful of shows that I'd currently stack up against anything down to at least Psycho-Pass.

(As always I may be suffering from a recency bias, plus all of these shows except K could still blow their foot off.)

How Girls und Panzer is a genuine sports anime while Saki is not

I've always felt that there was something different between Girl und Panzer and Saki, which it's reasonably frequently compared to. Recently I realized how the two are different in a way that makes the former a genuine sports anime while the latter is not. I know, that sounds inflammatory; given that Saki involves people playing a sport, how is it not a sports anime and if it's not, what is it?

My answer is that Saki is actually a shonen fighting anime in the guise of a sports anime, where the 'fights' happen at the gaming table and (generally) do not involve the characters punching each other. What makes the difference between Saki and Girls und Panzer is the presence (in one) and the absence (in the other) of magic powers and crazy special moves.

In Girls und Panzer the wins and losses depend on the actual strategy, tactics, and skills involved in the sport in question (in the real world). This is not obvious in GaruPan because there is no actual sport of tankery, but it's there none the less; the battles in GaruPan turn on actual things that real tanks and real tank commanders can do. This is not what happens in Saki. Saki is not really about mahjong and actual mahjong strategy and tactics (and usually low level play) are almost always irrelevant, in much the same way that punches and kicks are irrelevant background noise in shonen fighting anime. What the games are about in Saki and what determines victory and loss is who has what magic mahjong hack (and can use it best), in the same way as Naruto's victories generally turn on a carefully timed Rasengan or the like.

This is a large part of why Girls und Panzer is much more interesting to me than things like Saki. The presence of magic mahjong powers robs Saki's narrative of a great deal of predictability and suspense because the story becomes a game of 'okay, so what magic power is going to appear this time?' Conversely, the absence of unpredictable special tricks gives the battles in Girls und Panzer genuine tension and interest, because we can actually understand, follow, and predict what's going on (and in the process understand the problems Miho faces and make our own guesses at solutions). The reality of the contests makes them meaningful to watch.

(This is not the only reason that the battles in Girls und Panzer are good, because even with this the director has to make sure that you can understand, follow, and anticipate the action instead of getting lost in a muddle. GaruPan is very good at this.)

Girls und Panzer is not the only genuine sports anime, of course; there are plenty of them (just as there are plenty of magic shonen fight sports anime to go with Saki). For example, Cross Game is a genuine sports anime since the baseball in it revolves around real tactics and plays (instead of, say, some magic super-pitch).

(It looks like I don't watch much sports anime so I can't name any other examples off the top of my head with confidence, although from what I've read about it Chihayafuru is probably another genuine sports anime.)

Update: it figures that immediately after publishing this I remembered the other 'genuine sports anime' example I had in mind: Initial D, at least through the first few seasons. The car racing is probably not strictly realistic but it's real enough to feel grounded and limited, so you can understand the challenges that the racers face.

An unconventional reading of a bit of Sakurasou episode 4

(There are some small spoilers here for bits of episode 4.)

For context, we'll start with my tweet to @vuc_: Speaking of Sakurasou, I think there's an interesting unconventional reading of Mashiro's tanabata wish that plays to her theme.

(By Mashiro's theme I meant her empowerment. See the sidebar for more background.)

In episode 4, the group has a little Tanabata festival of their own and everyone writes up their wishes. The next day, Sorata discovers that Mashiro has not wished for anything involving herself (such as for the success of the manga she's working on) but instead that he succeed at what he's doing. In a conventional show, such a non-self-focused wish would be a sign that Mashiro had fairly strong feelings for Sorata, enough so that she'd use her wish for his happiness instead of her own. The unconventional reading is that Mashiro doesn't wish for herself because it's unnecessary; she knows that she doesn't need the help of a wish to get what she wants or for her manga work to be a success. Instead she wishes for Sorata's success because she thinks he needs the help and she cares enough to give him some. She's not being selfless, she's merely being casually generous.

(All the other people's Tanabata wishes were self-focused ones.)

PS: Mashiro is right; Sorata needs all the help he can get. There are even some signs that the show agrees with this.

(The usual cautions about reading things into shows definitely apply to Sakurasou, especially since it's based on a light novel series. On the other hand the director could have decided to do something interesting with the raw materials to hand.)

Sidebar: two readings of Sakurasou

There's two ways to look at Sakurasou. You can read it as a conventional LN based anime with an otaku-bait premise, or you can read it as a disguised, sharp-edged story about things like the true nature of apparent 'genius talent' (ie that it actually involves a huge amount of work). In the second reading, Mashiro is not a cute helpless idiot savant space case but instead a very focused young woman who knows exactly what she wants and works extremely hard for it.

(Naturally the second reading is popular with much of the section of the anisphere that I follow because it makes the show much more interesting and worthwhile. If you follow the first reading, the show is pretty much exploitative cynicism.)

The perspectives of the anicamera

If the anicamera (the virtual camera that 'films' anime) was a real camera, I'd talk about the focal lengths of its lenses and there would be any number of them in subtle gradations beloved by photographers. But since the anicamera is entirely unconstrained by physical reality it doesn't really have focal lengths. Instead anime has pretty much just a few different general perspectives that it uses, although it often varies the framing from scene to scene.

(Some scenes may be framed narrowly to include only the characters talking; other scenes may be framed quite broadly to show the characters walking along a street with buildings and so on. Also, a little disclaimer; this is from the perspective of a still photographer, so a cinematographer may have a different opinion.)

The most common perspective in anime is what still photographers call the normal perspective. Normal perspective is how we see the world, or at least how we think we see it, and also the standard perspective of drawing and painting; everything looks about the right size relative to other things in the picture and nothing looks exaggerated. As a result it's the default perspective in anime, used almost all the time if characters are just standing around or doing stuff. Normal perspective is ordinary and neutral in that it doesn't emphasize any particular part of the scene by itself; emphasis must come from other aspects of cinematography such as people, what's in the foreground, colour and lighting, and selective focus.

(My impression is that anime often cheats a little bit in normal perspective by making characters the same size even though they are not quite the same distance from the nominal camera.)

The most common distinctive perspective in anime is probably fisheye perspective. The telltale sign of a fisheye perspective is a distinct central bulge, where things in the center of the frame are larger than things at the side of the frame that are the same distance from the camera; if a character moves sideways and gets smaller (or larger), you have a fisheye. Fisheyes also exaggerate the distance between near and far objects (far objects look much smaller). The classical place for fisheye perspective is when the scene is showing the view through a door's peephole or sometimes a security camera. When fisheye perspective is used as part of a regular scene (instead of simply for an artsy shot) it emphasizes what's in the center of the frame because the center will be (hyper-)enlarged relative to everything else.

(My suspicion is that fisheye perspective is popular in modern anime partly because it can be done automatically by the computer. Instead of having to painstakingly draw everything distorted, the animators can just draw the scene normally and then apply fisheye distortion during final compositing.)

Next is (ultra-)wide perspective (aka wide angle perspective). This exaggerates near to far distances, making near objects much larger than normal (and far objects and people small). While ultra-wide is quite distinctive, moderately wide angle blurs into normal perspective since it involves only small exaggerations that can be hard to tell from what a normal perspective would be; what I think of as the usual sign of moderate wide angles is that the scene is focusing on some foreground object or person while things happen in the background (generally in reduced size). Strong wide angle emphasizes whatever element of the scene is closest to the anicamera; an extreme wide angle pretty much insures that this close object is the focus of attention.

(This shot from Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! (via) is a good example of a strong wide angle perspective.)

The final general perspective is telephoto perspective, which I don't think I've ever seen used in anime. While anime has long shots of things far away, telephoto perspective itself is the inverse of wide angle; it compresses the distance between near and far things, making them look close together and stacked on top of each other. This may sound rather abstract and unclear, so let's show you an example. This picture of mine is only moderately telephoto, but at least to me it doesn't look particularly far from the lamp post in the foreground to the elevated roadway and then to the building behind it. In real life, it's probably several hundred feet for each step (the elevated roadway is eight lanes wide here, for example).

(It's entirely possible that I've overlooked cases of telephoto perspective in anime, or maybe it's a sufficiently subtle effect in practice that I haven't noticed it when it was in front of me. I'd sort of be surprised if anime has genuinely never used the perspective, even if it was just a director playing around with it. I welcome pointers to examples, either in comments here or on Twitter.)

(Note that using a telephoto lens doesn't necessarily create a telephoto perspective; for example, you can have only a single clear thing in the picture, such as in this or this. Both were taken with the same lens and focal length as my telephoto perspective example.)

Sidebar: framing and perspective

To put it in simplistic terms, the difference between framing and perspective is that framing is what and how much you include in the picture while perspective is how the things in the picture look like in relation to each other. With physical cameras, framing and perspective are at least partially coupled together so the choice of one can put relatively narrow constraints on your options for the other (less so for cinematography than for still photography). Since anime is entirely drawn, you can frame a scene and give it whatever perspective you want to draw; however, some combinations of framing and perspective will look distorted, wrong, impossible, or absurd.

I talk about perspective here rather than framing partly because I feel that perspective has the stronger influence on the look of a scene. In anime especially, it's possible to frame a scene in the same way (or more or less the same way) despite significantly different perspectives. This is not to say that framing is unimportant to a scene's look, of course; it's just that it's less blatant than general perspective.

(The choice of perspectives is also more clearly analogous to lens selection with physical cameras than framing is.)

Checking in on the Fall 2012 season midway through

This isn't quite 'midway' except by a somewhat stretched sense of time (even by my standards of delayed watching), but now that my watchlist has settled out I feel like writing it up to go along with my initial impressions. The big surprise for me this season has been how many shows I've wound up following. In contrast to spring, where I thought I was going to follow a bunch but didn't in the end , this has been the season where I thought many shows were going to drop out but they've stuck around.

Hits, more or less in order of how eager I am to watch new episodes:

• Shin Sekai Yori: This remains good and interesting but I have nothing compact to say about it. Oh, I do have one thing; it's consistently beautiful (although not always conventionally pretty) and visually well-realized. Whatever else you can say about it, I don't think SSY ever looks boring or plain.

  Now that I've read this analysis of the end credits, the SSY ED may be my favorite one of this season.

• Girls und Panzer: This continues to mix very well done sports action (yes, with tanks) with amusing events and decent characters. One of the things that make it work is that the creators are treating the whole premise not so much seriously (which would make it absurd) as respectfully; they're inviting us to enjoy it rather than laugh at it. One reason that the action works so well is that it actually makes sense and is presented so that we can follow it (sadly this is not anywhere near as common as it should be).

  I was pleased to find out that the protagonist's tragic past is far less tragic than initially hinted at. Well, not tragic at all, really. It's melodramatic but that's okay, this show is the kind of show where that fits. We're not supposed to take it completely seriously.

  (Grim tragic pasts are overdone.)

• K: Many aspects of this are quite well done but what's more and more sold me on the show has been the characters and their interactions. It's reduced the trolling lately (which I don't mind) and has started to give us decent answers to some of the outstanding questions.

  I feel that K is the second most visually impressive show that I'm watching, although it's carefully hidden behind all those blue and red filters.

• Psycho-Pass: Rather to my surprise the third episode turned my view of this show around by presenting an interesting situation and a decent mystery (and the show has sustained that momentum since then). I'm not entirely enthused about the horror tinges and how the show loves its violence against women but it remains interesting anyways. Akane gets great faces (her smug face in episode 3 helped sell me on the show) and great moments.

  The show has fortunately gotten a more interesting approach to its cinematography and setting than desperately trying to be Ghost in the Shell.

  (Violence against women is apparently the in thing this season, or maybe I'm just noticing it more this time around.)

• Robotics;Notes: I kind of would like this to keep its conspiracy plot out of my goofy mini-robots show, but I understand that I'm not going to get that. It's slowly but steadily picked up momentum and interest as it goes on. I find Kai less irritating than other people do.

• Zetsuen no Tempest: All of the main characters keep on being non-spuds. The spouting of Shakespeare lines may get irritating at some point but for now I remain interested in where this is all going. My one uncertainty is that right now I don't see how this is going to sustain itself for an apparent 22 episodes.

• Magi: I'm less enthused than I used to be, partly because it's been a bit slow moving and partly because I've learned that it's being adapted from a still-running shonen manga and thus we're probably not going to get a real ending. It would be much improved if Morgianna kicked more ass more often; she remains the best bit of the show (as she has been pretty much since her first appearance).

  Magi is a bit silly and shallow in a kids-show kind of way.

• Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: This prospers on the alternate strengths of periodic sharp edges and brutal honesty (where the show carefully avoids the easy way out) mixed with well done and reasonably funny comedy, usually with the protagonist as the poor straight man. If you look beneath the surface I think the show is saying some interesting things (although I could be reading things into it that aren't really there).

  (By 'reasonably funny' I mean 'actually makes me laugh sometimes'.)

  I consider this show to be on the edge not so much because the current episodes are so-so but because it could very easily slip and lose the magic that's sustaining my interest so far.

• Sword Art Online: It is just as it ever was, a disappointing mixture of good and bad. If I was a smarter person I would stop watching because I'm not at all sure that I'm really enjoying it any more. See Evirus for more.

  (Sometimes I distract myself by coming up with ways to make it much better. Yes, this way lies doom .)

Finally ended:

• Eureka Seven AO: The last two episodes came out at last. I wasn't entirely happy, but it's over now.

Now declared a miss:

• Ixion Saga DT: writing up my initial impressions made me decide that this wasn't funny enough to continue watching. Since it apparently beat its cluster of related jokes into the ground in subsequent episodes, I feel justified in that decision.

Despite various (passive) sales efforts, I've continued to avoid the temptation of Busou Shinki. Apparently it's continued to be almost entirely about tiny robots doing housework and mooning over their owner rather than tiny robots kicking ass, so I don't regret this in the least.