2016-12-24
Thunderbolt Fantasy shows the power of fully embracing your genre
One of the best shows that I watched this year technically isn't anime. Thunderbolt Fantasy is a Taiwanese high-fantasy wuxia puppet show from a renowned Taiwanese puppet company; it slides into anime because it's co-produced by some Japanese anime companies, written by Gen Urobuchi, has a soundtrack by Hiroyuki Sawano, and so on. Basically it's anime not because of looks but because of one side of its lineage.
It would have been easy for Thunderbolt Fantasy to be pretty bad. Wuxia is awfully close to the kind of action fantasy that anime gives us in relative profusion (often from light novels), and those shows are only rarely even moderately good. Sure, Pili International was not going to do a bad job on the looks of the show (assuming that you can accept puppets and special effects in general), but just as important as the looks is the writing and Gen Urobuchi has written any number of stinkers to go with his solid work. And high wuxia is itself an inherently absurd and over the top genre, one that can easily fall into overblown camp.
But Thunderbolt Fantasy is good, in fact very good. Fundamentally it's good in large part because everyone involved fully embraced its genre. If they were going to do larger than life wuxia, they weren't going to be half-hearted about it; they were going to go big and dive in all the way. But fully embracing a genre isn't just about playing whole-heartedly into its cliches and its nature. It's also about not being lazy and about taking it seriously. There are absurdities that fit and absurdities that don't and things that are just lazy, and you must navigate through them all with care. Over all, you have to care and as part of that caring, you must work hard and do good work. Lazy writing, lazy planning, half-hearted gestures, taking the easy route, all of those will show through and send a show like Thunderbolt Fantasy plummeting in flames. Shows that are inherently absurd are balanced on a knife edge; they cannot forget that they're absurd but they must also commit to doing the absurdity with quality. That's what it means to embrace your genre.
(I won't go as far as to say that you have to love what you're doing, but I'm sure that it doesn't hurt. I'm pretty sure that all of the people involved in Thunderbolt Fantasy loved the whole idea, especially on the Japanese side.)
Gen Urobuchi did not take the easy way out when he wrote Thunderbolt Fantasy, and the results speak for themselves. Sure, there are crazy things but they are wuxia-crazy so they fit (such as the character who cuts his own head off so he can properly report his defeat to his necromancer boss), the overall plot is well thought out, and it has plenty of smart writing. The characters are all wuxia characters but they're well drawn and you can believe in them, a couple of them get character arcs, and the dialog often sparkles. There are genuine surprises, real laughs, and an actual understated romance that feels believable in a wuxia way.
(And there's also a spear-point, but just managing a spear-point doesn't necessarily make a work good by itself. All sorts of bad stories can manage one good moment where everything comes together for once.)
Of course Thunderbolt Fantasy is not the only show to achieve excellent results by embracing its genre whole-heartedly and truly understanding itself. This year many people praise Mayoiga (which I haven't watched as horror-ish stuff isn't my thing), and back in 2014 there was Witch Craft Works. Probably there have been others in genres that I don't pay as much attention to.
(Perhaps what Witch Craft Works did was slightly different, but I think of it as basically the same thing. Sometimes earnest is the wrong tone to take to make a work really shine, and sometimes it's exactly what you need. In both cases you can't be lazy and take the easy way out when putting the show together; you have to both care and commit whole-heartedly to what you're doing. Like Thunderbolt Fantasy, Witch Craft Works had smart writing with good characters and good dialog, and fully leaned into its nature with heart.)
PS: If you want to get an idea if Thunderbolt Fantasy is your kind of thing, you can do a lot worse than watching Thunderbolt Fantasy's OP. It's basically perfect for the show and is a great distillation of the whole experience. Certainly if you hate the OP and find it completely eye-rollingly absurd and over the top, you're unlikely to like Thunderbolt Fantasy itself.
(This is a 12-days post.)
Why only a few people got character arcs in Thunderbolt Fantasy
Only a couple of characters in Thunderbolt Fantasy got actual character arcs, but I maintain that this is not a weakness in the show. Instead, in my opinion, it's due to differences in what sort of character everyone was. To simplify, dramatic characters change over the course of the story, while iconic characters reveal and/or affirm their essential nature.
As is relatively standard for wuxia, most of the protagonists in Thunderbolt Fantasy are presented as iconic characters. Over the course of the story they wind up revealing their nature and affirming it, but they don't change and so they don't have a character arc; their character is already set and for the most part the show doesn't bother giving them events that might provoke character growth in dramatic characters. This includes Shang, who is an iconic character even if his full nature is not revealed for most of the show.
(Perhaps the purest iconic character is the Screaming Phoenix Killer, who conceals nothing about himself and who constantly affirms his character throughout all his appearances, completely living his life according to his very wuxia iconic nature.)
Only two characters in Thunderbolt Fantasy are dramatic characters, Juan Can Yun and Dan Fei, and both of them get satisfying character arcs that see them growing and changing; they end the show as quite different people than they started. Indeed, Juan essentially forms his final character over the course of the show. I don't think it's an accident that they're the youngest and most innocent characters.
(It follows that it's deliberate that Thunderbolt Fantasy ends the show leaving them behind while the adventures of Shang and Lin Xue Ya continue. As dramatic characters who've experienced growth, their part in an overall story is done now. The iconic characters of Shang and Lin Xue Ya can continue on, running into more situations that let them affirm and reveal more of their essential natures.)
(I got this framing of dramatic, iconic, and picaresque characters from Robin Laws' writing (primarily) about tabletop RPG characters (eg iconic heroes, dramatic heroes, and picaresque heroes). I have paraphrased it here and so any mangling is my fault.)
2016-12-23
How Flip Flappers tells us a lot about Yayaka through visuals alone
One of the things that Flip Flappers has been very good at from the start is communicating through visuals alone. One example of this is how much it has told us about Yayaka's character just through how she looks and her body language. Since this is visual communication, I have to show you pictures (well, screenshots).
One moment in Concrete Revolutio that symbolizes my issues with it
(There are spoilers.)
When Concrete Revolutio finished in the spring, I had somewhat mixed views of it. My views have only become more mixed and uncertain since then, and I can illustrate some of my qualms with the show by talking about one particular striking moment that has come to symbolize the show's core flaws for me.
Throughout the show, Kikko Hoshino has been not so much the protagonist (that's firmly established as Jiro Hitoyoshi) as our viewpoint character. She is one of the most innocent characters in the main cast and is often shielded from (and therefor surprised by) the darkness orbiting the other characters in the Superhuman Bureau. While she has a powerful dark side, she's only allowed to keep it briefly once it manifests in the show; afterwards, it is forcefully stripped away from her and she goes back to being a normal innocent person.
In the climactic fight at the end of the show, Kikko straight up kills someone. Oh, she doesn't wind up with blood all over her, the show's a bit more subtle than that; she consciously uses her power to teleport the evil bad guy into an energy-draining cell that will suck away all his power and destroy him (and she knows what the cell is and will do, as the bad guy just carefully explained that he was going to do this to Jiro).
Kikko doesn't react. No one blinks. This event is never referred to again. We briefly see Kikko later (in the show's epilogue), and she is completely unaffected by it. As far as the show is concerned, it's as if Kikko killing someone has no effect on either her or anyone else; it's trivial, not worth mentioning or thinking about. If Kikko was one of the other members of the Superhuman Bureau, sure, this would be perfectly in character; many of them are soaked in rather a lot of blood and wouldn't blink at another death. But Kikko is different; she is the innocent. You'd think that killing someone, and choosing to do so, would have some sort of effect on her.
Throughout the show, Concrete Revolutio neglected Kikko. She was our viewpoint character, but this merely made her into a mobile camera; it didn't mean that the show was going to give her more than cursory character development or much of a role in events. Her job was mostly to watch as things happened around her, not to be a player. Neglecting and sidelining Kikko was already one of the letdowns of the show; having her do something that should have a significant impact on her but then ignoring it was the icing on top.
(Using Kikko in the story this way was also something that CR indulged in periodically throughout its run; every so often, Kikko would show up to solve some problem or otherwise bail people out. At the time this often came across as a moment of triumph for Kikko, in that the show was finally giving her an important role, but I'm now not quite so sure of that.)
As I've turned Concrete Revolutio over in my mind in the time since it finished, this moment has become a symbol both of how CR treated Kikko in general and of how CR bit off more than it could really chew.
(This is a 12-days post.)
2016-12-22
The Ancient Magus' Bride is the one manga I'm definitely reading
I have a thing for urban fantasy, books like Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, much of Charles de Lint's output, quite a lot of Tanya Huff's work, and so on. Unsurprisingly this has carried over into my anime watching. Adding a dash of fantasy and magic will attract me to shows that I otherwise would have bounced off of.
As with basically every manga I wind up checking out these days, I stumbled across The Ancient Magus' Bride through anitwitter, the general collection of anime people that I follow there. I took a look because it sounded interesting, and it wound up hooking me right away, pretty much straight from its opening.
The Ancient Magus' Bride is not quite classical urban fantasy, but it's close enough; it is full of the same mixture of magic and normality, of cities and faeries and deep otherworldly wilds. And like the best fantasy, it understands that these fantastic creatures are often inhuman and this magic is dangerous. Well, can be; sometimes it can be beautiful. Sometimes it is both at once. And the fae are not the only monsters in the world, because humanity can supply plenty of monsters all on its own. All of this makes Ancient Magus' Bride very much my kind of thing and I've loved exploring more and more of its world and history as the manga goes along, along with the great characters.
I don't know how the recent OVA would come across for people who haven't read the manga, but for me it does a lot to capture the feel of the manga in animated form. The moments that are new to the OVA still feel authentically true to it (which is no surprise, since the manga's author was involved in the OVA). It's not quite the same as seeing the manga animated (the OVA is a flashback story), but it still makes me unreasonably happy and I'm looking forward to the future OVA installments.
(This is a 12-days post.)
2016-12-21
One nice thing Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! did
KonoSuba was not a particularly good show, but it was just funny enough to keep me watching in the winter season (apart from episode 9, which falls into the 'burn it with fire now' category). Part of what made it funny was some of its cast of characters and how they bounced off each other; they weren't great people, but they were generally flawed in interesting ways. In the process of this, KonoSuba did something that I have to grudgingly admire it for.
It would have been very easy for the show to make Aqua and Megumin into basically useless characters, people who could talk the talk but definitely not back it up when the time came to do things. They're both already overblown characters and somewhat puffed-up, so it would have been funny and more than that, it would have been entirely typical of the genre. But KonoSuba doesn't do that.
Megumin may be a chuunibyo, but she's also perfectly competent. She can only cast one spell once a day, but it's a very good spell, one of the most destructive spells going; if you can get Megumin pointed in the right direction, nasty things are going to happen to your enemies. As I put it on Twitter once, Megumin is basically a version of Lina Inverse who skipped straight to Dragon Slave and loves it so much that she refuses to learn or use Fireball.
And Aqua, well, Aqua may be petty and flawed and arrogant and foolish, but she's also (still) a goddess. Literally, as the show makes clear. She can and does cast high level magic basically on demand (sometimes foolishly, of course) and do things like purify an entire lake all by herself. Within her sphere of magic there seems to be very little that she can't do if she wants to, and more than once she saves the day when she acts.
KonoSuba could have fully embraced Megumin and Aqua as laughingstock. It didn't; instead it made them competent and powerful, albeit with limitations, blind spots, and flaws. I have to reluctantly give it points for this decision.
(The less said about Darkness the better, and the main character is relatively noxious and unimportant. To my vague surprise the Wikipedia summary claims that Darkness is actually pretty powerful, but in the show she's basically completely ineffective so I maintain my stance here.)
(This is a 12-days post.)
2016-12-20
Bubuki Buranki shows that CG anime has a bright future
Let me admit something that I didn't really say at the time: neither Arpeggio of Blue Steel nor even Knights of Sidonia looked particularly great as anime shows. Arpeggio was serviceable; Sidonia did better, partly because it leaned into its particular gritty SF aesthetics, but that trick only works for a certain sort of show. Based on these shows, you would not be particularly enthused about the future of CG-based general anime.
The good news is that we don't have to worry about that now, because Bubuki Buranki shows that the future of CG anime today is actually pretty bright. I say this due to three things that Bubuki Buranki demonstrated over the course of its run.
First, it simply looks good. Sure, CG anime is not 2D anime so the two look somewhat different, but Bubuki Buranki's visuals go a lot beyond the merely serviceable. They are perfectly good and occasionally great, both in static screenshots and in motion (although the show undeniably improves over its run, with earlier episodes more clunky and less attractive than later ones). But merely looking good is just the minimum requirement in a visual medium like anime; it's table stakes. CG needs more than just that alone.
(You can see examples in, say, Evirus's Bubuki Buranki category and here. The latter shows some first-episode moments where the CG is, well, at least a bit obvious.)
Second, the show consistently exploited being in CG to do things that normal 2D shows either can't pull off at all or can only do sparingly. While the show went in for intricate character and costume designs that wouldn't have worked in 2D anime (cf), for me what really stands out is how expressive it made its characters. Even in ordinary situations, people were often making various sorts of faces at each other; over and over they actually had expressions (sometimes exaggerated ones because hey, this is anime).
(And more subtly all of this carried through into background characters, long shots, and other low-resolution situations. 2D anime often collapses into wacky faces when the animators have to draw characters at even moderate scales, much less small ones; Bubuki Buranki never did that I noticed. This is obviously much easier when you have CG models for everything and just have to make sure that nothing bad happens when you render them smaller.)
To be clear, this doesn't make Bubuki Buranki's CG better than normal 2D anime. It just means that the medium of CG has its own advantages for anime shows, which is nice; if we have to have CG shows (and all the evidence is that we're only going to see more of them), it's good that we're getting something for giving up 2D.
Third and perhaps most important, the show has convincingly demonstrated that it can combine traditional 2D exaggerations and other animation tricks with its CG. I'm not sure if these were actually CG renders styled differently or occasional moments of 2D drawings (or a combination of both), but however it was done the result was both seamless and anime. Here, have some screen shots to show what I mean.
2016-12-19
The spear-point in Thunderbolt Fantasy
(There will be spoilers.)
Under the surface, Thunderbolt Fantasy has an unusual structure. Although it has the expected big spectacular ending in the last episode, the real high point comes a bit less than half way through the second-last episode. The rest of the show is interesting and necessary, but it's also all denouement with a kind of inevitability to it and little real tension (cf). You might wonder how this can be.
Jo Walton has written about what she calls spear-points, which are moments that take on their power because of the weight of the story behind them. To quote her:
When Duncan picks the branches when passing through trees, he's just getting a disguise, but we the audience suddenly understand how Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane.
The climactic point in Thunderbolt Fantasy is such a spear-point; it discharges a huge central tension that the show steadily built up over its run. That central tension is the question of Shang, our protagonist.
All through the show there's been a mystery building about Shang. He's not notable or obviously incredibly skilled in the way that other characters are, there are weird things about him, and people go back and forth on how powerful he actually is (especially after he does not so great in one fight). Also, there's a scene where Lin Xue Ya gets to examine Shang's sword and exclaims that it's a terrifying sword, although of course he doesn't say why. So the show has built up all of this tension surrounding Shang. How good is he, really? When is he going to show what he can really do?
Then, part of the way into episode 12, in the middle of a fight, Shang throws away his sword to save Juan and we know the time has come. We're about to get answers at last. Shang is going to have to cut loose.
Thunderbolt Fantasy doesn't disappoint us and it doesn't waste the opportunity. First, Juan exclaims over Shang's sword, finally revealing to us what's so unusual about it so we can understand and believe in what's coming. Then we get a showy wuxia fight scene that's used as an excuse for Shang to show off, lecture us, and demonstrate his real power by curb-stomping everyone involved despite having thrown away his sword. When the dust settles we have answers, a named villain has gone down in a dramatic scene, and Shang has finally revealed himself as a badass.
That sequence, that revelation and its aftermath, is the big whoop it up, fist-pumping moment of Thunderbolt Fantasy. Not because it's the most spectacular or epic fight or the most tense moment, but because it's the scene where the spear-point finally lands, a spear-point that we've been waiting for practically from the start.
(Thunderbolt Fantasy understands how climactic a moment it is, too. For example, the show switches from ordinary fight music to the big main theme fight music when Shang's curb-stomping starts.)
(This is a 12-days post.)