Roving Thoughts archives

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.)

The impact of good directing illustrated

It's not often that you get a master class in the importance of directing, and in about three minutes flat. But now we have one, courtesy of a competition between Studio Khara and game developer CyberConnect2. As ANN explains (via), both studios made shorts based on the same character designs (and maybe 3D models, it's not clear), basic situation, and maybe even scenario outline, and the contrast between them is really illuminating.

Let's start with CyberConnect2's version, which you can conveniently see on YouTube. My reaction is pretty much 'well, okay'. That's a perfectly decent exhibition short, with everything you'd expect here; there's some action, some graphics, and so on. But it's kind of unimaginative and pedestrian, and at least for me there were some confusing moments where I wasn't quite sure what was going on.

Now watch Studio Khara's version, again on YouTube.

Well, wow.

We have verve. We have dynamic situations, visuals, and action sequences, with clear back and forth moments, reversals of fortune, and even the injection of some character. What's going on is always clear and grounded (and it's set in a distinct physical place to help with that). I think Khara's short goes through exactly the same beats as CC2's short does (attacked, at a disadvantage, attempt to use ranged combat, near defeat, reversal of fortune, ultimate victory), but they are presented so much better. They're interesting. They're exciting.

There's little or nothing in the Khara short that couldn't have been in the CC2 short. The difference is not CG versus hand drawn (and it's not clear to me how much of Khara's is genuinely hand drawn; some sequences looked like they at least had a lot of CG assist). Almost all of the difference comes down to Khara doing a better job of designing and realizing what happens in the scenario, in other words to directing and storyboards.

(When we talk about the quality of directing in anime, it's usually hard to find such a direct comparison. If you're looking at two scenes in real shows, there's so many variables involved; the differences between the scenes, the shows (maybe), the subjects, their budgets, and even how people feel about the two different shows. This situation is free of almost all of those variables.)

(This elaborates on some tweets of mine.)

An example of telephoto perspective in anime, courtesy of Shirobako

Back in The perspectives of the anicamera I said that I didn't think I'd ever seen telephoto perspective used in anime. It turns out that I'm wrong about that, as a recent shot in Shirobako showed me. Let's start with the actual shot itself:

(full-sized)

What we're seeing here is a classic telephoto perspective, where everything is stacked up on top of each other and there's very little distinction between close objects and further away ones. Notice, for instance, how little the size of the traffic lights changes at each step backwards into the scene, yet we're given the cue that they're not all at the same distance from us because they partially occlude each other. Even the features of the buildings in the background are relatively large and so look relatively close to us. This use of a stacked, dense perspective is deliberate and conscious on the part of the show. Nothing that the scene needs to show forces this view; in fact this shot is present almost entirely for its emotional effect (the only thing that matters for the flow of the scene is that we know the lights are red, to show why Miyamori stopped for a bit).

I suspect that this shot will feel familiar to you even if you haven't watched Shirobako. I'm pretty sure that this kind of compressed view into an urban distance cluttered with signs and wires and other parts of the city is actually not an uncommon shot and may even be common enough to be cliched. Certainly now that I've seen it here I'm sure I've also seen it before, undoubtedly going back a long way. It just didn't come to mind when I wrote the initial entry, partly because this effect is somewhat more subtle than a clearly exaggerated ultra wide angle view.

(I'm pretty sure that Neon Genesis Evangelion has similar shots and I'm sure that NGE didn't originate it. In a way it's such an obvious way of doing things if you want this effect on viewers.)

Checking in on the Fall 2014 anime season sort of midway through

This is not exactly 'midway', but let's let that go; it's more than time for the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season. I'm actually glad I waited this much because the latest episode of one particular show has caused a drastic change in my attitudes to it.

Excellent:

• Mushishi second season: In contrast to the first half of this back in the spring, we're back to powerful stories that fully engage me. Since Ginko has still been a relatively oracular presence in a number of them, I think that part of it is that the stories have moved away from being horror stories and have become more about humanism and people being very human.

• Shingeki no Bahamut - Genesis: This has flowered into a full-throated, no holds barred adventure show. The characters have settled down a little bit (in particular Amira has quieted down, which makes me a bit sad) but they've kept developing in interesting ways, while the story beats and the directing continue to more than hit the mark. This show has verve and swashbuckling (and no pretensions of being deep literature).

• Shirobako: After throwing jargon-laden situations at us in the first few episodes, the show has slowed down and found conflicts and problems that are intricately tied to the anime business but that don't require deep technical understanding to really get. In the process it's given us powerful episodes that are painfully real and without easy answers.

Things I'm still watching:

• Garo - The Animation: I want to love this as much as Bahamut but with rare exceptions it simply doesn't have the verve of the former show and the potential depths and sophistication it hinted at in the beginning have yet to emerge. It doesn't help that it had a run of decidedly conventional episodes before deciding to finally do some interesting and powerful things.

  (It doesn't help that it's too fond of setting its action scenes in very dim surroundings where, well, you can barely make out the action.)

• Hitsugi no Chaika - Avenging Battle: This remains Chaika. There isn't much more I can say except that we're finally getting both answers and character development, which is really what you'd hope for at this point in the show.

  (Sadly it is doing a few irritatingly cliched things. Really, a straight amnesia plot? Hasn't that been done to death by now?)

• Log Horizon second season: This has continued onwards in the steady Log Horizon manner, putting one brick on top of the other and building up over time to nicely done climaxes. The show has also done a very good job of elaborating the world this season and doing interesting things with it that simply feel right.

• Fate/Stay Night - Unlimited Blade Works: On the good side it has a budget and some nice fight scenes and Rin and Archer. On the negative side, it's Fate/Stay Night, Shirou and Saber and all. There isn't really anything more I can say than that. Well, there is one more good thing; I'm pretty certain that the writers and the show are fully aware that Shirou is kind of a prat. They certainly do kick him a fair bit and I don't think it's particularly designed to make us sympathize with him.

Flamed out spectacularly:

• Psycho-Pass 2: The show was limping along with both potentially interesting things and eye-raising what the heck moments (including a bunch of bad directing), which made it okay but not as nice as the first season. Then episode 8 happened, with terrible writing and directing and much worse. This episode was simply bad on all fronts and I don't expect it to get any better.

  (See also eg The Cart Driver's overall reaction to the show these days.)

Probably dropped:

• Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu: It's funny but apparently not funny enough because I don't feel any real interest in watching the latest episode. I'm probably going to listen to my gut and not force things.

Dropped:

• Madan no Ou to Vanadis: I lost interest for various reasons. I will say that depicting battles through markers for the various units moving around on a map is less 'showing' and more 'telling', even if you pause periodically to show us bits of actual fights.

• Seven Deadly Sins: This wound up with too little fighting for me. The 'that's enough' moment was when one episode ended on a fight cliffhanger and the next episode ended the fight in about thirty seconds flat.

• Amagi Brilliant Park: I didn't wind up watching any more after my early impressions and nothing I've heard about it since has pushed me to change that.

Apart from the unpleasant surprise of Psycho-Pass 2 and the surprising excellence of Shirobako, this is pretty much what I expected to happen. I'm maybe a bit disappointed in Chaika and Log Horizon, although that may be because of overly rose-tinted memories of their first seasons. Three excellent shows, three good ones, and a decent one is actually pretty good for a season, especially after summer.

Brief sort of early impressions of the Fall 2014 anime season

It's time for another early impressions post, as before. I have to admit that these early impressions are actually rather late in the 'early' stage of things, for no particularly good reason (although Mushishi did only start airing last week). My overall view is that this is a really strong season with a major good surprise and I'm very happy with how things have come out. Any season where I worry that I'm watching too many shows to be sustainable is a good season.

Clear winners:

• Mushishi second season continued: There really isn't anything to say about Mushishi that I haven't already said, but the first two episodes of this resumption have been especially strong.

• Shingeki no Bahamut - Genesis: This is the surprise hit of the season for me and it came basically out of nowhere. The show is simply excellently done, with lovely directing, good animation, interesting characters, and an interesting series of change-up storylines.

  (This is the bit where I wave my hands because it's really hard to describe why Bahamut impresses me as much as it does. It has so many little touches.)

• Psycho-Pass 2: Before this continuation started I really wondered if the show would have anything more interesting to say after the first season, but after a weak first episode the show's picked itself up and staked out some interesting themes (well, as far as I'm guessing).

Things I'm enthused by:

• Hitsugi no Chaika - Avenging Battle: It's more Chaika and there's really nothing more to say than my description of its virtues at the end of the first half. I'm probably enjoying this more than Psycho-Pass 2, but it's more lightweight.

• Fate/Stay-Night - Unlimited Blade Works: The Fate-verse may be dead people all the way down but damn, this production has money and talent and it mostly shows (sometimes they fail). I'd much rather the show followed Rin and Archer rather than Shirou and Saber (cf), but the production (and the core story) is at least making the latter two tolerable right now, even if I sometimes feel like I'm watching in spite of myself.

  One of the interesting things about watching this iteration of F/SN is that I already know so many spoilers for it (including from the earlier UBW movie). On the one hand this drains a bunch of tension; on the other hand this means I can spot little details that might otherwise have passed me by and understand what they're signalling.

• Garo - The Animation: This is very nicely done and from the same studio as Bahamut, but it misses being an out of the park hit because it feels much more conventional than Bahamut. But it has set up a quite complex background and set of story lines, so I think it has potential to be quite powerful and really good. It's still good right now, it's just not great the way that Bahamut is.

  Garo has by far the best OP of the season of what I've seen. There isn't any contest.

  (See also 1, 2. I may be down on Garo right now because the third and fourth episodes were kind of conventional.)

• Log Horizon second season: The show feels slower and less exciting than before, but it's still Log Horizon. I'm on board for more evil Shiroe and so on, although I could do with less angst. I don't really have anything to say otherwise; at this point either you know you like Log Horizon or you know that it's not of interest.

Interesting:

• Shirobako: This is a show that I think is interesting without necessarily being good as such. I quite like the look inside an animation studio but at the same time it's chaotic and hard to follow and I have relatively little engagement with the characters. It badly needs a guide to what's going on and what all of the various people do, because if you aren't reasonably well informed about who does what and why various bits are important it's really hard to understand the problems the studio is facing. Even I'm getting confused and I've picked up a reasonable amount of the terminology and the anime production process.

  (For instance, in the first episode if you don't understand the crucial role of the sakkan it's not clear why the sakkan can take over animation for one sequence or why it's such a bad thing to lose the sakkan for a while.)

Entertaining but sitting on the edge:

• Madan no Ou to Vanadis: What I like about this is that almost all of the characters involved are functional and mature adults with heads on their shoulders (and the one character who isn't is the one that irritates me). Adults who act it are a decided novelty in anime and it's refreshing to have a whole cast of them. With that said, the charm may well wear off this at some point and it definitely has its awkward bits.

Marginal, where I'll be amazed if I watch them all season:

• Seven Deadly Sins (aka Nanatsu no Taizai): This is a kid's shonen fighting story and it makes no bones about it. What's kept my interest so far is how over the top the power levels are; for example, the climactic big fight in the first episode had them blow up the entire top of a hill. In other words, I'm watching for grand fights and I expect to keep watching only as long as it delivers that.

• Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu: People have very divergent reactions to this depending on whether its non-stop more or less single note jokes work for them. So far the jokes have been making me laugh; since that's pretty rare, I'm willing to keep watching. However I won't be surprised if the laughter wears off abruptly and because painful instead, at which point I'll drop this like a hot potato.

Probably not for me:

• Amagi Brilliant Park: This is well made but after watching two episodes it hasn't really grabbed me. I may watch more to see if clicks (especially since various people praise it and it keeps ranking high on APR) and in a slower season I'm pretty sure I'd be watching it, but this season is already really busy for me.

• Parasyte - the maxim: This is probably the best show of the season that I'm not watching (I saw the first episode and that was it). I think a large part of it is that a good part of Parasyte is some degree of horror and I'm just not a horror person. I can see how good the show is, my gut just signals the rest of me with 'nope nope nope not interested try again'. I think I might enjoy it better in manga form.

Definitely not for me:

• Gundam Build Fighters Try: There's nothing wrong with this show. It just has the misfortune of being a sports show about mecha, which are two things that almost never work for me. I gave the first episode a try and while I could see the quality and the appeal, it just didn't make me want to watch more.

  (Even my favorite Gundam works are my favorites for reasons other than the mecha, although it turns out the mecha are surprisingly integral to their stories.)

Misses:

• Inou Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de: Congratulations, show, you made the irritating chuuni guy so irritating that I can't stand him. Whatever else it is (and it may or may not be decent), this show is not for me at all.

• World Trigger: The first episode was a potentially interesting concept wrapped up in what was in retrospect a rather boring and lazy execution.

Have not looked at due to bad initial reports or other reasons:

• Akatsuki no Yona: On the one hand I theoretically like this genre in general. On the other hand I seem to only really like shows in this genre when they're unusually well done and early reports are that Yona's execution is kind of pedestrian and ordinary. In a less busy season I might have looked at this anyways; in this season I have triaged it pending effusive praise (which so far has not been forthcoming).

• Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru: This had the misfortune of airing late in a very busy season and not generating massive praise, so I've triaged it just like I have Yona.

• Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso: On the one hand I really liked Nodame Cantabile. On the other hand this involves characters in high school instead of university (which I consider a general warning sign) and may have excessive amounts of melodrama and hammering the audience. So far what praise it's gotten has not been effusive enough to get me to take a look.

• Cross Ange: Nope. I actually find this a pity because I kind of would like to watch a Sunrise mecha action show, partly because we haven't had one of those for a while. I just have no interest in watching one with this one's reported sort of content.

• Trinity Seven: Apparently your generic fighting harem LN adaptation in a very busy season.

• Terra Formars: From all reports this falls into the 'over-censored carnography' bucket without very much interesting in its execution.

• Gundam Reconquista in G: Gundam? Tomino incoherence? In a busy season? Nope.

(There are others that I haven't looked at due to their genre not being my kind of thing. And there may be some that I've just plain overlooked.)

Since I'm currently following eleven shows (with at least Amagi whispering to me to watch more), something is clearly going to give in what I'm watching. Sadly one of the losers may well be Shirobako, despite its appeal.

The importance (or lack of it) of Gundams in my favorite Gundam works

I am generally not a mecha fan, Gundam included, but I've wound up seeing some Gundam works that have genuinely impressed me and stuck with me; right now I'd say that my two top works are The 08th MS Team and War in the Pocket. For reasons that don't fit in the margins of this entry I recently wound up thinking about how important the presence of Gundams is in those two shows. Could you take the mobile suits out and replace them with something else without fundamentally damaging or changing those shows?

(This question makes more sense for me than for a Gundam fan, because what I like about these shows has almost nothing to do with the Gundams in them.)

I think that The 08th MS Team is actually surprisingly dependent on mobile suits in specific, because to make the whole feel of the show work you need a specific combination of attributes in your military machinery. They have to be ground based, because it very much matters that the MS Team is down there slogging along in the mud instead of flying distantly over it all. They have to be single pilot, because the whole dynamics of the situation would change if the pilots (especially Shiro) were working in a close team with other people in their vehicle instead of being alone. And they have to be powerful because people react to this; things would feel very different if the team was using, say, armed motorcycles instead of something that dominates the battlefield.

(That they dominate the battlefield also gives the MS team's actions special weight and their position special importance.)

War in the Pocket is a more ambivalent case. A lot of the situation and impact are not particularly dependent on mobile suits in specific so it feels like you should be able to swap them out for something else, but at the same time it's hard to figure out any alternative that leads to the crucial final confrontation while keeping Al so involved in it. To keep him so involved in the confrontation you probably have to keep it on the ground, so once again you need ground-based military machinery that has a single pilot and is sufficiently scary to force the defenders to sortie expensive and rare experimental hardware instead of relying on standard military vehicles and forces.

(Of course the background and settings for both shows are completely entangled in the Gundam Universal Century mythos as it is. But I think you could contrive some relatively similar setting that removed the mobile suits. After all, mobile suits are arguably an analogy for aircraft in the first place, although if we take this too far we wind up saying that the Federation is the US and Zeon is Japan in World War II.)

Looking back at the Summer 2014 anime season

As before, it's time (and long past time) for my usual retrospective look back at the season to see how well the final result matched up with my early impressions and my midway views. This has been delayed partly because the summer season turned out to be an almost total bust for me; I only managed to watch one show all the way through as it aired.

Watched and finished:

• Aldnoah.Zero: This was a reasonably entertaining show but I wouldn't call it particularly great; however, the show did manage to make watching it be enjoyable (for all of its absurdities). Following my usual rule that whoever gets the most character development is probably it, Slaine is the real protagonist; sadly, I suspect that the show disagrees with me. This is the only show I wound up following on a weekly basis through ths season.

  If I took this as a serious dramatic work, it would be a failure; it simply has far too many flaws. As popcorn entertainment I rather enjoyed it because I could laugh at all of the crazy and nonsensical bits and admire all of the ways the show found to make Slaine suffer. I agree with all of the people who say that it's impossible to believe that the show is serious about the events in its first-half climax.

  (Also, if this was a serious work it would be an extremely grim one given how large the show's onscreen and offscreen body count is.)

  I'm looking forward to the second half although it may well turn out like Valvrave, where the magic and charm wore off very fast.

  (Yes, this is a lot of words in an attempt to justify both sides of Author's collected impressions at once. As usual I see both the virtues and the flaws of the show but I weigh them in my own way.)

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei!: In the end I got bored enough (and desperate enough) to pick this up again after dropping it in the hopes that I would at least get some nice mindless action. I more or less got that, but it was competent instead of spectacularly stunning like I was kind of hoping for. I should really just resign myself to the fact that nothing in Prisma Illya will ever top the episode six fight from the first series and leave it permanently dropped. See also my Twitter capsule summary.

Dropped:

• Zankyou no Terror: I realized that I had essentially no interest in finding out what happened next to the characters or what was going on with the whole situation. So I stopped watching it.

Towards the end of the season I tried out two highly praised series that I had not previously given a chance to. My reactions:

• Barakamon: After three episodes my overall reaction is that I find the show charming and I can see why people like this a lot, but I don't find it compelling enough to drive me to watch more with any particular urgency (especially now that it's not a currently airing show). Part of it is certainly that the show is a bit too obvious and heavy-handed with its moral lessons for Handa. The segments when it wasn't concerned with that were much more enjoyable but unfortunately not all that frequent in the first three episodes.

• Sabagebu: The highest recommendation I can give this is that it makes me laugh on a regular basis (which is not common, most anime comedy fails for me). However in practice it's fallen into the same problem as Seitokai Yakuindomo, which is that plotless humor doesn't have much to strongly drive me to see the next episode. See also eg Evirus.

I expect to watch more of both of these shows, but in practice neither has grabbed me by the labels and demanded to be watched. Someday, when I feel like it or I want something to fill in a block of anime watching time.

I also tried out Strike The Blood for vague reasons, partly in the hopes that it would be another Tokyo Ravens. My capsule summary is that it hasn't proved to be anywhere near as compelling a watch as Tokyo Ravens was and is otherwise a perfectly ordinary shonen fighting show. I suspect that I'm not going to wind up watching much more of it; I just don't find it all that compelling.

Why I found Joshiraku an interesting series

I watch anime in translation (via subtitles), and almost all of the time I passively assume that the translation is essentially seamless and more or less transparent; what I'm reading on the screen is close enough to the original Japanese dialog that I'm missing at most minor nuances. Every so often there are stumbling blocks and near non-sequiturs and the rare moment where I can make out a Japanese word that I recognize and tell that the translated dialog is not quite what the characters actually said, but in those moments I assume that the translators have dropped the ball and done a bad job. I think this is an easy mindset to get into and to be honest I think that almost all of the time it's accurate; to put it one way, most shows likely don't have dialog that is all that complex.

(Most shows are not all that complex.)

Joshiraku demolishes this illusion. In Joshiraku the seams of the translation show frequently, not just in the puns but also in dialog that was clearly supposed to be funny and full of jokes but that went completely over my head. Watching Joshiraku was in part a continual process of being reminded that I was watching something in a foreign language and I very much was not getting all of the nuances. As a result, even (or especially) the jokes that I didn't get were interesting because they vividly show me those rarely-visible seams in the translations and my understanding of what was really going on. My puzzled silence when I was supposed to laugh made this gap quite visible.

I generally didn't find Joshiraku funny per se (although it had quite a lot of fun and enjoyable bits), but I always found it interesting to watch because of this and I'm very glad I saw it all. It's not often that I get such a useful and pointed reminder that yes, translation is happening and what I'm following is actually a simulacrum of the real thing (even if it's often probably a very close one).

(This is another aspect of the problem of interpretation, of course.)

PS: This is the reason I was talking about in my Summer 2012 midseason comments on Joshiraku. Yes, sometimes the wheels of blogging grind very slowly around here.