Roving Thoughts archives

Looking back at the Winter 2014 anime season

It's time for the usual retrospective look back at the season to go with my early impressions and my midway views. This time I've decided to be different in my ranking; instead of ranking series more or less on how good they are, which I usually do, I'm going to rank by pure enjoyment.

Plain good fun:

• Witch Craft Works: This show demonstrates the power of understanding that your basic premise comes straight out of bad light novel cliches (although it's actually adopted from a manga) and therefor should be ignored as much as possible. In the hands of anyone who took the basic plot seriously WCW would have been a disaster; instead it succeeds brilliantly at being entertaining by de-emphasizing the core plot in favour of a parade of diversions, from Tanpopo's antics to Kagari's deadpan craziness.

  WCW has no pretensions of being any deeper than a pothole after a rainstorm but it more than makes up for this with pure amusement value. That made it the most consistently enjoyable show I watched all season and gets it the first place ranking here.

• Seitokai Yakuindomo season 2: It delivered almost exactly what I was expecting, including an excellent troll in the last episode. Every episode made me laugh, often several times. I could ask for no more in a comedy.

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: Zvezda is the best show I watched this season. It had heart, intelligence, and a solid sense of fun and humour and was far more ambitious than WCW and SY. The problem is that while it quietly aimed high it didn't always hit that mark; while perfectly decent, the result sometimes felt like a bit of a letdown. This came to a head in the final episode, which was perfectly good but couldn't quite deliver on the promise of either the previous few episodes or the opening of the first episode.

• Noragami: This continued its good execution through the end and as a result I wouldn't mind a second season (as you might expect for a 12-episode series based on an ongoing manga, the major things are in no way resolved or concluded). I liked that it was willing to be subtle about some things. I disagree with people about the idea that the season should have ended with Yukine's plotline but that argument doesn't fit in the margins of this summary.

  (Whatever you do, don't watch the OAD. The OAD might as well be a different and significantly worse show, or at least a bad dream version.)

(In a way these four shows neatly split into two shows that were mostly about spectacle and two shows that were primarily about substance. The spectacle based shows executed it better than the substance based ones.)

Ordinary:

• Space Dandy: Ultimately this is an indulgent show, in that it indulges the animators, the writers, and the directors involved by allowing them to do pretty much whatever they want. The result is very uneven, kind of interesting on occasion, and not very compelling (I didn't find even the good episodes to be particularly powerful). In essence what we're getting here is a bunch of art cinema experiments and like most experiments many of them are only really interesting as 'look what we can do' things. Still, the zombies episode.

  Apparently this may be just what Watanabe wanted, so I can't exactly call Space Dandy a failure as such. But I don't think it's a success.

• Robot Girls Z: I wound up watching all three episodes, mostly out of a feeling that I might as well. It was okay, which makes it the kind of thing I've been trying to stop watching. Fans of old giant robot shows apparently got more out of it than I did.

Carried over from the fall:

• KILL la KILL: As I put it on Twitter KLK is an epic and spectacular show, and I'd add 'showy' to that list of adjectives. I think it clearly succeeded at what it set out to do, namely being BURNING ANIME in a good way. To deal with one issue: I don't think KLK (strongly) intended to have messages, although I do think it had themes that it worked into the narrative.

  Episode 22 and its ending and how people reacted to it is really the encapsulated KILL la KILL experience in one moment. KLK is all about delivering fanservice of the sort that doesn't involve nearly naked people (although it has them too, and in a much less fanservicy way than you might think).

• Log Horizon: This stayed strong through the nominal end. Since the show is getting a second season it didn't bother to invent some sort of temporary finish to things but just wrapped up the current story and hung out a 'here is your second season introduction cliffhanger' sign. I'm perfectly fine with this; the last few episodes were a good way to wind down from the more intense earlier ones. Log Horizon took a while to build up but the eventual payoffs were good.

  As peculiar as it sounds, I think that Log Horizon is above all thoughtful and intelligent. It did any number of interesting things with the intersection of MMO mechanics, MMO players, and a real world, and the smart characters in it felt genuinely smart. And I really liked a number of 'well of course' moments that it gave me, such as Crusty's enthusiasm for combat once he got into it. See also my fall retrospective.

• Tokyo Ravens: For reasons that boil down to 'I was bored and it was made to look appealing' I marathoned this right at the end of the season despite having dismissed it back in the fall. I don't regret this overall but I also don't regret skipping the show in the fall; I think it was drastically improved by being marathoned instead of doled out week by week. The first two episodes are weak and the final episode induced eye-rolling, but apart from that I found it surprisingly fun.

  (I also benefited from having been spoiled on one or two plot twists ahead of time, which made it easier to enjoy watching some bits.)

  One refreshing thing about TR is that it never beat around the bush about issues. Several times it raised suspicions and then immediately confirmed them in the next episode or two rather than drawing things out the way that many other shows would. The protagonist was still as dense as lead but the other characters were pretty smart and aware and not at all confused about who liked who and what was going on; as a result it skipped any number of tedious cliches that are common to the genre.

If I did a merged ranking of the carried over fall shows with this season's shows KILL la KILL would be clearly on top and Log Horizon might beat Witch Craft Works. Tokyo Ravens would be on the boundary of ordinary (and I would rate it much higher than Space Dandy, which spent the entire season on the edge of being dropped).

Ignoring the shows that carried over from the fall, I think this was a good but not great season. Four solidly enjoyable shows is not a bad number.

Why I don't rate the Rebuild of Evangelion movies all that highly

Back in my best N in 2013 entry I mentioned that while I'd seen all three currently available Rebuild of Evangelion movies in 2013, none of them made my year-end list for reasons beyond the scope of that entry. Today I feel like elaborating on that passing remark.

Fundamentally the reason I don't find the movies really impressive is that I've already seen both Neon Genesis Evangelion (the TV series) and End of Evangelion. Having seen both, there is not much really new and impressive that the Rebuild movies bring to the table. There are two sides to this, one for the TV series and one for EoE.

While the production values of the first two movies are higher than the TV series, the TV series covers basically the same ground in more depth and as a result has more fully developed and interesting characters. This is really what you'd expect because the TV series simply has more time. The movie hits the high points and adds some twists but its limited time forces it to simplify many elements (often ones I quite like) and I don't think it really adds more than one or two new things to compensate for this (the 'seaside' scene was nice but about it). Rebuild's desire to retread most of the same ground confines it and lessens it.

As for the third movie, it's mostly incoherent and unexciting as a movie (although it has some spectacular action sequences). What it really is is yet another giant Anno gesture in the direction of the fans, and as mentioned I've already seen Anno's first version of that. End of Evangelion is in many ways the ultimate middle finger to fans and I saw it years ago. By now yet more gestures from Anno to the fans have lost their ability to shock and impress me; now my reaction is more 'what, again?' (with a side of 'haven't you got tired of this yet?').

(The other difference between You Can (Not) Redo and End of Evangelion is that EoE tells a coherent and powerful story that just happens to be brutally ugly and 3.0 doesn't really. EoE is successful as a movie, not just as a gesture to fans.)

So the short version is: the Rebuild movies look nice but they aren't doing anything particularly new and interesting and they aren't significantly great purely as movies. This still makes them decent movies that I didn't regret watching but they're not 'best N in 2013' material.

(The first two movies are probably close to the best that they could be under the circumstances, but I tend to think that almost any relatively faithful movie retelling of a good TV series is going to suffer because of having less time. The movies did have some stabs at departing from the straight and narrow of the TV series but I didn't find those compelling enough on their own merits.)

I do accept that Anno is trying to say things to and about the Evangelion fandom; see Bobduh for one analysis of this. I'm just not particularly compelled by Anno's commentary, at least wrapped up in this form. To put it unkindly, being meta does not automatically make you interesting.