Roving Thoughts archives

Brief early impressions of the Winter 2014 anime season

As before, so again. Every season I do an early impressions post to organize my thoughts and also so that later on I can laugh sadly at my naive and optimistic views. This season I am either grumpy or being more selective than usual, depending on your perspective; as I put it on Twitter:

I'm increasingly feeling that I've been burned too many times by shows with 'promise'. Stop the excuses. Deliver something right here and now.

Quite a lot of shows failed this test for me, some of them well regarded ones. Even the ones that survived are not all that strong, so this looks like being one of those not so great winter seasons.

Clear winners (so far):

• Seitokai Yakuindomo season 2: The show reliably hits my funny bone just as the first season did.

  (This is extremely rare. Most anime comedies aren't for me.)

• Noragami: There's nothing exceptional here as far as genre and broad plot go but the show is very well executed and I like the characters. I'm with Aroduc in that it's refreshing to have a protagonist who gets powers and considers them really quite neat instead of something to be horrified about. I hope that she gets to kick more monsters.

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: It's hard to tell where this is going after just one episode but the first episode did a great job at holding my interest. My best guess is that the show will play its absurdisms straight but not seriously; if it manages to do a good job, I expect to like it a lot.

In ongoing shows, both KILL la KILL and Log Horizon continue to rock in their own ways.

Things I am reasonably enthused about so far:

• Space Dandy: This had an absolutely terrible first episode that was marred by any number of problems including bad writing that thoroughly alienated me; even people who liked it overall were saying out loud that the first half was pretty bad. Although it was an instant drop I just couldn't let go and very reluctantly watched the second episode, mostly out of masochism (there was a bit of me that didn't want to believe that something with SD's pedigree could be that terrible, although objectively I know better). To my total surprise, everything changed for the much better. The second episode was actually a nice show that did a good job telling a story and throwing in interesting and funny events without beating us over the head and even being subtle periodically. More to the point, it's a show that I want to see more of. So I've undropped it for now.

  At this point I have no idea if the good Space Dandy will continue or if the bad one will come back, so I have no idea if this is going to be something that I stay with. I'm honestly expecting an uneven and bumpy ride and probably a bunch of frustration.

• Nobunagun: This is nice and it's doing interesting things, but it doesn't have Noragami's quality of execution (or animation budget). It is clearly and consciously aiming to be over the top and to have a definite style; both of these are things that I can get behind. Better to have personality even if it doesn't always work than to be safely bland.

Not for me (tentatively):

• Tonari no Seki-kun: I read the first chapter of the manga and didn't find it particularly funny, plus there is something about the basic premise of 'boy does something that irritates girl until she reacts and then gets blamed for it while the boy always gets away with it' that rubs me the wrong way. I've seen the show's OP and frankly I think it has a good version of the joke that delivers most of the amusement value I'd get out of the show.

  I call this a not-for-me because lots of people seem to like the show quite a lot. Clearly the humour doesn't click for me and does for them.

Misses (in descending order of quality):

• Toaru Hikuushi e no Koiuta aka The Pilot's Love Song: There's nothing wrong with this as such. It's just bland and unimpressive and comes with impending grim doom (because the show has carefully told us that everything goes to hell later).

• Robot Girls Z: The first installment of RGZ has basically one core joke. Unfortunately neither that joke nor the show's execution of several variations of it are anywhere near funny enough or good enough to sustain an entire episode. As I put it on Twitter, the version of the joke done in the opening sequence is about the right length. You might as well watch that and stop.

• Wizard Barristers - Benmashi Cecil: By all logic I should really like this but instead it somehow irritates me quite a bit and I lack any interest in seeing the further activities of these characters. Perhaps part of it is that the whole exercise feels kind of soulless. The protagonist especially rubs me the wrong way with her collection of moe tropes (sleeping in late on her first day of work, jumping in apparently over her head, tragic past that gives her burning motivation, etc etc).

  (I'm also not sure I have much enthusiasm for watching a courtroom drama, even if it comes with magic.)

• Nobunaga the Fool: The first episode of this is a lot of chaos and incoherent things happening without explanation or much context. I'm all for starting in the middle of the action (it beats infodumps), but there has to be something there to get a grip on. There wasn't here and so I'm left with no interest in these characters or what's going on.

• Hamatora: This is the generic and cheaply made shonen show that Noragami wasn't.

I haven't checked out any of the four (I think) high school romcoms that are airing this season and I haven't heard anything about any of them that would change my mind. This is not a genre that generally works for me. Similarly I haven't looked at any of the other comedies, as none of them sounded like they would at all work for me.

The best N anime that I saw in 2013

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 2013 (regardless of when they were made or released). The top three shows this year are extremely close, so close they're almost a tie. I could wimp out by declaring it an actual tie but if I'm being honest the three shows are not quite equal in my affections.

(See also the winter, spring, summer, and fall retrospectives.)

In order:

• Shin Sekai Yori: This was an excellent but not flawless show for most of its run that is pulled up to greatness by the power of its ending, especially the last episode; I wrote a bunch of words about this. If I had done a '12 days of anime' series of entries, the climactic one would and could only have been:

  MY NAME IS SQUEALER!

  A perhaps underappreciated aspect of Shin Sekai Yori is its mastery of disturbing atmosphere. Over and over the show manages to be quietly creepy in visuals, directing, and so on, and it has quite a number of genuinely disturbing or tense moments.

  I've written enough about the show that I've made an index of my Shin Sekai Yori entries.

• Kyousougiga: I've come to think that Kyousougiga is a triumph of spectacle in service to story. It is visually stunning and crazy but pretty much everything (including some things that you'll initially dismiss) is there because the story calls for it. And the story is good enough to carry the weight of expectations created by the visuals. I also think this story could only have been told through anime, at least in anything like this form; it fundamentally needed to be told visually. See also. Some people will dock it style points because it was not necessarily clear in spots, but that's part of why I love it; it pushes a bunch of my style buttons. I like shows that throw you into the action ('in media res' as some people like to say) and leave it to you to decode things as you go along. I personally thought that Kyousougiga did this very well.

  (Bobduh has written a quite interesting discussion of Kyousougiga if you want to read more.)

• Uchouten Kazoku aka Eccentric Family: This is a small, quiet, but great show and one that pushes many of my buttons; I wrote a bunch in my summer wrapup. I don't love it quite as much as Kyousougiga only because it is more quiet and less visually spectacular, although it's full of its own beautiful moments.

  (I actually find it hard to directly compare the two and I sort of consider them tied here. Also I'll refer you to Bobduh's review of the show once again for more informed commentary.)

Because my top three are very close to being a tie, I want to add some more words on where each of them excels. Shin Sekai Yori is the most ambitious show; it aims very high and hits what it's aiming for, although at the expense of its characters. It confronts us with uncomfortable questions and doesn't give us easy ways out and it's the show that most makes me think and talk this year, as you can see. Uchouten Kazoku has the most fully realized characters and the best and most interesting story, but it's a small story in a small setting (it's both fantasy and ordinary life at once, and that's part of its power). Kyousougiga is the most spectacular and enthusiastic of the three shows, the most anime of the three, and it has the most interesting characters.

(For example, Koto is a great character and great fun, but I don't think she's as fully realized and human as Yasaburou or Yaichirou. She's closer to Benten and Benten is deliberately mostly a cipher.)

• Gatchaman Crowds: I really liked Crowds and it made me think; it's a very smart and aware show, one that repeatedly subverts your expectations in order to do interesting things. At the moment I feel that I can't rate it properly because I think that the Blu-Ray release is likely to involve a significant restructuring of the last two episodes. As it is, the TV broadcast version loses some style points for the first half of episode 11. See also and also, and relatedly some entries: 1, 2, 3 (all may have spoilers). As usual Bobduh has interesting things to say.

• KILL la KILL: As I like to say, this is BURNING ANIME. While it hasn't finished airing, how much I've unconditionally enjoyed the 12 episodes produced so far means that the show has shoved its way into this list anyways (which is perfectly appropriate). Besides, I don't think that this is the kind of show where the ending can ruin the overall experience; even if it goes down in flames in the end, we'll always have things like two-star banchou Mako.

  (I'm pretty sure that KILL la KILL is going to be remembered more for a succession of epic moments than for the stirring depths of its plotting and characterization. And it's delivered plenty of those moments so far.)

• Ghost in the Shell ARISE episode 1: Call this the special merit award for the best cyberpunk anime of the year. The first episode of ARISE is everything I could have asked for here, complete with genuine surprises and chilling moments that could only really have been done in this genre. I really like this new version of the Major, and of course it delivers good action and animation too.

  (I did not love the second episode as much and the whole thing is incomplete so far.)

• Space Battleship Yamato 2199: See my views on the show, which are too complex to try to summarize here.

Just on the edge:

• Psycho-Pass: As I said at the time this is far from flawless but it managed to become a good show by trying hard and having Akane. I wrote about Sybil and the ending. For all of its flaws, I will give it this: the show had ambition and it tried, and in the process it raised a number of interesting questions (some actively, some just passively and thus possibly not deliberately). That is fundamentally why I am reluctantly listing it here.

  (This is not as good as some of the shows below but more memorable, which shows that my classification scheme here has a bug or two.)

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

• Girls und Panzer: This is an extremely well executed sports action show; it was fun and interesting and enjoyable throughout. It delivered a stirring climax that was worth the wait, although I kind of wish it had managed to air all of its episodes last year so that I could put it among better company in last year's list.

• Little Witch Academia: This is a great little adventure story of a sort that we rarely see any more because everyone insists on complicating things (and often putting darkness and grimness into them). It was also very well made. Again, though, there is no real depth to it; it was simply fun. Not that fun is bad, but fun by itself usually lacks staying power.

• RahXephon: For all that I wound up somewhat down on it in the end the show was compulsively watchable, well made, and generally good throughout its run. It's the best and most interesting reaction to Neon Genesis Evangelion that I've seen.

• Ginga Kikoutai Majestic Prince: It had heart and affection for all of its characters and the result delivered a good show. It is not the show's fault that I am not a big mecha fan or that it did not have anything really new to bring to the table, just a good execution of relatively standard concepts. However it is laced with great little moments.

• Zetsuen no Tempest: In retrospect I didn't quite enjoy the second half of the show as much as the first half (as usual the romance plot was not quite successful with me) but it remains a very solid show. See my winter retrospective for more commentary.

Honorable mentions:

• Suisei no Gargantia: It was technically well made, it had a number of good characters and good ideas, and Chambers stole the show by the end. I think I've warmed to it somewhat since my views at the end of spring.

In the end I completed 28 shows, OVAs, and movies this year, which turns out to be exactly the same as last year (I also looked at and dropped a lot of shows). If I'm counting right, six of these were movies, also the same as last year. Overall I think that this was an excellent year, as I saw at least three shows that I consider great and a bunch more than I consider excellent. Shin Sekai Yori alone would have made for a good year; that I have at least two other shows jostling it for the top of the list is amazing.

While I saw all three Rebirth Rebuild of Evangelion movies this year, they do not make this entry for reasons beyond the scope of this margin. The third movie was the most interesting one.

Sidebar: Noteworthy things that I have not watched this year

I have not seen Wolf Children, Aku no Hana, Attack on Titan, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (which I tried out but couldn't get into), Silver Spoon, Watamote, the Madoka movies, or pretty much any of the 'cute girls doing cute stuff' shows. I understand that many of these are well done and appear on other people's top-N lists for good reasons.

More words on the ending of Shin Sekai Yori and the show overall

(There are plenty of spoilers here.)

This is sort of a reaction to Bobduh's articulate review, where he covers both why the show is excellent and why despite this it leaves him cold. While I've come to sort of agree with him about some of its flaws, what elevates Shin Sekai Yori to greatness for me anyways is the power of its ending, specifically roughly the second half of the last episode, and how I read it. Rather than simply give us an action show resolution to the situation in the ruins of Tokyo and then a straightforward upbeat epilogue, Shin Sekai Yori instead went out of its way to give us an uncomfortable ending that grants humanity to previously inhuman characters and systematically strips away the idea that the Cantus humans are the clear heroes; even Saki, our sympathetic protagonist character, is revealed to still be reflexively prejudiced. If there is a hero of the ending it's shown to be someone viewers had probably been looking down on and hating. This is a dramatic and powerful reversal of the situation that leaves us without comfortable or easy answers (and the revelation in the final coda of the show drives that home).

To be specific, I think that the staging and presentation of the ending makes it clear that we're supposed to sympathize with Squealer, not the Cantus humans running the trial. The whole visual vocabulary of the trial is that of a humiliating show trial, Squealer engages our sympathies throughout with both logic and bravery, and what happens to him is horrible. The final revelation at the end of the show finishes this off by giving the viewer no refuge for prejudice and no grounds to look down on the queerrats. I am not at Bobduh's level of 'burn down the Cantus humans' but the ending makes me believe that we're supposed to feel uncomfortable about what happened with Squealer (and even that it was unjust), and I do. At the same time the show has spent the entire run building up Saki (and Satoru) as our viewpoint and people we like, so we didn't want to see them die either. This dilemma is where and why I think the show becomes great.

(In fact I think most people will have been reflexively rooting for Saki right through the action in the ruins of Tokyo. Only when the show pulls back afterwards to give Squealer's side of things do doubts start seeping into our minds. I'm pretty sure that this is deliberate on the show's part; it wants us to be caught up in Saki's viewpoint and then come to a skidding halt as things look more and more disturbing afterwards. Some people may pull themselves away beforehand but I didn't really.)

To me, where Shin Sekai Yori excels is in raising hard questions and then not giving us comfortable answers. As I wrote at the time everyone is doing horrible things because they are all trapped in horrible situations. Over and over the show gives us a clear evil to rage against and then shows us why that evil exists and how it is the result of well intentioned people doing the best that they can in a terrible situation. There are no morally bright characters that we can root for without qualms, not even Saki and Satoru at the end. For all that Squealer is not a nice person, even his rebellion is morally defensible, as he carefully explains to Saki (and us, the viewers). I could do worse here than quoting @llvn from Twitter:

I love how it presents complexity without judgment. Everyone is wrong. But they deserve life, freedom.

Shin Sekai Yori is both a picture of fallible people trapped in a terrible situation making the best life that they can, mistakes and all, and a show that confronts us with hard questions that it doesn't give us any comfortable answers to. It doesn't give us any heroes or any clear villains; instead it makes us uncomfortably understand all sorts of people who are doing terrible things.

(Similarly, what happened with the queerrats is extremely unpleasant but it's also pretty much the result of relentless logic. Also note that even Kiromaru, the 'good' queerrat, is a complex character with his own motivations that don't neatly align with those of the Cantus humans. After all, the entire reason Kiromaru came to the ruins of Tokyo the first time was to see if he could find some effective way to rebel.)

By the way, I would probably have a somewhat different reaction to the end of the show if I thought that the show was presenting the Cantus humans as being successful. My view is that it's rather to the contrary; the Cantus humans are on a not so slow decline due to a shrinking population base and repeated horrifying incidents such as what happened with Shun (cf the worldbuilding bits pointed out in this comment). Since I don't like the Cantus humans and think that the world would be better off if they didn't exist, this is okay with me.

(I'm pretty sure that the show also agrees with this position since I don't see any particular sign that the show considers its world of the future to be a better place than today.)

As for the flaws (or at least one ongoing flaw), I have to agree with Bobduh that in retrospect the protagonists are the weak point of Shin Sekai Yori. I don't want to sound too negative here because I don't think they're bad (I found them and their interactions perfectly believable), but they are pretty passive. Shin Sekai Yori is not a story about Saki acting forthrightly to change her world, it is mostly a story about her experiencing and coming to understand it. In that sense Bobduh is right; this is more a science fiction story about setting and ideas than a story about actual people.

(This was also Inushide's major criticism of the show.)

Sidebar: an alternate reading of the show

To be fair, you can also read Shin Sekai Yori in a different way. I can construct a plausible reading where the Cantus humans are right to be as cruel and brutal as they are to everything and where the show is an argument from utilitarianism. In this version of the show, Saki's life is the story of a tragedy (and she even tells us this in a voiceover); her moments of rebellion against the proper way of the village lead first to the rise of Squealer and second to the tragedy of his rebellion.

(Squealer's life arguably revolves around his first encounter with Saki and her friends. That fateful meeting not only saved his life and his colony, it also may well have put him on the path to rebellion by showing him weak, fallible, and manipulable Cantus humans.)

My justification against this simple reading of the show is how it handled Squealer's trial, specifically how it doesn't show the Cantus humans in a good light. They are not people handing out justice, they are the masters punishing an uppity slave.