Roving Thoughts archives

Memorable anime from 2000 (for me)

For various reasons I feel like looking back at the anime from the first decade or so of this century, year by year (partly because I by and large now have a certain amount of distance from it, since I saw most of it years ago). I can't possibly do my usual 'best N I watched in' style of entry for old years because I have no idea what I actually watched back then, so the best I can do is look at what (first) aired in those years and that I still think is memorable or notable. This is a personal version of memorable and as such will skip some famous works that I personally didn't watch or that didn't stick with me in any particular way.

(For example, InuYasha started in 2000 but I never really watched it. Love Hina is also a 2000 series, I saw all of the TV show, but I don't think it's memorable for me in the way I want to cover here.)

Note that memorable does not necessarily mean good and there's at least one series that's going to cause me to froth mightily when I get to its year. For the most part this will be anime that I've seen most or all of. I'm taking date information from Wikipedia (which turns out to be a bit incomplete) and Anime-Planet.

Standouts:

• FLCL: I have nothing to say about this that other people haven't said better, except that watching it cold was a very trippy experience that probably can't be duplicated today (by the time you see it you'll likely have heard at least something about it).

• Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade: This is an amazing movie. I have nothing coherent to say about it and others have written lots about it anyways.

  (Wikipedia doesn't list it as a 2000 movie because it was released in France in 1999. It was released in Japan in 2000 so it counts for me.)

Ordinarily memorable:

• Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust: This was epic in a good way with all sorts of nice action scenes and some reasonably affecting characters.

• Blood: The Last Vampire: This was an excellent little unpretentious movie for what it was. I still have fond memories of several scenes (including one genuinely funny stereotype-puncturing one). It spawned a whole series of other works that I am progressively less fond of.

• NieA_7: This is a less well regarded Yoshitoshi ABe work but I enjoyed it a fair bit. It is slower and smaller in scope than his other works but no less charming.

• Escaflowne (the movie): Oh boy. The TV series was fine but the movie version of the story was kind of a trainwreck, with changes left and right. I once had a lot more opinions about this but they've faded with time.

Honorable mentions:

• Ah! My Goddess: The Movie: I was actually surprised to realize that I remember quite a lot from this film, including a quite nice race scene. It's well done and a quite good distillation of the essence of AMG.

• Initial D: Extra Stage: I get to count Initial D in this because Extra Stage aired in 2000. Extra Stage is a nice little side story focusing on some of my favorite secondary characters.

• Android Kikaider: This takes an old Japanese tokusatsu show and turns it into a surprisingly affecting psychological thriller that's lovingly drawn in an old-school style to boot.

Things I haven't seen:

• Banner of the Stars: I've seen Crest of the Stars and have always wanted to watch more, but Banner fell into the 00s gulf in my anime watching.

There are a number of other shows from 2000 that I have definite and often fond memories of but that I don't think are memorable enough for me to say anything about here. An incomplete list is Boys Be..., Yami no Matsuei, Gatekeepers, Gravitation, Hand Maid May, Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran, Love Hina, and Vandread.

(Some might be more memorable if I had seen all of the show instead of just parts.)

Sidebar: Me and incomplete or missed series from the 00s

The early 00s have a lot of incomplete series for me because I fell out of watching anime for a while. At the start of the 00s I was watching anime through various local anime clubs, but around here they steadily withered away as digital fansubs grew (which was kind of sad to see). For various reasons I didn't make the transition myself right away and only started watching anime on the computer rather later on. So there's a bunch of series that I saw some but not all of through an anime club before the anime club closed down, but I never went back to watch the rest of.

(And a certain amount of series that aired then, I missed at the time, and I've never gone back to watch since.)

An appreciation for Kyoukai no Kanata episode 10

By my standards, Kyoukai no Kanata is not a particularly great show on the whole (cf). But I had a very positive reaction to episode 10 and today I feel like explaining why I feel that episode 10 is an excellent single episode and in fact retroactively improves the whole show.

(There are spoilers in here, especially by the end. Also, if you want an idea of what actually happened in the episode see eg Bobduh's coverage, which of course contains full spoilers.)

Episode 10 is excellent in not one but two ways, in both its narrative structure (and associated directing) and in what it reveals about one character. I'll start with the narrative structure because it has fewer spoilers. Previous episodes have been mostly told straightforwardly as linear stories. Episode 10 could have been done the same way but instead it opts for an indirect narrative using three independent strands of story, all braided together in a way that builds up to the dramatic revelation and climax. It is this braiding that is the really powerful part, as both secondary stories are woven into the mix to make us more and more unsettled with the main strand.

And that is the real goal and excellence of the narrative structure of this episode. All of its directing tricks are deployed to show us, right from the beginning, that something is up. Things are wrong and we feel that right from the beginning when the episode starts well after the cliffhanger at the end of episode 9 and in fact completely ignores it. All through the episode the directing works to unsettle us, as it does things like cut to the inexplicable and odd third story just when we're getting comfortable and quietly uses inappropriate background music during what should be cheerful moments. All of this sets us up for the climactic reveal, both giving it extra punch and making it so that the reveal is not a complete and disconcerting surprise from left field.

When a show does this sort of thing there is a delicate balance between shoving things in our faces in an obvious way and doing it so subtly that people miss it totally, making the climactic reveal terribly disconcerting. Kyoukai no Kanata hits the balance excellently.

(It also doesn't overstay its welcome. Although I'd remembered it as running through the entire episode, in checking Bobduh's coverage again I see that the major reveal actually happened a bit less than halfway in.)

The other way that episode 10 is excellent is that it reveals Mirai's backstory. Well, that's a completely inadequate way of putting it, so let me phrase it better: the show forces us to completely re-evaluate Mirai's character in light of what it reveals. The Mirai we thought we were seeing from outside over the past nine episodes is not the real Mirai. The real Mirai is a lot more complex and interesting than what we thought and in the process much more morally grey. In the process the show retroactively mostly but not completely justifies a number of Mirai's more obnoxious traits and strengthens the links between her and Akihito. To push the point home the show reruns a number of earlier scenes (sometimes from slightly different angles) and leaves us to reinterpret Mirai's reactions in them in light of what we now know.

(In retrospect the show did this sort of character reveal once before, with Akihito.)

Sidebar: Where this episode's revelations fail

The revelations about Mirai can be used to justify a certain amount of her early moe clutziness on the simple ground that this was not actually clutziness, it was Mirai flinching away from genuinely killing Akihito (especially as she began to know him). But early Mirai was too moe-clutzy for this to fully pass muster and it can't explain why she couldn't even bring herself to hunt dreamshades. Mirai the killer makes cutely clutzy moe 'can't bear to fight dreamshades' Mirai even more bogus than it was before.

(You could try to argue that Mirai is doing this deliberately to throw Akihito and everyone else off, but the problem is that you're reaching here and the show is giving you no support. Occam's Razor says that early Mirai was made that way to give her moe appeal and for no deeper reason. And that is one of the show's failures.)

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

It's time for the traditional midway update to my early impressions. Past time, really, but this time the delay hasn't been because I've been disenchanted with stuff.

Clear winners:

• Kyousougiga: I have nothing coherent to say about this that other people aren't saying better. It's hitting lots of my buttons and being clever about it. Both Koto (the younger one) and Myoe are excellent characters and the others aren't bad.

• Kill la Kill: This has sustained its level of frenzied fun and over the top absurdities; in short it's still BURNING ANIME. It's not flawless (you can read lots of discussion about questionable things in various places around the net) and there are plenty of uncertainties but I don't care.

• Arpeggio of Blue Steel - Ars Nova: I have no particular justification for this, I just keep whole-heartedly enjoying it.

• Yozakura Quartet - Hana no Uta: This is another series that's just plain fun, especially when it cuts loose. Surprisingly it has the best fight animation of the season.

  (I could live without its apparent compulsion to flash us at least one pair of panties per episode no matter what.)

On the edge of boredom:

• Kyoukai no Kanata: I'm getting some pretty gorgeous drawings, a reasonable amount of fight animation (although it's no Yozakura Quartet there), and some reasonably interesting (secondary) characters. I'm not getting the appealing character interaction I was hoping for and I could have done without the episode that was a giant shaggy dog story.

• Log Horizon: This is perfectly good and entertaining but it's a bit slow and it's not quite thrilling enough to elevate it out of this category.

Almost certainly a miss:

• Valvrave: This season has turned down the crazy and it turns out that when Valvrave does so it's a much more ordinary show. I don't really care about the angst of the characters and the show got rid of several of the potentially most interesting characters the moment they got interesting. I think I'm going to drop this although I make no promises.

Misses:

• Yowamushi Pedal: I wrote an entire entry about how this sadly failed for me. Other people are apparently starting to get unhappy about how slowly it's moving.

• Galilei Donna: Oh boy. The short, rant-free version is that at least all of the writing having to do with the plot is terrible. Regardless of any other virtues the show potentially may have, I can't get over feeling that the writers are lazy and insulting me.

As far as shows continuing from earlier seasons go, I'm still watching Monogatari. It's okay and the final arc looks to be better than earlier ones.

I finished watching Space Battleship Yamato 2199. It was excellent.

Sidebar: Why I am not so impressed with Kyoukai no Kanata's fights

One of the marks of quality fight animation is not only that there is animation happening but that you can actually follow the action of the fight and it makes sense. A lot of KnK's fights have had animation but not quite so much coherent action. Yozakura Quartet's fights are not as pretty as KnK's but they are clearly coherent action. A good example is this beatdown from episode 7 (spoilers of course); at no point in the entire sequence of animation are you in any doubt about who did exactly what to who (and for that matter where everyone is). KnK's fight animations have lots of things flying around very fast but not as much coherent action. If I was being unkind I'd say that they look impressive but are ultimately hollow.

(I'm sensitive to this for reasons beyond the scope of this entry.)

Why Yowamushi Pedal fails for me

I wanted to like Yowamushi Pedal, I really did (in part because the story resonates with my own experiences), but instead it's become the first show I've dropped this season. I've spent a bit of time thinking about why and I'm going to put it this way.

Roughly speaking, a sports anime has two options. It can take the fast Initial D approach of almost immediately throwing us into important action, or it can take the slow Cross Game approach of getting us hooked on the characters and their interactions and then only slowly bringing the sport action into the picture. In the fast approach we'll forgive the characters being a little flat because exciting things are happening; in the slow approach we'll forgive a lack of action because we're invested in the characters.

(Of course you can do both at once and a really good fast show will do so; Initial D has reasonably interesting characters from the start. And to be honest it turns out that Initial D is actually slower moving than I remembered it being, although it sets up the critical stakes in the first episode.)

Yowamushi Pedal did neither (for me). I gave up on it after I fast-forwarded through most of the fourth episode, and I did that because I didn't care about either the otaku interactions of Onoda and Naruko in Akihabara or the reason the show invented for why they wound up bike racing there. As you might guess, part of the problem is that the characters never really came alive to me; they still felt too much like descriptive phrases instead of people. I cared a bit about what they were doing but not enough and the show was otherwise just too slow moving.

(An important part of being slow moving is that the stakes of the action are low. Initial D took four episodes to start the race, but from the first episode we understood how the upcoming race was a big deal with a lot on the line for the locals. None of the action in Yowamushi Pedal so far even comes close to this level of importance.)

Sidebar: Why Yowamushi Pedal resonates with me

To elide a long story, I bike a lot these days but I didn't use to do so; I just started biking one day (relatively recently by my standards) and slid into more and more of it. My mental image of myself has always been set to 'sedentary computer geek and reader and inside person' and it was kind of a shock to realize one day that I'd become someone who felt an ideal summer Sunday or holiday involved spending most of the day biking around. So I found Onoda's self image of 'I'm not athletic, I just bike to Akihabara to save money for otaku stuff' to be totally believable and realistic, and I was looking forward to seeing him come to terms with the idea that actually yes, he was athletic and had become so without realizing it.

(If the show was interested in taking this seriously, the high school setting offered a lot of potential. To put it one way, I suspect that even in Japan good athletes are given a lot more respect than colourless otaku.)

Some thoughts on the gamification in Gatchaman Crowds

One of the thematic clashes in Gatchaman Crowds is between Rui's idealistic vision of the world as a place where the population takes care of things through altruism without needing leaders and power structures and his actual implementation of this vision, both with the carefully selected Crowds users and that GALAX gives people rewards for their actions (and sometimes frames things as contests). By the end of the series Rui has thought better of one of these, giving the Crowds power to everyone instead of a select few, but that still leaves us with the contradiction of theoretically altruistic action versus GALAX's gamification of it.

The conventional view of this is that it shows the inherent contradictions and unworkability of Rui's vision. Appealing to people's altruism is all well and good but it doesn't actually work; in practice the large mass of people only act when they get paid for it, even if you're only paying them in social kudos. Rui is smart enough to realize this, which is why GALAX gamifies the whole thing despite Rui's professed views.

But there's an alternate view that starts with the observation that GALAX's rewards are not, say, money or anything comparable to it. Instead they're basically meaningless and I find it notable that in a show as aware of social media as Crowds is, no one ever talks about how many GALAX update points they have. Rather than being people's motivation for action in place of a nonexistent or stunted altruism, GALAX's meaningless rewards instead simply serve to give people a little push towards action and also to give them feedback to reassure them that they have successfully done the right thing. Or in short people are altruistic but also passive and GALAX's gamification exists simply to overcome this passivity.

(People may also be uncertain about what actions they should do, although having GALAX provide answers there edges into potentially darker territory. See this blog post by r042 for more elaboration of this idea.)

In support of this view, note that many of the things that GALAX asks its users to do are all out of proportion (in terms of time, effort, and risk) to any possible reward that GALAX is providing. In the course of the show, Japanese teenagers openly defy their teachers and school authorities, off the clock medical people dash into bad situations and hazards, and people spend significant amounts of time doing boring work to help strangers, all for nothing more than GALAX updates. It's hard not to call this altruistic.

Link: Gatchaman Crowds essay by Joe McCulloch

‘Gatchaman Crowds’: Four Flights Inside The Most Radical Superhero Reboot of Right This Minute is an excellent and well-informed 5,000 words or so on Gatchaman Crowds that says a lot of smart things about it. One of the reasons I love it is that it points out negative things too and makes me (somewhat reluctantly) agree with them, despite my fondness for the show. Because the essay's on Comics Alliance it takes a comics oriented view of the show, although one that's also informed by a lot of context.

(Note that there are some mild spoilers in the essay.)

If you like McCulloch's writing and want more of it, you can find him on Twitter as @snubpollard and at his Tumblr blog, where he holds forth on (among other things) Kill la Kill and other currently airing shows. I find both well worth reading and quite recommend them.

Brief early impressions of the Fall 2013 anime season

As before, so again. Every season I do an early impressions post to organize my thoughts on what I'm watching and also so I can laugh sadly at my naive views later in retrospect.

Clear winners (so far):

• Kyousougiga (aka Capital Craze, sometimes Kyousogiga): I loved this when I saw the low-resolution webrip in 2011 and I love it even more now that it looks good and I can follow the action. The second episode is a start on making the story coherent even as it tones down the madness a bit (not totally, which is good).

  (I'm aware of the on-web OVA series from earlier this year but I found the available webrips to be unwatchable so I never did.)

• Kill la Kill: This has its problems but for me they don't matter in the face of its frenzied energy and relentless, over the top absurdities. Kill la Kill turns everything up to eleven (including the potentially objectionable bits, but that may make them less bad). This is BURNING ANIME.

  (I mean, it has the mysterious teacher casually doing an over the top imitation of Utena's Akio Ohtori just as background scenery.)

  Update: see this commentary too. What it says.

• Valvrave: It's Valvrave all right. Episode 13 was a little bit tame for the show but it has to start somewhere (not drawing out the cliffhanger fight was a good move). Note that the fact that their government is entirely composed of high schoolers is causing them problems (in fact, it seems to be getting them run over).

Things I am reasonably enthused about so far:

• Galilei Donna: The first episode was great and pushed a lot of my buttons but it was all setup. Now it's up to the rest of the show to deliver on that initial promise.

  (For example: in the OP, when the machine Hozuki is working on explodes in her face she doesn't look panicked or even worried, just maybe a bit peeved.)

• Kyoukai no Kanata: What I'm hoping for is KyoAni-quality action scenes with the appealing character interactions of, say, Hyouka. The show has done reasonably well at delivering that so far although there are problematic aspects (I don't like artificially clumsy moeblobs). I'll give it points for being clever enough to have the character that uses her own blood as a weapon say 'well of course I'm anemic after a fight'.

  However shallow it is of me, my interest in KnK is directly related to how much action it has. I suspect that the character interaction will not keep me watching if the show shifts to just that.

  (At this point in my anime watching a show has to offer something pretty exceptional to keep me watching N teenagers talking to each other. It can be done (cf Toradora), but it takes work.)

• Arpeggio of Blue Steel - Ars Nova: Some people have violent reactions to the character CG. I'm apparently less selective; characters could be better animated, but it's not bad enough to bounce me out of the show. With that said I don't expect any great depths to the show, just well done ship to ship action (which I'm getting so far). If that flags, I'm out.

At least a bit marginal already:

• Yozakura Quartet - Hana no Uta: I could do without the fanservice but otherwise this is a serviceable and technically nicely done action show involving characters that I have fond memories of.

  (I suspect that the charm will wear off at some point.)

• Log Horizon: This is already more enjoyable than Sword Art Online, although that's not exactly a high barrier to clear. It's not deep but it is willing to be amusing (which is more than the grimly serious SAO ever did). I consider it a definite plus that it's lighthearted and people are not at risk of dying.

• Yowamushi Pedal: I have no idea how interesting this is to non-cyclists and I have no idea how long it'll sustain my interest. But right now I'm enjoying all of the little things that they get right about one of my things and I can't not watch it.

  (For example, I was absurdly happy that they put in the click of a clipless pedal clipping in in episode two. Yes, I know that sentence makes no sense if you're not a cyclist.)

  Some tweets about the cycling bits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Overall I'm pretty clearly watching too many things at the moment. Some shows are going to fall by the wayside, probably a bunch of them; at some point I'll get tired of spending time on stuff that's merely blandly entertaining. On the positive side the only show continuing from last season is Yamato 2199.

(Oh wait, I forgot Monogatari Series Second Season. That may not stay on the schedule for long.)

Misses:

• Tokyo Ravens: This is simply too generic, bland, and slow. In short, nothing like the OP made it look. It's possible it will turn into the K-like show that the OP suggested but if so, it did so too late for me. It's an extruded Light Novel product despite initial appearances.

• Coppelion: I don't like cliched melodrama at the best of times. When you combine it with various setting stupidities (and questionable art, regardless of how pretty the backgrounds are) it's far too much. I especially dislike how the characters seem so unprepared to wander around the ruined Tokyo, both physically and emotionally, despite the fact that this is apparently what they've been preparing for all their lives.

  You could do an affecting, interesting drama with this basic setting and premise. This show is not it.

Not for me:

• Gingitsune: There's nothing wrong with this but there's also nothing exceptional about it either, and it's not really my kind of thing. I'm sure that it's going to be heartwarming and nice, sort of like a more bland version of Natsume Yuujinchou (which I've already basically burned out on anyways).

• Samurai Flamenco: This is apparently a realistic drama about someone who wants to be a superhero in an ordinary world. This is not a story I'm interested in.

  (To the extent that I want realistic superhero stories, what Gatchaman Crowds did is much more my thing.)

Not even tried and I feel like saying something about them:

• Infinite Stratos S2: Gets utterly terrible reviews even from people who quite liked the first season. I have no interest in yet another set of allegedly comedic harem hijinks.

• Unbreakable Machine Doll, Strike the Blood: Apparently your generic extruded Light Novel product.

• Golden Time: Apparently not the mature, university-based story with mature characters that was vaguely advertised.

PS: I link to my tweets partly so that I can find them again. Besides, it sometimes saves me from repeating myself.

(Since someone is going to ask someday, I generally go with whatever name for a show that the fansubbers are using and they usually use the Japanese names instead of the English translations. This is simply me being lazy since I keep track of what I've watched using the fansub names.)

Link: History Must Be Curved (Galileo and the heliocentric revolution)

This is the kind of thing where I'll start out by quoting some text:

HISTORY MUST BE CURVED, for there is a horizon in the affairs of mankind. Beyond this horizon, events pass out of historical consciousness and into myth. Accounts are shortened, complexities sloughed off, analogous figures fused, traditions “abraded into anecdotes.” Real people become culture heroes: archetypical beings performing iconic deeds. (Vansina 1985)

This is from the conclusion of Michael Flynn's masterful nine part essay on "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" (also). This is all about how geocentrism (the view that the Earth was at the center of the universe) gave way to heliocentrism, how surprisingly small a part Galileo actually played in it (contrary to common stories about him), and exactly how he got himself into trouble with the Church.

To increase your interest: it turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that geocentrism actually had a fair amount of evidence going for it and the last explanation for why part of that evidence was wrong was only worked out in in 1835. As Flynn notes:

Conclusion: Our ancestors were not fools.

In three centuries, the long complex story of how the mobile Earth replaced the stationary Earth dipped below the horizon from History into Legend. Like all good legends, the story of heliocentrism and the culture-hero Galileo is simple and general and geared toward supporting the Rightness of the Modern worldview. But history is always detailed and particular.

If this sounds like a great read to you, rest assured: it is. Go ahead and start at part 1.

(Via Popehat, as you might have guessed.)

Some bits about the ending of Gatchaman Crowds, especially Berg-Katze

(There are spoilers here. Also, I ramble.)

I called Berg-Katze a magnificent villain who had been one step ahead of everyone all the time, so let me explain that. Berg-Katze said two significant things during its conversations: that humans would destroy themselves (in a big conflagration) and that what it was looking for was a suitable source of lots of fuel for this blaze. Berg-Katze's plan all along was to engineer this.

First, BK got Rui to create GALAX and empower the Hundred. This created something that BK could take over by impersonating Rui and a source of disgruntled ex-Crowds users, which BK then recycled into the Neo-Hundred to cause chaos. This chaos, concentrated into one place by the chase for the Prime Minister, created a bunch of paniced people. BK then hijacked the Prime Minister's broadcast and goaded all of these paniced people into becoming Crowds themselves. Berg-Katze's expected result from this was increasingly violent chaos as a whole bunch of uncoordinated people with newly-given powers stampeded back and forth, inevitably made mistakes about who was a 'bad Crowds' (and defended themselves from attacks by what they thought were bad Crowds), and so on.

(Psycho-Pass did a very similar take on the panic of crowds towards the climax of the show.)

At every step of this, Berg-Katze manipulated everyone to create the conditions for its next step. Nowhere was this clearer than when people restored trust in GALAX and distributed smartphones to everyone during the disaster to restore order, only to have Berg-Katze use this to reach everyone with its corruption of the Prime Minister's message and offer them the Crowds power. This wasn't an accident; Berg-Katze planned for this response to the Neo-Hundred. In fact the entire purpose of the Neo-Hundred and their chaos was to set up this situation.

Since I've seen some confusion about this: Berg-Katze didn't take over the Prime Minister's body during the broadcast, just the broadcast signal. We were clearly shown a mismatch between what was happening in person and what the broadcast showed happening.

(I made some tweets about this whole thing: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Defeating this plan took multiple things and would not have happened without Hajime's effects on everyone, especially Rui. OD needed to defeat Berg-Katze to recover Rui's NOTE, but that wasn't enough by itself; Rui had to reach a point where he would offer the clearly dangerous power of Crowds to everyone, where he trusted that people's potential for good would overcome the clear possibility of even more chaos. It was a brave gamble given that it amounted to pouring more potential fuel into a burning fire.

(How I regard the 'gamification' of GALAX and its users is sufficiently complicated that it calls for another entry.)

On OD: I have no idea if he's supposed to be dead or not. On the one hand he does collapse from his injuries and doesn't appear in the epilogue. On the other hand, his visible injuries don't appear to be life threatening, Utsutsu was presumably available for healing, there are no visible signs of mourning in the epilogue, and other characters don't appear in the epilogue either. I'd like to convince myself that he survived but I'm not really able to do so.

Similarly, I have no idea if the fallen Crowds' people from Rui's fight with Berg-Katze eventually recovered. I'd like to believe they did but I don't think we have any evidence about it one way or another.