Roving Thoughts archives

Checking in on the Fall 2012 season midway through

This isn't quite 'midway' except by a somewhat stretched sense of time (even by my standards of delayed watching), but now that my watchlist has settled out I feel like writing it up to go along with my initial impressions. The big surprise for me this season has been how many shows I've wound up following. In contrast to spring, where I thought I was going to follow a bunch but didn't in the end , this has been the season where I thought many shows were going to drop out but they've stuck around.

Hits, more or less in order of how eager I am to watch new episodes:

• Shin Sekai Yori: This remains good and interesting but I have nothing compact to say about it. Oh, I do have one thing; it's consistently beautiful (although not always conventionally pretty) and visually well-realized. Whatever else you can say about it, I don't think SSY ever looks boring or plain.

  Now that I've read this analysis of the end credits, the SSY ED may be my favorite one of this season.

• Girls und Panzer: This continues to mix very well done sports action (yes, with tanks) with amusing events and decent characters. One of the things that make it work is that the creators are treating the whole premise not so much seriously (which would make it absurd) as respectfully; they're inviting us to enjoy it rather than laugh at it. One reason that the action works so well is that it actually makes sense and is presented so that we can follow it (sadly this is not anywhere near as common as it should be).

  I was pleased to find out that the protagonist's tragic past is far less tragic than initially hinted at. Well, not tragic at all, really. It's melodramatic but that's okay, this show is the kind of show where that fits. We're not supposed to take it completely seriously.

  (Grim tragic pasts are overdone.)

• K: Many aspects of this are quite well done but what's more and more sold me on the show has been the characters and their interactions. It's reduced the trolling lately (which I don't mind) and has started to give us decent answers to some of the outstanding questions.

  I feel that K is the second most visually impressive show that I'm watching, although it's carefully hidden behind all those blue and red filters.

• Psycho-Pass: Rather to my surprise the third episode turned my view of this show around by presenting an interesting situation and a decent mystery (and the show has sustained that momentum since then). I'm not entirely enthused about the horror tinges and how the show loves its violence against women but it remains interesting anyways. Akane gets great faces (her smug face in episode 3 helped sell me on the show) and great moments.

  The show has fortunately gotten a more interesting approach to its cinematography and setting than desperately trying to be Ghost in the Shell.

  (Violence against women is apparently the in thing this season, or maybe I'm just noticing it more this time around.)

• Robotics;Notes: I kind of would like this to keep its conspiracy plot out of my goofy mini-robots show, but I understand that I'm not going to get that. It's slowly but steadily picked up momentum and interest as it goes on. I find Kai less irritating than other people do.

• Zetsuen no Tempest: All of the main characters keep on being non-spuds. The spouting of Shakespeare lines may get irritating at some point but for now I remain interested in where this is all going. My one uncertainty is that right now I don't see how this is going to sustain itself for an apparent 22 episodes.

• Magi: I'm less enthused than I used to be, partly because it's been a bit slow moving and partly because I've learned that it's being adapted from a still-running shonen manga and thus we're probably not going to get a real ending. It would be much improved if Morgianna kicked more ass more often; she remains the best bit of the show (as she has been pretty much since her first appearance).

  Magi is a bit silly and shallow in a kids-show kind of way.

• Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: This prospers on the alternate strengths of periodic sharp edges and brutal honesty (where the show carefully avoids the easy way out) mixed with well done and reasonably funny comedy, usually with the protagonist as the poor straight man. If you look beneath the surface I think the show is saying some interesting things (although I could be reading things into it that aren't really there).

  (By 'reasonably funny' I mean 'actually makes me laugh sometimes'.)

  I consider this show to be on the edge not so much because the current episodes are so-so but because it could very easily slip and lose the magic that's sustaining my interest so far.

• Sword Art Online: It is just as it ever was, a disappointing mixture of good and bad. If I was a smarter person I would stop watching because I'm not at all sure that I'm really enjoying it any more. See Evirus for more.

  (Sometimes I distract myself by coming up with ways to make it much better. Yes, this way lies doom .)

Finally ended:

• Eureka Seven AO: The last two episodes came out at last. I wasn't entirely happy, but it's over now.

Now declared a miss:

• Ixion Saga DT: writing up my initial impressions made me decide that this wasn't funny enough to continue watching. Since it apparently beat its cluster of related jokes into the ground in subsequent episodes, I feel justified in that decision.

Despite various (passive) sales efforts, I've continued to avoid the temptation of Busou Shinki. Apparently it's continued to be almost entirely about tiny robots doing housework and mooning over their owner rather than tiny robots kicking ass, so I don't regret this in the least.

My views on Eureka Seven AO's ending

On the one hand, AO did not have a bad ending. It gave us good answers to our questions, it was well made, it had a bunch of quite nice action sequences (easily up to or exceeding the standards of the show to date, which have not been low), it gave Ao himself several good scenes to show various aspects of his growth, and it wrapped things up in a satisfactory way.

The problem is that in the process of doing this, the show took the entire cast of interesting, complex characters that we'd become emotionally invested in over the course of the story and reduced them to bystanders and spear carriers. None of them had their stories and themes resolved, none of them were given endings the way Ao was; they were all just ignored and wiped away. Naru was particularly badly done by (partly because her storyline raised some of the most interesting questions and themes of the show).

In effect the ending rewrites what the entire show was about. If it was actually about all of those character conflicts and themes that we thought we saw in the show, the writers dropped the ball at the end. My standard use of Occam's Razor says that instead, I was reading all of this depth into the show when the writers didn't deliberately put it there.

This has the unfortunate effect of reducing the whole show in my eyes. First, the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I liked those characters and it annoys me to see them treated so shabbily by the ending. Second, the ending kind of turns Eureka Seven AO into a show about spectacle and Ao and that's not really enough; Ao himself is not a strong enough character to carry the show alone.

(In retrospect I wish that the other characters had known what was at stake if the Quartz Gun was fired again and had told Ao to go ahead anyways. That would have made it their conscious sacrifice as well as Ao's. But see above about reading things into the series that probably weren't actually there intentionally.)

Liked: I don't regret watching it. In the end it was still a good series; it had good production values, various moments of awesomeness, and good characters and character interactions. It was just let down by the ending.

Rewatch: No, and I'd actively avoid one. I don't think I could rewatch it just for the spectacle and for Ao's character development, partly because the other characters are such an integral part of the show right up until the last two episodes change that almost completely.

(This is kind of an elaboration of my tweet about this.)

My favorite Miyazaki movies

This all started with The Cart Driver's top 30 anime list; I wound up both thinking about what my own top 30 list would look like and raising my eyebrows that they only included one Miyazaki movie (my untempered first reaction was that basically all Miyazaki movies would make my list). In the end, while I like all of Miyazaki's movies that I've seen and think that they're all very good I'll admit that I like some more than others. I'm not going to try to rank them against other anime (not right now at least), but I'm going to list the ones that I've decided are my current favorites and picks as the very best of his work.

First, I haven't seen any of Ghibli's films since Spirited Away, including both Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo; however, based on commentary I've read about both, I doubt that seeing either would change this list. Given that, my choices today are:

• Tonari no Totoro: I can't possibly be objective about Totoro; I watched it at exactly the right time for it to settle firmly into my heart and as a result it's my emotional favorite of all Miyazaki movies. But beyond my personal attachment, Totoro is the Miyazaki movie that is most purely about joy and wonder, with essentially no plot or tension to distract you. The movie is all about Satsuki and Mei having a series of happy, joyful experiences, from discovering and chasing around the soot spots to Mei falling on Totoro's fuzzy stomach to waiting in the rain with Totoro to, well, almost every moment in the film. Even the ending climax is not really tense and is most memorable for the cat-bus's spectacular run (speeding across the fields with people not seeing it, trotting along the high-tension wires, and if you've seen Totoro your memories may be flooding back here too). It is sentimental in the best way.

  Or in short, Totoro is Miyazaki's love letter to the wonders of childhood, the distilled essence of wandering around and having marvelous things happen. And it is a very, very well written love letter.

  (Totoro also has what's probably my single most favorite moment of flight in all Miyazaki movies, and that's saying something given that Miyazaki movies are just full of spectacular flight sequences.)

• Porco Rosso: I might not have listed this without the Cart Driver's prompting, but they're right. This is Miyazaki's most grown up and adult movie and at the same time also his most numinous; while other Miyazaki movies have more magic and more fantasy, in them it is more mundane, routine, and explicable than the one restrained, transcendent scene in Porco Rosso. Porco Rosso makes no attempt to explain the things that are not real and in doing so makes them more powerful. As his most adult movie it's also the one that's the most indirect and restrained, deliberately not showing us things and not giving us direct, clear answers.

  (As a result of this, Porco Rosso is the least straightforward and accessible Miyazaki movie, which is why I might have skipped over it initially.)

  I feel that this is the movie where Miyazaki most wears his heart on his sleeve. Miyazaki loves flight in general, but this film is filled with so much love for a particular realistic sort of flight (ie, between-war small airplanes) and for its time and place. Miyazaki also does us the service of not forgetting or ignoring what is in the background of this time and place, the way that might have happened in the hands of a lesser filmmaker.

  (There is nothing in the straightforward plot of Porco Rosso that required us to be carefully reminded of the growth of Italian fascism.)

• Spirited Away: This is Miyazaki's best adventure story (Porco Rosso has an adventure but is more a meditation on Marco's situation) and best fantasy. It is about children (or at least a child) without being childish, and is not so much about growing up as about growing into yourself and into what you can do. As a fantasy it presents the best-realized, most interesting world of fantasy in any of Miyazaki's works, full with both beauty and terror, because Miyazaki understands that the fantastic is both; you cannot have the different without also having the disturbing and the dangerous.

Again, I like all of Miyazaki's films and think they're great. The other films are just not as great in various ways as these three; these are the ones that I think are the purest, most refined Miyazaki.

(I feel conflicted about Mononoke-Hime. There's a lot to like about it and maybe I'm underrating it, but somehow I feel that it doesn't completely click with me. Maybe I need to see it again. Call it something close to an honorable mention for now.)

PS: I don't think that Miyazaki's messages in Mononoke-Hime, Nausicaa, and Castle in the Sky are flaws in any of those films, although some people disagree with this view. I don't rate any of those as highly as these three for other reasons.

Sidebar: going outside of Miyazaki

I've deliberately confined myself to Miyazaki's films here. If I was to go outside of that to films by Studio Ghibli people in general I would immediately point you to Gauche the Cellist, an early work by Isao Takahata. If you like classical music (as I do), this is a beautiful 'sense of wonder' film that's well worth your time.

(That it's entirely built around classical music probably makes it inaccessible to people who don't at least somewhat like the music.)