Roving Thoughts archives

Lens flare in anime

If you've watched anime for long you've probably seen a scene with lens flare in it, either in the form of streaks of light or as sharp diamonds. Lens flare is commonly used in beach scenes and other situations where the animators want to communicate that the sun is very bright; they'll pan a shot up to include the sun and as the sun enters the picture, throw in the flare. Generally the single callout in a single shot is the only time you'll see lens flare in the scene. As I mentioned last entry, lens flare is a really striking case of the anicamera deliberately emulating (old) cinematography for the aesthetic effect.

Here is the thing: lens flare is a lens defect and artifact, an undesirable property of camera lenses. It's not how we see bright lights with our bare eyes and it's not something that photographers want (and they go to some effort to avoid it). Old camera lenses could flare badly but modern still camera lenses go to significant effort to reduce or almost entirely eliminate lens flare; such a lens used in the same situation in real life would be unlikely to flare anywhere near as much as anime depicts (and real lens flare is often significantly less attractive than the lens flare that anime depicts).

(I don't know directly about modern cinematography lenses, but I suspect that they too do not flare very much these days; there's no reason that the improvements from still camera lenses would not have carried over to them.)

This makes anime's use of lens flare very clearly an aesthetic decision; it's not imitating how we see the world or even how a good modern camera does. Anime is doing extra work and deliberately invoking something that still photographers avoid either because the animators think it looks good, because they want things to look cinematographic (in a cliched way), or because they're using it as a signal that means 'this is in bright sunlight'.

(In anime, as in cinematography, all well lit scenes have pretty much the same apparent brightness level so true 'real world' brightness has to be communicated by other cues. Part of it is environmental, where we just know that a scene outdoors in sunlight is brighter than a scene indoors under normal artificial light, but sometimes anime throws in explicit indicators. Even artificial ones like lens flare.)

PS: this is where I direct interested parties to the tvtropes entry on false camera effects.

The unconstrained anicamera

Before I start talking about some of the things that the anicamera takes from real cameras I want to expand on a point that SeHNNG made at Altair & Vega, namely that the anicamera is unconstrained by physical reality. Specifically it is unconstrained by reality when it 'photographs' a scene, whereas when you film or photograph a scene how you do so is often imposed on you by physical constraints. There is a continuum of these constraints; the anicamera is at the unconstrained end and generally still photographers are at the most constrained end with cinematographers in the middle. This is not because film cameras are better or more flexible than still cameras but because cinematographers generally have more money. To show what I mean, here's two examples.

First, if a still photographer wants to take a picture of a group of people in a relatively small room they will almost always have to use a wide angle lens, which introduces perspective distortions from what we consider a 'normal' view. Cinematographers just build a soundstage where the room doesn't have one wall, allowing them to back up enough so that they get a normal perspective. Second, still photographers who take pictures of buildings often spend a great deal of money on special lenses in large part to compensate for the fact that they can't feasible take their pictures from ten or twenty feet (or more) up on a ladder. Camera booms are standard equipment on film sets; filming a broad overview of a building from thirty or forty feet up is almost trivial for a cinematographer.

The anicamera takes this further by enabling shots that would not be possible even in cinematography; at best film could fake them with special effects. One example comes from the first battle in Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works, where the end of the battle has a dramatic continuous pull-back that starts from a closeup on a character in the battle and pulls all the way back to overlooking another character who is at least a mile or two away. You could not possibly film this in real life; there is no lens that could zoom in and out that much and no camera platform that could physically cover the distance fast enough. And the pull-back is necessary for the impact of the shot, because it involves Shirou turning to look towards Archer; only the continuous pullback lets us clearly understand what it means that Shirou turned and looked in the direction he did.

(Another way that the anicamera is unconstrained is that it takes up no physical space. You can thus have anime shots taken from spots in a setting that would be very difficult to get equipment into in real life. To some extent this could be faked on a soundstage but even that has limitations.)

Apart from enabling otherwise impossible shots, this matters because it means that how things look in anime is almost entirely an aesthetic choice. The look of a scene or a shot is never forced by physical constraints in the way it can be in still photography and cinematography. The corollary to this is that whenever the anicamera takes from real cameras it does so for aesthetics, admittedly sometimes because a lot of cinematography has established that those aesthetics work or at least trained audiences to expect them.

(The clearest, most striking case of this is lens flare. But that's another entry.)

Some notes and views on Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita

I was planning to make this a carefully written coherent entry, but that's not happening. So this is going to be more or less point form notes before more of my thoughts slip out of my mind.

I was previously somewhat ambivalent on Jinrui. I take that back because in retrospect there were only two episodes that I felt were beating me over the head and I've become convinced that those episodes were necessary. I now feel that Jinrui was the most interesting show of the Summer 2012 season; it was the one that most consistently fascinated me and made me think and it had the highest number of moments of awesome. It was at least sometimes subtle and beautiful, which is more than most shows ever manage.

I wrote my theory of decline partly with Jinrui in mind. I think that a low birth rate is the best explanation for humanity's decline, but that's partly because Jinrui doesn't really explain the decline. There's some evidence for it, especially in the school episodes (11 and 12), but I think there's also some counter evidence. In particular, in both the first and third episodes we see a fair number of other girls and young women of Watashi's rough age (and in the first episode they're all in one village).

(If anything, young men seem to be the missing element. Although we do see some of them other than the Assistant.)

As I tweeted, I think that the school in #11-12 isn't there to educate the students but instead to socialize them, something that's necessary because many children are growing up without other children around (as suggested by Watashi's opening narration in #11). One strong reason I feel this is that both Watashi and Y are clearly both very smart and quite well read (Watashi from the very moment that she shows up at the school); 'unschooled' clearly doesn't equal 'uneducated' in their cases. In any school that really wanted to put them in an appropriate grade, they'd rapidly be moved up through the grade levels. But instead the school forces them to sit in various early grades for a fair amount of time, which makes perfect sense if the real goal is to socialize the kids instead of just teach them.

(As noted, I kind of think that the school shut down because it wasn't working. As demonstrated by Watashi and Y's experiences, its pupils may have been getting progressively weirder and more disturbed over time and the school environment itself may have been feeding that. This is probably taking this theory too far.)

For the record, if people have any doubt by now:
Liked: absolutely, at least right now. Once I got going with it, it was the highlight of the season (against strong competition from Eureka Seven AO).

Rewatch: quite possibly, because I strongly suspect that there are things I will pick up on a second watch.

(I do hope for someone to do a roundup post on Jinrui commentary and analysis. I want to read it all, because I'm sure there's things about Jinrui that I missed.)

Sidebar: Jinrui and Eureka Seven AO

The quick summary is that these are both good shows but they are so different that I can't compare them directly. Jinrui is a show that is very much about (meta-)commentary, analysis, and paying close attention to the non-obvious. AO is a much more conventional show that is at the same time somewhat less obvious and more subtle about things; it never pushes its themes to the forefront in the way that Jinrui sometimes does. You can enjoy AO purely on its surface narrative while I'm not sure that Jinrui is always interesting at that level.

Despite all this I found Jinrui more interesting and fascinating than AO; it made me think in a way that AO didn't. Jinrui also had more straight up awesome moments than AO did (eg, eg). This is not to say that AO has been without awesomeness; AO just spreads it out over more time rather than concentrating it in focused moments.

Brief early impressions of the anime of the Fall 2012 season

As before, here are my impressions of another season's first few episodes, or at least of the shows that I've bothered to watch. I'm reusing the same format as last time and for the same reasons. This time around I'm trying to be harsher than usual because my goal is to only watch anime that I'm going to really enjoy; I have enough other things competing for my time.

Hits:

• Magi - The Labyrinth of Magic: So far this is a straightforward adventure story but I'm finding it nicely done. It's not deep but it's enjoyable. One reason I like it is that it has that rarity in an action show, a strong female character who is going to be one of the main protagonists.

• Shin Sekai Yori - From the New World: This is this season's deep and serious show (well, the successful one). It's well done and interesting so far, with intriguing mysteries and decent characters. Bits are a little bit clumsy but I'll forgive them since the rest is so good and interesting.

• K: After the third episode I've become convinced that this show is consciously trolling us, setting up cliched situations and characters only to deliberately do the opposite of what we expect. It's great (assuming you like that sort of thing, which I do when it's done well).

  (A smarter person would have become convinced after the ending of the second episode. Or even during the second episode.)

• Zetsuen no Tempest: What I like most about this show is the main characters, who are much more interesting, complex, and nuanced than the usual run of the mill spuds in your typical action anime; I look forward to the show exploring them more. As an action anime it's otherwise decent (and enjoyable) but ordinary.

  (It's worth mentioning that the action seems well animated and well done, since a lot of alleged action shows cheat massively on this.)

• Girls und Panzer: This surprised me by being much more interesting and enjoyable than I expected (once I was persuaded to give it a try by all sorts of praise in the anisphere). It's not exactly deep and you really don't want to think about the setting, but it's quite fun so far. While it could fumble things, I suspect that the staff has enough of a handle on what's fun about this setting to keep things going for its entire run.

  (The protagonist has some sort of tragic past lurking in her background, but this seems to be mandatory these days.)

Either this season is really good or my attempt to be strict about what I'm going to watch is an abject failure so far.

Need to see more of because I can't make up my mind:

• Robotics;Notes: After two episodes, I would have to describe this as quiet. It isn't as flashy and splashy as the other series and it's not moving as fast; that makes it easy to overlook and to discount. It's well made but the characters are perhaps a little too stereotypical and predictable for their own good; still, they have a certain amount of depth and interest to them. At this point I don't doubt the quality of the execution in the show; I expect it to be solid throughout. I just don't know if it's going to wind up going anywhere interesting.

• Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: After the first two episodes, I was going to brush this show off as not sufficiently good to overcome its fundamentally generic premise. Then the third episode came along and at least temporarily upended all of that by not taking any of the easy, cliched approaches to its up-till-then stereotypical situations and in the process injecting a bunch of brutal honesty into the proceedings (and changing our view of at least one character). This burst of maturity and solidity may well fade into a predictable heart-warming resolution of the current plotline, but right now there's at least the chance that this show is going to do something genuinely unexpected and unusual. I'll watch the next episode and see how it goes, although I don't have really high hopes.

  (This did get adopted from a light novel, after all. The chances of a a successful light novel series doing something genuinely daring and unusual are low.)

On the edge:

• Ixion Saga DT: This is totally not taking itself seriously at all; it's full of slapstick and other deliberate comedy, all of which is well enough done to amuse me. But it hasn't had many jokes so far and if it runs out of decent ones, that's it. The third episode was kind of marginal, so I don't know how long I'll last with it.

  (Even if it doesn't fumble the jokes, if I was being sensible I should probably stop watching it as not quite sidesplittingly funny enough to justify the time. But it's so hard to stop watching things that are entertaining but not hugely so.)

  One fundamental difference between Ixion and K is that K is playing things in a straight-faced deadpan, while Ixion wants to make sure we know things are funny. This is one reason K is better.

• Psycho-Pass: This is a great example of copying the superficial form of good things without understanding what makes them good, since it's clearly trying to be Ghost in the Shell and various SF films. It aspires to be deep and serious and meaningful, but Shin Sekai Yori has at least twice its depth (with characters half the age). The second episode was mostly an extended and clumsy info-dump, and the characters are mostly a collection of predictable cliches (like the old man who's world-wise and cynical because hey, he's old, right).

  Oh, and apparently we're likely to have a patented Gen Urobuchi shock surprise turn at some point, where everything turns dark(er) and what ideals we've retained are betrayed and we see characters destroyed and so on. My anticipation for the brutality is palpable.

  (That was sarcasm. This is the Internet, so I want to make sure people understand that.)

  I don't know why I'm leaving this marked as on the edge instead of a miss. I guess I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream that this could be good.

Misses:

• CODE:BREAKER: I want to like the setting, the plot, and the idea of the characters because all of them sound promising. In practice I've ended up completely uninterested in the actual characters and what happens to them; they're boring (and sometimes stupid) and I just don't care about any of them.

Not for me:

• Chousoku Henkei Gyrozetter: I watched the first episode for some reason and while this is not bad as such it's also not appealing enough to get me to watch another episode given that I am very much not in the target demographic for this show. What I find most interesting about it is the ending animation, which is worth watching once to see the logical result of the availability of computer-driven CGI character dance animation (as seen in, eg, the IM@S games and the Pretty Cure ending animations) when combined with CGI models for other things. Like, oh, your show's giant robots.

  That's right, CGI giant robots doing an idol dance routine (complete with the hand gestures). You know you want to see it. Here, have a link for your convenience.

• Kami-sama Hajimemashita: This is perfectly good shoujo romantic comedy and seems decently well done in the two episodes I watched. But it's not striking enough to overcome the fact that shoujo romantic comedy is pretty much just not my thing.

  (Sometimes a romantic comedy show is striking enough, so I keep watching one every so often to see if this one clicks. Kami-sama seemed promising since it had the supernatural element, but that wasn't enough to overcome the relatively ordinary feeling situations.)

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: I'm just not in the mood for MANLY SHONEN ACTION this season; I couldn't even make it through the first episode of this when I tried (I gave up at the point where Dio leaps from the carriage). It doesn't help that Jojo's is painting with a brush so broad that it's more of a roller.

• Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!: This is probably the season's most praised and well-respected show that I have no interest in at all.

  The animation is spectacular though (from the Youtube clips I've seen). Someday someone will assemble a clip show of all of the striking fantasy bits.

Actively passed on (that I feel like mentioning explicitly):

• Busou Shinki: I might give this a try if it was about the shinki fighting, but apparently this is mostly a comedy anime about them doing housework and getting themselves into trouble. So, no. Pass.

  (One of the reasons that I'm passing is that I have a very bad reaction to the whole anime habit of taking warrior women and turning them into cute dojikko who can't do things and get themselves into trouble.)

  It's a real pity, though; some of the combat sequences look pretty spectacular. I reserve the right to change my mind about this later. Maybe I'll experiment with fast-forwarding through all of the boring and irritating bits and just watching the fights.

• BTOOOM!: Another entrant in the 'trapped protagonist forced to fight for his life' genre that I've decided I have no interest in.

• Little Busters!: I believe that I've liked exactly one Key-derived anime, and in that one I didn't like the half of it that everyone else apparently did.

  (I liked the modern-age parts of Air but not the flashback to medieval Japan; the former were interestingly different, the latter were all too ordinary fantasy Japan.)

Mentioned for completeness as still continuing: Sword Art Online. The execution continues to be decent enough (and entertaining enough) to overcome all of its flaws.

(I can't count Eureka Seven AO as 'continuing', since it doesn't have episodes currently airing; we're just on hold for the concluding two episodes in November.)

Bokeh in anime: selective focus, blur, and the anicamera

SeHNNG recently wrote about the anicamera, the imaginary camera that 'films' anime. As it happens I have an interest in this area, so today's topic is the interesting issue of out of focus blur in anime.

(Well, interesting to me, partly because I'm an amateur photographer.)

Most anime scenes have everything in focus (what photographers would call infinite depth of field). This is the natural look of painted and drawn art and what we think of as the conventional way things are, but it's not entirely realistic; real cameras and lenses can at best fake it, and film usually doesn't have everything in focus this way even if we don't consciously notice when we're watching. However, every so often anime likes using selective focus with areas deliberately out of focus, sometimes together with shifting the focus from one person in the scene to another to draw your attention along with it. In this as in much else anime is consciously emulating film cinematography, which uses selective focus and focus changes for very similar reasons.

Back in the days of physical cels, my understanding is that this selective focus was achieved when the cels were filmed. Instead of stacking all of the cel elements that made up a shot right on top of each other, you'd add some sort of spacers to separate some cels from the others and then focus the camera on the particular cel you wanted in focus; the cel to cel distance was enough to throw the others at least somewhat out of focus. In the new modern world of digital animation with no actual camera creating the final shot, selective focus is presumably created by selective deliberate blurring of appropriate digital layers in the image as it's composited together.

This is where we get to talk about photography (and cinematography) with physical lenses. One of the things that (some) photographers care about is bokeh, the characteristics of the out-of-focus blurred area of a picture. Different lenses can give you quite different bokeh; some are considered good and smooth, others bad and harsh. Back in the days of physical cels, the blur you got in a selective focus scene was determined by the lens used in your rostrum camera; you got whatever blur the lens gave you and that was that. But in the new world of digital animation, the blur you get is created by software. And software can do whatever you want.

Which brings us to the interesting bit. Now that the anicamera is fully virtual and all software, someone has to actively decide what the out-of-focus blur will look like. The bokeh of a selective focus anime scene is now entirely up to the people creating or using the software. So I wind up wondering things like whether some directors deliberately try to make the blur look natural (or to emulate a specific camera lens or look), if people painstakingly emulate the specific out of focus look of traditional cel animation rostrum cameras, or if the programmers just do a simple generic image blur and call it a day.

So far I don't think I've seen any anime that's deliberately done a high-bokeh scene, one where almost everything is thrown out of focus (the current common cliche for still portraits and certain sorts of lazy artsy photographs, and sometimes seen in films shot with DSLRs). It may come someday, though, especially if this look enjoys a burst of popularity in film cinematography.

(I suspect but don't know for sure that physical cels couldn't do this sort of drastic out-of-focus areas. Software almost certainly can if someone wants to create it, especially if the scene is being partly created in 3D and then flattened during compositing.)

My view of the chronological order of Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita episodes

(There are some semi-spoilers for Jinrui here, but this is deliberately mostly opaque if you haven't actually seen the show.)

I'll put my conclusion first and then write on about my justifications later. Based in large part on Vance's comment at A&V, my assumed chronological order of episodes is: the school portion of 11-12, 10, the epilogue of 12, 7-8, 5-6, 1-2, 9, and ending with 3-4.

There is a clear ordering of some episodes: the school portion of 11-12, 10, 7-8, and then all episodes with the Assistant (1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 9) in some order. It's strongly implied that 1-2 follows shortly after 5-6, since Watashi's hair is cut at the end of 6 and episode 1 is the only other episode where she has short hair (and she returns to long hair before the end of the episode).

(Although I think the ordering is sensible, I don't think the show supports Vance's logic about the relative positions of 9 and 5-6. In 6, Watashi is rationally afraid because she's around a bunch of angry people who are upset over what she's deliberately done; in 9, her screwup is mostly accidental and pretty much private.)

The position of the non-flashback epilogue of 12 is not clear to me. It has to go after 10 (since Watashi has fairies) and before 3 (since the epilogue is the first time since school that Y and Watashi have seen each other). I think it can't happen shortly before 3 since the dialog between Y and Watashi in 3 implies that it's been a while since they saw each other. Based mostly on Watashi's relative equanimity in 7-8 onwards, I prefer to put it between 10 and 7-8.

It makes both internal and thematic sense for 3-4 to be the chronologically last episodes. In internal logic, 3-4 is where Watashi is the most hands-off and concerned about the fairies and their enthusiasms (an attitude that makes sense for her to have after 9). It's also where the faeries are the most overtly weird and ostentatiously magical in what they do. And, as Vance mentions, it's set in winter or very early spring, unlike all of the other episodes. Thematically, 3-4 can be read as a meta-commentary on the show itself and episode 4 climaxes with the characters' (manga) series being canceled, the characters waking from a dream, and so on. Applications to the end of the anime series itself are obvious.

(Read this way, many of the lines at the tail end of 4 can be given double meanings. Consider Watashi's line that the fairies' mangas are too hard, for example, given that Jinrui itself requires work to understand at more than a superficial level.)

I have no idea what chronological order the original light novels are in and I'm not sure it matters. I'm inclined to consider the anime a separate creation from the LNs instead of an attempt to adopt them literally. (The things I see in the anime may be there in the LNs too, but I'm not assuming that. Jinrui feels like something where the anime may have gone in its own direction.)

A theory of decline

One of the periodically recurring tropes in anime is humanity being in decline; not through a loud apocalypse or for any visible reason, but people are just quietly diminishing. This season's Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita puts this in the series premise (the title of the show means 'Humanity Has Declined') but there are plenty of others, such as Sora no Woto and the classic Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. In the version of the trope that I'm thinking of, the cause of the decline is never stated (and the decline itself is often just a background detail, not the main focus of the show). One of the things that this generates is a lot of speculation about why humanity is in decline in any particular show. What catastrophe do the creators imagine having hit us?

As it happens, I have a theory on this. Japanese creators are almost uniquely placed to vividly feel one particular quiet catastrophe in real life: a low birth rate. The Japanese total fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, well under the replacement rate necessary to just hold the population level constant (see eg Wikipedia). The effects of this decline are apparently visible all over Japan, especially in less attractive areas with lower populations. The whole issue is considered a serious problem (especially when combined with an aging population), with various government attempts to encourage children, discussion in the press, and so on. Extrapolating Japan's very real issue with a low birth rate into a future setting is a natural thing to do.

(As you'd expect, I believe that one of the most visible signs is fewer and fewer schools with fewer and fewer pupils. This has cropped up as a plot point in contemporary shows; for example, I remember the climax of the GTO live action series taking place at a now-shut-down rural school that one of the characters had attended.)

A really low birth rate is a great fit for the typical anime decline of humanity. It's slow but devastating, it's quiet, and there's nothing really to fight or to make a fuss about. There's no singular event that's causing the problem, just a whole collection of small individual decisions. Life goes on, the world shrinks (because there are fewer and fewer people in it), and so on.

(And with fewer people in the world you start to progressively lose technology that you no longer have the manpower to run the infrastructure for. It takes a lot of people all through a supply chain to run a modern chip fab, for example, especially once you include things like the transportation infrastructure, the water supply, and so on.)

Reassessing the Summer 2012 season midway through

I feel like writing something here and while I have any number of entry ideas circling through my head I can't manage to get enough spare time, energy, and enthusiasm to write them. A midseason review of Summer 2012, however, I can bang together pretty easily so you get it.

(The short summary is that I have added two new shows, Joshiraku and Nobuna, and effectively dropped two of my initial ones, one because it's bad and one because it's not good enough.)

Hits:

• Moyashimon Returns: I would like more microbes and fermentation than it is currently providing, but this is doing a reasonable job of delivering the fun of the first season.

• Dog Days': This continues not going anywhere. I'm a bit sad but I'm still watching it for the same reason Author is; it's something I can watch without having to invest too much in it. I can just sit back and quietly enjoy it.

  (Dog Days' is ideal for this because I know there it's extremely unlikely for there to be any significant sudden angst, dark drama, or whatever. It'll probably keep on being cheerful light action all the way through, maybe with a little tinge of more serious stuff towards the end.)

• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita: I sometimes feel like Jinrui is beating me over the head, but when it's on it's often really on and it's on fairly often. I continue to really like how the show is willing to be quiet when it's clever (instead of the all too common habit of making something obvious just to make sure that you get it).

  Jinrui has had all of the best awesome moments of any show this season so far.

  It's quite possible (and even likely) that Jinrui is my kind of show but not yours, much like UN-GO.

• Sword Art Online: This was always nice looking but has now shaped up to be a competently executed and reasonably engaging show. It's not really going anywhere right now but I'm willing to give it a pass while it explores the scenery.

  (I believe SAO is currently adopting side stories from the light novels; if so, it shows.)

  SAO has so far avoided beating us over the head with character death and the whole 'stuck in a game' situation while also not ignoring the issue, which is more than I expected. The various character reactions to the situation seem reasonably realistic.

• Oda Nobuna no Yabou: This was a late fill-in, but so far it's been pretty entertaining in a straightforward way and the protagonist amuses me. It's good that the show isn't really taking itself too seriously. It's not flawless; in particular it's doing the common anime thing of not letting the nominally competent and dangerous female character actually do much more than acting semi-tsundere while the male protagonist gets to magically solve all (or at least most) of the problems.

  (I was persuaded to give Nobuna a try due to various chatter in my section of the Twitter-sphere, possibly especially including Jinx's work.)

• Joshiraku: This is entertaining and amusing. I wish I found it more consistently funny, because then it would be a must-watch instead of something that I'm working through slowly.

  (I know I'm not getting all of the jokes here, even with explanations from the translators, but I find even the jokes that I don't get to be interesting for reasons that don't fit in this margin.)

Entertaining but still hovering on the edge:

• Campione: Some bits of this are tiresomely ordinary but it continues to be decently executed and thus decently watchable. I'm enjoying it partly for Erica Blandelli, who is a character type that we don't get to see very often.

• Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon II: This continues to deliver a good amount of crazy wackiness and decent action, which is what keeps it watchable for me. The ninja is my current favorite character.

  (As far as I'm concerned, the less Toori and Horizon talk the better.)

• Hagure Yuusha no Estetica: The more I actually think about this show the more I feel conflicted and a bit disturbed. On the one hand the action and plot are decent. On the other hand it spends a lot of its time on serious (and sometimes extreme) fanservice and the male protagonist's behavior is objectively decidedly skeevy. If I tune out the fanservice (which is my usual reflex) and don't think too much about the protagonist's behavior it's an enjoyable show, but I'm not sure I should be doing that.

  (Writing this entry may have persuaded me to more or less put it on suspension. I'll see. Certainly I have enough to watch this season without watching any more of it, and it's not so interesting that I'll miss it if I don't watch any more.)

Now declared as misses:

• Muv-Luv Alternative - Total Eclipse (#4): I watched about three episodes too many of this; in the future I hope that I'm smart enough to drop shows that waste my time for the first two episodes. There's just nothing interesting in this show for me and plenty that's boring, irritating, or cliched (or all of the above).

  (Everything I've read about subsequent episodes has confirmed my decision to drop it.)

• Rinne no Lagrange season 2 (#2): There's nothing wrong with it but it's apparently not interesting enough to make me sufficiently enthused to watch more.

In ongoing shows, Eureka Seven AO continues to rock while honesty compels me to admit that I haven't watched Accel World for several weeks; it's possible that the charm has worn off and I've gotten bored without realizing it.

(On the other hand, writing this may cause me to start with AW again.)

The problem with Dog Days' second season

I tweeted:

The problem with this season of Dog Days is that we're just hanging around; unlike the first season, we're not going anywhere.

I feel like expanding on this a bit more than fits in 140 characters.

Right from the start of the first season there were things actively happening and the characters had a problem to deal with. The major reason (or at least excuse) that Princess Millefiori had for summoning Cinque at the start of the show was that Biscotti was in a big pinch, with Galette and Leonmichelle relentlessly attacking, winning, and taking more and more territory. By the time this was fully dealt with, the problem shifted to returning Cinque back home. Certainly things were light-hearted, but the characters were always working on and towards something; I always had the sense that things were going somewhere.

There is nothing like this in Dog Days' so far. This season we've been doing nothing more than hanging around with the characters and taking in the spectacle; what was in service to something in the first season is simply empty this time around. This is enjoyable and amusing (Dog Days' is competent and even well done) but it doesn't really feel like the show is necessary.

(You can argue that the show needs quiet in order to set up the characters and get us immersed in them. My reply is that the first season managed to do this just fine without having to stop and wander off sideways.)

Even if the second season starts going somewhere soon, it will have wasted at least a quarter of its run on fluff (I'm being charitable and spotting it a couple of establishing episodes). If the second season doesn't go anywhere, well, I'm going to wind up kind of wishing that they hadn't bothered to make it.

(But I'm sure the Blu-rays and DVDs will sell well to the fans who wanted to see more of their favorite characters.)

Looking back at the Spring 2012 anime season

As before, now that the Spring 2012 season is over it's once again time for me to take honest look back to go with my early impressions. This is an especially relevant exercise to me this time around due to the strength of the spring season.

Shows that I actively watched (and finished where applicable):

• Eureka Seven AO: This is the real surprise of the season for me. The show's excellent execution has compulsively pulled me along and turned it into my highest priority show to watch.

  (With recent plot developments I find myself really regretting that I never got around to watching the original Eureka Seven; I suspect that I'm about to absorb a certain amount of spoilers for it and miss a certain amount of stuff.)

• Lupin III - The Woman Called Mine Fujiko: I predict that this show is going to be polarizing people for years. It had highs and lows and I'll agree that it didn't succeed with everything it tried, but it's still stunning and powerful; its high points were excellent and it hit them quite frequently. Even most of its low points were still quite enjoyable for me. I had no problem with the ending and actually quite liked it; in many ways it's the only answer the show could possibly have given to the question of 'who is Mine Fujiko?'.

  To be clear, I consider this show a significant success overall. Although it was sometimes not as easily entertaining than other shows and it has rough spots, I currently consider it the best show I watched this season.

  (I'm being cautious here because this is the sort of show where my initial feelings sometimes change later, once I have some distance from it. If I don't wind up reconsidering things with more time it'll easily be one of my best N shows of 2012.)

• Moretsu Pirates: I basically wrote my summary of this for my Winter 2012 retrospective. I will echo a whole lot of other people and say that this is a lightweight SF adventure story. In the end I think it's overly lightweight and thus flawed.

  (I don't think that things need to be grimdark, but ultimately the show never convinced me that Marika was really working for her victories. In the larger picture everything fell into place too easily, although the show managed to make the individual moments dramatic. This really undercut the seriousness of nominally serious situations.)

• Accel World: I'm continuing to enjoy this as what it is, which is a well executed shonen fighting show. I don't think it's a great show (and it's clearly not to everyone's taste) but I'm consistently liking it.

  (I'll admit that I periodically don't watch it for a couple of weeks and then watch several episodes in a burst.)

• Fate/Zero: This is technically well executed and fills in the background for Fate/Stay Night but in the end it mostly left me cold. A large part of it is that I wasn't interested in the characters. Another part is the erratic pacing, which didn't improve from the problems of the first season.

  But when Fate/Zero was pretty it was very pretty. Some of the fights were spectacular.

  (The best bits of Fate/Zero were Waver's bits. If FZ had been from Waver's perspective and been focused on his maturation, it would be a much more interesting show. Of course then a lot of Fate fans would have hated it.)

• Haiyore! Nyaruko-san: As I should have expected, this turned into a reasonably funny but ultimately ordinary magical girlfriend comedy; the periodic horrifying bits of the first episode that gave it a sharp edge disappeared almost immediately. Inertia caused me to watch it all the way through.

Shows I still intend to watch more of:

• Hyouka (#6): It's beautiful and well done but somehow I haven't had the energy to actually watch it except very occasionally. I really do like it when I do watch it, though.

  (The nasty thing to say about the show is that it's a beautiful shell wrapped around an empty void. I'm not convinced that this view is wrong.)

• Aquarion EVOL (#17): as I mentioned in my Winter 2012 retrospective, no sooner had I written about why I was still watching it than I stalled out for vague reasons, partly because it was getting plot in the good craziness.

• Tsuritama (#2): I don't have any reason for having stalled on this; I just did. I want to watch the next episode, just not enough to actually get around to it. It's been praised enough that I do want to continue with it, which may be foolish.

  (I might be better off being honest with myself when I don't find a much-praised show that I was initially very enthused about compelling enough to actually watch more of.)

• Sankarea (#4): The show is pretty and decent and does interesting things and all of that good stuff, but somehow I don't find it compelling. Maybe this means I should formally abandon it, but the commentary about it I've seen in the ani-sphere keeps making it seem attractive.

  (I stalled out after episode #4 in large part because the ending of the episode left me expecting that the next episode would take a particular boring plot turn, one that I wasn't looking forward to sitting through. It turns out that this is not the case.)

With a relatively busy summer season starting up, watching more of these shows may turn out to be more of an aspiration than an actual plan. Especially since two of these shows that I'm actively watching are continuing in the summer season.

In theory, may watch more of someday:

• Tasogare Otome x Amnesia (#3): There's nothing wrong with this and a decent amount that's nice, but there wasn't enough in the first three episodes to really hook me. I've already seen plenty of magical girlfriend shows.

Abandoned or dropped:

• Sakamichi no Apollon (#2): I could flail around and blather about this, but the truth is that it failed to hold my interest enough to get me to watch the third episode. Based on my exposure to bits of commentary about the path the show took, I tacitly decided to abandon it; I'm just not that attracted to an adolescent drama, even one with jazz and good directing.

  I sometimes find myself regretting this. I know it has great moments that I'd enjoy (I've actually recently seen some in Youtube clips that people have shared); the problem is getting to them.

• Jormungand (#3): The show committed the cardinal sin of spending a large amount of episode 3 on a boring, stupid action sequence involving some new characters mostly made from cardboard. The combination is deadly, especially when the preview for episode four promised more of the same.

  (I was quite disappointed by this development.)

• Kore wa Zombie Desu? of the Dead (#2): In the end I thought that this continuation was okay and decently entertaining but not necessary. The first season said enough and I had other things to watch and do this time around.

• Zetman (#2): Bleah. After two episodes, something about this had thoroughly rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't just find it boringly generic, I actively disliked it and didn't want to watch more.

I'm certain that someone, somewhere, has put forward the aphorism that in practice your priorities are shown not by what you say they are but what you actually do. This season made a nice illustration of that, as what shows (and how many of them) I wound up watching were (shall we say) somewhat different than what I put forward in my initial brief views. Particularly striking is that basically all of the 'artistic' shows I thought I was going to follow got stalled or dropped; what I actually watched was almost all action shows. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'd certainly like to think that I'm the kind of anime watcher who enjoys things other than (often brainless) action shows, but the evidence on that is a bit scanty right now.

(The counter argument is that it's not as if I didn't try out other shows at all. Forcing myself to watch shows that I don't genuinely like and feel enthused about is just stupid, even if they're objectively good or theoretically broadening my horizons. Still, people like Author keep making things like AKB0048 and Tari Tari sound attractive.)

I'm not sure how to score this past season with my standard metric, partly because I avoided trying to figure out what shows I was likely to actively follow in my early impressions (if I had any private ideas about that at the time, I've since forgotten them since I didn't write them down). I kind of consider several abandoned or stalled shows to be failures but that's partly because they're shows that everyone says are pretty good.