Roving Thoughts archives

Kemono Friends and the magic of anime

Sometimes, anime is magic. There are many forms of this magic, and we saw a number of them this year, as we usually do; there were touching stories, dramatic spectacles, quietly true to life works filled with little details, emotionally wrenching scenes, shows that are over the top in the best way, and quiet meditations on life delivered by blobby characters in deliberately scratchy backgrounds. But one of the ways that anime is periodically magic is that it can completely surprise us, with a show coming from left field to be excellent.

(Aroduc used to mention one example in his season previews as a cautionary note to not base too much on preview impressions.)

These surprises are one of the reasons that I keep watching anime. When they happen, they're magical; what once looked like dross is transmuted into unexpected gold. It's an unlooked for present that usually leaves me stunned and awed and glad that I was there to see it. And there's a joy in it beyond myself, because it means that the people who made the show have achieved something beautiful in their work and I have to imagine that that's a great feeling for them.

Kemono Friends did not exactly start out promising, seeing as it was a CG anime made on a shoestring, by a tiny team who'd done almost nothing, with the premise of a basic kid's show, based on a mobile game about animal girls that had failed before the show started. Early views were strikingly down, for example Bobduh's capsule summary of the first episode:

Kemono Friends is a simplistic show for very young children starring grotesque CG. We are still multiple categories from the bottom of this list.

(Like many other people, Bobduh would wind up changing his mind on the show.)

Then the show's astounding qualities began to show through, probably first in Japan and then later in the west as news and buzz spread. Despite everything we did think initially (and for good reason), improbably and absurdly Kemono Friends was really good. More than good, it was excellent. The janky CG ultimately didn't matter when set against its honest sincerity and heart and the skill of its creators that let it pull off story beats that few shows can manage and deliver thrilling drama. Yes, it was a kid's story, but it was the best sort of kid's story, one of the ones that have significant depths and moments of great emotional impact for everyone. One of the kid's stories that are magical.

(The best kid's stories understand that you cannot talk down to kids; kids are just as sophisticated consumers of stories as adults are, they just have different tastes. Good kid's stories are made with just as much care and good writing as good adult stories.)

This year, Kemono Friends embodied the magic of anime, the magic of delivering a complete, unasked-for, unpredictable surprise of a beautiful, thought provoking show that I'm glad that I was there to see and that has left an enduring impression on me. To quote Bobduh again:

I don’t know how Kemono Friends exists, but it feels to me like a perfect example of why we watch anime at all. Sometimes the best stories come in the most unlikely packages. Well done, Kemono Friends.

So here's to you, Kemono Friends, and everything and every moment you earned with your heart and hard work.

Merry Christmas everyone, and welcome to Japari Park.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

The importance of Kanna in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid

(There are spoilers here, if you care.)

I'm not generally one for child characters. It's all too easy for a show to make them either grating or too sugar-sweet (and sometimes both at once), and if we're being honest most children are not infrequently brats. So when MaiDragon (to use its common abbreviation) introduced Kanna, I didn't initially think very much of her, especially since she was presented as sort of a joke. By the end of the show, my view had shifted and I now think that in many ways Kanna is the emotional lynchpin of the show, the point and character around which the central issues of the show revolve.

Kanna did not make Kobayashi and Tohru a couple, or even perhaps a family; they would have gotten there in the end even without her presence. But Kanna was the catalyst that crystallized the family into existence earlier than it might otherwise have formed and then made it obvious to us. Kanna was the force that pushed Kobayashi to make significant moves to recognize that family; the move to a larger apartment, the move to leave work earlier and to make time in her life for Tohru and Kanna (as exemplified especially in episode 9, the school sports festival episode). And in the final (TV) episode, it's my view that Kanna is a major force that pushes Kobayashi to recognize how much she misses Tohru. Without Kanna there to put burdens on Kobayashi that constantly remind her of Tohru's absence, I think Kobayashi might have quietly slid back into her pre-Tohru life; not because she really liked it, but just because it was the path of least resistance.

All of this leads to the emotional resolution of the series, where Kobayashi takes Kanna and Tohru to meet her parents. This is the point where Kobayashi implicitly takes into her heart that she's part of a family, even if it's an unusual one. The family may have formed quietly, but this is where it's officially acknowledged, even if no one says it out loud, and Kanna is at the heart of it.

Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is one of two shows I watched this year that are clearly in large part about family (Alice & Zoroku is the other). It's about the accommodations you make to be in a family, and the changes that happen to you and others. More than its comedy, more than its amusing characters, more than its fun animation, this is why it's very likely to stick in my mind, and Kanna with it.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Old anime looks different, but sadly I can't tell you exactly why

One of the things I did this year was watch some older anime; the Crusher Joe movie (and one OVA) from 1983, and Iria: Zeiram the Animation from 1994. One of the things that struck me about both of these, especially Iria, is how they looked and felt clearly different from modern anime. This is more than a difference in the look of the art, the style of people's outfits and hair, and the kind of settings; it was also something distinctly different in how each work looked in a broader sense.

(Crusher Joe is very distinctly an 80s work; consider this scene, for example.)

Some of this is in the use of 'light gleam' effects that aren't used as much (or in the same way) any more, such as the bright beam blasts near the start of this Crusher Joe scene. My understanding is that this classical effect in cell-based animation is done by leaving sections of the cell either completely transparent or translucent (with coloured film behind them) and then letting the backlight from the rostrum camera show through the cells. This gives a vivid glow in a relatively simple to animate way (and it's a glow that can spread outside the lit up area).

Crusher Joe is a film and was clearly well-produced even at the time. Perhaps as a result, its 'old anime' feel is mostly confined to how things are drawn; there's an old fashioned feel to both the foreground and the background rocks along the roadway in this segment or the hand-drawn digital display in this scene at about four seconds in. But even then there's something that feels distinctly old about how the movie simply rotates the cell of Alfin in her cockpit starting at four seconds in this scene. I can see how this would be an easy effect to do in a cell-based world; you draw the cell a bit larger and then just rotate the rostrum camera when you film the frames.

A case with a deeper feel of difference is the opening for Dirty Pair: Project Eden here (or on YouTube with sound). This is from 1986 and undeniably beautiful, but at the same time it strikes me as something that you wouldn't see today and that looks definitely old fashioned (it too has a bunch of 'light gleam' effects). I suspect that a lot of the unusual feel is the use of silhouettes and of echoed movement (for example at 51 seconds). But I don't know if this was easier or harder in days of drawn and filmed cell animation.

Iria: Zeiram the Animation is an OVA and thus probably had less production resources that the Crusher Joe movie, which I suspect makes it lean more heavily on things that were easy to do in the cell animation days. Looking at its opening, I see things that stand out to me at various points; there are repeated inset frames of animation (at 25 seconds), 'light gleam' streaks (at 29 seconds), rotating cells (33 seconds), distinctly overlaid foreground snow (at 1 minute), echoed frames of animation (at 1:26), and then it just runs some earlier animation backward starting at 1:29 or so. Beyond that, there's a lot of scenes in the actual show that feel to me like they wouldn't be done today.

(For example, it feels like Iria uses a lot more held frames and panned frames than is normal today.)

However, this is where I run into the limits of my ability to analyze and explain animation this way. All of what I've talked about so far is basically hand waving and theorizing. I know both Crusher Joe and especially Iria feel distinctly different but I can't really tell you why, with chapter and verse and technical details. All I can do is look for some obvious things that feel unusual, when really it was a much more pervasive thing that ran all through my watching of both works and it didn't feel directly related to the different look of hand painted cell animation. I'm pretty sure that many shots were composed and designed differently than they would be today, but I can't tell you how (or why); at best I can theorize about obvious things, like rotating cells or those 'light gleam' effects and how they give the frames an overall glow.

This frustrates me a bit. I'd like to be able to understand this myself and be able to explain it, instead of waving my hands and doing what feels like nit-picking. Instead, it's another limitation I've discovered on my ability to analyze things.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: The other way Iria looks different

As an SF show, Iria takes place in a different world (a couple of them, actually). It's clear that the show has worked hard to create a coherent yet decidedly different cultural feel for its setting, where the clothes, the buildings, the vehicles, and so on are all pretty different from what we'd usually see yet also clearly go together. This is a degree of work and imagination that doesn't seem to come up very often in modern SF shows, which generally look far more normal and conventional.

Some words on Mimi in the last episode of Flip Flappers

(There are spoilers here.)

I have tangled feelings about both Flip Flappers as a whole and its ending, feelings that I'm still sorting out. However, there are some aspects of the ending that I'm completely behind, and one of them is the show's perhaps odd decision to spend most of the first half of the last episode on a knock down, drag out fight with Mimi when Cocona and Papika had already neatly punched her monster out at the end of the previous episode. As spectacular as all of the fighting might have been, was it really important or necessary?

My answer is that yes, it was, or at least it felt that it belonged to me. To put it one way, it would be nice if you could get your over-protective mom to go away just by you and your girlfriend telling her to buzz off, but life is not that nice. Getting your overbearing mom to ease off generally requires a big screaming argument, although this is usually delivered by words, not you and your girlfriend beating down dark mom's monsters and eventually her more or less directly. But this is Flip Flappers, so this particular psychological point was delivered through some spectacular fireworks.

(In the end it wasn't just this fight, of course, and it never is. Dark mom Mimi had to come around, not merely be beaten down. Beating people up doesn't generally change their mind, and Mimi had to have her mind changed in order to really resolve the situation. Multiple things ultimately contributed to this change of heart, not just Cocona and Papika, and I feel that even Dr Salt wasn't quite as completely decorative as he looked. His presence mattered, even if he didn't actually do anything except stand around.)

Mimi's possessive over-protection of Cocona was a pivotal development (as was Cocona's willingness to accept it), and disposing of it casually and briefly simply wouldn't have felt right. It and other unresolved issues around Mimi needed to be resolved with enough effort to make the result feel earned.

PS: One of the things Flip Flappers is about is external representations of internal psychological struggles and issues. See, for example, this discussion of the pivotal episode 7.

PPS: Yes, they're girlfriends. How much more on point does transforming under their own power into a matched set of armored wedding dresses have to be? Flip Flappers may not always come out to say things out loud, but it's not beyond hitting us over the head with them.

Made in Abyss passes the threshold and enters the unknown

(There are some spoilers here.)

"The Great Fault", Made in Abyss's ninth episode, is well known as anime-original content. Despite the stereotype that usually comes along with that, the episode is widely regarded as solid work that does important things with Riko's character and is simply enjoyable. You could quibble about the ending, where Reg is the one to make the climactic finish instead of Riko, but perhaps this was intended to be part of the point of the episode, to show that Riko could hand a fight to Reg when necessary and wouldn't insist on doing it all herself.

(I'm making an excuse for the show here. It's not flawless.)

It is my opinion that episode 9 is much more than this and that it shows that the show's creative staff fully understood what they were doing. Episode 9 does one very important but inobvious practical thing, which I'm putting in a sidebar at the end, but beyond that it carries a huge metaphorical and mythological charge that is the silent marker and foreshadowing of a phase change in Made in Abyss. This is because of just what Riko and Reg face and defeat at the end of the episode. What they face down and see off is not just any monster of the Abyss; it is the initial monster that Riko and Reg faced, the crimson splitjaw from the very start of their adventure together.

This crimson splitjaw is the gauntlet that has haunted and dogged Riko and Reg from the first episode onward; it was unfinished business from the past. In defeating it, they pass beyond the threshold of the past and enter the unknown, moving on into a new world. The crimson splitjaw was a lingering remnant of their old life that started in Orth, and now they're beyond it.

(Yes, this is a very Campbellian view of things.)

As people who have watched Made in Abyss know, episode 10 will go on to make this change very concrete.

In short, episode 9 primes us for episode 10, not in an obvious way but in a subtle, indirect one. I think it's deliberately designed to do so, since the staff of the anime adoption specifically brought back that crimson splitjaw, not just any monster and not even a generic crimson splitjaw (if they didn't want to design another type of monster). As a result, I like this episode quite a lot.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: The important practical thing episode 9 covers

Episode 9 contains Riko's first serious encounter with the Curse of ascending in the deeps of the Abyss, and illustrates how hard and wrenching it is even in the third layer. This serves as an important lead in to the ascent she goes through in the fourth layer during episode 10, and means that the major impact of the Curse there doesn't come out of more or less nowhere.

(Being told about the Curse in exposition with semi-cute pictures isn't the same thing as having seen it in action the previous episode. The latter primes us much more; it's more visceral and real, especially with how Riko's hallucinations went.)

Rearrangements from manga to anime and how they alter the feel of the show

This year I watched a number of shows where I've also read the manga version (either before or after the show aired). One of the interesting things I noticed about the anime versions is how they rearranged and adjusted early elements of the manga, and how this changed the feel of the story being told from one media to the other. To make this concrete, I'm going to talk about three shows (and there will be some spoilers).

The most straightforward to talk about is Land of the Lustrous. As part of an interview available on Sakugablog, director Takahiko Kyougoku explicitly discussed how some manga elements were restructured to give us more focus on the main character so we'd know who it was:

To go into more detail, we took steps like giving the main character more close-up shots, or having them intentionally repeat important lines. It may not seem like much, but when you watch it, you can tell which character had the most presence and what their goals are. [...]

What doesn't get mentioned in this interview is that the anime also completely omits a big infodump that happens within the first few pages of the manga, when Kongo tells Phos to recite the history of the setting as the gems have been taught it; this exposition includes both information we only heard later in the show and some that we still haven't. This leads to a restructuring of the conversation between Kongo and Phos where Kongo gives Phos their job.

Next is Made in Abyss. As mentioned in this interview with the mangaka and the director, the early portions of the show are revised from the manga for various reasons (including that the mangaka explicitly asked for the first part of the story to be 'brushed up'). As in Land of the Lustrous, the MiA manga starts with an infodump about the nature of the Abyss. It then goes in to a relatively long lead-in sequence before Riko and her classmates head into the shallow end of the first layer of the Abyss as part of their training, which is where the first episode of the anime starts.

In Made in Abyss, the change from the manga to the anime does more than cut out some material and tighten the story up; to a certain extent it changes our view of Riko's character. The manga opens with Riko boasting and making wild theories up, then her classmates cutting her down to size and being dismissive, and it goes on somewhat in this line. In the anime, we pretty much start with the heroic and active Riko who throws herself into the line of danger in order to save a classmate from an unexpected menace. Manga Riko comes across as someone with rather more significant feet of clay than the anime version, someone who somewhat stumbles into things rather than throws herself bravely in.

(As a result of this shift from the manga to the anime, I'm glad I saw the anime first before I peeked at the manga. Manga Riko is a somewhat less attractive character than anime Riko, since some of her flaws are more front and center and more emphasized.)

The rearrangements in both of these shows have been made primarily for structural reasons; they've been done to show us who to focus on and tighten up the story, partly because what works and is seen as necessary in manga doesn't necessarily work in anime. Their effects on the story itself are secondary or incidental, although I suspect that at least Made in Abyss is conscious of them. This brings me to my final example, The Ancient Magus' Bride.

In The Ancient Magus' Bride, unlike the first two works, the rearrangement isn't in the form of chopping out early manga material; instead it's the other way around. The manga version of AMB starts with a very cold open, where the first panel is Chise on stage in chains, being auctioned off as an implied slave. Only somewhat later do we find out that Chise had more or less voluntarily put herself in this situation instead of committing suicide. In the anime, the show opens with Chise explicitly agreeing to all of this; it is immediately front and center both that Chise is in an extremely nihilistic and bad mental space and that this is voluntary on her part. The story effect is to remove a certain amount of the initial shock from the manga and tone things down and make them nicer in general. More is explicit and explained, and as a result the whole affair comes across as more sad and less shocking and horrifying, at least to me.

With that said, I suspect that part of the rearrangement was driven by the structural mechanics of storytelling in manga versus anime. The manga version of Ancient Magus' Bride gives us the background of Chise's situation in a series of flashback panels that are intercut when present-day dialog and events trigger Chise's traumatic memories. This fluid intercutting between past and present is harder and less natural to do in an anime, and also not as clear. With manga's variable-speed pacing, readers can slow down to take in the flashback panels; what's going on is clear to us even though the panels themselves don't take up much room in the manga's first chapter (probably about a page and a half in total, spread across several separate flashbacks and specific incidents in Chise's past). I'm pretty confident that a good direct translation into animated form would take a lot more time, and so doing the whole background as a more or less linear sequence at the start of the first episode takes up less time and may well be clearer.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

An appreciation for My Hero Academia's Bakugo (especially in S2)

Let's start with the tweets:

@MinovskyArticle: Bakugo is extremely divisive on Twitter for a character who wins every MHA popularity poll by a landslide.

@pontifus: I think he's a good character and i also live for him getting dunked on

@cks_anime: I hate to say it, but he's more interesting than Midoriya (although I wouldn't want Bakugo as the lead/hero character).

Let's talk about Midoriya for a moment. Midoriya is a classical Shonen Jump hero protagonist; he's earnest and good and quietly heroic, a standard underdog with a heart. He has some internal qualms and concerns, but he's not riven by any particular conflicts or angst the way many other characters are. He's sort of an everyman. As a result, he's not so much bland as straightforward. He makes a good lead character, but he's not particularly fascinating by himself.

Bakugo is nothing like this, and he's such a contrast from what you'd expect in a Shonen Jump character.

To start with, he's an unapologetic asshole, and MHA doesn't give his character any cover for it; he has no tragic backstory, no inner angst. He's just an asshole, which is a refreshing change from the usual approach of attempting to 'humanize' such characters. And Bakugo's not just any asshole; he's all surly teenage anger and prickly obnoxiousness.

(By contrast, Mineta is a noxious asshole and the worst character in MHA. Were he to disappear from the story, it would only improve.)

Part of why Bakugo works as an asshole is that he's also ridiculous at the same time, and the show knows this and periodically dunks on him. His 'grenades included' hero costume is one example, as is the whole exercise of coming up with his hero name. Bakugo is an angry teenager writ large and My Hero Academia understands that angry teenagers can also be fundamentally silly. Since this is a superhero show (and a Shonen Jump story), Bakugo gets dialed up to 11 here, hyper-exaggerated surly faces and all.

Some characters are empty assholes; they're obnoxious, but either there's nothing behind it or all they have is power and they think that power alone entitles them to what they want. Bakugo is not empty in this way. Sure, he has great power and he feels that this matters, but he doesn't coast on his power alone; he has smarts and skill and tactical awareness to back it up, and beyond that Bakugo is willing to put himself through pain when necessary. To put it one way, Bakugo doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk as well, even when it hurts.

(This is part of why I don't think Bakugo is much of a bully, although he has aspects of one, especially in the first season. I think of bullies as fundamentally cowards; they dish it out but can't take it back. Bakugo can take it back, it just pisses him off (more). Another part of this is that in the second season Bakugo is willing to ignore people trash-talking him.)

One aspect of that 'even when it hurts' is that Bakugo has integrity; he wants to win honestly, to genuinely be on top. What he cares about is being the best, not having an award; being awarded a first place finish is meaningless unless it's a true, genuine achievement where he really is the most powerful, the best fighter, or whatever. Winning by default, winning because someone else lets you, all of that is empty, and Bakugo makes it completely clear that he doesn't want an empty prize.

(I think that Bakugo hates not being the most powerful, but he doesn't want to change that by making other people less powerful; if he's not the most powerful, he wants to get more powerful. This is a very Shonen Jump protagonist motivation, refracted through a prism of perpetually angry asshole.)

Then, of course, there is the fact that Bakugo gets to do genuinely cool things. Some MHA characters are ridiculous or have ridiculous powers, and some of them have modest powers or only get to use them in modest ways, but Bakugo has a big power and the show lets him use it to do cool and clever things. The explosions help.

At the same time, the world doesn't go Bakugo's way; he only rarely gets what he wants, and watching Bakugo get frustrated by this is part of the fun. For all of his power, Bakugo is more of an underdog than Midoriya is; as the protagonist, Midoriya gets genuine victories. The best Bakugo can manage is to dunk on villains sometimes. And while Bakugo gets to do cool stuff, the show does not generally present him as genuinely cool the way it does with, say, Todoroki.

The final way that Bakugo is interesting is that he is Midoriya's thematic mirror image and contrast. As I put it once, Midoriya is all morality and no power; Bakugo is all power and no morality. Together they create a clear contrast around the central question of what a hero is. Is it someone with power, or someone with morality? I'm pretty certain that Bakugo's answer is that heroes are people with power and if you don't have power you can't be a hero. My Hero Academia would be a less interesting story without this contrast and challenge that Bakugo implicitly provides.

That Bakugo is an interesting character doesn't make him an appealing one, because he still is an unrelenting asshole that respects very little (and certainly not you or me). That's part of why he would make a terrible lead character. Assholes are tolerable only in relatively small doses.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: First season Bakugo versus second season Bakugo

I'll be honest: early in My Hero Academia, Bakugo is a lot more obnoxious and a lot less interesting than he is later on. It's not quite as simple as the first season versus the second season, because Bakugo starts to show his coolness in the big hero versus villain fight at the end of the first season (cf), but Bakugo mostly becomes interesting over the second series.

The early Bakugo is not an attractive character or person. Given how he treated Midoriya, he was a knife edge away from being an unrecognized villain, enough that you might reasonably wonder why he was admitted to UA High School (or at least why the school doesn't have a way to exclude people even if they score high on the admissions test).

One pivotal moment where Kemono Friends shows its quiet excellence

Today I want to talk about the spear-point moment in Kemono Friends. There will necessarily be spoilers and what I write may not convince you, because by nature spear-points rely on the weight of story that's come before them for their power.

Spear-points are often active and loud, like last year's spear-point in Thunderbolt Fantasy, but they don't have to be. Sometimes a spear-point is a quieter moment that would not otherwise work without the weight of the spear the story has put behind it; everything has been built up to allow this moment to exist and to convince.

For most of its run, Kemono Friends was all about the cheerful adventures of Kaban and the Friends in Japari Park. Sure, there was some danger from things like the Ceruleans and the environment, but it was the danger of a kid's show; it was there to create tension and have our characters solve problems, such as in episode 9. Then, at the end of episode 11, Kaban sacrifices herself to draw a giant Cerulean away from the incapacitated Serval, ending up being swallowed by it. This was quite something, as was the effects on people watching. Although this was an extremely powerful moment (and one fully earned by the show's work to build up to it), it's not the big spear-point. The spear-point is what happens the next episode, when Kaban basically comes back from the dead.

Bringing people back from the dead is very hard to do well. To truly sell it, the story must make it not merely excusable but inevitable, the logical and emotional consequence at the tip of the spear that was built piece by piece as the story progressed. The logical steps of Kemono Friends' spear are straightforward (I've put them in a sidebar), but what that really means is that they're woven deep into the subtle worldbuilding of the entire setting; they're straightforward because they're foundational. Kemono Friends didn't surprise us with anything that went into Kaban's return because by the time we got there we already knew the pieces; we'd been shown them before bit by bit as part of previous events. As far as logic went at the spear-point of Kaban's return, it was inevitable.

But logic by itself isn't enough; returning from the dead needs effort and emotion too, to give significance and weight to such a momentous thing. So the final episode of Kemono Friends opens with an epic, climactic running fight against the giant Cerulean, one that sees all of the Friends we've met over the course of the series show up to help out with their own abilities (for good reasons that go back to that subtle worldbuilding). On the surface it's an attempt to rescue Kaban from the Cerulean and defeat it, but it also makes us feel that all of these Friends working together so hard and caring so much about Kaban deserve more than to be left with nothing. They and especially Serval have earned having Kaban come back. And so it comes to pass, with not a dry eye in the house.

(It also helps that we the audience wanted Kaban to come back, so that Kemono Friends could finish as the cheerful and good-natured show that it had been all the way through up until then. Kaban's return is firmly centered in the show's genre.)

Kaban's return from the lost is not a big explosive moment; it's not epic in the way Shang's fight was last year, or shocking in the way Kaban's sacrifice was. Instead, it's quietly, intensely emotional. It's Serval embracing Kaban, crying as she repeats what she said in the first episode, "I won't eat you!" It's a miracle that is perfectly logical and completely earned, at the tip of a meticulously crafted spear that stretches all the way back to the start of the show.

Kemono Friends makes it all look easy, when it's anything but.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: The logic chain in question

Friends are created from ordinary animals (or pieces of animals), and when swallowed by a Cerulean, they are stripped of their Friend nature and reduced back to their original animal form. Kaban is a Friend, and when she was swallowed by the Cerulean she was reduced to a glowing ball which would condense to her original form. But Kaban is a human and the original form of a human is still a human, so when the ball evaporated to reveal her animal form, it was still Kaban.

I won't call Kaban's nature a mystery of Kemono Friends because it was always pretty obvious what she was to the viewers. But it was the central pivot around which all of the series revolved, and if we had any doubt about what she was, this ended them; Kaban is a human Friend (and we know her origins). To quote the Professor, "They [humans] truly are a mysterious species."

Some shows that didn't work out for me in 2017

Every year, there are a certain number of shows that I start with high expectations and hopes, fully expecting to enjoy them, and then things don't work out. I'm always sad when this happens; I want to enjoy shows, especially shows that I'm looking forward to, but every year there are times when this just doesn't happen, and not because the show turned out to be a disaster in some way or is clearly a 'not for me' show. These are the shows that by all rights should work for me, but for various reasons the show and I never connected. Often it's hard for me to drop these shows, because I feel like I should like them but I just don't. Somehow the magic that should be there has leaked out.

(Shows that are actively bad or that are clearly not my kind of thing are much easier to let go of, partly because it's a lot more clearcut. It's still disappointing but it's a mild disappointment. It's also easier to let go of shows that I had no particular expectations for in the first place, ones that just had some initial promise but I wound up deciding that I didn't like them enough.)

Today, for my own reasons, I want to look back at my collection of such shows from this year (or at least the ones that stand out to me), not to condemn them but to create a little memorial to them and to what could have been. That these shows didn't work out for me can say as much about me as it does about the shows.

In the order that they aired and I sadly walked away from them:

• Blue Exorcist - Kyoto Saga: I quite liked the original Blue Exorcist back in the day, but this version didn't catch fire with me. I don't feel as sad as I might, because it's been so long and I never really expected another season from Blue Exorcist (and we did get a decent movie); also, I didn't entirely feel that this was really a continuation of the original because it had to reset a number of things from the anime-original ending of the first show. In a way you could say that this is a different show than I thought I was getting, one that just happens to sort of use the same setting and some of the same characters as the Blue Exorcist that I watched. And who knows, maybe my tastes have changed since 2011.

  I think the show was competently made and I've heard that it followed the manga fairly well, so I suspect that manga readers are pleased by this season.

• Little Witch Academia: Oh, this one hurts. I lost interest after five episodes of this much heralded Trigger TV series version of a couple of quite good OVAs. There were a number of specific things, but in the end it basically turned out the way I'd been afraid of since I heard it was being turned into a TV series, which I'll summarize as 'the pacing and feel changed a lot'. The first OVA had only so much time and it had to cram a great deal in; as a result, everything moved at a rapid clip and there wasn't time to look very deeply into anything, which made it a madcap ride. With far more time to fill and the natural expectation that it would go into much deeper detail on the characters, character growth, and so on, the TV series could never have managed the same feel.

  (The second OVA was somewhat closer to the feel of the TV series, since it was an additional story invented after the first OVA was successful, but it was still far denser and more condensed than the show.)

  I wound up labeling LWA as 'not for me' instead of dropped because I think it not working for me is mostly about my tastes in pacing, characters, and so on.

• Rage of Bahamut - Virgin Soul: The original Rage of Bahamut was a flawed but generally very good show that really got the cinematic Hollywood action-adventure feel and important things like how to have awesome moments. Virgin Soul had a great premise, the same director, and more running time (and hopefully plenty of production time), all of which gave me great expectations for it. Perhaps what happened is something similar to what happened with Little Witch Academia, where adding time (and focusing more on characters) required slowing the pacing down and coming up with more elaborate and complex plots.

  (With that said, the show has its own serious issues in how it handles Charioce; for one discussion of this, see here.)

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond: This is a regrettable late addition (not just this season, but late in the season at that). It's actually been useful at showing me another thing about my tastes, because there's absolutely nothing wrong about BBB & Beyond as such; it's delivering exactly what's on the can, and in quite good quality as far as animation, story, and so on is concerned. It's just that BBB & Beyond is not going anywhere in particular and it turns out that I want more than that, even from my popcorn watching. But for people who like to see these characters ramble around Hellsalem's Lot and find out bits about their background and day to day life, well, I can see the appeal. My understanding is that this season is very much like the manga in that respect, so manga fans are probably quite fond of it (and irritated that the first season apparently pruned back so much from the sections of the manga that it covered).

  (The first season of BBB did have an ongoing story working its way through the episodes, with Black and White and everything they were tied in to. It also had the advantage that it was introducing us to Hellsalem's Lot.)

  (A confession: there's a part of me that wants to keep on watching BBB & Beyond, although I'm pretty convinced I'd just wind up disgruntled if I did. After all, I'm only two episodes away from the end of this season; surely I can just finish it out. But no. That's a combination of the sunk cost fallacy and my completionist nature.)

Then there's some shows that I'm more mildly let down and sad about, where it doesn't hurt as much that I and the show didn't work out.

• Re:Creators: I didn't have high expectations for this at the start of the season, but the initial stuff was cool and the high concept was interesting. It kept me interested for 14 episodes, which is at least ten more than many shows manage, and there are any number of nice bits and characters that still stick in my mind. Also, the OP music remains excellent (I prefer the first OP's music to the second, but they're both good).

  In retrospect, Re:Creators had a good line on 'cool'. Perhaps this is partly because many of its characters were consciously supposed to be fictional (plucked into 'reality') and so did not have to be given feet of clay in order to feel more realistic; they could mostly run on the rule of cool and nothing else. For example, Mamika is almost too perfect in the show itself; in a work where she was intended to be a real character, she'd probably have been made more tangled and ambiguous and less appealing as a result. But I wave my hands here.

  (Sometimes this didn't work in the favour of the character and the show. Yes, I'm still sore about Magane.)

• Fate/Apocrypha: I have a mixed relationship with Fate as a whole and I did drop and then un-drop this after the first episode, but I still keep hoping for a Fate series that delivers all of the cool stuff (including but not limited to fight action) but without the other things that are probably inevitable given that this is both Fate and a TV series (with a TV series' production limits). Some aspects of F/A were great, too, but for me they wound up as too little in too much of an ocean of stuff I was too indifferent to.

  (Overall I feel I got what I wanted from the show, since I went in with modest expectations and stopped watching when I felt I was about done. But I still feel sad that it wasn't more. I'll probably always feel this sadness every time I watch a Fate work and it doesn't knock me out of the park.)

• A Centaur's Life: It feels like a miracle that such a peculiar and far-out manga got animated in the first place, so I'm only mildly sad that various aspects of the actual implementation didn't work for me. Perhaps the interesting bits in the show will have persuaded some people to check out the manga and gotten them hooked on it.

  (The manga really is far more out there than you might expect just from the premise. It gets really weird in places, especially as it goes on.)

Perhaps it's silly to go into new shows with expectations at all, since any long-term anime watcher knows that anything can happen with a new show (for bad or good), but it's also entirely human. People aren't perfectly logical robots; we're always influenced by emotional factors and our knowledge. Even if you deliberately shield yourself from hearing anything about a new season, you know that some shows are successors to shows that you liked (or adopt a manga you know something about), and that builds up inevitable expectations.

PS: I'm deliberately not considering shows that I actually finished even if I wasn't as taken with them as I expected and wanted to be. This is for shows that didn't work out to such an extent that I stopped watching them, not shows that merely disappointed me for various reasons or that turned out to be less than I'd hoped for or expected.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Story endings can be broad or narrow ones

I've written before about the different ways that story endings can be satisfying, where they can deliver either or both of narrative or emotional satisfaction; they can wrap up the plot or resolve the emotional conflicts a character had, or both. Today I want to talk about an additional dimension in story endings that plays into how satisfying people find them.

Story endings can be what I'll call broad or narrow. A broad ending is one that ties up as much as possible of the open issues in the story, while a narrow ending ignores many of them and only addresses a few. It's most common for this distinction to matter narratively, because the plot side is where it's most common to have a lot of outstanding issues; usually the emotional side of a story is already concentrated on only a few characters, so the story doesn't need to cover very much to give them emotionally satisfying resolutions. However, in some situations you can still have an emotionally narrow ending, because you just ignore issues with secondary characters or focus in on only a few characters in an ensemble cast.

(For example, I feel that Eureka Seven AO had an emotionally narrow ending. There were character conflicts and themes that were simply dropped on the floor in the ending, if they even existed, since the ending focused purely on Ao.)

One way to get an emotionally unsatisfying ending is to have it be emotionally narrow. The show may wrap up the central character's conflicts and themes, but it ignores all of the rest; we the audience then feel that these other characters have basically been dropped on the floor, reduced to unimportant spear carries when the show had previously implied that they were important.

You can obviously get a narratively unsatisfying ending by having it be narratively narrow. However, a narratively narrow ending doesn't have to be unsatisfying, at least to some of the audience, because not infrequently there are plot questions that are fine to not answer . The show has to stage its mysteries somewhat carefully in order to make it clear that not getting answers is a possibility, which includes not making the answer to them be important for understanding things. But done well this can avoid a common problem with mysteries.

(In practice we already accept that many things about the setting of a show will not be explained in any depth, even things that are reasonably central to the show's premise. For one example, many science fiction series involve a great deal of technology for things like faster than light travel or flying cars that's simply never explained. Ghost in the Shell doesn't explain the mechanics of cyborgs, ghosts, hacking things, or the various weapons; it's enough for the story that we get a vague idea of how they work and what their limitations are.)

Of course, what works may vary from person to person. For a personal example, in Shingu I'm fine with Muryou's mysteries not being answered but other people aren't necessarily so happy.