The Jellyfish Princess – 01
So we’ve got a few weeks in to this much touted new season of anime. While it would be unwise to draw any lasting conclusions from the first few episodes of everything, there’s certainly lots of potential not yet tapped. A prime example of such in my view would be Kuragehime, translated as The Jellyfish Princess.
The first thing that grabbed me about this show is the opening, unsurprisingly. In this case it’s certainly done it’s job. It features the show’s characters appearing in lots of famous movie scenes, like Gene Kelly’s famous romp through the rain in Singin’ In The Rain, scenes from Star Wars, the James Bond opening sequence, and others. The references to mostly western films are especially fun for us to spot – I was particularly fond of the nod to Mary Poppins. It sets up Kuragehime as a fun show full of character.
More than the animation of the opening, I very much enjoyed the opening song by chatmonchy “Koko Dake no Hanashi”. Not only did it fit very well with the pace of the opening animation sequence, it’s an absolute earworm. I couldn’t get it out of my head today. Chatmonchy are very good at doing that – they love their syncopated rhythms and catchy lead guitar riffs, and I love them for it. In fact, one of my favourite ending songs is also by them: “Shangri-La”, which was used as the ending song for Working Man (you may know it as Hataraki Man). The ending song is also sounding pretty good too.
The Jellyfish Princess is adapted from a josei manga by Akiko Higashimura. The josei demographic mostly consists of adult women, giving us a hint of what we can expect from the rest of this noitaminA show. Takahiro Omori directs, after directing such shows as Baccano! and Dullalala! It doesn’t look likely that this show will share quite the same pace as either of his former shows, but what it does have in common is that feeling that what you’re watching is high quality. It’s hard to describe this, but it made me think that Kuragehime was good despite a number of factors.
One of these factors are the characters as a whole. While we’ve only just been introduced to them, they’re big walking one-dimensional stereotypes at the moment, with the possible exception of Tsukimi (voiced by the dulcet tones of Kana Hanazawa) and our Shibuya “princess”. I do have every hope that these fujoshi will be fleshed out in the coming weeks, though. The trap was also a bit obvious, but it’ll be interesting to see how this situation develops.
Who knows how we got here, but it seems that anime with seafood in the title are faring the best at the moment. Apart from Kuragehime, I’m also very much enjoying Squid Girl (Shinryaku! Ika Musume) for it’s main character’s refreshing demeanour, almost like a dictatorial Yotsuba from the sea. Blog post incoming on that, hopefully.
The Jellyfish Princess currently isn’t available to legally stream, but it’s available from the usual fansub outlets.
Uta∽Kata
Uta∽Kata is a short, one season show that originally aired back in 2004. In what is nowadays an irregular occurence, the story of the show wasn’t adapted from a different medium, but was created especially for TV by gímik, a collective of Keiji Gotou (key animation, Fate/stay Night, Evangelion), Megumi Kadonosono (character design, Clannad movie, Rayearth) and Hidefumi Kimura (concept, Dai-Guard). gímik’s other well-known show is Kiddy Grade. The recent buzz around it, despite being from 2004, is that it was recently announced that it had been licensed by Sentai Filmworks in North America.
The basic plot is that our protagonist, Ichika Tachibana, one day finds a very old mirror in an abandoned part of her school, where she meets Manatsu Kuroki, a mysterious girl who appears from the mirror. As payback for helping Ichika find her mobile phone, Manatsu wants her to utilise the power of the Djinn, elemental spirits whose powers she can use, then write about her experience.
It’s quite difficult to narrow Uta∽Kata down to a particular genre or demographic. The fancy costumes Ichika wears when possessed by each Djinn are firmly in the magical girl realm, each one designed by famous faces in the anime/manga industry, and evoking a very Card Captor Sakura feel. The tone and content of the story is anything but this, though. While everything seems to be happy and cheery at the start, we very quickly gets the sense that things will turn bad. In fact, there’s no nuance about it – the fact that things are going get worse is rubbed in your face every other minute, leaving the surprise anything but that.
There is a lot that Uta∽Kata gets right, though. The suspense felt around the beginning of the second half of the series is palpable, and the show certainly isn’t afraid to get into subjects that many of its contemporaries willingly avoid. In fact, I think the whole point of the show is to display the human condition. There are a few obvious ones the show plays with, like its large emphasis on lying, but there are other altogether more subtle elements of the human condition it plays with. Mental illness, eating disorders, suicide, these are subjects that aren’t often dealt with in a serious way, rather than just being wheeled out for extra drama. A big theme of the show that I haven’t seen in many others is serious misanthropy. It’s painful but fascinating to watch Ichika’s journey of ever-growing self-hate as her body is taken over more and more. Also, it isn’t afraid to show a bit of gore here and there, but not so much that you become desensitised. It’s still gasp-worthy when it happens.
Despite the above, I’m not saying Uta∽Kata doesn’t have its faults. Ichika herself, initially, is incredibly annoying. She’s agreeable to the point where you will her to go against the grain, though part of this was probably intentional. This is especially the case when Manatsu wants her to use the powers of the Djinn under the pretense that it’s to do her summer homework. It’s laughable, but Ichika just goes with the flow and agrees. Quite why she continues to struggle through her power trips is sometimes unclear. The show is clearly aiming to have some sort of moral, but by the final explanation, I think it gets rather muddled and descends into anime cliché. If the message was simpler, I think it would have had more effect.
I really want to like Uta∽Kata. I really do. It’s an interesting concept, and its drama and suspense can be incredibly good. Having said that, while it has some great moments, I don’t think the series as a whole stays as consistently good. Oh, and avoid the OVA episode like the plague, unless the end of the series leaves you terribly heartbroken and in need of some form of closure. In the end, I would recommend it, but I just feel it could have been put together slightly better.
Uta∽Kata is out on DVD in North America on 2nd November 2010. Fansubs are available from the usual outlets.
Autumn 2010: A Small Preview
So Summer is well and truly over. It’s started to get colder again and the nights are getting longer, but who cares about that when we’ve got a fairly nice season of anime coming up? After many believed that the Summer line-up wasn’t as good as it could have been (which is par for the course for the Summer season, generally), there’s a lot of onus on the new shows that will be gracing our screens over the next few months.
I’m not going to do a full preview, mostly because it’s been covered by other blogs and websites very well. Andy over at the UK Anime Network did a very nice summary of the season, and Chartfag (not forgetting Scamp at the Cart Driver) continues to be a nice aggregator of knowledge on what is actually airing. What I want to do is narrow the focus on a few select titles of note, as well as titles I am personally interested in.
Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt
Quite possibly the most “in your face” title this season, especially with those of us who can understand English, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is the latest project from Gainax, the jiggle-meisters themselves. The story revolves around Panty (the blonde one) and Stocking (the Goth lolita one), as they battle ghosts on Earth.
The trailer (which is highly NSFW) rushes at breakneck speed through some of the action, leaving the viewer with little doubt that PanSto won’t be a conventional anime. The art style, in a departure for Gainax, is a very western affair, evoking many comparisons to Genndy Tartakovsky’s hit Cartoon Network show Powerpuff Girls, what with its thick, simple lines and saturated colours. The trailer also shows hints of Dead Leaves, which makes sense given the two share a director.
From what I’ve seen of the source material, this is going to be pretty raunchy. Especially if it turns out to be true that the production team were promised not to be censored by the TV networks. Certainly one to watch for those who like extreme innovation and/or smutty anime. Can’t wait.
Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt will be streaming on Crunchyroll from 1st October.
Currently Watching: Shiki
You’ve got to love Fuji TV’s noitaminA slot. Every season they manage to bring something fresh to the table, and while these projects may not always work out (House of Five Leaves and the Tatami Galaxy, while good, weren’t universally well received), you have to admire them for trying their damnest to open up anime to the masses. Their offerings at the moment include the live-action version of the brilliantly quirky microbe-fest Tales of Agriculture and the subject of this blog post, Shiki.
Shiki begins rather hauntingly – in the middle of a search party for a missing person. This pretty much sets the precedent for the rest of the first five episodes I’ve watched so far. Shiki is based on a horror manga written by Ono Fuyumi and Fujisaki Ryuu based in an extremely parochial Japanese village cut off from the outside world by dense forest. The residents of said village are somewhat traditional and close knit, as you’d expect from a village of that kind. The story appears to start moving when some new residents move in to the house on the hill in the dead of night.
We’re very quickly introduced to a large cast of characters, all residents of Sotobamura. It’s absolutely impossible to remember all of these people, but the main recurring characters have all helpfully either been given actual personalities, or in many cases crazy anime hairstyles, to be memorable. If the number of characters wasn’t hard enough to follow, why don’t we jump back and forward in time as well. Seriously, this show could give Baccano! a run for its money.
First Impressions: High School of the Dead
So the Summer 2010 anime season has well and truly begun. As usual, everyone’s assumed that it’ll be crap and that anime is doomed. But it can’t be that bad, right? Err… Anyway, there are usually a few hidden truffles to snuff out every season, and I’ll be hoping to cover some of those over the coming weeks. At the moment, Occult Academy and Shiki are looking interesting enough.
One anime has arguably had magnified interest before the season started thanks to a fairly unique premise for an anime, which is strange both because “unique” and “anime” don’t often belong in the same sentence these days, and because the trope almost feels like it has been overused in other media. Zombies!
It beggars belief that there hasn’t been a proper Dawn of the Dead-esque zombie apocalypse anime before (at least, not that I know of). The medium has the potential to lend itself very well to emphasising the scale of such a disaster, as well as the human stories that arise from it.
So here we have High School of the Dead. It’s based on a popular manga which, as of Comic-Con 2010, has been licensed by Yen Press in the US. Luckily, US Yen Press releases tend to trickle on to the UK market as well.
An admission – I am terribly excited about this show. It has an original premise, giving it lots of potential, it promises balls-to-the-wall action thanks to the undead perusing the streets and as we see from very early on (episode one), it isn’t afraid to get into some of the moral strains that can appear during zombie apocalypses.
It’s being animated by Madhouse, which as we recently found with Redline, appears to still have the money to push the animation of its works into a different league compared to your typical late-night anime. The stellar opening sequence takes the time to transliterate its staff members into English. If that isn’t a sign of a show confident in itself, I don’t know what is. All in all, everything’s looking good.
The show doesn’t waste much time in setting up its advertised plot. While Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 left us waiting for the whole episode for the inevitable to happen, HOTD drops us right in with the gore turned up to eleven. Excellent!
Android Ana Maico 2010
I’ll admit that one of the main reasons I heard about Android Announcer Maico 2010 is the fact that we are now in the year it is set in. Given that it was produced in 1998, it’s certainly not as much of a leap to guess the future as Nineteen Eighty-four was. And yet, we still haven’t managed to invent android disc jockeys. What a tragedy.
The premise of the show seems interesting at a glance – the Japan Broadcasting System (Fuji TV if you regard the blatant logos everywhere) wants to get the listening figures up, so brings in an android radio announcer to present a show, and brings together a rag-tag group of the “best” staff to work on the radio show. The anime is based on a much racier manga involving crime-fighting and sexdroids as well as radio presenting, but the anime removes the blue parts, and is probably better for it. The premise of the manga seems jarring to me, though I can’t say I’ve ever read any of it.
Thinking past the premise, it’s hard to visualise what the anime can actually do with such a restricted set-up. And sure enough, the majority of the short 15 minute episodes are set entirely in the broadcast studio of “Jump Out Maico 2010”. This anime is supposed to be funny, so Maico and the team get themselves involved in shenanigans involving the guests, the sponsors and each other, but it gets somewhat repetitive after a while. Read more
