Archive for the English Anime Category


Yuri Anime: Loveless, Volume 2

April 4th, 2007

I know, I know, I reviewed Volume 3 of this ages ago, and it’s practically ancient at this point. But I’m making a concerted effort to get through my too-tall “pile of anime I need to watch” and review everything.

First and foremost, today’s review is once again due to the kindness and generosity of the guys at Media Blasters. They gave me this about 7 months ago and I’m just getting to it…good lord.

Secondly, watching Loveless, Volume 2 today was a good reminder that stories make more sense if you watch them in *order*. ^_^

I originally reviewed the Yuri arc of Loveless at the end of 2005, but even then I hadn’t really watched any of the story previous to when Yamato and Kouya appeared. This time, I sat down and watched the episodes – I even paid attention and everything. ;-) And yes, I feel like I have a stronger grasp on the story now. I also can say that this volume is way stronger than Volume 3, Yamato and Kouya aside.

This volume includes a lot of angsting by the hero Ritsuka, a lot of masochistic enduring by his partner-although-they-won’t-admit-it-yet, Soubi, and some darn solid advice by Ritsuka’s therapist. Who lied about her age, IMHO. ^_^ But for our purposes, this volume also has the appearance of the second Zero pair – high school girls, and lovers, Yamato and Kouya.

When they appear, they instantly have a backstory, which is kind of interesting. We don’t get the backstory in this volume, but it’s very obvious that it is there. Unlike, say, the first Zero pair, who remain two-dimensional to the end. Kouya and Yamato also manifest actual intelligence as compared with the twits in the first Zero pair. So right off the bat, they come off looking like a formidable couple. We learn a bunch more in the next two episodes, but they are in Volume 3, so read that review for related gushing praise.

The one thing I wanted to note about this volume was entirely unrelated to anything Yuri at all. After he and Soubi defeat an earlier pair, Kin and Gin (Gold and Silver, for those that like stuff like that,) Ritsuka receives a “strange memo” that somehow relates to his brother’s death – the event that was the catalyst for everything in the series. I had to laugh, because I recognized what that “strange memo” was immediately as a result of my job. I don’t know what age the audience for Loveless is (I thought the magazine it ran in, Comic Rex was for adults, but I have no idea, really) but I guess the average manga/anime fan isn’t going to recognize a….well, I won’t spoil it. It’s not very exciting anyway. Beats me how it could help Ritsuka. I could look it up, if it were real. ^_^

One last note – I was amazed at the excellence of the voice acting cast. This anime got star treatment. And it shows. I’m almost tempted to take a look at the manga and find out what happens now.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Character – 8
Music – 5
Yuri – 8
Loser FanGirl – 20

Overall – 7

Either I’m in a significantly better mood today than when I reviewed Volume 3, or the quality drops off massively for the next volume. I have no clue which it is.





Yuri Anime: Ninja Nonsense, Volume 1

April 1st, 2007

First off, today’s review is brought to you by Sergio Aviles, who sent me this as part of my holiday beg-a-thon. (And, once again, should *you* desire to sponsor a review, feel free to pick something from my Amazon Wishlist. It will be greatly appreciated and you will be thanked!)

It’s standard operating wackiness (S.O.W.) in Ninja Nonsense, Volume 1. As I commented in my original review of Ninin ga Shinobuden, the entire plot of this series can be summed up as “wackiness ensues.”

It all begins when high school student Shiranui Kaede is sitting around not studying for her finale exam when female ninja-in-training Shinobu enters her room, and her life. Shinobu is on a quest for schoolgirls’ underwear in order to pass her ninja exam. And that’s about the way the whole series goes. ^_^ Something normal (flower viewing) is complicated by something silly (monsoon) and then something inexplicable happens (crocodile eats Onsokomaru.)

The whole series is a parody of just about everything you can imagine, from the expected ninja tropes to pervy otaku behavior. Shinobu’s master, Onsokomaru, is a yellow sphere with major “Id” control issues, and her partners in training are a pleasant pack of pathetic ninjas who are all called Sasuke, for ease of identification.

Despite the constant threat of severe pervification, there’s really only a little bit of nudity, butt jokes and related potty humor in the series. Onsokomaru and the ninjas are representative of a 15-year old’s worldview. So the humor is crude. Very.

In the Yuri department we have Shinobu, who early on develops a raging crush on Kaede. In her own incompetent way she pursues Kaede – on the one hand, it won’t come to much, on the other, she gets further than most boys do in non-hentai anime, so…take your pick. ^_^ This is typical one-sided “comedy” yuri.

What makes this series worth watching is how darn silly it is. I was re-watching this volume with the above-mentioned Serge and his lovely wife, and we were all giggling like crazy. It’s S.O.W. but it’s *funny* S.O.W. With some Yuri, too.

Ratings:

Art – 7, but irrelevant, as it’s a goofball series
Story – 7 – ditto
Characters – 7
Yuri – 6
Service – 6

Overall – 7

As a ninja story, it fails utterly. As a series to take your brain off-line with, fine and dandy.





My HiME Anime, Volume 2

March 26th, 2007

This review has been brought to you by the generosity of Okau Hero Brent A, I believe – there was no name on the shipping label.  In any case, my sincere thanks for his generosity and kindness. This is another of the items off my Amazon Wish List, which I am exceedingly glad to review for you all, as promised. :-) If you would like to sponsor a review, just go ahead and choose something off my wish list – I’ll be sure to acknowledge you with genuine thanks and warm, fuzzy feelings.

So, in Volume 2 of My HiME, we continue filling in the ranks of HiME, get some backstory on a few of the characters and commit the first of what will be a series of heinous crimes against the viewers. The things that were good about this volume were also the things that were bad, so it was an interesting watch from my perspective.

Let’s talk technicals first. The subtitle issue was not resolved for Volume 2, so unless you have state of the art DVD players or computers, you will not be able to see the subtitles. Luckily, since I reviewed Volume 1 I did indeed get both a new DVD drive and new software. Not, you understand, so that I can watch this disk, but because my previous DVD burner began to melt. So, I was able to see the subtitles. And boy oh boy, I understand why they want them to be hard to see! Bandai…appears to be using the teeniest, most pixelated yellow subtitles they can find. I’m not asking for fancy text effects (Ogma knows they’re wasted on me) but I’d like to be able to *see* the subtitles. My laptop screen is 15″. I’m old. They were small and hard to read. And pixelated! That’s all I’m saying.

Once again., let me stress that the animation for My HiME, despite your faulty recollection, is *significantly* worse than that for Mai Otome. Really. If you think I’m lying, you just don’t remember. Because the animation for this volume is *awful*.

Volume 2 deals primarily with two things – the addition of two HiME who function for a *very* short time as foils for one another, and Mai’s personal backstory. The backdrop to all this is rain, so you know it’s dramatic. In fact, the first episode is called “Rain and Tears” in case you miss the point of just how dramatic it is.

But as fast as we gain HiME, we lose at least one in this volume and, in the process, we learn the true risk of being a HiME…that the person (not yourself) that is most important to you will disappear if you’re defeated. On the one hand, we gain a HiME who thinks of her role as a superheroine – and revels in it, much as she revels in her obvious lies about herself and, on the other hand, we lose a HiME who probably wouldn’t have hurt a fly otherwise.

The Monsters of the Day turn up the conflict a notch, Nagi continues to be irritating and wow – is it freakish watching this volume after having been so thoroughly brainwashed by Otome. The level of angst is SOOOOOOO high, that it was hard to take seriously, since I know that all the pain and suffering will…well, I won’t rant about it again. It just seems more like *this* is the fanfic now, where someone took all these happy-go-lucky Garderobe characters, made ’em kids, stuck ’em in a school and upped the angst.

Let me digress a bit and talk about angst. In my Fanfic Writing Workshop, which you can find on “Worldshaking” Fanfic (or at a con near you that is also near me), I discuss the concept of “hand of god” writing. Many people – especially young people, like very angst-heavy stories. There’s a lot of reasons for that that I won’t get into, but I will say this – from the author’s side angst is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier to write. You know the saying, “Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard”? This comes from the stand-up comic circuit and it is absolutely true for writing, as well. That’s why so much fanfic sounds like this “Person X is forced to react when Person Y is killed doing something or other.” That’s hand of god writing. To me, the very best writing of all is the kind that plays out in small details. So a lot of anime fails in terms of writing, for me, but some are better than others. I was all for My HiME’s hand of god until the end, where the entire series was invalidated. (Dammit, I promised not to rant again… oh well.)

I had completely forgotten that Nao was Mikoto’s age in HiME, that was really weird. LOL In any case, I found it a tad depressing to watch this volume this time, but if I treat it like a fanfic of Otome, it’s not so bad. ^_^

No Yuri, really, even if you squint and turn up the Yuri goggles, unless you’re counting Mikoto and Mai. Which I’m not.

Last up, the DVD extras. They were universally disgusting. Oh, wait, no, the last one wasn’t disgusting, just pathetic. I know that they are just service for the fanboys, but gawd…how do you guys stand it? I was gagging trying to get through them. (Just another good example of how what lesbians think is sexy and what guys think is sexy is nothing like the same thing…)

Ratings:

Art – 5
Character – 6
Story – 6
Yuri – 2
Service – 9
Angst – 8 and going up quickly from here on in.

Overall – 6





Yuri Anime: Project A-ko

February 14th, 2007

Here’s why, until recently, I had never seen Project A-ko. ^_^

In the dawn of time, MTV was carrying extremely late night anime, (they were dubbed, and mostly old-school. This was long enough ago now that the current anime/manga boom could not have even been predicted as a possibility,) and I was working three jobs: a full-time day job, teaching martial arts at night, and on the weekends, selling swords at a RenFaire. I’d get home Saturday night at about midnight and be completely fried. The wife was working two jobs (day job, and doing henna in Soho in NYC on the weekends) and while waiting for her to come home, I’d stare at TV.

I watched Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer, which was so screwed up it put me off the series for years, until I watched some of the TV series for review purposes years later, which put me off it forever.

And I saw one teeny, tiny, wee bit of Project A-ko. The dub voices sliced through my exhausted nerve endings, leaving me shaking. I turned off the TV and never again even tried to watch A-ko. I should have tried again, of course. I mean, history, and all that. But the dub left such an unpleasant impression, that I’ve just sort of skirted the issue all these years.

And that’s where it might have stayed, except for a recent barrage of cajoling and wheedling by members of the Yuricon Mailing List, which culminated in Jen hoisting me with a quote of my own, from my Kekkou Kamen anime review, praising the voice acting skills of Shinohara Emi. Well, Jen won. I caved. I watched.

It is an apparently well known fact that A-ko was originally supposed to be part of the Cream Lemon hentai series, but was not, in the end, included. It has much of the same kind of art, and a great deal of fanservice. It also has a strange edginess that I find hard to explain. It’s not desperation, it’s almost…like the voice actresses found the story so bizarre and laughable that they just decided to go ahead and do it as over-the-top as they could.

I’m kind of glad I watched it when I did, because I was sick and heavily medicated, which made it more enjoyable, I’m sure. ^_^ Seriously, it was…inexpressibly bad, in that totally kitschy funny way. The writers clearly knew what they were spoofing, and why, and did it in a way that *just* rode the line between being godawful and hysterically funny.

B-ko, voiced by Shinohara Emi is, as many people pointed out to me in their campaign to entice me to watch it, a very Evil, very Psychotic Lesbian. As EPLs go, B-ko provides an exquisite example for the young EPLs-in training of the world, like Miu from Ichigo Mashimaro – except for her execrable taste in women, as C-ko is quite possibly the most annoying creature to ever grace any anime ever.

A-ko, ironically, was voiced by a young Itou Miki. She and Shinohara Emi have recently been working together again as part of an anime you may have heard of – Maria-sama ga Miteru.  Is there a less likely pairing for Youko and Sachiko’s voices than B-ko and A-ko? It’s almost surreal to imagine.

Which leads me to this comment I made on the YCML, “My last thought was that the dub must have been pretty good, since the level of nerve shredding in the voice acting was consistent with what I remembered from that aborted late-night attempt at watching it.”  How’s *that* for a compliment? ^_^

The music is also quite excruciating, even surpassing the oh-so-80s music from the original Bubblegum Crisis for cringe making.

If you already are a fan and don’t already own it, the box set, pictured and linked above, is a genuinely good deal (2022 Update: The new link goes to the Diskotek Perfect Edition with remastered animation and extras. The edition I reviewed here is long out of print.).

Ratings:

Art – 4
Story – 4 realistically, but 7 for crackheadeness
Characters – B-ko – 8, everyone else – 6, C-ko owes me points
Yuri – 6
Service – 8

Overall – can you even do an overall for this kind of crap? Let’s say 6

You know, A-ko wrong in so many ways, that we had to show it at Yuricon’s 2007 “Yurisai” event. ^_^





Silent Mobius Anime Volume 1 (English)

November 6th, 2006

I was asked a while back to review the Silent Mobius series and, as I needed to re-watch and read it anyway for that winning story for the “Worldshaking” Fanfic contest, this was as good a time as any other. :-) I was lucky to get the box set of the anime for a really good price, which will allow me to clear out some precious shelf space. I recommend the box set – it’s a good deal – about a buck an episode. Of course I’ve linked to it above. lol

To begin with, Silent Mobius is set in a future dystopia in which two worlds, that of humans and a parallel universe full of demony things called “Lucifer Hawks” have collided. Lucifer Hawks feed on, slaughter and breed with humans like the inhuman creatures of the night that they are.

The AMP, “Attacked Mystification Police” force is an all-female squad assigned to the single job of dealing with Lucifer Hawks. Who the members are, and why they, particularly, are chosen, are the subject of many of the first half of the series’ episodes. I will say this – I remember much of these character stories – they were very, very good.

Also good are the relationships between the women, and between them and characters outside the group. Everyone seems very human, very real – far more real than many current series ever get close to – with far fewer inexplicable hand-waves and plot holes. This story is quite seriously, well written and conceived.

Like You’re Under Arrest, Silent Mobius is an extremely straight story, but because of the nature of fandom, people just aren’t willing to settle for that, dammit, and go through all sorts of hoops to make couples of the women of AMP.

Frankly, I’d forgotton how much I like Kiddy and Ralph together. LOL And Roy and Katsumi are kind of sweet, too, even though I know that they are doomed. ;-)

Yuki, if the story were redone now, would be drawn as a 12-year old goth-loli and Nami’s the female equivalent of a eunuch. Lebia Maverick gets my vote as “character most likely to prefer sex with herself”. ^_^

Which leaves us with the only two characters who ping *my* Yuri-dar….Mana and Rally.

But I get ahead of myself. In this volume we have no more to ID them than exceedingly severe shoulder pads and a ball-buster attitude. (One day, many years ago, I went to work in a suit jacket, tie and long skirt. At least three guys told me that I looked “severe” or like a “ball buster”…I never really thought about it until I re-watched this DVD. I see what they mean!)

There is of course, Rosa, who with her S&M dom look and sister complex gets some people’s blood going. Not mine. And she hasn’t shown up yet, anyway. ^_^

Volume 1 is pretty much just a intro to the story. There are a few differences from the manga, the most notable of which is that Mana is already with AMP, and that it is told chronologically from Katsumi’s arrival in Japan. I think I prefer the manga, but that’s probably just me. There’s nothing wrong with the anime.

“Kindan no Pensee” is a really good opening theme, too – it was the first MP3 I ever downloaded to play on my computer. Ah, nostalgia…

Yuri? Not in Volume 1, but this story is more about good action, and solid characters than it is about Yuri. I’m surprised how well it holds up – even if the clothes look awfully 80’s “vision of the future.” ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 7 (The Lucifer Hawk had to be severely simplified for animation, which makes it easier to see them and what they do)
Story- 7
Characters – 8
Yuri – 0
Service – 1

Overall – 7

A strong action/magic/scifi/ball-busting severe woman/future dystopian/romance of a story.

With big shoulder pads.