I have, at last, returned from my quest for King Arthur, the Holy Grail and the plot of my next Sailor Moon/King Arthur crossover fanfic. (The first two are Kuroko, Senshi of the Kitchen, and Sailor Jupiter and the Green Knight, if you are interested.) The next will be starring Sailor Mercury. I’ll leave it to the well-read and creative among you to figure out which of Arthur’s knights Ami is. ;-) Feel free to conjecture in the comments section. I was accompanied by my two boon companions, as you can see in the picture above. We had a fabulous time.

In any case, as absolutely NONE of my trip was Yuricon related (for the first time in four years, I have to point out) it’s not really appropriate to put my travel journal here. However, if you’d like to read about what I do for fun and relaxation, please feel free to read my Cornwall Journal.

Let me warn you in advance that the contents are full of bizarre and obscure references. I have not explained a single one, but I have hyperlinked just about every other noun in the journal, so with a few clicks and a bit of reading, you’ll have a reasonable idea of what I mean – and you’ll have learned a few things on the way.

Also very important – most of what we traveled around to see was rocks. Just to warn you ahead of time. We *like* rocks.

I’ll be back on Monday with a new review. Feel free to say hi, tell me you missed me or otherwise offer kind words in the comments section. ^_^

This anime is based on the manga series Jyoshi Kousei (High School Girls in English), which I reviewed in August 2005. For the first two episodes, at least, the anime has followed two manga chapters closely – but not the first two, and in a way that is putting off some manga fans.

As with the previous to New Spring 2006 Yuri Anime I have reviewed – Jyoshi Kousei is not Yuri, but is of interest to the Yuri fan community.

If you read the earlier review of the manga, or if you have read the manga itself, you know that there are two Yuri-ish couples in the story – Yuma and Ayano, who are childhood friends and so close that their relatives and even Ayano’s boyfriend assume that they are going out. “Outsider” Eriko and “insider” Kouda Akari hit each other on every single raw nerve almost immediately so, of course when they become friends they become really *close* friends in the way such people do in anime. I am not alone when I noted that these two are a quite implicit couple. However, at least for the first two episodes of anime, neither of these couples are implicit or explicit. Yuma and Ayano have barely spoken, much less bickered emotionally – and Kouda has yet to suggest something outrageous and suggestive to Eriko. Boo hoo!

Okay, so the anime really does follow the manga closely – the first episode is the the first chapter of the manga and the second episode is the first chapter of the fourth volume? Why? I have no idea, except that maybe they were the two most panty-shot and perviness-filled chapters that the animators could find. The first two episodes of the anime have so many panty shots that I found myself feeling a little ill. At least in part because the shots are long, detailed, *very close up* and…did I mention they lingered? It was SO irksome, I picked up the manga to see if it was that bad, convinced that it couldn’t possibly be that awful.

It is. ^_^

Apparently the problem lies with myself once again. When reading the manga, I can skip over annoying bits quickly. When watching the anime, I have to abide by the pace set by the animators – and they like panty shots much, much, much, much, MUCH more than I do. So if I want to watch the anime, I’m going to have to deal.

So here’s the swing vote on this. If they give us back our Yuri, I’ll suck it up. No Yuri – no Erica watching. They get two more episodes to make me happy. ^_^

The opening credits are very cute 90’s shoujo anime looking, but the ending looks as if a box of Mezzo-Forte opened on the characters of this anime. The characters then do little dances to the closing theme, which appeals to me mightily.

Ratings:

Art – 8 (At least the variety of underwear color and design is refreshing…)
Characters – 7
Story – I really can’t tell yet. At the moment 5, but here’s hoping it gets better.
Music – 7
Yuri – 0 grrrrr
Service – 8 (Did I mention the variety of underwear color and design? Sigh…)

Overall – 7

Welcome back to my reviews of the Spring 2006 Yuri Anime Season. I’m going to try and finish these up this week.

Let’s get this out of the way – this anime is not Yuri. It may look Yuri and feel Yuri, but it ain’t. In order to convince you I’ll have to offer a gigantic spoiler, though. So, let’s cut to the chase – Kei isn’t a girl. There, now that that’s out of the way…let’s talk about Yume Tsukai.

The manga came out ages ago – we discussed it on the first and now long-gone version of the Yuricon Mailing List, so we’re talking back in 2001. (A quick glance at the listing on Amazon Japan for the Yume Tsukai manga gives me a date of, yes, June 2001.) The manga is deeply weird, with incredibly detailed and disturbed art, a violent and unpleasant dreamscape, with lots of yucky Freudian sexual metaphors and a wopping load of lolicon. Not only are the characters put into many quasi-sexual situations, but the one adult male character is openly obsessed with little girls. Like most obsessives, he doesn’t know when to just not talk about it – and like most men he doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “shut the fuck up already, I said no.”

So you can understand why I did not review the manga here.

However, there were many interesting things about the manga, and I’m glad to say that they kept all of those, while minimizing much of the yuckiness for the anime.

The art was really just too detailed to translate well to animation, unless they had an enormous budget and long schedule – clearly they did not, because they’ve just simplified the art a bunch. And while Hajime remains a “funny” pedophile, he’s not being too openly disgusting – just sort of saying that he likes little girls once in a while, just so the rest of the characters remember to bash him around for fun.

And bizarrely, I think, for such an openly pervtastic manga, the anime transformation scenes are the least suggestive/sexual I’ve ever seen. They are quite innocent of any flesh at all. It’s kind of a relief, really. I was all clenched up waiting to see what they would do for that.

Okay, so why *am* I reviewing this story? Because while not really a Yuri story, the plot has some serious Yuri elements. In the first episode we follow a series of girls as they disappear into a classroom and are never seen again. Satoko finds herself drawn there, but is saved by grade schooler Rinko. Rinko’s advice leads Satoko to a strange shop that seems to specialize in figurines, where Satoko meets Touko, Rinko’s sister. Touko, Rinko and the aforementioned Hajime are all “Yume Tsukai” – Dream Users. They use a kind of pre-Shinto shamanic magic to travel into people’s dreams and free them from the evil bad things in there. In this case, Satoko is drawn back to the classroom, where we learn that it is her unaccountable desire for classmate Kei, which draws her on. When Rinko and Touko get into her dream world, they fights Kei’s avatar, a giant evil version of the little ghosty charm thing you hang out to make it be sunny (it’s called a teruterubozu, just in case you wanted to know.) Kei looks like a girl, dresses like a girl, so as far as Satoko is concerned Kei is a girl. And Kei appears to be female well into the manga, but…Kei is not a girl. So don’t get your hopes up.

No Evil Psycho Lesbian (TM) for you.

However, the girls Kei enthralls don’t know that til waaaay down the line, so assuming the anime follows the manga, you can get vicarious Yuri thrills, if you like that kind of thing.

Actually, what appeals to me most about this series is the shamanic magic the Dream Users use. Seriously. I find it fascinating – and it’s why I’m watching this anime, despite the fact that the manga squicked me.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Music – 6
Yuri – 2
Service – 2

Overall – 6

Thinking about it, I almost feel bad for the lolicons who do tune in looking for all the same stuff as in the manga, only to find that it’s all been removed.

Remember – the order to encounter any story with the maximum amount of enjoyment is: 1) visual media; 2) manga; 3) novel. Why this order? Because with every succeeding version, you get more detail, more richness of story and character and more of the original author’s intent. Go the other way, and you get annoyed at the loss of depth, character development and scenes that had to be cut for time and convenience.

Which brings us to the Kamikaze Girls manga. (Don’t be fooled by the god-awful indexing at Amazon, which lists this as the novel. It is not the novel. The novel does not have people on the cover.)

The movie, as you may remember from my glowing review, was brilliant. Surreal and funny and reasonably well-paced, the movie was a visual and mental treat. I have since encountered two other movies by the same team, one I mentioned in my Sakuracon report, Survival Style 5 one a drug-induced hallucination, Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san, and there are some things that are common to all. But by far and away, Kamikaze Girls was the best of the bunch.

So, of course, I wanted to read the manga.

It was – different. For reasons known only to the manga artist, she made Ichiko, our crude, but honest, Yanki (gang girl) very boyish and added a gag about her being mistaken for a boy. Momoko is made to look even younger than she does in the movie, but overall the relationship between them is much the same – that is, they are almost destined to be friends, despite their lack of common ground. There is a word in Japanese, ironically used by Shinokita Reiko (Kita) in YajiKita Gakuen Douchuuki to describe her similar relationship with Yajima Junko (Yaji) – I can’t find it at the moment, but it means people who can’t, somehow, get rid of one another. ^_^

What was stranger to me than turning Ichiko into a bishounen-looking girl, was that the entire movie/novel, was only half the manga. The second half was a wholly new story made up by the manga artist detailing the trials and tribulations of Ichiko’s possible love for the twin brother of the guy she falls for in the first half. (In the movie, he is made into a parody of a gang type, in the novel, he’s just a cool guy.) The twin, whose name is silly, wants to be a ballet dancer. Ichiko ends up donning goth loli clothes once more to inspire him as he tries out for his dream role. It really isn’t a bad story, and is largely in keeping with the utter silliness of the movie, only it’s drawn and written as a straight shoujo manga complete with melodramatic angst. I’m not sure if it worked or not. If you read the novel first, it doesn’t. Remember, keep the order and keep your sanity. :-)

More importantly to us Yuri fans, the first half of the manga ends much as the movie does, with Momoko riding off on the back of Ichiko’s bike. As in the novel, Momoko lays her head on Ichiko’s back, “like a lover” and thinks that she does, indeed love Ichiko. (The second half of the manga sort of makes that moot, but screw it – that’s what we have good imaginations for. ^_^)

So, like the movie, this is a story of shinyuu, of friendship not of desire. As another retelling of a quirky and unique story – the manga comes in as interesting, but not captivating.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Characters – 7
Story – 6
Yuri – 1
Service- 1

Overall – 6

If you’ve read the novel – don’t bother with the manga. If you haven’t, then try it. The movie is better and the novel the best, but the manga isn’t bad.

If you’re at Sakuracon in Seattle, WA this weekend, don’t miss the yuri and shoujo-ai panel at 8PM – 10PM, in Room 604 on Saturday, March 25. (Not that both time and place have changed from my original announcement…)

See you there!