Archive for the Yuri Anime Category


Top Yuri Anime of 2015

December 28th, 2015

Of everything I do here on Okazu, this list is always the hardest. Even when there is so much amazing stuff I can barely contain myself, it’s hard. On years where there was very little of note, it’s almost impossible.

I’ve commented over the years that Yuri anime is cyclical. We get a lot….then we get none. Then we get a lot….then we get none. This was one of those “none” years. And like most “none” years, we still got some. ^_^

As always, these are my opinions, you’re never obliged to agree and you are most welcome to tell us your Top Yuri Anime in the comments!

YRYRSH5 – Yuru Yuri

I know you know I’m not a fan. For one thing, there’s very little Yuri in this series, mostly in the form of set-ups for fans to pair characters, not any actual mutual feelings between two characters.  But this series is appealing to some number of fans, and clearly to the folks at Ichijinsha, so they keep throwing money at it.

2015 included OVAs that received theater releases in Japan and a third season of anime. I think it deserves a little recognition for that, don’t you? Here’s a little recognition.

Yuru Yuri is streaming on Crunchyroll.

sound4 – Sound Euphonium, Sabagebu and anything else you watched, not explicitly named here, that had a little bit of Yuri.

Yuri as a character trait, or a fetish or an add-on is still plenty common in anime. As anime, specifically, becomes more and more a media for easily influenced lonely guys, there is never a real lack of characters with vastly overstated crushes. Some of these are very good, others are bad, but it’s worth noting them and thanking them for dribbling little crumbs of Yuri on our plates. ^_^

Sound! Euphonium and Sabagebu are streaming on Crunchyroll.

pp3 – Psycho-Pass 2

The lesbians got to have sex and not die…again. Achievement unlocked!

You can watch Psycho-Pass on Hulu, or buy it on BD/DVD from Funimation in 2016.

 

hqdefault2 – Dear Brother and Sailor Moon ‘S’

I watched every last, miserable fucking second of Dear Brother with a HUGE grin on my face (except for when I was sobbing into a handkerchief.) It was, it is and it always will be an awesome story, with amazing characters, a pile of Yuri and one of the most tragic loves ever.

Sailor Moon S is currently streaming and I’m avoiding it like the plague until the BD/DVD disks come out, because I don’t want to touch anything and ruin it. But the episodes sit there, in their oh-so-very gay glory and taunt me. So very, very gay. Squee. Next year this goes up to Number 1 unless we get something amazing. Gosh I hope we get something amazing!

Dear Brother is still available streaming on Viki.com and Sailor Moon can be watched on Viz’s Neon Alley, with BD/DVDs coming for the third season in 2016.

232b78a7e4e10c28f9fcd2bb74b8b22a1420158390_full1 – Yuri Kuma Arashi

To be honest, this series had no competition at all this year. It was the only actually Yuri anime made.

Yes, it exploited that with a surreal glee, slapping the word “Yuri” on everything until it made no sense, and it was pandery and kinda creepy and did I mention it made no sense, but who are we to complain? Not me certainly, because above all other things, we got an awesome Evil Psycho Lesbian, we got to watch Ikuhara Kunihiko publicly flail with an obvious love/hate thing for Yuri and we got to see Morishima Akiko’s character designs animated and streaming on Hulu.com. There really was never a question about the number one on this list this year.

The Top Yuri Anime for 2015 is Yuri Kuma Arashi.





Yuri Anime: Dear Brother, Set 3, Disk 2

July 30th, 2015

DearBrother3-275x390“The tears, they will not stop.”

We hear this sentence at the end of of every preview, but do we listen? The tears, all the tears which have not been shed by Rei, by Kaoru, by Fukiko, and by Nanako are going to come gushing out in the most horrible lancing of a wound possible. It takes a pointless, awful, stupid, tragic death for healing to begin.

Saint Just is dead. It’s not a suicide, and that helps, but it doesn’t change that she’s gone.

All along, we were thinking that Nanako was the mascot of this series, that the story was always about the beautiful people. But in the end, it turns out that Nanako, like Yumi many years later, is truly the protagonist and that she functions as a catalyst for the lives around her, is not entirely accident.

Misonoh Nanako, who can see the symbolic moments in her life, the rain, the wind, and the doves, has always been the center around which this tale orbits and Saint-Just was just everyone’s mascot after all.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Yuri – 4
Service – 6 Bathing suits, nakedness

Overall – 9

It’s been a long time since this series ran on Japanese TV. Divorcing parents are no longer a scandal, breast cancer is no longer a death certificate. But, some things are timeless. Dear Brother is timeless.





Yuri Anime: Dear Brother, Set 3, Disk 1

July 3rd, 2015

DearBrother3-275x390It’s so fascinating, isn’t it, when something that was life-crushing 40 years ago is pretty normal now.

There is a movie, Stella Dallas. It is about a poor mother who has a child out of wedlock. She raises the child while working, but when a rich sophisticate falls in love with her daughter, the mother all but disowns her, driving her daughter into her fiancee’s arms and keeping herself out of the picture. She sees the wedding through the church windows from outside, in the rain, because of course. In 1937, this movie was a tearjerker. In 1990, when it was remade as Stella, it kind of didn’t really make any sense. Single, unwed mothers were no longer a life-ruining thing or something to be ashamed of.

In 1975, divorces were just starting to become common. I remember when, for the first time, I was in a class where more students had divorced parents than not. It was just about then that the stigma of a divorce was starting to fade.

Now, in 2015, it has no stigma at all. Like, say, being gay, having divorced parents will not completely trash most young lives. It’s not to say that the actual action of coming out or going through a divorce is not difficult, but…

So watching Mariko in the beginning of Dear Brother, Set 3, Disk 1, crying her heart out over – and worse, suffering bullying because of – her parents divorce is a Stella moment. It doesn’t have the impact it would have in the 1970s…it wouldn’t even all that much in the early 1990s when the anime was made. Times change.

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As Miya-sama will learn, as Kaoru-no-kimi proposes the dissolution of the sorority. Watching Miya-sama’s delusions being eroded, while she sits in denial, was fascinating.

The school drama is far more interesting than poor Mariko’s personal drama, until we learn that Mariko and Aya had once been friendly rivals and in the end, save each other just enough to face another day.

And finally, we come to the most amazing, heartbreaking scene, as Fukiko asks Rei flat out if she hates her and Saint Juste breaks down completely over her feelings of love and hate for her half-sister.

This volume is a rough ride. I think I ended every episode by saying, “Wow, this is a depressing series.” But for all that, it’s one of the most deep, complex and in many ways human, dramas I’ve ever watched. The characters by now are all so fully fleshed out that you can see them as humans, rather than ciphers. These were the days before one-issue/joke per character was the rule. Everyone has flaws, everyone has strengths.

My personal favorite scene is when Nanako notices that drama-signifying doves have all left and no one else notices that there were ever any doves at all.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Yuri – 2
Service – 4 Naked Rei.

Overall – 9

To the end, Miya-sama remains selfish and mean. And in our hearts we can never even imagine her as anything but.





Yuri Anime: Yurikuma Arashi (English)

April 14th, 2015

yurikumaThe Yurikuma Arashi anime from Funimation is, like so many of Ikuhara Kunihiko’s works, a fairy tale. Like so many of his previous works, in this fairy tale the fairy ex machina is the tale itself.

Tsubaki Kureha has met – and forgotten – a childhood friend who is a bear. Ginko has never forgotten her childhood friend and seeks to become a girl to be with Kureha. Surrounding this bastard child of The Gift of the Magi and every outsider story ever, is a series of repeated, variably meaningful images and a story that is never quite sure if it believes in itself or not.

Because there’s no coherence in the story in and of itself, there’s a lot of time to just enjoy the random bits of imagery and wonder what it means to Ikuhara, since it’s almost never given any meaning in the context of the story.

Buried as we were  in overuse of “Yuri” imagery, some with overtly sexual connotation, some completely lacking anything of the kind, all those lilies ceased to have any meaning, which was sort of interesting. Lily petals, whole lily flowers showering down upon the heads of characters and yet, it had almost no connection to the narrative.

There were two standout qualities of the series for me – first and foremost, seeing animated versions of Morishima Akiko-sensei’s art made watching this series worthwhile. Additionally – and I have thanked her personally on Twitter for this – I really appreciated Yuriika, an honest-to-goodness, Evil Psycho Lesbian character. She was my favorite and her death was utterly meaningless, as befits someone who is so pointlessly obsessed.

Yurrika

I do not feel that this series was compelling, in the way Utena, or even Mawaru Penguindrum was, but the ending was not predictable, none of the loose ends were tied up and everything we experience in the body of the story turned out to not be true, so that has to count for something. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 8 Two great tastes that tasted deeply odd together
Story – 7 Once upon a time…oh fuck it.
Characters – 7 Uncarved blocks, one and all. Just remove everything that isn’t a bear
Yuri – 14 million
Service – 7 Much higher than I’d like

Overall – 7

My final thought on the end of Yurikuma Arashi is this: There’s something right/not right about “Ave Maria” becoming a Yuri anthem.





Yuri Manga: Yuri Kuma Arashi, Volume 1 (ユリ熊嵐)

January 25th, 2015

yurikuma1Today I wanted to talk about something that has been much on my mind…

Picasso.

You know, Pablo Picasso, painter. Mostly famous for his Cubist paintings, but he was a prolific artist and evolved throughout his life, so while his work is undoubtedly his, it changed as time went on, as he changed, aged, evolved.

He’s on my mind a lot as I read and watch Yuri Kuma Arashi. And we’ll get to the “why” in a bit, but first, let’s just talk about the manga.

In Volume 1 of the Yuri Kuma Arashi manga (ユリ熊嵐), we meet Tsubaki Kureha, a shy, retiring student, who has recurring dreams of being rescued by a bear princess who, coincidentally, looks just like her popular and outgoing classmate Yurishiro Ginko. Ginko takes a liking to Kureha and starts to cultivate her friendship and develop her personality.

Kureha admits that she knows Ginko is a bear and all about the tragic backstory of her planet, but Ginko’s reaction is to fall apart in laughter a such a preposterous story!

Ginko lives with her late father’s sister as her mother is forever overseas (and unbeknownst to her, maybe, is her aunt’s lover). When a new girl transfers in claiming to be in love with Ginko, it throws a wrench in Kureha’s emotional gears; she was just deciding she “liked” Ginko, you know. If it weren’t enough that Lulu is a love rival, there are persistent rumors that Ginko and the Student Council President (male) are going out. Kureha doesn’t know what to believe, honestly.

When Lulu, Ginko and Kureha accidentally burn down their dorm cooking, Ginko has both of them come live with her. And, at last, we learn that Kureha may have been right about Ginko all along. Kureha swears to protect Ginko as the volume comes to an end, with many questions and few answers.

As you know, if you have been watching the Yuri Kuma Arashi anime and/or are familiar with Ikuhara Kunihiko’s style, these questions may not have any answers.

The manga is very much Morishima Akiko-sensei’s brand of cute/sexy art, with slightly more typical fanservice than usual. Unlike the anime, which has so much fanservice it’s actively crowding out the plot (if there is one) at the moment. And, if you are familiar with Ikuhara’s work, it’s important to remember that the repetitive scenes may never have any meaning per se, just visual impact, that we will later layer with meaning. The best way to approach his work is to not try to guess what it all means, but simply go along for the ride and see where it takes you.

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Which brings me back to Picasso.

One of the things Picasso was seeking to do in his Cubist portraits was show two or more angles of a person simultaneously.  His masterwork Guernica takes this to another level, in which he is simultaneously showing us all three dimensions at once, among other things. And this is why he has been much on my mind. If you treat the simultaneously released versions of Yuri Kuma Arashi as two unique perspectives on the same story, there is still no guarantee that it will make sense, but it gives you a completely different understanding of the whole.

It’s unlikely that Yuri Kuma Arashi is Ikuhara’s Guernica, but heck it might yet be, we won’t know until it’s over and we can see all the angles. And the relics of other series that echo back at us like blood red buildings by day, have started to be integrated into – maybe – a new stylist tic, as they turn blue at night. Indicating what? Who knows…yet. Or ever.

I’ve only seen two episodes of the anime as of yet, but I do want to say that of all the random repeated elements, the one I actually like is “Kuma Shock”, which @twiitar has turned into a nifty ringtone. Thanks Phil! ^_^

The service in the anime is off-putting for me, as it’s not nearly at the level of creeping horror subtlety we’ve become used to. It feels a bit slap in the face-ish.  The one element that I truly do not care for is the use of the word “Yuri” and the image of the lily as a bludgeon, for no apparent reason. Yes, yes the girls are all named Yuri something, got it. Yuri and honey imagery. Yuckers.

I hold no hope that the “trial” scenes will ever make sense.

The one thing about the anime that I genuinely find appealing is that the character designs are very much Morishima-sensei’s art, animated. ^_^

Ratings for the manga only:

Art – 8
Story – 7
Characters – 8 They appear more coherently formed than in the anime
Yuri – 9
Service – 6

Overall – 8

By the time Volume 2 comes out, if indeed it does, the anime will likely be over and I’m sure we’ll have concocted meanings for all the things that don’t mean anything at all. ^_^