Archive for the Yuri Anime Category


Yuri Anime: El Cazador de la Bruja, Volume 1 Part 2 (English)

December 28th, 2009

El Cazador de la Bruja, Volume 1The second disk of Volume 1 of El Cazador de la Bruja is where it all changes for Ellis, Nadie, Jody…and us.

For Ellis, she’s come to recognize that her relationship with Nadie will be far more than that of a bounty hunter and her bounty. She’s starting to tease and poke Nadie gently and makes no bones about her admiration for her “partner” to other people. When they meet a happily married couple, Ellis compares her and Nadie to them without reserve.

For Nadie, the truth about Ellis’ past brings a renewed sense of protection and affection for the girl who is not a girl at all.

And for Jody “Blue Eyes” Heyward, full understanding of Project Leviathan brings about a determination to keep Ellis and her power under her care, even when the rest of the witches disagree. And she gets some smokin’ henchwomen. :-D

For us, the series shifts into a more well-worn pattern with our heroines encountering faceless drones bent on killing them, while they change lives by being Ellis and Nadie.

I remember being totally squicked when the series began that Ellis and Nadie might become a couple, but by this 2nd quarter of the series, the idea no longer bothered me. It’s obvious to me that Ellis, in her innocence, naivete or because she likes jerking Nadie around, is leagues ahead of Nadie in sensing what they already mean to each other and where that might lead. Nadie is slower than Ellis in this one thing and that works just fine, keeping their relationship totally organic and not at all rushed or fake feeling.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Yuri – 3, growing slowly, but steadily
Service – 2

Overall – 8

Once more, my sincere gratitude today to Okazu Superhero Amanda M. for sponsoring today’s review!





Top Ten Yuri Anime of 2009

December 27th, 2009

I probably should have put this disclaimer on the Top Ten Manga of 2009 too, but I always assume that my readers understand that this list is *my opinion*. If you see a series you disagree with, or don’t see one you like, then the answer to your question is, “Because I have a different opinion than you do.”

Also, for various reasons I’ve just combined the list into one again, like I did with Manga. I’ll note whether something is available in English, Japanese or both.

And with those restatement of the obvious disclaimers, here’s MY Top Ten Yuri Anime of 2009!

10. To Aru no Kagaku no Railgun (Japanese)

The Yuri in this series is meant as a joke. It’s played as perverted, as over-the-top-uncontrollable, as laughably embarrassing and pointless. Pretty much everything Yuri was in most anime for the last 30 years – a veritable step back into the “blackface” era of Yuri.

But.

Kuroko was in all ways a wonderful person; reliable, intelligent, loyal and friendly. Her feelings for Misaka were, wayyyyyy deep down past the layers of hopeless pervy-ness, probably real.

And frankly, who cares? Railgun was a fun anime with some crappy characteristics and some good ones. It was entertaining, which is why I watch entertainment. So, step back into hopeless, psycho lesbian urges, yes, but it still makes the list at Number 10.

9. Maria Watches Over Us, Season 3 (Japanese & English)

Sachiko would recognize Yumi, even in a panda suit.

8. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha/ Nanoha As (Japanese & English)

I’m really sorry that these series didn’t do better here. There’s some issues with the fandom that I wish we could resolve with fire and pain but, below the icky service and tiresome loli, there was an awesome series with the beginnings of a wonderful couple.

For those moments of off-stage quiet, when you can imagine Fate and Nanoha flying together for the sheer fun of it, and for a future Pluffy BedTM that we didn’t get to see licensed, but we know is there, this is my Number 8 anime series for the year.

7. Candy Boy (Japanese)

I stopped watching it after 5 episodes, so I have no idea if it got to a place where I would have actually thought it “good,” but that’s not why Candy Boy is on the list. Clearly, Yuri fandom liked it. That’s a truism. But what was most interesting and important about it is that it showed that an ONA – Original Online Animation has a future in Japan, where fans will pay. Will it ever be a realistic model in the west is still a bit up in the air. But, for changing the way Japanese anime companies think about things – and maybe paving the way for a new wave of short, original works – it makes Number Seven.

6. Kanamemo (Japanese & English)

Good heavens, there were some really crappy things in this series. lol But setting aside an elementary school age manager and a mopey protagonist and everything about Haruka, Kanamemo presented us with quite possibly the single most realistic established lesbian couple in anime this year – maybe ever – Yume and Yuuki. They are presented with a surprising amount of empathy, romance and love. They kiss. We don’t see, but we know, that they they sleep together. Above all, they are treated as an established couple by the people around them.

I couldn’t say it was a “good” anime, but Yuuki and Yume are definitely a great couple.

5. Saki (Japanese & English)

I’d seen this manga on the Japanese Yuri lists forever when the anime began – and my first impression was, “uh, yeah, okay.” Sure Saki and Nodoka, sitting in a tree….but, once we got the other schools into the mix, the Yuri rating took off. I know that I’m in a minority, but I still think Momo and Yumi were the best couple of the series. :-)

4. Blue Drop (Japanese & English)

This may well be the last thing I’ll ever like by Yoshitomi Akihito. It’s true that the anime tromps all over the same tropes he’s beaten to death over the last few years, but aside from the Dead Lesbian and the Psycho Lesbian, and the school girls and hopeless romances, this prequel to the Blue Drop manga stands strong as a fascinating “clash of cultures romance.” Still holds the record for the best pickup line ever too.

Are you getting excited? This is where I always get a little doki-doki….

3. El Cazador (Japanese & English)

I love Bee Train’s Girls With Guns On The Run trilogy. I’ve loved all of the series for themselves and love them all together as a series. I’m still a bit over the moon that we actually have all *three* series on DVD in English. It’s kind of amazing – like an alternate universe in which stuff I like actually gets licensed in the US. Catch me, I’m feeling woozy….

There’s no question that this series, as it’s sister series in the past did, would make my Top Ten list but, because I love Ellis’ “Yes, sir!” and Nadie’s “Yuigon attara, dozo” and above all I love Ellis who loves Nadie when her eyes are shining, this series makes Number Three.

2. Sasamekikoto (Japanese & English)

I didn’t expect this series to translate as well as it did to anime, but…wow, it did! And I didn’t expect people to like it, especially folks who weren’t familiar with Yuri tropes, like Aoi’s Loser Fangirlyness or Sumika’s hopless love for her best friend but, amazingly, it transcended tropes and communicated directly with viewers’ hearts.

Sasamekikoto marks the first time an anime has been seen on several high-profile lesbian entertainment sites, and the second time Afterellen.com has carried a Yuri anime. It also marks the truly significant fact that Crunchyroll has made a conscious and conspicuous effort to support and promote Yuri Anime. Heck – they even have a Yuri kisses contest. lol

For all these many reasons, and for others I haven’t thought of, but you probably have, Sasamekikoto is my Number Two anime of the Year.

And finally, probably no surprises here…

Aoi Hana (Japanese & English)

It was…beautiful. It was quiet and gentle and real. It was lovingly animated, it was extremely well-adapted from the manga – perhaps slightly better than the manga in places.

It had characters I could wish over for lunch, and a storyline that resonated as one of the absolutely most realistic portrayals of a young woman in love with another woman ever seen in an anime.

It had an Opening sequence that made us smile.

It simulcast in many English-speaking countries an hour after it ran on Japanese TV.

It is, finally, what we have never before had – a gateway Yuri anime.

There was never any question in my mind as I watched this all-too-short season that Aoi Hana was the absolute best Yuri Anime of 2009.

***

I only hope that I can wish 2010 be as good, because besting this is going to be hard. :-) And crichey – look at how much of it came out in English!

One more list to go – check back on New Year’s Eve for my Top Ten Overall.

And once more I end with the question – what was YOUR Top Yuri Anime of the year? Tell me in the comments!





Yuri Anime: Sasamekikoto (English)

October 23rd, 2009

What an amazing year. Not only have we had a ton of Yuri in anime in general, we had the delightful and lovely Aoi Hana and now…unbelievably, in English, for free, legally streamed to our computers, the Yuri comedy-drama Sasamekikoto. It’s like a dream state. ^_^

In short, Sasamekikoto, the “thing that is whispered,” is a story about Murasame Sumika who is in love with her best friend, Kazama Ushio. It’s a hopeless love because, despite the fact that Ushio loudly proclaims that she likes girls, she only likes cute, petite girls. Tall, athletic, hypercompetent Sumi just isn’t cute and frilly, the way Ushio likes them. May I just editorialize for a moment and say Ushio’s an *idiot.* Sumi is perfect.

The first few episodes start off on a dour note, with Sumika pining away for an oblivious Ushio, who appears to fall for a new girl each week. The first few episodes follow the manga pretty closely, so I don’t expect too much change as the story goes on.

Sasamekikoto is surprisingly richly animated, well voiced by a mostly-new cast and is an interesting take on a variety of Yuri tropes. Best friend, one-sided love, cross-dressing, and more to come. (For all full breakdown of all the tropes, check out my review of Volume 2 of the manga.) Although the story is decidedly melodramatic, it has pretty steep ups and downs of comedy and drama to manage, which it does pretty well.

The only real negative I can muster for Sasamekikoto is that I suddenly realized – I don’t like Ushio. Yet. Sumi beating the crap out of the bag in karate made me realize that I really *like* Sumi and want to slap Ushio. It’s a sign of a good story that I’m feeling anything at all about any of the characters, so bravo for the anime producers.

And bravo for Crunchyroll, who continue to invest in Yuri! They’ve told me that they have a genuine interest in building up the Yaoi and Yuri audiences, and I’m very excited to see that they are putting their money where their mouth is. Now we, the Yuri-viewing audience, needs to do the same.

I know, I know, the licensing doesn’t cover huge swatches of the planet. Trust me – if they could get those covered, they would. But for those of us in the US and Oceania – here it is, Yuri. For Free. In English. One hour after it airs in Japan. Support this please, because the better their numbers are – the more they will get. It’s really *that* simple.

For the price of a sandwich a month, you get good Yuri like Sasamekikoto and Aoi Hana and really stupid Yuri like Koihime Musou and not Yuri, but really, like it needs to be any more weird than it is, like Book of Bantorra. (What? You’re not watching it? Oh, you should be…it’s absolutely dreadful. Laughably, hilariously so. And Paku Romi as Hamutz Meseta. There are no other reasons needed to watch this.)

Watch Sasamekikoto and collect the whole set of Yuri Tropes!

Ratings:

Art – 8, with a few obvious cost-saving measures
Story – 7
Characters – 7, but they will get better
Yuri – 8
Service – 2

Overall – 7.5

Teenaged girls with wildly roller-coastering emotions? Ridiculous.

Joshibu ahoy!

…

I like Tomoe and Miyako best, if anyone cares.





Yuri Anime: Saki, Mid-season review

September 21st, 2009

Saki, we need to talk.

It’s nothing bad, really, it’s just …

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t sure that we’d get along at first. You seemed to be too fake-cutesy, with those ridiculous ever-blushing cheeks, but always flashing your legs at me. It was a creepy mixed signal thing that got on my nerves. And Nodoka, always bouncing her big chest like that….I thought, can you both really be so innocent as you’re gazing into each other’s eyes longingly? But fine, I set that aside.

Then you really started taking off. You let your innate abilities show, like you were finally free to be yourself. Sure, I noticed a few things, like the way you suddenly throw your ass into my face, dress up to please the guys in bathing suits, yukata and maid costumes all while you’re looking at Nodoka so intensely. It kind of freaks me out. Like, pick one, okay? Can you not be the G-rated version of Girls Gone Wild? But I know that’s not really your fault. You just want to get ahead in the world and the best way to do that is to have the fanboys on your side. If they love you, I know, I know…

Despite all that, I’ve really come to enjoy our time together.

And when you introduced the whole new cast, I thought, good heavens, this is overkill, but now…I find myself really happy that you have all these new friends. I want to watch you having fun playing Mahjong with them. (And I’m even collecting those Mahjong tiles Crunchyroll gives me when I watch you playing. How silly is that, huh?)

I admit, I really like those two from Tsuruga, but you’d guess that, wouldn’t you? Yumi and Momo remind me of you and Nodoka, only without that other stuff. They don’t even seem to notice anyone else but each other. I think they make a great couple. And Kana and Fujiko from Kazekoshi too.

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I’m really proud of you and I think you’re a good anime. I just wish you could shed the service and be a great anime. I know you have it in you.

Thanks for listening.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Characters: 9
Yuri – 5
Service – 5

Overall – 7

In my first review of this series, I said this was a predictable anime – and I wasn’t wrong, but it really has exceptionally likable characters and has upped the Yuri, so there will be no complaints from me.





New Anime Season Summer 2009: Yuri Anime: Kanamemo (English)

July 13th, 2009

We’ve talked about how similar 4-koma comics are to each other many times. They are usually slice of life, perhaps at a school, in a club, a bunch of friends, all hangingoutandbeingsilly. Life, you know.

Well, Kanamemo isn’t like that. It has a rather depressing set up, as it happens. Kana’s parents had passed away when she was young and she was living with her grandmother until she also passed away, leaving Kana alone. So alone, in fact, that not a single adult, government agency or busybody neighbor even notices that she’s got to go somewhere. As the movers begin to take her grandmother’s items, it struck me as odd that whoever was in charge of the funeral thought to get the old lady’s personal items cleaned up, but somehow forgot to find somewhere to put her *granddaughter.*

When Kana panics and runs off with only a rucksack, she finds, after much travail, a live-in position with a newspaper delivery office populated by 4 adults, an elementary school girl for an office chief and I started to realize that this was going to be a problematic series for me. Specifically – there are too many handwaves.

At the Fanfic Revolution, we had a few rules for writers. One of them, coined by Adam Jones, was the “one handwave” rule. Every author gets one “handwave” – one thing that can just be passed off ’cause. If you are writing a story in which aliens land in your house, then that is the handwave. Everything after that ought to be internally consistent with that and everyone’s actions ought to make sense given their personalities. If people can fly – fine. But if people can fly, then suddenly some of them also have telepathy and, oh, didn’t I mention the Morlocks? Well, there are Morlocks. ….No.

Kana’s grandmother dying and her being completely, utterly forgotten and forlorn was the one handwave. Then she finds a live-in position at Fuushin Newspaper. Okay. Not *quite* a handwave. Acceptable.

The other staff members are a lesbian couple, a drunken pervert, a 3rd year ronin. Acceptable. Stupid, but acceptable. Not a handwave as such.

The office chief is an elementary school girl. No.

But then, above and beyond all that, I am being asked to believe that Kana, who I must remind myself is only 13, is also an idiot. And that was it. When she failed to ride a bicycle – failed to even let go when she repeatedly fell(!) – I developed a deep dislike for her. She’s hopeless, I thought, throw her in the river in a box and have done with it.

And then there’s the pervert. She is the Japanese male audience, wrapped in a sexy woman suit. She behaves the way the viewers would want to, if they were dressed in a sexy woman suit and had any cojones at all. Which is the final handwave. When I am reading a manga, I can skip over things that bore, irritate or annoy me – I can make distasteful scenes last microseconds. To have to sit and linger lasciviously on every violation perpetrated by Haruka on the underage characters makes me stabby.

By the second episode the depressing premise is pushed into the position of “tool used to provide Kana with a means of narration,” we can move on. Setting aside the issue of Haruka, let’s turn to Yume and Yuuki, the resident lesbians.

They are, in fact, a lesbian couple. No one will say that – no one will even imply it in conversation, but they are. The first time we see them, they are giving each other a goodbye kiss and while it is not lasciviously lingered upon, it cannot be denied or passed off as anything else. They continue on in this vein, as the provider of silly, eminently undeniable “they are a couple” humor. Yume is cheerful, energetic and studying to be a pastry chef, Yuuki is clingy and passive-aggressive, so clearly, she’s a lesbian. They are quite cute together.

Saki, the aforementioned elementary school office chief is wise and competent beyond her years. Basically she’s a 40 year old woman in a loli-bait body. I don’t pretend to get why the hell that is, but she’s hardly the first such and will hardly be the last.

And Hinata is the only character that seems in any way realistic. A student who has failed the university exam three times, she is working and, one hopes, studying. She is the other cipher for the viewing audience – the Dr. Jekyll to Haruka’s Hyde.

It’s not a godawful tear-my-eyes-out series, but it makes me depressed. It’s not a fun 4-koma, it’s a miserable drudgery of a 4-koma inside a decent 4-koma suit. I’d like to watch the suit, without the creature inside it, plskthx.

Ratings:

Art – 4 to me, but rather typical for 4-koma, so 6
Story – 4 to me, 7 to people who like that kind of thing or can not see the obvious
Characters – same as above
Yuri – 8
Service – 7

Overall – 5 to me, maybe to climb higher if it gets rid of that thing inside it.

I think there are some cute elements. They just happen to not be the things that the Japanese audience thinks are cute elements.