Archive for the Yuri Anime Category


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.





New Anime Season Summer 2009: Yuri Anime: Aoi Hana

July 2nd, 2009

If you are not familiar with Aoi Hana check out my review of Volume 1 of the Aoi Hana manga (or if you want the story through Volume 3, check the Aoi Hana category on the sidebar. Today we’re just going to talk anime.

Crunchyroll launched this anime with no fanfare – in fact, with barely even a blip on the radar. No press release, no time to build anticipation. But, there it was, with 6 hours to go before it launched on Japanese TV at some gawdforsaken hour, a simulcast in CR was announced to be shown one hour later. You can still catch that first episode, of course.

Rumors about this production were pretty rampant. The voice cast is newcomers to the field, maybe Ikuhara Kunihiko (of Revolutionary Girl Utena fame) might be animating the opening sequence. In fact, he did and it’s quite lovely and although they are relatively new names to the seiyuu world, the skill and professionalism of the voice actresses was top notch.

So, the clock ran down and there we were watching what was certainly the most anticipated Yuri anime of 2009 to date.

Right off the bat, the opening sequence was lovely. Spoilery, maybe, but lovely. The ending sequence uses some of the watercolor art from the manga as a background and was, in its own way, just as nice. The songs were totally suitable.

As I said, the voice cast was excellent. Some people have complained that Fumi’s voice is too high, but as usual, they are forgetting that by Japanese standards, a high-pitched girly voice is *more* attractive, not less. And despite the delusion we as fans have, there really is no sign that Japanese anime companies give a rat’s ass about what we want. Especially as it is still Japanese fans who shell out the yen for what they want, while foreign fans are much more reluctant to do so.

I found the art appealing, and felt that the tone of the manga was captured perfectly. I have no complaints about the anime itself.

There were a number of issues with the subtitles. Although I had no problems, many people have written in here and other places to note that subtitles did not always work. At least one person commented that it’s a known bug. This is unacceptable, really, for a company trying to rethink their business model and be *the* portal for anime to the western audience. In some cases, simply right-clicking and “enabling” subtitles worked to fix this. In other cases, refreshing the page did. In yet others nothing seemed to work.

On the positive side, it appears that there was no subscription embargo for the simulcast, although there were IP limitations. CR has posted a list of the countries in which the series can be legally viewed in their Aoi Hana forums – consider posting intelligently there to counter the “eww Yuri” posts. For my part, less than $7/month is less than one sandwich and chips and I think it’s a ridiculously low price to pay for legal streaming anime, subbed, that I want to see, right after it was on Japanese TV. I’m more than happy to pay the price.

My main thought about all this is that we finally have a “Yuri” anime we can show people as a stereotypical Yuri series, in the same way that Gravitation has stood as a gateway “Yaoi” anime for so many years. This story has many of the most typical Yuri tropes, but is not a parody or a melodrama. It is a good story, but undeniably about a young woman who likes women. The characters are strong, are likable and are the kind of people you’d want over for lunch.

Yesterday I was able to watch a simulcast of Aoi Hana, eat ice cream and watch fireworks. It was just about the most perfect day ever. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 9
Characters – 9
Story – 8
Yuri – 7 (Ultimately, not in episode 1, however)
Service – 1

Overall – 9

This is a great way to continue the odd-numbered year Yuri effect. We can look forward to this, then autumn will bring even more good things for us with El Cazador and Sasameikoto.





Yuri News: Aoi Hana Anime on Crunchyroll

July 1st, 2009

Fans of Aoi Hana will be able to watch the new anime within an hour of it showing on Japanese TV on Cruchyroll!

Check out the CR Aoi Hana listing for information. It will be made available at 3PM EDT for American viewers.

Update: This simulcast is subbed, and appears to be available to UK, Mexico and Canada viewers as well. If you can confirm any other countries, please let us know!.





Yuri Anime: El Hazard – Magnificent World (English)

June 8th, 2009

I know I’ve told the tale many times, about how Sailor Moon was my gateway into Yuri. But it was not my gateway into anime. My first anime was back when I was watching Star Blazers after school and instinctively understanding that anime was a black hole into which all my time and money would go, so I avoided it like the plague. A decade later, I was teaching martial arts and hanging with a group of other MA teachers. We’d get together and watch crappy movies and stuff and one day one of them brought along Tenchi Muyo, the TV series, and for some reason, we all got hooked on it. We watched that and the movies…I’ll never forget how filthy the third movie made us all feel. ^_^;

Because, or perhaps despite the fact that Tenchi was one of my gateway anime, I somehow managed to skip El Hazard…until now. Of course I had *heard* of El Hazard. I knew of Fatora and Alielle. But I had never actually watched the anime.

When I announced on Twitter that I was about to embark upon watching Magnificent World, I was inundated with “OMG, that was SO AMAZING! Best EVAR!” responses. I asked those folks when the last time they actually watched this anime was, knowing full well the answer would be, for most, several years ago – or never since they first watched it, when it was their gateway. I knew, based on my many years of experience with anime fans, that these folks loved their *memory* of El Hazard, not necessarily the reality of it.

Let me say this. I enjoyed Tenchi Muyo. It was my first experience with harem anime, a genre I dubbed “dorky boy and beautiful babes.” But I am fully aware that it wasn’t high art, either, and if I sat down to watch it now, I’d probably give myself a headache from rolling my eyes. ^_^

Sean, who really understands my opinions on this kind of thing, got it right. El Hazard is good for what it is – a Tenchi-like harem anime in a fantasy, rather than scifi, setting. He understood how I manage my expectations of anime. He explained what I could reasonably expect to enjoy. He was pretty much right on, so cookies for him, when I see him on Saturday. ^_^

So, all that having been said as preface – El Hazard – Magnificent World was not bad. It had some elements that were interesting and some that were not as much to me as to others.

The basic plot is self-fulfilling. Average (but not below average) Makoto is sent to an alternate universe by the goddess Ifurita in order to save her from something that hasn’t happened yet. Along with Makoto, his self-proclaimed rival Jinnai, a childhood friend Nanami and a hapless teacher Fujisawa also find themselves in the Magnificent World. Makoto learns that he is the dead ringer for the missing princess, Fatora, and is thus requested to take her place until she can be found.

The bad guy is hopelessly obvious, the plot is a lot of sound and fury and really very little happens, but entertainingly enough. There’s enough silliness to appeal to the physical comedy crowd, a little bit of falling on naked women for the harem crowd and Jinnai laughs maniacally a lot, which seemed to be appealing to many who professed love for the series.

I was told that I would like the three priestesses, as they are “strong” female characters. And it made me wonder that they are considered strong, when they are obviously the weakest characters in the series. They scream and fight quite a bit – but they are weak in the sense that they lose more than they win and they go completely mushy for Makoto or other potential romantic partners. That is not how I define “strength.” I liked Diva and her bugs, and above all I liked Jinnai’s relationship with the Bugrom, which was surprisingly sincere.

Which brings us to Fatora and Alielle, who are both more interesting for what they are not, than for what they are. We are introduced to Alielle as the missing Fatora’s lover – it’s instantly apparent that no one really takes her seriously in this regard. It’s only after she then expresses interest in other women, that we are forced to reevaluate her. Yes, we have to admit, guess she’s actually “that way.” But because she is so diminutive, we’re never really going to take her seriously…ever. I believe this is quite intentional. If she were drawn as an adult, say like Shayla-Shayla, we’d be forced to see her and Fatora as an *actual couple*. And that is not done, so by drawing her (and voicing her) so childishly, we can nod, amused and certain that they are cute together, but not much more. Fatora, when she finally shows up is not the blueblood princesss we expect, but a total jerk, which pleased me no end. I think she and Alielle make a fine couple. ^_^

The main romance does not suck. And in this OVA at least, at the very end, in the still art that accompanies the credits, we are able to see something that utterly, completely lacks in today’s harem anime – some representation of Makoto and Ifurita as a totally normal, functional couple. They touch, they put their arms around one another and, we presume with the final panel, they kiss. It would have been even nicer to see them do so in the anime itself, but I’m glad to see it at *all* so I won’t quibble. :-) The fact that in a bad mood Ifurita can destroy the world is sort of passed over, but we’ll pretend that being a high school boy’s girlfriend is all a goddess could ever wish for and they live happily ever after. The End, until the next OVA.

This box set is not bad, considering it’s old. Old enough to be from Pioneer, not even Geneon. The packaging is nice, there’s a bit of artsyness to it and unlike the old cardboard box with 6 DVDs model, it doesn’t take up too much space on the shelf.

Compared with Tenchi, Makoto is less of a loser, the service is mild by today’s standards. The most eye-rolling handwave is that no one can see Makoto is a guy until his long wig comes off and then suddenly it’s instantly apparent he’s male! The romances are not icky, there’s less haremization of all the females. And Fujisawa, who today would be a creepy perv is just a plain old respectable drunk, who really gives a shit about his students.

I’m probably not running back to The Magnificent World as a comfort anime, but it had some good elements and was reasonably entertaining – as anime should be.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Characters – 7
Yuri – 6
Service – 4

Overall – 7

Sincere thanks for the generosity and kindness of Okazu Superhero Eric P. for sponsoring today’s review and letting me catch up on this classic Yuri anime!