Archive for the Yuri Anime Category


Yuri Anime: Strawberry Panic

September 28th, 2006

Here are my final thoughts on Strawberry Panic as I expressed them on Zyl’s most excellent blog Hontou ni so omou?:

Considering the fact that this story is really no more than a collage of recognizable scenes, stereotypes and conventions taken openly from other series, I have to say, I thought it turned out pretty good.

There’s no denying that Strawberry Panic wasn’t brilliant, but considering that it was meant to be trashy, it pulled out a few moments of dignity and elegance out of the trash heap.

As stolen memes go, using the (admittedly obvious) one from The Graduate for the final episode made a satisfactory semi-resolution.

Yes Miyuki and Tamao are still doomed to lives of loneliness and alcoholism, but as clones of Youko and Tomoyo that was their fate from the very beginning. In other news, the Shizuma x Nagisa, Amane x Hikari, Kaname x Momomi and in a surpising late entry Yaya x Tsubomi pairs all live *happily ever after!* or some reasonable facsimile thereof, until bad fanfic writers kill one of the pair off in a heavy-handed attempt to create crisis and re-pair the other with someone else.

But I digress.

No, SP is not a diamond in the rough, but let us call it an attractive riverstone, washed suprisingly clean and shiny by the many, many, MANY tons of water that has flowed downstream from clearer and cleaner sources. ^_^

…

Considering that I began watching this anime with something akin to loathing, I might have to retract the “not brilliant” comment. It must be some kind of decent/funny/entertaining for me to have 180’ed so thoroughly. I’m not sure if it’s a case of the story becoming real and richer despite itself – as parodies are wont to do, just ask any fanfic writer – or the writers managed to find something unique to play with within the framework of the openly stolen memes. I’m inclined towards the former, as I’ve read many a story that started as a 2-dimensional parody/ripoff that suddenly morphed, without the author being really cognizant of the moment of change, into a decent-ish story.

There’s a great scene in Dorothy L. Sayers Strong Poison where mystery author Harriet Vane is bemoaning that very thing to a only-partially sympathetic Lord Peter Wimsey. He, quite rightly, insists that if a writer is going to write anything worth reading then, when the moment comes, s/he must shed the potboiler facade and *write* – conscience be damned. I’d like to think that that was happened here.

What began as thin, barely 2-dimensional trash developed a personality, while never losing that sense of “what can we steal this week?” So, let’s call Strawberry Panic the clever, fun-to-be-around street whore of a Yuri series that it is. ;-)





Yuri Anime: Strawberry Marshmallow, Volume 1

September 19th, 2006

Boy oh boy, had I forgotten how sticky the opening theme of this anime is…now I’ll have it in my head for a week.

So here we are, looking down the barrel of Strawberry Marshmallow, aka Ichigo Mashimaro. And it’s still cute.

I cannot tell you how *annoying* I find it, that’s it’s so damn cute. And girly cute, no less. And giggly. God, if anyone ever saw me giggling at this, I’d never be able to show my face in public again…

…and this isn’t even my favorite volume.

So, I realize that I never really covered any of the episodes specifically in any of my earlier reviews, but I did capture the essence of the series: cute girls doing things cutely.

The first volume is primarily an introduction to our five principals. Itou Nobue, 20 for the anime, so they can leave in all the smoking and drinking gags, her younger sister Chika, 12, annoying next-door neighbor Miu, who is undoubtedly the star of the series, adorable English girl Ana 11, who has forgotten how to speak English and Matsuri, 11, crybaby and everyone’s punching bag.

There is no plot in this series, just a series of goofy gags strung along through the mostly-normal lives of the five girls. School, work, playing games like “let’s pretend” that kind of thing. Or, it would all be normal, except Evil Psychotic Lesbian(TM)-in training Miu always seems to make everything turn out strangely.

And that’s why we watch. Because Miu is crazy. And we love it. ;-)

This US release includes some extras, but nothing exciting. 4 episodes on the first volume, a mini-poster, a reversible case cover and oh boy! a non-credit opening! But I’ve got all the Ichigo Mashimaro dollies I can stand from Dengeki Daioh (and a few I can’t stand,) and US releases never have anything really good anway, except the occasional pencil board (and even those are terrifying at times, like the ROD The TV pencil boards.) More importantly, Geneon has included the clever and rewarding $3 coupon for one of the next two volumes, which I heartily approve of. In fact, let me once again offer up for free, my advice on how to get us fans to buy more DVDs.

1) Include a pre-order form or URL for the next volume in the series. Offer a discount for pre-ordering.

2) Include the same coupon, which provides another discount, thus bringing the cost down to what appears to be a really reasonable price.

3) Offer deeper discounts to people who pre-order the whole series, box sets or thinpaks. Send us whole sets, not one disk in a box and make us buy each other disk separately.

In other words, give us *incentive* and we will buy. Otherwise, get used to selling lots of Volume 1s. This coupon is a baby step in the right direction.

Ratings:

Art – 5 Looks like the manga. Yup.
Story – 7 – If you get past the hump that there is none.
Characters – 7 -This is a completely character-driven series. More specifically Miu drives it.
Yuri – 2- If you can call Miu’s crush on Nobue, and Nobue’s thing for Ana and Matsuri “yuri.” Which is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Service – 7 – Just because of the essential loli-ness of series and author.

Overall – 7

Don’t drink soda while you watch this series, though. You’re liable to suddenly spurt it out your nose.





Yuri Anime: Stellvia, Volume 8

August 17th, 2006

Twice, I thought over how I would approach reviewing this, the final volume of Stellvia. Twice I thought about the plot, the characters, the Yuri, and twice I had the same thought: Battle Atheletes.

These two series have quite a lot in common. Both are series that ran in Dengeki Daioh magazine, both have lead females whose extraordinary talents save the world, and both have a cast of supporting characters that are more interesting than the lead herself.

So let’s do a compare/contrast for fun. To start let’s compare the Yuri:

Battle Athletes clearly wins here. There are so many potential couples – many of whom make *sense* and are not just random pairings of two women who stand next to each other on the screen. And there are at minimum, two canon couples – especially if we count the manga. Mylandah and Lahrri and Kris and Akari are couples. No ifs, and or buts. In contrast Stellvia has only one Yuri couple, but a very decent one it is. I once again enjoyed the heck out of Yayoi’s and Ayaka’s public acknowledgment of their feelings. Not as good as Kris’ and Akari’s manga kiss, but just as public. ^_^

Comparing them as space stories:

Stellvia wins, no question. While both series have invading aliens, threats to the planet and the like, the Battle Athletes anime has so many other, incredibly stupid add-ons to the basic formula that even thinking about it makes me squirm. Stellvia sticks with bug-eyed monsters and a gigantic threatening alien energy menace.  I think, perhaps, the aliens in BA might have not been so bad if they hadn’t chosen the stupidest plot complication EVER as their means of attack.

But, as I thought it over, the real point of comparison has to be their lead characters. And this is why, both times, my mind connected the two. Because once again, Stellvia is vastly superior. Akari from Battle Athletes is the typical idiot savant character. She can do NOTHING right, ever, no matter how hard she tries. But she never really tries, until a crisis occurs and her innate skills mystically pop into overdrive. (This is far more prominent a theme in the anime than the manga, which was mostly free of this.) At every step up the ladder Akari starts back at the lowest level until a miracle catapults her to the top.

This happens to be something that generally bugs me about anime – one of the main themes of nearly every anime is “hard work” – and especially “teamwork” – will get us to the top. There’s a lot of cultural reasons why this is so that I won’t get into but what bugs me is that, in anime it is so rarely either that really gets anyone to the top. Sailor Moon never really works hard at anything, she just *is*. The same is true for most heroes and heroines of manga and anime. Of course fighting series are full of work, but the heroes follow a similar pattern – they are defeated, then come back and defeat the person who just beat them – usually by having miraculously, sometimes magically, sometimes just from sheer “guts”, powered up a gazillion orders of skill/power.

In stark contrast, Shima works her ass off through the whole series. Volume 8 of Stellvia has scene after scene of her working hard enough to make herself puke. There is the teeniest deus ex machina at the end of the series, at zero hour, when the clock has counted down to one second, etc, etc; but as Shima has spent the entire series actually striving to do this *one* thing, I can forgive it without prejudice.

And her moment of lucidity arrives just as infuriatingly cool – or is that, clueless – Kouta melts down completely. That was worth watching the volume for because that boy was annoying the living daylights out of me.

So, yes, Battle Atheletes has more Yuri, but I genuinely think that Stellvia is the better series. It makes sense. No cows. No transgender psychotic murderous twins, no resurrected dead parents. Just one teeny little handwave and a lot of good solid human moments.

Ratings:

Art – 7 Consistent, mostly, throughout, but never great. The CGI stuff is quite good.
Story – 9 I kept nodding over and over as key “space opera” points were handled, competentely
Characters – 9
Yuri – 7
Service – 3 The uniforms. Ugh.

Overall – 8.5

Stellvia was one of my best anime of 2004. Over here in 2006, it’s still in my top twenty of things I’ll reach for to rewatch. My only regret was that the sequel was never, and will never, be made.





Yuri Anime: Simoun mid-season review

July 13th, 2006

Simoun first bleeped onto our Yuri-dar as the manga series running in Yuri Hime magazine, followed almost immediately by the anime which debuted in April 2006.

Now the Simoun franchise includes a great Original Soundtrack, an upcoming novels (Volume 1 and Volume 2), a PSP game and some news/rumor to the effect that Megami magazine will begin running the manga. There is some confusion as to whether it will be the *same* manga that currently runs in Yuri Hime or perhaps a manga created for the anime…or something else. Since the anime and the manga are telling related but not at all identical stories, and since the current crop of Japanese anime magazine overviews of Simoun are full of fanservice-y swimsuit pictures of various characters draped over one another, it’s apparent to me, at least, that they’ve discovered their audience hook. I think it’s a good bet that the manga to run in Megami will be less character and more fanservice than the one in YH – if it is not actually the same manga, simply moved to a new magazine.

But we are not here to discuss the manga…we are here to discuss the anime, which only recently passed the halfway point. For folks who are unfamiliar with Simoun or who just need a refresher course, here is a link to my Simoun category.

Before the anime began, the conversations within Yuri fandom were primarily, predictably, about the gender-choosing issue within the series, and how it might complicate any Yuri pairings. I consider it a win for the story that this topic has long ago been dropped in favor of discussion of the workings of the helical motors, the fate of Chor Tempest, and the various internal and external struggles of the Sybilla, the Simoun pilots, themselves. In fact, I’ve been really impressed by the depth of thought that Simoun fandom has displayed.

Simoun is not an easy watch. There is no doubt in my mind that if it and Strawberry Panic were licensed and sold here at the same time, that SP would be instantly popular, while Simoun would lag behind. Lowest Common Denominator *does* make a difference, and the average anime fan does still has the attention span of a gnat. The Simoun anime contains many technical terms, a large portion of which are drawn from Latin and French, and the world constructed within the series is multi-layered and not entirely filled in. The relationships between the characters are absolutely critical to the story, and complex enough that, at times, it’s not all that easy to gain a grasp of what’s going on the first time one watches an episode.

Simoun provokes many questions – a quality that *I* enjoy in an anime, but fans who want simpler entertainment might dislike. It’s a series that takes work to follow – but IMHO is worth twice every second of effort. I look forward to every episode and I am quite looking forward to the next installment of the manga in the upcoming issue of Yuri Hime.

There’s much here to admire – worldview, plot, character backstory and development. There is pandering, yes, and fetish hooks and fanservice but, because the series as a whole strikes me as intelligent, I’m willing to see them more as smart ways to keep a wide viewing audience and less as cheesy things. Call it a “handwave.” I’ll give the series the kisses and the ero-eyecatches, because it gives me more interesting things to think about.

Ratings:

Art – 7 (when its good, 9, when it’s bad 5, so it averages out)
Story – 9 (bottomed out in Episode 4 and has built steadily since.)
Music – 8 (I’ll be buying that soundtrack…)
Character – 8 (I can’t think of anyone I don’t like…seriously)
Yuri – 7 (I’m still ambivalent about this…which is good.)
Service – 5 (I mentioned the ero-eyecatches, but let’s not forget the uniforms….)

Overall – I think I’m going to have to say 8. I know that every Monday evening, I start slavering for a fix, so, yeah. 8.





Yuri Anime: Loveless, Volume 3

July 11th, 2006

There’s a couple of pieces of business I want to get out of the way before I commence with this review.

1) I am neck deep in the tedious grunt work stage of Yuri Monogatari 4, the newest yuri manga anthology from ALC Publishing. As a result, reviews *will* be more spaced out than usual. My arm is already falling off, and I’m just in the beginning stages. So please bear with my much slower-than-usual pace of reviewing.

2) I can tell that I am getting more popular – more of you are writing in to tell me how wrong I am. ^_^ I do read all your posts…not always all the way through, but I do give each the old college try. Don’t feel bad if I don’t respond. It just means I don’t have time, don’t have anything to say, don’t feel that strongly about it, or think you’re an idiot. You can decide which it is. ^_^

3) Today’s review is due entirely to the generosity of the folks at Media Blasters, who are very, totally, supportive of Yuri in general and Yuricon in particular. I am beginning with the third volume of Loveless because that is the one I was given. Should I obtain the second volume at some point in time, I will review it. If you would rather read a single cohesive review of the very Yuri, very lovely Yuri arc in Loveless, then you will want to read my initial review of this series.Since my opinion of the show as a whole hasn’t changed, you’ll probably want to read that anyway.

Volume 3 picks up after we have initially met Kouya and Yamato, and learned that they are a Sacrifice and Sentouki pair. They are also, we learn, Zeros. This appears to mean that they have been genetically created or altered (the anime is vagueish about this – the manga might shed more light on this, but please don’t think my lack of information denotes interest) to be nothing more than puppets in this game.

Kouya’s and Yamato’s arc, while short, is actually quite good. It also looks to be just about identical to the manga arc, so that’s something for Yuri fans to look forward to in the translated manga. The bottom line is that they find hope and light in what is a palpably hopeless and dark life of doomed combat. In other words, we can believe that they actually do live happily ever after.

My personal favorite moment was about 2/3 way through the arc when Yamato is facing Ristuka, the protagonist. I had just been saying to myself that Ritsuka’s deceased older brother must have been a total prick, when Yamato makes that exact comment. <3

Just for kicks, I watched the two episodes after their arc. I spent most of the time cringing at the icky shota and utterly soppy, faggy gayness of all the male characters. Thank GOD Kouya and Yamato weren’t treated with the same broad strokes, or they would have been wearing tool-belts and birkenstocks. I kept screaming at the TV “Not every gay guy dresses like that!” ^_^;

Because the DVD is a Media Blasters release, there is only a subtitled track , no American voice track. This is no loss for me, personally, but you might want to be aware before you buy. Additionally, I found the subtitles to be plain wrong in places – in that way I always complain about, where the translator takes liberties with what they say to make it more casual language. Again, not a problem for most people.

HOWEVER, I will never, *ever* understand the thing anime companies do when the character screams one thing – almost always a person’s name – and they substitute something else like the person’s title. If Ritsuka screams “Sensei!”, why on earth would you translate that as anything other than what it is? It happens several times where a person is called by one thing and the translators, for reasons of their own, have them say another thing. My final complaint about the DVD; the opening menu is nigh on impossible to read from 10 feet away – at least for my tired, old, eyes.

Ratings (for the Yuri arc only)

Art – 5 (grainy and hard to see at times)
Story – 8
Character – 8
Music – ugh, don’t get me started
Yuri – 8
Loser FanGirl – 20

Overall – 7

I seriously doubt that I’ll ever be able to watch anything but the yuri arc in this series…it just has too many fetishes that are not only not mine, but make me actively cringe.

But the Yuri arc, primo. Thumbs up. Excellent.