Archive for the Yuri Anime Category


Yuri Anime: Strawberry Panic

April 11th, 2006

I’ll do my best to make today’s post simple and straightforward, so you have less room for cognitive dissonance, but I have little hope of you all following the logic. So, with a deep breath and a dash of desperation, I bring you the first of the Spring 2006 Yuri Anime Season reviews.

I first encountered Strawberry Panic as a series of short stories published in Dengeki G’s Magazine. (These have now been collected into a single volume, which is NOT the same as the first volume of the manga.)I reviewed these stories as a whole in January 2004. These stories were all short, plotless vignettes. Each one gave the briefest glimpse into a “Yuri coupling” (the phrase used on the original website which is now gone) between two girls who attended one of three schools – the same schools with untransliteratable names as those in the anime.

Because Dengeki G’s is a magazine for fanboys who play dating sims and h-games with characters that all look unpleasantly young (and who, I am sure, call out “oniiii-chaaaan” at every opportunity,) in every short story, we meet a horribly lolified girl who does something exciting like trip and scrape her knee, or fall inexplicably into a pond, or make lunch. In each of these vignettes, the older, admired/desired girl is cool only by comparison with her partner who looks 6 years old. At the end of every vignette, we read a breathless thought of love, or perhaps a scandalous confession of like or, in some case, even a quick peck on the cheek! Shock!

Now here’s the part where you have to work hard to follow me. *Based on the aforementioned stories*, the anime is not that bad.

Don’t get all hairball on me – I am not saying that the anime is not bad or – heaven forfend – good. I am saying, in what I hope is a clear and concise manner that given the utter craptasticness of the stories from which the idea came, the anime is less horrible than I expected.

The anime, while moe (duh) and distinctly derivative of Maria-sama ga Miteru, and school uniform fetishy, and just plain stupid, is still better than I imagined it would be, because for however bad the Strawberry Panic anime is – it is *still better than the original stories.* (And incidentally, better than the manga, as well, in which Nagisa is one of those horrible creatures who refers to herself in third-person.)

Okay. So, I’m the only person on this continent whose expectations for the Strawberry Panic anime weren’t disappointed. But I had an a priori understanding of how dire it was going to be.

Now, let’s get the actual review over with quickly. Strawberry Panic is written for the lowest common denominator, will have as many cliche’s as possible crammed into each episode and the Yuri equals fanservice. This is a classic use of Yuri as a sales tactic. Yuri is the fetish du jour here.

Ratings:

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

Overall – 6

Will I watch it, since it’s such crap? Hell, yes! I find crap as amusing as the next person. But the first person who tries to, say compare Strawberry Panic with something decent like Strawberry Shake Sweet, which is Yuri by a woman for women (and men), will be shunned.





Yuri Anime: Mai Otome

April 7th, 2006

moccThere were so many things wrong with Mai Otome (or Mai Zhime if you prefer,) that I had very low expectations of it from the first. And with the cataclysmically badly written reset ending that made the first 24 episodes of Mai Hime meaningless, I expected a train wreck at the end of this series.

I’m pleased to report that my low expectations were surpassed. ^_^

Don’t get me wrong – Mai Otome is not Haibane Renmei…or even Stellvia. It’s a fanservice-filled action romp through several tedious fetishes with a plot thrown in for good measure. But given that, the ending was pretty damn good. The key point, I think, is that unlike Mai Hime, which was very serious in all the moments outside the fanservice-based moments of “humor” (look, heh heh, her tits are big! Heh, look she has no underwear, heh), Mai Otome was actually fairly light hearted, (with copious amounts of fanservice-based “humor,” as well, duh.)

Things the end of Mai Otome *didn’t* have:

– Giant Shizuru x Natsuki lovefest reunion

– Nina getting a clue

– Mashiro comprehending that rebuilding the palace was *still* a bad idea for her subjects – even if it had her happy giant sunflower on it, instead of a giant laser.

– Spontaneous reincarnation of every person who had previously died. (They sort of brought back a few key people, but that was done with an actual tie-in to the plot. And it was nothing like the “our viewers are idiots” mass reincarnation from Mai Hime.) In fact, they so very did NOT bring some people back, that I can only assume that that was the major complaint they had heard on the first series.

Things the ending *did* have:

– The calvary thundering down the hill to the rescue about three dozen times. And as stupid as each one was, I enjoyed it every time. :-)

– A really amusing, if obvious, gag involving Miss Maria.

– Chie and Aoi lovefest reunion

– Haruka getting a moment of actual cool

– All the Otome getting a moment of actual cool

– An epilogue which not only made some sense, but gives the most obnoxious plot complication (Nina and Sergey) a chance to reset in a semi-organic manner.

Ratings:

Art – 8 (On a head-to-head comparison, the art for Mai Otome is SO much better than that for Mai Hime)
Characters – 8
Story – 7
Music – 7
Yuri – 5
Service – 8

Overall – 7

Overall, I really think that this ending was as good as we could have hoped for from this series. This summer there are 4 Mai Otome movies slated for release…let’s see if they can manage to not ruin the TV series for us, shall we? ^_^





Yuri Anime: Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl

April 6th, 2006

Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? I wanted to end the previous season before I took a look at the new season of yuri anime and I thought that Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl was a good place to start as it was a remarkable ending.

The Kashimashi anime moved in a totally different direction than the manga has taken. I can’t say that it was a bad thing. Without giving away any of what’s going on in the manga (I’ll wait for Volume 3 to come out for that) I can say that the anime had only one seriously weak plot complication, where the manga has that and at least one more and the chance that it may develop into two more.

More importantly, the anime ended. I mean – it *resolved*. Decisions were made, choices were finalized – it ended. For real.

No, really. I mean it.

Hazumu remains a girl and chooses one of the two girls who loves her. It was so…normal.

Think of all the dumb things that could have happened: Hazumu turning back into a boy was the one I was waiting for. But she didn’t. How weird is that?

In fact, then ending was so normal – so much like a thing that might have actually happened in real life (with the one exception of the silly plot complication, if you’ve seen it, you know what I mean) that it kind of just went under the radar. No outcry of “OMG! An anime actually ENDED! With a RESOLUTION!”

Instead there was a huge silence. So – after all these years of watching crappy unresolved restart endings we FINALLY get a real ending and it’s a yuri ending where the girl remains a girl and get the girl and…thud. Nothing.

Go out and watch the damn ending already! ^_^ We can call it Kashimashi Girl Gets Girl.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Characters – 7
Story – 7
Music – 7
Yuri – 8
Service – 5

Overall – 7

Hazumu doesn’t turn back into a boy and still get the girls. ^_^





Yuri Anime: Madlax, Volume 5

March 16th, 2006

Madlax 5 is absolutely, positively worth the wait.

I know that most anime fans have the attention spans of a gnat, so I wanted to say that quickly, before you stopped reading – or if you, perchance, have stopped watching Madlax because you saw Noir and think that it’s the same thing. It is the same thing – but better. Think of Noir as practice.

This volume is entitled “Convergence” and for once, the title actually fits. In this volume all the playing pieces gather together on one board.

Madlax and Vanessa have been framed so that the entire country believes that they have murdered a member of the royal family – which they have not. Rimelda (the official translation is Limelda, but I prefer the R to the L, so I’m sticking with my version, even though it is wrong) has been assigned Madlax as a target, but when she confronts Madlax and Vanessa, they give her the data they stole from Enfant.

This entire volume is the death and rebirth of Rimelda and it utterly, totally, completely rocks.

Rimelda dies as an elite sniper of the Royalist army and is reborn as an insane, obsessed killer. Think about that sentence for a while…eventually you’ll realize that there is, of course, no difference at all. Rimelda hasn’t *quite* gotten there by the end of the volume, but she’s on her way.

Vanessa learns to shoot so she can take care of herself, which ups her cool factor a few notches. When Margaret and Eleanor (another name for which I refuse to use the official version) show up, she’s not unhappy at all to have them join her.

They all *converge* upon Quanzitta’s village, where Naharu (a third name I use my own version of) wonders why she can’t get Madlax out of her head. Carlossea Doon shows up too, but he’s such a non-entity in this series, even if he is one of the main three characters. (I’m being generous here… his name is pronounced Carlossur Dawn. But because I don’t care about him, I’ll use his official spelling. Which the dub actors pronounce “Dune.” argh)

So we’re all together and the three mystical books are gathered. Finally Quanzitta has something to do other than take baths.The plot is pulling together and they are all getting closer, as Laetitia points out. The tension runs high, and the end, while not far away, is not really at all in sight. Something else, I like – when it’s carried off decently. Plotwise, this is the beginning of the end.

But the strength of this volume is in Hisakawa Aya’s portrayal of Rimelda, as she loses her life, her dreams, her status and her mind and replaces them all with an obsession. She falls in love with her idea of Madlax – and that supremely unhealthy love is only strengthened by every encounter with her prey. Rimelda nails their relationship after an aborted hand to hand fight with Madlax – if only Vanessa hadn’t interfered, they could have continued the dance.

I love Rimelda and Madlax together, so I was a little peeved at Vanessa too. And in myYyuri goggles, now that Eleanor is there, she and Vanessa can play family with Margaret, leaving the fightin’ chicks to each other. ^_^

My first thought – and one that resounded over and over as I watched this volume – Rimelda is Chloe, but done *right.* Not just because she has the same voice actress – but because they are the same lost little girl characters who are living a lie. Only where Chloe always seemed like a refugee from a different story in Noir, Rimelda is a crucial part of Gazth-Sonika. In many ways, she is more part of the world than Madlax herself – both as a character and as part of the larger mystical plot.

The song “I’m here,” which plays before every scene in which Madlax gets all bad-ass, becomes, in this volume an actual, active part of the plot. The final use of it in the volume – it is as much part of the story as the action going on around it. If you haven’t read the lyrics, do. It’s absolutely the story talking to the audience. I was left quite breathless by it. Good song, too.

The liner notes are, as always, worth the read. There’s a wacky little note about Rimelda written by Hisakawa Aya, which is very funny as it censures Rimmy about sleeping with Doon, but never even mentions falling in love with Madlax.  And I don’t know why I missed these, but the extras on the DVD include “Conversations with SSS,” which are completely insane dubbed scenes that are totally stupid, go on too long and are really funny. I’ll have to go back and watch the back volumes now. ^_^

Ratings:
Art – 7 (good, until it gets wonky)
Story – 9
Characters – 8
Music – 9
Yuri – 7
Service – 2

Overall – 9

This was *such* a good watch. I was really into it. I’ve heard from alot of people that they couldn’t get into Madlax, or they felt it was just a Noir clone. I love Noir, but of the two, I really have to say that Madlax is the far superior story. As I said in the beginning, this volume is absolutely worth the wait.





Yuri Anime: Stellvia, Volume 6

February 14th, 2006

Let’s jump right into Stellvia, Volume 6, shall we? In this volume, we get one of the best bit of character interaction I’ve ever seen in any anime. All the girls argue. At once. And with a level of snarky bitchiness that I’d actually expect from a group of four women arguing.

For that, and that alone, this volume is worth watching. As I do go on endlessly, the strength of this series is the humanity. The plot is really pretty meh. The aliens are bugs, literally, and they are horrible and violent and we can feel righteous about destroying them in the classic space opera fashion. The time spent with clueless Kouta (and his inability to ASK what is bothering Shima when she spends six hours crying in his presence….I mean really, could he be anymore of an annoying clod?) is just marking time in between the great moments as all the four main female characters crash and burn in their own ways.

Ayaka seems to have gotten herself together, but Yayoi starts to lose it. Akira, who is suffering a completely normal crisis of identity and confidence – and a bout of plain old jealousy – turns out to be quite perceptive. She not only pins Arisu to the wall on running away from being a pilot, but implies that Arisu’s crush on Shima isn’t as secret as she might think. AND she gets the snarky award for telling Yayoi that her subtlety is no beard for her real interest.

Arisu tries to be the good guy and gets stabbed in the back by an entirely self-absorbed and petty Shima, who is so entirely caught up in herself that she can’t even see that she’s being a jerk. I bet none of us have ever been there, huh? ^_^

The girls all make up in the time-honored anime fashion of having a good cry, which I object to, but the fight *was* stellar.

The art wasn’t as bad as usual for some reason. I can’t imagine why. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.

For the rest of this series, the plot is fairly inconsequential, even tiresome, but the characters reign supreme. This anime, like Patlabor, is about the people. The rest is just window dressing.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 4
Characters – 8
Music – 8
Yuri – 5 (mostly from Akira’s bitchy implications, but still there’s shades of Ayaka and Yayoi on their own)
Service – 6 (any spacesuits that have separate colors for the secondary sexual characteristics are *entirely* servicey seriously)

Overall – 7

If you don’t like it, you don’t like. I like it. ^_^