Winter/Spring 2012 - What I'm Watching Now

Psygremlin and I have been grumping about the sorry state of anime over at mangacityforums pretty much ever since the 2008 recession/depression started. Funding for creative projects dried up practically overnight and we went from hoping for something like a Kaiba or a Simoun to hoping for anything that didn't involve teenage sports, teenage vampires, ancient magical swords, pedophilia, or sibling incest.

It's been a lean few years. AIC animation studios got bought by a pachislo machine company (pachinko/pachislo parlors are casinos, and yes the same sort of people are involved in the business there as in the USA). Worse, Madhouse got bought by Nihon TV channel to save them from financial troubles caused by the recession as well. Nihon TV promptly canceled Satoshi Kon's final movie (Dreaming Machine) and sadly, we'll never see what might have been his greatest work.

There were several seasons when there was one show worth watching, and that wasn't especially good except in comparison to most of what was playing.

In fall 2008 we had choices of new series like:
Spice and Wolf
To Aru Majutsu no Index
Gunslinger Girl Il Teatrino (not really a continuation of the Madhouse series)
Michiko to Hatchin
Tytania
Tentai Senshi Sunred
Mouryou no Hako
Toradora

It's a pretty diverse list - different quality, different genres, different maturity levels. But they do have one thing in common - they're from some sort of seinen material (Spice and Wolf, Gunslinger Girl, Michiko to Hatchin, Toradora) or are highly deconstructive of their genre conventions (Tytania, Tentai Senshi Sunred).

That sort of 'edge content' is what has disappeared from the market. By Fall 2009 the only new non-generic things released were Sora no Woto, The delightful Hanamaru Youchien, and two quirky one-shot OVAs: The Legend of Koizumi and Boku, Otaryman. But the worst was yet to come. There were some other good shows airing, but they were franchise continuations - no financial risk if the first show was successful.

It's all about the risk. There's no great anime right now because nobody in the Anime world is willing to run the risk necessary to create it. I suspect that a lot of interesting proposals are being dumpstered and a lot of projects are being reworked or shelved because they aren't sure things. Anime studios are playing to the base - which for them is the adult otaku market and little kids. I suspect that middle-school boys ate Ben-To up - it was cleverly produced and had all the right memes. I anticipate likewise for High School DxD, which I've been skimming in light novel form (mostly out of curiosity about the Paradise Lost meme soup) but can't imagine enjoying as an anime.

In Fall 2010, the new odd choices were down to Panty & Stocking, Shinrei Tantei Yakumo, and Kuragehime. Good choices all of them (I thoroughly enjoyed both Yakumo and Kuragehime), but mostly lacking in seinen value. Cerebral, plot-driven stuff like Spice and Wolf was long-gone.

And then came the drought: Fall 2011. The closest thing to seinen content was Mirai Nikki. Yeah, not really the thing.

I chose fall seasons, but Winter/Spring or Summer would have done just as well.

Tl/Dr version - Psygremlin asks: "So, is there anything good [in this season's anime offerings], or am I just being a grumpy old man?"

We're still in the dry spell. The shows I'm looking at this season are (in order of eagerness and carefully avoiding spoilers):

Another - Picture the creepy atmospherics of the better episodes of Ghost Hound in combination with the haunted school imagery of the Mai arc episodes of Kanon.

L&R: Another anime promo art and light novel cover, respectively.

The plot is sort of an spooky, impersonal version of Ano Hana as a school haunting. Excellent visuals, good seiyuu work, and suitably atmospheric SFX and music combine to make this my current pick for best show of the winter 2012 season. The OP and ED are appropriate but uninspired. On your left you have a poster illustration for the anime, on the right the cover of the source light novel.

Daily Lives of High School Boys (Danshi Kokosei no Nichijou) - It's a silly premise, but they're handling it very well. It's sort of a male version of the first season of Hidamari Sketch, but without the art school overtones and a stronger 4-komi plotless element. They also add a 'High School Girls are Funky' post-script after the end credits. Light, harmless, but often funny with no false notes. This, like Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, rewards viewers with detailed Japanese pop culture knowledge. Video game slang, tropes from dating sims, light novels and anime are all much in evidence.

Ano Natsu de Matteru - I've seen this show before. It's called Onegai Teacher and it was a pretty big hit a decade ago. Ditch the whole 'stopping' handwave by the simple expedient of aging down the red-haired alien chick to a teenager (same chick right down to glasses, hair color and ship critter, although no pocky box has appeared yet), but is supremely well done. The execution exceeds the material with this one. Basically, they've tightened up the weak spots in Onegai and bumped the production values a bunch and produced an enjoyable, though by no means original or creative show.

At left: Could it be...Kazami-sensei? At right: Reductive, yes, but pretty to look at.

There are some interesting questions left hanging - most noticeable to me is: why is somebody's teenage daughter driving a spaceship around anywhere near a planet that hasn't experienced first contact yet? For that matter, if she has the power in her little ship to miraculously fix the devastation caused by her crash, why wasn't she just teleporting between A and B anyway? Why does lead character remind me so much of (Japanese) Young George Lucas? What is the deal with Limon senpai? If you think too much about this one, your head hurts, just as it did with the original.

Papa no Iukoto o Kikinasai! has been the surprise so far, getting on with the story in journeyman fashion. I have, incidentally decided that the OP and animation thereof is the best OP or ED this season out of what I've watched.

At left: Yuta unwittingly beholds his doom. At right: The hypothetical happy family shot in Yuta's one-room manshon. Guy in back is the pedo otaku viewer surrogate.

Great art? No. But it's simple and good at what it is. I will never love this show - there's too much fanservice in it for that - but it is well executed for what it is, and is on the 'this is OK' side of the pedobear scale - indeed, if I knew that there weren't dirty-minded pedo otaku watching it in Japan and hugging their Sora-chan, Mio-chan, or Hina-chan (shudder) pillows I'd be completely fine with it. Now if we can just get to the stage where Oda-senpai reappears and starts interacting with the nieces fun should ensue. The anime is actually a little better than the manga, so far. I hope somebody at Baka-Tsuki picks up the source light novels - they're probably pretty good.

Bodacious Space Pirates (Moretsu Uchuu Kaizoku)- Just OK. Again, the characters are pretty off the shelf, but the material is at least mildly interesting. They're really playing up the [Maria-sama ga Mitteru/Ouran High School Host Club/Mei-chan no Shitsuji] wealthy high-school/pirate princess dichotomy angle so far.

At left: Dunno if they're bodacious, but they're what's on offer. At right: Main Character in schoolgirl mode.

The ED animation suggests that we're going to end up with Joshikousei Pirate Star Trek TOS with Kuro-megane as Spock, Forelock meido girl as McCoy, and Main Character as Kirk (of course). This would be improved with the addition of voluptuous, green-skinned dancing women, but isn't bad for what it is so far. One thing I do like is that there is no sexual typecasting going on - lots of technical specialist roles are all held by girls. So far (ep 5) we have exactly one male character in any capacity and he's a prospective subordinate to Main Character. As my favorite early review (from artist-retired at myanimelist.com) says, "..I-is it okay? I mean this should be a total piece of garbage by all means, but there's no panty shots? No bungie cord titties flopping around? There's a shit ton of girls and even a maid cafe, but... Why doesn't this show suck?" From visual novel series Miniskirt Pirates. Unanswered questions: why don't the characters get fuzzy hair in microgravity (hairspray? but aerosols are murder on full recyc HVAC systems)? Why don't their school uniform skirts not create panchiro constantly in microgravity? I'm happy they don't, but my SF-geek willing suspension of disbelief wants to hear about velcro or something. At least their post-diaspora skinsuits looked credible, even if their bust sizes don't. Oh, and for the record - this is probably the worst OP recording of the season so far - even worse than Kill Me Baby...

Rinne no Lagrange - athletic highschool chick (president and sole member of the 'jersey girl' club which involves track suits and not big hair and bubblegum as you might expect) has some sort of mysterious subliminal connection with alien-provided transforming giant robot. Said providing aliens are represented by Mr. 2smooth2begood and Ms. Probablygoodbutconflicted. Random 'bad guys' who get lots of air time and character development are trying to take Main Character and her giant robo away. I strongly suspect that the bad guys are going to turn out to be the good guys and that Ms. Probablygoodbutconflicted will choke/defect in some critical battle scene when fighting Main Character after man character has been captured/suborned/convinced that the bad guys are really the good guys and that Mr. 2smooth2begood is, in fact, bad. Nice mecha design - you can tell that there are mecha design otaku out there and that they are being pandered to. It's better than watching paint dry. The characters are unexciting. Main character's victory 'Maru' move is already annoying. Ms. Probablygoodbutconflicted's signature 'nyaa' gesture is also already annoying (this is after ep 3). Probably will watch it, but it's going to be dead last in the regular viewing rotation. The characters and situations are just too off the shelf to interest me much.

Recorder to Randoseru - Same people as did Morita-san wa Mukuchi but only has one gag, which is pretty stale after the first ep. Even at three minutes, not worth my time. At left: otouto and nee-san. Yes, that's the one joke (illustrated left).

And last and most decidedly least, we have Kill Me Baby! It's 4-koma again. It's incomprehensible. It's badly drawn. It has a really annoying theme song. Oddly enough, I don't hate it. I don't like it very much either, but if I'm in a sufficiently angry-and-mindless nihilstic frame of mind it might be the right tool for the job. I probably won't finish this one. I might not watch ep 2.

So what are we watching in place of all the great anime we wish we were watching? Great old stuff! Psy has started some stuff I've recommended that he never got to: "I've finally got my paws on Aoi Bungaku, so that'll help me through the lean period. Going to have a look at some really old stuff - Mermaid Forest, Utena and The Third."

At right and below: There's always good old stuff like Takahashi's Mermaid Saga and Gallery Fake (yes, that's Van Gogh's Sunflowers behind) to tide us through the global meltdown.

We never finished Aoi Bungaku or Utena and never even started The Third, so his ideas are suggestions for chez Senile as well. We've been treating e-chan to Kamichu! and both versions of Cyborg 009 among other things. Milady and I have been enjoying Gallery Fake, which is 37 eps of excellent characterization and ambiguous situations involving fine art.

L&R: Gallery Fake DVD vol 1 cover and manga vol 1 cover

After watching lots of formulaic anime, I sometimes forget that characterizations are what make a show worth watching. Neither of the lead characters in Gallery Fake (pictured left) are simple enough to be tropes, although Fujita probably is the source of one. Sara is the sidekick and sounding board, but is a stronger, more complex, and more entertaining character than the leads in Rinne no Lagrange, Moretsu Space Pirates, or Ano Natsu. There's just no substitute for seinen material.

Last night our evening viewing was Tailenders - something else I'd been meaning to watch for ages.

PS.We await the on-again off-again Mardock Scramble

Whither Manga?

As I've explained before, most anime was something else first. Sometimes a light novel series, sometimes the plot from a first person computer role-playing game (like a dating sim game). Most commonly, however, the source material for anime is a successful manga.

We use the loanword because a manga is not precisely newspaper comics (though it's usually originally serially published in a magazine with other manga in a weekly or monthly format) , nor book comics, nor graphic novel (though it usually has a strong plot arc with defined beginning and end, and usually has better art than US comics). There is, however, a simple linear-panel variant still popular in Japan called the four-panel comic (yonkoma) which is frequently published in general interest publications and is very similar in sensibility to a US newspaper comic strip. Jumpy sketch-comedy animes like Azumanga Daioh, Hidamari Sketch, and Doujin work are derived from yonkoma.

In any event, historically there has been a steady and large demand for a lot of different manga. Couple the big demand with the low production cost (newsprint, black ink, and staple binding is a cheap combination), and the result is dozens of weekly and monthly manga magazines catering to every possible niche of the manga market.

At least that's how things used to be.

Manga circulation in Japan is dropping. It's way down from the boom years of the mid-1990s, and it has lately been dropping at a steady (and not especially gentle) rate. I can't regard this as a good thing, because a lot of the manga (and manga-derived anime) I like are from marginal stories in marginal magazines. If Shounen Jump (the biggest single circulating manga magazine) is falling in circulation, I have to be somewhat concerned - I want mangakas (authors) to make money and keep making manga!

So why is this happening and what are some of the likely results? Here I tie into a post I made on mangaforums when Sphinx asked about the recent spate of erogame-based anime.

Frankly, I think the v-novel based series are a symptom of a somewhat worrying trend. The reasoning goes like this:

1. Japan is busy having a population collapse. As a proportion, it has one of the oldest average ages in the world.

2. this means that there are, proportionately fewer young adults, fewer high school kids, and even fewer still elementary school kids than at any previous time in living memory.

3. guess who the biggest consumers of manga and anime have historically been? Yup. Kids. Adults frequently read manga as well, but not so religiously - they also tend to gravitate toward the slick monthly manga aimed at adults and away from the pulp weeklies where most manga are published.

4. add in the Nintendo factor - "books are old school, my console is cool."

5. result: manga consumption is dropping rapidly.

6. result: the anime market is getting increasingly bimodal: one group is A. the traditional kids and young adults, the other group is B. the otakus who obsess over manga/anime, but have somewhat different perceptions of goodness than the average population.

7. result of 5: manga are going to get somewhat rarer, and new mangakas are going to have a harder time getting published. Most mangakas will likely also make less money.

8. result of 6. b: More and more otaku-centered manga/anime out there: Lucky Star, Genshiken, Doujin Work, Welcome to the NHK, as well as more 'moe-moe' extreme character designs (Misaki Chronicles, the generic kawaii loli character, etc.).

9. result of 4: since kids aren't reading manga, but are playing dating sim games, guess what you make anime around if you want to target a young audience. Yup, eroge anime isn't going anywhere any time soon.

I wonder where this leaves complex stories like Ai-Ren, Gunslinger Girl, or Hataraki Man. As the non-manga-reading kids age up, they're not going to be interested in seinen or josei manga, either...

We may all be hanging out at manwhaforums in a few years...

The last remark is a comment that Korea has a steadily growing but not-very-mature graphic story telling medium called 'manwha,' which is basically the Korean version of manga.

There has been a lot of computer game-based anime lately. This season, for instance, we have Clannad (from the Key game of the same name), Ef-A Tale of Memories, (derived from Ef- A Fairy Tale of the Two by Minori), Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai, School Days, and Myself, Yourself among those I could easily spot.

It's true that there are plenty of good manga-based anime coming out as well, but the scripted computer games (I refuse to call them visual novels, as some of their creators do) definitely seem to be here to stay.

Is this bad?

Right now, yes, it is bad. All the sim games follow pretty straightforward plots, and, because the total text content of one of these is small relative to a good anime or manga, there's not a lot of room for subtlety of character or convoluted plot twists. I have yet to see a character in an erogame-based anime as complex as, say, Enzou from Hotman, Aaeru from Simoun, or even Kozue from Mahoraba, and I don't think it's likely that I will anytime soon. The formats are conventional and the plots are either straightforward schoolboy love stories or murder mysteries.

We can hope that the sim game consumers mature into desiring more complex plots, but the format doesn't encourage that sort of growth. I have 20-something coworkers who spend large amounts of their free time playing MMORPGs. They don't seem to grow bored with the sameness of trying to beat a rigged system with a small decision set, and they never seem to become interested in reading the Tolkien novels that form the basis of the thin milieu in which they play.

The one upside to this is that there does seem to be a minority trend in focusing more effort toward complex seinen and josei stories in manga. A manga like Honey and Clover would never have been published 20 years ago, and would never have been made into a successful anime even ten years ago.

That said, it's starting to seem to me that the Japanese love of shiny flashing things may mean the loss of a lot of diversity in the manga and anime market.

I really hope I'm wrong.

Simoun - The Primer

Well, we finally finished Simoun. Milady felt the end was a bit of a letdown, as did I initially, until I went back and thought over what had happened and why. And I realized that I had been wrong in my comprehension of what the show was really about.

So what is Simoun about, then? And should you want to watch it? I'm going to address that question here while avoiding spoilers as much as reasonably possible.

One warning: Stay away from the wikipedia article if you are planning on watching the show - it is comprehensively spoiling.

The technical stuff: It's a 26 episode half-hour show. There's a strict chronological plot order. It's not derived from a manga or light novel (although two manga series came out after it premiered). Frankly, I haven't had much luck finding out who actually came up with the idea, who wrote the scripts, etc. The anime production and mecha design stuff is pretty well documented, but I have yet to see lots of discussion about where the complex setting and plot came from.

When Simoun came out in early April 2006, it arrived along with several other anime that quickly developed huge followings in Japan and in the West: Suzumiya Haruhi, Ouran High School Host Club, and Nana. In Japan Simoun did pretty well, and got some buzz from bloggers who were sucked in by the yuri (girl-on-girl romantic/sexual) tones of the show, and others who stuck it out past the first two shows and realized they were looking at something complex, unique and special.

Here in the West, the Naruto and Batman fanboys completely ignored it. Somebody, looking at the pre-release press materials, christened it "Loli-Copters." It might never have been widely seen here, but for a few hardcore viewers watching the raws who talked the show up in their postings. It looks like the early fanbase here might also have been mostly Yuri fanatics (who were also, no doubt, also celebrating Strawberry Panic). The good news is that they had non-yuri-fan friends who liked anime and were curious to find out what the fuss was about.

So what is my take on the whole whole yuri thing? I'm very heterosexual, not a yuri or yaoi fan, don't have issues with what other people choose to do, and so had no problems with it at all. Further, it all makes sense in context - the story doesn't happen on earth, and the people involved aren't actually humans. They just look and act like humans. Simoun obviously falls in the (very popular) convergent evolution school of TV Science Fiction. Yes, I recognize that this is a handwave for dramatic purposes. So is most science fiction and fantasy set on other worlds. Your mileage may vary.

There's another issue for a few - if you're strongly religious, and have problems with willing suspension of disbelief where your faith is concerned, you might not be happy with Simoun. This different world has a different religion, and different results and expectations thereof.

At some point (about two episodes in), a critical mass was reached and people started to talk about fansubs. Doremi dug into an adequate job, then dropped the project about six shows in. The rabid fans got together and formed their own fansub group, logically enough named Simoun-Fans. Enter a great truth: The more the fansubbers love the show, the harder they will try to make the subs perfect. This is the reason why fansubs are always better than commercial subs. Simoun-Fans' subs are excellent - as good as Solar's subs of Honey and Clover, which are my benchmark of subtitle quality.

Their love, whether or not it dares speak its name, is not misplaced. Simoun is as interesting and worthwhile as any 600 minutes worth of TV anywhere. It shares a quality with other worthwhile literature in that it doesn't tell you what to think. It shows you happenings, and leaves it to you to figure out what you think.

So, should you watch Simoun? Maybe. You should not bother with Simoun if:

• You like clear-cut villains, heroes, and predictable character stereotypes
• You can't handle seeing girls and (on one occasion) guys kiss each other
• You can't stand the idea of sexual indeterminacy (and no, I don't mean gender-bending, I mean neither one nor the other, as in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness)
• You get bored if people in the show aren't shouting at each other or trying to kill each other
• You think nonverbal symbolism is for sissies
• You don't want to pay attention enough to learn to tell eighteen characters apart
  

You should watch Simoun if:

• You like seeing characters develop
• You like seeing people wrestle with problems of duty, identity, and self-determination
• You enjoy Studio Ghibli-style scenery
• You appreciate a soundtrack with musical complexity and subtlety
• You enjoy being surprised by plot developments, and rarely are
  

Interested? Good. I'll give you a little primer on what's good to know before you start.

Good stuff to know:

• Latin. Latin is hard to work with in Japanese, but they give it a good try. Place names, technical terms, some character names, and other miscellaneous words are often Latinate. This isn't a bad idea if you think of how alien Latin is to the average Japanese TV viewer. The few who recognize the derivation will also get that it's an ancient, dead language, which fits the milieu of the story as well. The fact that the phonetics are awkward makes figuring out what the Latin word actually is something of a challenge. Here (from Hashihime) is a pretty spoiler-free vocabulary list.
  
• The shows come in pairs. If you've got time, I recommend watching an an odd number episode and its following even-numbered episode immediately afterward. I think this is because the scripts were written for an hour-long timeslot and then cut in half.
• There's a big cast of characters. Print this (from Hashihime again) and keep it handy when you watch. It'll save your sanity during the first few shows. Just about everybody on this page advances the plot in some way, so it behooves you to get to know them all. Don't stand on your first impressions of any character - they're all deeper than the initial impression suggests (yes, including Floe).
  
• The world's name is Daikuuriku, which translates as something like 'Land of Great Skies.' It is in a binary star system.
  
• People on Daikuuriku are all born female. As teenagers they choose (or have chosen) a permanent sex. The process of becoming male, if necessary, takes some years to complete. If this sounds farfetched to you, I'll note that there are a number of vertibrate species on Earth that do exactly this.
  
• Our principal characters are all citizens of the nation of Simulacrum, which is a theocracy.
• Simulacrum is at war with all of its neighbors. We don't know how many neighbor states there are, but the two that matter are:
• The Argentum Archipelago, (Latin: 'silver') which is in the midst of a coal- and oil- fired industrial revolution (think Edwardian Britain), and appears to be either centralized communist, a monarchy, or a dictatorship with limited personal rights
  
• The Plumbum Highlands, (Latin: 'lead') which is an impoverished mountain nation
• Simulacrum appears to be feudal and agrarian. It has no heavy industry and is not doing well fighting the artillery, tanks and aircraft of Argentum.
• The Theocracy of Simulacrum worships the deity Tempus Spatium, (Latin: 'time' 'space') which is apparently responsible for setting people's permanent sex, among other things. There is no evidence presented of anybody in Simulacrum not worshiping Tempus Spatium, and no evidence of religious repression, either.
  
• Along with services held in temples, in which wings and stained glass figure prominently, Tempus Spatium is worshipped by performing certain ritual aerobatic maneuvers called ri maajon with aircraft called simoun. When the simoun perform a ri maajon, they leave a sparkling silver trail in the sky.
  
• different ri maajon have different functions. Some are diplomatic or ritual, some have a destructive effect. A number of ri maajon are documented in ancient writings, but only a few of them are fully understood.
  
• Simoun are regarded as holy artifacts. They can only be operated by pairs of girls who have not yet chosen a permanent sex. These operators are addressed as miko-sama (translates as something like 'honored temple maiden') by ordinary citizens of Simulacrum, and as sybillae (singular: sybilla (Greek: 'prophetess')) by themselves and the theocracy.
  
• Simoun do not use propellers, airfoils, or jet engines. They fly by virtue of two helical motors and are, apparently, moved by the direct blessing of Tempus Spatium.
• Simoun are capable of performing maneuvres that would be impossible for any aircraft that can or forseeably could be built on earth. Quite a feat for a pre-industrial agrarian society.
  
• There are also trainer aircraft called Simile Simoun (or just Simile) which are powered by one helical motor. They are not regarded as anything special, and can be flown by anyone with sufficient training.
• There is a cadet system for training young women in the practical and theological ways of being a sybilla. It appears that many are called, but few are chosen. Cadets are easy to spot because they wear a distinctive white-and-blue uniform, are younger, and are often attending sybillae.
• Because simoun are so maneuverable, and because they can perform destructive ri maajon, the Simulacrum government has been using them to fight the war with Argentum. Since simoun are holy items, and their pilots are preistesses, there are profoundly mixed feelings about this move in many quarters.
  
• Sybillae are organized into a chor (latin: 'choir'). A chor at full strength has 12 members and six simoun, and is capable of performing the most complex ri maajon known. They are normally based at the Simulacrum Grand Temple, but have been relocated onto various helical motor powered airships acting as aircraft carriers.
• The sybillae who are most of the show's characters are all members of Chor Tempest (Latin: Choir of the Storm). Chor Tempest is based with two other chors on the former luxury liner Arcus Prima (Latin: 'first ship') at the start of the show.

One last thing - as I said, I sort of got the show wrong on initial viewing. I won't spoil it with excessive detail, but will point out that you should pay attention to what the populace expects of the sybillae, and what are the effects of having them around. You won't learn much about either of these until about halfway through the series, but they figure prominently in understanding what the show is really about.

That's it. Anything more would spoil the fun. Enjoy.

Fansubs vs. Commercial Subs, and Common Errors of Fansubbers and Scanslators

...and why commercial distro companies are doing a bad job of competing. To be fair, it's always hard to compete with people who do something for free out of love of the product, which is why Microsoft is so terrified by Linux (frankly, having produced a crapoplex like Vista, they should be terrified). It's also probably a lot of why fansubs/fan scanslations keep circulating long after the commercial subs/scans are out there, even if the commercial ones have been ripped off as well.

Put simply, fansubs are usually better. Here are my comments about it when psygremlin at Mangaforums asked about mangled fansubs. I honestly couldn't think of any I'd seen in recent memory that really butchered the dialog. Scanslations, yes, but not fansubs.

I know a little Japanese. I try to learn a little more every day. One easy way to do this is by osmosis from subbed anime. Here's what I've decided about subs:

1) Commercial subs are, at best, as good as average fansubs. Most of the time, they're worse. If you're really unlucky, they used the dub script for the subs, and so you have mangled meaning both from translation errors and from the dub director's edits to retime to mouth motion. If you're doubleplus-unlucky, you get something like the Disney sub track for Kiki's Delivery Service, which includes lots of annoying patter that doesn't even exist on the Japanese voice track and whose only purpose seems to be to distract from the beautiful pictures on the screen. (insert generic I-hate-Michael-Eisner rant here).

2) Fansubs (and manga scanslations) sometimes suffer because the source material for translation isn't a Japanese soundtrack, but a commercial or pirate Chinese or Korean dub or sub track. Nothing like two layers of translation to ruin your day. The problem, simply put, is that there are a lot more people who can, and choose to, translate Chinese or Korean into English than can translate Japanese.

3) Fansubs, most of the time, are labors of love, and fansubbers take them seriously. This may result in slow release schedules, but usually means good product. Generally speaking, the more widely popular the content, (consider Welcome to the NHK versus Slayers), the more care is taken in translation. Likewise, standards have gone up over the years. I have yet to find good subs of the Captain Harlock series, and the subs of Devil Hunter Yohko are pretty weak as well, but the average sub of last season's stuff is generally pretty good. I'm grateful there are groups out there like Central Anime who are currently doing a great job subbing stuff from my childhood like the Yamato series. (You guys rock!).

Likewise, there's talk now (mostly due to the strong underground fan support) of releasing a licensed R1 DVD set of Simoun. English-speaking Simoun fans are of two minds on this: On the upside, we'd get direct-to-DVD video quality. On the downside, it's unlikely at best that the subs that shipped on the DVD would be as careful, nuanced, and generally good as the ones done by Simoun-Fans (you guys rock, too!). So I guess I'd end up ripping the R1 DVDs to computer, building subs in from the Simoun-Fans subs, and then burning new viewing copies. Please, Simoun DVD people - if you're reading this - just use the Simoun-Fans subs - they'd license them for free I'm certain.

4) Fansubs, at their best are so full of otaku goodness that there's no way that a business would dare release shrink-wrapped DVDs with their content. Consider the detail in the Solar subs of Honey and Clover, where literally any piece of readable text in the frame is translated in a matching font. Sure, it takes three rewinds to read it all, but who cares? It's great, and adds a lot of meaning and depth to the scene. Oh, and yes, I did catch them in one translation error in all 41 (I think?) episodes of H&C they subbed, but it was minor. Careful sub work like this or Oyasumi's work on Welcome to the NHK (which translates the ads on the trains in Tokyo) just doesn't happen if somebody has to make a living from it. (You guys rock, too!)

Frankly, I've read a lot more creaky manga scanslations that creaky anime subs. Some of the chapters of Fruits Basket I have require considerable mental editing before a coherent English sentence emerges. Chobits was another one that I feel like deserves a best-possible scanslation and hasn't had one.

Originally Posted by psygremlin

I agree with the comments above. My intention wasn't to disparage the translators (who do a sterling effort!) but more to see if there are any classic examples of Engrish that crop up from time to time. Funnily enough, I've found the translations in scanlations to be better in some cases than in the licenced mangas - the latter often seem to suffer from mild censorship (*grumble*) that does then lose something in translation.

More often than not, I would say it's not Engrish you get as much as hybrid grammar. For instance, the Japanese equivalent of an indefinite third-person pronoun is "ano hito." This translates literally as "that person." Sure enough, you see "that person" a lot in scanslated manga, and it's often used as an indefinite, rather than a reference to a particular person. English, of course, has a perfectly good indefinite third-person pronoun as well - "one." Example: "One should be neither a debtor nor a lender." It's sexless (remember, words have gender, people have sex, and personal pronouns refer to people), and is therefore a perfect synonym.

Most of the time when 'ano hito' is used in an indefinite sense, 'one' is the only grammatically correct and logically consistent translation. But nobody ever seems to use it.

A lot of times I'll see someone's sentence stretch across two bubbles, and the grammar won't make good sense in English, because predicate phrases and verbs usually need to be switched around. This is a case of translating the bubbles correctly, but not the sentence.

And then there are sound effects. Some, like the 'gacha' a sliding door makes opening or closing are great and should be left alone or just rendered in the roman alphabet. I've actually gotten used to doki doki and dokun for heartbeats (in either katakana or romaji), and never have liked translations to 'ba-dum' or 'thump' because neither is specifically an onomatopoeia that only a heart makes like 'doki doki' is, and it can sometimes confuse the reader instead of explaining something.

Another area of complaint: Japanese uses a number of ritual set phrases. These are always the same, and carry a certain formality simply because they're rituals. Accordingly, they logically should be translated the same, and in a way that makes sense. 'Hajimemashite' generally does OK ('nice to/pleased to meet you'), but 'yoroshiku onegai shimasu' is frankly difficult to literally translate into English, because we don't use such formalisms in English any more. Perhaps the closest real English phrase would be something like "Hail and well met," or "May the sun shine upon the hour of our meeting." but they're both medieval. It'd be nice to see these used in a sword-and-sandals manga, though, since they're usually set in Japan's feudal period - using feudal English would be a good fit. Perhaps something like 'I hope we'll be friends' might not be out of place most of the time.

A common mistake is with 'onegai shimasu' and its variants. This phrase is usually translated as 'please.' But a bunch of different words and phrases can be translated into 'please,' and don't mean the same thing. 'Onegai shimasu' has overtones of humbly beseeching (it's what you say at the shrine when praying for something from a god). Just translating it as 'please' often isn't strong enough.

A lot of times its these ritual phrases that trip up translators who aren't native speakers of Japanese. They get mistakenly literally translated, so unless the reader knows that it's a ritual phrase, he don't understand that there's probably more gravity and formality to the situation than the literal meaning of the words suggests. The phrases used for "lets go steady/let's get engaged" are frequent victims.

A last example is poor modeling of degrees of completeness and politeness. You've probably noticed that girls generally say 'gomen nasai' when they are making heartfelt apologies. Guys, being in a more dominant position in society, generally get by with a bowed head and 'gomen...' A 'gomen...' from a girl means she either is not as worried about appeasing the recipient of the apology or she doesn't take the offense all that seriously. Frequently, the translators will miss one or the other case. A guy actually saying all of 'gomen nasai' while bowing is really profoundly apologizing (sometimes in a comic over-the-top way). A female needing the same degree of apology would probably have to raise her voice, repeat it several times, or abase herself to get the same level of intensity. Insults work the same way...

So that's the sort of thing I see most often wrong with fan translations. All of this said, they're still generally drastically better than some of the evil things that commercial firms have done to manga and anime to supposedly dumb down/broaden appeal to the western market. You know, if you take all the seasoning out of something, it becomes bland, and nobody likes bland. Tokyopop's earlier efforts on Fruits Basket (de-pervifying Shigure, among other things) as pointed out by Sephiroth's Samurai Girl (hard working translator) are a great example why I won't be buying the Tokyopop tanks of Furuba ever.

May 07 - What's On My Mind Right Now

Just a quick update because I'm in the middle of a big post on character archetypes and I don't know when it'll be done. Anime and Manga reading has contracted some as the weather has improved and Real Life (tm) has intervened.

Anime first:

We're four shows into the most recent adaptation (13 episode series) of Takahashi's Mermaid Saga (titled Mermaid Forest). It's quite faithful to the manga, and to the earlier OVAs, and milady generally likes it. I've always liked this story best of Takahashi's work (but haven't yet read Maison Ikkoku, so it's possible my opinion will change). My one complaint so far is that while there's gore and violence as there should be, I'm distinctly missing Yuta's melancholy. Likewise, Mana's character seems to have lost some genki somewhere along the way. The OVAs had a genki (and younger-looking) Mana playing against a melancholy (but cheered by Mana) Yuta, and it worked pretty well. We'll see.

Hataraki Man has been on hiatus because milady has been requesting Simoun every night. I must admit that this development pleases me. The last Hataraki Man we saw featured Hiro's masseuse and dealt with themes of compromise with corporate goals while still managing to have a sense of worth and accomplishment. I rather liked it. As I've said before, I think we in the west suffer from not getting more workaday anime and manga here. The Japanese spend a lot of their lives at work, and their fiction that touches on this is usually worth attending. That said, Simoun is just plain deeper and more complex.

Before e-chan goes to bed we often give him some anime for a half-hour or so. Since we haven't started Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2 yet, he's been getting Binchou-tan. He loves it. I like it. Even milady, who is a hardened cynic where kawaii is concerned is affected. This show may just be the ultimate weapon of chibi-kawaii. Drop it on an al-qaeda hideout and listen to the simultaneous 'awwwww!' (or whatever they say in Arabic).

And that leads us to the meat and drink of evening anime lately: Simoun. I'm probably going to burn some more electrons on this later, but we're over halfway through the show now, and I have to say that I'm siding with the rabid fans on this one. That said, it's like a shinkansen - the pace gets fast and furious, but it needs a few kilometers of straight track to really get moving.

One thing that milady noticed that hurts the momentum early on is the show length. She commented that the shows seem to come in pairs. I agree. We started watching two a night, and it flows a lot better. The plotting suggests that this was meant to be 13 one-hour shows instead of 26 half-hour shows. If you watch the first two hours of Simoun in two sittings instead of four, everything makes sense a lot faster, less forgetting happens, you learn the cast faster, and you get into the real meat of the plot faster. All good. It also makes Neviril seem like a lot less of a whiner.

By this metric, the plot really starts doing stuff during hour three, and you probably are going to be surprised by your first plot development around hour four.

Oh well, if the only slot they could get was a season of 1/2 hour showtimes, I'm still profoundly glad they made it.

Another thing that hurts the early shows: it has a Fruits Basket problem. By which I mean that there's a large cast of characters, they all have distinct personalities (good character design - they're all visually distinct, and are credible as people), and they all advance the plot in their own ways, so it behooves you to pay attention to them all. Yes, the guys in the hats, too. This means you're going to be confusing people for a while. Don't worry too much about it - as long as you pay attention, you'll have everybody straight in your head by the time it becomes really important to understand who's motivated by what. I'll warn you of this, though: Download and print this spoiler-free character list (from Hashime's blog) for reference in the first few eps. It'll make your life better. Also: stay away from the wikipedia article which is pure spoilers, and will reduce your viewing pleasure. Once you're about six eps in, you can check out this amusing Simoun Relationship Chart, from Kurogane's Blog. I may be sounding fanboyish here, but I think I'm in good company...

Good thing: They don't waste recap time. There's a little recap when they jump right back into the plot, but it usually contains a little new dialog along with the old, and maybe a reverse-angle shot (often with useful information in it) of the conversation you saw at the end of the last show. It's a great idea, and it works well at keeping you glued to the screen even though you just saw that conversation.

Another good thing: The soundtrack. I like the OP song OK, (but wish they'd kept the mournful a-capella sound instead of going with the drum-machine overlay), and like the ED song a little better (milady likes it less). The actual soundtrack music (all composed specifically for the show) is a wonderfully eclectic mix of orchestral music, dance music (including a very tasty tango), some synth work, and even a couple of pretty 'traditional' tunes (one a hymn, one a lullaby sung by Rodoreamon). It's just all so good. Sahashi's work is as good as any I've heard in anime for any sized screen (and that's high praise from a music snob like me).

We watched the, um, 'trip to the ruins' show (ep 17 and 18) last night (he said, carefully avoiding spoilers), and I'm here to tell you that I was honestly surprised by two plot developments in that 46 minutes of TV. I don't remember the last time that anything on TV really surprised me - thought I'd seen every 'creative' plot twist that had been tried. Heh. Y'all can keep Lost. I'll stick with Simoun, thanks.

It's going so fast and furious right now that I think the wheels are about to come off. But then I thought the wheels were going to come off at ep 10, and again at ep 14, and the train just kept going faster. It's masterful plotting. Now I'm wondering how they're going to wrap it all up neatly in the remaining four hours (which are actually about 46 minutes each).

My greatest sadness is that it's only 26 episodes. My greatest fear is that they'll try to do a sequel and ruin it. I think it's like Serial Experiments Lain in (only) one way - it is about something, and when it finishes talking about that something, it will be done and will exist as a perfect thing in itself.

Manga:

Pretty short list right now - I've been reading Ai Kora/Love Collage (by Inoue, who did Midori no Hibi, which remains my all-time-favorite shounen romance). Ai Kora isn't as good, frankly, but it's not terrible, either, and I'm hoping that he has an idea how to wrap it up neatly when the time comes. Right now (I've just finished vol 4) we're kind of stuck in character non-development limbo, but there are signs that this might change. I'll say this - Inoue-sensee is willing to do anything to get a laugh, and I still like his page design, plotting, and character design as much as ever.

His and hers bedtime reading is still Fruits Basket. Now that we've (finally) introduced all the juunishi, the plot is (finally) pleasantly humming along. We're into Tooru's second year in HS, and this is when all the fun starts to happen. Probably the last big plot hurdle is developing the student council characters, but these are vital to Yuki's plot arc, so I'm trying to keep milady from getting too annoyed at having yet more characters show up to be distinguished from each other. I've done a great job concealing the crucial spoiler about Akito from milady, so I hope it'll bop her right between the eyes just like it did me when I read the manga. She has developed an appropriate loathing for him, so all's going well so far. I have not yet read the last chapter (Sephie published it) but I have a pretty good idea where it is going, since I read through about chapter 128. Oh, and BTW, it appears that Tokyopop rethought their butchery of the US release and hired new translation staff for the manga. So the last few volumes should be good - just all the earlier ones will suck. Sadly another case where fan scanslation is better than commercial scanslation.

I did read the last two chapters of Kare Kano. Ha! the gag in the last chapter got an actual laugh out of me. Completely in character and exactly the sort of puckish humor a mature Yukinon would pull on Arima. I still found myself completely unmoved by the whole pop band story arc, and regarded it as being sillier and more marginal at +16 years than it was originally. Oh, and does this mean that love is fated, or just that Asaba was always a latent lolicon? Oh well, after the whole Maho-and-her-dentist plot, we know that Tsuda-sensee doesn't have problems with playing ball if there's any grass on the field at all. I can't say that anything surprised me, but it was a pleasant ride. Overall, Kare Kano gets a B+, which ain't bad for a shoujo romance manga that runs over 100 chapters. I'd give Furuba a B by comparison, mostly because the art and page layout aren't as good, but also because the character development isn't as detailed as in Kare Kano.

Other stuff in the can: Got hold of the Japanese raws for Chobits finally, so can at last check out some translation questions I had. Re-read Ai-Ren. Got teary-eyed again. I have some one-shots in the can suggested by smart people over at mangaforums. Maybe this weekend.

[post-weekend update]

I read up through the currently-translated chapter of Ai Kora (no big changes, except that we now know how many parts Hachibe can obsess over thanks to a diagram of his brain) and we watched up through ep 22 of Simoun, which finally had its first schmaltzy moment, but was bearable. I think I see where the big arc is going now, and I suspect that the plotting-ignorant fanboys/fangirls generally don't like it at this point, but it's necessary to slow the train down before it pulls into the station. Of course, there may be another huge plot twist yet (I'd write one in, and I see a couple of possible ones). I think Checkov's gun is still hanging on the wall from about ep 6 (in the form of something that used to belong to Aaeru's Oji-chan), and I suspect that it's about to be taken off the wall.

The bulk of Sunday's post-yard-work TV watching was the Elsa arc in Gunslinger Girl. I admired the job they did with it. That manga chapter brought tears to my eyes and I was both dreading and looking forward to seeing it in the anime. Apparently I wasn't the only one so affected - the Anime production staff did a beautiful job on it and stretched it into a three-episode arc. Milady kept justifiably admiring the scenery. Among other things, the anime is a fine tourism advertisement for Italy both urban and rural. Certainly Sicily never appealed to me as strongly as a destination before Giuseppe and Henrietta visited it, even with the purse-snatching scooter bandit. I'm sad to say I was completely oblivious to the "Roman Holiday" references in the earlier Henrietta episode, and only twigged to them when I read it in a blog entry somewhere.

I felt like the plotting and pacing on the whole arc was pretty close to perfect. Certainly the payoff scene (which I was dreading, and stone-facedly refused to spoil in spite of all of Milady's questions and conjectures) had all the emotional freight of the manga. It sparked an interesting conversation between milady and me about Giuse's burden because of the the metric ton of emotional anvils that 'Etta dropped on his shoulders when she smilingly uttered her "but I wouldn't do that because you treat me so well!" line.

I twitched and shuddered at the thought of being Giuseppe. He's simply never allowed to have a bad day around Henrietta - he's the totality of her universe, and her happy little applecart stays upright every day only because he's nice to her. Rico is happy to be alive and whole, Triela wants a supportive friend more than an obsessive onii-chan. Henrietta, however, is incapable of being happy unless she thinks Giuse is pleased with her. And we see just what are the consequences of an unhappy Henrietta in Elsa's story. The episode works even better because they immediately preceded this scene with the conversation between 'Etta and the female section 1 agent about how being a little girl cyborg assassin just isn't 'normal.'

Milady had a...less cheerful childhood than mine. She simply can't imagine why anybody would sign up for Giuse's job with its inevitable painful emotional freight. My response was obvious (to me) both because I'd read the manga (which includes Giuse's back-story) and because I think I'm more than a little like his character: "Because you know that somebody's going to do it, and probably wouldn't do it as well (as compassionately, in this case) as you could. These girls have such a terrible, brief existence that there's a moral imperative to palliate it as much as one can." She completed my sentence for me (some days, I think she really does understand me). And then said that she just doesn't emotionally understand noblesse oblige, which is how she defined my reaction.

Behold the power of good anime made from good manga. It causes people whose brains have not yet been rotted by US network TV pablum to have interesting conversations about relevant topics. How different might the current Battlestar Galactica have turned out if the writing staff had been forced to sit down and watch Gunslinger Girl instead of Desperate Housewives, or whatever dreck caused them to come up with season 3.

Anime off the Beaten Path

If you've been watching anime for a while and you're not an otaku (fanboy), you are probably aware that lots of anime seems to be designed to appeal to people that aren't you.

That's certainly true in my case. I haven't been a shounen for several decades now. I have a chibi-me running around the house, a wife, a job...all that stuff. So yet another schoolboy doing derring deeds saving the universe while looking longingly at the fanservice-intensive female lead probably isn't going to get me very interested most of the time.

So I'm always looking out on the margins. What's new and sounds strange? What are older seinen like me in Japan watching? What can I watch that I won't automatically compare to the last five things I saw just like it?

Here's some fun stuff that has come out of this search:

1. Old stuff. Yes, there's more great old stuff around now than there was five years ago. Central Anime in Kansas is doing a great job of fansubbing on the Uchuu Senkan Yamato cycle (see my capsule review of S1 here). They're using the cleaned-up R2 DVDs released to vintage otaku types there. I've run across some of the Harlock series as well, but the subs haven't been very good. I also ran across a nice dual-audio copy of Vampire Hunter D, and a good fansub of Macross from the restored R2 DVDs (I'd never seen the original Macross before - wow is that OP song bad).

I think I ran across Legends of the Galactic Heroes somewhere, and there's likewise the entire Gundam franchise which I've never watched. I should be set for vintage space warfare for quite some time. My one big regret so far is that nobody seems to have English subs on Heidi, girl of the Alps, which apparently never ran in the US. No, I haven't lost my mind - I have a rug rat to entertain, and he digs Yamato and Nurse Angel Ririka SOS down to the ground. What's not to like about a Shoujo show made by Miyazaki and Takahata?

The above points out that not all obscure old stuff is from people you've never heard of. Studio Ghibli, for instance, has an extensive back catalog. You probably haven't seen everything in it. I haven't, yet, and I'm making an effort. Mimi wo Sumaseba (called Whisper of the Heart in the US, but more accurately titled as If you Listen Closely), for instance, is a fine example of a perfectly nice teenage romance you've never seen with all the characteristic Ghibli pretty views and (generally) good soundtrack. I'll warn you, though, that a John Denver song figures prominently in the plot, although the heroine (to my amusement) says the lyrics are trite after translating them literally.

My favorite seldom-seen Ghibli movie is Omohide Poro Poro, which translates as something like "Memories Falling Like Raindrops." It's a more adult story than most Ghibli offerings, and is set in (mostly rural) Japan of the recent past. If you ever wondered what a slice-of-life Ghibli movie would be like, you need wonder no more. So check out the back catalogs of big names you know - you might find a gem or two.

2. Stuff meant for older viewers. The first HD series I downloaded right when I got back into anime after the decade hiatus was Kamichu! It sounded fun and quirky, and I wanted to see how good it looked. Right on all counts. It's set in Onomichi of the 1980s, so has a distinct nostalgic feel for anybody who lived through that time, even if on a different continent. Turns out it's designed to micro-target men my age...

Milady, who is the same age I am less a few months, is an avowed fan of Hataraki Man. The Go-Gos-like OP tune sets the mood perfectly, and it definitely speaks to her. I find it amusing as well, even though several of the characters fall into shoujo/josei stereotypes. I'll say this: the workaday world of Japan doesn't often make it across the pond to be fansubbed, and it's our loss. All of the few work-life comedy anime and manga I've seen were enjoyed, and some are favorites.

I haven't really got it figured out yet, but I think Binchou-tan might fall into this category as well. It's so purposefully sparse verbally (less than 150 words spoken in the first ep), so pretty to look at. So pathetic. In its own way it evokes the Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou manga for me more than the two OVAs did. It's too slow for kids, so I think it's actually seinen as well...

3. Odd fish. The manga/anime industry in Japan is so big that they semi-randomly create wonderful mutations. Somebody takes a silly idea (say tactical cyborg loli-assasins) seriously and creates something sad and wonderful like Gunslinger Girl.

Or a couple of guys get together and do a what-if show about breaking down the barriers between the internet and the physical world which, amazingly enough, is really good, like Serial Experiments Lain.

Or somebody sells Bandai Visual on this great novel idea they've got involving aerial warfare, lolitas, ancient priesthoods, forgotten wisdom of the ancients, teen-age sex changes, and some other stuff I'm probably forgetting. Something like Simoun results.

Or somebody decides to do Thelma and Louise, except with Thelma being kickass at kung-fu, and Louise being deadly with a katana walking around Edo era Japan with lots of slapstick comedy, like Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran.

These mutations are such prizes. And they inevitably have a long shelf life, and are usually well made. I always hope the next thing I discover will be another one.

Senile Seinen episode 00 Start!

Yes, I'm the cranky old man from the future come to fight evil (or at least boring TV) with my Purostaato-beemu. No, I will not do a "shooting the beam" pose in front of any camera ever for any reason (at least not until you buy me a lot of tasty ethanol-enhanced beverages first).

My apologies if you have not yet experienced the amusement of Suzumiya Haruhi yet. The anime is funny, if a little talky. It's good if you have a limited imagination and need to see the pretty pictures. If you can read faster than most NBA athletes, you might try the hilarious translations of the light novels available over at http://www.baka-tsuki.net/. They're much funnier than the anime, in my opinion, though that may be because the narrator Kyon is probably more like me than any other fictional character I've ever read/seen, with the possible exception of Randy Waterhouse in Cryptonomicon.

So, why am I spreading my egoism around the web, he asked rhetorically? Mostly because I get into interesting conversations involving anime and manga in different places around the web and kept thinking I should centralize the content somewhere. If I'm going to do that, I might as well also publish it, which starts to sound suspiciously like a blog. So I, the crufty old web curmudgeon (when I was your age, we did our HTML in a text editor in a shell on the server and we were grateful for it!) have finally bowed to this whole blogosphere thing. Ugh.

Well, let's get rolling. Here's some of the content of an email I sent today to a guy who used to be a coworker and is still a good friend, and manages to have geek cred and a life just like I try to have. He was asking if I'd bothered to catch up on the end of BSG S3. Here was my reply:

No, my holiday was not especially nice. I came down with something communicable from "my little disease vector," as I so often call him. Also found myself dismantling and cleaning the burner on the furnace on Easter morning. 25 degrees, snow, and no heat was not a popular combination. While I smelled like home heating oil for the rest of the day, we had a cozy warm house, and milady had the warm glow of affection she gets when I do something manly and resolve a household predicament.

E-chan and I finished up Space Battleship Yamato last night. I'd forgotten how sketchy the last ep is. I have the feeling they were going to do an hour-long show and cut the script in half (Yamato actually had pretty disappointing ratings in its first run in Japan, as I understand it - not unlike Star Trek TOS here). It was really fun pointing out to milady how much descends from this show - it was the first significant (1974) ship-based SF series to run anywhere after Star Trek finished in 1969. Apparently it got wide distribution via videotapes: Star Wars (1976) borrows from it freely (if you've ever seen the Wave Motion Gun, you know where the Death Star's main weapon came from, and R2D2 bears more than a passing resemblance to Analyzer), Glen Larson rips it off almost completely for Battlestar Galactica (1977). Several Star Trek movies and Star Trek Voyager have more than a little of that Yamato aroma as well.

I've got to say the show mostly hangs together pretty well - not bad for a "kids show" from 1974. All the Leiji Matsumoto themes are there - individual nobility, striving against unconquerable odds, personal loyalties cementing the group, etc, and there's a level of character development that shames nearly anything SF (current BSG excepted) done in the US before or since. Example: Sanada - the second officer and ship's engineer (the degreed kind, not the holds a wrench kind - they have one of those with a back-story too) and science officer gets his own back-story show and saves the ship with a surprise (but logically defensible) deus ex machina in the last ep.

Other stuff we watched over the weekend since the weather was so lame:

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (love the Joe Hisashi score, hated the Disney dub job, was grateful for a good subtitle track, added "ohmu" to e-chan's vocabulary).

a couple of showings of Kiki's Delivery Service for e-chan's benefit (added "airship" to his vocabulary)

Several episodes of Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, which is a magical girl show from the early 90s downloaded specifically for toddler entertainment and to explain what magical girl shows are to milady (if you have to watch one of the blasted things, this is one of the better ones). Now she gets the cosplay jokes, otaku jokes, and various fake magical girl characters in Welcome to NHK, Densha Otoko, Midori no Hibi, and Suzumiya Haruhi, among others. Notable item: The bad guy in this show actually took advantage of the long time required by the protagonist's power-up-and-change-clothes sequence as shown by intercuts of him chanting and gesticulating while she did her turn from fourth-grader to Nurse Angel thing.

Two episodes of Jigoku Shoujo (Hell Girl). Wow is this beautiful. Wow is this dark. I'd watch lots more horror movies if they were this pretty. Milady doesn't like it - too cruel and gruesome. I'll be watching the rest because I can't stand not to--it's just too pretty. The Shinto references are thick in this one - glad I watched Kamichu! first.

Two episodes of Simoun. I'm trying to define this one and I just can't really. Take Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, stir in some...Powerpuff Girls, maybe? until the colors go Studio Ghibli bright, add a heaping cup of Black Sheep Squadron/Baa Baa Black Sheep (or Band of Brothers if you don't know that one), but stop before the powerpuff girls start chain smoking, add some essence of the setting from either The Name of the Rose or the Brother Cadfael mysteries (believe it or not - there's even a bunch of Latin), put in a half-cup of Steamboy, dump it all in a pressure cooker, put an anvil on top of the vent hole, turn the stove on high, and walk quickly away. Yes, it's that hard to define. And more amazingly, it seems to have come from nowhere - there's no preceding manga or novel, just the anime. It's interesting, and a number of reviewers have gone drooling-nutso about it. I'm only up to ep 4, so I can't say I'm riveted yet, but i'm certainly interested in seeing how it turns out.

Two episodes of Hataraki Man (translates roughly as something like hard-working man). Slice of life show about the life of a woman (mid 20s) who is an editor and star reporter at a weekly magazine not dissimilar from "People." Definitely more adult in tone than most anime we get on this continent. Amusing note: the giant publishing company where she works is a verbal pun on Kodansha, which is Japan's largest publishing house, and which publishes the real-world Hataraki Man manga in Weekly Morning, which is its leading seinen manga magazine. Milady digs this one down to the ground because the lead is so much like her at that age. I've got to say that j-pop again works perfectly - the opening credit music couldn't set the tone of the show any better. It's a girl band doing kind of a punk/go-gos style with lyrics about working life.

Two episodes of Welcome to the NHK. We're well into the plot now with this one, and Milady is really enjoying it. I carefully waited to show her this until I knew she had enough understanding of the otaku stereotype in Japan thanks to watching Maid in Akihabara and Densha Otoko. Studio Gonzo has truly elevated my opinion of themselves with this one. It's thankfully a little lighter in tone than the (frankly often bleak) manga, but still is pretty true to the setting, characters, and themes. The fansub is spectacularly good - and another great example of why fansubs are better than commercial subs.

Two episodes of Gokusen (live action. Title translates roughly as "Mob Teach"). If you know what Great Teacher Onizuka is, you know what Gokusen is. If you don't, I'll describe Gokusen as Welcome Back Kotter mixed with The Sopranos except everything is Japanese. Good acting, a cast and scriptwriters who obviously read and liked the manga, and Japanese not-overpolished production values make a fun show.

One episode of Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran. This was actually run as an antidote to the showing of ep 2 of Jigoku Shoujo, but backfired - we got the only really sad-toned show in the series so far, where Meow meets her childhood friend who has gone down a bad path in life. Ended up reading three chapters of Fruits Basket to get everybody calmed down for bedtime.

And The Yakuza (1975 Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, dir: Sydney Pollack). This was because the lead (yakuza princess) in Gokusen made the comment that Takakura Ken was necessary for a good yakuza movie. I see why. Others have called him the Japanese Clint Eastwood, but that's not fair to him - for one thing he's incredibly buff, for another, he obviously really worked out at kendo every day, and for a third, his acting isn't all of the strong-silent-type mold. Not a bad movie for a '70s organized crime drama. Mitchum makes a surprisingly acceptable effort at the little Japanese he speaks, there aren't any glaring cultural gaffes, and the soundtrack isn't painfully '70s bad, just a little too soupy-strings for my taste. The only miscast was the supposedly-Japanese 20-something daughter, whose actress was a Nisei (American of Japanese family), and spoke English like a Californian and Japanese like one, too.

Oh, and no - I feel no urgency to watch the BSG shows I've not yet seen. I've got the first six shows of Space Battleship Yamato season 2 ready to go, and I remember even less about that one than I did about the first season.

So there you go. A typical sample of my "light-informal" style. Only the names have been removed to protect the innocent and guilty. Vocabulary: E-chan is my offspring currently age two. Milady is my significant other. I deliberately did a lot of series name-dropping here because my correspondent isn't as up on this stuff as I am, and I wanted to help him out. I posted this specifically because the effort required to come up with a good description of Simoun got me thinking that this wasn't bad reading. I was really nice here and tried to link everything out to a relevant wikipedia entry (because they're more stable links than ANN Encyclopedia entries, Nausicaa.net entries, or IMDB entries).

I'll also be posting stuff I've written for various forums around the web. It'll generally be on the subject of anime and manga. Likewise, I'll probably put some original content here as well (I feel a rant coming on about Disney dub tracks and general treatment of Ghibli movies, for instance). I am certainly not unwilling to review stuff, but don't expect to get a review every time, and I definitely don't plan on doing show-by-show blogging like some people do. More than that? You tell me. That's what the comments section is for.