Ore no Imouto

Complications Involving Big Brothers and Little Sisters

I'm one of those people who didn't really like the upgrade that Kyon no Imouto got in the Suzumiya Haruhi animes versus her more distant supporting role in the source light novels. She usurped an important character development point of Kyon's.

That said, I'm following the Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai anime and I must admit to some complex opinions on it.

At left, the cover of volume 1 of the Ore no Imouto light novels.

Beforehand, I was worried that it was going to be some variation on inappropriate pervy/incestuous stuff like Kodomo no Jikan, which could be cute, but is mostly just creepy. (See Hanamaru Kindergarten for this same plot done without the creepy lolicon) Happily, it isn't, at least not so far (ep 7).

The lead character (Kyousuke - 京介) is a Kyon sort. He's the mild-mannered man seeking a normal life being constantly (at least during the plot) thrust into abnormal situations. It's not a new idea in comedy - several of the great Hollywood and UK comedies of the 20s and 30s use the straight man comic lead (Harold Lloyd and the young Alec Guiness come to mind), but the Japanese seem to have come late to it. Tanigawa's leading man in the Haruhi stories has become a trope. I can't regard this as an entirely bad thing, nor an entirely good one. I'd rather have quirky original non-trope characters, but if they had to use a trope, at least they picked a non-annoying one. The good news is that at least they didn't choose the iconic Sugita Tomokazu (the voice of Kyon, Yuichi in Kanon, and Rin in Shuffle! among thousands of other cool, detached male characters) to do the role. Instead they got the guy who played Tomoya in Clannad, and Ryuu in Kimi ni Todoke to do the deed. I think he's an excellent choice - someone as detatched as Sugita's characters would not fit the quiet desparation that drives Kyousuke to take muscly dad's right cross in place of his little sister.

Kyousuke is, by any measure, a late bloomer. He's 17 and seems to just be noticing that girls can be something other than annoyances or platonic companions.

L and R: If Manami had anything to say about it, Kyousuke would have more action than a pinball machine in an earthquake.

Something that
the anime does well is provide an initial expected trajectory for Kyousuke's life. He's perfectly happy to be a good student, go onto college, and then settle down to some sort of civil service job for the next 40 years or so. He expresses an interest in a simple, relaxed life, going so far as to purposefully delay taking the logical 'next step' in some of his relationships to maintain it. While he doesn't appear to be interested in police work (his father's career), he does seem to have a strong sense of and appreciation for the proprieties and gentilities of quiet existence, including brotherly duty to his junior sibling and valuing peace and order above self-expression.

There's a surface similarity here to Kyon in the Haruhi books, but the difference is that Kyon mostly uses the 'normal man' suit as a sort of camouflage. He eventually admits even to himself that he loves being the straight man consort to a fickle goddess because it livens up his otherwise somewhat dull life. By comparison, at least as of episode 7, Kyousuke really does seem to be more desirous of 'comfortable' than 'interesting.' The source light novels are currently being translated, and I'm curious to see how much depth the characters gain relative to the anime.

All of this set up gets pushed around in the first couple of episodes in which he discovers that his 14 year old little sister is not a noisy annoyance but a person, and that she seems to value his opinion and support, much to his surprise.

Fourteen-year-old Kirino-桐乃 (the little sister in question) is practically a walking stereotype. Not a trope, mind you,

At right: The core cast. L-R: Saori, Kuroneko, Kirino, Manami, and Kyousuke

although she embodies several of those as well, but she actually is very close to what I remember many/most middle-school little sisters of friends being like when I was in high school and college. She's not especially bright, is very focused on appearances, and is certain of her own certitude until she makes some misstep or is challenged, whereupon she collapses into a weeping puddle or has a fit of pique.

Her relationship with Kyousuke is mostly tsun-tsun, with increasingly common moments of mild dere creeping in as she begins to trust him as a source of support.

The OP music is the same every time but there's considerable variety in the OP animation including character introductions new to that episode. The ED songs vary by show and have unique animation for each one. I like this trend - if you have to tack on the OP and ED stuff, at least make it entertaining and different every episode.

So far, so good. Now the predictable, eye-rolling bits.

1. Her need for 'life counseling' is a consequence of her infatuation with otaku culture. And no, not just any otaku culture.

Couldn't be Harlock, Gundam, BL or Yaoi, nope. She has a thing for magical girl stories (and, a-la Genshiken, she has a 'bogus' favorite mahou shoujo anime that we'll no doubt be seeing animated in a couple seasons) that has, as she has grown to her current surprisingly-mature-looking 14 years, grown(?) into an obsession with erogames. Little sister erogames.

At left: Kyousuke deflects trouble from Kirino by claiming the eroge is his. Otou-san is not amused.

As I commented when I had just seen episode 1, "Basically, it's just a crossing of the characters of Kyon and Kyon no imouto from Haruhi with the plot from Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu."

Yeah. Pretty weird. And if it were played for irony, deconstruction, or social criticism, it would be predictable and possibly cogent and incisive, but probably not very popular with the viewership.

So far, though, Kirino is taking the traditional (and hollow) youth culture tack of declaring that her self definition is dependent on self-expression through eroge and expressing her inner otaku.

Her relationship with her favorite fellow otaku (a taciturn goth-loli) is similar to her relationship with her brother. Again, very typical in my observations. This is not the eye-rolling part. The eye-rolling part is that she's an otaku despite there being no reason given why she might be or why she picked up an interest in imouto eroge of all things. It's counterintuitive, and would bear exposition. So far, (ep 7)they haven't even hung a lampshade on it.

2. Her income stream. She has to be cute. It's in the title after all.

At left: Kirino's secret closet of addiction.

She doesn't, however, have to be a model. This is rather obviously a simple plot device to a) explain her ability to afford a secret closet full of (really expensive) erogames and anime, and b) will presumably serve to get her involved in the anime business pretty soon. Middle school models aren't particularly common. Again, it's just a little too convenient and there hasn't even been a vague attempt to explain it or lampshade it.

3. Complete lack of recognition that a hardcore otaku lifestyle might be marginalized by mainstream Japanese culture because it's - oh yeah - antisocial and unhealthy.

At Left: Kirino's 'normal' friends are not thrilled to find that she's an eroge otaku.

Tthe downsides of otakudom are either glossed over or handwaved away. This makes some sense for Densha Otoko, but a 14 year old girl with welcoming access to mainstream society is a different matter.

4. Fan Service. Yes, they were doing fan service with the 14 year old girls. Not much, thankfully, but it was definitely there.

At right: Kyousuke is always willing to give his sister a hand.

There's been a spate of this lately in a wide variety of shows - you'd think middle school girls were the apotheosis of feminine sexuality from the number of upskirts and low angle shots we've had lately. Factoring in a) that Japanese girls develop more slowly than they do in Europe and America and, b) they don't eat as horrible a diet as American kids do, it's reasonable to assume that a Japanese middle school girl wouldn't be cuter/more developed/more feminine than the American middle school girls I see every day when I drive e-chan to school. Quite a few of them are cute, yes, but generally not in a 'want to see her pantsu' way to any healthy male over about age 18.

5. Complete ignorance of the Westermarck effect. No, I don't expect Fushimi-sensei (the author of the light novels) to know about a fairly obscure bit of imprinting research, even if it is iconic in the psychology business and even if it is a standard checkbox item in Psych 101 classes the world over. That said, all you need to do is ask anybody who has a sibling what they think of getting some action in that quarter. Put simply, the only people who actually find the idea of sexual hijinks between siblings interesting are those without siblings. If either party cohabited with the other before the age of six then there never is romantic interest between them.

The 'love my imouto' stories that have been popular lately all have this blind spot. It's pretty much a requirement for the plot to go anywhere. A better question is: why are these plots popular in Japan now? My theory is that it's a consequence of Japan's low birth rate - relatively few Japanese below the age of 30 have a sibling. The concept of a sibling is an abstraction to them and they don't see any reason why there wouldn't be some sexually-charged moments between siblings.

So having named its deficiencies in considerable detail, why am I still watching it? Because it's entertaining and ambiguous. I'm curious to see which of the possible plot paths it will take, and it has consistently been willing to go anywhere with the characters to get a laugh out of the viewer.

How I did it by Victor Frankenstein, or Reading Scanlated Manga for Beginners

Yes, that's another pop culture reference - this time from the best movie Mel Brooks ever made.

What I'm going to talk about today is the direct result of a conversation with some distant in-laws (shout out to y'uns). After finding out that they had doings in the paper comics/manga community, the inevitable question (that I had never anticipated) came about: How do you read fan scanlated manga, anyway?

So let's talk about sources and methods. I'll address manga first, then anime.

So you've heard about this great manga from somebody. It's not commercially available translated where you are, so your only option is to read it on your computer. What to do, and how to do it?

Well, you don't go to Wikipedia, which does a great job of telling you everything about the manga (or anime) including the entire plot and all the themes. It also doesn't say anything about any non-commercial scanlation/fansubbing efforts. If you're actually looking forward to reading/watching it and making your own decisions, stay away from Wikipedia!

Obtaining the Drug

First, you have to get hold of the manga. The best single place to find out who did what and where you might be able to find it is Mangaupdates.com. The releases page shows you what has come out today, and there's a handy search box in the upper right of every page that will accept titles, authors, and scanlation group names.

If your manga has been scanlated by somebody some time, it will show up as a search result. If you then click through on the title, you get a brief synopsis of the manga, usually with a picture of the cover of one volume. In the middle left column there's a show all scanlated volumes link that will take you to a list. This is good for mangas that have been out for a while and may have been partially scanlated by one group then dropped and picked up by another group(s). You can then click through to the group names to find out how to get their files. If you're really lucky, there will be a DL link at the far right of a line for a chapter or volume. Click there and it may well take you to the file you desire, or to a torrent file for it.

Manga scanlations are available via a wide variety of distribution methods. Some groups use direct downloads from sites like Mediafire or Rapidshare. Some groups prefer to use bittorrent as a primary distribution method. Many have bots serving content on their IRC channels. There are plenty of tutorials out there about how to IRC and how to bittorrent, so I'm not going to get into that here.

So let's suppose that the group doesn't have the chapters you want up on IRC anymore, or that they have disbanded and taken their IRC bots with them. Fear not - the internet is a big place, and there is almost certainly somebody somewhere distributing the files you want.

First, stop by a bittorrent search engine like Mininova or BTjunkie and put in your title. You might find that the manga you want also had an anime done of it, so you'll have to browse through some files. Manga are, as you might guess, vastly smaller files than a TV episode, so look for small file sizes and .zip or .rar filetypes.

No luck with torrents? Fret not - there's always #lurk. Stop by gotlurk.net and put your title in. They don't have everything, but you can rest assured that if they don't have it, it's definitely obscure.

Another nice thing about #lurk is that they have an entire server loaded with raws (untranslated manga). So if you want to know what the original looked like, or you want to check a translation, it's a good place to stop by for that as well.

But how, he asked rhetorically, is one who can neither get on IRC nor download torrents supposed to get a manga fix? Answer: Direct Download (DDL) websites. Mangadownload.net, Mangatraders.com, StopTazmo.com and anime-eden.com all have large lists of downloadble manga. All require that you open a free account to be able to download, which generally also gets you a forum ID on the discussion forums, where lots of manga and anime talk happens. There are a lot of these DDL websites out there, and there's only one universal rule: scanlators work for free. We do it because we enjoy manga, and we want to share it with you. If anybody ever wants you to pay for a fan scanlation, get it somewhere else.

My only real complaint with the (non-Tazmo) DDL websites is that many of them mangle or replace the original filenames of the manga files, making it harder to do file management of a big manga. But it's not that big a deal.

OK, so let's assume you've found the files you want, by whatever means. You now want to read the manga you've downloaded. It is, as I've explained before, usually in a .zip or .rar file. Compressed in this file is usually a folder or set of folders containing picture files like .jpg or .png files.

Consuming the Drug

Because Manga and comics are visual, you need a lot of display space to be able to read them on a computer screen. Believe it or not, display size isn't all that important; it's pixel count that matters. Most manga pages are scanned at about 1000 pixels down. This is generally sufficient to get all the goodness out of the art without making excessively large files. In order for you to see all the goodness without having to scroll, you need to have at least 1000 pixels down available on your monitor. 1024x768 or 1280x720 (720 video) are not really sufficient - you lose too much detail and the text is hard to read. 1280x1024 is good. 1920x1080 (1080 video) is also fine, but you'll have a lot of space left over on the sides. If you're still using a CRT (picture tube) monitor, you'll want to crank the refresh rate up as high as it will go, because flicker is deadly. To be honest, I couldn't read manga very well with a CRT monitor. I much prefer LCDs for this sort of use.

Now for the good news: You need almost no computing power at all. Grandma's Pentium Pro will do fine displaying manga as long as the video card and monitor are up to snuff.

If you have a Windows computer, you can just double-click on a .zip file and browse within it. But viewing the files sequentially is difficult - Windows hides the work, but what happens when you double-click a file in a .zip is that windows unpacks it somewhere in a temp folder and then starts Windows Fax and Picture viewer to display the file. You can't use the back and forward buttons in the viewer this way. It's much better to unpack the whole zip file and then browse it with picture viewer if you want to go this route. The downside is that you now have two copies of the manga chapter you're reading - one compressed, one unpacked. It's wasteful and can become a bookkeeping problem.

I, of course, don't do it this way. I use the right tool for the job: CDisplay.

Why use CDisplay? Well, it's just better than anything else I've tried. It's free (as in beer), it uses all the display space on your screen automatically, it can be configured to display two-page spreads (very important with some manga) and it can be told to display them from right to left, so the page flips are correct.

Another really cool feature of CDisplay: it reads .zip and .rar files. Yup, no unpacking of anything is required. You just download the .zip or .rar file, right-click and choose open with CDisplay.

The only things that confuse CDisplay are 1) files created on Macintosh with their filesystem extensions included, and 2) .zip or .rar files containing more .zip or .rar files. The nested files are easy: just unpack the parent file so that the child files appear in their original folder structure, then start reading the child files (usually one chapter each) with CDisplay. If the files are sequentially named, CDisplay is smart enough to open the next file in order if you tell it to.

The mac files are easy too. Just unpack and view the folder containing the image files unpacked. You can delete the mac folder structure and repack if you like, and CDisplay will then be able to open it.

Starting CDisplay

CDisplay is so simple that it's deceptive. Open it without a file selected and you get nothing but a blank, gray screen. That's because CDisplay uses every last pixel to display your comics/manga. Fear not: everything you care about is a right-click away.

Configuring CDisplay for Manga Viewing

The modes you have to turn on (from the Configure screens) are 'Display Two Pages' and 'Supress for Double Pages' on the image sizing options tab, and 'Japanese mode' on the Program Settings tab. Japanese mode puts the new page on the left, instead of the right, so the manga page turns work correctly. I don't generally use the auto fitting options on the image sizing tab because my monitor is usually big enough, and if it's not, it's too small in the left-right axis and I'd rather scroll than shrink the picture in that direction.

Now you just right click and choose 'Load Files' Browse to your manga, select and choose 'open' in the usual way. To advance a page, press the space bar or page down. Page up to go back a page. Home is first page, and end is last page. If you're navigating forward through 50-100 pages, Shift-P (or right click/page movement control/go to page - slider) pops up the navigation slider, which will get you where you want to go quickly even if you're not sure at what page it was you stopped.

Of course, if you didn't load another manga since you shut down last night, you can open CDisplay and use the 'Resume Reading' option, which picks up exactly where you left off when you shut down CDisplay last.

The only other trick to using CDisplay isn't really an application problem. Many scanlations don't have page numbers on the outside corners of the page, which makes it sometimes hard to tell which is the binding side of the page, and which is the edge. You care because a lot of manga is drawn across two page spreads, or depends on a mood foreshadowing at the left edge of the left page before the flip which then colors the whole next page, or even the two page spread.

You're missing some compositional detail with a lot of manga if you can't tell where the middle versus the edge of the spread is. Accordingly, if you know where the middle and the outside of the spread are, you want to bump the spacebar twice to get to the next two-page spread.

Sometimes there are page numbers down there. That makes it easy. When I edit my own scanlations, I very carefully leave them for this exact reason. Even if there aren't page numbers, there may be plate or drawing numbers in teeny-tiny print in the middle of the art on one edge. That's the inside (binding) side, believe it or not.

Sometimes, though, you may start on a chapter, get four pages in, and realize you've got it backward, then go back to the start and reread the chapter to see what compositional cues you missed. Oh well, it's worth what you paid for it, right?

...Which leads me to the sticky issue of copyright. Manga are copyrighted works that are generally published for profit. Simply distributing a manga as published is a violation of copyright. It can be argued that a scanlation is, as a derivative work, still subject to the publisher's copyright. As a rule, nobody in the business seems to care about electronic distribution of a manga outside of Japan unless somebody has bought distribution rights to the manga in your market. Further, copyright enforcement centers around economic gain at the creators/rights owners expense, which is emphatically not happening with free fan scanlations. Publishers seem to realize this and limit their copyright enforcement to cease-and-desist letters or DMCA takedown notices.

Now for the key point: possessing a scanlated manga is not (currently) a crime, nor is it a violation of copyright (and no, these are not the same thing). Distributing it at no gain to yourself may, or may not be a crime or violation of copyright depending on the way the wind is blowing legally in your locale right now.

Of course, if you enjoy a manga, you should consider rewarding the mangaka's work. Buy the hardcopy - mangakas make most of their money from tankobon sales. "But wait," I can imagine you saying, "the manga isn't published in English, or I'd be reading it that way!" I'll let you in on a secret: mangakas aren't well paid from foreign distribution, if they're paid at all. If you want to reward the artist, buy the Japanese tanks. Sasuga books, YesAsia, and Amazon are common sources.

Reading manga electronically is a great way to check out a lot of manga without having to hunt them down in a bookstore. It also enables one to discover mangas that were never translated into English commercially. Enjoy.

ha ha only serious

(that's a jargon file reference) Or: How Different People Have Said Interesting Things With the Really Silly Idea of the Magical Girl Story.

Senility. Yes, it must be truly setting in. I've gone from talking about serious anime and manga to talking about magical girl (魔法少女 - mahou shoujo) stories. But stick with me on this one. As I've said before, if you bother to dig around in the chaff, you can often find some truly golden wheat. Here, then, are three stories that star girls with supernatural powers that explore bigger ideas than just saving the world from some over-the-top evil organization in weekly installments.

Kamichu!
かみちゅ！～かみさまでちゅうがくせい～
Kamichu! ~Middle-School Goddess~
'Kamichu' is a contraction of Kami (god) and Chuugakusei (middle-school student)

I haven't written about Kamichu! in detail here before, which is a regrettable oversight. Kamichu! was the show that convinced me that there was stuff worth seeing in the world of anime, and that it was time that I started watching it again, and that if I was going to watch this pretty, high-definition stuff, I'd have to upgrade to some computing hardware that could cope with playback. I've just built my third-generation 'media box,' so you may safely assume that I'm not planning on stopping with anime any time soon. You can blame Kamichu! for starting me down this path.

At left: cover of the Kamichu! manga with the three lead characters in front of Onomichi and its harbor. L-R Matsuri, Yurie and Mitsue.

Kamichu! is about Yurie, a middle school girl (chuugakusei) in the city of Onomichi, Hiroshima
prefecture circa 1983. Yurie doesn't get her superpowers from some mysterious magical realm full of unpronounceable katakana names. She gets it the old (very old) fashioned way: she wakes up late for school one morning and realizes that she is now part of the Shinto pantheon: a kami. (or, more accurately, an arahitogami) Divinity has, for some reason, reached out and touched young Yurie, and she is now part of the spiritual firmament.

At Right: Yurie in her god getup. She usually looks even more miserable than this while wearing it.

She can see and interact with other denizens of the spirit world, does in fact have magical powers capable of altering the world, but still has to go through the daily grind of being a middle-schooler. She can bestow blessings, and attend god conventions, but she still has to get her frowsy self to school on time, still has a silent, blushing, suffering crush for the weirdo president (and lone member) of the calligraphy club, and is still the smallest and frailest late bloomer in her class.

One of Yurie's first challenges, after trying to convince her friends that she's a god, is to find out just what sort of god she is.

At left: View of Onomichi from mountaintop Raifuku shrine.

Her powers are as undeveloped as her stature, so it takes some careful probing by her friend Matsuri (who just happens to be the senior miko of an impoverished local mountaintop shrine) to get any idea at all of how to use her newly-found godly powers.

Sure sounds like a magical girl story, doesn't it? So what sets Kamichu! apart? Three things:

1. Yurie comes to magical girl status from a very human direction. She's not exceptionally smart, not exceptionally pretty, not exceptionally athletic. Indeed - she's not exceptional at all, except that she has definite, if rather ill-defined divine powers, but she has no idea why. She didn't grow up being a fairy princess, and she certainly doesn't think like one. She thinks like the 12-year-old daughter of a civil servant in a sleepy provincial town.

At Right: Yurie's nascent divine powers prove less useful than her knowledge of constitutional law in this situation.

When confronted with geopolitical complications and the leveled assault rifles of JSDF troopers in episode four, her solution is to recite, schoolgirl-like, Article 9 of the Japanese constitution at them until they realize the error of their ways.

2. Yurie herself: she's about as far from the traditional cute, perky, certain-to-grow-up-beautiful mahou shoujo as she could be and still be female. Yurie and her friends are in the exact middle of the awkward years of adolescence - no longer girls, but a long way yet from being more than notionally womanly. They're definitely not sexified pedo-bait.

At Left: Yurie sidles slowly down the path of love. Her beau is checking out calligraphy brushes.

We're presented with comparative images of girlhood (in the form of Matsuri's grade-school sister Miko) and womanhood (in the form of Yurie's ditzy-but-comely mother) that show us just where Yurie and her friends came from and where they're going. They are not especially comfortable with the journey and are uncertain about the desirability of the destination. It's a long way from the hundred episodes of unchanging fifth or sixth grade seen in most magical girl stories.


3. The setting and incidental characters. Onomichi's distinctive geographic and architectural features are carefully detailed.

At Right: More of the cast in an illustration done for the R2 DVD release. L-R Yurie's brother Shoukichi, Matsuri's sister Miko, Kenichi, Yurie, Matsuri, and Mitsue. The little humanoids are kamis of the things they resemble.

I knew I was watching something unusual in episode one when I realized I could see the entire far side of the bay from Yurie's schoolroom window, and that everything was carefully drawn to resemble something real. I suspect that this is Onomichi near its prettiest, but it's not scrubbed overly clean. There is rubbish in the streets and fishing boats chug in and out of the bay regularly.

Character designs, likewise, resemble real Japanese much more than some ideal never-world. Yurie's desk-bound father is plump. Her miko friend's father, who would rather be a farmer than a shinto priest, is always seen in his farmers coveralls, boots and tattered straw hat. He throws his back out periodically and has to lie belly-down in semi deshabille on the floor with a cold compress on his backside. On the spiritual side, the shinto belief in everything having a divine spirit creates a busy world of chattering kamis. It's remarkable that Yurie is able to do her schoolwork at all when the pencil eraser kami is pestering her with questions.

It is also worth mentioning that Kamichu! is a very Japanese show. It's rather obvious that it was not produced with an eye on the export market, as many shows are. It's a measure of the show's goodness that it was licensed by Geneon in spite of this, and is one of the titles picked up by Funimation for distribution after Geneon's implosion. A lot of the content deals with Japanese ideas of appropriateness, right and wrong, etc., and it makes some political and social commentary as well, as Dotdash details in two excellent blog entries here and here.

So what's it all about? It's about living and growing and learning to make decisions, compromises, and agreements like adults do, or at least should do. It's about shinto, sort of. It's about being 12 years old. It's about life. It's worth your time.



Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo
奥様は魔法少女 - Bewitched Agnes
My Honored Wife is a Magical Girl - Bewitched Agnes

Remember Bewitched - That TV sitcom from the '60s about a generic white-bread American family with a witch (yes, the black hat-and-cape kind) as the housewife? I wouldn't either if it weren't for syndicated runs on independent TV stations in the '70s and '80s.

It originally ran 1964-1972. It was apparently very popular on American TV (was rated #2 in its first year), so it was quickly picked up for international syndication in a lot of places, including Japan.

The Japanese, with their own history of alien goddess/princess stories (Kaguyahime, anyone?), put some rather different cultural freight on the idea of a wife with supernatural powers. Clever mangaka Yokoyama Mitsuteru aged the concept of a magical woman in a mundane milieu down and created the original magical schoolgirl, Sally (魔法使いサリー, Mahoutsukai Sari), in 1966. Sally herself was a huge hit - there were obviously a lot of Japanese baby-boomer girls who enjoyed the fantasy of a schoolgirl with superpowers saving the world, or at least her friends. Sally was a princess from a distant magical realm who wanted to hang out in the middle kingdom (Earth in this case) and meet humans because it looked fun. I'm guessing Yokoyama was borrowing from Hans Christian Anderson for that bit.

So what does any of this have to do with our second entry? Well, everything and nothing. When Bewitched ran in Japan, it was titled 奥さまは魔女 Okusama wa Majou (My honored wife is a Witch). Take Bewitched, stir in 30+ years of magical girl manga and anime in Japan, add a sprinkling of Ah! My Goddess (Aa Megamasami). Stir.

At Left: Ureshiko/Agnes doing the mahou thing, complete with broomstick.

Sounds formulaic, doesn't it? Everybody knows all the standard rules of a magical girl show by now, after all. Well yeah, but we left out Mysterious Ingredient X: Actions have consequences: there is duration, cause and effect, and everything that happened last show matters next show. Oh, and this has been going on for a few decades with a succession of magical girls...

Confused yet? Let's put it another way: What if there really were a magical girl from some magical realm protecting some nice little generic Japanese town?

At Right - Ureshiko hard at work managing her boarding house. Note that she's a little well-built for a mahou shoujo...

What if she had to obey all the peri-adolescent constraints - she can't start being an adult and stop being a magical girl because her town will be unprotected? No kissing. No kids. What if it goes on for years and years? She graduates middle school. She graduates high school. Her friends settle down, get married, have kids.

She can't. Because if she does, something bad will probably happen to the town/planet/universe she is sworn to protect. Sounds pretty hellish, doesn't it? Welcome to the world of twenty-seven-year-old Asaba Ureshiko. She's ready to get on with life, but she doesn't trust the replacement magical girl protector sent from the magical world of Realm (yes, that's its name this time) with her beloved town.

At Left: Tatsumi and Ureshiko.

Since Ureshiko can't very well still be a schoolgirl anymore, she has settled in as the manager of a boarding house. Yes, one of those boarding houses, like in Maison Ikkoku and Love Hina, among many others. Sure enough, a handsome young man (22 year old former college athlete Kagura Tatsumi) starts renting a room at her boarding house at the beginning of the first episode. If you've ever run across Maison Ikkoku (probably the greatest of the boarding-house romances and first big hit of Takahashi Rumiko's manga imperium), as everybody in Japan of a certain age has, then you automatically assume that she's the hot widow landlady and that he's the dim young guy who will single-mindedly try to win her love for hundreds of torturous chapters to come. You'd be wrong in this assumption, as you were when you assumed the same thing while reading Chobits.

There's a lot of toying with viewer expectations in the early episodes. The more you know about the back stories of various magical girl and boarding house romance stories, the more likely you are to be tripped up when the show delivers something else. Thankfully, the producers are actually pretty clever, so it all works out.

Right: Sayaka (in stealth schoolgirl mode) getting advice from an older mahou shoujo on the mechanics of dating.

There are three principal characters in Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo: Ureshiko, Tatsumi, and Ureshiko's appointed (by the Powers that Be in Realm) successor: Kurenai Sayaka. Sayaka is twelve going on 25 - so much so that she sometimes ages herself up magically to about 16 so she can go on dates and not be taken for a kid. Tatsumi is 22 going on 17 - he was a college athlete, and doesn't seem to have worried much about life after the high jump until it was thrust upon him. Now he has to grit his teeth and learn to be a salaryman. The transition is not an easy one, but he has intestinal fortitude and strength of character. Sayaka, likewise, is trying to transition into the magical girl protector role, but doesn't really understand what is at stake, or just what her duties really are.

Left: Sayaka takes advice, magically ages herself up and gets a beach date. Pink keitai symbolizes young womanhood, Kuma-tan childhood.

Ureshiko seems to mentally alternate between age 17 and her actual age 27, but it's pretty obvious that 27 is more natural to her.

According to her friends, Ureshiko is alternately serious and young-at-heart. Which, if you think about it, is pretty much the doomed existence of any magical girl protector. She can't be a flighty little girl because she has a world to save.

Right: Ureshiko, constructed on sound structural principles, doesn't fit her mahou shoujo outfit very well these days.

She can't be all serious and duty-oriented because it's both unappealing to the audience (who presumably like the shoujo archetype or wouldn't be watching) and because, one hopes at least, that it is contrary to the nature of her being.

Left: Sayaka uses magic of a different sort along with the age-up magic on her date.

The show also deals with the contrived nature of the milieu in the typical magical girl show. Wonderland (the town) is, in fact, entirely artificial. It's built to be a perfect little world where a magical girl protector from another dimension can live and do her thing without actually having to deal with the unpleasant realities of human perception, persistence of memory, and the fact that normal people tend to find daily destruction, mysterious magical reconstruction, and 27 year old women in very skimpy clothes flying around on brooms remarkable.

This leads me to discuss another feature of Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo - the show very deliberately pokes fun at the more dubious conventions of the mahou shoujo genre. Did you ever wonder if Sailor Moon, Nurse-Angel Ririka, et-al being sometimes little girls and sometimes full-developed women was weird to Japanese people, too? Wonder no more: Ureshiko's fully-developed 27-year-old self stuffed in a magical girl getup is very purposefully skewered for humorous effect.

Right: Sayaka, like Ureshiko, says 'hai' to all the dirty old men in the audience at the end of her powerup.

Likewise, the power-up sequences verge on softcore porn (or Ecchi, if you prefer). There's even a fourth-wall break moment when a bunch of adult men shout the mahou shoujo's name at the end of the power-up sequence, and she replies with "Hai!" Likewise, some of the humor directed at aged-up Sayaka/Cruje by her (unaware) classmates borders on sexual harrassment...

So what is Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo really about? There's pointing out the absurdity of the Mahou Shoujo format, of course. It's about changing roles, finding one's place in the world, the difference between make believe and the real thing, and the importance of letting go when the time for something has passed. In this last respect it's a little like Kaiba, oddly enough.

Kiki's Delivery Service
魔女の宅急便
Majou no Takkyubin
'Federal Witch Express' is a pretty close translation. Takkyubin (宅急便) is a trademark of Kuroneko Yamato Transport, which is similar to FedEx or UPS in the USA.

Yes, Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli did a magical girl story as well. In an entertaining switch, our magical girl (actually a witch in the Western sense) just has to leave home, travel to a different town and set up shop. It's her rite of passage from childhood to a witch's adult life, and it happens when she turns 13. Kiki comes with all the standard equipment - a broom, black clothes, and even a witch's familiar - her black cat Jiji.

Left: Kuroneko Yamato Transport's logo. Any similarity to Jiji, and particularly to Jiji and his progeny late in the film, is probably intentional on Studio Ghibli's part.

It's not Miyazaki's deepest work, but it's a good exploration of coming of age themes and an entertaining mixture of magic and technology set in a European '50s neverworld.

Right: Our Heroine considering the radio weather forecast and her future before departing home. The red hair bow is a feature in the original collection of short stories by Kadono.

It shows that Miyazaki spent some time in Europe gathering material that eventually became Alps no Shoujo no Heidi - the milieu is a bit of an alpine mishmash, but it generally hits the right notes. It's also a colorful feast for the eyes, as we've come to expect from Ghibli productions. Perhaps surprisingly, given the chosen specifically European setting, there are none of the all-too-common glaring Japanese cultural misappropriations or wild anachronisms about. Anachronisms do exist, but they're quite deliberate. Miyazaki gets the little things right, leaving us free to pay attention to the story.

Left: Kiki's chosen town for her journeyman year. Scenes like this make me wish for an HD copy.

To a degree, Majou no Takkyubin is sort of Anne of Green Gables with broomstick aviation. This isn't particularly suprising since Isao Takahata - Miyazaki's partner in Studio Ghibli - directed the still-best adaptation of the L.M. Montgomery novel (as Akage no An) in 1979 for World Masterpiece Theater.

Right: Street scene in Kiki's new town. I wonder what Ashland Refining thinks of their trademark on the store facade. Given Miyazaki's confirmed gearhead status, it can't be an accident.

As is usually the case in Ghibli films, particularly those directed by Miyazaki, the music is both evocative and appropriate. Kiki prefers to fly around with 1950s pop playing on her transistor radio hanging from the broomstick. Likewise, Hisaishi's incidental and background music seems always to reinforce the story. It is all that it could be, and never strikes a wrong note.

Left: Kiki making a delivery on foot amid more Ghibli beautiful backgrounds. It's a throwaway scene, but speaks volumes about the care put into the film.

Something that isn't all it could be is Disney's dub. As I've complained before, while the Disney dub cast do an acceptable (though not inspired) job with the material, the dub track and script itself is not a thing of beauty - Disney decided that soda-pop swilling American children didn't have the attention span for the lovely film Miyazaki had directed, so 'helped' it along with verbal slapstick in place of music and new throw-away one-liners that add nothing of value to the film, and detract from its great strengths of plotting and framing. The Disney English sub track is nothing spectacular (I think it was written from the dub dialog sheets), but isn't as bad. I would be curious to see the Carl Macek sub track for comparison.

Right: Because there was no WWII, (and possibly because there were witches around for airmail) aviation has not advanced as rapidly in this world as in ours. When this Zeppelin has trouble later in the story, Disney couldn't resist adding 'oh the humanity' to both the dub and sub tracks.

Incidentally, after seeing Wall-E in the theater, I am inclined to believe that Disney might have been right about the sugar-and-jump-cut-addled attention span of American youth. My (anime- and PBS-raised) four-year-old son was entranced through the whole movie, but a flock of 8-12 year olds two rows back from us didn't stop chattering at each other until the action started in the second half. Wall-E might as well be a Miyazaki movie - it is very similar to Nausicaa thematically, and Pixar are avowed Studio Ghibli fans. Whether or not the dub directors and writers were right about the American audience, it wasn't their place to be making significant editorial content changes to a film by an acknowledged master.

Left: The youth of Kiki's new town don't exactly embrace her with open arms. There's some social commentary about the differnence between children of privelege and those who must strive.

Oh well, at least the Ghibli/Disney distribution contract forbids clipping even a single frame of film.

Right: ...but Kiki tries hard and does good deeds (here tending a wood-fired oven for a parcel customer when the electric one fails) and earns her place in the town.

The message is more succinct, but very similar to that of Akage no An: A lively, determined girl can make a place in the world for herself if she tries earnestly enough, believes in her own abilities, and is smart enough to ask for help when things go against her.


Left: bonus pic: Some things are the same in this alternate universe. Behold a Fiat 600 Multipla taxi, circa 1956. Kiki's walking the other way as it whizzes past - she can't afford a taxi and didn't bring her broom.


I considered doing a section on Gunslinger Girl here as well, since the first-generation girls obviously riff off of the idea of a mahou shoujo story in some important ways. But I've tilled that ground very thoroughly before, so didn't want to go over it again.

Total Recall

Huh? What? Senile has finally lost it. He's referring to cheesy Schwarzenegger movies now.

Maybe. I almost titled this post We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, which is the Philip K Dick story that inspired the movie. But then I decided that, since nobody in the anime/manga fan world seems to pay attention to anything but anime and manga, I might as well title it with something from pop culture in hopes that somebody would get the reference.

At this point, you're bound to be wondering what I am writing about. Relax: It's all new stuff (currently airing anime) and it all relates to the theme of moving memory and identity around technologically. I'm going to order these by personal preference - most to least favorite.

1.
Kaiba
カイバ
Madhouse/Yuasa Masaaki

Ever seen Fantastic Planet, or any other eastern-bloc animation from the '60s or '70s? Nah, I didn't think so. Well, if you had, you'd say "Wow, this looks a lot like animated Eastern-European formalism from the '60s or '70s!" As it is, you'll just have to take my word for it. Since Madhouse did the animation and production, you can rest assured that it looks exactly how it is supposed to look. I think they were warming up for this when they were making the dream world sequences in Paprika...

At Left: Kaiba awakens knowing nothing of who he is or why he is here.

This is one of those shows that keeps me looking at anime. It seems that for every thousand shounen fanservice fests out there there is only one show like Kaiba, but that one is so worthwhile that it justifies all the crap. You just never know when you're going to stumble across the concentrated results of creative imagining. Kaiba is bright, beautiful, dark, puzzling, on the surface and deep and mysterious all at once. It involves space travel, mind control, thought transference, the definition of self, and the ethics of terrorism...and that's just in the first four episodes.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the enigma that is Kaiba. It's bright, colorful, complex, and it (unlike nearly everything else this season) even has good OP and ED music. Be forewarned: everything you see in episode one relates to everything else, so even if you don't understand what's going on, pay careful attention. It'll all be explained later on...probably.

2.
RD Sennou Chousashitsu (Real Drive)
ＲＤ 潜脳調査室
Production I.G/Shirow Masamune (yes, that's the pair that did last season's Ghost Hound)

This show has two things in common with Kaiba: 1. It deals with the abstraction of intelligence in a virtual world, and 2. It throws you into the plot already running at full speed.

The differences are just as significant. While Kaiba is set in some measurelessly distant future, There's a date explicitly set in the middle of the 21st century for Real Drive. Likewise, while the art of Kaiba is formalist and fantastic, Real Drive is set in a world so real and literal that you can almost taste the sea foam when the 'camera' pans across a shoreline. Beg, borrow or steal enough computing horsepower to watch this one in High Def if you must - there's a lot of detail, both painted and rendered on the screen. And if you wait for the DVD, you'd be well-served to see it on Blu-Ray.

At Left: The years have not been kind to Haru Masamichi. But at least he has great views.

Meet Haru-san. He's got a problem. He went for a dive one afternoon and woke up fifty years later. Luckily for him, and for his world, the nursing home he inhabits these days is fully wired. Also lucky for him, he draws a smart and genki candy striper (Aoi Minamo) to help him in his dives into the Meta-Real Network (usually known as 'Metal'). Extra points to those who bother to parse Minamo's surname kanji, btw.

At Right: Is 15-year-old Minamo-chan Shirow's first genki girl? She gets extra points for the brown eyes, hair bow, and lack of idealized features. She even has chubby thighs, just like the real thing. Think "Matsuri from Kamichu! meets GITS".

I haven't watched a lot of this one yet, but Shirow's plots seldom disappoint. There's some talkiness at the beginning, but once Haru wakes up from his dive, the show gets on with it and the talk is driven by the plot, instead of vice-versa.

3.
Himitsu - The Revelation
秘密 〜The Revelation〜
Madhouse/shoujo manga by Shimizu Reiko

If you find Real Drive a little too futuristic, there's always Himitsu. The idea here is a pretty simple one: Cops in the near future do the Law & Order thing by sucking the memories out of a dead person's head with a computer. Since the last thing a murder victim saw is often the murderer, it helps a lot with criminal investigation.

At Left: Uke, meet Seme-san, your new boss. But who's who?

Our protagonist is the 'new guy' on the detective squad. He has been hired in to replace a detective who died of unnatural causes. His special ability is lip reading, which turns out to be very useful to the detective team for the simple, if unexplained reason that the computer sucks visual, but not auditory memory out of dead (but not too-long-dead) brains.

But wait, it gets better: In order to get all the memories out of somebody's brain, you have to crank it up to 120% of neural function, as indicated by dramatic bar graphs that go into the scary red zone right before stuff starts happening. Huh? Try running this idea past a research psychologist. For extra amusement value, make sure that the boffin is taking a drink first... Let's just say that this show has the same relationship to neurological science that Star Trek has to nuclear engineering.

Since it's based on a shoujo manga, there's a lot of hand-wringing involved about the ethics of knowing a dead person's innermost thoughts and the basic 'yuck' value of the whole thing, at least in the first show. Our protagonist doesn't exactly show himself as a shining example of intestinal fortitude. The super-plot is all about solving murder mysteries. There are sub-plots involving some light yaoi themes and the aforementioned hand-wringing.

At Right: Seme-san is revealed by his important posing in front of racks of blinkenlights. That is, unless he really wants to just give it all up to the new hire.

The storytelling is rather conventional murder-mystery stuff. Frankly, Arthur Conan-Doyle did this better more than a century ago in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery," and thankfully spared us the boys love angle. The 'thrilling climax' failed to thrill me. It had the feeling of an Agatha Christie story: All the chess pieces move around on the board with just the endgame shown to the audience, and then Miss Marple recites the game for you at the end. Meh. I watched one episode and haven't looked back. If you have read enough actual detective fiction to know good from bad, you'll do the same.

If you want to see a better version of this same basic plotline done with genetics and the paranormal instead of technology and the mental, consider watching Witch Hunter Robin.

Gunslinger Girl - Further Thoughts and Anime Series 1 and 2

I've been reading Gunslinger Girl again. This is prompted by having finally acquired all five volumes of GSG in print in the US (from ADV Manga).

Here's review of the recent ADV releases from a conversation on Mangaforums:

Read through the ADV release of Gunslinger Girl vol 5. My conclusion: it's just as good/bad as their vol 4.

In particular, the very last conversation in the volume between Hillshire and Triela is an excellent point of measure. Psygremlin and I had a conversation here on exactly how this should be translated which culminated in me translating it myself from the Japanese raws. In short, ADV fails. I wouldn't translate '褒める' as 'congratulate.' My dictionaries are rather clear that it's 'to praise,' which coming from Triela has a very different meaning than 'to congratulate.'

There's another place where they get it not quite right. Somebody else's translation of the Henrietta and Giuse in the former monastery scene looking at the portrait (I think it was Toukoubi?) included a nice cultural note explaining what is the deal with the monk, the cell, and the portrait. Nada from ADV.

If it were Naruto nobody would care. But here the mangaka has gone to significant trouble to put his fictional story in the real historical Italy with real buildings, artwork, cars, guns, etc. Because of the nature of Japanese college entrance exams, it's distinctly possible that many Japanese (at least the ones attracted to Gunslinger Girl) would recognize much of what is missed by less-well-educated English speakers...

Cultural notes, people. They don't take up any space, and they often add a lot of value...

My final grade for the ADV translation of Vol 5: C (adequate, but the fan scanslations are significantly better).

And that pretty much sums it up. The first place to look for a quality scanslation of Gunslinger Girl is Toukoubi. Sintendo also did a good job, but have disbanded. Sadly, I know of no fan scanslations circulating of any volume earlier than four, which means that I might just decide to adopt a darker cover and do it myself when I feel like spending an hour a page improving my Japanese reading comprehension someday. As I've said about Ai-Ren and Chobits, Gunslinger Girl deserves a best-possible scanslation and (with the exception of Toukoubi and Sintendo's work) hasn't had one.

Gunslinger Girl is thought-provoking. It's full of moral quandaries and no-win situations. Like Ai-Ren, I think it it some kind of emotional litmus test, possibly of one's ability to be compassionate.

Looking at the printed manga has been an interesting experience in itself. The eye catches different details on paper than on the screen. I was especially interested in the contents of Giuse's desk in vol 3 - he's building a ship in a bottle, and has an aquarium. A patient fellow, our Giuse.

Here's part of a long conversation between me and psygremlin at mangaforums about Gunslinger Girl, among other things. I'll edit to reduce spoiler content, but if you click through to the original, you'll be entering a spoiler minefield, so be warned. Here's Psygremlin, having just watched the original 13 episode anime (there's a sequel in production now).

Just finished watching the series, and although I have a lot to say about it, I'll keep it brief for now, because I don't know how far you are in watching it, plus there's probably going to be a raft of spoilers.

But salient points are:

- I love the artwork in the show, very nice and crisp. That caught my straight from the lovely opening sequence.

- Now that I'm finished I can see exactly why you bought it up in response to my comment about the brutality in Here & There. Except I feel that in many ways GSG is more 'horrific'. Here & There deals with war and people are brutalised during wartime. In GSG, it's about the indifference and almost contempt the girls are treated with. Most handlers treat them like the machines they've designed to be (despite clear traces of their inner humanity shining through - think Triela and her bears). Most of the handlers (apart from Jose) seem to see the girls' devotion towards them more like a dog's loyalty and obedience than "love" - for want of a better word.

- Although one scary part of their conditioning comes through in the interaction between Rico and the bellboy (as you mentioned). The soulless, mechanical way in which she says "sorry" literally sent a shiver up my spine. She wasn't sorry at all - she was doing her job and he got in the way.

- Strangely (and possibly highlighting the 'wrongness' of their situation) if I compare it to the last girls with guns anime I saw - Noir (altho this is more a lolis with guns) the main difference is that although Noir killed more people than your average Tarentino movie, not a drop of blood is ever shown on screen. Whereas in GSG, there's plenty of blood flying when bullets hit home (not to mention poor young Elsa). Add to this the fact the girls are running around in clothes more suited to the mall (and their ages) than say a military style jump suit highlights their youth, perceived innocnce (which could be more naievety - afterall, Henrietta no longer knew what Venus was), and wrongness of their situation. (a bit like the girls wearing their school unifoms in space in Voices of a Distant Star).

- Funnily enough, I found the OP (which I now love) became more and more poignant for me as the story progressed each episode. Especially the opening line "In truth, there is no better place to be" - when you consider the girls' situation before they ended up at Social Welfare (great pun too - they remove people that could affect the welfare of society), they are in a "better place".

And here is my reply:

You got what I hoped you would get out of the Rico/Bellboy scene. It's not what she does, but how she does it that makes it so horrible.

One of the ways that Aida really tweaks the reader/viewer's sensibilities is with the brutal, bloody reality of what the girls do versus their native personalities. Is innocence the same as naivete, or is it simply that they don't have vivid memories of what they did on missions because of the conditioning?

Something worth mentioning too is that children really are the ultimate pragmatists. Aida seems to understand this. Rico might be fully aware of what she's doing, but she knows it's the only because of what she does that she isn't stuck in a hospital bed anymore. Jean may beat her, and her missions may be horrible, but it's obvious that to her, at least, being able to walk and do things for the first time in her life is so good that it's worth all the bad.

One thing I find interesting is how the handlers are portrayed. They're generally not soulless bastards. Marco is detatched from Angelica precisely because he was emotionally hurt by her progressive amnesia due to the conditioning. I think Aida does a great job of making everybody (even the "villains") someone worth knowing and understanding - much like Miyazaki does in his best work.

Concur on the clothes - not only are they necessary for urban camouflage, but they point out that the cyborg assassins are girls who, left to their own devices, think as girls think, and wear what girls wear. Jose's gift of the expensive fashion over coat to Henrietta is very definitely a gift of human affection, and Henrietta treasures it as such.

Ultimately, GSG is not about lolis with guns. It's not about mind control. It's not about the ethics of terrorism and anti-terrorism. It's not about cyborgs. (although all of these things are touched on). GSG is about people and the consequences of actions, both anticipated and unexpected. That's why there's blood - it's a consequence of shooting people. GSG works as a story because it always follows through with the consequences.

It's art, and I'm surprised it's not more widely seen here, given that the anime is both accessible and commercially available. But then nobody has read Ai-Ren, either, which is as profound in its own way.

Which provoked this reply from psygremlin:

What's interesting is there are essentially 5 very different relationships (6 with Elsa) portrayed in the fratellos. And each seem to work on their own levels. Obviously we feel most for Jose and Henrietta, because he treats her more like a human - as Triela says "his kid sister" - than the others. Yet I got the feeling that even this approach - while humane in our eyes - wasn't right. There were a couple of moments when Henrietta does something - like the way she first holds the coat, or wants to keep the wrapping from the camera - that bordered on the obsessive. Add to that the fact she knew what happened with Elsa and her handler, and I'd have to say of all of them, she would be most likely to do the same.

To which I said:

The treatment of Elsa in the manga really brings it home - Jose/Henrietta is the literal fratello attatchment at its closest and most intimate. If the wheels come off this relationship, it turns into Lauro/Elsa. It's made quite obvious that Henrietta empathizes completely with Elsa, and that's why she's the only one who can answer the question of Elsa's fate of all those who have been asked. Her empathy is what I found so heartbreaking in the manga scene. She obviously isn't abstractly considering doing what Elsa did when considering Elsa's condition.

Yes, Henrietta is obsessed with protecting Jose (to both his worry and discomfort at times), and is obsessed with being the precise center of his attention. This is all creepily familiar with anybody who has seen the responses that military working dogs have toward their handlers (yes, same term). All it would take to upset this particular applecart would be for Henrietta to discover that Jose had a serious girlfriend...

Hillshire/Triela is presented as an alternate and (I agree) generally more functional relationship. The difference here isn't so much in the relationship itself, I think, as in the difference between the participants. Henrietta and Rico are the emotionally youngest of the girls, and from their stature I guess that they are the physically youngest as well. They're emotionally very different from Triela, who is enough older that she's dealing with menarche and the change of perception that comes along with it.

Since Triela's more emotionally mature, she needs a friend and partner much more than she needs a protective/loving big brother. Teddy bears are an amusing choice of gift for her because she, of all the girls least wants/has a use for stuffed animals. She seems to know that she ended up here because she was nearly killed in a snuff film, and it gives a certain edge to her perspective. Hillshire, accordingly, fills the friend/partner role. As much as anything, he humanizes her when she's prone to indiscriminately kill. The conditioning adds a certain creepy reverse-lolicon quality to their relationship, which Hillshire (being a both a wounded but still determined idealist and all-round decent guy) carefully ignores.

I thought that sending Triela off to train with the green-beret equivalents of the Carabinieri was a stroke of genius. It also thought it pointed out that they (section 2) had spent a lot of time training the girls to behave like perfect SWAT team members (policemen, basically), but had neglected several thousand years of experience in the basic rules of human strife that every good soldier (or good martial artist) knows. It's sort of a variation of the question asked by Neviril in Simoun - You send us on these missions and tell us to act like soldiers, and then you train us to be police. Which do you want us to be, and are you willing to accept what we will become if we do what we must to win?

It's worth mentioning that Giuseppe and Hillshire are alike in that they don't like to blunt their charges' awareness with heavy conditioning, preferring instead to teach their charges appropriate behaviors the old fashioned way. Giuseppe and Jean are brothers (actual fratelli), but couldn't be more different in their approaches to fratello management.

...which was true when written, but the more recently scanslated chapters of the manga have developed Jean and Giuse's relationship as brothers, and shown some complexity to Jean's treatment of his Cyborg charges (he's also responsible for Claes) that was not apparent before Vol 3. As in real life, people in GSG change, and their actions in the present are not always predictable from those of the past.


Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino Anime

In other Gunslinger Girl news, Gunslinger Girl II: Il Teatrino is running now in Japan. It's another 13 episode show, and it is, so far, very canon to the manga. Aida-sensei is supposed to be prominently involved in production and scriptwriting, and they're getting a lot of little things right.

Sadly, what they're not getting right is the animation, which is...acceptable at best. It's obvious that the animation is both rushed and done on the cheap. The first episode is the worst (crowd scenes had me cringing), but other than that, it's watchable. The first series was done by Madhouse, who do Kon Satoshi's movies now, so probably couldn't be bothered to do a TV show like GSG2 even if the budget had been big enough (it obviously wasn't).

Here's my take from having just watched the first episode:

I've also heard bad things about the AEN sub (from different sources) so I waited a whole day and pulled the torrent for the Triad release. When I added the torrent last night before bed there were 300+ seeds and 600+ peers. Completion time was limited by recipient bandwidth. It was sitting on the hard drive this AM when I woke up.

{edit - later}
Watched GSGII ep 1. My initial impressions: OP song indifferent. OP animation (partially - looked like some posterized photo capture there) OK, but not spectacular. Does get the point across, though.

I got really, really tired of the lame moving-block animation in the crowd sequences. Either animate the people or do snap cuts between stills. Don't bother with Hanna-Barbera-style moving cutouts. OTOH, Backgrounds were great. They were playing with a watercolor wash look (probably to hide that they'd ripped some scenery out of photos) but it worked OK.

Something that didn't work quite as well was the character animation. Henrietta's face wasn't as mobile as in the manga, which is something of a trick given that the manga is still pictures. Likewise, they didn't show the payoff scene in the walking-on-the-curb sequence (I suspect it was cut for time). Things improved after Hillshire and Joze returned from France, although the animation was still rather clunky. The vehicles aren't generic (thankfully) but haven't gained the stature of the manga yet. I suspect they will - writing the Alfas out of the plot would probably not please Aida-sensei. Likewise, nice to see that the Vespa is yellow...

The cyborgs' eyes seem to be intentionally creepy. Fine. I can cope with that, and it does fit, especially when 'Etta does her trick on the scooter. I don't think I'll ever get used to Joze's hair, though...

All of the scenes are canon from the manga, though they are rearranged in chronological order to provide a good introduction episode before starting on the Pinnochio arc. I didn't much like how Henrietta came off looking robotic, reverse-lolicon and incompetent while Triela looked thoughtful, mature and capable, though this may be dramatic setup for the first Pinnochio encounter - 'pride goeth,' etc. They did get the feel of the dynamic between Joze and Henrietta fairly well. They touched on that between Hillshire and Triela, and showed very little of Jean/Rico, but nothing out-of character happened.

I liked how they introduced all the Section 2 supporting cast. We only know a couple of names, but we have seen all the faces and characteristic mannerisms. Nice touch. I was also amused by Beatrice's cameo...

ED song and animation - not bad at all. As evocative as 'The Light Before We Land,' if with a rather different text. Gets the point across well, I think. I wonder if they'll sub in different animation vignettes as we go along.

I have to say I wanted a higher-res encode from Triad. Lots of artifacts, etc. I'm guessing their raws weren't wonderful, but ugh. Since the filesize of the AEN sub is about the same, I suspect they're both from the same raw. Oh well. I'm sure it'll go to DVD sooner or later.

Conclusion: Animation nowhere near as good as Madhouse's work in the first series. Right now it gets an A for backgrounds, a B for character animation, and a C for misc. animation. Music: OK but nothing wonderful - isn't as evocative as that of the first series. Character development and plotting: A. If it stays at this standard I'll grumble at the animation gaffes, but will enjoy watching. If they're saving up cash for later eps, all might be forgiven, though I'd say they were stupid to short-budget the first show.

And here from a little later on:

Re GSG2: to be fair, the bar was set very high by Madhouse. They are a cinematic-quality shop, so naturally their work looks very good indeed (and I think that GSG II is a victim of their success - I'm sure they're working fulltime on Kon Satoshi's next movie right now). That said, it looks like Artland wasn't really trying. I don't know about the budget, but so far this falls in the category of 'cheap TV animation.' Which is fine for something like Hidamari Sketch, but not so good for something as immersive as GSG. Re 'shiny' I think that's both a stylistic choice and a way to hide a lot of the splice work holding the backgrounds together. That's fine - it is sunny Italy after all. I didn't like that cars on the street are mostly matte polygons with dropover textures. Quick, cheap wireframe CGI work.

They definitely got a lot of the important stuff right, which is why it's watchable with such marginal animation. Yes, Henrietta with Joze's shirt was done very well (but I was a little annoyed at them getting the surfaces of his desk right - there's a bottle, a tank, and a computer, but not showing any detail - you don't know what's in the bottle or the tank. Joze's character remains more opaque than it might to the viewer because of that). My reaction - and Hillshire's - to the the way Triela looked after the big shootout was well done. Likewise Triela and the manhole cover. In both cases, it does a good job of setting up the essential tension between the characters and their job.

And here, I talk a little more about it after having seen episode three:

It's becoming apparent to me that, while there's no budget (and this is a great pity), they're trying very hard to tell a good story. The placing shots of Montalcino at the beginning of the ep were reminiscent (in a somewhat low-res, fuzzy way) of the trip to Sicily footage from the first series. They got the feel right, which indicates that somebody in this overworked and obviously underpaid art department is trying hard to get it as right as they can. Likewise, pacing and direction are quite good. Even the spots that should be draggy aren't too draggy. The only places I feel like the art quality hurts is in facial expressions- Aida's art style gives a lot of expressiveness in a face, and we don't always see those subtleties carried across to the animated character.

Yes the framing rate could be higher - the jerky motion does bother me, and is reminiscent of a lot of mediocre TV animation of the last two decades. But if they had to sacrifice plot, backgrounds, or frame rate, I'm glad they chose frame rate. On the upside, there was actually good BG music in this ep. It was distinctly reminiscent of the happy Italian town BGM from the first series, which is no bad thing. The OP continues to leave me cold (cheap drum machines usually do), although I sorta like the still montage. The ED works better for me, and I still like the inset vignette. Stark works well with GSG, so the stark titles and credits are good. I suspect that when we see a higher-res picture, they'll suffer significantly less than the animation will.

My conclusion, as of ep 3 at least: ArtLand doesn't suck. They're just underpaid. And if they had to scrimp on something, I'm glad it was the opening episode, which was barely canon to the manga and mostly existed to establish characters. I just hope it didn't hurt the ratings for the rest of the series too much - after all, Aida's still writing, and if this show does badly we'll never see a GSG season 3.