Summer 2010 Part I
It’s summer, I’m officially a NEET, and I have all the time in the world to watch cartoons. Then write about them. Alright!
High School of the Dead
I haven’t ever seen a zombie movie in my life, nor have I read the manga that this anime is based on, so I came into this at very least expecting DAW’s designs to be beautifully rendered by Madhouse’s team of expert animators. And I got exactly that! The amount of detail put into jiggling breasts and ass-hugging panties in this TV show is wonderful. However, I am not sure how I feel about these things when juxtaposed against a zombie invasion. I loves me some exposed panties, but when they’re tightly hugging the crotch of girl who is in the process of being eaten alive, things slip too much into guro territory for me. I understand that this is supposed to be an homage to campy cult movies, but episode 1 seems to be playing it too straight for me to detect any sort of irony. I’m guessing that I’m simply not the target audience.
I do really like me some Digital Accel Works characters, but I’d rather seem them animated in a porno or something.
Kure-nai OAD
Alright, I knew going in that this rendition of Kure-nai was going to be a Little Different this time around with Brains Base opting to use Yamamoto Yamato’s designs straight up rather than using the TV series designs. That’s cool. Yamamoto Yamato’s cool. He’s a got a cool name. He draws cool drawings. Hell, I own his book. He’s a cool dude. But this anime is very not cool.
Let me tell you what’s not cool about it. Remember how the Kure-nai TV series was super chilled out, and actually kind of mature? Remember how the characters actually had nuance and a realistic edge to them? Remember how it was just really well directed? Yeah, you ain’t getting none of that in this 30 minute set of vignettes set around the characters going about their daily lives. Now, there isn’t anything wrong with this. Hell, the Kure-nai TV series was primarily exactly that. It’s all about presentation. This stuff feels like your normal run-of-the-mill anime! And not even a good one. Like, I’m fine with stuff that’s generic. A lot of my guilty pleasures are just that. But I expect better out of Kure-nai, which is one of the fine wines of anime. What we get in this OAD is wine of the boxed variety. It’s completely uninteresting and rather trashy. Once complex characters are now boiled down to stereotypes, and the few new characters make their requisite stereotype obvious within their first 3 seconds of screentime. I will admit that Murasaki is very cute in this (The high point of the whole 30 minutes is her parading around in a bikini.) but even she is boiled down to “token loli.”
Now, if the Kure-nai TV show was like this from the get-go (and did it very well) I’d be less shocked and disturbed. But this is just very generic, and not even that well done. There’s an attempt to establish some kind of sense of continuity between this OAD and TV series by using Muramatsu Ken’s beautiful musical score as background music, but in the context of this episode, it just feels miss-matched.
Strangely enough, it seems that being GENSAKU DOORI is not to blame for this. I have some second-hand information which claims that the Kure-nai TV series is very close in tone to the original novels. Considering that Denpa Teki Na Kanojo is based on novels by the same guy, I’m willing the buy that. It seems the franchise’s manga adaption is to blame for this, which is unsurprising, considering this came bundled with a volume of the manga.
Mitsudomoe
I’m going to come clean here–I had reservations about this show going in. I wanted to like it, but I was afraid it’d fall flat. Thankfully, it did anything but! I was hooked like a motherfucker after the first minute.
I love elementary school settings. They just have far more spunk and energy than high school settings, especially when they are hit with a heavy dosage of sexual humour. This show is dirty, and it makes a ton of noise about it. At the center of the madness are a set of triplets who all partake of their own unique flavor of perversion that run the gamut from straight up boob obsessed, sadistic, to quietly paging through skinmags in the corner of a classroom. But everyone in this show is clearly fucked up, and they make sure you know it–even if said characters haven’t even had speaking roles yet! The whole thing is completely HIGH TENSION and never lets up with its barrage of twisted sexual humour, all centered around small children.
If I had to mention any issues I have with this show, it may be that designs adhere a bit too strictly to the manga’s somewhat lacklustre artwork. But they managed to grow on me regardless, even if I like my lolis to be a bit more realistically proportioned. And hey, if being accurate means seeing more loli camel toe, I am down with that.
Apparently the team who worked on Minami-ke (the good first season) is working on Mitsudomoe and it shows, the show is too hilarious I don’t even care about loli camel toe anymore.
Indeed DAW characters are awesome and there is plenty of ways to show us how great (with plenty of fanservice moments the manga has provided) but if they could just tone it down for the duration of the action scenes it would be much better.
I was a bit disappointed by HSotD, to be honest. I really appreciated the manga for what it was– the author basically said, “Here are some things I like! If you can like or learn to like them too, you can have fun reading my manga!” But, so far, I don’t feel like I’ve seen that yet in the TV adaptation. Admittedly, so far we have only seen the first chapter or so, and I didn’t really like the first chapter of the manga either, so perhaps once the rest of the characters show up and the normal “mode” of the story starts up, it will be a little more enjoyable. I’ll still be disappointed with the art, though. The only things that really seem well animated are the boobs and the pantsu, but I guess I can live with that if they can take up ~15 minutes of each episode or so. I’m just hoping that all the weapons will get some extra attention too, just so I have something else to look at once in a while.
Mitsudomoe has forced me to do something of a double take. Initially, I said to myself, “Is this going to be Kodomo no Jikan, Kyou no go no ni, Minami-ke, or Dokuro-chan?” and so far, it has almost lived up to all of thsoe four in the comedy department. This show really IS funny. The character designes REALLY turned me off at first, and the whole style felt a little too much like a childish “cartoon,” but I suspect that was meant to be juxtaposed with the rather more adult subject matter (played for laughs, of course, just as the idea of elementary schoolers reading ‘skinmags’ and the like is supposed to be funny).
After I watched the first episode, I was disappointed with how little I had enjoyed the fanservice, due to the outlandish character designs, but, I have to admit, after I spent a little time on danbooru, I think I can change my tune and appreciate chubby, round-headed loli fanservice after all.
In the end, I expect to enjoy the next few episodes of both of these shows a little more than I did the first, or at least I hope I will. I might even enjoy the first ep of Mitsudomoe more if I watch it again now, as a matter of fact, but I think I’ll just wait for next week.