JP and Hinano have been posting some good stuff. I think this comment by Hinano speaks for itself:

just for the record, I Did not force jp to watch Boku no Corncob Buttsecks...

And we'll just leave that one sitting right there, and move on to the other post, about which I wanted to respond:

"What your bottom 5 anime say about you"

We did "top 5", so now it's "bottom 5"? OK, I'm game. I did a "bottom 4" several years ago, and I'm going to assume that those trophies are retired so I have to come up with a new list, not really in any order. And honesty forces me to admit that I bought all of these.

1. UFO Princess Valkyrie OVA. The whole UFOPV franchise is pretty mediocre, with the second series being the stand-out exception (in that it rises from the average "what a piece of shit" level up to "well, that one was mostly OK"). What the series did have going for it, even in its worst moments, was lots of fan service. And that's why the UFOPV OVA stands out: it didn't even have that going for it. the only fan service on the DVD is in the OP.

2. Demon Fighter Kocho. Apparently it was a 1-episode satire of a "Devil Hunter Yohko" which itself was none too good. Anyway, DFK is really down in the dregs. There's a fair amount of nudity, but the animation budget was so low that it wasn't really done very well. But what really makes this show one to avoid is the worst, most gawdawful henshin deck of all time, up there in the "where's the mind-bleach?" territory of sheer awfulness. I do have to admit that henshin deck was funny, though.

3. Animation Runner Kuromi. There were two of these, in fact. I ordered them both, for some reason. I don't think I ever even unwrapped the second one. The first one, which I watched once, is an industry inside joke pretty much. Lots of references which I could sense but didn't get to specific people and events in the anime industry, along with an overall message of, "MAN, this job really sucks big-time. We sure sacrifice a lot to bring you your cartoons, you know that?" Nominally it's a comedy, but it comes across more as a half hour of whining rather than as any kind of joke.

4. .Hack/Sign. When I wrote my review of it, years ago, I summarized it as "5 characters in search of something to talk about." There have been shows inspired by games, or created as marketing vehicles for games, but I daresay few as utterly dull as this one. Some things do happen, but most of the show consists of the characters meeting one another in the gaming world in various combinations to talk about what they said to other characters in the previous scene. After burning through about 20 episodes like that, eventually things kick into high gear, and a whole lot of really impressive but bewildering stuff happens, and the show finally comes to a screeching halt in a situation which is completely unresolved. Why? Because it ends where the first of the computer games begin. Turns out this series is one gigantic retcon intended to set up the first game. The game series has been very successful and many later titles have come out. There have been other anime, too, but I'm not even slightly curious and haven't checked them out, mainly because it looks as if you can only really understand and enjoy the franchise if you consume both the anime and the games, and I don't game anymore. Anyway, there's little or no character continuity between them. Each anime introduces an entirely new cast.

5. This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. This one suffers from the same problem as Animation Runner Kuromi, in that it was made for the staff rather than for the audience. It's a reunion for the cast and staff of Mahoromatic. And that meant they had to have characters for all of the seiyuu who were in Mahoromatic, whether they made sense in story terms or not. I bought it as a complete collection, and made it through the first DVD before giving up watching it. The first series had two androids, and this series has two magical girls with the same seiyuu. The original series had two guy buddies and three girl buddies, so this one does too. (Only they made one of the girl buddies into a cousin tsundere romantic interest.) The first episode has an awesome combat scene, and it promised much. It promised something that the rest of the series didn't deliver, sadly; there was no more combat like that until the very end, and such combat scenes as did happen later weren't anything like as good. I know this because I scanned through the whole thing to take frame grabs for the top rotation. The art is really good; the girls are cute. But the concept and the execution are entirely too precious and self-absorbed, and it reeked.

UPDATE: So what does this say about me? I guess what it says is that there was a time when I'd buy damned near anything.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:10 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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