I thought the summer season was going to start a week ago, but most of the shows I was going to check out haven't started yet. A couple of days yet, I think, before subs show up on the majority of them.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 05:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I think I'm probably as surprised as anyone else that Shukufuku no Campanella is on my rewatch list now. I  just rewatched the whole thing, and really enjoyed it.

Fact is, they did a good job of scrubbing all the eroge stench out of it. But even more important, they came up with a decent story to replace it all.

So instead of it being about Leicester jumping into bed with everything near by that has tits, it's about a world-wide problem with the flow of magic, and about a magically-animated girl automaton.

One of my heuristics is that a harem show is worth watching in direct proportion to the extent that the guy in the middle gets his act together. And Leicester does have his act together. He isn't pushed around by the women. There aren't any tsunderes. He doesn't make stupid embarassing mistakes. He knows what he is, and he likes himself, and he cares about the people around him. He has a job to do, and he does it well. He really is pretty admirable, and that goes a long way towards making the show work.

On rewatch, the big problem is Ritos Tortilla, and I simply skipped almost every scene she was in. Watching her abuse her sister isn't funny.

There are a lot of things they did right. Carina does have a bit of a tendency towards possessiveness towards Leicester, but they didn't make her angsty. Indeed, no one in the show really comes off as angsty.

And though it clearly is a harem show, they actually deemphasized that aspect of it. Carina is madly in love with Leicester, but it's also evident that he's in love with her. And everyone else knows it. Other women may be attracted to Leicester, but none of them let themselves become serious about him because they know he's taken.

That is nice, too.

The art in the show is wonderful, and the animation generally is very good, and the underlying story of the series really is a lot better than I realized when I watched it for the first time. It's a comfortable show to watch.

The fan service is good, too, but I skipped those scenes on rewatch as well. They weren't what I was rewatching for.

I have no idea when, but I'm sure I'll rewatch it again some time.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:51 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Yuru-Yuri is "cute girls doing cute things" except that they're older, and there's sex involved. Or at least intimations of it.

It feels a bit like an attempt to subvert the "cute girls doing cute things" genre. It's very silly.

The characters are two 8th graders and two 7th graders. The parallel to Ichigo Mashimaro is pretty obvious and I suspect not accidental, though there's a two year difference. One of the older ones is Yui, who has dark hair and is the most sane and self-controlled. The other older one is Kyouko, the blonde, and she's nutso. So far, so good. Kyouko is a budding doujin artist, and her character is a magical girl named Miraku-run.

The redhead is Akari. She's one of the younger ones. She calls herself "Akari", and using your own name like that is a childish affectation, something kids usually outgrow by the time they're 12. Akari spends a lot of time crying; she may be intended to correlate somewhat to Matsuri.

Those three have been friends since grade school. The fourth, with pink twintails, is Chinatsu. Turns out she looks very much like Kyouko's Miraku-run.

When Chinatsu shows up for the first time, Kyouko comes on very aggressively to try to convince her to join the Entertainment Club. Yui bops Kyouko on the head and otherwise calls her off. And then we start getting yuri vibes: Kyouko gets a nosebleed looking at Chinatsu, and in the mean time Chinatsu starts having "onee-sama" vibes about Yui. At one point there's a three-way grabbing scene.

Akari isn't part of it. And we get something almost like a fourth-wall break, where they talk about how Akari had begun the show apparently as the main character, but her presence had declined. The other girls decide to figure out what to do about it. They each write something suggesting what should change. This was Kyouko's:

おっぱい ミサイル is oppai misairu i.e. "boob missiles", as the translators made it. And I admit I laughed out loud.

And it proceeded to get even stranger from there.

Oh, forgot to mention. Ichigo Mashimaro also had a perverted older girl, right? We didn't see her in the first episode, but it looks like Akari's older sister is all that. At the beginning, Kyouko peeked inside the older sister's bedroom, which had "absolutely no admittance" on the door, and found imouto games and imouto books, and loli pictures on the walls, and a lot of pictures of Akari herself. Plus a hug pillow with Akari's picture on it, and lipstick kisses on the face. And a couple of pairs of Akari's underwear, which Akari had been complaining had gone missing.

Kyouko got seriously freaked by that. I'm sure it's going to come up again.

What it is, is a humor series. What it isn't, I'm happy to say, is pedo bait. There wasn't any fan service to speak of. There was a scene with Kyouko looking up Yui's skirt, and a scene where Kyouko grabbed Yui's boobs, but no jiggle, no panchira, and no nudity.

The dynamic between Kyouko and Yui is very similar to Chika and Miu, except that Kyouko isn't the same kind of crazy as Miu.

Did I like it? I got mixed feelings. The potential is here for this to be seriously funny. (As it were.) But I don't know if they can keep it up, or if they'll head into the ditch with loli fan service. If they keep it clean, that'll help a lot.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 05:52 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Pete says he doesn't want to watch the Railgun OVA. Apparently he isn't aware that in the OVA, Mikoto loses her marbles.

It's only 35 minutes long, and the OP (which is completely new) is awesome. Oh, well; his loss.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:03 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. I think it's an example of "healing anime", I think was the term. (I asked about that here once, and Pete provided the proper term, but it's lost somewhere in the comments and I stupidly didn't write it down in a more easily-accessible location.)

By which I mean a story that's slow, gentle, warm... Someday's Dreamers was an example of it. Everyone is nice. No one is evil. Nothing terrible happens. Everyone is happy, or at least they become happy in the end.

I can't say I disliked it; in fact it was really pretty nice. But maybe I'm evil; I couldn't watch it without fearing all kinds of things might happen, that eventually didn't.

I am not the audience for this show. That's the problem. For the audience for which it is intended, it's going to be a hit. I'm not among them, and I'm not sure I can adapt to it.

The show is based in Paris, nominally in the last half of the 19th Century, but more specifically probably around 1890. The main characters are an old man, Oscar, his grandson Claude, and a Japanese girl named Yune. And I do mean "girl"; she looks like she's about 8.

Oscar took a trip to Japan and brought back a lot of souvenirs. Yune seems to be one of them, and it isn't exactly clear how he got her. Maybe she's an orphan. Claude, the grandson, is really scandalized by this entire idea -- me, too -- but it looks like he's warming up to Yune by the end of the show.

The art in the show is fabulous. I'm sure that 1890 Paris wasn't really this clean and beautiful, but for a fantasy show like this one the fantasy version of the city is probably a better match. So there are horse-drawn trolleys, but no piles of horse manure in the streets. Things like that.

It's really well done, but I don't think I can watch any more of it.

UPDATE: The term is "iyashikei".

UPDATE: Divine loved it.

UPDATE: Aroduc hated it. But these days Aroduc hates damned near everything.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I haven't even watched it yet, and already it's clear that Uta no Prince Sama isn't for me. (I'm not even sure just why I added to my list. It's off again, now.)

Meanwhile, regarding Ro-Kyu-Bu, Random Curiousity says:

I suspect a good measure of how you'll like Ro-Kyu-Bu! is going to be tied to the question of how you feel about a series that introduces itself with an extended scene of five 6th-grade girls in the shower.

In other words, it is as I feared: this is Sofuteni demoted to grade school. And based on this picture, one of those sixth graders is already a D-cup. (If you're wondering what the hell they're all doing in meido costumes, they decide to greet the high school boy who's going to become their coach by cosplaying, and calling him goshuujin-sama. I saw elsewhere that they eventually switch to onii-chan, which is hardly better.)

How do I feel about it? My reaction is to run away screaming, Stay away from me!

It's a hell of a thing that I'm starting to think of Chu-Bra as being restrained and refined.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 02:10 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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This Penny Arcade cartoon? Something like that happened in Stratos 4, and it was the single best scene in the entire series.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 12:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Pete finally finished watching To Aru Kagaku no Railgun. His conclusion? "It didn't totally suck."

Ah, well; I suppose that was the best I could hope for.

But the job's not really done until he watches the OVA, which fits into the continuity just after ep 14.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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And here's what I'm going to try to watch during the next week, along with their broadcast days:

Nekogami Yaoyorozu -- SATURDAY
Uta no Prince-sama -- SATURDAY
Ikoku Meiro no Croisee -- SUNDAY
Yuru Yuri -- MONDAY
Dantalion -- FRIDAY
Itsuka Tenma no Kuro-Usagi -- FRIDAY

And I'm going to scope out three as possible candidates to donate to the top rotation:

R-15 -- SATURDAY
Manyuu Hikenchou -- SUNDAY
Idolmaster -- THURSDAY

Manyuu Hikenchou's home page is "oppaidaisuki.jp", which isn't very subtle. (It can be loosely translated as "I love breasts".)

As to how many and which I'll be watching the week after, it's anybody's guess, but the most likely scenario is that I drop nearly all of them. Ick.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Not bad at all! The pacing was, perhaps, a bit clumsy. I'm not sure it really required two episodes for the finale, but generally it worked pretty well.

The fight sequences in the second, fourth, and especially the ninth and tenth episodes were handled very well. The last combat of the last major battle was really scary.

Shinku is a good lead, nicely handled. He isn't angsty. He's brave, strong, capable, and in fact genuinely heroic. When people in that place call him "Hero", they aren't being ironic. And at the same time he's not pretentious. He's likeable and outgoing, and people there genuinely like him as a person, as well as respecting him as a warrior. They did a nice job conceiving him and presenting him as a character, without making him too good to be true. Someone like him could come across as insufferable, but he's just too nice a guy for that.

There's no deep message to this show. Watching it isn't any kind of life-changing experience. But it's fun, and a pleasant way to spend a few hours.

And I admit that when I finally got to this scene, I got tears in my eyes.

"Yatta!", she's saying.

Yeah, the ending was a bit contrived, approaching deus ex machina level. And I don't care. It was what I wanted, and they knew it, and they gave it to me.

Recommended.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:39 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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