I didn't get very far into Urusei Yatsura, which was Takahashi's first series. I bought three DVDs but only watched about half the first one. So this is all based on a pretty prelimiary exposure to the series.

Nonetheless: it's a series of 15-minute shows, and generally speaking the storylines covered one or two shows. They were mostly about gags, especially physical comedy.

Takahashi's second series was Maison Ikkoku, which has much more well-conceived characters, at least two of which are supposed to be sympathetic. I bought the first series of that one, and literally gave up on it after watching two minutes of the first episode. I don't know how to explain it, but major sirens went off in my head that said, "This is NOT for me." So I don't really know what the series construction is like, but I do know that I've been told that time passes, characters change, and the primary relationship does advance.

Ranma 1/2 was Takahashi's third series, and I gather also her most successful. It looks like it splits the difference between the previous two. It's more comedic and slapstick than Maison Ikkoku but the characters are far better conceived than in Urusei Yatsura.

One thing becomes clear at this point: the series is constructed of a sequence of multi-episode story arcs. There's an occasional one-off ep (like the "Ramen Delivery martial arts" story) but what you mainly have is arcs that cover 3-5 episodes. And that really does work pretty well. If the series were constructed entirely of one-ep stories it would come off as rather vapid. This way the stories are more deep. It keeps me coming back.

Another thing I've noticed is that the degree of ecchi is not constant. The first and second major story arcs had a lot of ecchi. Since then damned near none. And I think part of the reason is that it hasn't really made sense since then. Most of the ecchi in the early part of the series made sense in plot terms. Shampoo's rather dramatic ecchi entrance, for instance: in her cat form she jumps into Ranma's bath. Naturally, she appears nude in her human form.

Now that doesn't mean it isn't totally gratuitous. They're choosing their camera shots to let the audience have a good view. For instance, they could have shown us Shampoo from the rear. And the Ranma-chan topless shot during the costume change in the skating-martial-arts arc was totally gratuitous. But mostly the fact of Ranma-chan losing her clothes has made sense in plot terms.

This series is an interesting blast-from-the-past. It seems like anime back then was more... innocent... for lack of a better way to describe it. Almost naive. The accumulated canon of another ten years has made us all jaded, I think.

Oh, and the eyes were a lot smaller back then.

Compare, for instance, to Clannad:

The eyes, the eyes, they haunt me so. Will the Clannad pain never end? Please, tell me that the series isn't infinitely long, and that new episodes will stop coming out.

There's a sequel? OMG, the nightmares, I will never be free of those eyes in my dreams...

UPDATE: Seriously, did they have to make them so damned big? I think the only other thing I've seen with eyes that big is some of the characters in Sugar, a little snow fairy, and those are all children (or fairies). But KyoAni has made all the soap-opera show characters have eyes that big. They were like that in Kanon, too, and in Air. I guess that's how Key does their characters.

This now being the third series KyoAni has done based on a Key game, maybe if we're lucky they've used them all up and KyoAni can get back to doing good stuff again, like another Haruhi series, or something like Lucky Star. (Man, even those girls didn't have eyes that big.)

I've written before about "five bladed razors", such as the number of sisters in "Sister Princess", or tit size in "Eiken", or the number of maids in "Hanaukyo Maid Team La Verite". Is Clannad the five-bladed-razor of eye size? There's been a gradual increase in eye size over the last fifteen years; is this the series that finally takes it to such extremes as to cause a reversal of the trend? We can only hope.

UPDATE: Cue outraged shrieks...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:13 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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