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Cartoons: the summer review edition
12 Jun 2009 09:40 amSummer COUP is a lot more laid-back, since its mostly townies and a handful of summer students. We get to watch random stuff and finish off series we watched a few episodes of here & there over previous semesters.
Basquatch 1-4: The premise of the show is amusing: What if people played basketball in giant robots that look like VW Bugs with legs? And if it stuck to that, it would be an amusing show. Unfortunately, it turns into gross shonen fanservice very quickly. One character's tits are the focus of the screen for 45 seconds. Another character gets off in her mech when a male character knocks her over -- and she wants to get his "genes." A third character comes from the moon, and the episode where she's introduced focuses on her "Lunar Bust." Her tits are bigger than her head.
Verdict: If someone edited out the bullshit fanservice crap, this would be passably amusing. Otherwise, don't waste your bandwidth.
Tytania 3-4: I still adore the crap out of this show, despite it being a serious sausagefest. We meet Captain Miranda in episode 4, and she remains the awesomesauce. One of these days I'll get around to finishing it.
Kurozuka 3-4: This is one of those sort of artsy shows which uses a variety of techniques to be vague about what the hell is going on. It's also seriously violent and bloody. After 4 episodes, the most I can figure out is that there's this samurai guy, Kuro, who met this woman, Kuromitsu, who was really a vampire. He was on the lam, and when the baddies caught up with him, they killed him and she vampirized him, so they're living through time or something. Then suddenly they're in post-apocalyptic Japan and he's hiding from some guys again. It's deeply weird, but I think there's an intriguing story buried under it somewhere. I'm not sure I care enough to watch it on my own, though.
Mononoke 1-2: No relation to Mononoke-hime, this is about a guy who travels feudal Japan as a medicine seller, but he's really looking for demons. The art is very stylistic, deliberately looking like Edo-era woodblock prints. It's sort of like Mushishi, but weirder. It's also a lot more culturally Japanese, based on what I've seen. Whereas Mushishi evokes a sort of timeless Japan-like country, Mononoke is very much feudal Japan. It's interesting, and I would probably not complain if someone gave me a bunch of it to watch, though it wouldn't go high on my priority list.
Golgo 13 3-4: This is an update of the old (70s? 80s?) show & movie about the World's Best Assassin. It's macho shonen gun nut stuff, and if goofy camp Die Hard shit is your cuppa, Golgo is your man. Just don't watch the Streamline dub of the movie. (OK, do, but it's a doozy.)
Bubblegum Crisis 2032: The original 80s-era 8-part OVA series, not the late-90s remake. We got our paws on the Blu-Ray release, and it's hilarious what the animators put on computer screens and assorted display readouts that you could never see at VHS resolution. Song lyrics, lists of 80s bands, random news; it's fabulous.
BGC is very 80s, with the Zeitgeist of technophilia and technophobia creating a world where AI androids go mad, and if they're military droids, well, it's a bad thing. But the Knight Sabers, a team of four women wearing hardsuits (fancy armor with robot-like stuff), fights them when the police can't. (Also, Leon the policeman is a stereotypical 80s womanizing cop.) There's a lot of influence from Blade Runner as well, and that's the milieu of the show.
Of course, being an 80s sci-fi anime, there's a lot of pop music. Priss is in a band, Priss and the Replicants (Blade Runner!), and every episode has 1 or 2 of their songs playing in the background.
Moyashimon: MICROBES! So, the main character, Sawaki, can see microbes with his naked eye. He sees adorable little yeasts and bacteria and the like. (Seriously, they're ADORABLE.) He goes off to agricultural college so he can take over his family business of ... culturing yeast for sake brewing, I think. It's been a while since I watched the beginning. Anyway, it's his first year of college, and he gets into a lab run by a guy who's mad about fermentation and fermented foods. He's got some strange colleagues in the lab. It's all about college life, but also about adorable microbes.
The last 2 episodes we saw were the Spring Festival episodes. (Rule: Any anime set in an educational facility must have an episode devoted to the spring festival.) This is probably the weirdest school festival EVER, and I laughed myself silly. There's some fanservice, but it's not IN YOUR FACE like some other shows. (Dear shonen writers: see this as how to do fanservice without being gross. Thanks.)
Eve no Jikan: Not to be confused with that *other* no Jikan show (ugh ugh ugh, not naming it here, eeew.) People have androids in their homes as servants. Some people become overly emotionally attached to their androids. The protagonist notices that his android goes places without instructions from the family, so he follows her one day and discovers an underground cafe where androids and humans have no differentiation. (Normally androids have status halos.) He has to face his preconceptions and come to terms with his feelings about his android. Good stuff, so far.
Basquatch 1-4: The premise of the show is amusing: What if people played basketball in giant robots that look like VW Bugs with legs? And if it stuck to that, it would be an amusing show. Unfortunately, it turns into gross shonen fanservice very quickly. One character's tits are the focus of the screen for 45 seconds. Another character gets off in her mech when a male character knocks her over -- and she wants to get his "genes." A third character comes from the moon, and the episode where she's introduced focuses on her "Lunar Bust." Her tits are bigger than her head.
Verdict: If someone edited out the bullshit fanservice crap, this would be passably amusing. Otherwise, don't waste your bandwidth.
Tytania 3-4: I still adore the crap out of this show, despite it being a serious sausagefest. We meet Captain Miranda in episode 4, and she remains the awesomesauce. One of these days I'll get around to finishing it.
Kurozuka 3-4: This is one of those sort of artsy shows which uses a variety of techniques to be vague about what the hell is going on. It's also seriously violent and bloody. After 4 episodes, the most I can figure out is that there's this samurai guy, Kuro, who met this woman, Kuromitsu, who was really a vampire. He was on the lam, and when the baddies caught up with him, they killed him and she vampirized him, so they're living through time or something. Then suddenly they're in post-apocalyptic Japan and he's hiding from some guys again. It's deeply weird, but I think there's an intriguing story buried under it somewhere. I'm not sure I care enough to watch it on my own, though.
Mononoke 1-2: No relation to Mononoke-hime, this is about a guy who travels feudal Japan as a medicine seller, but he's really looking for demons. The art is very stylistic, deliberately looking like Edo-era woodblock prints. It's sort of like Mushishi, but weirder. It's also a lot more culturally Japanese, based on what I've seen. Whereas Mushishi evokes a sort of timeless Japan-like country, Mononoke is very much feudal Japan. It's interesting, and I would probably not complain if someone gave me a bunch of it to watch, though it wouldn't go high on my priority list.
Golgo 13 3-4: This is an update of the old (70s? 80s?) show & movie about the World's Best Assassin. It's macho shonen gun nut stuff, and if goofy camp Die Hard shit is your cuppa, Golgo is your man. Just don't watch the Streamline dub of the movie. (OK, do, but it's a doozy.)
Bubblegum Crisis 2032: The original 80s-era 8-part OVA series, not the late-90s remake. We got our paws on the Blu-Ray release, and it's hilarious what the animators put on computer screens and assorted display readouts that you could never see at VHS resolution. Song lyrics, lists of 80s bands, random news; it's fabulous.
BGC is very 80s, with the Zeitgeist of technophilia and technophobia creating a world where AI androids go mad, and if they're military droids, well, it's a bad thing. But the Knight Sabers, a team of four women wearing hardsuits (fancy armor with robot-like stuff), fights them when the police can't. (Also, Leon the policeman is a stereotypical 80s womanizing cop.) There's a lot of influence from Blade Runner as well, and that's the milieu of the show.
Of course, being an 80s sci-fi anime, there's a lot of pop music. Priss is in a band, Priss and the Replicants (Blade Runner!), and every episode has 1 or 2 of their songs playing in the background.
Moyashimon: MICROBES! So, the main character, Sawaki, can see microbes with his naked eye. He sees adorable little yeasts and bacteria and the like. (Seriously, they're ADORABLE.) He goes off to agricultural college so he can take over his family business of ... culturing yeast for sake brewing, I think. It's been a while since I watched the beginning. Anyway, it's his first year of college, and he gets into a lab run by a guy who's mad about fermentation and fermented foods. He's got some strange colleagues in the lab. It's all about college life, but also about adorable microbes.
The last 2 episodes we saw were the Spring Festival episodes. (Rule: Any anime set in an educational facility must have an episode devoted to the spring festival.) This is probably the weirdest school festival EVER, and I laughed myself silly. There's some fanservice, but it's not IN YOUR FACE like some other shows. (Dear shonen writers: see this as how to do fanservice without being gross. Thanks.)
Eve no Jikan: Not to be confused with that *other* no Jikan show (ugh ugh ugh, not naming it here, eeew.) People have androids in their homes as servants. Some people become overly emotionally attached to their androids. The protagonist notices that his android goes places without instructions from the family, so he follows her one day and discovers an underground cafe where androids and humans have no differentiation. (Normally androids have status halos.) He has to face his preconceptions and come to terms with his feelings about his android. Good stuff, so far.
