Tag Archives: review

Winter 2013 Anime Shorts Impressions

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From: Danbooru

From: Danbooru

After being impressed with anime shorts (anime where each episode is less than the full length of 24 minutes) last year (actually it is just Thermae Romae), added with the fact that they are short an hence needs me to invest little time to them each week,  this season, winter 2013, had a multitude of shorts airing, and that most shorts tends to be comedic, one of my favorite genre, all factoring me to picking few shorts this season. Obviously, it is not all joy and fun, as some of the stuff is just painfully boring or horrible. So here is my list from the worst to best shorts I have watched this season:

8. Ai Mai Mi 

The show involves the three girls in a manga club and their daily activities. One of the first thing that I was treated with was a badly drawn girl throwing up blood while someone describes the show’s setting…for what reason? After several minutes of absurd stupid outrageous crap that tries to be funny by being as outrageous as it can be, in particular, one sequence where one of the girls tries to stop another from drawing manga by fainting death, I just had enough of this eye cancer and dropped after episode 2. The ONLY redeeming  thing of this was 8bit ED sequence.

7. Ishida to Asakura 

This show involves Asakura, and his friends all wanting to be his partner and is set in a normal high school. The While less appalling than Ai Mai Mi, this isn’t that much better. With not bad animation, the show tries to be funny by being surreal, usually by having conversations that doesn’t really follow, but just ends up being stupid. This is not how you make comedy. Dropped.

6. Mangirl! 

Mangirl follows the 4 females leads as they create a manga magazine. From an opening where the voice actress have horrible singing skills to it being a show about cute girls doing cute things, having huge overlaps with Tamako Market (which it obviously inferior to), it was pretty much boring from the start. However, it did get points for being at least informative about the process on making a manga magazine.

5. Puchimas!: Petit iDOLM@STER 

Puchimas, as the title suggests, is just the daily lives of the idolmaster cast with their corresponding mini version of them. Really, this show is just riding of the success and fanbase of idolmaster, and at core this show mediocre at best. But that mountain of mini Haruka is just so…must not…but so HNNNNNNNGGGG (and since this is related to Idolmaster, the ED is obviously a treat to who like the franchise).

4. Boku no Imouto wa “Osaka Okan”

Osaka Okan follows Namika, grew up in Osaka, who now lives with her (presumably Tokyo-raised) older brother and how her culture differs with the local culture. Each episode is separated into 2-3 segments each showing a particular part of Namika’s characteristics and then states how that is stereotypical to Osakan (questionable). The episode themselves aren’t amazing, with parts really boring, but I like it when I can agree on some of Namika’s characteristics. I also like how the beginning of each episode, the first thing that Namika speaks kind of makes fun of the whole Imouto craze.  But more importantly, Namika is voiced by Asumi, Kana and her talking in Kansai-ben is basically the main reason that you should watch this, along with her singing about the contents of the episode in the ED (different lyrics every episode).

3. Yama no Susume

Yama follows childhood friends Aoi and Hinata, which they recently reunited after being separated for a while. At small, both girls shared the same passion for mountain climbing, but after an accident Aoi stopped involving herself outdoor activities, while Hinata kept the passion even up to their reunion. I really want to like this show, the calmness, the focus to scenery, and the whole friend supporting you to remember your old hobbies has a very strong Tamayura feel (which I really liked); Hinata and Aoi both voiced by someone that voiced Karou and Norie from Tamayura also helps. There are some places where it does gets a bit emotional (ie ep2), but it just doesn’t have the same level of magic as Tamayura has, and hence is short of being the best thing this season.

2. Inferno Cop 

The show is about Inferno Cop, the titular character, revenging, fighting against the Southern Cross. I donno if this the best or the worst thing, but heck this is one thrill to see what will Inferno Cop do to get out of the random mess that the story is throwing him in every week. Ya, the show is full of profanity and a high amount of “what the heck is this happening”, but it is pretty good to see Inferno Cop being badass every week. Heck this show is not trying to save anime or anything, but for what it is, it is highly enjoyable.

1. Senyuu.

Now this show is trying to save anime (lol Yamakan). Mind what you think of Yamakan’s past performance, but man this is pretty good. With the show making fun of the whole hero RPG genre (might even go into MMORPG), the punchlines are more often than not done right, making this show a solid and funny show. Also with an OP and ED both by JAM Project, Senyuu just blows the water out all other shorts song-wise.

 

Day 2 – Anime Power Rankings and Reviewing Anime

Posted on by fnzna
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From Hyouka ep13

From Hyouka ep13

Back in episode 13 of Hyouka, there was a scene where Mayaka Ibara discussed with her senpai about the usefulness of reviews, with senpai taking the stance of that reviews are useless because the quality of a show is based solely based on the preference of the individual, and hence, is on whim and without a set standard, rendering reviews, which tries to be unbiased as possible and judges the medium objectively, baseless. Mayaka proceeds to refute by raising up stating the existence of masterpieces, which is enjoyed by everyone despite differences in their tastes, and because of the existence of it, it is possible to objectively find a masterpiece, making reviews not useless.

While the scene mentioned above was debating about manga and is also mainly used to introduce a manga that will become instrumental to the issue later, I can still apply that discussion to what I have been doing every week for almost the whole past year: ranking the performance of current anime and submitting the list in hopes that my favorite show for that said week will be number one on Desu ex Machina’s APR. If the senpai is right, does that mean that my ranking and the whole APR is worthless and I should stop doing it because it is all subjective the ranking itself has not basing on the quality of a show. Or is Mayaka right, in that objectivity exists in APR, with shows like Zetsuen no Tempest being better than Smile Precure,  just like how no one understand how Ayumu “Osaka” Kasuga was the least moe character in all the contestants in ISML 2008. I purpose that both sides aren’t fully correct, at least in the context of APR.

From Cromartie High School

From Cromartie High School

First of all, not everyone watches the same amount of shows. Most people just don’t have time to watch 10+ shows per season, and even I didn’t start watching that many current season shows until around this year, so it will be safe to assume that there some people aren’t just watching some shows, no matter how good it is; this is especially true in this year’s winter season, with arguably the highest amount of good anime compared all other 3 previous seasons. Also because of busyness, few would like to pick up something new midway into the season since it also mean that the person had to catch up to the most recent episode before voting, and hence what they view would tend to be finalized right at the very beginning of the season already. On top of that, with services like CrunchyRoll, it is now easier for people to watch some anime over the other, which I won’t be surprised will impact into some’s decision of which shows to watch. Similarly, shows like Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb and Smile Precure, both of which I really like, most likely have a relatively viewer base, with the former because of both the high prerequisite necessary before going into it (as this is the 4th season in the franchise) and the latter’s target audience not of the people participating in APR. These facts displays the importance of the show’s marketing, especially pre-air marketing, to the APR results, with a really good example just from week 10 of fall season, with Girls and Panzer tying with Chu2koi, even when it is a clear fact for people that watched both shows that Garupan is miles ahead of Chu2koi (Warning: personal opinion). From a reviewer’s standpoint, marketing shouldn’t be a part of how good the medium is, but as seen above, APR is affected by how appealing a show is even before it aired, the ranking are affected by marketing, and hence the rankings might not fully correct. However, this does not mean that the rankings are total trash.

Let’s venture to the bottom of the rankings instead, to the shows that are getting single digits score. While I do not have data for the ranks aside from the top 10 from the APR posts, I recall that shows like Total Eclipse is constantly getting 0 and kevo did reveal those low scoring shows for Summer week 12. While we can still attribute those shows as just shows where everyone just didn’t prefer it, that fact points to the fact that there might be some consistency between people’s preference. For reviews to be totally useless, it must mean that each person’s interest is totally random (no common between a reviewer and the reader, and even if there is, it is by pure chance) and that there are no correlation between one’s interest from another, which upon graphing each voter’s interest, the number of support to each genre should be roughly equal, which should translate to at least more people liking the stuff that are constantly being pushed to the very end. Hence either the idea of people’s interest being purely random as false, and that there is a connection, or correlation, between each voter, or that the idea is true but there are just so many shows of the same genre that the the supporters are just too spread out to put one high, or the voter sample size is too small, causing sample error with the voters, whom are all anibloggers, having the better taste while the rest of the world watch Sword Art Online thinking it is the best show ever. If the first possibility is true, then it would justify reviewing anime, the second one seems unlikely since based on the data given out on Summer Week 12, even if you the votes for those ecchi shows together, they most likely will be less than the score that the top 5 are getting. For the third possibility, we can compare our ranking to anime ranking or ratings that are more accessible, for example MyAnimeList, of which its users rated Garupan as 6.93/10 (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻.

Assuming the first possibility is true from previous paragraph, then APR, or reviews in general, is useful, since there is at least some common thread between the reviewers and all audiences, making the audiences trust the reviewers for their opinions up to an extent even if their tastes differs. Furthermore, APR has the benefit of grouping several reviewers, all with different tastes together, expanding the sample size of people’s thoughts on the weekly anime, cancel out the non common interests parts between the reviewers and hopefully find a good function that makes an anime good, ie finding the regression line. Or in if we take each person interest’s as risk, joining them would hopefully get rid of the individual unsystematic risk (interests) to just receive the systematic risk (interests) and then plot each show based on that CAPM line.

However, the issue that some people aren’t watching shows that they would enjoy might make the results not perfect, as it would push up less interesting show (for them) while pushing down more interesting shows (again for them), and with enough people doing that, the regression would treat the voter’s common interests incorrectly.

In short, Anime Power Rankings is mostly correct but Garupan is better than Chu2koi and I’m still sad that people aren’t watching Smile Precure.

Summing up Summer 2012 Anime Season

Posted on by fnzna
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ちびキャララミバ / えらんと

Despite stopping Weekly Musings since the end of last term, I still have kept up keeping track of my weekly anime ratings in terms of a spreadsheet, mostly for my APR ballot. Since it is the end of the summer season, it means that I will be doing my final touches on my summer 2012 spreadsheet and starting my fall spreadsheet, let’s just tally up and see what I think was the worst to best show of the summer season.

Last season I ranked the shows based on the total points it accumulated during the whole season (a point is gain from having a better episode compared to every other episode that aired in the same week), and even than I stated how that way of ranking placed Natsuiro Kiseki at a huge disadvantage, as I started that show half way into the spring season, it didn’t collect any points for the episodes that I didn’t watch as it aired (5 episodes). For this season, I first tried to just find the average points gained for each show and ranking it based on it. While that solved the issue that Natsuiro Kiseki had last time, there were still places that some shows might end up having an disadvantage on. For example, on the weeks that Olympics were held, several shows didn’t get to broadcast for those few weeks. The results is that the shows that were able to broadcast would not have gained an extra point if that show were better than the shows that were postponed. So additionally I tried a new different methods to rank this season’s shows. One is to only let each week’s top 5 get points and then calculate the rankings according to the average points, that way, even on a week with less shows, the maximum number of points that a show can get is 5. Lastly I ranked the shows according to each method (original method, or Method A, or the top 5 method, Method B, gave them points according to each rank from 12-0, took the sum and did a final ranking. Here are the results:

Method B Method A  Final result
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita 12 10 22
Smile Precure 11 11 22
Joshiraku 10 12 22
Yuruyuri ♪♪ 8 9 17
Tari Tari 9 6 15
Hyouka 8 7 15
Binbougami ga! 6 5 11
Space Bros 5 4 9
Saki Achiga 1 8 9
Eureka AO 4 3 7
Kokoro Connect 4 2 6
Sword Art Online 4 1 5
Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse 0 0 0

I swear that the top 3 being tied is pure coincidence, I didn’t force my result to be like that or anything >_>.

Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita

I liked it the show very much, though I can’t really put my finger on especially why. In general though, I really liked the main characters, all of them have this sarcastic personality that just make the character not like any other generic character seen in other shows, which on top is helped by the wonderful (or lack of) performance of their voice actress. Yes I’m talking about Watashi and Y in particular, which both is a huge reason why I liked the show. Additionally, another big reason why I liked the show was because of the fairies. They love sweets, makes really nasty comments with a smile, does random stuff just because and are just adorable. The the whole series being colorful and wacky also helped me liking this show also. I’m still a bit iffy about the last few episodes, as it stopped being just fun and games, but recalling that the original novel was written by Romeo Tanaka, person behind Cross Channel and Yume Miru Kusuri (both really good visual novels), I guess the last few episodes are where we get to see the serious stuff underneath all the fun and games (similar to Cross Channel, which while was funny and wacky at time, really dives in to some really serious plot).

Smile Precure

What can I say? The show talks of friendship and each episode have the girls just having fun and fighting weekly monsters. After watching for 30+ episodes, I have come to like all 5 of them, so I guess I’m pretty biased toward this show. I guess my biggest issue with them is that the fighting scene is a bit too uninteresting, especially since the amount of them they still use to animate their final move.

Joshiraku

Written by the same guy behind Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, Joshiraku has the same kinds of jokes that made me like SZS so much. Additionally, instead of being illustrated by Kumeta himself (as with SZS), it was illustrated by Yasu and is animated by JC Staff, which seems to making few good shows this year. I loved SZS, and hence why Joshiraku being similar to SZS enough, easily became one of my favorite shows this season. If you love puns and references Joshiraku is something that you should sometime, if not, you can still watch it for the moe girls. My only issue with this? Not enough people are subbing it.

Yuruyuri ♪♪

Despite having a perfect final two episodes, the quality of jokes for each episode differs quite a bit. I guess the main reason is that some cast are just less interesting than others, and when some episodes put more focus on the less interesting characters, I get bored and hence ranked this show lower than, say Joshiraku, which all 5 were almost always present. Despite that, I really enjoyed the show, and came in close in being the best show if it weren’t for those less than satisfactory episodes.

Tari Tari

Heck, the art was beautiful, the few times that the main characters sang were also pretty good, Wakana is cute etc. However, while I can’t really hate this show, there weren’t much there for me to like either. Yes I like Wakana’s arc and her in the last few episodes, but some of the other arcs were so-so (or how Taichi just got shafted). I donno, maybe they are just playing it safe with the show, as it have seemed to have done everything right, but nothing just seem to be that memorable for me other than Wakana (actually, even Wakana’s arc seemed to have ended pretty blend)…

Hyouka

I’m guessing most of you would be putting Hyouka as your favorite this season. No fault of the show, but I only warmed up to this show in the final parts where I finally realized something that everyone realized way before. Yes, the end of the school festival arc was KyoAni’s genius ability at work, and yes the final episode was very pretty and HNNNNGGGG-ing, but I guess I really didn’t ‘get’ the show until or near the end of the school festival arc. Call me slow but that made me rank Hyouka lower than most people had in the earlier episodes

Binbougami ga!

While I do like comedy, I’m less of a fan to slapstick comedy than I’m a fan to puns and references (Joshiraku), and my ranking for this show shows that. The comedy aren’t bad, and I really like it when Momiji dresses up as characters from other franchise, but heck I will never put this above Joshiraku. Also, aside from the comedy, the drama part of the show weren’t all that original and was kinda meh.

As for the other ones: Space Brothers is getting a bit too slow for me to enjoy on a weekly basis, Saki Achiga only happened once so not surprising that it didn’t get that high (only one chance to gain points in Method B), Eureka 7 AO went from anticipation to interesting then right to annoying and a disappointment , Kokoro Connect ended up looking like it was making plot twists for the sake of making them making me stop caring about them, Sword Art Online was never that good for me, and Total Eclipse is just flat out horrible, why am I even still watching that show?

 

What should I think of Nisemonogatari?

Posted on by fnzna
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阿良々木月火 / ant

I ranted against it, I praised it, and now I’m just a bit confused. From seeing Nisemonogatari’s ranking throughout Winter 2012’s Anime Power Rankings, it does seem that most people do think that Nisemonogatari is a good show. But I really don’t know if I actually like it or not. Let’s just go through the strengths and weaknesses that I think Nisemonogatari has and try to come to a conclusion of how I feel about the show.

Before I start

I was never a big fan of Bakemonogatari, the prequel of Nisemonogatari. Yes, it was well written, the character are all unique, the animation is amazing, but really I never seem to get a grasp of what Bakemonogatari was trying to do, and hence was also pretty confused on my stance on Bakemonogatari. In hindsight, I was partly to blame, since I didn’t watch as it aired, but watched it after the BluRays came out, meaning that I was able to watch each episode back to back (which I did). Looking back, this prevented me to actually watch episode, think and reflect on what just happened, and then continue on to the next episode. In short, Bakemonogatari can be (and is most likely) deep but I never took the time to look into it.

The following post might have spoilers for both Nisemonogatari and Bakemonogatari.

Continue reading →

Day 9: Hoshi o ou Kodomo

Posted on by fnzna
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After waiting four years since the release of 5 Centimeters Per Second (and having denied of it on WFAC), Makoto Shinkai finally released his fourth film, Hoshi o ou Kodomo. This movie was like 5 cm/s, a departure from his previous movies. Instead of dealing with science fiction (Voices, Places Promised) or pure reality (5 cm/s), Makoto latest film had a lot more fantasy placed into it, giving me a much more Studio Ghibli feel to the movie than his previous ones (read: all his previous films don’t feel it is in any way related to Studio Ghibli). I came out convinced that it was a great movie, but just not as great as his previous two films: 5 cm/s and The Place Promised in Our Early Days.

One thing that was obvious was how much grander the whole film was, of how a lot more background details were introduced in the film. There was the whole another land, the different creatures, different tribes, the technicality behind the fantasy etc. The cast was also a lot larger than the previous movies. And maybe as a nod back to Hayao Miyazaki, there were faint messages of anti-war. In all, it seemed grander than what Shinkai had made before.

Yet, the problem is that by focusing on so much stuff, it seems that Shinkai forgot to develop the characters and their relationships as much. The strongest point of 5 cm/s was that it took time to show the relationship that Takaki and Akari had formed a first, and then the suffering that Takaki (and Kanae) suffered as time passed by with Takaki not being able to see Akari. Similarly, Place Promised also spent the first half of the film showing the day to day interaction the three friends had before actually thickening the plot. On top of that, both movies had parts where there would be soliloquies by the various characters, expressing their inner feelings/depressions. In comparison, Hoshi o ou Kodomo skimps on the soliloquies and the relationships up building parts, and hence the characters ended up being more static and was just less fun to watch than Shinkai’s previous films.

As the soundtrack, while I’m in no way dissing TENMON, there wasn’t a particular track that particularly stood out for me. In 5cm/s, there was One More Change, One More Time (not TENMON), which after almost of whole movie of documenting their separation, fleshes out the emotions that had been accumulating for the whole movie. Place Promised had the main theme (Sayuri’s violin), which was played two times, one in the first half by Sayuri and once again near the end of the second half. The song, or the playing of the violin, signified the past where the three friends were together. Yea, the soundtrack for Hoshi was still really good, but none of them was just stood out for me. Maybe if I get around to getting a CD I might start to like and remember some tracks. >_>

Lastly, at least once during the movie I actually felt bored…and once or more that I rolled my eyes at how clichéd something was…not a good sign.

In defense, I think animation wise, Hoshi o ou Kodomo is better than what 5 cm/s and The Place Promised in Our Early Days had. For Place Promised and especially for Voices, the character art not only didn’t blend well with the beautiful CG art, but almost ugly to look at. 5cm was a bit better, but the character was still out of place at times. I never felt that when watching Hoshi o ou Kodomo, with the character movements natural and actually look as good as the background, I say that Hoshi have the best character art in Shinkai’s films so far. Also, because of the fantasy setting, the background art tends to be more colorful than other films, hence making it look more like a Ghibli film. Added with the still magnificent sky/clouds CG, the whole film was just visually appealing.

In isolation, Hoshi o ou Kodomo is a fantastic film, but since it is from Makoto Shinkai, I expected more, and hence I am a bit disappointed when it doesn’t deliver something that was supposed to surpass 5 cm/s.