Merry Christmas and Anime!

Merry Christmas!

As none of you may know I have completed college and will be receiving a shiny new Computer Science Bachelor’s Degree in the mail any day now and am excited to be starting my full time position at Microsoft within a few weeks. Unfortunately my blog was hacked in my very long time away and in devising a way to get rid of all those super annoying links to pharmaceutical drugs I’ve procrastinated actually writing anything on this blog while I played all the games I’ve missed the past 4 years back to back. Needless to say there were a lot of wasted days and somehow my night and day have reversed completely. However, my anime watching abilities have not been impaired and since that’s been the focus of this blog for who knows how long I’m sure it’s the thing I should focus on talking about.
Let’s start generally:

Some of the animes I’ve actually completed in my time off that were memorable for good reasons include:
Irresponsible Captain Tylor
Nichijou
Dantaian No Shoka
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Mawaru Penguindrum
GOSICK (barely makes the memorable category)
Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko
Level E
Sacred Seven (I kept thinking it was going to be like Code Geass, but it never ended up being all that good)
Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood (I skipped the initial release because I had just finished reading the entire manga and it was kind of boring, but I finally went back and watched it. I really enjoyed it: I love FMA. I can’t believe the same mangaka is now doing a manga about an agricultural school. It’s decent, but this is the mangaka that came up with the world of FMA and they could be doing something so much more).
Un-go (For mysterious reasons and I’m sure it being from this last season and I just watched the last episode don’t hurt)

Some anime’s I watched an episode of which inspired me to read the manga for instant gratification and then never went back to watch the animes:
Beelzebub
Sket Dance
Usagi Drop

I completed a few more animes that aren’t on the list such as Infinite Stratos or Season 2 of Working!! and Shinyaku! Ika Musume, but there’s not much worthy of mention for any of those shows. The thing I found most surprising about this year was how easily I became bored with shows that had some promise, but became too much of a chore to watch. Take Ano Hi Mita Hana No Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai: For one, it’s annoying to write the full name, second, the angst of the characters trying to get over the death of an overly cheerful ghost became too heavy. Maybe I would have made it through the entire show if I had marathoned it, but as the weeks rolled by I just didn’t want to turn it on. I also stopped watching Hanasaku Iroha about halfway through. Although I liked Iroha’s character I got a bit tired of the heavy handed obvious story telling. Everything was just a bit too contrived for my tastes, though, once again: If I marathoned the show I would probably enjoy it more. The last show that should have matched my tastes but I didn’t end up finishing was Kami-sama no Memo-chou. I might go back and watch it at some point, but for me it has the same problem as Guilty Crown: A main character I just loathe. I’m getting pretty tired of the morally superior winy hero in anime and I would like more variety. Actually, it’s not really the character’s fault most of the time it’s the writer: The one presenting everything from one perspective as if they can’t see out of their fixated world of right and wrong. Kyon was a morally superior character, but he’s often proven wrong and out of his depth unlike the typical anime hero who makes snap moral judgement based on their limited world view and are proven right by their power: After all, we all know might makes right. But that’s ok, because they’re benevolent assholes… Err in short I would rather be entertained instead of being preached to.

Enough with the negativity: I want to talk about some of my favorite moments in anime this year and possibly talk about their significance within the story or just about them in general.

One: The Magical Morbidity
Let’s start with an easy one. When Mami’s head got bitten off in Madoka Magicka. I’ll clarify that this isn’t my favorite moment from an emotionaly standpoint, but from the shock and awe it created in the Magical Girl genre. The sinisterness of the show had always been lurking behind Kyube’s staring eyes, but not until Mami did I realize what the show was capable of. Madoka Magicka had a lot of great moments, such as Homura’s repeating time episode that left me sad and nostalgic, but nothing shocked me as much as the cruelty involved in the execution of Mami.

Two: The Survival Strategy
I felt the ending of Penguindrum was a little lackluster, but I was in love with the middle of it. From the beautiful imagery and detail to the complex characters that went through distinct and heartbreaking character arcs. I can attribute this to the lack of Ringo screen time, but I loved her crazy persona from what I’ll call Act One (before she becomes uncrazy) and the love story between her and Shouma. Shouma finally telling Ringo he loved her on the train was a farcry from how I felt when he pushed her out of the way of the car right after their huge blow up and her failed rape attempt.

As strange as it is for me to say this the darkness in the show just became too big and enveloped way too many of the characters for me to be able to really differentiate them anymore. Yeah the siblings were struggling in the beginning with Himari’s death sentence and getting the penguindrum to change their fate, but the penguin comic relief alone made it bearable. When Ringo’s story came up and Shouma’s affection for her followed, my heart throbbed.

By the end of the show they had gone through and shown us that every single character’s happiness was fake and for many that it was simply unachievable. Fate gave us our parents and our parents ruined us all beyond repair. I think more than anything they had taken away the possibility that there could be happiness in the world of penguindrum which left me as a viewer emotionally deadened on a week by week basis. I wanted to believe the characters might succeed even if they couldn’t, but the only character trying to fix things was Shouma and he had so little direction you couldn’t actually believe he could do anything. Overall though the show was visually stunning! I loved how so many of the illusory images were simply an augment of reality instead of trying to recreate reality as is and plastering it in a median that can do so much. I hope other studios watch Penguindrum and come up with some off the wall representations for stories that they would have otherwise never thought of. I liked Penguindrum a lot! It was probably my favorite show of 2011.

Three: It’s Cold without my Futon
Denpa Onna Seishun Otoko had its moments. My favorite though was riding a bicycle off a cliff with your adorable, if not creepily adorable, cousin in the front basket. To be fair what drew me the most to this show was the protagonists almost Kyon like soliloquies as he narrated the story for us. As much as it touted its youth point system I felt like that moment captured the mood of the show more than anything else. For just one moment they’re idealistic dreamers hanging over the edge of the cliff feeling like they’re flying. The reality comes afterwards, but for one moment they could be aliens that could make that bike ignore everything your snooty professor told you about gravity and see the world for what it wasn’t. In the end they faced the real world consequences of the action, but not for one second do I think he actually regretted it and I appreciated that stupidity.

Four: The Abused Fourth Wall
Admittedly I did not watch the anime, but Sket Dance’s Saotome Roman (just Roman if you please) cracked me up just about every time she opened her mouth. She’s really the embodiment of what I loved about reading Sket Dance: It broke the rules. The manga is absurd in every sense of the word and whenever you’re about to get used to them putting down Bossan as a lousy main character (which I don’t think he is), they turn around and make him a stick figure after losing a questionaire popularity contest guessing game. The manga is meta in a way that isn’t self-gratifying: It’s meta for the sake of humor and it really works. The characters end up being a lot of fun to. I just wish I could read the chapters more quickly than they come out.

Five: Troll Face
Nichijou was a show that I needed. Unlike other shows that I could delay a week without watching the new episode I could never manage it with Nichijou: It was the perfect pick me up from a hard week with its light hearted, sometimes over the top humor. This isn’t saying that every episode was as funny as the every other episode, some I would laugh out loud while others I could quietly sit through, but it was always relaxing.

The one thing that makes me sad about Nichijou is perhaps the limited rewatchability. I wish I could be surprised by the surreal jokes after seeing them the first time, but when you know what is coming, the punch line really can’t measure up to the first time. Normally I like Kyoto Animations adaptations of source material, but this time I’m not really sure they did such a great job. A lot of the plots seemed really drawn out, as if they were trying to fill space with the really good sketches which mostly cheapened it as a whole. That being said their animations was amazing as always and seeing Mio chase Yuko and vice versa made my day (Or the camping trip where Mio beats down Yuko with wrestling prowess after a hilarious day of fail). I’m not sure any other studio could have done it better though and I’m sure it would be interesting to see a side by side comparison. I’m sad that it isn’t doing nearly as well as K-ON! as I happen to think Nichijou is far superior, but then again I guess I’m not surprised… Much like how Big Bang Theory gets consistently higher ratings than Community even though one is a terrible show and the other is amazing…

Six: The Book of a Subtle Soul
I know Dantalian no Shoka isn’t the best show ever created nor is it Gainax’s best work ever, but I really enjoyed watching it on a weekly basis. If for no other reason than:

The show was just beautiful to be perfectly honest. I loved the art and music even if the story didn’t have enough time to develop and the characters didn’t really have enough time to be fleshed out. I really wish Dantalian could have been more than 13 episodes as I enjoyed its method of telling us short stories while weaving together a bigger story. If they had had more time to do it properly I could have been telling you about another Cowboy Bebop, but instead I’m regretfully telling you about a show that had some great moments (One of my favorites being Book of Wisdom where the children become so wise they realize it is best to do nothing at all), but ultimately will probably be forgotten by most and never given its day in the sun where it belongs. Was anyone else relieved by Huey as a main character? He was so calm and direct. His past was sad but he wasn’t ruled by it… Overall he was just a fantastic, slightly emotionally repressed individual that took care of the people around him without making a big deal of it. I loved the subtlety of his character much like the original Hei before they got too up close and personal with all of his deep and dark secrets. He was just a guy with a mask who had a problem with contractors and hardly ever said what he was really thinking.

To me, the sky is too vast
And time is too swift
Without knowing anything,
I’m gathering words in vain,
Which only end up rotting in the Earth.

I believe that concludes this post. I’m not sure what the future holds, but I’m certain I won’t stop watching anime in the anytime soon. Hopefully I find it within myself to write about it more as well! Maybe a good post about Artificial Intelligence in Anime… Hmmm…