dorchadas | Summer animu (Reply)

On Saturday, Anime Chicago had a Summer Anime Sampler event, where a bunch of us piled into a room and watched the first episode of a lot of upcoming anime while we ate food. I made a big pile of tamagoyaki--a dozen eggs' worth--and paid the $12 for a year's membership to Anime Chicago so I could attend, and we watched anime for five hours.

Here's my thoughts, ordered by how likely I am to watch more of it:

はたらく細胞, Eng: "Cells at Work": An anime that's both fun and educational! It's about a new-on-the-job red blood cell, a white blood cell she meets while running from a viral invasion, and their adventures. Killer T-Cells are a SWAT team, macrophages are battle maids, platelets are elementary schoolers, the lungs are a giant forest, the capillaries are a maze of tiny rooms and storage closets, a sneeze is a missile launch, etc. It's actually pretty close to accurate, and informative tips about the scientific facts keep popping up during the run time.

The first episode is all about fighting off a virus and if they follow that formula for every episode I can see it getting stale, but I really liked what I saw so far. A lot of it is the presentation and the jokes, so it's a little hard to explain exactly what draws me to it. The style of humor reminds me of Azumanga Daioh, one of my favorite anime of all time, even if the rest of it is nothing like it.

中間管理録トネガワ, "Middle Management Chronicle Tonegawa," Eng: "Mr. Tonegawa Middle Management Blues": There was an anime back in 2007 called Gyakkyō Burai Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor, about a man in debt who was forced into a game with fatal consequences as a way of repaying his debt. At the end, he came face-to-face with Tonegawa Yukio, the person who conceived of and ran the death game, and defeats him. This anime is a prequel about the horrific trials and difficulties of...being a manager at a large company. The first episode has Tonegawa and a bunch of identical-looking men in dark suits in a meeting room as they do self-introductions and he tries to remember who they are.

I've seen people online complain about the tonal shift between this and Kaiji, but having never seen Kaiji, I don't care. I like that even the yakuza has to deal with petty bullshit and bureaucratic idiocy in the course of its operations, and I can recognize the reused tropes from the first anime, like the pan back as ざわざわ ("unease") displays all over the screen, used this time when all the subordinates have the same hobby, or two of them have similar names and Tonegawa worries about being able to tell Ogino-san and Hagio-san apart. I don't know that I'm in the mood for anything too serious and true to life lately, but light office comedy sounds great.

Also, I appreciate that the narrator either speaks English or is very good at English phonetic pronunciation. He keeps talking about Tonegawa as the #2 in the Teiai yakuza group, and he says "Number 2" instead of something like "Nunbā Tsū" that I'm more used to hearing.

天狼 Sirius the Jaeger, Eng: "Sirius the Jaeger": Vampire hunters in Taishō Japan. I don't really need more to draw me to it than that, since that's not an overused niche at all. The main character is obviously a werewolf, since he has multicolored hair, he powers up when fighting a vampire (though doesn't transform) and also 天狼 is an obscure Japanese word of Chinese origin for Sirius, the Dog Star. So I want to watch for the setting--pre-war Japanese nobility, period cars and clothes, and vampires that transform into bat monster things fighting werewolves. What's not to like?

ちおちゃんの通学路, "Chio's Commute to School," Eng: "Chio's School Road": Chio walks to school and finds construction has cut off her route, so she climbs onto the roof and walks from rooftop to rooftop, trying to remain unseen. Then she runs into a popular classmate and has to interact without revealing that she's a huge nerd who plays Western video games (she makes multiple Assassin's Creed references while climbing around). The title makes it seem like it'll be about things that happen to Chio while on the way to school, so like Hataraku Saibō, I'm curious how far they can stretch the premise. This also seems a lot like Azumanga Daioh in being about absurd situations and having a character named Chi(y)o. I'm definitely trending to comedy lately.

少女☆歌劇レヴュー・スタァライト, Eng: "Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight": Two friends, one lazy and one genki, go to school at an acting school. They keep talking about acting, but seem to be practicing ballet? Other characters are introduced, and it looks like it's about building camaraderie and becoming your best self. But the protagonist has a dream about the Eiffel Tower and falling, and then partway through she finds a secret elevator and descends into a theatre where two of her classmates are dueling for the right to join the Revue Starlight. She leaps onto stage, dons a magical girl outfit, and interferes in the duel to save her friend, only to be called an idiot. What is happening?

The tonal shift halfway through the episode was very odd, but learning that the director was a protégée of Ikuhara, the director of Revolutionary Girl Utena, cleared it up a bit. Is this a metaphor for how all auditions pit you directly against people you know, with clear winners and losers, and the winners get to eat and the losers have to scramble for other gigs? Who is the giraffe? What is even going on?

Utena was a masterpiece, so it'd be very hard to measure up to that. But if it can...

ぐらんぶる, Eng: "Grand Blue": The protagonist moves to Izu to go to university and live with his uncle at his uncle's scuba shop, "Grand Blue." He dreams about a happy college life filled with cute girls and good friends. But when he walks into the shop, he meets the members of the diving club, who have other plans that involve roping him into joining them.

The first episode had no diving at all, so I'm wondering if this is going to be like Gamerz where it claims to be about one thing but is actually about something completely different. There were a lot of deliberate art style shifts throughout the episode that drew my attention--usually that sort of thing is due to running out of money, but here it was to emphasize a particular joke or reaction. I can see the humor grating on me if it's all about the protagonist's misfortune and people thinking he's a weirdo, but if there are actual diving scenes it could get interesting.

はねバド!, Eng: "Hanebado!": A badminton competition, narrowly lost. A high schooler obsessed with becoming better so she'll never fail again and grinding the other members of her badminton club down with her drive to improve. And then the girl who beat her arrives at her school, but doesn't even want to join the club?

I'm not usually a fan of sports in any form, but the setup reminds me a lot of Hibike! Euphonium. That could be good or bad--good because I liked Hibike! Euphonium, or bad because Hanebado! is a sports anime and that would drag it down. Also, the protagonist is a jerk. I don't think it's enough to keep me going.

邪神ちゃんドロップキック, "Evil God's Dropkick," Eng: "Dropkick on my Devil!": A witch summons several demons and lives with them, but one of them is not happy about being summoned and wants to go back to hell. If she can just dropkick her summoner even once she'll be able to escape! Unfortunately, she has a tendency to monologue, and her summoner is not a forgiving woman since Jashin-chan will regenerate anyway.

The humor here is in cuteness mixed with ultraviolence--at one point, the summoner rips Jashin-chan apart with a chainsaw and blood splatters everywhere--and it was funny because it was surprising, but it wasn't otherwise that interesting. Cuteified or not, a show focused on chainsawing a snakegirl isn't something I care about.

殺戮の天使, "Angels of Slaughter," Eng: "Angels of Death": A young girl is in therapy, but then wakes up alone. She's told that she is the "sacrifice" and an elevator takes her up one floor, where she is attacked by a man wielding a scythe. She escapes and finds an elevator to another floor, where she meets the doctor who had been treating her. But this is called Angels of Death, so you know what happens.

Based on a video game. I'm guessing it's about figuring out what's going on, is this some kind of weird experiment, who is the announcer saying the girl is the sacrifice, that sort of thing. It's just...I don't really like horror in a visual medium, and I don't care about those things. Not going further.

バナナフィッシュ, Eng: "Banana Fish": A gang leader's older brother suddenly snapped and attacked his own men during a war. When subdued, he said, "Banana Fish." Twelve years later, the gang leader finds a man in a pool of his own blood, who hands over a vial of an unknown substance and also says, "Banana Fish." Two photojournalists from Japan show up to do a profile of the gang leader and get drawn in. I don't like gritty crime dramas and have no real interest in Banana Fish.

There were others I saw in the queue that we didn't get to, like High Score Girl and Asobi Asobase, but I already have enough to watch to last me a while.