Anime Chicago Winter Sampler

[dorchadas]

I spent a big chunk of yesterday at the Anime Chicago Winter Sampler where we watched the first episode of a few anime coming out this season, so I'm going to write about them again!

This list is in the order that I'm likely to watch more of it.

1. どろろ, Eng: "Dororo": A daimyō decides that he needs the power of hell to secure his people, and asks for the aid of demons in exchange for whatever they want. They take his son, who is born a mutant with no arms, legs, eyes, or skin. He orders the baby exposed to the elements, but the midwife sets it adrift on the water before she is eaten by a demon. Sixteen years later, the orphan rascal Dororo meets up with a mighty demon-slayer who has bandages on his limbs and wears a mask. Is he the child from sixteen years ago (yes)? What will become of them?
   
   This anime is straight-up Legend of the Five Rings, the anime. It's set in Japan, but with demons, Shadowlands taint, turning to hell for power, all of that. It's also based on an older version of the same story by anime master and tutelary deity Tezuka Osamu, though apparently this remake has most of the silliness removed in favor of a grim story of murdering demons. I haven't watched an action or non-romantic drama series in a while, and the last jidaigeki anime I watched was Rurouni Kenshin back in university, so I'm really looking forward to this.


2. かぐや様は告らせたい ～天才たちの恋愛頭脳戦, "Kaguya Wants to Be Confessed To ~The Geniuses' War of Love and Brains~, Eng: "Kaguya-sama: Love Is War" is about two high school students in the student council at a prestigious high school. They both carry a torch for each other but they're both far too proud to be the first one to admit it, so it's all about mind games and oneupsmanship to convince the other one to be the first to admit they have feelings. That way, the non-admitter has all the power and so wins. Truly the foundation for a healthy relationship!
   
   (Eat the rich )
   
   I thought it was very funny, though, and I kept laughing at things other people didn't pick up on because they were based on Japanese formality levels and pronoun choice that the subtitles didn't do a good job of translating into English. Each episode is also a series of smaller stories rather than a single long con, too, so nothing has a chance to grow stale. If they can keep up the pace and humor of the first episode, I'll really appreciate this.


3. 約束のネバーランド, Eng: "The Promised Neverland": A bunch of orphans live happily in a house in the country, where the only rule is that they must never go beyond the gate or over the (waist-high) fence in the forest. Eventually, one child is chosen to leave to go to a foster family, and orphans Emma and Norman follow her to return her teddy bear that she left behind. That's when they discover they're actually on a human farm and it's a cookbook!
   
   Are they being farmed by aliens? The children called them "Demons," which I think makes sense from a descriptive point of view, but what are they? Why does the matron of the orphanage put up with this? Who set up this system and who benefits from it? I'm having a very hard time not googling for all the answers, so that's a good sign that I'm invested and should just watch it.

At this point, there's kind of a gulf and everything else is further down than just a number would indicate.

4. えんどろ～, "End Roll," Eng: "Endro!": A party of four moe adventurers fight and defeat the demon lord, using a spell to seal him into another dimension. The opening sequence is the end credits as we show their victory party! Then we flash back in time to the four heroes in adventurer school as they get a new teacher, Mao, who takes them on their first practicum. But twist! Mao is the demon lord (魔王, maō), sent back in time because the heroes botched the spell. She's determined to stop them from ever getting into a position to oppose her. Will it work? I doubt it, because the first episode involves the hero getting the sword that makes her the hero, which she was only in a position to do due to Mao's schemes. It seems like a closed time loop where the demon lord sets in her own defeat through her meddling with the past. I do love closed time loops, ever since I played Final Fantasy, but how annoying will the dojikko moeblobs get? We'll see.


5. 同居人はひざ、時々、頭のうえ, "My Roommate Is On My Lap, and Sometimes, On Top of my Head," Eng: "My Roommate Is A Cat": A man's parents die in an accident and he picks up a stray cat at their grave. He takes the cat home and continues his work as an author, while the cat tries to figure out what to do with this odd human. The hook, at least based on the first episode, is that part of the episode is from the human's perspective and then the same part is replayed from the cat's perspective, which has the potential to go either way. I wasn't sucked in by episode one, probably because I'm not really a pet person, but some people in the audience seemed to like it a lot. Especially when the cat kept leaving food outside the human's door because he would go into writing trances and the cat was concerned he wasn't eating.


6. ブギーポップは笑わない, "Boogiepop Doesn't Laugh," Eng: "Boogiepop And Others": I never saw the original Boogiepop Phantom, so I have no idea how or if these are connected. Also, this was unbelievably confusing. Someone gets stood up on a date because his girlfriend is taken over by Boogiepop to stop a threat to humanity, but then there is no threat. Schoolgirls are disappearing but we never learn anything about it despite seeing a mutilated corpse wrapped in telephone wire. People keep discussing the rumors of the shinigami Boogiepop but nothing happens. It really felt to me like I saw the beginning and end of a movie with everything in the middle edited out. Maybe it's the kind of thing you need to watch a bunch at a time to really understand, but I don't really want to put in the investment.


7. 私に天使が舞い降りた！, "An Angel Alighted on Me," Eng: "Wataten! An Angel Flew Down to Me": Miyako is pathologically shy, until her younger sister brings home a friend from school. Miyako becomes (creepily) obsessed with Hana, wanting to dress her up in the cosplay outfits that Miyako designs and take pictures of her. Hana reacts appropriately to this, threatening to call the police and deciding she'll never come over again, until she is lured back by Miyako's cooking. It's supposed to be comedy, but it was mostly just uncomfortable. I agree with someone in the audience who said, "Can we go back to the murder?" This one isn't at the bottom only because of:


8. 超次元革命アニメ『Dimensionハイスクール』, "Super Dimensional Revolution Anime 'Dimension High School'," Eng: "Dimension High School": This is part CGI anime and part...live action? A bunch of high school students in the real world are chosen to help save another world, which they are pulled into and then become CGI anime characters. There, they are asked riddles by a sphinx-looking monster and killed if they fail to answer them. They fail the first one, but succeed at the second and all of them return to the real world, but the one who died has lost that which was most precious to him....the money he made as a day trader (subs made it sound like a mobile game called "Date Raid").
   
   Most Westerners, even anime fans, find the over-the-top style of acting popular in Japanese TV offputting. I don't mind it as much and was willing to give the live-action part a chance, but when I got to the CGI part that's when I tuned out. Maybe the show is aiming for janky and cheap-looking as a kind of self-deprecating "isn't this trash? Meme it!" thing, but I have better things to do with my time.

There were two other episodes I didn't see. We skipped the episode of 盾の勇者の成り上がり, "The Rising of the Shield Hero" because some people vetoed it due to content warnings, and I left before they played モブサイコ100, "Mob Psycho 100" Season 2 because I haven't seen Season 1 and people seemed to feel very strongly about the possibility of spoilers.

Someone was saying there was nothing interesting this season, and I don't know. Dororo seems like a lot of fun, but maybe that's because I have several tabletop RPGs that are basically "feudal Japan + the supernatural," and I like the more grounded depiction I saw there in comparison to more over-the-top ones. I liked Kaguya-sama more than some people did because I've taught in a Japanese private school, albeit not one used by overly-rich people. And Neverland has the mystery to draw me in. Everything else, I'll probably never watch. I'm never going to be one of those people who watches like twenty shows per season. I can't think of much of anything I'd want to devote that much time to.

Comments

[shadaras]

L5R: The Anime is a very good pitch, and like something I might try watching at some point!

'Neverland' sounds creepy in a really interesting way, too.

[dorchadas]

I watched more Dororo tonight and can confirm it's really good.

Especially if you're a fan of yōkai! Looks like the fourth episode is going to feature a kamaitachi, so now I'm even more invested.

[shadaras]

:)

Aha, nice! I haven't gotten into yokai very much, but everything I know about them is that they're pretty neat -- and the kamaitachi page you linked definitely bears that out.

[dorchadas]

I love yōkai. When I lived in Japan with my ex, it was in a Japanese-style house in the countryside, so I can easily understand people thinking that tools used for long enough develop their own spark of life.

The students who walked by our house told us that our house was scary because we hadn't repaired the shōji windows for a while, and it turns out there's a yōkai for that.

[shadaras]

oh my god

that's amazing, thank you for sharing

But yeah, I can definitely understand tools gaining life from use -- and then being upset about not being kept in good repair.

[tuulentupa]

Oh, I have to check out this version of Dororo! I really liked the manga, and that silly live action movie too, what comes to that. Could do with a little bit less silliness, for sure. The other two in your top three sound quite interesting, too.