Category: Anime Retro Reviews

Michiko e Hatchin

(22 episodes, 2008-2009)

My previous exposure :
None, besides some low-key pimping by salinea.

What’s it about ?

A fictional version of Latin America (it looks a lot like Mexico to me), in the 60s or thereabout. One of the most disorientating aspects of the settings is that most of the major characters have Japanese first names, for some reason. It’s really jarring, and doesn’t help immersion one bit.

It’s basically a road-trip buddy movie with Michiko, a woman in her late 20s who’s just escaped from high-security jail ; and Hana (nicknamed “Hatchin”), a 10-year-old girl martyrised by her foster family. They’re both looking for Hiroshi, Michiko’s former boyfriend and Hana’s presumed father. He’s supposed to have died a long time ago, but the math about Hana’s existence doesn’t add up, which Michiko sees as a evidence he’s still alive somewhere.

Other recurring characters include Atsuko, Michiko’s former BFF who joined the police and is now tracking her down in a personal vendetta ; and Satoshi, Hiroshi’s former best pal who’s risen to the top of the underworld.

What did I think of it ?

I really wanted to love this series. It’s got a cool soundtrack, it’s very good at setting up a sense of place and atmosphere, and the action pieces are impressive. It’s got tons of gonzo energy, and I can get behind just revelling in the B-movie stylings of it all.

I even grew to love watching Michiko in action. Sure, she’s a moron, but an entertaining moron, with enough street smarts, fighting skills and guts to keep surviving despite blundering from one dodgy mishap into another. In contrast, Hana was a bit more boring, as she spent a lot of time whining about Michiko’s stupidity. With good cause, of course, but being the voice of reason doesn’t make her very entertaining by itself, and as a result I didn’t like as much the more Hana-focused episodes where Michiko is incapacitated in one way or another.

But the bigger problem is the overarching plot. We’ve given no reason at all to care about the search for Hiroshi. He doesn’t show up in flashback until the 9th episode or so, and what little we see of him doesn’t impress (and my opinion of him certainly wasn’t improved by the tomato-growing episode). It doesn’t help that Hana seems to lose interest in him very quickly and mostly keeps going to indulge Michiko. Who’s a lovestruck moron and is obviously seeing her past through rosy glasses, so her opinion had no sway with me.
The conclusion of the quest is a huge anticlimax, as our heroines randomly stumble upon him halfway through the last episode. You’d think the big reunion would be given more than five minutes of screen time and that he’d get more than a few token lines of dialogue, but no. And of course Michiko does the dumb thing and leaves Hana in his care while surrendering to the cops chasing them ; the only thing redeeming the ending is that it’s made clear ina distant epilogue that Hiroshi dumped Hana within three months, and that she’s better off without that flake anyway.

The other overarching subplots didn’t win me over either. Satoshi gets a lot of build-up as a big threat, with the charisma and the connections to pull it off ; he goes down like a chump to a few random thugs in the second-to-last episode because we’re nearing the end and the writers want to get rid of him. WTF ? Atsuko fares a little better, although her inconsistent behavior (“I’m dead on your trail !”/”But I’m letting you go just this time because of my massive issues”) gets a bit repetitive after a while and it’s a bit hard to sympathize with her because of it.

So, it doesn’t really work. Which is a shame, because the series is at its best when it embraces the lunacy of the setting and lets Michiko do what she does best : barely escape from stuff by sheer dog-mindedness. Too bad about the wider plot, then.

via [LTTP/WIW] Various anime from the 00s and beyond.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

(11 episodes, 2009)

My previous exposure :
None, besides the notion that it deals with an big-time earthquake in Tokyo (which of course makes for an interesting watch with hindsight). Also, it aired on NoitaminA, so there were good chances of it not being crap.

What’s it about ?

The Tokyo Bay is hit by a big one (I’ll let you guess the magnitude). Disaster ensues.

The series focuses on Mirai, our de facto middle-schooler protagonist ; she was with her younger brother Yuuki to a robot show on the Oidama island when the earthquake hit. They’re helped by Mari, a young delivery-woman in her twenties who took a shine to them and needs to take the same direction to go home anyway. The whole series follows their long trek back home in the aftermath of disaster.

What did I think of it ?

This is a very, very low-key show. Realistic to the utmost, it examines in painstaking detail what the aftermath of such a disaster entails. Some people do dumb or selfish things (especially in the crowd scenes – I’m sure I saw someone getting trampled to death), but there’s also a lot of genuine solidarity (and tons of professionalism from the rescue workers). What saves the series from being a glorified PSA is that all this stuff stays in the background, letting the focus rightfully fall onto our three leads.

And that’s basically the limitation of the series : a lot of your appreciation of it relies on how much you can bear with Mirai, who starts off as a complete brat and becomes somewhat more tolerable as she suffers through the ordeal. In comparison, Mari feels unreally saintly, with an incredible amount of patience for those kids she’s just met. For such a character-focused drama, the characters feel a bit flat, and the show suffers from it.

Still there are moments of genuine emotion that truly work. Episode 5, where we meet a grandfather who’s just lost his grandchildren who were visiting him, and still keeps helping as much as he can, is a tear-jerker. And the big twist in episode 10, that Yuuki died two episodes ago but he kept appearing on-screen because Mirai was in denial about it, despite being a hoary old cliché, was well-enough executed that it gave the concluding gravitas that the series really needed. It’s transparent emotional manipulation, but it works.

It’s not a groundbreaking show in any way, but it’s clearly earnest in what it’s trying to depict, and it works on that level.

via [LTTP/WIW] Various anime from the 00s and beyond.

Monster

(74 episodes, 2004-2005)

My previous exposure
Well, it’s an adaptation of a critically-acclaimed manga, so I’d at least heard of the basic premise well before coming close to it. I’ve mostly avoided spoilers, although I did hear of a particular thing Johan does in Prague, which thus didn’t surprise me when I reached it.

I actually watched the first 20 episodes of this way back in 2009, and only went back to it very recently. The reasons why should become clear below.

What’s it about ?

In the late 80s, Dr Kenzo Tenma was a promising up-and-coming Japanese brain surgeon in Germany… until he decided to save the life of a 11-year-old boy called Johan who got mysteriously shot in the head, instead of the mayor he was supposed to operate on. This basically cripples his career… for a few days, until the top management get mysteriously poisoned and the new management give him his status back. Meanwhile, Johan has disappeared…

Flash forward to 9 years later, when Johan re-enters Tenma’s life by shooting one of the doctor’s patients right in front of his eyes. (The man was an agent of Johan’s who was getting a bit too talkative.) It turns out that Johan is a charismatic monster, leaving a bloody trail behind himself, and he’s very thankful of Dr Tenma for saving his life. Did the doctor do the wrong thing by saving the not-so-innocent child ?

Dr Tenma soon finds himself accused of the various aforementioned murders, and is on the run from the cold but very clever Inspector Runge (who thinks Johan doesn’t exist and is an alternate personality of Tenma’s). Can the fugitive stop whatever Johan’s up to before it’s too late ? And is the good doctor really going to kill Johan, however much of a monster he is ?

Secondary threads of the series follow Nina, Johan’s twin sister (who shot him in the first place), who tried to forget it all before Johan suddenly killed her adoptive family ; and Eva, Tenma’s former fiancée who entered a self-destructive spiral after she dumped him during his short disgrace. Another big question involves the investigation of Johan’s past : how exactly does such a monster come into existence ? Who’s responsible ? It’s not an easy question, especially considering how Johan is now being quite thorough in his quest to eliminate everyone linked to his past in any way…

What did I think of it ?

It’s certainly a very strong story… but I don’t think the anime version really does it justice. It’s a flawed adaptation that I had trouble to keep watching because of how much it tries to play it safe. It’s obviously trying to stick as close to the source material as possible, including every single detour despite how inconsequential some of them may be. The pacing is sluggish, with some very obvious padding techniques carrying the series from cliffhanger to cliffhanger (despite not much really happening between them). That kind of thing isn’t suspenseful, it’s just irritating. A third of the anime’s length could probably have been cut without losing much.

I got the impression that this really wanted to be a live-action series, with all the lack of creative use of the medium this implies. The realization is very pedestrian, bringing absolutely nothing in to make the story visually compelling. I’m not asking for Death Note-style flourishes, but at least something should have been done to keep the series from being so boring (which surely a story like this has no right to be !). Compounding the problem is the general grey-and-brown palette, especially for people ; the bland colors dull the strikingness of Urasawa’s angular character designs. Those are not characters with realistic appearances, however much the anime tries to hide that. As a result, the series loses a lot of impact and immediacy.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy watching the series ; but there’s a lot of tediousness in between the good parts. While I didn’t particularly care for Tenma and Johan remained an enigma till the end, there were lots of fascinating side characters that helped carry the story along the rough patches (ah, Grimmer…). The questions the show asks about human nature and how can evil be born are poignant ones, and the eventual denouement is quite clever. The coincidence level is a bit too high (I raised an eyebrow at the background of Tenma’s lawyer, which is a bit too conveniently connected to the rest of the story), but it mostly works out. Still, I’m not sure the series completely delivers on explaining Johan’s evil (the final crucial part of his background doesn’t feel like much of an explanation to me), and there are large parts of his behavior that I don’t really understand (for example, why did he protect Grimmer in Prague ?).

But what this series really lacks is energy, as well as writers daring enough to cut the chaff out and make the plot much tighter. That’s what prevents it from being the masterpiece of storytelling it could have been.

via [LTTP/WIW] Various anime from the 00s and beyond.

What are Anime Retro Reviews about ?

First, let me explain where I come from.
I’ve been watching anime on and off since early childhood, but I didn’t really jump back heavily into it until 2008. As a result, there are tons of series I’ve vaguely heard about, but never watched. So I’ve been working towards making up for that gap, watching anime at a very quick rate (on average, 20-30 episodes per week – I have a long commute and need the distraction).

Now, I really want to comment on what I’ve watched, but there’s no way I can do a “regular”, episode-by-episode WIW thread. I don’t have the time, nor the wish to go into so much detail. So I will be doing something a bit different : a quick summary of the premise of each show, followed by a retrospective analysis. And hopefully that’ll allow to spark some discussion. (It’s probably going to be a bit similar to salinea’s comics thread, except I’m somewhat less of a newbie to anime than she was to comics at the start.)

There will of course be HEAVY SPOILERS about each series as I cover them. Be forewarned.

In order to make this thread a bit more interactive, I’m going to be very open to suggestions. One of the goals of this, after all, is to broaden my horizons and discover series I’ve barely heard of. Some caveats :
– Please suggest GOOD series. I know there’s some mileage out of eviscerating crap, but I’d like to keep this as pleasant as possible. And there’s always the possibility that I won’t like your favorite series. I have some wide tastes, though, and I’m game for about any type of story.
– Please don’t suggest manga. Anime adaptations of manga are fair game, but I’m not interested in reading manga. That’s not what this thread is about.
– Please don’t suggest anything from 2010 onwards. I’ve been following those last few seasons pretty well, so I’d be really surprised if I missed anything of note.
– I’m going to try and focus on the 00s for now. I’m sure we’ll have time for the 90s (and earlier) later on.
– I prefer short series. 13 or 26 episodes ? Perfect. Series with 50-ish episodes or so are going to need some very convincing arguments to justify me bothering with the time investment. Anything beyond that is probably right out. (This includes any shonen longrunner.)