Review: Ah! My Goddess! Season 1

 I was excited to revisit Ah! My Goddess!. It was one of the first shows I watched after jumping back into anime after a burnout period and because of that it had always held a special place in my heart. Even before watching the TV series, I was a big fan of the original OVA and the film, so at the time I was guaranteed to love the series. However, the last time I watched this show was six years ago and it is rare that something matches up with fond memories. Keiichi Morisato is a student at Nekomi Institute of Technology who has always had bad luck. After selflessly helping a little girl find her wallet, he accidentally dials the Goddess Relief Office and is granted a wish. Without thinking he wishes that the Goddess stays by his side forever.

I want to approach this as fair as I possibly could, because I’ve seen this show before in several varieties and knew what to expect from the jump and yet this time watching it, I couldn’t help but feel creeped out by those first few episodes. In essence, Keiichi wishes that Belldandy stays with him against her will. That is the core concept of the show. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t take advantage of her, it doesn’t matter that she learns to genuinely like him. This time it just stuck with me as odd. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen this formula so many times in the last five years that the vail has been lifted. I wrote in my preview of Ano Natsu de Matteru that a show around a girl coming from supernatural place and living with a guy has been done so many times that its lost all meaning. 

Ah! My Goddess! takes that up a level as having the supernatural girl being tied to the main character by an unbreakable magical force. In the first few seconds after the wish is granted she rushes over, calls her boss to ask if the wish had been granted in a panicked voice. Only after that brief moment does she then switch over to being cheerfully sweet at the whole situation. That brief moment of panic is enough to ruin the whimsical nature of the scene and give it a creepy vibe.

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Convention Report: Anime Boston 2012

The numbers are in and I’m shocked. Even with PAX East 2012 across down, a much more mainstream convention, Anime Boston’s attendance grew yet again. A fitting bullet point for the convention’s tenth year.

I was glad they acknowledged how big a deal the tenth anniversary was and yet they didn’t go overboard in reminding the attendees of the milestone. They had a few retrospectives panels run by staff and a small “museum” in the Sheraton hotel dedicated to the convention’s history. They had shirts from all ten conventions; even if they were just staff shirts; they had badges and programs from all of them as well alongside special bits of signed merchandise and newspaper articles from the convention's history. They even had a ten year old room sign which, when I saw it, I clearly remembered the style of sign from that original convention. As an attendee of the first Anime Boston I was happy that they had gone through the trouble to preserve the conventions history. While ten years isn’t a long time, it is a significant part of my life and my fandom that the convention has been around. I wore my Anime Boston 2003 shirt and looked at the same shirt displayed proudly in the museum as a piece of it’s own history. I felt like I was a part of something in that moment, and felt confident that Anime Boston will be a staple of the fandom for years to come.

Anime Boston is held, as it has for the last few years, in the Hynes Convention Center and Sheraton Hotel in the heart of Boston. Unlike most convention centers, which are normally build away from city centers, the Hynes provides easy access to the Prudential Center Mall’s food court. If that doesn’t sound appealing, there dozens of amazing restaurants within walking distance and an entire city’s worth of attractions if you want to drive or take public transportation. A favorite in the area has been the Pour House, which is a pub that serves an amazing burger. This year we decided to take a short drive, long in Boston traffic, down to the famous Eagles Deli which has been featured on Food Network’s Man Vs. Food for a delicious Cheeseburger and some of the best coated french fries I’ve ever had. Of course, as I have for the previous two years and because disgusting Chinese food is one of my guilty pleasures, I also went to Panda Express in the reasonably priced food court. Hynes also has the normal convention food located right in the main hallway but if you buy from those venders you’re wasting money and not allowing yourself to enjoy the food that a major population center can offer.

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Spring Preview 2012

It's a solid season this spring but, unfortunately, one only has time to try out a few shows. I attempted to pick two of the big Moe shows, two of the most serious general audience shows, and two shows that just looked adorable. I hope you enjoy my previews of Dusk Maiden of Amnesia, Mysterious Girlfriend X, Japanese Folktale, Polar Bear Cafe, Kids on the Slope, and Space Brothers. Hopefully I help you decide if you want to check something good out… or help you desperately avoid something. 

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia 

The show is built around ghost stories told at a high school. Most of them involve Yuuko-san, who is rumored to have been a student who died at the school. On his first day at Seikyou Private, Teiichi Niiya meets Yuuko-san in an abandoned part of the school and agrees to join the school’s paranormal club in order to help Yuuko get her memories back.

The episode started out extremely cute with club member Momoe going over the reports of paranormal activity and while she remains oblivious to her stuff floating around her head. She seems to revere Teiichi as someone who can communicate with spirits, someone who has a connection to the dead. When Teiichi arrives he seems more nervous and flailing than anything else, he is also talking to someone who isn’t there which leads to more fun humor as Momoe thinks he can read her mind and several misunderstood statements.

The show was enjoyable up to this point, Momoe is a cute and fun character and the fact that Teiichi is constantly distracted by something that isn’t there, obviously a ghost, was the source of some great misunderstanding based humor. 

Where the show started to lose me is that after the eye catch they replay the entire first eight minutes of the episode again, except this time the audience can see and hear Yuuko. Well, that was an interesting way to introduce the character and concept to the audience but it didn’t require reusing all the footage a second time. While at first I thought it was neat, I quickly grew bored.

After they had gotten past that point it returned to being a fun show. Yuuko’s constant annoyance at her own legends are funny as well as Teiichi’s attempts to cover up her presence to Momoe and the other characters who can’t see her. However, these are jokes that will be quickly played out as the show takes a monster of the week structure. 

 Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a cute and beautiful show but I doubt the content will be enough to keep me interested for thirteen episodes. They had to replay a long scene in the first episode twice! That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the show, even if their intentions were to do something compelling and different. I’d watch one or two more episodes, but I don’t have high expectations.

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His and Her Circumstances: Building on top of Evangelion

His and Her Circumstances, or Kare Kano for short, is famous among Otaku for being the final piece of animation directed by Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno, who left the project before it had finished due to disputes with advertisers and the author of the original Manga, Masami Tsuda. Which is strange because she, supposedly, claims she was unhappy with Gainax’s focus on the humor and not the romance. After watching the show I doubt that was the only thing she was uncomfortable with in the adaptation.

Kare Kano is an odd show, not odd in the sense that it’s a weird or hyper active like some recent Gainax titles. It’s odd because the core of the story is a generic Shoujo anime. Yet, Anno takes what could have been a simple romantic comedy and transforms it into a commentary on the nature of relationships and how they effect and charge individuals. A few episodes in the post-Evangelion style of Anno is apparent. Elements reserved for some of Evangelion’s more spectacular episodes are used in Kare Kano with abandon. These include sketches, dialogue as text for emphases, still frames, long sequences of inner monologue, manga frames, and abstract animation meant to symbolize a character’s mental state.

Lets try to go back to the time and place and get into the head of Anno as he starts to direct Kare Kano. It’s the year 1998 and he just finished creating one of the most influential anime of all time, one that’s colossal impact is still being felt over fifteen years later. Then he was allowed to refinish the ending of his masterpiece with a huge budget and again creates a masterpiece that pushes animation forward narratively and stylistically. Gainax will never raise higher than the peak they reached in the wake of End of Evangelion. How is Anno rewarded for these accomplishments? He gets to adapt a Shoujo manga.

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Review: Hanasaku Iroha

With so many Anime drama’s being built around horrible cliches and stock character designs it’s refreshing to see a show that thrives for realism above recycling tired old anime tropes. P.A. Works celebrates their tenth anniversary by crafting a show that is closer to a live action drama then traditional anime drama. Does their attempt to bring a realistic drama to modern anime work or does the show falter? Ohana Matsumae is a sixteen year old girl forced to mature faster thanks to her less-then-ideal mother, Satsuki. When Satsuki’s boyfriend becomes involved in a crooked deal they’re forced to flee Tokyo sending Ohana to stay with her estranged grandmother at a traditional Japanese inn. Ohana needs to work, learn to deal with people, and attempt to repair the relationship between Satsuki and her family.

There is a beautiful simplicity to Hanasaku Iroha. It doesn't relay on any of the standard anime tropes or set ups, it doesn't seem to be one of the many shows that wants to appear to the niche anime audience through their fetishes, and it doesn't seem to care about wish fulfillment. At first glance, I expected all of these things from the show and it surprised me by avoiding all those traps of most recent anime. It has been hard to find shows that don't reflect some of those problems, even from modern quality anime. Hanasaku Iroha strives for realism and after spending a short time with the characters and living in the world for a bit they've definitely hit the mark.

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Review: Steins;gate

There are few things in the world I enjoy more than I good time travel story. Time travel offers a unique twist to a standard narrative, in that, events don't always occur linearly. The events the characters experience are jumbled and due to this the plotting of a time travel story come out far more interesting than a standard drama. Steins;Gate takes place in Akihabara where a group of friends modified a microwave to send text messages into the past. Underestimating the consequences Okabe Rintaro, self proclaimed mad scientist, allows people to use the machine to change the past. What he discovers is that even altering the past slightly can completely change the world.

Steins;Gate is really two different shows. The first half is a Moe show with time travel elements and the second half is a time travel show with Moe elements. Strangely both work, for different reasons, and the transition from the lighthearted and fun atmosphere of the first half of the narrative moves smoothly when Steins;Gate suddenly becomes deadly serious. Such a change in tone is difficult to pull off, yet Steins;Gate manages it by having a fantastic first episode which encapsulates most of the elements that the series will represent going forward. The audience gets the insane antics of Okabe, the wonderful Moe of Mayuri, some of the deep time travel elements, technobabble, and murder. This execution is viewed in hindsight, however, as the first episode’s tonal imbalance may turn away overwhelmed viewers.

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Winter Preview 2012, Part 2

The second and final part of my 2012 Winter season preview. Here I review the first episodes of Nisemonogatari, Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne, Another, and Ano Natsu de Matteru.

Nisemonogatari

Picking up right where Bakemonogatari leaves off the show follows Koyomi Araragi as he deals with various supernatural phenomena. He also has to deal with his insane girlfriend, his sisters, and a cast of lovably crazy characters.

Fans of Bakemonogatari rejoice! The long awaited sequel is here. Like the original, the animation and character designs are absolutely beautiful. There is a special craftsmanship to the backgrounds in this show, probably because the majority of the show is made up of long scenes of dialogue. Due to the lack of action, the look and feel of scenes becomes extremely important. In the scene that takes up a long portion of the middle of the episode Koyomi speaks to his younger sister about life and love. The room she is in is elaborate, featuring a

large round couch sitting directly in the middle, a fully fledged art gallery on the left wall, and ladders arranged oddly. The camera angle shifts as they speak to highlight different parts of the scene. These backgrounds are the most beautiful part of Nisemonogatari and like Bakemonogatari I look forward to each new location that Shinbou crafts and look forward to deconstructing how they reflect the narrative.

The show is largely dialogue, but what made Bakemonogatari brilliant is that the dialogue is as compelling as the best choreographed action scenes. The banter back and forth between Koyomi and the various characters is wonderful, each character having a different flavor of banter which allows the characters to get fleshed out in an abundance of detail. It’s almost as if the tone of the show shifts depending on whom Koyomi is interacting. In the opening scene with Hitagi the show takes on a dark, desperate aura but the next scene makes the show feel like a romantic drama. Like Bakemonogatari expect these changes in tone to be constant throughout.

The unfortunate thing about Nisemonogatari is that it picks up shortly after the end of Bakemonogatari and viewers without knowledge of the pervious series will be completely lost, especially with the opening scene. I have seen Bakemonogatari but this first episode assumes a level of detail that two years has wiped from my memory. Even so I can that that with this first episode it looks like fans of Bakemonogatari may have finally gotten a worthy sequel.

Nisemonogatari is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.com

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Winter Preview 2012, Part 1

In this first part of my Winter Preview are the first impressions for Poyopoyo, Familiar of Zero F, Mouretsu Pirates, and Brave 10.

Poyopoyo

Moe Sato finds a cat and names him Poyo because of his round shape. The episodes are short pieces about Sato’s new life with her pet.

Poyopoyo’s first episode was extremely quick and simply a set up for some of the jokes going forward. The show is about an adorable cat who is round, to the confusion of most of the cast and is really the chief gag of the series. This episode established that the cat does cat like things, and is cute while doing them.

The art is cute and fun, fitting the style of humor and the length of the episodes. The humor of the show doesn’t only come from the cat but from a bunch of quick jokes simply tossed at the audience in mass. The Father quickly became my favorite character as you watched him instantly fall in love with Poyo and suddenly put him in a role reversal as he and his daughter beg his distraught son to allow them to keep Poyo.

If you like cats there is no reason not to check out Poyopoyo. It’s three minutes an episode and streaming for free. You’ll find it cute, at the very least.

Poyopoyo is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.com

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