The year 2014 was the most productive year this blog has seen. The end of 2013 saw my return to anime and reviewing in general after a multiple year hiatus due to a variety of factors. This time period saw the transition from relying heavily on fansubs for at least expedient availability of anime, if at all. Crunchyroll has become the center piece for legally streamed anime content in North America and would begin to dictate viewership. The ease f access after years of scouring shady websites and clogging up bandwidth would be replaced by scrolling through choices on the living room TV. This ease coupled with older children who were becoming more receptive to more mature content allowed for more time to view anime as well. What followed was a year full of crazed consumption of both anime and manga. Here is a look at the titles that saw at least a few episodes of consumption by myself as they aired simultaneously in Japan and on the internet.
Ai Tenchi Muyo
Tenchi Muyo has long been a favorite of mine, beginning with the Sci-FI channel anime week viewing of Tenchi Muyo in Love. Though, the ease of availability of later iterations made the series fall off in the following years and a lot of content was passed over in the Tenchi Universe for me. Most of Tenchi ends up being relegated to direct to video releases instead of getting the broadcast treatment, so I was quite excited to get a new Tenchi series on TV! Unfortunately it was the terrible short form Ai Tenchi Muyo, which was confusing, not related to the world of Tenchi I was familiar with and full of annoying harem tropes. Tenchi is one of the original harem romance anime and over the years its really pushed that idea into a fanciful representation of polyamory. Poly is a pretty acceptable and easy to digest resolution to the common quandary around the harem anime tensions. Yet, Ai Tenchi lacks any real cohesion, instead showing a series of initially unrelated realities in which Tenchi falls back into early stage romance antics. I didn't stick around long enough to see if it made any sense in the end...
Sadly, there is not a lot of mecha anime that isn't part of the Gundam universe. Aldnoah.Zero was the right fresh mecha anime at the time. The story follows a group of high school students struggling to survive a devastating invasion and war by humans who emigrated to Mars decades earlier. Forced to fight to defend their homes, they also work to keep a princess thought to be dead, from really ending up that way. Their goal is to ensure the lost girl, who's assumed demise was the catalyst for the conflict, survives long enough to put an end to the bloodshed. The series didn't make much of a blip outside of meme world. It was a more palatable cat and mouse game than Code Geass...let's be honest, that show gets to be too much some times.
Social outcast and top student, Kanie, is urged by a new transfer student to start working at a decrepit amusement park. He reluctantly agrees to start working at the park but feels its better off being demolished and sold off to developers. The entire crew works hard to convince him otherwise and then leverage his skills to breathe new life into the fading attraction. This was a rather mid romantic comedy that had a strange hook of the parks costumed mascots being magical beings. If you decide to sit through all 13 episodes, you're really there to see whats up with the princess, because the outcome is predictable.
A different take on the high school debut trope. Instead of the character upping their drip, Futaba starts school in a new environment by trying to make herself blend into the background and appear frumpy and unapproachable. Her plan is almost flawless until her friend and past crush also starts going to the school and forces her to stop hiding from who she used to be. This was an enjoyable shojo story that offered a slightly different starting point before diving into introspection on self worth. Unfortunately it got distracted by story lines that pulled the audience away from the humanism too many times.
2014 saw not one, but at least two original mech series. Argevollen tells a deep political intrigue story as two nations go to war against each other. This series takes the typical wunderkin trope and adds a bit of a twist through the dangers of technology being wielded by the unwitting hero. As the need to use this new and dangerous mech technology provides them with an edge to survive if not win the war, their success will lead to its further, dangerous, development. The show its self has never made much of a splash and has fallen into obscurity. Many of the characters are poorly developed and the series does little to tread new ground as a mecha or military story.
A spoiled privileged young man in the world of professional calligraphy is given a severe reality check after assaulting an art critic. He is forced into exile in a remote fishing village, where he has to think about what hes done wrong. He doesn't see this as a way to grow as a person, but as a period of forced isolation to hone his art. What he doesn't anticipate is a group of the villages children gloming onto him like the host of a morning kids variety program. The rural rugrats, through their carefree and unsupervised lives, end up showing the self interested man child that it takes more than going through the motions to express himself in his art. This is a pretty run of the mill slice of life story that is enjoyable and comfortable. It could have pushed its self further by creating a more dynamic plot arc, but its really a series of goofy events that force the main character to realize hes been sheltered his entire life and until he can really live he won't be able to succeed.
A senior in high school is carrying the burden of his childhood friends death, using it as the catalyst for his plan for the future. His plans are wiped away when a girl transfers to his school that reminds him of his lost friend. Instead of being his old friend, the girl is part of a shadow organization that is modifying young girls to be weapons. She and another girl are trying to escape the group, but their escape is leading to their own death. Driven to make use of the life that was given to him at the expense of his friend he decides to help these runaways, even against a powerful quasi government group. This was ultimately a pretty bad anime, a shoddy facsimile of the earlier Elfen Leid series...both of which were written by the same author. This show replaced the frequent nudity with more rote fan service and cosplay archetypes all while wrapping up the story in a confusing and convoluted show down. Better off to pass on this unless you're a big fan of trash tier anime.
The arrival of two host guests, one being your fiance, can be jarring under normal circumstances for any high school student. When the circumstances of that betrothal and any memory of the fiance at all elude you, problems can arise. To make things even more problematic, the fiance and his younger sister are hiding something strange from everyone...but your older sister and mom seem to know some of the details and support the arrangement wholly. The set up for the premise could lead to a story filled with little more than set up for rote fan-service scenarios. Instead it sits grounded in a reality that includes an amount of super natural elements as the main character struggles with memories that don't exist for her, but do for those around her. While not the best romantic comedy around, it is a solid middle ground and not a bad way to waste some time in-between landmark stories.
Nothing shakes up the bond between life long friends in their final year of childhood like the appearance of an outsider in their closed circle. An outsider that sparks buried emotions in everyone, forcing them to admit their hidden feelings and urges. The intruder has his own plans and works to convince one of the members of the group that they are destined to be together and that she shares a strange ability to see glimpses of the future with him. This was a strange and confusing story of teenagers having a severe coming of age experience together. Their fabricated camaraderie is instantly shattered by the introduction of an outsider who pushes through their own feelings to resolve his own disillusion ideas. The whole super natural thing...hard to say if it was even real in the first place as this series kind of dissolves into a collection of unresolved character arcs. Live just be like that some times.
A creepy, self sufficient orphan girl suddenly manifests a spirit fox who decides he needs to fill in the gap of parental protection for her. The girl, firmly entrenched in her solitary existence, outwardly refuses the spirits offer. Her resistance doesn't dissuade him from moving in and working to shift her upbringing into something he feels is more conducive to being a productive member of society. Where one spirit manifests, soon others follow, joining in the experience and looking for a bit of fun. Meanwhile the little girl tries to prevent her world from being upended too much by the pesky supernatural room mates. This may have been the most amusing show of 2016. Ridiculous situations, strange main characters and fantastic direction come together to make this super natural remake of Three Men and A Baby a classic comedy. Highly recommended for both the anime and the manga.
Gundam Reconguista in G
Gundam has existed since the late 70s and features a wide selection of titles both contained in the canon universe and outside of it. Yet too many times the story rehashes the original narrative of the struggle of good versus evil personified in one teenage child with unnatural talents and a powerful authority figure. Rec G is another spin of that same story, with the franchises origin al creator at the scripting and directing helm. Instead of a clean rehash of the original struggle between Char and Amuro we get an overly convoluted and incoherent story set a thousand years into the future of the UC that is hard to understand what the target audience is.
IN an alternative version of the world, some people are born with super natural abilities, known as Minimum Holders. In Japan a group of 'holders' has banded together to run a detective agency, Hamatora. When other Minimum Holders begin to show up dead, with their brains removed, the members of Hamatora begin to uncover an insidious plot helmed by the shadow government agency behind them. This was a fun action series that felt more like a plot line in the X-Men comic franchise. The series wrapped up with the Re:_Hamatora follow up series but left some questions unanswered. both anime series' which aired in 2014 were part of a larger mixed media project, and those confusing aspects may have been expanded more in the other media releases but I never bothered with them. I should really revisit this series ten years later and see how it holds up. The original criticism's focused largely on the character designs being ready made for cosplay.
High school student Arikawa Hime has one trouble in his young life. His parents are globe trotting scam artists who use his name to rack up piles of debt to cover their lavish vacations. He frequently uses his feminine features to pose as a girl to avoid creditors and other unsavory characters coming after him due to his parents spending habits. The members of his schools student council find out about his troubles and come to his rescue, paying off the most recent debt collector. Unfortunately for Hime, this wasn't done out of any benevolence but as a way to force him into indentured service for the remainder of his high school career. The result, exploiting his features as a honey trap to sell to the sexually overactive student body. This short and insane series was enjoyable in small slices, but would have gotten tiring if it was stretched into full half hour episodes. This is a comedy that points and laughs at fan service tropes and does so in glorious fashion.
I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying
What happens when a self proclaimed otaku does the unthinkable and marries a 'normal' woman? He continuously learns that her love for him as a person exists outside of those deep passions that make up his personality. This series explores the way two people come together even if they share nothing in common but are able to transcend that to accept their illogical emotions. This short form series and its follow up is really cute and charming. The artwork is quite simple, reflecting the simplicity of the manga it's based on. But the artwork isn't the important thing, the strength is the quality of the writing and how it portrays the two main characters as they navigate their life as newlyweds. It is a truly lovely series.
The Kawai Complex Guide to Manors and Hostel Behavior
Usa begins high school with the standard drastic change trope in mind. He convinces his parents to let him attend school far from home and reside in a boarding house. Everything looks set to work out well, except for the personality issues with his fellow boarders. To make his life more complicated, he begins to develop feelings for an upperclassman and fellow resident of the boarding house...which the other adult residents use to enhance their free time. In many many ways this is a modern remake of the classic romantic comedy Maison Ikkoku. Instead of the main characters being young adults, they are high school students. While not exactly a carbon copy, it is pretty damn close to the spirit of the original. This is a fun romp in a wondrous world of absurd freedom that does pan out to be a cute romance as well.
After an aggressive alien species destroys Earth, the few survivors of humanity have retrofitted pieces of the destroyed planet as generation ships and spread through out the stars to search for a new home to restart humanity. Uncountable years later, all alone in the vast darkness, one of these ships the Sidonia has had to take drastic measures to ensure their continued survival after they barely avoided destruction a hundred years earlier by the same alien enemy. The grandfather of one of the wars heroes appears from the bowels of the ship, unaware of anything outside of his hidden home. The leader of the ship recognizes the abilities of the strange boy, who was raised in secret by his elderly grandfather, only taught how to pilot the ships mech units in simulators day after day. The appearance of someone who may just be the most talented pilot comes as a new threat from their eternal enemies arises. A lot of people stay away from this series due to the entire thing being done in 3D CG. Unfortunately that medium hasn't come very far in the ten years since the release of this show, but the animation company behind this and other Nihei anime projects do a pretty good job given the issues with the medium. But, its understandable that the artwork and character motions can be unsettling for many viewers. Outside of any complaints one may have in the artwork, Sidonia is story that eschews much of the trappings of anime in general. Nihei loves to depict humans on the brink of annihilation in all of his works, Sidonia is no exception to that. There is little modern humans can relate to in the setting and struggles the characters face but the scale of the setting is breathtaking and fearsome. This is a rare mecha/space anime that I highly recommend, but it is not for everyone.
What happens when your crush misinterprets your confession as accolades for your side hustle? Chiyo finds out that when her crush thinks her confession translates into her saying she likes his manga, she winds up volunteering as an assistant. Her crush, stoic and impressively manly Nozaki is a successful shojo romance manga author. He doesn't tell many people about his early career success for a variety of reasons, but he assumed Chiyo was talking about his manga. Chiyo had no knowledge of his secret but was so astonished by the revelation and his misunderstanding she goes along with his offer to help him. This is a really fun and amusing comedy that has light romantic tones and more sets it self up as a primer for amateur manga production peppered with standard high school slice of life antics.
Raku is the heir apparent for a powerful yakuza group, but he wants nothing to do with the criminal world. He tries to distract himself by searching for a mysterious girl he met earlier in his life. A girl he only can identify with a key he received that works on her locket necklace. Unfortunately word of his goal spreads through out school and he begins to be approached by girls who may or may not be the one who has captured his heart. Now he has to suss out the truth and confirm is his love still remains. This is a lauded and loved harem anime that ran for way longer than it should have. I cut myself off from it in the first season and did everything I could to purge this rote and repetitive series from my brain....yet I decided to watch all of Rent-A-Girlfriend, because I hate myself apparently.
When a high school student in modern Japan ends up isekai'ed into the past to live out the rest of his life as national hero Oda Nobunaga. Using his vague understanding of Japanese history he takes the reigns and works to ensure he succeeds where the historical Oda did. This is a little talked about series that seemed to serve as a weird historical fan fic...it wasn't bad but it wasn't good either. What it did was make me depressed about the severe lack of detailed history in English related to, arguably, Japans most important historical figure.
What do you do when the girl you like in class, who you get along with and enjoy spending time with has selective amnesia and loses her recent memories after every weekend? In his case, main character and stand in personality vessel, Hase, keeps replaying his approach and efforts to get close to the medical anomaly Kaori. Each week, he restarts his attempts to befriend her and spend time with the quiet girl who intentionally isolates herself from her peers. He hopes that he can someone implant himself enough into her subconscious that he might break through her repetitive amnesia and be able to establish a lasting relationship with her. This is what you get if you take the romantic comedy 50 First Dates and turn it into a depressive slice of life...drama. Everything about this show is subdued and almost narcoleptic. It might be a good sleep aid, but in the end it doesn't really resolve anything...wops spoilers! The yonkoma manga its based on felt more like a silly comedy than the sleep aid the anime adaptation became.
An alien invader uses the pan-spermia approach at overtaking Earth by infecting as many people as possible to stealthily replace them. The alien infection is designed to replace the head of its host, utilizing the remaining body for is own designs, furthering the invasion by hunting and eating other humans. By shear coincidence, protagonist Shinich, inadvertently prohibits the parasite from accomplishing the original goal, instead forcing it to replace the hosts lower in a moment of adaptation. This forces the invading alien and Shinichi to begin a precarious symbiotic relationship. Their goals only partially align as Shinichi begins to hunt down other local invaders and fight them with the aid of the alien that has overtaken his arm. The teenager, faced with savagery and violence has to come to terms with the reality of humans as predators and what this hidden threat means for the world. This is a rather satisfying action horror series that presents everything up front. The meat of the story isn't the ultra violence, savagery or overall mystery, its really about the forced analysis of modern humanities obfuscation of predation with modern convenience and dissociation.
Ping Pong
A story about two childhood friends who navigate a long time competitive bond over table tennis. One of the adults running the neighborhood club they play at tries to get them to focus on their natural abilities to achieve greater success in the sport. But their own personal struggles and ambitions prevent road blocks in their path to greatness, a path that neither of them understands if they want to achieve. Don't get tricked into thinking this is a bog standard shonen sports story. The original manga is by the legendary, and obscure in Western circles, Matsumoto Taiyo, an author who focuses on realistic circumstances of ugliness and ambivalence. Then you hand the directing reigns for the anime adaptation for someone who's career has been solidly established on shirking the norm, Yuasa Masaaki, and you get an unconventional anime gem floating in the void of iseki, friendships built on violence and masturbatory romances. Ping Pong is fantastic and finely crafted and adapted and does get some of the respect it deserves in the West.
A man who embodies the very essence of rogue, lies himself into accompanying a beautiful young woman to a remote city, where she hopes to reunite with her mother. What our roguish guide doesn't realize is the woman is an aberration in a world caught in the middle of a struggle between the forces of heaven and hell. Powerful figures in the world of demons have enacted a plan to unseat their ruler and bring about the destruction of the entire world, unleashing a legendary and apocalyptic dragon. While first desiring to seduce the woman their trip causes him to re-evaluate his purpose in life as he tries to make her sole wish come true. I consistently reject fantasy anime (this past year is a very rare exception) finding I don't click very well with Japans usual approach to sword and sorcery stories. From the beginning of the first episode of this series I was hooked. It reminded me more of the antics of Cowboy Bebop than the D&D sessions come to life in Record of Lodoss War. The world and setting isn't interesting in the end, its really the fantastically written main characters and the way they interact with each other then the situation they find themselves in. This is such a fun show and was followed up a few years later with Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul, which continued the playful spirit of the original. Yet, both shows never appeared to have made much of an impact on Western audiences and are barely referenced in online circles. Shame.
Ronja is the daughter of the leader of a gang of bandits. One day while playing in the vast woods her family hides in, she encounters and befriends a boy who is the son of her fathers rival, another group of bandits. As the two childrens' friendship grows the work to build a better future for themselves and the people they love, even in the midst of a brewing conflict between the two criminal outfits. This is an interesting venture by the son of Miyazaki, Goro, who chose to follow in his fathers footsteps by adapting a European children's novel into an anime. The similarity ends there as Goro worked with 3DCG animation firm Polygon Pictures (see Knights of Sidonia above) to produce something that drastically differs from the Studio Ghibli esthetic his father is known for. Instead, Ronja is a full CG production, with a lower per episode budget and quality than one would find in a feature length film, given this was a show for TV broadcast and aimed at elementary school children. Clunky artwork and comparisons to his father aside, the story is endearing and lovable overall, even if the dialogue struggles with any depth...again this is aimed at children. It is still a quality product, with its flaws and failed expectations, that is great for children and their otaku parents to share together.
You ever see that meme of the elderly man handing a machine gun to a duck? That's from Sabugebu! a weird slice of life comedy that follows a quirky group of high school girls who decide to put together an after school club dedicated to air soft guns. This is an amusing wargame fan service romp of weirdness and satire. That meme sums up how out of hand things get, how far the plot derails even when it tries to center its self through reminders of the events being partially fantastic imagination on the part of the characters. You just have to experience the series for your self to understand how strange it really is.
Soul Eater was a fun shonen series from 2008 that didn't take it or its story seriously and made for a pleasant product. Soul Eater Not! returns to this strange world of teenagers tasked with doing the grim reapers work for him, so he can be lazy. Yet instead of a fun story that does a good job of building the bizarre world its characters inhabit, Not resets us back to the basic academical premise and serves up only thinly veiled moe content. The story focuses one three new students to the DWMA and a plot they get wrapped up in that might lead to the destruction of everything. Yet, the three students are no where near are talented or trained to handle the extreme threat building around them and instead...fan service galore!! I feel this was titled correctly...this is NOT the Soul Eater that I enjoyed, instead it presents its self as some official doujinshi with an entirely different purpose in mind.
Take a detective agency, staffed entirely by extreme caricatures, throw them into scenarios that work as set up for a variety of gags and pepper it with a healthy dose of butt jokes. This off kilter adaptation of a frantic gag manga adds cocaine fueled pacing to the absurdity the source material provided. Its amazing this saw legal distribution and translation in the West, given a lot of gag manga is too obscure for general anime audiences outside of Japan. Not for everyone, or many people in general, but I do love me some gag stupidity!
Super Radical Gag Family
Speaking of gag stupidity. Super Radical Gag Family is another adaptation of the long running manga and the first exposure to it I encountered. From what I could find no one ever really fansubbed this weird quirky show about a family of criminally negligent nut jobs and the equally problematic personalities in their neighborhood. Even with it being only in Japanese I laughed so much through this short form series episodes it has become a personal favorite of mine. The series does have a legacy of older adaptations being localized in Latin America, but this is an anomaly in English speaking circles, sadly.
Two secretive super genius teenagers decide to 9/11 Japan to kick start a shift in society they see as necessary for continued prosperity. Their actions and persistent video uploads, taunting the authorities, leads to a task force being established to find and arrest the terrorists, bringing a downtrodden retired detective back to work. This is a fantastic effort by Watanabe Shinichiro to put his own twist on a classic Hollywood action trope. This may have been better served as a feature length movie, allowing for a more focused budget, but the 11 episode TV anime we got instead was still a pretty solid quality, with a great soundtrack from the legendary Kanno Yoko. With the exception of Tokyo Ghoul, this entry is one of the more popular series that premiered in 2014 on this list.
After gaining a strange psychic ability, high school student Rinka joins forces with a coed, using their new abilities to help fight petty crime in their community. Months later a brazen attack on the center of Japans government forces her to use her ability to fight for real, determined to protect those who cant protect themselves. The group of terrorists are attempting to force a new society in which those people that are gaining unnatural abilities are in control of the world, relegating normal humans to second class citizens. This is a slick and enjoyable action series that tells a standard but fun tale in an unconventional way. Rinka is the hero that we need, but in the end her ambitions become waylaid by other standards outside of the world in the story and the trajectory of a strong female lead gets diluted. Beyond its 'pre-woke' ambitions and failings, this was a really enjoyable and compact action series with some great characterizations and fun experimentation.
We've all spent too much time bored in class during our obligatory educational years. Yokoi doesn't have to rely on her internal distractions to fend off boredom during lectures. Instead she has a strange boy named Seki next to her in class and Seki goes above and beyond reason to fend off boredom. Yokoi internally narrates dramatic analysis' of her classmates past times. Seki continues to occupy his brain by establishing a wide range of scenarios using found material on his desk, from silent stage performances with children toys to Rube Goldberg machines from random pieces of his school bag. Yokoi continues to be drawn into the strange and silent world of play that Seki makes for himself on his desk, oblivious of his audience. This is a cute and creative way to waste some time and not be bogged down with a plot. The viewer watches in amazement with Yokoi as Seki uses random every day objects in increasingly unusual ways, all while avoiding punishment from the teachers. The strength of the show is the creativity given the setting is typically relegated to the characters position at the back of the classroom and almost all of the dialogue comes solely from Yokoi.
Tokyo Ghoul
In a world where changed humans hunt other humans for sustenance, an unfortunate teenager becomes thrust into the dangerous hidden world when he survives and attack by a ghoul. Now being a creature that exists in the human world and the hidden ghoul world, he has to overcome his new reality and struggle to survive the dangers of the darkness. How far can he go and still cling onto his humanity? OK...so I only made it through the first 4 or 5 episodes of this massively popular shonen action series before I became completely bored and disinterested. I'm not the audience for this and it doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. It retreads modern gothic horror plot lines of trying to protect humanity once the veil of ignorance is lifted from the insidious darkness of a reality where humans are little more than prey for more powerful beings. The super natural aspects of the story can be used and probably are used as dramatic allegories of the horrors of modern society, but I can't be bothered to actually dive into that. Kaneki's character presented its self to be too unbelievable for the world he has to survive and conquer. The plot armor around him was too apparent from the very beginning and made the idea of continuing the story pointless and unpleasant. I refer back to Parasyte and its more enjoyable way of handling a similar story and circumstance, a story that does not telegraph the success of its protagonist from the very beginning.
When Supernatural Battles Become Common Place
What do you do if your chunibiyou delusions suddenly come true? You dive fully into the reality you wished would happen, feeling confident that you rightfully prepared yourself for this almost impossible outcome. Ando is just that chuunibiyou and he and the other members of the small literary club in his high school have to reconcile the new reality that all of them suddenly gained abilities beyond reason. But what are they supposed to do with these powers? Obviously it means there is a high purpose in store for them and sure enough, others who find themselves in the same situation come calling, willing to flex their strengths against others...because whats the point in having super natural abilities when you don't use them? Or, that's what he was hoping for but things don't turn out as one expects even given unusual circumstances that would otherwise be true. This is a fantastically enjoyable lambast of the standard chuuni persona and supernatural battle genre in general. Yet, it ends abruptly, making you want more...but that just means you need to buy the light novels the anime adapted. If anything, you need to watch this series to experience the amazing and epic monologue dump by Ando's childhood friend Hatoko...it's incredible.
If you're interested there was a look at the anime that came out 20 years ago as well, but that list was quite a bit smaller than this and lacked the quality meme content.
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