Anime Review: Show by Rock

Yep, in a way I watched two shows about music last season, although this show and Sound! Euphonium were so different that I tended to compare this one more to Wish Upon the Pleiades instead. They were both rather cute, fluffy shows that you could almost believe were for kids at first, especially since the original game/character project is from the same company that created Hello Kitty.

Show by Rock!

Anime Review: Sound! Euphonium

This show wasn't even on my radar when the spring season started and now it's a lock for my top anime of the year list. It's funny, so far it's felt like a weak year (although fall looks amazing so far) since there haven't been as many shows that I want to watch but for the shows I am watching so many of them have ended up being ridiculously strong. Now to pray that the PonyCan release isn't ridiculously expensive....

Sound! Euphonium (Hibike! Euphonium)

Manga Review: solanin

This is a comic I've seen in bookstores and wanted to read for years (since, goodness it must be high school if I was actually in a bookstore on a regular basis) but didn't want to just blind-buy it, despite the fact I knew that several of my friends had enjoyed it. So as soon as I saw it at my new local library system (and convinced them to give me a library card) I immedately checked it out and got to reading.

solanin by Inio Asano

Book Review: Seraphina

Originally my last review of the year was going to be volumes 5 and 6 of Kieli (yes not only  did I finally get both of them but I found time to read them as well!) and I didn't think I'd have a chance to read this book until 2013. But unexpectedly one of my libraries had a copy of this, I got it out, and then proceeded to read it over a day and a half this. This was impressive because not only is the book around 460 pages (which even for me is a bit thick) but those two days were Christmas Eve and Christmas Day where between the two of them I spent over 10 hours in parties and another couple of hours each day getting to/helping prepare for each. So I didn't just read this book fast, I read this book fast for me and I think that alone says something about how I liked it.


Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

Summary: In the country of Goredd there has been a tenuous peace agreement between humans and the dragons for 40 years which seems threatened nearly every day due to a lack of understanding of each side. For Seraphina the peace is even more important for her than most, her mother was a dragon (a fact her father didn't know until she bled silver blood while she died giving birth to Seraphina) and her father human making her a hybrid and a fact she hides every day. There seems to be no upsides to her strange parentage and it only seems to have given her terrible headaches and strange mental landscapes to attend to, hardly a desirable thing. But with dignitaries from both sides gathering to celebrate the treaty she'll simply have to deal with everything while trying her best to stay out of the dangerous politics that it seems like she was born into.

The Good: Now THIS is what people should do if they want a medieval-Europe inspired setting! Goredd isn't a dressed up and renamed England or France, it's an original setting which draws heavily inspiration from real world culture (such as the music and the idea of Saints) without falling into some of the traps ("noooo you can't have women with power in a middle ages setting, wait almost all of the named royals are female? Well, everyone has to be whit-oh hell side characters from other countries and clearly described to be not-white!"). The story makes use of it's large page count to create a fairly detailed plot with multiple subplots that come together by the end (like a calmer version of Diana Wynne Jones' books) and there is plenty of politicking and scheming to make me happy. In these ways it feels like a rather mature young adult book, I can easily see that if just a few things were changed that it could be a work of adult fiction. That isn't to say that it should be an adult fiction book, it's simply a book that I think has more crossover appeal than others. 

The Bad: There were some points where it felt like Lucian, who can be a bit touchy but isn't hot tempered, got mad (or madder) at Seraphina than he should've just for the sake of advancing the plot but even then you could come up with a realistic reason for that (being in charge of all the security for the peace treaty celebration will make anyone cranky). I also had a bit of a hard time buying that Princess Glisselda was only 15, she does act like a 15 year old a lot of the time but there are other times when she was too wise beyond her years (which is something I could say for a lot of characters in young adult books actually, so while a bit frustrating it was something I could easily deal with and did half expect).


So I happily give this book four out of five stars, would buy it, and I'm hoping that there is in fact going to be a sequel. There was a note in one of the appendixes which lead me to think so but honestly I won't be crushed if there isn't. Yes there is so much more plot that could happen but after spending this much time with the characters I can see how they could further develop so even if there's not a sequel I can easily imagine how it would have gone down. For those interested there's a prologue which fills in one or two details and gives you a good feel for what the characters and the book is like. 

Anime Review: Kids on the Slope

The other noitaminA show and one that received a bit more pre-airing hype since it reunited director Shinichiro Watanabe (Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop) with composer Yoko Kanno (Wolf's Rain, Aquarion) for the first time since Cowboy Bebop and, well, people over here really like that show. The show had the tall order of adapting a nine volume (already completed) manga series in just 11 episodes so I had already lowered my expectations from "perfect thing that will never be equaled" to "has a rather good chance of being excellent".  A quick note  though, this show isn't JUST about jazz, as I'm afraid a lot of people thought when they went into it. It's about growing up so sure there's a lot of jazz but there's also friendship and a good deal of romance. If you want a show that's just about music that's fine, go watch Beck Mongolian Chop Squad, but I really hope that part alone doesn't turn people off from this series.

Kids on the Slope (Sakamichi no Apollon)

   
Summary: Kaoru is a military brat in 1960s Japan and Kyushu is only the latest in the long line of places his had to move to because of his dad's occupation, transfer schools, and generally feel alone and bitter about all of it. He does enjoy playing classical music on the piano a lot and that's how his luck changes as he meets classmates Ritsuko (whose dad owns a record store) and drum-player Sentaro and gets dragged into playing jazz in the basement of the record store. From there his life becomes more interesting as he begins to meet and open up to more people and finds out how painful a love triangle can be.

The Good: This is the kind of show that lives or dies by it's characters and thankfully Kaoru and Sentaro are characters that turn out much more interesting than they first appear (the rest of the cast is also interesting but it's these two boys and their friendship that holds the show together in my opinion). Kaoru noticeably, if slowly at times, grows from a cold, self-centered person whose been lonely all his life and Sen turns out to have problems of his own which greatly affect how he handles hardships. But the best part of the show is when the characters are interacting with each other, I feel like by the end of the show you could name any two characters and I'd be able to predict pretty well how they'd react (some of them wouldn't be interesting interactions but that's another thing altogether).  

The Bad: I do wish Ritsuko had gotten a bit more character development, or at least earlier on in the series since for too long she feels more like a role, "the childhood friend" or "the love interest", than an actual character. My bigger problem with the series however is that there are a lot of unexpected time skips and I'm not sure if this was a problem from the original manga or if this was a problem from the adaptation (ie, they had to cut stuff out which resulted in some rather awkward transitions). While I do believe this show was paced as well as it could've been I also do wish it had been 22 episodes instead; the characters could have been even better fleshed out and the pacing would have flowed smoother but other than that this was a solid show. 

The Audio: While this isn't my favorite Yoko Kanno soundtrack* it's really solid and all of the jazz scenes are spectacular. The music works well and I can easily see myself re-watching just the clips of the jazz sessions on youtube which is rather unusual for me. The voice acting work is solid and I really liked the opening and ending themes for the show. Both of them had subtitles by the end of the run and I like to interpret them as the opening is supposed to be Kaoru singing about how meeting Sentaro changed his life and the ending as how his relationship and infatuation with Ritsuko again changed him. I have no idea how much control an anime production has over the opening and ending themes (I know sometimes the composer helps compose the songs, other times I feel like the higher ups just try to get a up and coming group to try and get sponsorship money from their company) but regardless they worked really well here.  

The Visuals: The show did a good job making the series look like it's set in the 1960s and I really liked all the details in the backgrounds that made it feel like another time and place. But by far the most interesting part of the show was, again, the jazz sessions because of how fluid they looked. I don't believe they used rotoscoping (although apparently Kanno did choose two young, talented musicians for Kaoru and Sentaro's pieces and the grew set up tons of cameras around both of them from all angles for references) but the show is on par with Nodame Cantible for and accurate representation of characters making music. Normally this isn't a show where I would be gushing over it's looks but I was really impressed at how well those scenes turned out and everything else looked great as well.

So while in the end I enjoyed tsuritama more I still thought this was a solid show and plan to buy it when it comes out in the US (it's licensed by Section 23, fingers crossed that they get the rights to all the shows in the show). People interested in watching it can go over to either crunchyroll.com or theanimenetwork.com to watch the series legally in it's entirely. The original manga has not been licensed in the US but I, ahem, plan on looking into it at least a bit anyway to see just how the anime compares. 


*weirdly enough for me that would be Wolf's Rain, which is only weird because I didn't really like the show in the end

Spring Anime 2012 round-up

Once again I am later than everyone else but to make up for it I have all my reviews in one place (so, erm, it's long, I had just hit a fourth page on Word when I was writing these up).Did not try Jormugand, Sankarea, Hyouka, Kuroko no Basuke, or Nyarko-san but might later on if I somehow get bored, they all sounded like something that may catch my fancy but I already have enough shows I'm committed to watching to keep me entertained (plus Funimation still hasn't put up Sankarea, y'all sure you know what the word "simulcast" means?). Still following Bodacious Space Pirates and Aquarion Evol in addition to Legend of Korra, thank god MLP:FiM just finished up or I'd be spending my entire Saturday watching cartoons. Funny enough my one and a half fansub shows this season are both mecha (half since I watch Evol on a weird schedule so it only half counts), and the fact that I was already committed to one and a half shows is why I didn't try out Hyouka (the entire reason this is delayed so much, I had expected it to be simulcast which obviously didn't happen). Enough mindless rambling though, let's ramble about the actual shows!

Accel World: Set a few decades in the future, high school life in Japan is similar to today’s except that the technology has rapidly progressed and everyone is now permanently wired into the ‘net. This works in Haruyuki’s favor since he uses his favorite online games to escape the bullying at his school and it turns out that someone has noticed his skills, student body president who is only known by her handle Kuroyukihime, and recruits him to help her in a different kind of game called Brain Burst. I checked out the first chapter of the manga adaptation which didn’t really catch my attention but the anime did. It’s paced well, looks good (do wish Haruyuki was a bit less deformed but I’m not going to obsess over that like some viewers have) and while the plot is a bit on the simple side it works just fine. I can’t tell at this point if I’m going to keep enjoying the series as much as I have, especially since it’s “plot twists” seem rather predictable at this point, but for the moment I’m having fun with it.

Accel World has been licnesed by Viz Media and can be viewed by USians either on hulu or on their site using the hulu player, Canadians are in a pinch here.

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia (Tasogare Otome x Amnesia): Many years ago Yuuko was a student at a strange high school and died under mysterious circumstances and now her body lies beneath the Paranormal Activity clubroom. She claims that she’s not interested in why she died or any of those details, she can’t even remember them to start with, but when Teiichi comes along and is able to see her she starts to become a little more curious and starts the club in order to find out. Honestly that’s all that has happened in the first two episodes (the majority of the first episode was taken up by a hilarious segment showing the episode first from the point of view of the club member who can’t see ghosts and then from the POV of the two who can) and the show has more fanservice than I care for* but somehow the show has grabbed me anyway and if it’s going to be a short series then I’ll be sure to stick around and see what ends up being revealed.

The show has been licensed by Section 23 and for the moment can be viewed on Crunchyroll.

Eureka Seven AO (Astral Ocean): The follow-up to the original 2005 show Eureka 7: Psalm of the Planets (which I have seen, it was just back in 2009 back when Anime News Network was starting to stream shows), Ao has grown up in Okinawa under the guidance of a local doctor when his mother (who is clearly Eureka) vanished while he was small (no mention of his father but it’s Renton almost for sure) and has endured harassment ever since for being an “outsider”. But when a monster emerges from the alien scrub coral and starts spreading havoc it seems like Ao is one of the best chances they have to save the island. But for older viewers a few things seem off, the series is set on a modern looking Earth in 2025 (instead of 12005 on a changed Earth like the original series) with scub coral attacks dating back to the 1940s. I think it’s an alternate universe here so on the one hand I want to say that people who have read a bit about the original but not seen it can follow but at this point it’s not quite safe to say. Ao is a more likeable protagonist than Renton so far and I never disliked Renton to start with, although I am a little hesitant on who seems to be the female lead Naru but I’m warming up to her fast. At first glance the two shows seemed very different but I can now see a number of similarities and I think I’ll end up liking this a lot.

Fate/Zero II: Continuing mere minutes from where the first half left off, Fate/Zero is a record of the fourth Holy Grail war (10 years before the 5^th war in Fate/Stay Night) where pairs of Masters and Servants (heroic spirits summoned just to fight in this war) fight to the last pair standing to receive the wish granting grail. And fight they do, almost half the servants are gone by the time I write this and there has been fighting amongst the pairs as well, much like the first half the show loves to have long monologues on philosophy and morals between characters and then spend the next ten minutes showing a beautifully done fight sequence. I’ve really gotten into the show now, enough that I’m planning on watching F/STN over the summer once this finishes and even though I’ve guessed/been spoiled enough to figure out how this story is going to end I can’t wait to see it play out, as triumphant or tragic as it may be.

While not licensed per-say in the US, each new episode can be viewed on the Japanese NicoNico site with English subtitles and on Crunchyroll a week later. 

Hiiro no Kakera: When Tamaki's parents suddenly get jobs oversees, something that seems a bit suspicious to her, she moves in with her grandmother and discovers that she was brought there to be the next "Tamayori Princess," someone who deals with the spirits in the area and whose power seems to be growing. In a twist that shows it's dating-sim roots there are five attractive men assigned to look after her and the chemistry begins! While I can easily see the appeal of dating-sim games I don't really see the appeal of the animated adaptions since they take out the best part, actually getting to choose what to do and which guys to get closer to. So this one gets a pass from me, although I am tempted to make a plushie out of that adorable fox ghost mascot.

Hiiro no Kakera is streaming on Crunchyroll. 

Kids on the Slope (Samakichi no Apollon): One of my most anticipated shows of the season, Kids on the Slope makes up half of the noitaminA spot and focuses on transfer student Kaoru who has just moved to Kyushu in 1966 for his father’s job and expects this move to be like all the others, another chance for him to be isolated and lonely in his new surroundings. But things go a little differently this time around thanks to the friendly class president Ritsuko and delinquent classmate Sentarou who introduce the piano playing Kaoru to a new kind of music, jazz. I’ve only had a chance to check out the first episode so far but I really liked the vibe it gave off. The setting was different, the music was great and the characters already feel a bit rounded. I am really worried at how this show is going to compress all nine volumes of the manga into just 12 episodes, especially since it sounds like their aren’t any subplots that can be easily cut out, but fingers crossed and hoping for the best!

Section 23 has already licensed the show and it can be viewed on Crunchyroll.

Lupin the III-A Woman Named Fujiko Mine: I saw the first episode of this show on accident actually, I was watching a livestream and the streamer decided to show the latest incarnation of the Lupin the III franchise (which can be summed up as Lupin is a famous thief who likes to steal difficult things because of the challenges they present).  As I had already figured out from the reviews I’d read, this isn’t the show for me but it’s a pretty cool show. I’m not a big fan of Lupin, like many my only experience with the franchise is The Castle of Caligstro (which I didn’t  like that much) and the whole phantom/gentleman thief genre is hit or miss with me to start with. All of that said, you don’t need much familiarity with the Lupin franchise to follow this show and it looks gorgeous (to quote a friend, “they blew the budget of three anime studios in the first five minutes of this show”) in it’s super detailed retro style. Funny enough the copious amount of fanservice in the first episode didn’t bother me either which I think might be because the show not only has a female writer (Mari Okada whose work I’m plenty familiar with) but also a female director (Sayo Yamamoto who did Michiko to Hatchin which I still need to get around to seeing) and I wonder if that had just enough of an influence on the show to make the fanservice less annoying. In any case, Funimation is now streaming the show and if this sounds at all interesting I recommend people check it out (just be careful where you do however, the first episode is seriously NSFW because of Fujiko’s frequent stripping to distract the male characters).

Show is being streamed by Funimation on their website, you do need a free account to view it however due to the boobies.

Medaka Box: Tried this one out because, well, it was on Crunchyroll and I was bored? I also had a raging headache at the time and I’m not sure if that contributed to my feelings on the show or not but this just didn’t quite work. The premise is simple enough, Medaka is the new president of her high school and her first act is to create a suggestion box for the students and her first request is to clean up the kendo dojo, and by clean out they mean kick out all the delinquents who have taken up residence there. The problem is that Medaka just isn’t that interesting a character, she feels a bit like a Maniac Pixie DreamGirl to the male lead whom I suspect is actually the main character, and is simply so out there (with her proclamations that she will fix everything for no reason other than the joy of helping others) that I couldn’t take the show seriously and didn’t find it funny either. The premise reminds me a lot of Sket Dan, which I read the first chapter of a year or so ago, but at least there the series focused on comedy, here the show just feels disjointed and like it’s trying to do two different things at once.

This show is streaming on Crunchyroll as I mentioned earlier.

Polar Bear Café (Shirokuma Café): The lone josei offering of the season is a strange one, a comedy series set in a world where humans and animals live everyday lives with each other, the first episode shows the character Panda (who, true to his species, is rather lazy and would rather lay around all day eating bamboo) trying to find a job and eventually ends up with part time work as a panda in the local zoo. A large chunk of the show also takes place in the eponymous Polar Bear Café which shows off the best bits of the series humor with it’s strange puns and odd situations (plus, if you’re familiar with Japanese seiyuu then there is plenty of humor to be had in hearing them voice various animals). I did laugh a few times but I don’t think that this kind of humor would stay funny to me for an entire season (and in general I prefer series where humor is a secondary genre, not the main one like here), but I’m sure plenty of other people will enjoy it enough to make up for me.

Currently the show is unlicensed but it is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Saint Seiya Omega: I’m not familiar with the original Saint Seiya at all, beyond a basic plot synopsis that is, but I really liked the art style for the show and that I was familiar with. From the same people who did Casshern Sins and Heartcatch Precure (which I really need to see) I had been reminded of just how much I liked their retro-esque designs last fall when they did an episode of Mawaru Penguindrum and I decided that was enough of a reason to give this show a shot. And it seems that not much knowledge of the original Saint Seiya is needed to get this show, it seems to be a sequel where we start off with main character Kouga who is being put through some brutal training to become a “saint” who will one day protect the goddess Athena and he’s not particularly happy with this choice. It’s a super shonen-esque show with calling your attacks, hot blooded determination trumping experience and mysterious mentors calling upon Kouga to use some kind of inner strength he has, although I have no idea if the original show had magical girl-esque transformation sequences as well (looking at the team’s previous work I could easily see this being their own flair). In the end the show didn’t do enough things differently for me to want to continue, think I’ll just track down Heartcatch Precure sometime to get my fill of the artstyle that way instead.

Saint Seiya Omega is streaming, like a lot of other things this season, on Crunchyroll.

Space Brothers (Uchuu Kyodai): Set a few decades into the future, brothers Mutta and Hibito both had the same dream as kids, to become astronauts and explore space. Of the two however only Hibito has been able to achieve this dream while Mutta has been recently fired from his lucrative job as a car designer for head butting his boss. But even if Mutta has pretended to forget his dream his family hasn’t and he soon finds himself taking the JAXA [link] exams to become an astronaut. Hmm, realistic, near-future science-fiction (can it even be called that?) with an older protagonist? Sounds fun and sounds different, the pacing is a bit slower than most of the other shows out here but it sounds like the show will be running for a full year so it has the time to set a steady pace. I am a bit amused that Mutta has the same VA and similar appearance to Kotetsu from Tiger and Bunny last year, then again I remember the VA (Hiroaki Hirata) joking last year that after that role he’s now the “ojisan” actor and maybe that’s coming true…

Streaming on Crunchyroll.

Tsuritama: The other half of this season’s noitaminA timeslot and from the same director who did [C], Mononoke, and Trapeeze, Yuki is also a transfer student as he moves to Enoshima, has also moved around a lot and despite that also still gets panic attacks whenever he tries to introduce himself at his new school. Given the, odd nature of his panic attacks (outwardly he just makes strange expressions but inwardly he imagines being swallowed up by a rising wave) he’s also short on friends and not expecting to make any but self-proclaimed alien Haru, also a transfer student, has taken an interest in Yuki (as well as moved in with them) and seems intent on dragging him and two other guys all over town fishing. This show gave me a lot less to go on than Kids on the Slope and if it wasn’t noitaminA I would’ve considered dropping it since it was just so odd (actually, given who the director is and my strong feelings on the ending of [C] this still isn’t out of the picture). Right now I’m going to give it a few more episodes and see if I get into the swing of it since I have absolutely no clue right now what it’s trying to do.

Like Kids on the Slope, Tsuritama has been licensed by Section 23 and is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Zetman: In a dark and edgy setting, Jin was created as an experiment, a “player” with superhuman and near demonic abilities, but rescued as a baby by a man he grew up to call Grandpa. His grandpa was killed by a rouge player and soon after Jin’s own powers activated and ever since he’s tried to not get close to others to keep them safe. Another case where we’re getting a severely compressed adaptation (the entire manga series in one cour, sounds like they’ve already had 20+ chapter timeskips) but it wasn’t the pacing or such that put me off the series, as a non-manga reader the first two episodes flowed alright even though you can see it was compressed, I’m just tired of seeing “dark and edgy” shows. I might give this a go again later if I get bored, although given how much I have to watch I don’t foresee that happening. So it’s a case where the show isn’t bad, just not for me.

Just like this post started, Zetman has been licensed by Viz Media and is being streamed by them as well.

And that's all from me! So, seven new shows to follow, two continuing, four or five I might try/follow anyway (since it seems like every season I end up following one show I don't even mention here), and a giant backlog for when I get bored. And, given that all the shows I watch air between Thursday afternoon and Sunday evening I do get a bit bored by Wednesday, or I could use that time to catch up on live action shows.... 

*yes Japan, boobs are squishy and bounce when you don’t wear a bra, moving on

Book Review: Lament

Way back in August Maggie Stiefvater was doing a signing not that far from me (the same store I saw Scott Westerfeld in actually) and, since it's generally considered polite to buy a copy of the author's book at the bookstore (and I really didn't like Shiver) I got a copy of Lament which is from a different series and that I had read years ago and remembered liking quite a bit. I was hesitant that I might not like it anymore since it had been four years and that plus my habit of putting books I own at the bottom of my to-read list (after all, my books don't have due dates/fines) it took me a really long time to get around to actually reading it. It seems like I waited the right amount of time though since the second book in this trilogy has been out for a while and the third one is being written so hopefully there won't be another year wide gap between reading those two.

Lament by Maggie Stiefvater

Summary: Deirde is an up-and-coming harp player who has a fairly normal life with a few quirks. Her life gets a bit quirker after a local music competition, strange boys appearing, clover blankets her front yard, her dog reacts to things only the two of them can see, so she's only half surprised to find out that faeries exist and they have taken a possibly deadly interest in her.

The Good: I really liked how Luke was upfront from the beginning that yes, there is something supernatural going on and is willing to try and see how much he can say to give Deirdre a fighting chance at surviving all the weirdness going on*. And I liked how James, Deirdre friend, also noticed that something odd was going on at how he was a bit special himself. I’m used to seeing a major supporting character, often a male love interest, become magical/powerful as the story goes on as a way to keep them in/so they can keep up but it’s unusual to see them like this from the beginning and I also loved the scenes when the two of them sat down and tried to figure out just what was going on.   

The Bad: There was a character death and a betrayal by another character which both caught me off guard, even though I kinda thought I remembered something like that happened, and while both of the events had a bit of foreshadowing they still came off too suddenly for me. Also rather curious how this is going to tie into other books in the trilogy since the story here was neatly wrapped up (and it sounds like the second book has little to do with these characters) yet the first words in the third book are apparently "Luke Dillion". Not a bad thing per say but something that always makes me nervous, I've been seeing a lot of odd sequels (admittedly in anime) lately that I'm extra wary of them these days.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see that yes, I still liked this book and still enjoyed it a lot more than I did with Shiver. Maybe it was because Shiver is primarily a love story and this one isn't, that could be it....

*he actually reminds me of Mark from Guardian of the Dead (by Karen Healey) in that respect and I really LOVE when characters admit something strange is going on, considering how obvious it is to the read it can be frustrating to read about genre blind protagonists all the time.