Gifuu Doudou!!: Kanetsugu to Keiji

If it weren't for two other particularly strong entries, Gifuu Doudou!!: Kanetsugu to Keiji—the double exclamation marks say it all, really—would probably be a strong contender for the most righteous show of the summer 2013 anime season. Gifuu Doudou!!'s premise is simple: Naoe Kanetsugu and Maeda Keiji, two ridiculously large and powerful "legitimate eccentrics," recount their exploits dispensing their brand of "RIGHTEOUSNESS" all over Sengoku-era Japan. It has the right attitude to make this sort of narrative funny and fun, clearly not taking itself very seriously with things like an over the top opening (entirely composed of recycled footage of course) named "SAMURAI ROCK" with ... lines like "come on come on come come on SAMURAI BABY" in English and heavily, heavily caricatured depictions of most of its characters. When watched with friends this can all make for a very righteous (and enjoyable) experience.

But don't get me wrong, this show is not very righteous (or good) in any traditional sense of the word. Gifuu Doudou!! is plagued by all sorts of problems, from its extremely low budget to its terrible writing and strawman characters. In the world of Gifuu Doudou!!, physical size roughly correlates to righteousness which roughly correlates to power.

Most characters are not very big.

Okay, so having our protagonists tower over all of the other characters in every scene can be fun if you are the sort of person who can look at that sort of absurdity with an appreciative attitude, but there is one aspect of this show that absolutely lacks righteousness: Gifuu Doudou!! hardly deserves to be called a piece of animation. Perhaps Studio DEEN decided that its money was better spent elsewhere, but this is one of the most plainly underfunded anime of recent years. Foreground characters rarely do much more than flap their mouths, background characters never even move, some episodes are almost entirely recycled footage from previous episodes, and most shots are slow pans across a still image or hilarious slow dramatic zoom-ins on some character's massive face. Most egregious, however, are the "action" scenes. Shirohata Bob, the director, generally does a good job of avoiding action whenever he can by just cutting to shots of bodies on the ground after the enemies have been dispatched (wouldn't want to have to draw too many frames). However, whenever he is forced to show actual combat, the result isn't pretty. Having the top of someone's body literally slide off of his stationary legs while an enormous quantity of horrible looking blood gushes out is bad enough, but even worse is when the director takes a still shot, overlays some diagonal lines, and literally just shakes it for about ten seconds in some sort of pathetic attempt to convey motion. I understand that you're working with approximately one frame every ten seconds, but please, Bob, please don't just shake the camera like that.

If you have friends available to take along for the ride and the right kind of appreciation for absurdly over the top samurai-ninja-tiger-monks (Maeda. Keiji.) I wholeheartedly recommend Gifuu Doudou!!. If not, you won't get very much out of this weekly dose of righteousness.