Spoiled orange juice below:
Okay, so I want to get in and out of this shit as quick as possible so let's just get the easy stuff out the way. The art is ok. It has some nice landscapes and shit that look like a slightly worse version of things you have probably seen before like The Girl who Lept Through Time. So the backgrounds and areas look good enough for a TV show. The characters are kind of muted and bland looking. The women's faces have a tendency to look like drugged out aliens with wigs on when they are at their worst, but usually,
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the art isn't that terrible. The voice acting is voice acting in which voices were projected onto the screen with sound through recording devices. That is to say, it was mostly average. I give props to the main character, the girl was emoting her heart out in this and I can tell even as a foreigner who only knows a smidgen of Japanese that she seemed more talented than the rest. The music like everything else was ok, it was the most average of average things about this show, with no real pitfalls or highs to speak of. Let's just get to what I really want to talk about here which is this shows story.
This show right here has one major problem with it. Ok so for people who don't know, this whole show is based around stopping one dude from killing himself during his high/secondary school years. Now the thing I kept asking myself when this was revealed was whether this kid was even worth saving or not and I just have to say it, friends, this kid wasn't worth even a quarter of the effort these other people put into saving him. He might not even be worth ten percent of the effort it took to keep his ass alive. I know that's a harsh thing to say and I would never say it about a real living person, but as a fictional character, this piece of shit was just not worth a single iota of the effort all these people put into saving him. As Bill Hick's would say "I don't think we're losing a cure for cancer with this guy." I don't even think we're losing a cure to foot fungus with this dude. Look if this kid was in a trolley track scenario I think most ethical systems would say it's a-ok to let the train ram this dude at full speed and save whoever or whatever is on the other set of tracks. Unless Yui Hirasawa is on the other track in which case send a cart down both lanes at full speed.
It's not even that this guy is terrible or more useless than average people, nor do I think people need to prove their worth to warrant being alive. I mean I'm clinging to existence and I don't feel particularly deserving or worthy of it especially at the moment. It's just the level of effort and sacrifices everyone else in the show has to commit to including ending a few perfectly happy marriages in order to go back and save this kid just seems mighty big. Especially when the kid still might want to be dead at the end of the day. I mean I know they would probably think all this effort is worth it anyway, but what if he just really wanted to die? Respect his wishes and leave the dude be. That is to say, don't pull out the necromancy books when I go. I'm where my ass want's to be, in hell for writing this review.
It all also hinges on the idea that he is worth saving because a high school romance went unfulfilled, you know those things that are notoriously flimsy and not stable once you reach adulthood and your priorities and perception of people change? This is for some reason worth more than being married to someone who seems like the nicest dude on the planet if this show is any indication. It's a really good responsible message to give to a mostly young audience that these romances have suicidal and cosmic significance. To be fair to this show though it's not like this fuck up is exactly new, I mean it's at least as old as Romeo and Juliet and that story also added political and cultural significance to the fleeting young romance at hand.
Harsh jokes aside let's get to the real problem here. If this kid had a real psychological problem and the show was about helping him overcome that and the problem was detrimental enough to explain why his personality was bland and uninteresting I could be more forgiving and this might even be one of my favorite shows. I like shows that take psychological problems and ailments seriously and if this show was a serious look at suicidal depression, I would say go ahead and save the poor bastard. Hell, I might even petition the universe to send an orange-haired vixen to come save me from whatever the hell is wrong with me, but the show isn't a serious look at any psychological problems, it's not serious about anything.
Another problem with this show related to that is that the reason the kid want's to kill himself is just dumb. I won't spoil it for people who want to know why, but this is also the kind of dumb that undermines people with actual suicidal depression and other mental ailments that might cause you to self-harm. This perception that people only ever have dumb reasons or that a short term "moody" feeling is the main reason why someone would kill themselves is the reason why people have the stupid reactions they do when people say they're having these problems. "Just get over it" sentiments that don't really reflect the reality of what is going on with a person that has these problems and is never good advice to anyone.
I can also tell that his lack of a cohesive and or interesting personality was a mistake and not part of his characterization and the reason I can discern this like a true ace detective, is that every other non-afflicted character is also not that interesting. I mean the most I can say about these people is they played a serviceable part in the story. Serviceable as in they didn't add any kind of interesting personality or depth to what was being told.
One of the biggest problems with this show is that even if you accept it's shallow framework and understanding of how this situation usually works out is in there attempts to bring him back they aren't really giving him any good reasons to want to be alive after all is said and done. You essentially get the "love conquers all" bullshit, but even that isn't really ironed out enough to be the clear outcome of this story.
It was nice that they tried to save this lad ok, but I just expect more from this kind of story and I think there needs to be more responsibility entailed in doing a story like this so that you're not further undermining mental illness. So in other words, great show literally, laterally and figuratively saved my life.
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May 13, 2019 Mixed Feelings
Spoiled orange juice below:
Okay, so I want to get in and out of this shit as quick as possible so let's just get the easy stuff out the way. The art is ok. It has some nice landscapes and shit that look like a slightly worse version of things you have probably seen before like The Girl who Lept Through Time. So the backgrounds and areas look good enough for a TV show. The characters are kind of muted and bland looking. The women's faces have a tendency to look like drugged out aliens with wigs on when they are at their worst, but usually, ...
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jan 20, 2019
Kaze Tachinu
(Anime)
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The Wind Rises is the second Miyazaki film I'll be reviewing and like the first film of his I reviewed My Neighbor Totoro I think this movie has a lot of the same things that made that one great. The reason I am coming back to the Miyazaki well so soon after my last review is I recently re-watched Schindler's List and in doing so I remembered that this film reminded me a lot of that one in some ways. They're both about the same war, about the same side in that war, they're both about real men who are caught up in the in
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the wars in a supporting role rather than a direct way. The differences start to show themselves when you examine the characters and the journey's they take, this movie is the inverse or Schindler's List in that sense. I think exploring these differences and just reviewing both movies at once in a comparative sense might be interesting and I like any excuse to erect massive walls of text. I want to be the Henry Darger of reviewing after all. So this isn't going to be a typical review of just one movie. I want to compare and contrast both films, I want to explore some ideas and themes both of them share and I want to do some defending of the characters, their general story arcs and the films in general as they both have a similar history of controversy. So let's start with Schindler's List.
This review will spoil everything from both films. Avert thine eyes if this concerneth you: So I wrote my first serious film review on another site about The Shining, which just so happens to be my favorite film, by my favorite director. I defended Kubrick from criticisms of the author of the book Stephen King. The film was adapted from a book by him of the the same name and I tried to generally make the case that the film was better than the novel. Now in this I'm going to be doing a 180 as I'm no longer defending my boy Q-brick, but attempting to defend another director against his accusations. Kubrick was friends with Steven Spielberg, but they were both critical about each others film's at certain points in their careers. Before Stanley died, he gave an offhand review of Schindler's List that is now considered canon opinion among deep thinkers as to what is "wrong" with that movie and his criticism essentially boils down to "The movie turns the Holocaust from tragedy to triumph." Spielberg spit his positive soul through the wire, instead of focusing on the human failure of the overall event in question he decided to view the Holocaust through the lens of Oskar Schindler and through him a positive story within the framework of that tragedy. In a more general sense and what I can see is some people's opinions here and on other sites like it, is that this movie is essentially the drama equivalent of "Transformers" or more accurate to Spielberg "Jaws" it's big budget schlock that uses cheap tactics to pull at your emotional heart strings. Well kids I can respect such a negative opinion about a critically acclaimed film concerning such a controversial subject in fact I admire the gumption and edginess to an extent. But as grandma Hegel once said and I'm paraphrasing here I think the courage of creation and positivity always trumps that of criticism and negativity in the end. We can only move forward by taking the first step and that is what I want to show with this review here. Why? *Shakes fist* Just read the damn review kid. Steven Spielberg is the person I associate with the word "director" in relation to film. I'm not saying this as a qualitative statement about his work in the positive. I think the reality of him being synonymous with film director is true for a lot of people within a certain age range and cultural reach. Since I am the synthesis of both hipsters and anti-hipsters I can more than anyone think his work is great, while also thinking he is an overrated hack. Despite people thinking of him as generic, even himself, people often describe certain shots and film techniques as "Spielbergian." This seems inherently contradictory to me as we often don't do this with people who have no creative input or impact on the media they're most associated with. He has a specific vision and style and we need to come to term's with the fact here that this entails at least a little bit that he has some amount of talent, beyond just pulling at heart strings and being sentimental. Unlike a lot of modern directors, his scenes actually last more than the average of a minute and thirty seconds, he is willing to let his scenes, persist and feel real in that way. Most directors won't do this because they're afraid your attention will get lost if they aren't moving from one scene to the next at a rapid pace. His movies also have at least a few layers more of depth than is usual for a blockbuster film and scripts and general flow of the stories of his films are well constructed in explaining specific details and having characters with defined arcs and motivations. You might think of this as a low bar, but compare him to directors like Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay who are also heavily associated with "blockbuster" films, the low quality of their writing and characters becomes even more apparent than it usually would with these when compared to Spielberg's. At the very least you can say his films have good structure to them in this way if you want concede they have a smidgen of depth. On the flipside. While I think it was well directed, I absolutely detest the film Saving Private Ryan for it's overall message. He also has a history of supporting the apartheid state of Israel and well that isn't cool. On a personal level I don't know how great of a person he is one way or the other, but when it comes to politics it seems like we disagree quite a bit. So in praising this film I'm more praising "it" for its own merit and the story of Oskar Schindler. Sometimes a nuancer has to nuance and this is one of those times. So Schindler's List is the 1993 film by aforementioned director Steven Spielberg. It take's place before, during and slightly after World War 2 in Germany. Oskar Schindler is a businessman who see's himself as apolitical, IE he has no stake in what is going in the world around him aside from the fact that he want's to make money. Given his apathetic selfishness and want to make money he starts hiring Jew's almost exclusively as they're the cheapest employees as they can't find work anywhere else. So he employs them at his general goods factory, The start of the movie correlates somewhat closely to the start of Jewish people's worsening place in German society. Beginning with Glasnost and other events we see the scene's of the movie parallel with those that caused the eventual Holocaust. Schindler take's a journey from the uncaring apolitical businessman he is at the start to someone who reluctantly becomes a hero as the movie goes on and as he sees the plight of the Jewish workers he hired and their worsening conditions in society. Early on in the Film Schindler sees a young girl among the Jewish population, each time she is shown it represents a turning point in his place in the story. The Movie is in black and white but the girl stands out because her coat is one the colored item in the movie and it's a deep red for maximum effect. I think we can note her importance as even though she isn't a "character" in the film as in she has lines or is given a scene that explicitly explains her existence, she is the one on the movies posters and box art. The last turning point for the movie and what I would say is one of the best scenes in film history is when Oskar notices a pile of bodies and the girl's is among them at the top for all to see. Oskar says no words in the scene but you can see with the way the film is directed and with the way Liam Neeson who play's Oskar here that this is the moment where all his blinders about reality come off and he realizes the awful truth about himself and his society. This is the moment where from here on out he stops being the reluctant hero of the story and becomes the willing hero of the story. He tries to improve the lives of Jews around him and he goes into bankruptcy trying to save the Jews that are employed under him. He does all this while under the watchful eye of a particularly vicious Nazi played by Ray Fiennes. Cue an ending that still brings me to tears every time I see it and dats the film. The filming of the movie is a rare masterwork in blockbuster cinema, despite what some snobs will tell you. There a lot of scenes where Oskar's inner thoughts and feelings are expressed without any words. There is a scene at the start of the movie where Oskar is looking out of a big window in his office overlooking the factory. It's a typical setup for a building of it's type but the way it's filmed and the way Oskar is looking down on his workers, you can almost see the way Oskar views society as a whole through this one scene he is joyously viewing his workers and even though everyone around him seems miserable at this point he is still high on the idea that he will be a successful businessman and everything is going according to plan. There are many scenes in the film like this where the set design, lighting, general directing and the cinematography manage to convey as much of the the emotion and the inner thoughts of the characters as much as the acting does in an average film. Just to make sure that I firmly dig the hole against myself when it comes to the Internets deepest of thinkers and to put even more unnecessary comparisons in the gumbo that is this review, I would like to defend movies in this review like It's a Wonderful Life and Ikiru from the idea that they're "hokey" or overly sentimental in the execution of their drama. I want to do this not just to indulge myself as always, but also to relate their main characters to Oskar Schindler. In both cases you have a standard human male specimen with no particular want of being a hero. In fact both of them have somewhat selfish dreams and desires they keep wanting to fulfill rather than live the life they were given. In other word's they aren't "good" people in the sense that they aren't natural born heroes, with an automatic penchant to do what is good and best for the people around them. As main characters they constantly have to keep giving up their dreams and desires or in the case of Ikiru get sidelined into other people's problems getting in the way of their happiness. It is only through struggle, their characters going through a well defined arc and them realizing thing's about themselves through the lens of their bad behavior and selfish society that they come to realize they could still do something that counts with the life they have. I wouldn't defend these films, as being deep psychological and philosophical meditations, cinematic realism or profound in some grander sense. Well I mean Frank Capra the director of It's a Wonderful Life was a brilliant propagandist, whose film Lost Horizon was the equivalent of the Grapes of Wraith in it's brilliance of covertly showing the benefit's of a non-capitalist society, some of those themes I suspect were also inserted into IAWL. I mean listen to George Bailey's speech to Mr Potter and think about banks today and then judge for your self. While you do that, pay close attention to how Frank positions the shot so that George's Father and the building and loan sign is constantly in frame with George as if he is invoking the spirit of the building and loan and his recently deceased father so he has the right words to tell porky to suck a dick. Ikiru was actually adapted from my favorite existential Novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy, a book about a man who slowly dies from something absurdly trivial and he has just enough time to realize he wasted his life on things even more trivial than what caused his death. So It's not like the movies have no merit's or deeper themes, but put that stuff aside for a second. Even if they didn't have any other merits, I will defend them all day and every day for being film's whose "happy endings" and inspirational feelings are earned and come from a real place of struggle and toil from the main characters. George Bailey has to give up his dreams several times throughout IAWL, he has to get sidelined by his own younger brother and you feel his resentment and stress through life as a he slowly settles into a role he never wanted to have as the town's local S&L manager and consummate father figure, in a town he never liked to begin with. this is a relatable problem for people even if they didn't take George's particular route through these problems. We often have dreams we cant fulfill or that we have to keep putting aside for more practical concerns. Did you pick the major you really wanted in college or did you pick the one that got you some of that cheddar? Do you pick jobs for personal happiness and general fulfillment or did you again go for that cheddar? Did you get the significant other you really wanted or did monetary concerns, distance and time constraints get in the way of your budding romance? Now imagine making those hard life decisions, but on behalf of other people's happiness your whole life and you enter the struggles of one George Bailey... I like George Bailey. In Ikiru Kanji has to come to grips with the fact that his life of careerism in an endless bureaucracy and seeking basic pleasures he was told to want by others masked his inner want to do something meaningful with his life. He only realized this when it was too late, but the small amount of happiness he gets at the end of the film by finally doing something he wanted which was to help others, feels really earned and you feel every bit of the journey he takes in the movie as it's happening up to that point. Like these other unlikely heroes everything about Schindler's story is built up and earned. He is a reluctant hero, he has his own dreams and wants to fulfill those at the expense of those around him, he doesn't see himself as a fundamentally good or bad, he sees himself as a young business man who just wants to make money. He even hires the Jews at the start of the film because he can exploit them for less money than German workers. It is only through him going on a journey of learning about the Jews around him and their worsening state in his own society that he comes to sympathize with them and then slowly by circumstance he becomes a reluctant hero like George and Kanji. He has to get over his own selfish desires, he has to see his society for what it is and he has to see the sad reality of the Jews he employs for himself and he slowly but surely commits everything he has to a cause that is not his own and ultimately will not benefit him the least bit, but by the end of the story he is a real hero. Unlike those two though, this was about a real-life man that lived this arc making it all the more meaningful that it happened. We can say it's hokey and emotionally easy to pull at heartstrings like this, that Spielberg just took the cheapest route possible in trying to get you to care but if it was really that easy why don't I see more on-screen heroes with as well developed and earned triumph as these characters? if it's so easy to make people care about dramatic tragedy in this way why aren't there a ton of films like this? I had to pick two very specific examples to relate to this film and I didn't pick them randomly, they were the only ones that fit the comparison. It seems more rare to me than typical and the typical is usually the antithesis of the inspirational and yet all three of these films have been described that way. It takes exceptional means and acts to be inspirational and despite and maybe even because of his earlier short comings Oskar was that. I think what sets these characters apart from other heroes is there is an inherent realism and relatability to their earlier selfish and myopically self absorbed stages. I actually think a lot of modern cinema is more sentimental and hokey in that the "heroic" main characters have less flaws, are less likely to have overtly selfish desires and they often give main characters and even side ones unearned senses of accomplishment and happiness at the end of a film to a point of absurdity. Watch 95% of most comedy films that come out in a given year and see how long and drawn out ending's get with their want for you to leave with happy reassuring feelings. I think the worst example of this was the ending of the 2016 film WHY HIM? I mean every fucking character had to have layer upon layer of "resolution" in the end and nothing really built up to this or made you feel like their accomplishment in this regard was earned. It had more starts and stops than the end of Return of The King and that movie needed the long ending that is often memed about because it was abridging a large story and they wanted to make sure they didn't leave any obvious questions unanswered. In this way there is more realism and more interesting qualities to an Oskar Schindler than most people give credit for. If Steven Spielberg merely wanted to pander to you with this character, it would be non-stop sappiness with Oscar flying through life without much struggles and then he would come save the day at the right time. Why bother having any negatives to a character if you just want to pull on peoples heart strings for a short term gain? Well maybe he did that because he wasn't trying to pull on heartstrings, he was trying to get you to relate to the character on a more personal level and hopefully through both his faults and his positives come to see yourself in the character of Oskar. I don't really know where else to say this, but I think it's something that needs to be said in relation to things said above and more importantly things that will come below. I'm not trying to fetishize the idea of "struggle" at any point in this review. What I'm trying to do is bring attention to the fact that we feel inspired by people that actually earn something in some way and overcome obstacles. If you mix this with seeming selflessness and a few other things, than the struggle can come to mean something more important than itself, but I think we should see it as a stepping stone and not the be all and end all of what we want out of life. I'll also try to anticipate another abstract point of contention here and say that my emphasis on earning something, doesn't mean we should preclude people with an inability to have these heroic arcs for whatever reason from consideration. It's just that as a story convention it is a nice stand in for the real hardships we face in life and I can't really think of any words other than "earn" that codify what means to deserve something in a broader sense. All this is to say I don't believe in the meme western idea of Karma or that life should be fair to those who do something good in some kind of weird felicific calculus. In fact I think very much the opposite. This paragraph wont matter to all but less than 1% of people, but I try to anticipate potential areas of disagreement when I can. I tried to defend Schindler's List up above, but one obvious criticism that I will levy at it myself is that, it's rather easy to sympathize with Oskar Schindler once the film is over. You can imagine that you would be a hero like him and do the same things he did in helping the Jew's. You would be the protector of the under dog's of society. Well yes it feel's good to imagine we would all be Oskar Schindler's in the end but the reality is the majority of people are people that would be more like Oskar at the start of the film, self absorbed, baldly selfish, apathetic or unaware to negative the circumstances of those around them and worse than that they would commonly demonize those on a lower economic or societal scale to ensure themselves that their place in life is earned and deserved whereas those "other" people they're poor or disenfranchised because of things they did themselves and not because of mitigating circumstances. We externalize our own faults with excuses, explanations and self assurances, but we see the faults of others as inherent to their personality, their bad circumstances as rightfully earned. Most of this is done unintentionally out of self interest, I doubt most people are mustache twirlers that pride themselves on the ill-treatment of others, even the most overtly bigoted and narcissistic people like to pride themselves that they're more fair and charitable than may seem at first glance. What I'm trying to say with all this is, it's easy to think you'd be the hero of your own historical story, but chances are, most of us would not be. There is a reason Oskar's story is exceptional and that's because it is a very hard life to live to be selfless, to do something great for a people who aren't your own and to see their suffering as your suffering. What further complicates the matter is that the circumstances that led Oskar to become a hero, can also turn people intending to do good into villains. So what if a film was made where a person took that journey instead? So now we get back to the other film I'm reviewing The Wind Rises. So before we get to that comparison. Lets get the obvious and tedious "review" part of the review out of the way. The animation in the film typical of Ghibli stuff is excellent. There are some scenes that look like paintings, especially the scenes where the main characters future wife is painting. There is the same attention to environmental detail and scenery that there is in all of Miyazaki's stuff. I really like the pastelish colors used for a lot of this film too. I think a directors typical inclination when making a story like this with animation would be to just make it look real, but Jiro as a character in this film seems to assign an almost dream-like quality to flight and the animation and the coloring represents that in some scenes. It's intentionally made to look less real in part to more accurately depict the mindset of the main character. The film is about flight and the wonders of flight and in that sense it doesn't disappoint it uses animation to uniquely show the wonders and pitfalls of flying in a way only this medium could. The film has a lot of the same slow burn build up and muted emotions I described in my Totoro review. There is a lot of realism to the story of Jiro's life and the way it's told even though a lot of it is taken whole cloth from some other story. The acting is good and Jiro is played by the creator/director of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show that I have shoehorned into almost all of my reviews, because like Gendo I cant let go of a past love. While I jest there, I see some symbolism in choosing this man as an actor and the character of Gendo in that he chased his dream at the expense of others, to the point he even excluded his own son. You'll see that there is some symmetry with this and the character of Jiro, even though admittedly it might be unintentional. That's the pesky thing about interpretations, we can't be certain about any of it short of hearing god-man Miyazaki himself confirming it and even then we might have or want to throw out even that opinion. Look, fuck you just read the review kids I'm trying my best. The Wind Rises is about Jiro Horikoshi it starts by showing him dreaming about being a pilot as a kid and then in a dream he is convinced by a famous aircraft designer to pursue that instead. So he does and eventually he becomes an aircraft designer for the Japanese Imperial Army. He attempts to build a new design with Japan's relatively old technology and it fails. So he is sent to Germany with a friend to try and learn from their designers and new technology. On his trip there he notices the ill-treatment of Jews and has another dream reassuring him that his "dream" of planes is good despite humanities ill use of them. While he is pursuing his dream to become an aircraft designer all throughout the story he keeps by chance running into a woman named Naoko Satomi. First during a massive earthquake in which he helps save her maid and then later on when he goes on vacation after one of his designs isn't picked up in favor of another. She is a painter and like Jiro a bit of an unrealistic dreamer. They slowly fall in love and in typical Miyazaki fashion it's almost perfectly paced and built up. The relationship feels real and manages to show that Jiro has more dimensions to his character than just the typical obsessive Japanese careerist that is a common trope in anime and Japanese media more broadly. Unfortunately their romance is doomed almost as quickly as it starts because she has tuberculosis. Despite this they get married and he remains by her side as she slowly dies from the disease. Similar to the way in which I described the general realism of emotions in Miyazaki film's in my aforementioned Totoro review, I think there is also a realism to the moral ambiguity of people in this film. Jiro isn't presented as some monster even though he is arguably doing monstrous things in the pursuit of a selfish dream. Unlike Oskar he starts out and stays a good person when it comes to common social relations and the people around him. He seems like a genuinely great guy if the Miyazaki film is close to reality. Actually I learned that a lot of the elements of his personal life were taken from an unrelated novel called The Wind Has Risen, and Miyazaki inserted them into his biography. For the sake of argument I'll just assume it all fit's. The movie has multiple layers though, past his surface relationships with people whenever he is given the chance to do something very heroic regarding his career and the moral choices it gives him, instead of veering in a heroic direction he almost always reassures himself he is on the right path with his plane designs anyway. Jiro is in the same professional position as Oskar and his life affords him the same chances of being a hero in his own narrative. On an individual level, he see's the fanaticism of his own government when they send the Japanese secret police against him. He witnesses the ill-treatment of Jews and the general nature of the Japanese governments Nazi allies. Despite all this he continues to work on planes. Even though everything about the situation point's to the fact that he is just adding to the bloodshed and carnage he wishes to ignore. This self delusion almost always leads to him doing more and more for a military that seems counter to his own dreams and beliefs in "the majesty of flight." It's hard to say Jiro is a bad person, despite his actions indirectly leading to the loss of a lot of people. The Japanese themselves tend to view people like Albert Einstein in a similarly complicated light, as in there are good and bad aspects to the man himself, but his discoveries and work with first the German and then US militaries may have led to their island getting nuked twice. Despite him not having much to do with the actual work on the bombs, or at least not as much as even more morally complicated people like Robert J. Oppenheimer. I don't think any of these three men are what we would call bad people on a surface level, but their actions directly and indirectly and their inability to add a moral dimension to any of the work they were doing is a violent transgression none the less. I think it would be a fair criticism of this review to say that Miyazaki himself has said he intended Jiro to be seen as the heroic artist type. In interviews he notes the complications about the work the man was doing and the bad consequences they lead to but he is generally positive about Jiro himself. I can even see that given Miyazaki's now somewhat dismal view of the current state of Anime that he might even see a little of the bad of Jiro in a self reflective way. As in he created something for what he saw as good reasons at the time, but it was all leading into a broader industry he didn't really care to develop. I concede though that his intentions might not be to have a protagonist take an inverse journey to someone like Oskar Schindler, a problem I have noticed with people is they take intentions to be what is actually shown. Sometimes an artist or anyone making some kind of statement can intend for something to be the case, but the reality of their statement show's something else entirely or in this case can be more open to other interpretations. One of the ways in which this film is not an inverse of Oskar's journey is that Jiro generally doesn't have an "arc" after a certain point his development reaches a plateau early on and he is generally the same hardworking happy go lucky guy all throughout. In a way, it almost feels like an intentional parody of the common leading character in this kind of anime story given the subject matter, but I think you can surmise that given the rest of the review here. Unlike Oskar who I had to reach deep in the wells of film history to find comparative characters a lot of characters are like Jiro in anime and broader film. In a way his commonality makes his character a very frightening one for me. If his happy go lucky nature is masking this terrible side to his life what are other happy can-do protagonists hiding... I've got my eye on you Yui! In the same way that I think it's very easy to sympathize with Oskar it's also very easy to condemn someone like Jiro. The reality is though, that I think again, more people would live through Jiro's arc than Oskar's if given the same choices, because taking the path of moral least resistance and following your desires at the expense of others is always easy to do and justify. A lot of people don't even have the guts to state their political stances publicly and the most they have to lose from this is might make their social life a little bit harder. Imagine if they had to make or acknowledge a moral facet of their life that might cost them something personally? Most people would rather not even acknowledge these kind of questions than even engage in them in the first place. Jiro went on to live a long happy life in Japan with a pretty good career after the war. Oskar Schindler was shunned by his fellow German's who knew him and he was never able to have a successful business again. He tried moving around the world and he would have died penniless had the Jewish people he saved not taken him in and financially supported him. Those Jewish people were in Israel which I acknowledge it's citizens can be good people doing good things, but the states military actions and treatment of the Palestinians are beyond evil. If you asked Oskar to relive the same life, he might have wanted to live Jiro's lack of an arc in hindsight as well. It's not easy to do the right thing when everything in life incentivizes you to do the wrong thing. Is there a point to all this? Am I just moral navel-gazing for the sake of it? Probably. Truth be told I'm not exactly sure what the point of this review is. Luckily for me I know no one will read it, so I'm free to write my unabashed incoherent opinions about topics no one cares about in complete freedom and isolation. These are dispatches from the last working radio signal on earth and I'm just sending signals out to hear my voice, because I'm not hearing anyone else's in the hazy fog. Like a Ghibli film, I just want to take a look at a persons life and see what it reflects back on me. Well the mirror must be pretty dirty because what I see looks terrible, but then I realized that is just my face. I'm a cynic at heart and I know nothing convinces a person that doing the right thing is good unless you come clean about your own inadequacies first and you admit that the seeming negative universals you're invoking are also uncomfortably true about your self... Let me help you brace for impact here, the real critic hours are about to commence, I'm about to get dead ass serious and honest. It may not have come across enough in my Monthly Girls Nozaki Kun review, but I really don't like most people in an abstract sense. I don't think this is a unique trait I have either, I think it's very easy for people to fall into the habit of thinking most people aren't that good and you might as well look out for yourself in opposition to others. Like Jiro you might even come up with delusional "positive" reasons for why this needs to be the case. My dreams and desires are worth more than your life. There is always a good excuse to do the wrong thing. That feeling and those excuses have beat on me to the point that my personality has become a fortress where I let no one in and it's hard for me to care about people on an individual level let alone an abstract one. My own inherent negative thinking erases the need for anyone else and it's very easy to live this way. I have no friends and I'm not sure I can have any at this point. I don't feel whatever "magical feeling" other people do in needing to be around others. I'm not saying this in an edgy or emotional way, I mean it literally I haven't talked to anyone outside my family on a regular basis in eight years or more. I'm 32, I have no job, no friends, I'm not close to any of my extended family, I'm ugly, I'm fat, I have no positive prospects for the future. I'm George Costanza without the charm. In other words I'm a loser by most peoples definition and if admitting all that isn't enough to curtail peoples ideas that I said the preceding things to sound cool I'm not sure what could possibly dissuade them. There aren't many points in your life when you actually get to make hard ethical decisions, yes we could all be doing more in small ways, but the juicy choices that make dramas and tragedies emotionally interesting don't come very often. Before I was in my current state of isolation, I was a right-leaning libertarian. I had a group of friends who were like minded and I watched as they slowly went from a somewhat normal group of people into a cult of white nationalist identitarians. Well as normal as a group of libertarians can ever be. I had some terrible beliefs in regards to those political opinions and I came to have worse as you will soon find out. This happened around the mid to late 00's. It was like a prelude of what happened to our society currently but on a smaller scale. I would like to say in this moment I tried desperately to change them and fought against them but at the precise time when I should have made a difficult ethical decision, when I could have went the Schindler route, I veered hard towards Jiro. I caved to peer pressure and made excuses for why they were the way they were now. On some level you don't want to believe people you knew could turn out this way, but I knew this was reality and instead of doing something about it I flinched at the moment of truth. I valued the friendship of racists over my own personal morality. I wanted to stay friends with them enough that I tried to believe what they did. I don't know what specifically I could have done in this situation, but I always regretted being a bystander at best in my own in my own life during this ordeal and a willing accomplice to overt racism and sexism. We had a falling out eventually and I would like to say it was due to their beliefs but the reality was it was more personal reasons than anything. This falling out was a blessing in disguise as I can now write to you that I wrong at the time. It's made only worse when some of these former friends are now speakers and public advocates for these terrible positions and I had to wake up and hear one of them failing to debate Destiny while writing this. I was never a Schindler in life, I was more of a Jiro than most people can imagine in relevant situations like this and I've lived and learned enough to regret those previous aspects of myself and my former life. I hope other people can do the same before things get worse. The reality is I'm reviewing 2 movies about two very different states from two very different perspectives. I'm putting this review up on one site that is about rating Japanese cartoon media in English. I've made allusions to two Jewish directors, two Japanese directors, Irish Liam Neeson, A book written by a Russian author, a movie made by an Italian American director and later I'll talk about several POC rappers. I'm eating Mexican food as I write this sentence and I have my Duolingo set to study French later and after that of course some Nihongo. This is the reality of the multicultural world we inhabit today and we all engage in and enjoy media and inventions from many cultures around the globe. This isn't going away and it's not going to stop by people "voluntarily" leaving no matter what the fascist fantasy you have concocted in your brain tells you. I know from personal experience that you can hold racist beliefs and still believe in a multicultural world to the extent that it comes off as a "meritocracy" but the reality is most of us are undeserving participants in a world that was largely gifted to us from previous generations and we don't "merit" special treatment or consideration anymore than anyone else. We owe everything to a large backlog of historical circumstances and traded ideas and objects that come from every part of the globe, no one race or people is more deserving than others in regards to the advancement of humanity as a whole. The more you study history the more you see that despite regional and ethnic differences we advanced piecemeal together. Which is why we can see broad similarities and advancements happening at certain times. The "Axial" age being a key example of this. I'm talking about two movies that are about nationalistic governments, whose international ambitions led the whole world collectively into a massive war, for better or worse we need each other and we rely on other nations and even when we have indulged in myopic fantasies about self sufficiency in the past these fantasies quickly turned towards world conquests precisely because we cant live in isolation without other nations and peoples. We have only stepped one foot into national fantasies during this presidency and we're already seeing that the rest of the world even supposed members of a collective "white Christian west" don't seem to share the love for ourselves American whites seem to feel a masturbatory ingratiation in. The world is too interconnected economically, politically and socially and that only increases more and more each day. The problems we face are also too large for one country or one people to handle. The whole world is going to have to deal with diminishing returns on oil and our dependence on it, nuclear nonproliferation, climate change and eventually when we get our shit together do positive things like share resources responsibly, cure diseases and explore other planets. The idea that we can turn back time and rely on nationalism, single "races" and our ethnicities to guide the way is over. You can't put your brain asleep in sweet delusions and wish the problems of the world away, your thousand year Reich, will last as long as the last one did and it was a helluva lot less than a thousand years. Another way to put all this is, "you’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose!" You can't beat old Woodie's wisdom and a loser like me knows'em when he sees'em. I'm saying all this to say I know more than anyone how hard it is to deal with other people, to the point that I would rather not deal with them at all anymore. I'm certain this is not a good way to live your life though and as much as it affects me negatively, I also feel like I'm not doing enough personally to help change anything for the better in a broader sense, nor have I done enough in that past as should have been made clear. This review is more of a meditation on my own inadequacies than a condemnation of other people. But considering others for a second, dehumanization of other groups of people happens on a daily basis, these aren't abstract moral questions bad things happen to other people every day for financial, racial, sexual, political and sometimes even just arbitrary reasons. I can't ask other people to do what I can't even do yet myself which is engage in the world and actively try to stop this from happening, but I can ask that they consider that maybe morally you're closer to a Jiro than Oskar and you might want to change that, for maybe just the duration of this review. Maybe if you get to that critical moment in your life, you can do more to change things for the positive. If I got you to read this far, I guess I accomplished something with my otherwise wasted life on Nihon cartoons, video games, and blockbuster films, but probably not. It would be a miracle in of itself if you made it this far into this review. I might be a bit more self conscious if I thought anyone would read this far. Both luckily and sadly for me you probably wont. I often say if you want to hide evidence of a crime or some classified information, some beta keys to Half-Life 3, put them dead center into the middle of one of my reviews and no one will ever find it. The good news is folks, if you made it this far, you got past the hump. We only have one last thing to do, which is to wrap this fucker up. I have noticed in recent years that a lot of pop music no longer aims to be just be catchy jingles. Trying times call for trying music and pop singer's feel compelled to infuse importance in their music. Not by having a concrete political or economic message... No that would be too risky to their wallet's and I mean that is the worst thing ever for a person with no personality who is aiming for universal appeal. Not by making smarter more densely complicated music either lyrically or musically. Instead what they aim to do is be nebulously "inspirational." Well I'm not a motherfucking firework, this boy isn't on fire and I'm definitely not all about that bass. You see it's my belief that you can't "aim" for inspiration with something. So all of this comes off sounding artificial and manufactured. Probably because it is artificial and manufactured, but even if it wasn't my contention is that "trying" to be inspiring never works even for the most independent and subterranean of artists, because inspiration is a latent quality of something or a byproduct of it. It's not something you can make happen it's something that grows naturally out of a thing or event in real life or in art. I think it's easy to snipe at pop artists like this and belittle their small attempts to make the world a better place with a bland positive message, that at the end of the day, even if I don't care for them they aren't hurting anything. So let me spike the punch bowl a bit by elaborating on what I mean with a more complicated artist that I actually like and I'm assuming probably has more "cred" here with the kid's today with the hair and the clothes. So Kendrick Lamar and his song "Alright." I really like dat boy Kendrick and upon initially hearing this song on TPAB I was inclined to think it was one of the best tracks on the album. The more I listened to it though the more it started to bother me for one reason and one reason alone. That reason was the ostensible reason for this whole review, only I was on Kubrick's side on this one initially. You see I started to think, well the truth is POC's in America aren't gonna be "Alright," no matter how enthusiastically and emphatically Pharrell say's it. The reality is historically and currently you are at a major disadvantage in a lot of ways in America if you happen to be the wrong color. Cop's target where you live, while not taking crimes done against you seriously, drug laws disproportionately target you so we can keep modern-day slavery enacted with private prisons, your vote is disenfranchised, your less likely to get call backs on jobs, a hole is dug for you the minute you're born and it isn't made any easier to get out as you get older, in fact it gets worse and worse. There are of course exceptions to every rule and some people flourish despite negative circumstances, but we need to recognize the unexceptional nature of pointing to exceptions in matters such as this. So my initial reaction to my earlier initial reaction to a "positive" song like Alright is one of disgust, it seems to be delusional merriment almost to a point of absurdity about complex issues facing a group of people who are severely at a disadvantage... I think this is a valid way of looking at a song like this and Schindler's List, the positivity flies in the face of logical sense and reality and yet... The thing is the group in consideration already knows how bad thing's are and no amount of telling them it over and over again is going to change that. Belaboring the point and listing out wrong things happening while good at pinpointing a problem isn't exactly necessary for the group to know, the reality of these things are already intrinsic to their material existence. Paul Robeson didn't start singing the blues when he got blacklisted, he sang even happier songs than he did before. Abrasive positivty is sometimes the real rational response beyond your initial negative reaction towards something. I think it's very easy to fall to cynicism and fall prey to the feeling that things are overwhelming, you should know by now I personally know this to an extreme myself. The forces arrayed against progress are large and powerful beyond our individual comprehension. Everything about struggle against some of these thing's seem futile and yet, people endure despite this. Inspiration comes from real struggle and suffering, I can't say for sure what all the ingredients are to inspiration but I know what it is and I know what it isn't and this is one of those ingredients. Using struggle to turn tragedy to triumph is one of the only ways I think we can cope with the immense failures that we nor any one single person can really control. We need an inspirational fleeting hope against the immense ineptitude of those who are supposedly representing us and mass faceless evil. The racism of our current system and the white supremacy that lead to the holocaust were caused by similar underlying mental threads of general dehumanization. One of the only ways of humanizing yourself in the mirror of racism is to know you can face your oppressors on an equal footing despite the immense odds against you. That's why I see value in "Alright" and I see value in Schindler's List beyond their surface level hopeful narratives. The human failure inherent in the thing's that "inspired" this art was indeed just that, a human failure as Kubrick stated, but the negative response to it was also a human response. The want to overcome these thing's and see a better society also is. So Jiro put that damn stencil down, Sounwave go ahead and turn that shit up, put those roses on Oskar's grave and rejoice in the fact that life does give you options and you can make a difference if you just fucking want to.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jan 19, 2019
Shingeki no Kyojin
(Anime)
add
Mixed Feelings
Possibly giant sized spoils below:
This is going to be similar to my shits about Monster, in that there are a lot of things I like and can praise about this show, but it has a few big problems with it that I think take the title of greatness away from it for me. Most of my review will be focusing on those negatives and I won't be doing a play by play on it or talking about the show at great length so much as I'll be talking about a general problem with it that drags it down a bit as a whole. A lot ... of what I don't like about this show is things that aren't actually in it but will be in it if it follows the course of the manga and has a similar storyline resolution to its various starts and stops at that. Just keep that in mind while reading this. Let's talk about what is good first. As I alluded to in my Kantei review this anime is basically a "medieval/fantasy" version of Neon Genesis Evangelion, they both have the exact same situation happening but with a different backdrop. They're both about a scenario where humanity has to eek out its existence on the margins while giant creatures from an unknown source are attacking them. Stopping these creatures and making society prepared for their attacks has become the sole reason human society still functions to the extent that it still does in both anime. I think this premise and the mystery around the Titan's is the shows greatest strength and a strong initial bedrock of intrigue and easy drama. I also think that like Evangelion, Titan takes this situation seriously and tries to show how society would really function under these harsh conditions and its world building to that effect is one of it's best accomplishments. Based of this I really wanted to like this show as the world is so interesting and yet for reasons, I'll state throughout the review it never really uses this great initial starting premise for anything interesting we can't already imagine the minute we get told this setup. This is going to seem like a really weird statement if you go on to read the rest of this review, but I don't hate this show. In fact a lot of what I don't like about the story hasn't even happened yet in the anime, it's the manga and extended canon. I can kind of passively enjoy this show at times and there are a lot of small elements of it that won't be mentioned here that I like. The main point of this little paragraph is that this isn't a show like K-on or Kill Me Baby for me that I find physically painful to watch. It's overall concept rather than what is happening on the surface level is what I don't like about this story. Although there are some things like the characters and the action that I'm not too fond of on the surface level either. Just keep this in mind because I don't want to exaggerate how bad I find the actual show. It's not a great story in my opinion but if you want a general recommendation for some action schlock with some cool concepts here and there, it can work on that very limited level of entertainment. So let's talk about the medium shiz. The show looks like most action/fantasy shows of a more serious nature and it doesn't ever look particularly great or bad. Its visuals are functional and work to the extent that they get the story across like an old ass car taking me from one point to another. I found the music a little below average and forgettable to the extent that it existed. I can say the same for the voice acting, I just didn't care about any of this shit. This shows general aesthetics and art direction is kind of like living in a house that has just enough furniture for life to function, but not be too comfortable or enjoyable. What I mean to say by that to be absolutely clear is that when I compare this to other shows like it, I don't get a sense of style, extra polish or anything special in its art. In fact, the most impressive thing about it is how this show manages to make fights between massive flesh golems seem understated and bland. I found the action, in particular, underwhelming and even though they tried their hardest to make you feel this David and Goliath struggle with the way the fights work, I found my self less and less interested with every battle that happened. I think the show wanted you to feel a culmination of awesomeness when the two titans finally fought, but like with every other aspect of the action, I just ain't give a shit. I think a problem with the show is we are constantly told how destructive Titans are, but we aren't ever given a real sense of the scale of this threat in a way that seems tangible, a lot of their destruction is done off screen and what we are shown isn't that impressive. There also seems to be this weird duality in the Titans movements, either they're running at high speed or they are standing stationary and moving their limbs slowly. If this was a real life movie I might be able to excuse this lack of variety in their movement, but as an animated show, I expect a lot more out of these fights than what we get. I want to see Godzilla level destruction to this society or at least some exciting shit happening. To the shows credit and this where we bottom out with the slight positives, there weren't any major miss steps or anything that looked terrible. Like I said before everything was functional in the show. As a side note and since I mentioned real-life movies when I think of the Titans running and the overused shot used to convey this it always reminds me of the shot used Ad nauseam of the "trolls" running in Trolls 2. Only that shot grows to be funnier and funnier the more it lazily used in that film and the only thing that grows with Titan's overused animations is my sense of utter displeasure. I wanna talk a little bit about the nature of plot holes and while it might seem like they're the bread and butter of a snide critic of media like myself, the reality is I personally don't think they're that important except in specific cases involving a show or stories main plot. I have an example I always like to use to illustrate this point involving the Harry Potter series, which I'm using for specific reasons that will be made clear later. So what if Harry and the gang are laughing with Ron's twin brothers and they offhandedly mention that time traveling vampires exist in this fictional universe? Well, these might be real creatures in the Potterverse, but this also might be a joke. Now a pedantic critic might jump on this immediately and start talking about how the concept of time traveling vampires would give us a bunch of unanswered questions about this universe and their application to it. As many critics of Harry Potter actually did with the concept of Time Turners as a plot device. I, however, would not take major issue with these things because the possibility of small plot holes being opened up by side things that don't matter to the core thrust of a stories general arc isn't that concerning to me. At the same time I don't think it's a sign of a great writer or teller of a story to start adding over complications to the narrative that might cause potential plot holes, but the point is if the overall story is otherwise good I can forgive some small mistakes made on the road to a good payoff. What would be concerning to me is if at the end of the fourth book JK lolling revealed that Voldemort is, in fact, a time-traveling vampire right before icing Cedric Diggory and then this aspect of the plot was never touched upon or mentioned again except as some story convenience from time to time to explain how Voldy appears in certain places when it's convenient. This would hinder the payoff of the fourth book which is the culmination of those early years and it would make us ask a bunch of unnecessary questions about the nature of a key character that overcomplicates a major part of the story to a point of absurdity. I wouldn't even say this would "ruin" the story if it otherwise stayed the same but it would bring my estimation of it down quite a few pegs. Now, in my opinion, the story of Harry Potter is actually a good one, at least it is up to that fourth book, but what if we're talking about a story that isn't even that enjoyable in the first place? Well, then each plot hole just further and further makes an already bad story lose even more steam. What if your story is about giants being an existential threat to your society and then you find significant ways in which to reduce this threat that you subsequently ignore? Well, that would kind of be like Harry going on a quest to get the Deathly Hollows and eliminate the Horcruxes when his ass could have just used a Time-Turner and staked baby vampire Voldemort in the heart. It makes an already bad resolution to a story seem pointless on top of it. Well, guess what kids, that very thing happens in this show numerous times. Keep this in mind as we go on to talk about the bigger problems with this show. So the way in which this show is not at all like the aforementioned Evangelion and the start of how, why and where it's disappointing is how it resolves it's mystery plot. Here is the thing about shows relying on mysteries, people have to be as invested in the payoff as they were with the initial mystery and that is not as easy as it sounds. The biggest problem I have with Titan is that everything you expect to happen once the initial mystery is introduced happens almost to a "T." I said there might be spoils in this review at the start, but the truth is the anime is spoiled if you have two brain cells to rub together and have basically seen any story with a premise like this in the past 100 years. It never veered off the path and surprised me at all. Aside from the general payoff being a letdown, a lot of aspects of the story beyond the initial world building are also a letdown. I mean look at all that text below this particular sentence, this show is truly an evergreen of disappointment even in climate changes abnormally long winter's. I would go into more detail on this and explain line by line what I think is wrong, but I think it's easier to ask you to just imagine what you think the resolution of this mystery is and I guarantee you will hit upon it without really trying nine times out of ten. I have a thing about "spoilers" the first thing is that I don't really believe that a good story can be spoiled, but I respect that other people think this. So building off that belief I also don't ever feel inclined to "spoil" a story that I don' t particularly like. I think even stories I don't like deserve a fair shake and I'll let other people enumerate on the merits of this in a specific sense concerning the details of what happens here. So instead of talking about what I thought was disappointing about the resolution of this story in that aforementioned specific sense, I'll talk more generally about how this was disappointing to me. An extremely brief synopsis is this, the Titans start out a mysterious threat that needs to be combatted but then were told first that they were created by humans and through complicated ways and means they're just some power fantasy bullshit that you might as well calculate in power levels, because this show basically becomes an average shonen at the end of the day. Guess what lads and lasses, them titans were created by humans to benefit more powerful humans and keep people in line and unaware of the broader circumstances of the world, so there's technically more to the story, but that's basically it and this resolution is just lame for a lot of reasons. The main being what I already stated and just how cliche and overused the "we secretly created this threat to keep the rabble in line premise is." I mean it's even overused in reality I've seen enough false flags in one lifetime, that I have forgotten what a real drape look like waving free in the breeze. Listen kids, if we cant rally positively over this review, then it's the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together. The first basic problem with the above resolution to the story is even though they go with a cliche plot my dog could write at this point, they can't even keep this premise clear and easy to understand. Heres where them plot holes and dips come in. At one point we learn the Titans were like prisoners that got turned into super powerful beings why? At first I thought it might be for some risky but logical reason like they were used for construction, manual labor or war or something like that, but no the story just kind of leaves that prisoner plot point hanging because I guess it's just self-evident we need to turn people we no longer want in society into an existential threat that can easily backfire on us. Instead of using the Titans to build walls the walls are made of Titans. What the fuck? I mean I can see a more clever plot using this in interesting metaphorical ways, but again Titan goes nowhere with this revelation, it is basically there to be shocking and it isn't that shocking as much as it is stupid. One Titan or a guy that can turn into one helped found this society and he and others want to give other unwilling people this power. Now I don't have much of a social life as might be indicated by the amount of time I can invest in these pointless reviews, but I can imagine what having one is like. As much as I can imagine having friends, I can also imagine hating people and having real enemies. In all those imaginings I never thought. "Damn, what I need to do is take these people I hate and give them the means to easily destroy my life." I mean maybe it's commonplace to take people unwilling or that you don't like and make them gigantic beings that can destroy a city, but I guess I missed this basic facet of social reality. What I'm trying to say with all this is I need to get out more and I cordially invite all you fucc bois and thots to come into the mental hellscape that is my reality. I think the show wanted to use these as clever dead ends and inroads to an interesting story, but they just don't really work. Again as stated heavily above, I'm not here to point out minor plot inconsistencies and for all I know, the manga clearly explains all this and even has charts explaining why gigantic people make the bestest prisoners, hell I'm not perfect maybe the anime clearly answers these and I was too busy looking at the other screen to hear why this was necessary. These things might have great answers but the bigger problem is this was all what I expected, this exact plot with these types of dumb problems. These plot holes and inconsistencies wouldn't have mattered in a better story and they might even be turned into possible interesting twists and strengths with more clever writing. They weren't here though, they were just large infected wounds left to fester on an already dying Titan. I couldn't help but read ahead about the things I missed and to try and make sure the things I perceived as dumb with the show weren't as bad as I thought they were in that reading about it I learned even more displeasing shit that is sprinkled throughout this review and warned you about at the start. There is one crucial detail though that I think really takes the cake on why this premise is really wasted on this show. So the last dumb thing ever happens and in a turn of fate, you're told that modern nations akin to our own exist and their technology makes easy work of the Titans. Like with a lot of things in the story this plot point serves only to nerf the realism and threat we're supposed to care about. It also makes me wonder about the nature of these other countries, they're seemingly filled with humans like us and the people in the walled country and yet they don't act at all like the way a modern country would act in relation to a primitive one. You see here in reality where we live, if you as a modern nation are told that a resource-rich smaller country exists and that the harm to you is minimal in overtaking them, you make up an excuse to conquer them. You then tell them and your own people it's for their own benefit and the government and a few lucky preselected businessmen walk off into the sunset with all that countries resources in tow. You also use the denizens of this country as a source of cheap labor while you extract all their wealth and then leave when it is no longer valuable to you or they finally become modernized and it is no longer easy to readily push them around through conventional means. Either way, while you're doing this to them you also force them to buy your own goods which are usually cheaply made consumer products in exchange for their actually valuable resource based capital. If they resist at this level of the game, then in at least one historical case, what you do is invent a product that they literally get addicted to and can't live without. Like Opium in China. We call this basic facet of material reality imperialism and it is essential to modern nations because capitalism relies on the constant extraction of resources and the opening of new markets. In fact, if you look at the financial times of any modern newspaper you'll notice that nothing gets these people harder than the phrase "new market" as even the perception that one is going to be opened up someway somehow is the most exciting thing to ever happen in their mind. There are only a few reasons why that I can think why you wouldn't do this, one being that this is a country that exists because they're within the sphere of influence of another country and the only exist for that reason. Like with North Korea, which only exists because of China and the conclusion of the Korean war in which they wanted a buffer zone between themselves and the US influence in the region. If North Korea was an island out in the middle of the Pacific they would have been conquered already, had a puppet government installed and told to start sending over those goods. This reason is not why the country in Titan isn't taken over. Even with North Korea being within China's sphere of influence, they still want the added protection of defensive nuclear weapons, they want to future proof their own regime. So even in this case a country still feels unsafe and weary of a possible invasion from outside forces. Another reason why you might not do this is the people in the country have no wealth to extract. The Sentinelese were in the news recently, they were the tribe the killed that Christian missionary on an island off the eastern coast of India. You might ask yourself why haven't we made contact with these people and the long complicated answer is that we have and there is a really bizarre and interesting history behind it that goes beyond the scope of this review. The good news for the Sentinelese though is that in early western explorations of the island, no minerals, salt deposits or oil was found there otherwise they would have been massacred like East Timor already and had all their resources sent over. This is not why the nation in Titan is not conquered in fact within their walled society they seem to have so many resources that they can be an insular and self reliant country for presumably centuries. Even in a primitive society like this, you have all those mined resources all those precious metals their weapons and jewelry is made out of. You know like the ones that keep us and previously the Soviets invading Afghanistan. Which is not an easy country to get to let alone fight an ongoing decades long war in. Compare that with civilization in Titan which is in the middle of a verdant grassland plains area that carpet bombing and then a ground invasion would wipe out in a millisecond or two. We aren't really given a good reason why these modern countries aren't invading this one aside for story convenience and treaties that amount to the equivalent of a non-aggression pact and those almost never work out in reality anyway. The minute a stronger country wants something from you, just brace yourselves an invasion is coming. The unreality of this one plot additive the introduction of the modern world to this reality of the Titans is so large that it's not so much plot hole, as it is plot titan, mindlessly destroying what little hope a man can have left in all of this. I wish I knew a surefire way that I could write how disappointing this all is, but the best way to do that would be to just have you watch the show and you should have already done that if you're reading this nonsense. I really tried to think up an analogy or some kind of scenario that emphasizes how lame the payoff is compared to the setup but I just couldn't think of something that encapsulates in a universal way how bad it is. I thought maybe I could compare it to the disappointment one feels when they realize the worst M. Night Shyamalan twist they imagined was the one that actually happened in the film, but the problem is that what happens in Titan isn't really a "twist" so much as it the basic unfolding of the bad story as is. Ok, I think I got it! It's kind of like lighting a firecracker and waiting eagerly to see it explode and then sitting there for twelve hours only to realize it's a candle disguised as a firework and you sat there and just watched it melt the duration of its waxy boring substance. I mean it melted, so something happened, but it certainly wasn't the awesome anime explosion you expected at the start. I guess a way to illustrate why it's bad aside from just restating it's bad over and over is that it's not just predictable is that it feels like A to B exposition story telling. You're presented with this mystery and interesting world and they proceed to give us a story around it that is exactly what I thought it was going to be, plot beat by plot beat. If I go to write a story and it's about me driving to the store we generally want something to happen that's different from a regular visit to the local supermarket, but what if the story I wrote was just that, me going to the store? I got dressed, went to my car, drove to the store without any struggle, browsed for the items I needed and then put them in the cart, paid for them and drove back home without any problems. I'm sure that was riveting folks, you were on the edge of your seat wondering if each item would make it to the cart and then it did without a struggle. An even more basic way to say this is the "see spot run plot" well the story is about seeing Spot run and he runs. I won't say Titan was as basic as that, but it was as basic as it could be building off its premise and not really veering away from exactly where a story like this usually goes. Now as per usual I have to give some heavy caveats and over explain things to make sure I run this shit into the ground, like a mindless Titan pounding his fist into the dirt. Not all predictive elements in a story are bad. If I'm writing a murder mystery and you as a clever reader saw some of the hints I laid out as to who the killer is, that's a good way of having predictive elements in a story. I once read a creepypasta named "MR Foggy" or something to that effect and the story had things at the start of it that hinted towards its conclusion and people criticized it for this reason, but I actually thought it showed that the writer had a good sense of what internal logic meant in relation to the world they were building with the story. I mean sure it could have used a red herring and some sleight of hand to throw clever readers off, but its general predictability in this instance didn't seem like a big detriment to me since it built logically from prior premises of the story in a creative way. A lot of plot points of Game of Thrones and Harry Potter were predicted by readers before the writers actually confirmed these things and their stories weren't bad because of these predictable elements, in fact, they showed the strength of the world and the attention to detail in creating them, in that the background elements help build upon things that were important in later parts of the story. I think something having internal logic is a measure of whether something being predictable is good or not. A lot of what is predictable about Titan isn't the internal logic of the story building on itself, while the overarching plot moves in interesting directions that might come back to these earlier understated facets of the story, it's the basic building blocks moving from one point to the next with no deviations in the exact way you would imagine they would when you first started watching it. It's going from the car to the cart and back to the car, with no real intrigue or drama added in aside from what's typical of the genre. Does that sound like a rip-roaring thrill ride against giant mysterious creatures? I predict that it doesn't. There is a story that countless movies and books have been made about in the past century, including two of the highest grossing movies of their time and that story is called the sinking of the fucking Titanic. One of the things people find intriguing about the real-life event and fictional tales of the boat sinking is that the setting of the Titanic shows us an enclosed space that is also just big enough that it gives us a wide view of society and in particular class structure in its passenger ranks. Similar to stories about the Titanic, AoT has an enclosed look at a rigid class-based society, in a life raft situation that has a lot of potential in showing us things about our own society but in a smaller more digestible way. In fact, it seems like it should be distinctly good at this kind of storytelling with how the story is told in the first few episodes and how the world building of the Titans is setup and yet it does almost nothing with this at all aside from the basic snippets you can imagine it examining. Guess what rich and otherwise powerful people are living high off the hog and benefit from this society like they do the present one and Titan does nothing to show why this is or why it matters in the slightest throughout its duration. I feel like this show set up a situation and I had to imagine a more interesting story and themes happening to get anything out of it. This seems to happen a lot in anim- media in general. Art like life is just a disappointing mess of bullshit, I'm sorry. A lot of people of my particular political ilk like to attribute fascist intentions to this show and they see immigrants, refugees and non-Japanese Gajin barbarians as stand-ins for the Titans. I can kind of see why someone would see this as an applicable situation to those things and given that a lot of action-oriented anime seems very nationalistic in a way that makes GI Joe seems pinko. It's not hard to attribute bad intentions here. That being said I think it's a mistake because I think it's attributing a theme that's more interesting than what the story can actually muster. I think the Titans themselves would need to have more intentionality and internal motive to fit that narrative. When you think about it, this show is kind of like a zombie apocalypse but instead of a bunch of small enemies, you have a bunch of large Titan's attacking things randomly and for seemingly no internal reason. Should we start attributing nationalist and fascist intentions to zombies too? I think not, like a Titan aiming its sinewy hand over the wall, this shit is reaching. Well actually in the history of media criticism a lot of people have tried to make zombies a placeholder for "others" but again I just don't see the connection unless we stretch the idea in such a loose way as for this situation to be almost analogous to anything. The fact that the Titan's are also being used to keep people insular and ignorant about the rest of the world can just as easily be a metaphor for extreme isolationism as it is nationalistic bigotry. So basically if it's analogous to any Asian state it's not nationalistic Japan which despite it's pretense for its own people was very international in it's intentions and it had to be because it needed to steal certain resources like oil to keep functioning as is, but rather North Korea which is an insular society that has to invent monsters to keep it's people which are essentially hostages to the ruling military establishment in line. The comparison between this state and fascism also isn't really historically accurate as fascism is a modern development that is distinct from feudalism which is what this show actually depicts. I would ascribe the first real quasi-fascist state in history as being that of Oliver Cromwell's regime and the level of modernity and the sophistication of the society isn't big enough to even come to that level in Titan. Ironically you need a modern society with a modern economy to enact cavemen like nationalistic ideals to the level that fascism exists at. You also need the military power for imperialism and other countries to invade to have enough wealth to live off of and sustain that military power which I have already shown isn't really possible with this society earlier in the review. If anything they are about to be invaded because all they have is hook shots and rope. To return again to my zombie comparison. In fact, the lack of intentionality of the Titans is part of what I think makes the fights uninteresting aside from what I stated earlier with the animation. There is no drama between protagonists and antagonists in this show and their cant be because the animalistic nature of the Titan's makes that impossible to happen. Now, this isn't necessarily bad the Titans themselves might not have dramatic interplay to contribute to the story, but a more clever writer could use their natural "evil" as a context for drama between the human characters. The way zombie apocalypse stories usually do. But then the Titans end up being people and you can be a Titan and all this bullshit that over-complicates a simple setup for potentially deeper stories.... I mean really just fuck it. This story always finds a way to nerf any potential goodness it might have had. Anyway, me and my bois been thinking, instead of killing them Titans, we gonna turn our weapons on those rich fuckers on the hill. No gods, no masters anime ghetto blast ya. Oh, wait you had the same idea but you just want to keep the same dumb society with the same rules? You really can't even get this Robin Hood shit right? Godddamnit. Going back to wanting to imagine themes I think it's almost impossible not to want to do this with this story because what you get in the end is magical power fantasy bullshit on top of a podium that seemingly promised us something much deeper and profound. This is one story where the fan fiction might be better by default than the official canon writing. So in the aforementioned Evangelion, we come to understand the nature of the problem the people are going through in that world, but only just enough that keeps us interested until the ending takes us in a completely different direction. This completely different direction does a few things for the show, like making it one of the greatest of all time, but also it leaves some of the plot details especially those concerning the threat a little murky. By doing this it makes it hard to criticize the shows internal logic, as it's never laid out enough to be a rubric to start citing things wrong with it. This is where Titan's threat and the resolution it builds up to start's to fail hard. So like after everything is done and le epic heroes have saved the day their first thought is to take Wall Maria and the lands contained within back. This might sound like a good plan to you if like the main character you're an over emotional moron attached to some ruins. News flash kid, you found out the nature of the Titans, your shitty wall system and the society contained within can be put to rest since you know you can reverse and positively engineer the process in your favor. Listen, real close kid... You can make those big Titan's, you know the whole reason you have these walls human again, the process is shown to be reversible through extreme means and through the knowledge that we see people turning into and not being Titans. I couldn't give a fuck less about the Wall. You can retake the world back and use your knowledge of Titans as an offensive measure against those that remain in the wild and other threats. And you can do all this by making an army of Titan's your self. This is why the power fantasy elements don't work with this realistically built up world, the details we give could lead to a much easier resolution. This is why I cited the murkiness of Evangelion as a positive, it masks obvious problems and those pesky plot holes that might have come up about the threats resolution if they went with a more conventional anime ending like Titan did here and failed hard with a vengeance at that. Oh, wait they can't do any of the above because modern reality exists outside the walls of this city. Again WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE? Did you do this? Stahp it plz. Was it just to piss me off and break my titan sized heart and balls? Another way in which this shows is not like Evangelion at all is its characters. Their personalities and design leave almost no impression on me and even after watching the show twice all the way through I have a hard time distinguishing who is who and why they matter. The main character is also just a boring dud, I'm having a hard time even picturing him now as I write this and I'm literally, figuratively, metaphorically and allegorically looking at a picture of him. Wait was the main character even a guy? I'm starting to forget about these boring characters more and more as I write this. As much as I hated character's in shows like K-on and Kill Me Baby, at least I can say I remember them and their names. Titan's characters are so forgettable, I think this show made me develop a form of facial aphasia and now I can't distinguish individual people in a crowd, thanks a lot Titan. So when I think real hard on it, I remember the guy who runs the place was your basic mean old man archetype and then there was the black haired girl who liked potatoes and I kept thinking. "When they gonna focus on her, she's the hot one!" But then they never did and now I can't even like the show in quantifiable fappability levels that I can display on a chart for an oral presentation at college. I can only imagine in my heart and in my dreams, a show where she loves me as much as she loves potatoes. Seems no one around me comprehends my potato, guess I'm just a spud boy looking for that real tomato. So on a more serious note, nothing really happens to these characters, they don't have great arcs of development and they aren't entertaining on a more basic level, they mostly exist to fit an anime trope checklist and be exposition signposts that keep the story going. I really want to emphasize in this particular review that despite my harping on it in this review and others, things can still be fun and cliche at the same time. I mean the first three Star Wars films are a series of thousand-year-old hero tropes with some spaceships added in and people like that. A lot of the stories I like are basic, I'm not that hard to please, it's not just that these are overused and cliche, it's that they're overused and cliche in a way that just isn't compelling in a way I can imagine them being. So with that in mind, back to the main character for a second, he is kind of like Edward Elric from Full Metal Alchemist, but without any of the charm, believability or good writing. So he isn't at all like that character, but I think they kind of wanted him to be like that or at least it's the closest approximation to what they were going for that I can think of given the genre and the way they act. You see the thing about Edward Elric is him and his brother have a series of large struggles that are easy to understand, they want their bodies intact again and beyond that, they want the happy family life they missed out on. Their story isn't groundbreaking or something no one has heard before in fact what is compelling about it is its familiarity, we can understand the loss of family and the guilt over major mistakes rather easily. On top of these easy to understand motivations and goals Edward has, him and his brother also have concerns and goals involving the other characters in the story and like with the two main characters I can understand these characters motivations and why their struggle in life matter even though the world is an alternate reality where alchemy exists instead of modern chemistry. The problem with Titan's main character is that even though I can understand his "struggle" in an abstract sense and I can perceive a want to survive in a harsh reality where Titans exist, I never understand it or more importantly feel it at any moment in the show. I mean I know he wants to be a hero and do heroic things, but I'm not exactly sure why I should care as a viewer aside from seeing the story move along on the screen. His main goals as stated earlier don't even make sense. There also isn't enough dramatic interplay or interesting characterization with the other characters to get me to care about this world beyond the main character. I won't belabor this particular point too hard since I have mentioned this before in other reviews on here and RYM, but the main take away is you can't just show and do emotional things in a story, you have to actually make us care and feel these things along with the characters first. I think that's the problem with this story in general, it just kind of happens and I'm never expected or invited to care at any point, like one of those fake aquariums that show the same five fish doing fish things over and over. This is an anime show where people fighting Titan's do the same Titan fighting things you expect them to do over and over. When I started writing this review I actually thought the show was pretty good and I even had to change some sentences at the start after writing the rest because this ended up being more negative than I initially intended. I convinced myself in one review or less with no money down that this show just ain't that good. I'm mindless like a Titan I'm just attacking shit that I ain't even know the purpose or significance of. Aside from it's starting premise and the world itself there really isn't much too praise. I think if you look at my review as a whole you should take away one crucial message and that is... I might have liked it more as a painting is what I'm trying to say. I'll let you figure out what that means.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Nov 18, 2018 Recommended
Shirobako, A Japanese title meaning "white-bullshit" is an anime about creating anime. It follows a few girls whose jobs intersect the anime industry and some related fields and they're connected socially because they knew each other in a school anime club. You should know from my previous reviews how much I love those school clubs.... Luckily for me the school stuff is kept to a few minimum flashbacks and the majority of the show takes place in the present where the girls and their coworkers waste their lives away creating anime I can eviscerate in a second or two with some well placed smug criticisms.
...
Negative asshole that I am I was pleasantly disappointed to find out this show was actually good in a lot of ways in fact it came so close to edging excellence, I felt a rumble at the edge of my desk while watching it. Speaking of school clubs a show I have mentioned before Girls Und Panzer was made by the same people and most importantly the same director who did this and while the only surface similarity is that some of the art of the people looks similar and by similar I mean Aoi kind of looks like my main tank Femme from across the Thames, Darjeeling. I cant help but feel a lot of the same things about this show that I thought about GuP. That it did most things right for it's genre and what it was aiming for and had utilized it's premise enough to be satisfying and neither show really had any major mistakes. Well actually that scene in GuP when the one girl starts dancing for no reason when they were all in that barn kind of made me want to die to stop feeling the intense cringe. I think the biggest problem with both shows is more what they didn't do, than what they did. So I will attempt to show why I think this was a pretty good show and then explain in some ways why I thought it was just inadequate enough to not be excellent.
The characterization and the general arc of this show is really strong. Each one of the characters helps us understand the world of an anime production studio and all of them have believable quirks, faults and positives given their personalities and they all have an interesting history. One small detail I like about this show is the characters appearance actually changes in regards to things going on in their life. In some cases this is drastic like when the former PM comes back and he has lost weight since he is no longer in such a stationery work place, but the other characters all have different outfits, their hair and facial hair changes and they have different postures and body language. They also don't all look like palette swaps of one another, the characters are different sizes and heights which seems like a low bar for an animated show but... Let me just tell you I have seen some laziness in my time regarding these things and it's a welcome change to finally have a show go out of their way to differentiate the characters this much in both looks and personality. The main character Aoi Miyamori is a PRETTY good businesswoman and I respect her ability to successfully manage a project of this size and scope. She has a cute- I mean she has an acute sense of what it takes to get things done in these harsh circumstances. I love her... Dedication to the job. Ok real talk ladies, I want to compliment Aoi's big ass- abilities and propensity for patience with all the other work she had to do. For real though, I would have told those bastards to neck themselves if they asked me to go get them tea. Aoi is the hardest working woman in show business, she ain't got time to make your weak ass tea, go make her a fucking sandwich assholes. I'm not even joking, it seems like both of the fictional anime shows they were creating would have been a complete failure if Aoi wasn't out there busting her ass to get things done. This is a main character that really earns their main character status, it feels laughably ironic that one of the shows I completed and reviewed right before this was K-on with one of the most useless protagonists of all time in Yui Hirasawa and then to see a character like Aoi who is likeable, useful and yet still has believable faults. I would ask you out on a date Aoi, but you're probably too busy doing the Sisyphean task of keeping Musashino Animation in business and you're probably too good for me. I will worship thy image and hope for your good fortune from afar. I wish only the best for you thy lady virtue Aoi Miyamori, a golden woman for the modern age. Salute her as she passes, she needs all the support she can get. Seriously, if you don't get up and clap for this character at the last episode, you just might be an asshole. I also really like the character of Seiichi. There is something about a ridiculously pathetic, perverted, overweight, past his prime, unmotivated loser that is still trying to relive past glories that appeals to me for some reason... I mean, I might know someone like that. A-anyway, his voice actor was also really good and managed to convey some of the more nuanced aspects of this character really well. Jigguri Jigguri Heaven sounds like the type of terrible show I would be "tricked" into watching after seeing nonstop hot photos and WeBMs of it. It appears I have been bamboozled again good sirs. *Adjusts monocle to bring the jiggle physics in better focus.* Yes... "Tricked" indeed. Most of the other characters serve their purpose well enough and have just the right amount of development and screen time. The only character I don't like is Ai Kunogi and she is kept at a bare minimum and isn't important to the plot. I think the biggest problem with her actually is that she is an unnecessary character and we would be better served just getting more time with one of the animators we already knew throughout the series. You know this show wasn't even trying to be inspirational but for just a second while watching episode twelve, I felt like that food critic in Ratatouille, I remembered the joy of creation and what it means to care about the thing's I'm criticizing. My heart made of burnt out ashen coal reignited with fire after seeing Sugie find meaning in his old busted life. It was like split second Ikiru. For just a minute there I thought of all the people who must have worked on the shows I gave extremely negative reviews for and for the ones I will probably give in the future and I felt a pang of genuine remorse for them. The hardships they go through and the harsh nature of this industry behind the scenes. Then I remembered Yasuna's voice from Kill Me Baby and Yui's terrible personality in K-on and I was brought back down to earth. The point is folks, sometimes you remember that as fun as it is to hate on something, these things were someones dream and someones toil at one point. I would say the single greatest thing about this show is showing all the bullshit and strain these people have to go through just to get a show done. In that way a big production like this are a small miracle even when they do end up being mediocre in some way. Related to the writing one thing this show did that not many pieces of media do is it tore away just a little bit at the idea that we should hold the original creators of these stories up on a pedestal. The amount of strain and bullshit related to the erratic whims of an author who refuses to speak with the anime production staff directly is a Kafkaesque nightmare and indicative of those circumstances is the absolute unfairness of a nameless, judge who can eviscerate weeks of work, time and money because of a slightly differing interpretation of a story that he wont even discuss until the last minute with these people just trying to get a fucking job done. I like artists, writers and I would like to think I'm a fan of creativity, but these people have faults too and they can be inconsiderate to an insane degree in situations like this and I'm sure a lot of people adapting someone else's work can relate to the insanity of this situation at least a little bit. The art in this show is so-so. It isn't bad and everything that is represented looks alright to me, as stated earlier the the characters all look good and have a lot of uniqueness to each of their designs. I will say I thought the CGI water in this show looked terrible, but that was about the only detail I can say looked really bad in some way. With me admitting the shows adequacy in terms of art. I think this is a show that should have went with a more realistic or a more radically stylistic look. What I'm about to say is sacrilege, I might even get my anime reviewing license revoked for suggesting that such heretical black magic be used but I might even suggest something as radical as blatant rotoscoping/penciled in photo realism in this case. I know, it's lazy, you hate it, only dat real hand drawn stuff gets you hard. I'm just suggesting something out of the ordinary here or some extreme stylistic choice. Maybe if that is too extreme how about something like Ping Pong: The Animation? The reason I think that this would help here is it would make it more easily discernible from the anime being made within Shirobako's universe from whats being shown to us all the time in the show. They try to change the styles of the fictional shows they produce, but it's not quite enough for me and part of the problem is the baseline art is very basic for a show with such a high concept and potential. Something about all the animation in universe and out, all running together with one seamless style doesn't quite work for me. Again I'm not saying this shows art is bad as is, but that I think this would have improved it's ability to tell it's story if it got more creative in this regard. I noticed that the VA's in this show talked really fast most of the time. Every other second was an affirmative and abrupt "はい." This show had a tense fast paced atmosphere despite it's subject matter about a business and without much outside drama inserted in. I think this could have been aided a little with a more unnerving/fast paced soundtrack. The tunes aren't bad but they detract a little from the atmosphere of the rest of the show. I think of the movie Birdman (2014) and one of the things that worked about that really well was it's tense jazz soundtrack and how it and the way it was filmed, edited and acted all gave this extremely tense atmosphere. That movie was also about creating a work of art and I could tell Shirobako wanted the same はい tension surrounding the creation of anime but couldn't quite reach it and I think it's conventional soundtrack was one of the reasons why. I have already said some things like the art and sound could have been utilized to greater effect to reach some of what I think this show was missing, but I think there is something else missing here. As someone who has wasted a good portion of his life digesting media. I like to engage in a little imaginary diversion when I beat a game, finish a film or read a book when I think it was good, but there was just that little bit of extra missing that might have made it a personal favorite of mine. So to find that out what that missing element might be let me explain what that aforementioned game is. "What would it be like if "x" made this?" -What would it be like if From Software made an Elder Scrolls game? -What if Nicholas Winding Refn directed this random romantic comedy I saw? -What would a trap rap album by 2Pac be like? -What if Michael Bay directed Shindler's List? -What if Obsidian made a Warhammer RPG? -What would a school club anime made by Shinchiro Watanabe be like? Some of these are just admittedly humorous random mix ups but there are times when I think mixing things like this can shed light on the latent potential of something that wasn't quite reached. So lets do this with a seemingly random anime creator I totally haven't preselected ahead of time and Shirobako. Hmmmmmmm who to pick... Ok, I got it! There is a little known anime director named Satoshi Kon and by little known I mean he is like one of five anime directors people know by name so that already puts him in the top one percent of people to care about in the media. So what if Satoshi Kon made Shirobako? I think Shirobako came really close to being one of the best, if not the best anime of all time. In fact I would still say it's a great to excellent show, but there is just that slight amount missing to knock it down from being one of the best shows ever for me. I think what it's missing and what I'm trying to get at with the Satoshi Kon example I'm about to espouse on is a break from the general format of anime. A show about anime creation should really celebrate the media in a way that utilizes editing, creative illustration and the history of animation to really push it forward. Granted they do try to add in some surreal elements with the main characters figures acting out her emotions a bit and the girl's imagining their future in fanciful ways, but it's just not enough for me. I expect more unbridled creativity out of a concept like this, for a longer explanation as to why I might feel this way read my Monthly Girls Nozaki Kun review. I have a feeling if this show had someone like a Sotoshi Kon behind it we would see what I think is missing from this show and it's premise, we would still have the same great story but more of the emotions and sheer artistry of the "in show" animation would be shown. His surreal elements would have went even further and we would get more of the psychological aspects of being an artist. We would see more of the negatives and downsides of the industry more elaborately spelled out maybe even in his case it would go overboard and show too much negativity, but at least it would take that risk. Shirobako to it's credit does attempt to show some of the downsides and struggles of the industry and even praised that to a small extent earlier in this review, but it has this kind of constant ambient positivity about everything that makes it just the slightest bit unbelievable for me. I also think a more creative director would bring more themes and use this opportunity to commentate a bit on the anime industry as a whole. I know we would get the things described from him because we got it in his own works particularly in Paprika, Paranoia Agent and Perfect Blue. Which is again why I choose him to explore what is "missing" from this show. I guess will never know if this would have made for a better or worse show, but it's something I was pondering while watching it. I wonder how many people will read the first sentence of this review and immediately tell me my obviously false translation of Shirobako is wrong? I guess we will see kids. This show even despite my small gripes is still an excellent anime take on the anime industry. If you even have the slightest inkling to watch it, I would suggest that you do. I wouldn't say it's an absolute favorite of mine, but it got really close to that. When someone asks you "Whats that anime that got you hooked?" Tell that normie shithead "AND-DDESU CHUCGGKY!" And then deny them a sauce.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Nov 17, 2018 Recommended
Some spoiled brats below, watch out:
So the good: I don't know if this show is as psychologically "deep" as is commonly memed about, but I'm more willing to believe that here than with most shows with this reputation because it gets the basics of characterization right and despite the story getting somewhat convoluted and jumping from POV character to POV character I can't think of any obvious plot-holes or unresolved plot points. Which given how large in scope this story becomes is kind of a small miracle in and of itself. I really liked a lot of the show's side characters as is and each ... one felt necessary to the story. I wanted to bluntly state that here because while I do have a lot of negative things to say about one of the shows' characters I think on a whole these people were enjoyable and distinct enough to make me actually care about the story while I was watching it. When it would shift POV's between characters I never really felt like I was missing someone either, each one was interesting enough to make me enjoy their point of view while it lasted. Middle/mixed: To get the basic bitch shit out of the way real quick, the art, general aesthetics and the music fit the story well enough, while also not being overly impressive ever. There was a lot of gray and brown in this show, which often leads to a feeling of blandness, but it never hit a point where I felt too put off by it. The Voice acting was also adequate to the task. None of this stirred any emotions in me, you might say ironically given what comes next. This show reminds me a lot of Death Note, in that episodically it is very exciting and it leans on all the right emotions. It kept my interest throughout and I can't say any part of it was a drudgery. It has good atmosphere and on paper it does everything a story is supposed to do competently, but once I was done with the series I didn't feel any kind of "wow factor" from either series or any feeling of loss from not being with these characters or this universe anymore like I feel with other shows I enjoy. It's better than the average show, but something is missing to make it "great." I don't know exactly what that "something" is but it might be explained a little below. The bad: The show does something I don't like which is brush up against political ideas constantly but doesn't really say anything with them or about them. It's a lot of weak appeals to "moderacy" and "people on both sides are extreme and that leads to extreme things being done. Therefore, henceforth and in conclusion we shall never try for anything new in society this is the best of all possible worlds, cheggmate utopians." Oh wow, I couldn't have fathomed such a thought without this show pointing it out, thanks a million. I hope I can pass this wisdom on to my grand kids and further on, I'll have it inscribed on titanium tablets so people will forever know that Liberal Democracy and capitalism shall never be slain. Boot stamping on political imagination for all time. I wish I could go back in time with animation equipment and commission a fine anime for Louis XVI and appeal to the moderacy of the times and assure the people of France that the absolute monarchy is surely going to last forever. Maybe he can even sign the check before his head takes a ride down a hill slope and into the dustbin of history. People often use the excuse when anime does this that Japanese people care about different issues and have different political concerns, aside from the fact that I don't buy that excuse for a lot of other reasons, this show was set in Germany and they talk constantly about the former east/west division. It just seems like a lost opportunity to not say something more with this, especially since this anime focuses so much on the twins and peoples dual nature, a state that was literally divided politically could help tighten some of these larger metaphors and themes. I think more cohesive and overarching themes were part of what was missing from this in general. It's like someone made the bread for a cake perfectly, but then forgot to add frosting, decorations and filling. It reminds me a lot of Stephen Kings writing in that regard, where the framework of a good story is constructed, but it isn't filled in with anything interesting beyond the surface level narrative. The things above are admittedly subjective want's of mine that the show doesn't necessarily have to follow to be good. The biggest problem with this show though to me and one that I think most people should care about is it's antagonist. Johan is kind of like an anchor that starts off above sea level, but slowly pulls the entire show below water. It seemed like they wanted "Johan" to be sympathetic at point's like a Griffith from Berserk but it just never really happens. Infact, I thought the show was building up to a twist that Johan was going to be working towards something "good" but he has to use extreme means to get it done. I started thinking this around the 35th episode and above. The show kind of gives us a twist in this way, as you know but him, seeing bad things being done isn't enough for me to justify all the terrible and bizarre shit he did. I think the weakest aspects of the show revolve around Johan in general, in that his charisma and charm seems supernaturally over the top and this works at the start when his nature is ambiguous and mysterious, but once you learn he is just a human in hindsight it's seems too over the top to work with this shows generally realistic setting otherwise. I actually think if I watched through this a second time I would have a much worse experience knowing what Johan is in hindsight than I did while watching it the first time. Which is a really bad way to feel about a show that relies on intrigue and mystery, I should feel the opposite given that twists and turns usually give you insight in a show like this to things you didn't know while watching it the first time that make it interesting to watch it a second. Alternatively, they could have contrasted Johan more with the main character by making the main more morally complex and gray so we would have a harder time seeing Johan as unabashedly bad in his world. This also could have been done with more of the side characters. I think another solution would be to just keep Johan more mysterious and never really reveal what he is or why he is doing what he is doing. I don't know what exactly was needed to fix this, but I'm dead certain Johan is the central focus of most of my misgivings with this show. One trope in anime I really hate is characters who are considered special because of how "unemotional" or lacking of emotions they are. This show isn't the worst example of this trope I have seen, compared to some truly terrible shows like Darker Than Black it's use can be considered relatively mild by comparison. I'm mentioning it here to throw another jab at the characterization of Johan. The source of Johan's mojo in this show is of course how lacking in emotions he supposedly, allegedly, probably, maybe sorta might by the observation of others he is said to be. Yeah, well passion and a want for revenge of some kind have emotional underpinnings. Everything we do as humans has an emotional underpinning of some kind. Even the want to be hyper rational to the exclusion of obvious emotional appeals has an emotional basis, usually insecurity and anxiety about how other people perceive our outward insights and abilities. I'll put it as basic as possible, without at least some emotional directionality, we literally would have no reason to do anything. We would be as inert as a rock. So a person lacking in emotions should actually be way less motivated to do their over elaborate schemes and machinations. Hence Johan should not be an elaborate schemer, but someone more apathetic and less motivated, like an anime version of The Dude, but with even less ambition and urgency in life. I think you can see this directly in your own life without needing to put much thought into it, the things you're most focused on and feel a want to get done the fastest are the things you have the strongest emotional response or general feelings about. We don't feel a sense of urgency or a need to get things done when we don't care about them. I mean this should be so obvious that I should feel dumb stating it and you reading it right? And yet here we are and here I am, explaining this because so many protagonists and antagonists with apparently no motivating inner emotions are motivated to do things way beyond what a normal human would do. I just don't buy it, even if you attempt a somewhat educated defense in saying that Johan is sociopathic and therefore lacks emotions I still wouldn't buy it. I don't think there is a psychological state where we ever lack emotions, and in the case of sociopaths and psychopaths I think they merely have a different emphasis on certain emotions and place emotional value and weight in things to an abnormal degree. Most serial killers as an example, don't describe themselves, nor do I think they should be described by others as emotionless, they're highly motivated emotionally towards violent and sexual ends. I'm sorry to inform you all of this, but there is no way to escape your emotions, not even in fantasy. Only I rational super being that I am, may do that. *Warps behind you.* "Nothing motivating me emotionally towards your imminent demise, Kid." I wouldn't usually suggest a show aiming for realism go this route infact, I would prefer the "staying mysterious" solution I put forward above over what I'm about to say, but if they were dead set on both making Johan an elaborate schemer with all the "powers" he seemed to have, while also somehow being emotionless I think a supernatural or science fiction origin for him would have been more plausible given the situation. Although I think there would be more internal consistency this way, the show would have been admittedly worse for it. I don't know what to do ye bastards, maybe Johan just can't be fixed. I mean seriously that guy is an asshole that just ruins everything. You might even call him a monster... I'll just call him the worst aspect of the show and the more I think about him the more the show seems worse for his existence. So the show was generally enjoyable, but this one major thing had to be wrong enough to make me second guess that enjoyment. I would recommend watching it to people regardless, but I personally won't ever watch it again.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Nov 15, 2018
Kenpuu Denki Berserk
(Anime)
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Possibly spoiled milk below, traverse at your own risk:
Kids for once I'll be brief. I mean I can give you a rundown on how this show and its manga reflects historical periods in medieval Europe, Chungoku and Nihon and how it has all these great literary references, mythological aspersions and meditations on power. Despite what people tell you about this though they really don't care about any of that stuff. They can cry that this isn't true and that really they like to sip latte's and talk about the depth of their favorite anime with the finer people in life but really there is one ... reason alone why this show becomes an instant favorite to almost anyone who watches it. That reason is "THE SCENE." I almost feel like it goes without saying. I think you intuitively in your heart of hearts know what scene I'm referring to without me even saying which explicitly. You think you're prepared in life for such moments. That you were raised to endure such awesomeness but all your emotional defenses come tumbling down when "THE SCENE" commences and your mind is drained of all it's fluid from a sensory overload so intense you never quite fully recover. It's sheer awesomeitude and manliness of mantasticness cant be described with words we have already invented. Just watching it gives men a third testicle and women a temporary penis. It has all the badassness of Kenshiro and the craziness of Vegeta rolled into one ball. I'm literally shaking with awe just thinking about it. I'm not worthy even to describe it. This is just a tribute. You have to see and experience this for your self. Don't bother training or trying to prepare your weak ass either, there is no hope, JUST VIEW IT. So what am I talking about in case you have saw THE SCENE and you still haven't guessed. Well, ask yourself, what do you expect to happen in a sword fight in an anime? Make a list... Ok, now throw it in the FUCKING trash because there is no way you said "MOTHERPHUCKING BITE THE TIP OF A DUDES SWORD AND PUSH THAT ASSHOLE OFF A CLIFF WITH THE SWORD STILL IN YOUR FUCKING MOUTH." Which is exactly what happens in THE SCENE. I still remember the exact day I viewed it, I couldn't believe what I had just seen. It was so primal and awesome, I had to pause the show afterword and take a breath. I was dumbstruck for days. I wandered around town wondering what to do with my life after this moment. I couldn't believe something like this had possibly been made and yet no one had told me or attempted to force me to view this. This moment more so than the day of my nonexistent marriage and the birthday of my nonexistent kids is more important than any moment in life I can think of. Seeing Gut's do this act changed my life that day. Thank you sir, I love you more than silver haired devils with a dream and feisty short haired vixens can dare to try. I would let you bite my sword any day Gutz... I think that is enough for now.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Apr 15, 2018 Not Recommended
This is a review of both of K-on's seasons, spoilers and stuff warning here.
K-on was one of the first slice of life/school club/girls doing things shows I watched. It was one of the first because I got told by a lot of people on several websites, anime "experts" and lists it was one of the best anime shows ever and I saw it talked about and memed just enough to give it a try. Upon my initial viewing of it, my opinion was that it wasn't the best anime show ever, but that it was the slightest bit above average. I had some reservations ... with it then, but I could generally understand what people liked about it or at least I did until I started watching a lot of shows like this. I really like to try and see what people like about something like this so I even went through the trouble of watching the second excruciatingly long season and listen to some of the songs independently. My enthusiasm of this rather than grow just keeps getting lower and lower the more I tried to understand it's appeal. How do I put this... I find it hard to bluntly state what I find wrong about this show in clear terms on it's own, so let me illustrate the broader issue with it, by pitching my own anime here: I have this really great idea for an anime show, it will be about a school club. It will start with one girl but over the span of a season or possibly just the first episode we will introduce each new girl in the show. We will have about four to ten of them. We don't want to have too little because we want to cover all the obvious types and flavors possible in terms of desirability. We also don't want to have too many because we don't want to dilute the character pool or run into redundant archetypes. Each one will have different hair and eye colors and possibly if we have time after doing everything else regarding their looks we might write them a differing personality to distinguish them a little bit. We wont actually make them interesting, we will just give them one defining character trait like they're the seven dwarves. Angry, Mopey, shy, arrogant, submissive, smart-erish kinda and of course the "motherly" one that works from behind the scenes and convinces one of the angry ones that they really want to be a part of the school clubs fun times as well. Aside from this their faces and basic body structure will be so similar it's almost as if we just palette swapped some features onto a generic body and head, because we did. Some of the girls will be reluctant to join the club at first and maybe even two of them will seemingly be obstinately against the clubs existence at the start, but through the power of friendship and smiling as we utter each others first names and without honorifics as we all agreed "tee hee," we will come to realize the necessity of being part of this awesome school club experience. Also with the aforementioned "motherly" types help. There will be some hardships along the way and some of the girl's might regret even trying to accomplish what they're attempting with this school club, but our plucky main character will keep things going with her nonstop "can-do" attitude. Will make the clubs existence a necessity beyond this because... The school is being shut down because no one enrolls there or something that isn't good like that is going to happen if: -the school astronaut club doesn't complete it's first successful manned mission to Mars by the end of first term. -the school plumbing club cant clean out all of the cities disgusting sewers by the end of the fourth week of school. -the school astro-physics club cant prove the existence of dark matter after a week of light studying. -the school hentai club cant accurately depict inaccurate body proportions and graceful sensuous movement by this afternoon. -the school music club cant put on a professional level musical event with immaculate singing and dancing after three months of work. -the school ninja club cant eliminate all of the targeted foreign leaders by next Wednesday. -the school general practitioners club cant pap smear all the students in a ninety day period. -the school art club has to help the hentai club in the prequel sequel where we have to save the school in three different time lines that converge into Picard playing Poker with the crew. Yeah will do something like that to slightly raise the dramatic tension. We will have an episode where the girls go to the beach, at least one scene at the hot springs and we will have one where they go to a mall and/or that one shopping district in Tokyo. If they live in the city we will have them visit the country and if they live in the country we will have them visit the city. If they live in Tokyo or Kyoto we will have to by law mention how much different Osaka is at least once if not multiple times. If they live in Osaka, this is impossible because they only exist in the same way that "Thebes" exists in Athenian tragedies as a place that is referenced and used as a setting to reference "others" but doesn't really exist as is. Will definitely have an episode where they all sleep under the same roof and pillow fight, but to be "funny" one of the girls will be grumpy and not having a good time, but in the end she too will join in the fun. <HILARIOUS HIJINKS HERE>. After all these heartwarming moments, the girls will accomplish the thing we want them to accomplish in the end and we will have at least one scene of them all smiling about it and possibly a musical number about how great the experience was even if the show doesn't have anything to do with music. Will try to keep the uniquely Japanese things the girls do at an absolute minimum as to not scare or confuse dumb western audiences too much. I don't know maybe will say the word "senpai" once or twice so they can meme about it, but aside from that will go full western to the extent that we believably can. The whole idea of a school club is "patronizing" to American's whose schools cant even get funding for the basics let alone extra curricular clubs, because rich politicians and the people they represent need an excuse to lower their taxes and poor kids enjoying themselves on the riches dime is just too much to ask for and they cant vote yet anyway, so fuck'em. In spite of this we think they can mix the idea of school and clubs together enough to understand the concept. The girls will have zero romantic interests despite being hormone crazy teenagers and they will live their lives according to such a prudish moral standard and work ethic that it would it would make even the Cleaver family and Archie comic characters wince. We will even have lines where the girls recite the value of doing homework and chores with a smile and we will expect the audience to not laugh at this but to take it seriously. I don't think audiences will be ready for an experience quite this unique and ground breaking. No show has been made like this EVER. This show will inspire people and change lives with it's sheer positivity. So in all seriousness I can be talking about a lot of shows with the above and while K-on doesn't fit every single one of these cliches or this general crappy school club formula it does hit quite a few of them. I find this to be the most formulaic and lazy genre in anime currently, which is unfortunate because I really like the idea of "slice of life" stuff generally and I go into each one of these shows wanting to like them. Even school club shows with a seemingly outlandish premise like Girls Und Panzer end up following the same general arc and use the same filler episodes and archetypes. I find that even shows that aren't necessarily about a school club like Senran Kagura almost have this same cliche structure at their heart, but they don't quite put enough effort in or admit to the fact that it's just another "school club" show in an attempt to seem more unique than they are. Before we go on and I explain in more detail why I don't like this. I want to make clear just in case it wasn't that I'm not one of those people that only likes "manly man" anime, that seems to have become it's own cliche in anime culture, my problem with these shows and K-on in particular isn't that it's about girls doing supposedly girly things. I can imagine a show about much more traditionally feminine things like a school nail salon club or the school cosmetology club and I can imagine it working for me if the art, characters, general story etc are good. I don't give a damn what a show is about as long as it is interesting to me in some way and I think almost any subject can be made interesting. I can imagine a good show like this in my head. The problem is I just haven't found a good show in this genre yet and the more of them I see the more I start to resent all of them as a whole. Which brings me back to K-on. So K-on doesn't buck any of the previously mentioned cliches or subvert them, in fact the most charitable thing I can say about the show is that it was slightly more sparing with it's cliches than some of these shows, "Love Live" being what I see as the purest platonic cliche form of them all. Love Live is going to be a show of comparison for a lot of this so brace yourself for that. Unlike Love Live though, K-on is argued to be a great work of art and a pinnacle of it's genre. When I hear something is those things I expect a lot out of it and I expect it to be either reasonably different from the rest of the works in it's genre or I expect it to be the origin point of these said cliches, as in it's so ground breaking other shows have felt the need to copy it. K-on isn't fundamentally different from these other shows and it wasn't the origin of these trends, it was another surfer on the trend wave. A cliched piece of media can still be enjoyable in a simple way. It can also be argued that not every piece of art needs to aim to be groundbreaking and "unique." Some things can be good just as a particularly well crafted or more polished take on a previously established formula. Sometimes you just might want more of the same thing, because the same thing is good enough. It can also be said, that some things might be cliche on the surface but have depth in between the lines or in the subtext of it's particularities in the general formula. I'm also not above enjoying some cliches and predictable things myself, I really like horror films for instance and slashers in particular, I've come to enjoy their cliches and predictability and on a day where I just want to unwind instead of think deeply about something this is what I'll turn to for that. Closer to home, I can say I really love Dragon Ball Z, but I recognize that a lot of my love for that show is nostalgia and it having a special place in my life. There is nothing inherently special about the shows story aside from a few standout moments and it is very typical or cliche for it's genre. I really like Akira Toriyama's designs in Dragon Ball, Dr. Slump, Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest, but the art and more specifically the art style is about the only thing I would say has stood the test of time from DBZ and even with that I'm not sure how impressive successive generations will find it. I gave these two things Slasher Films and DBZ as examples to say not everything I like is an immaculate piece of unique art or even just great works of art. The difference being I wouldn't make arguments or excuses about why other people should enjoy them either, which is unfortunately what people do with K-on. But if you don't, for the sake of fairness I'll say I'm cool with people liking something if they acknowledge it's derivative or cliche nature. I can understand a guilty pleasure and I can imagine someone just really enjoying these school club cliches even though I personally don't. So to recite the obvious with K-on, I don't think it's a notable or polished take on the formula, I don't want more of this same thing, because I dislike this genre now and I don't see any depth beyond it's surface level school club narrative. In fact one of the main arguments for this shows greatness I've heard a lot is how "simple" it is, in comparison to... Ummm, I don't know, the defenders of this show tend to leave this defense as context-less as I just did. I think they mean in comparison to anime in general, but most school club shows have the same plot at the same pace, so I don't really see anymore inherent "simplicity" against the rest or that would make it special by comparison. A lot of people like to say that one of the main appeals of this show is how the characters truly feel like a group of friends. The immediate problem I have with this is these girls don't feel real ever, they feel like most of the archetypal girls in this genre, from the happy go lucky nonsense to the cliche "moral" dimension of these characters. Even though school club shows are always about secondary/high school kids, I could understand people liking these simple characters with their simple archaic morality if they were made for a much younger audience and I wouldn't berate kids for liking this. Again the problem is that so called "experts" in the highly important field of anime criticism constantly tout this as one of the greatest shows ever made and these people aren't children, they're my age and even scarier sometimes older. The impression I get of high schoolers from Japan in these shows is that all of them are compliant robots whose main want in life is to be the best student in school. I would call these shows an implicit dystopia where all resistance and teenage rebellion has been made futile. I'm more than certain this is probably not reality. As most real life Japanese films depict more conflict and tension in teenagers. I might have a personal bias as I just never cared about school, I wouldn't ever have joined a club and I certainly wouldn't have looked at another student dead in the face and say some nonsense about how home work is the best part of my day. Where are the losers, outcasts and scumfucks in these shows? Do all Japanese kids want to be goody goodies or do some want to wear black Timbs and black hoodies? The best hypothetical moment in one of these shows for me will be when these lame girls go up all happy to another girl to ask her to join their club and she bluntly tells them to go suck a dick. She has better things to do after school, like shitpost on the net, try Fentanyl and listen to trap rap loud enough to piss off mom and dad. Fuck a light music club. Reviewing things negatively like this has this weird way of making me optimistic about real life. I think kids in these grades are smarter and more complex than this and I think their lives could give us a more interesting story than what is given in these school club shows and I think that about kids all over the world. The kids are alright, the show is just bad. This show reminds me of things like High School Musical, Glee and Saved by the bell, where the characters are "high schoolers," but the target audience and the mindset needed to enjoy it is much younger. You know what I wouldn't call any of those? The height of their artistic medium. In fact I would call them calculated commercial properties aimed at the lowest common denominator viewer that doesn't have a whole lot of point's of comparison. These shows and K-on are the television equivalent of a Katy Perry song, lifeless uninspired art trying to be inspirational and fun. You know as a kid I lived through one cliche in this show, I had a sleepover with an older cousin and a few friends. I tried doing that thing where as the younger person I keep talking before we sleep. Well my cousin adorably said at the age of twelve "STFU and go to sleep already" and that was the end of that heart warming memory. Well I guess reality isn't like my Japanese animez's. I don't mind a slow relaxing story, meant to be more calm than action or drama focused in fact my defense of Ghibli film's in my Totoro review was defending slow painstaking realism to an extreme beyond what K-on musters. This could be a twelve episode anime version of My Dinner With Andre and I could imagine it being interesting to me. K-on has two major problems that I think negate this common defense of the show for me. One, the world of K-on and it's characters don't feel real enough to be a true "slice of life." There is almost no struggle or real setbacks these characters ever have to face, their life is a line from one easy fluffy event to the next. Even in real life we feel relaxation by contrast with things that aren't relaxing, so it stands to reason that even if a show wanted to aim for "relaxation" being it's general appeal we would need some of the opposite to contextualize these feelings the problem is we never really get that with k-on. Secondly, the format of K-on is all wrong for this kind of story. In a show aiming for relaxation, I would expect a lot less of the school club formula I described above and more of a slow contemplative free form show, with possibly a slower more relaxing take on the musical aspects. I would also expect a different kind of music to be employed here, more of a singer/songwriter type of feel and less slightly abrasive pop-rock. Instead of the singer songwriter route they can also go the slow jamz route to relax to. Didn't the makers of this show listen to the brilliant anime expert Jamie Foxx? We want some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross, a little Anita and we can get this anime started alright! There is one cliche I left out in my pitch above about these shows and it relates to how they end. Almost every School Club anime goes through an excruciating three episode arc where they cry about the fact that they wont see each other anymore when school is over. This cliche is at least as old as the school club anime Grease (1978). Frenchy is best girl and you know it. So it comes as quite a shock to me when people say this here lame, hackneyed, overused and predictable bit of plot is what makes this show good. The fact that the girls are thinking about their future... I'm thinking about my future right now, there isn't a whole lot to think about as it looks pretty bleak at the moment. Does that make me deep? It doesn't give something existential depth, to have the characters slightly ponder about and feel emotions over obvious crossroads in life. The worst thing about this in K-on was they didn't have the kindness to limit this to the last three episodes, they basically have a whole seasons length of episodes about them being sad school is ending. None of these episodes are interesting or do anything you wouldn't expect out of a more abbreviated version of the same general sad emotional thrust you get out of the ending episodes of these shows. This is also one of those ways in which I simply cant relate to this show, by the end of high school I was ecstatic at the prospect that I wasn't going to see any of the people I knew there ever again. Teachers and students alike, I felt trapped in the group of "friends" I had and I was glad to see them slowly trickle out of my life. I don't miss any of them and I don't reminisce fondly about the times we had. They changed, I changed and life moves on. Now maybe if I had joined a school club... Nah I would still be the same asshole in a different setting. I also don't think of high school as a relaxing time. You're constantly being told if you don't get into college, your life will be ruined and you will forever be relegated to working the most menial of tasks, my guidance counselor told me I was destined to be a ditch digger or worse a moderator on 4chan. Then in a Zizekian fashion you are implicitly being commanded to enjoy high school as one of the "greatest times of your life." Well it wasn't, it was "a" time in my life, nothing more or less. Frankie Avalon was wrong Frenchy, keep the dream of beauty school alive, perk up that beautiful angel face and never fucking go back to high school. I didn't know where to put what I'm about to talk about right now, but since it concerns the ending I thought I would dump it here. Alright, so let me take a breather for a second while I brace myself.... So the absolute worst episode of this show is episode twenty of season two. What makes this episode bad you say with anticipation, curiosity and trepidation? Well dear readers, the short answer is "everything" but I'm sure you're reading this already long review waiting for the long answer to be given and I will nicely oblige. Remember that this is a show about music, even though it's kind of easy to forget that since the characters seem to forget it all the time themselves. So like a lot of shows with a subject like this there is an "end goal" in mind and that is a school festival they're all going to perform at. Episode twenty just so happens to be the episode where that festival happens. Now in any other show like this the creators even if they consciously know they're creating a cliched piece of filth know that this episode has to be one of the great ones. It has to be that episode we remember and that pops out because everything is building up to this. I feel like this is a slightly functioning vestigial organ school club shows have taken from the previous era of spammed anime shows Shonens, where everything always built up towards competitions or a set (of) obstacle(s). The thing about this episode is all that build up is wasted on the girls playing two extremely boring songs and Yui doing an awkward unfunny stage performance that just goes on forever. I mean really bad performance, like not in the "it's funny shes a little nervous" like if she came up to me after my response would be "Well at least it looked like you had fun up there I guess." You know that passive aggressive way of saying "it fucking sucked," that still makes it clear it was the worst performance you have ever seen in your life. If I went to this concert I would ask for my yen back even if I didn't pay to get in. This should have been one of the shows best moments, but like with everything else in the show it is just terrible. Lets go back to Love Live again, when this show had the same cliche structure and buildup, it basically delivered and gave you what you expected out of a show like this concerning the Idol performance we knew this was all building up to. A big live performance with an exciting song that tied into what was going on in the show. It wasn't the best thing I ever heard, but it was basically what I expected out of a premise like this and it met my small expectations. One of the truly terrible things about this show, is how little it uses it's underlying premise about music. People often note that it is has very little actual music in it attached to what the characters are doing, if you discount supplementary materials and merchandise, but it also doesn't really do enough with training and leaning about music. A lot of these shows about school like to jack themselves off about how educational they are, but I don't really learn anything about music or light music clubs from this show that I didn't know before. Compare this to a show like Dagashi Kashi, which isn't even about school or learning in the slightest and I still learned quite a bit more from it about Japanese candy then I ever learned from K-on about anything music related. I would think at least some musical activities and exposition scenes pertaining to how you go about learning musical stuff would happen even if just by accident given the premise, but a truly amazing thing about K-on is it manages to not do anything with this premise aside from use it as a way to advertise the shows supplementary CD's. Now let's bring up Love Live! School Idol Suicide Project again. Love Live is almost as much as a cliched flat line as this show, but with Love Live I can say it taught me at least a slight smidgen about being an Idol and they did sing and practice for singing quite a few times in the show, at least once an episode. So as bad as it was it at least lived up to it's limited premise more than K-on did, which was not something I was expecting considering the shows differing reputations. I can also say despite the girls fitting each cliche I noted above in terms of emotional disposition almost each one had something to bring to the group initially concerning the idol premise. Like Nico's knowledge of school idol persona's, the red haired girls song writing, that one blonde girl's dancing abilities etc. So if you take anything away from this, Nico was why Love Live needed to be made, her demon like appearance, elitism, arrogance and narcissistic personality was just enough to get me to care in a special way. She wasn't my muse from heaven Chiyo Sakura level's of inspiring but I mean who is? To get back to the real point, each one of the characters in Love Live had at least some small level of importance in the story. The problem with K-on was almost none of the girls mattered in a musical sense and more broadly they aren't defined enough to matter as individual people aside From Ritsu whose an annoying asshole and if I was her "friend," I would commence to ass whoopin real quick if I had to endure her presence for longer than five minutes. Now in a better show the characters not being cliche archetypes might come off more realistic, if the girls were amateurs just jamming in a garage and they sounded that way it could have it's own kind of charm about it. Maybe they could even get Merzbow as a feature. The problem is they don't come off amateurish, they come off professional and despite being a light rock band with instruments, they play quite a bit of pop with some mild guitar sounds in it. Everything about this is wrong and I don't like it. Again Love Live was a bad show and I didn't care for the music, but at least they were idols singing pop idol music, so it fit the premise of the show. As for the story, well I basically outlined it above with my "perfect" pitch, little music joke there Yui, maybe your writers can take notes. Aside from that long series of cliches it doesn't add anything new to the formula or warrant any close observation and analysis. If the characters didn't have different colored hair and slightly different outfits, I would forget who they are really quick. They try to go slightly different with Yui's take on the happy go lucky can-do front lady, but there are two problems with the way they try to go against type. One, they make her clumsy and stupid, these are terrible traits for a main character, unless this is a pivotal part of the story and it isn't it's used for fluff "humor" and as a substitute for giving her a real personality. One of my favorite shows growing up was Futurama and a problem with that show was Fry started out as an average guy who reacted realistically to the crazy situations he was in, but a problem with this show over time was that Fry became an extremely stupid character to supplement the fact that other characters became more interesting around him. This was the exact wrong approach to go with his character he was fine as he is being the average fish out of water guy who was the foil to the strange world of the year 3000 and more interesting characters around him. The dumber Fry got the less I cared about him and his relations to other people and subsequently the rest of the show. K-on suffers a similar disconnect. I wanna like the main character of a show, but when they're constantly shown to be useless and they react to situations in a way I wouldn't and there is nothing to be gained by this otherwise, it just serves to further and further disconnect me with what is supposed to be this shows anchor. I want to state that by contrast I don't want the show to go in the opposite direction, where Yui is a perfect person who makes nonstop rational decisions, but what I want is for there to be a balance and for me to feel like she at least sometimes isn't just a worthless annoyance in the world she inhabits. People can be understandably ignorant or inept given their characterization and lack of experience with something. The problem with Yui is that she doesn't have enough of a personality otherwise to understand why she has these faults. Someone that act's this dumb all the time if they need to exist at all which I would argue they don't, they should be relegated to being the "comic" relief and nothing else. They definitely shouldn't be the main character. Yui is just awful, when you imagined in your mind what a terrible character from these shows would be like before watching any of them you basically imagined Yui Hirasawa without knowing it. Another problem with this is like everything else in the show they don't even fully commit to her being dumb and inconsiderate enough. Almost every episode ends with them attempting some hamfisted "heart warming" moment where Yui realizes being a useless dumb ass is ok because they had "fun" or she is going to buy that guitar herself. Some of which in turn back fires because it undervalues the whole episode we just watched like with that aforementioned guitar buying episode. There is an episode in the second season where Yui and the younger twin tailed girl decide to play music for this old lady that lives next door at a talent show. The whole episode is setup like a classic I love Lucy episode where Lucy commits to doing something that is well meaning but is above her skill level and ability and she humorously fails trying to do something good for someone else. This also seems to be the case for Yui as she is trying to juggle training for this show and doing her finals. I kept expecting moments like this to happen for Yui where her faults and her supposed good aspects meet by her trying to do something good for others and her failing in humorous ways, like with this episode and despite all the comedic potential of her bombing hard on stage this never really happens. Her failures and their attempts at heartwarming moments never meet to make a fully realized character named "Yui Hirasawa." Instead she always manages by some miracle to push her worthless self through seemingly impossible odds given the setting. I would hesitate to call her a mary sue, despite her being that, but the bigger problem is that she is that in a world where every character is that. They all do everything with little effort and some slight positivity, it's like a self-help mary-su-niverse. So her dumb traits are just a mild annoyance until she faces a challenge and then despite doing nothing of value or putting in any effort she is given every consolation and win this show can throw at her. K-on you got some splainin' to do! I feel a pain in my heart, I think this show is trying to pull on it, but it's writing is too weak to play tug-o-war with my cholesterol filled veins. I would like to say these problems with characterization were limited to Yui con corn queso senpai, but all the other "characters" have a similar problem. Mio is supposed to be like the sweet, smart and quirky one, I think, to the point that she has an on campus fanclub but she only does this a lot in one or two episodes which are explicitly about pointing this out. The blonde one is supposed to be... Umm the other smart one? The imaginative one? I'm not sure what her characterization is supposed to be, she is so muddled and undefined that I find it hard to parcel out what their intentions were with this character. Ritsu probably has the most defined character in the show and that is that she is an arrogant asshole, I should probably relate but I don't. Twin Tail gets the most episodes from her perspective that aren't from Yui's, most likely because she had the hottest selling figurine or something and I think the episodes from her perspective in particular illustrate why K-on is poorly written. In season two episodes thirteen and sixteen she is the POV character for most of these episodes we see her interact alone with other members of the light music club. In a better show these interactions would be used to define both characters more either through opposition or similarity. In episode sixteen Azusa even commentates on this possibility which makes it all the more laughably bad when it doesn't happen in any of these scenes. We don't learn anything more about the girls when they have moments away from the group than when they do. This is similar to the problem I outline in my Kantei review about how new situations the characters are put in don't give us any new information about them or reveal new aspects to their personalities. After every interaction that should make them more personable and/or interesting instead we get more nothing. In Love Live I thought the characters were boring and one note in their execution, but at least I could say I understood what their one note was supposed to be. They also were able to play off each other as foils because their personalities were defined enough to show how the girls were different in the first place. Three out of five of K-ons main characters don't have a personality I can understand on a basic level or apply a common archetype to and they aren't relatable in a more complex sense either. Yui's personality is garbage and Ritsu is an extremely simplistic take on the arrogant trope. Love Live wins again. Someone might see all that and then say "Well yeah but does any of that matter?" I would immediately retort with "It depends." To get my reason for doing this entire review out of the way again, remember that I was repeatedly told two things about this show. One, that it is the bestest thing ever by a lot of people and two, that the characters feel like a real life group of friends. So these criticisms matter to me, because they tear away at both of those ideas. When I hear characters feel real in a story I assume that means a lot of things about them, but for your sake dear reader I'll condense them down to two possible options and you can imagine a mix of them in between. I can imagine that someone means by that these characters are good by the standards we usually judge characters by in a story, they are well defined, are relatable to their target audience, they have believable motives and reasons for doing things, they have believable pros & cons given their situation, they can be easily discerned from one another in ways more than looks, every character has at least one purpose for being in the story if not many for each character and they have arcs and development that make the journey we see them go on mean something. You know the things a creative writing teacher would look for aside from grammar and spelling errors. Secondly, it can mean they feel real more in a raw documentary style, personal or some experimental sense where an author or script writer is attempting to reach a new semblance of realism by either trying something new or just taking things directly from real life and trying to transcribe them in a way that makes them interesting as a story. I'm being a little bit purposefully vague with the second option because creativity should leave a gray area for people to try something new. I have already touched upon one type of example of the second option in my Totoro review. That aside, the main point of all this is K-on doesn't live up to either one. In fact it is painfully in the red in some areas as described ad nausea above. So was the story all terrible? Ok, I'll be nice end the story analysis on a semi-good note here. There were a few episodes in this show where the teachers back story and the history of the light music club was shown. Every time they showed a flashback to what her life was like and what the light music club was like back then I kept thinking "I wish I was watching that show instead." Her life and iterations of the club seemed far more interesting than the one I had to sit through and watch. I think you know a shows characters are bad when you find yourself exploring the potential possibilities of the side characters to distract yourself from whats going on with what the show actually gives you. Also they played metal, so for a second I felt my pulse again and the teachers singing wasn't bad. Maybe it was "vicarious quality" and I've just convinced myself it's good because it's sandwiched by blandness back to back, but this was probably the height of this show for me all around. The art in K-on is below average. It isn't the worst I have ever seen but it is the worst art I have seen on a show considered the best of it's genre. It is also the worst art out of any of the shows I have reviewed. Even with Kill Me Baby I can argue that it had a "style" to it so some of it's awful artistic choices at least had an excuse. K-on is bad even just amongst school club shows and all the ones I have seen have had passable to bad art. I noticed that the girls bodies and faces have this odd tendency to get scrunched up and not properly center their facial features when they have a lot of movement. Their eyes, mouth and nose recede into the center of their face in a bizarre way. Which is weird, because the problem with a lot of anime shows is the opposite where the eyes and mouth have a hard time keeping within the structure of a characters face. So you'll sometimes see these moving parts "clip" with the border of their face and sometimes just end up outside. I think this has to do with the fact that movement is sometimes grafted onto a 3D like model, but the face is still on a 2D plane so the features don't always match up or at least that would be my amateurish guess knowing zero about animation. I'm not sure at all what would cause K-on's problems, maybe it was a precursor to the "little face" memes. This show is often labelled amongst those as being about "cute girls doing cute things." Well the girls need to be cute first, which I'm about to argue they aren't and they need to do "things" which I have argued in the rest of the review they have done poorly. I hate to so blatantly quote another reviewer but when it came to K-on's art I had to keep asking a very important question "What is wrong with your FACEEEEEEEEE?" Yui and the gang must like potatoes because they look pretty mashed here. Her sister and Ritsu might have encephalitis. That blonde girl's face and hair... Don't look into her eyes, you'll get lost in her eyebrows dead lights. How can someone look at that and say "Yeah this is an acceptable bit of art for a show we want to be a hit." They all have baby Grinch syndrome too. Alright I'll stop hating on their faces but my god they were awful. Aside from their faces, there is also the problem that they all look way too young to be in the grade they're in. Every single one of the main characters looks like a toddler. Now granted I can sympathize with them a little bit here in that I too look like a gigantic toddler, but their characterization or lack thereof and their odd toddlerish looks just made this show even more excruciatingly childish. It does make me believe though that this show is intended for a much younger audience and for some reason out of touch, infantile older westerners have convinced themselves it is somehow appealing anyway. I will give the show some credit here, not for what they did, but for what they didn't do. Given the above and how the characters look extremely young even for shows like this it would be especially appalling if this show tried to do fanservice and general sexual pandering. Luckily for the sake of my mind and the good of all humanity they don't really do this, the girls wear outfits that are realistic to their situation and the furthest they ever push anything is with bathing suits and they are almost always worn in appropriate contexts. I don't know if my face has enough muscles in it to handle the cringe that would have ensued had they tried to do that with this anime and this "art style." General movement is just bad in this. When it isn't one of the few times they play music their limbs and body motion just looks off and during speedy sequences it looks disjointed. The backgrounds looked horrendous a lot of the time when they weren't in a confined space. I remember the mandatory beach episode looking particularly bad in this. I will say there was a scene in episode eight of the second season where Yui is a child in what I assume is a playground and this scene had a lot more detail and generally looked better than most of the episodes of this show. This scene was about half a minute long and it was the highlight of the show's art out of a little less than forty episodes. I want to mention something I noticed about this show and Love Live and that I started to see in a few other shows subsequently. In scenes where a lot of the girls are just lined up talking to each other or otherwise in a full group, I would find myself laughing at the way their faces looked when they were just standing there not talking, there was something humorous about it, but I couldn't quite pinpoint what at first. Then I realized that the characters faces never move when they aren't talking and their eyes don't blink. So it just makes them look like a derpy anime mannequin. This little bit of artificiality got me to notice that the girls almost never speak over each other by accident despite being a relatively large group of friends. As in conversations don't feel organic and real but rather like a cause and effect domino series of exposition. The animation on top of being bad is stiff and the characters look even more unnatural than is usual for animation. There is a huge continuity error near the end. An unbelievably important plot point where Yui stupidly cuts too much of her hair and makes her bangs look terrible and this was so important we had to spend almost five minutes of a twenty four minute episode dwelling on it. Anyway in the next episode her hair is back to the way it was before cutting it, again even though in the timeline of the show only a few days should have passed at most. Maybe some people consider this "nitpicking" at this point and I probably wouldn't have brought this up if things ended here, but what makes this mistake even worse is in the next episode they change it again and she is back to having her botched hair job. Guess what happens in the episode after that? Her hair goes back to normal. How do you make this many mistakes concerning a stupid plot point around a characters appearance you previously thought was so important it needed damn near a whole episode dedicated to it? This is one of those shows where people fawn over the voice actors, even more so than they do the actual characters. Which if that is the appeal is hearing these women and their singing voices, well than why not just like them as a musical act? Why does a lackluster show need to be made around this? Time and effort was wasted animating this show. I'm wasting time reviewing it, time I could have spent doing more important things... Like finding content for my porn Tumblr, trying Fentanyl, taking the tide pod challenge and racking up more hours on Steam. You know I jested there for a second, but I really wonder, why does a show like this need to be animated? What does a show about not so cute girls doing regular things gain by being animated especially when it is badly animated and it brings nothing interesting to the table? I think this is a fundamental question to ask about something that is animated, does it do anything or gain any value added from being animated in the first place? As bad as some of the other shows have been that I reviewed, I would argue that every single one of them before this, had a good claim for needing to be animated for one reason or another. To go back to a show I already mentioned in this review Girls Und Panzer, I can at least say it's subject matter about tankery made it's animation a necessity, despite it having the same school club structure as k-on. I can say that idol shows are already an over saturated thing in Japan, so Love Live gained something by being animated, by helping it stand out amongst a crowd and trying to pull in an anime viewing audience that might not necessarily care about idols. Nothing about k-on warranted it needing to be an animated show in fact I think it makes it harder to fawn over the voice actors when the ugly art serves to be a barrier to entry. I would rather the real life Japanese VA's just have a show about being in a light music club. I didn't really like the music, but I didn't really hate it either, it was just kind of a thing that existed. Aside from their music, I noticed one of the shows bedding tracks sounds nearly identical to the Pop Corn Song, enough to be plagiarism. What a bunch of hacks, I mean can you imagine stealing someones work in the same field as you? Anyway, I would give the track a light to decent six, TRANSI-TIONNN. As I said earlier I think the music was the wrong fit for a relaxing premise and I can tell especially in the second season, they realized how limiting the concept of a "light" music club was with the school club formula they wanted to milk with this. They really wanted more members, because more female leads equals more merchandise, but the existing cast was already useless and bland, so adding even more people would just clutter the band and the music they were pretending to make. If this had been a show about the school band, this would have given them the excuse they wanted to add more members, but nah we gotta do this light music club stuff. I waited until the end to call this show boring, because I expect people who like this show to see that as most peoples central criticism of this, but as I've shown all throughout this review, it's not just that it's "boring," it's boring because of a series of a failures emanating from it's core. The show is a paint by numbers take on the school club formula and it tries it's hardest to hit every single cliche possible within this sub genre. Even with this lazy structure laid out for them, the show still manages to underutilize it's core premise and be obstinately against doing something interesting with music. The characters don't feel real and are at best mildly less annoying than usual and at worst terrible, unfunny cliches. The main character is just moronic and unrelatable. It has a child like mindset but without the endearment and a whole lot of sappy overly sentimental attempted recreations of school life. Only with all the struggle and hardship filed away, leaving us with no strong character arcs, development or contrast for the so called relaxing moments. It's art is below average and looks horrendous on occasion, but it's biggest sin is that it doesn't make up for the lack of interesting things in every other aspect of the show. In fact it's animation is so poor it leaves me wondering why this show needed to be animated in the first place. The music is bland for it's genre and doesn't really add to my enjoyment in any way. This show is boring, but not for the reasons usually stated because "nothing happens" or "because it's too lighweight" a lot of cliche things happen and it's has plenty of girth in the whole lot of low quality writing department. I had to force myself to get through the second season, it was painful. I kept wanting to watch anything else and I found I had to slap my own hand away from going to my browser and my audio player to try to escape this. I was hoping at the end of this shit rainbow I would run into a pot of gold that justified all the terrible things I saw and all the praise this show gets. Alas there was nothing to be had, it was as bad from the first episode as it was from the last. This show is just every other school club show, but blander and with worse writing. Yui-son goku deku sensei I'm sorry, but Nico Yazawa is the better animated pop star. Say it with me "NICO NICO NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!"
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Apr 3, 2018
Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
So I have been depressed, latel- my whole life and I cant seem to stop questioning the point of everything I do on a near constant basis. On top of my own internal criticisms, externally I was sent a brilliant question on another website I review things on "Why do you write long ass reviews no one will ever read?" You know I'm not exactly sure why. On the same day I put up a 70,000 character review of something I'll see someone get a million thumbs up for reviewing the same thing but saying "All I hav 2 say es i luved it <3<3<3."
...
In fact go ahead and copy and paste that as a review to something you luved. I would like to say it is easy to take things like this in stride and just move on to the next thing I want to talk about, but on some fundamental level it does hurt at least a little. I mean my great intellectual peers on these websites, wont recognize my utter brilliance for what it is. I don't really know what to do in this situation, but I'm really good at one thing in life and that is hating myself. So to give into my masochistic ways, why not write a few more really long reviews no one will read, before I find that rope that is just strong enough to hold my body weight again? Yeah, lets turn pain into mild inspiration here, I actually think it's interesting to hear other peoples reasons for and general philosophy on reviewing something. To illustrate my own, I have decided to review the last anime I watched and explain how I see something while reviewing it and explaining what I think the importance of reviewing something is along the way.
So the last anime I watched was Monthly Girls Nozaki-Kun (MGNK) and it is a show about a girl named Chiyo Sakura who has a crush on a young Shojo manga writer. The show is loosely about her comedic attempts at romance with him and explaining what goes into making a romance manga. So for the structure of this review about reviews we will be starting with what I consider the most basic forms of reviewing something and moving onto what I think are "higher" forms of reviewing something. Most people here and most sites like this want to review something because "One Piece was like totally my favorite show as a kid XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD. I used to drink Capri Sun and piss my pants while watching it 10/10." Or they do the exact opposite "One Piece was the show that made me realize anime was bad. I used to drink Capri Sun and piss my pants angrily while watching it. 1/10." Basically people want to give their bald unvarnished opinions on something without really analyzing anything, it's just the catharsis of other people knowing your joy and pain. I can understand this type of review even if I don't like it. The whole point of communication is communicating emotional and practical needs, so there is a place for this type of review and there is a purpose. Thinking of these websites as a way to find new things to watch we cant really take these reviews as critical masterpieces but as a general nebulous cloud of positivity or negativity surrounding a piece of media we can gauge a consensus around something when a lot of reviews like this reflect a general sentiment in the extreme positive or negative. If I look at a show and 75% of it's "reviews" are generally one sentence saying "it sucks" you might think you're above such trite evaluations, but you aren't. People are swayed by consensus even when they think they aren't, in fact the small mental pangs those reviews give are probably more important than any amount of lengthy criticism I or someone else can muster. So I guess in a way they do deserve those thumbs up and I deserve a thumb up my a- If I was to give my own blunt one sentence review it would be: TL;DR: All I hav 2 say es i nuanced it :^) :^( :^) Let's say for some reason despite knowing the above and knowing that your magnificent words and brilliant thoughts will never amount to even one declarative like or dislike and yet you still wanted to actually evaluate something because like me you have all the time in the world and no rouge haired vixens to spend it with. Well I guess I have some advice for delinquents that still wish to waste their time and their youth away writing these. The actual analysis should be the brain of your review and you should aim to have a critical take on something that is actually interesting and not just the same blunt emotional opinions about something everyone has. This is another reason why I can almost respect those one line reviews, if a person thinks something is just great than say that bluntly real quick and move on, if you think something is terrible do the same. We don't need to be told something over and over in the same way a million times, so brevity in this situation is actually welcome. The depth of your analysis depends on what it is you're aiming to do with a review and most of the rest of my review here is dedicated to exploring various depths I think you can reach. So more on that to come. The main thing you should take away from this is have something interesting to say but don't do it in a long review, you know like my long ass reviews. Most writing even non-fictional writing aims to have emotional elements, that makes what you're trying to get across more palatable to the dumb masses, I mean my dear readers. I like to make the thing I feel the most emotional about either in the positive or the negative the center of gravity for a review. If the analysis is the brain, the thing you feel the most strongly about should be the pulsating beating heart of the review. The emotional framework by which the other elements fill in. MGNK didn't have a lot of elements that stood out to me in this way except... The cutest most adorable protagonist I have seen in a show ever. I mean it was love at first sight. It's like someone took Asuka and said "I'll make an even cuter version" and the absolute madman actually did it somehow. Her cuteness in fact breaks the show, because I find it hard to believe the boring as -redacted- guy she wanted to go out with didn't like her back and was aloof to her attempts to go out with him. In fact it's hard for me to believe most men and women wouldn't immediately see Chiyo and start formulating wedding plans and imagining a long happy life together the second they see her for the first time. I mean the guy she likes isn't the worst but one question just kept coming up in my head as I watched this... IS SHE REALLY GOING OUT WITH HIM? IS SHE REALLY GONNA MAKE ME CRY? IS SHE REALLY GOING OUT WITH HIM? IS SHE REALLY GONNA PEN MEDIOCRE MANGA WITH HIM TONIGHT? IS SHE REALLY GOING OUT WITH HIM? IF THINE EYES DONT DECIEVETH ME THERE MUST BE SOMETHING WRONG AROUND HERE... Well this serves as an example of what I mean, you take an element you like or dislike a little bit more than the rest and you then seed the rest of the review with references to this as an ongoing joke and an easier way to make transitions. Yeah it was all just a joke. I don't really want Chiyo that much, crushes and anime are for kids. *Forced laughter, as he wipes away tears.* I'm sure that manga writer with bland looks and a puddle deep personality deserves someone as wonderful as Chiyo Sakura. You know what, it hurts too much lets just move on. So you can have emotional elements to a review but you don't want it bogged down with a bunch of bizarre hit or miss humor that only a few weirdos will find funny or possibly just you. I haven't learned this lesson myself yet. I need to get down with the memes and the lingo of the kids today and try to up my social networking presence with some fly one liners. To start do people still say the word "fly?" The point of most reviews that go beyond one sentence or a paragraph on the internet and in general is to evaluate something as a product. So back to MGNK the last anime I watched, I could at the very least say, it was a romantic comedy centered around a girl who likes a guy who makes manga. Well it had romance, it had comedy and it showed to some extent what a manga creator thinks about and does as a job. It focused on the two main characters just enough and it properly used the supporting cast as foil's to the main. So I guess just as a product doing what I think it's trying to aim for it does it pretty well and it doesn't fall into too many cliches and overused plot arcs on the way. I guess that is a success to some extent. Three out of four of things I have reviewed so far on this site don't really meet this level of "success" as I see it, they aimed for something and they missed the mark by quite a bit. I think this is kind of the lowest level of reviewing something professionally, just evaluating it on what it "tried" to do. If I was reviewing or analyzing things in this way I probably would get bored pretty fast, because 97/100 shows, games, films, etc in each genre are relatively the same and most meet or come close to the low bar of criteria they set for themselves. So there is only so much you can say about them in this way before you burn yourself out. I think you will find that most "paid" reviewers review things this way because it is rather easy to be charitable given this limited criteria. Well "X" met it's mark so go out and buy it and or view it for advertising/subscription dollars on CRUNCHY ROLL, LINK IN THE DESCRIPTION. Don't forget to like us on Facebook, Twitter, Pornhub and use my Amazon link when you make a purchase. Even the ones that have a pretense of calling their stuff an essay/video essay because the old format of selling things to people who haven't realized Disney owns every reviewer through maker studios doesn't seem as kuth anymore. In fact my house just got bought by a subsidiary of a holding company that is owned by another holding company that is owned by an advertising firm that is owned by Disney so I only have about fifty more minutes to write this review before I'm evicted and thrown out. I wont be having fun in the lukewarm southern California sun and that is assuming I spend that time finishing this review. I mean there are other things to look at on the internet that I can do some short activities with... Not too short mind you. What's the length in time of Chiyo's skirt? That came out wrong... You know what forget it, I'll just finish this review. You definitely want to hide the fact that you're a marketer in a review, don't make it too transparent that you're covertly working for a company while pretending to be critical of them. Be critical of one small incidental piece of the thing in question so you can pull one over on us and pretend you're really evaluating it. For instance, I needed to get some weird stains off my wall next to where I keep my Chiyo shrine and Bioclean got those stains right out. The only problem was it contained a chemical that was toxic to puppies and now I don't have any friends. Aside from that though it was a top product I can highly recommend. Link below, to the side and up above. To get some of the more mundane product like aspects of my own review out of the way I have to say I really like the art of this show. There is an almost "crispness" to it compared to other show's I have seen. Everything is nicely outlined and detailed and there is a vibrant use of colors. I really didn't expect to see this much detail and visual flair in a show like this either, because most of the anime romance & comedy shows I have seen so far have terrible or just standard art. All of the character's in this look distinct and have a nice style to them that still manages to keep with the show's realistic modern setting. Well the main male lead is kind of boring looking... But I might think that for reasons not related to the art that I already mentioned. On that subject again let me just state bluntly that Chiyo's hair looks amazing. Her hair shines like a radiant sun in my clear grey skies. I mean it's almost a more important character on it's own than a lot of the actual people are. There is an absolutely beautiful scene in this show with rain and some blue flowers and the environment contrasts radiantly with Chiyo's color scheme. I think they spent half their budget and time animating this one scene. They knew this was going to be "it" the one nerd's were going to remember them for and they were right. This scene deserves a short film award and possibly an Oscar for best non-verbal use of a waifu in a comedy. The voice acting and sound were "good." Yeah as I've said before I'm not the best at evaluating the audio aspects of a show. A reviewer should probably know more than the average person watching something. In part because it justifies your opinion being heard over others but also because it is just good to have more knowledge and broader frame of reference in which evaluate something. I clearly know nothing about anime voice actors and yet here I am arrogantly reviewing this show as if my opinion matters in the slightest. Just call me a spaceman because I want to crash land into planet Zettai Ryouiki while Chiyo's voice actor gives me messages from ground control. So the second level is evaluating something against other things of type/genre and what it says about anime as a whole. Well as a work place slice of life, it's inferior to stuff like Shirobako and New Game! that more properly represent what it's like to be in the anime and game business respectively more than MGNK manages to show us about Manga creation. I'm not sure it does a lot more than the one episode of Golden Boy where he is an Anime creator does and Golden Boy was a softcore porn comedy. As a romance it fairs slightly worse. To it's credit it manages to navigate around the obvious pitfalls and it leaves the viewer wanting slightly more by Spoiler: not having any of the characters get together at the end. But for reasons I'll explain later in more detail the main characters lacked chemistry and real romantic inclinations. It manages to be pretty funny and milk the obvious humor you expect it to for most shows of it's genre, which is not something I can say for every romantic comedy. Again I don't think any of the previously mentioned three things I reviewed before this fared as well against the rocky edges of other shows in their genres. In fact I think they compared rather poorly to most other shows in their genre or in Ergo's case that were attempting similar things thematically. So why does it matter if something isn't as good as other shows like it or shows of it's genre? Well to be blunt in a broad sense it doesn't matter. From the perspective of someone who doesn't care about anime at all, these comparisons are like farts in a heavy wind. On the other hand if you do like anime, the point of criticisms like this is to evaluate whether something is worth your time and appreciation in comparisons to works that already did things much better or worse. We cant evaluate things in a vacuum and there isn't some standard of measure to appeal to, so the best thing a critic can do to show their expertise and show why something is wrong or right is comparing it to other things like it. Now watch as I use something that isn't an anime as an example to stun and confuse the audience and then hopefully catch them off guard with a comeuppance towards a relevant point. There was a movie staring Don Cheadle called Miles Ahead (2015). In this film Don was playing Mile's Davis, probably the most famous Jazz Musician ever. This was an acting part he had wanted most of his life and I could see why. He looks like him and to his credit his acting in the film was an almost immaculate recreation of the real Miles Davis. The reason I'm bringing up this film in particular in a seemingly totally unrelated review about an anime that isn't at all about Jazz music is that I was eagerly awaiting this film and in that eagerness I had some expectations about what this film would entail. You see Mile's Davis music is very complex and experimental and in the hands of a good film director editing and camera techniques can be used to abstractly represent his music while simultaneously relating it to Mile's complicated life and personality. You can use his odd time structures and improvisation to great effect in going balls out wild with your own film making techniques... Only that didn't really happen in this to my grave disappointment. The movie was filmed and edited in a pretty standard way. Certain media subjects like this come almost prepackaged with certain expectations regarding the content I will now attempt to explain why. As someone who has read and watched a lot of critics of varying level's of merit, there is one almost universal truth about media criticism and that is that one of the things that makes something a masterpiece is something commentating on it's own media or in the case of the MGNK anime something commentating on a related media. (To be fair, it was a manga to begin with.) So let's say I make a movie about making movies like 8 1/2, Ed Wood or F for Fake, well what you might do like these films did is show why the medium of film is both important and as it is the way of making a film is analogous to life itself and what these things mean in a broader sense. You can use camera techniques, editing, acting set design and special effects to bring attention to the things about film that make it a film and not reality. Most of the fiction we consider groundbreaking for a medium does something like this with it's said medium, the most important literature is generally about writing itself and how this new work aims to transcend everything about it up to this point. Even as a relatively younger medium we're starting to see a similar pattern with video games, the games that are seen as the most important are the ones that manage to take the tropes of earlier games and ideas and use them to transcend into something new while commentating on the media as a whole. The majority of people don't give two damns and a fudge about any of this, they just want the same tropey slop thrown in their face because they like when lights move on a screen like people chained up in Plato's Cave, but critics and people who have seen more than the average amount of crap most people see, tend to appreciate these aspect's of a work because it play's into that type of media they like and because it uses the media as a way of reaffirming that media's importance and by extension those critics lives. It also take's a connoisseurs eye to notice these things and it plays into a form of elitism and special understanding when you can spot the minute small differences that deem something a masterpiece or mundane. It would be hard to spot these thing's if they didn't relate to the media itself and their area of expertise. So hence a culture of criticism naturally gravitates positively towards work's pertaining to what the critics are criticizing in the first place. While this is definitely true of things within a media like what Shirobako is to anime. I would also add this expectation to things that are related to the same media or that can be utilized in creative ways being transplanted from another media, like Miles Ahead was from music to films and what I was thinking MGNK could be for manga to anime. Luckily for me this show... Disappointed on this front in almost every way imaginable. So as a pretentious reviewer of very little merit, what I expect out of a show like MGNK is some moment's where the nature of manga and it's creation are used to bring attention to their own medium in a way that a more conventional manga and anime, such as the one's they're talking about creating would not. Similar to the expectation I had with Miles Ahead. I also expect this to reflect on the characters lives in some way and relate a manga's creation to a person's life and have a profound statement to make with this. MGNK manages to avoid doing this to a point that it almost seems to be intentionally trying to avoid going in a direction that might make it's use of it's own premise seem interesting. I could imagine using the format of manga as a way of making unique choices regarding editing, transitions and artistic choices with this anime, they don't really attempt anything like this. The only time they even hint at something like this is in the ending and opening credits. I can see using the manga they're writing within the story as an analogous narrative to the story being told in the anime itself and there are points in the anime where this is done to small comedic effect, but I think it could be done to say more important thing's than a one off joke or implication that certain characters might like each other. The point is all of these aspects that are basically begging to be used for something more are just wasted in this show. Chiyo and Miles clearly deserved better. Love is a universal subject and it's the type of subject that has an instant appeal to most audiences. When you're aiming for money, fame or electoral power the more universal and seamless you can make the product seem the more of each you will seemingly get. The problem is other people have realized this and the world is filled with silly love songs and films aiming for a universal mass market appeal. That is why ironically they have to appeal to particularity now to standout amongst the crowd of attempted universals. Why isn't this just a show about a girl who falls in love with a young guy? Because we have seen that before a lot in anime and everywhere else. Why isn't this a show about a guy who just creates manga? Because we have also seen that and also male characters don't sell merchandise. So we have these two mixed premises making manga and young people falling in love. Do these two necessarily make for a good combination? Well if you're asking me, I think it's horrible that she would like that smelly bastard, but if you mean what is my opinion of the story, well I can imagine this combination working, but I don't think it did here. The problem is the love elements felt tacked on in comparison to the information and laser focus on manga creation and despite them trying these two never feel enough like a couple to be convincing. In fact I think the secondary characters Yuu and Hori seemed more like a couple I wanted to root for. I think part of the problem was the third element in the mix "the comedy" while well executed for it's own sake nerfed a lot of the moments that should have been more quiet, romantic and emotional. At least part of this shows running time should have been at least a little dedicated to making me want to see these two get together in the end, but I never really cared about that outcome one way or the other and it certainly didn't help that I thought Chiyo deserved a million times better. I mean I'm a complete loser and I've lived out more romantic scenes in my life with members of the opposite sex than what this show showed. I've managed to see a few anime in my experience that are much worse and much better at romance than this. Like I said earlier I like that it avoids obvious cliches. While we're on that subject though, you know there is one cliche in particular I just have to ask about regarding anime and romance. Why do so many of them have a part right near the end where usually the female love interest runs away for absolutely no reason? Where did this terrible cliche start and why do the makers of these shows think anyone will be convinced they're actually going to go through with this and not have the couple get together? This dumb bit of plot has happened in so many romance anime I've seen so far that I instinctively fast forward through a show when this starts to happen. I think it was the absolute worst in Love Hina but that was only because everything about that show was terrible. I'm assuming that show also might be the source of a lot of bad cliches as it seems to be the route and root from which all evil comes regarding Japanese animation. If you see the DVD in stores grab it and flush it down the nearest toilet and don't stop pressing the button until either the toilet breaks or the police come. Luckily this cliche didn't happen in MGNK and I give it some extra credit for that. The problem is in the absence of obvious cliches and overused plots, MGNK doesn't really give us anything else to cling onto regarding the romance. One of the jokes I thought was funny more by implication than with execution was that a guy who writes romantic manga isn't very romantic and has a hard time seeing the forest from the trees, when it comes to romance in his own life. This was hinted at here and there in the show, but I think a lot more can be done with this comedic premise than was done here. I really like characters that are hypocritical at their core, I wanted to write a book about a vegan butcher. There wasn't a lot of humor in the show, which was kind of weird for a romantic comedy but when they did aim to be humorous I was always laughing with the show, which is something I can say in it's favor. It's humor was simplistic but effective. I just think that like the other two premises this was woefully underutilized and it actively hurt some of the romance as stated before. The manga creation elements were interesting as factoids and as a behind the scenes look at how they get created was interesting in an educational way. I genuinely don't know much about the creation of manga or even anything related like western comics or animation so I cant say how accurate it was. I think the earlier failures I mentioned with this show and it's lack of creativity in use of the subject matter here hurt the manga creation sections the most in that we mostly see the characters physically making the manga and then maybe a cut or two to what the semi-finished or finished results are. Where as they could have found more creative ways in editing and animation to better illustrate illustration. The jokes about the cliche nature of the manga may have been a bit funnier if the characters in the world of the show didn't seem just as hollow in other ways. So the manga sections didn't really add anything aside from some slight facts, but it also didn't detract much. All media and art is a mirrored reflection of the people who make it and the society around them. With that in mind, I actually think reviewing a thing for it's own sake as counter intuitive as it may seem is actually the least important part of a review or a piece of criticism. As I showed with the first level of reviewing most people can evaluate rather easily if something lived up to it's own potential or not and this type of reviewing can be done by basically anyone and unless you care about the reviewers emotional responses and ability to spot minor infractions in a piece of media like they're a factory worker looking for defects on a consumer product, there isn't much gained from this type of criticism. On the second level most people who are into something enough to care what a critic has to say need to have enough knowledge to know whether their comparisons between things in a media and broader medias actually pan out, making the critic a redundant interlocutor in your own internal monologue. As in the critic is only as good as your own knowledge on the subject. So the third level encompasses the previous two, but it also starts to turn it's attention away from the particular piece of media in questions and starts to use it as a way to use a particular piece of media as a lens towards asking broader questions. Bigger questions about life, society, yourself and all that nonsense. So what's really important is what the piece of media in question can say about humanity in general and how you can use examining that to show how this reflects positively or negatively on us. Usually I think most people would stop at this, I mean what more can you milk out of something and still realistically be reviewing it while also trying to ask bigger questions with it? MGNK doesn't really say a whole lot that can easily lend itself to larger questions about life. I guess that people really want to see the same types of stories and comedic situations shown over and over again ad nauseum, because the majority of our history has been oral story telling so we are preconditioned for wanting to hear the same things over and over again. I mean at least in this case this show and manga were worth making because Chiyo needed to be birthed into existence to save me from my mundane life of boredom and sadness. In other words it's worth it because of cute girls, Miyazaki was right anime and reality are a mistake. Seriously though, why did some Japanese miscreant go and create MGNK? Was it because there is a non-stop need for Manga to be penned so the rights can be bought by an animation studio, that then goes and makes a show out of it with the cheapest animation techniques, using non-union labor so that they can then sell merchandise of these characters? Probably. I would like to think an angel like Chiyo was created with only the best of artistic intentions in mind, but I have to be honest with myself for a second, she was probably made to appeal to some loser like me so I would buy her figurines and Dakimakura and believe me I will -I did. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here to make a point, about how there is not a point to reviewing a show like this. I'll remember Chiyo and some of the good art in this show, but aside from that in about three years time I wont remember anything else about this show. I can say the same for the majority of things it's possible to review. I like to see things as an "argument" in part because of my previously mentioned philosophical background and because I debated people for aeons on the internet and probably wasted more of my life doing that than I can ever care to admit. There is a symmetry between types of communication lies, stories, arguments and basic conversations and the more you get critical about them the more you realize what makes them believable and interesting is usually the same emotional appeals and buildups that slowly ramp up to an actual point. In Plato's Republic Socrates makes a point about how people from certain trades come to view the entire world through the lens of their occupation. A plumber sees life in metaphors of plumbing. A brick layer relates everything to laying bricks. If this is true for these professions then I suggest it is also true for critics. I've come to the point where I see peoples personalities in a similar vein, they're lists of likes and dislikes and packets of unrelated information to be evaluated and judged like any other declarative statement and so is the media we tie to these things. Well like most art, most people aren't that interesting or even worthy of an evaluation. If each human had a back cover synopsis I would suggest skipping to that. Instead of wasting time reading the bland filler and the cliche arcs in the middle. I said earlier art was a mirrored reflection of humanity and I was saying that in a partial sarcastic jest because while that is true, I don't assume the good things people usually say when they say something grandiose like that. Especially in the case of MGNK it reflects our own averagness back at us. Our want for the typical things in life, that we all supposedly want, laffs and romance. There is a lot of art, but only a smidgen of it in the extreme positive or negative is really worth pondering about for more than a few seconds. This is not one of those, I'm just sorry. *Clenches teeth tightly as tears roll down face in a steady stream and the wind blows against his poorly animated hair.* I think most fundamentally when reviewing something you have to ask what it is you as a reviewer bring to the table. The thing you're reviewing already exists, other peoples ability to evaluate it does as well. So what specifically can you bring to analyzing this that makes your opinion worth a damn in the first place? Are you particularly good at analysis? Do you know a lot about the subject? Do you have a history with it? Does it have a special place in you life in the positive or the negative? Can your analysis shed new light on a work previously thought to be totally uninteresting? Do you have some kind of writing talent or charisma that can make up for the lack of other qualities? In my case it's obviously my good looks and my humble nature, but you have to consider what you bring to something before wasting people's precious time. I think this is the way a critic is most like the artist whose work they're criticizing in the first place. It all comes down to trying to make something that will be entertaining, currently relevant and meaningfully timeless and not just something that is forgotten in a few days or possibly worse derided and criticized in turn. We hope our creations and analysis are helpful and that they help people appreciate things on a deeper level than they did before. To expect greater things and push forward a media in a way that would seem too smart for audiences of a previous generation... Who am I kidding, I cant even live up to my own advice. I have nothing interesting to say about this show. Where is that damn rope? Reviewers are subject to their own cliches, bland argumentative arcs and a propensity towards the over dramatic in heightening their own importance. I've never been fond of the "emperor has no clothes" analogies myself. In part because I love empress dowager Chiyo the sixty-ninth ruler of sunrise land and this review is in fact both my oath of fealty to her name and her house and my declaration of courtly love to her and I will not have lowly rabble besmirching her honor. I also don't like it because it encapsulates all the pitfalls a bad reviewer can fall into. It's easy to fall into the extremes when reviewing something "this is best thing ever" and it's inverse are thing's you should shy away from as quickly as you can when you realize you want to evaluate something. People hate nuance and I'm going to rail against some of what I see as false moderacy in a minute, but when reviewing something you should aim for nuance as much as possible concerning your own emotions and peoples tendency to over rely on them when describing the appeal or lack thereof something. "The emperor has no clothes" line is often stated as an extremely emotional declarative statement and usually isn't warranted anyway. A lot of reviewers also fall into the want to come off as universal. They're a cultivated and molded product from external criticism as much as the thing they're reviewing is. In part because a lot of reviewers are marketers in hiding and they don't want to scare away possible ad revenue and a consumer base by showing any of their "gross" particularities that might scare you away. Notice when you watch some famous internet reviewers how hard they try to come off as "moderates" politically and how contrived this stance is when you think about it for even a millisecond. How many refuse to discuss any issues that are minorly uncomfortable? You might say "well is it their responsibility to discuss these things?" I would say it depends on what they're reviewing. I'm not suggesting people shoehorn a political stance in like I haphazardly inserted reviewing into this review about a random anime show. If they're reviewing Biocream for instance, unless they have evidence that the people making it are dumping chemicals in a near by lake I think they can stick to the script and just regurgitate what the company told them to say. In media criticism though, I do think it's a reviewers responsibility to discuss and not shy away from topics that are politically charged when it is inherent in what they're reviewing. Anything else is cowardice and advertising. If there is anything I'm sick of in this regard it's reviewers constantly trying to find a "middle ground" on something whenever they do bring up a political or societal issue. There isn't two sides to the truth, faux perspectivism and pretend neutrality can only take us so far on the most important issues of the day. Luckily for me this show doesn't bring up anything of social relevance. I would be in some real hot water with the two people who end up reading this if I had to reveal my political stances on anything. Chiyo likes artistic dreamers, I think my stances would be cool with her and that is all that matters in the end. Wow, you can say my review lacks the substance I opine for in other peoples criticisms, I'm hypocritical and moronic or you can say regarding my review "The emperor has no clothes." Who will criticize the critics? If only there was a critic of critics, who could come and critique my criticisms in a critical way. I'm going to invent my own god, a golden calf with Chiyo's face on it called the uncriticized criticizer. This being will be the bedrock of all critiques and the source from which all good criticisms will come. Like Chiyo it will be a flawless package of arguments immaculate in it's own creation, so it will have no need for internal criticism and it will swat away your weak observations and thoughts before you even utter them. Pray to theeee. Despite my bashing of it, I've come to the point where I actually enjoy criticisms and reviews of things more than the actual work itself a lot of the time. I'm sure a lot of people have had this thought, but maybe not. I'm a hermetically sealed, mint in the box NEET whose only contact with the human race is these shows and video games at this point. So I'm probably completely off base here. Which is why I want to be a super Saiyan review master, but alas I can only be Hercule in my own sad story. I guess that's why I do these reviews though, it's fun and self indulgent or something like that. Well now that I have criticized literally all of humanity and most of it's art and my fellow critics it's time to turn the critical lens inward. I critique therefore I ain't. If I could analyze myself and get over my own short comings I probably wouldn't be writing this review at six AM on a Wednesday... Well I guess since I asked why someone would create this it's only fair I ask a similar question of myself. "Why did I watch this?" Well in all honesty I saw a picture of Chiyo, reverse image searched it faster than you have done anything in your life and I found out it was a comedy about Manga creation. I've liked some show's with a similar premise and wallah, I watched it. I don't think this show was particularly worth reviewing and really I could place any show in this shows place in this review. It wasn't bad, it wasn't good, it was just a painfully average experience and if I didn't have the review about reviews conceit going on here, I doubt I would have a whole lot interesting to say about it and I may have even failed with all that additional effort. This is another way in which the critic is like an artist at the end of it all, we release what we create out in the wild and just like an artist we are only as influential and as important as our audience allow us to be. I expect a reach of two people or less and a possible gold star and veggie tendies from my mom after all this effort. If only Chiyo wanted to help some loser write his reviews instead of wanting to help a respectable and successful young manga artist. I mean there is also the whole her being a fictional character thing, but I can get over her small faults. You know what, I'm gonna make my own piece of art about a reviewer who is aloof, self important and lacks self awareness. I'll inflate his self importance to a level never seen. I'll just steal Chiyo whole sale and put her in my work, yeah I'll just take her and the anime shes in and shoehorn the whole damn thing whole sale into some random piece of work I'm making that is only slightly related to what I'm talking about. I doubt anyone will notice I mean, they come to super brilliant critics like us to tell them what to think anyway so I'll just write a review justifying how awesome it is later. Yeah... I'm not talented enough to do that. So until then, I guess you can have whatever this is instead. So my review clearly lacked brevity. Was overly prone to the emotional. I didn't bring any special knowledge about the show, it's creators or anime in general. I don't bring any kind of special knowledge or charisma of any kind to the table. It wasn't funny except possibly unintentionally and I can't live up to my own standards. If I reviewed my review I would give it a score lower than is currently possible on this website and this review is a reflection of me as a reviewer... On that note, thanks for reading. The show was medium out of well cooked and my neck is about to look raw, peace out... Actually my fifty minutes is up, Disney owns that rope now.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 3, 2018
Tonari no Totoro
(Anime)
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There are some spoilers, reader discretion is advised.
I was wondering what my first positive review on this site would be and I intended it to be something else but I think that review will be more complicated than I initially planned so I was kind of in a rut and then it hit me, maybe the first review where I'm not just needlessly ripping something apart or going off on tangents no one cares about could be a review of the first thing in anime I ever loved, My Neighbor Totoro. So for this review I need to take you back to the past... ... Not to play games of low quality that intake fecal matter straight from the source, but to properly set the stage of what it was like back in the day when this film came out. I need you to step in this time machine with me and we will be all set. So go on ahead and step in. *Points to what appears to be an old wooden tool shed.* I'm telling you from the bottom of my heart this isn't just an excuse to be locked in an old tool shed with a creep like me, but I am going to need you to strip naked and I need to place this cloth with chloroform over your mouth once we're inside... This is how time travel works in this universe ok? Wait, where are you going? GOD DAMNNIT just get in the damn shed. * some punches are thrown as we roll around in the well animated Studio Ghibli foilage.* Alright, now that you're all tied up and strapped in, just let me set the destination in my mind and we're off. So anyway our destination should be about 1994. I think that was the day the magic happened and I first saw this film. So in all seriousness I tried to think back to when I watched this and I had one specific question in mind when was I consciously aware that "anime" existed? I think the first time I knew a cartoon was made else where was with Speed Racer and Gigantor, they were showing reruns of both on MTV or a nickelodeon for a while and my dad told me they were old even for him, Japanese shows he would watch back in the day, but I never heard anyone refer to this as "anime." I remember Sailor Moon being big in my childhood but again with this show I wasn't even aware it is Japanese, I mean it looks just enough like other shows from that era that were made in the US so unless you went looking it was hard to know it had a different place of origin than say Jem and the Holograms or Thundercats. I've heard the argument that Pokemon is what brought the word "anime" to mainstream popular consciousness finally, but I honestly don't remember anyone calling that show anything other than a cartoon either. In fact I know a lot of people back then and now who probably wouldn't consider it an anime even with it's place of origin being known. Also because it features delicious hamburgers and donuts, so it is clearly American, despite Nintendo trying to trick us with their dark Oni sorcery. I think the first time I personally heard the word anime uttered and consciously knew there was a culture around it was with Dragon Ball Z. I think it was definitely this that broke the barriers for me because I remember knowing people who had to go out of their way to import the original Japanese voice versions. I don't think I knew about DBZ until about 1996 and for some reason I used the time machine to go back to 1994. Oh yeah because this review is about the film Totoro. I mention all the above to say that the first time I ever heard the word "anime" when one of those same friends was trying to explain the appeal of Dragon Ball Z, he was at a loss in doing so so he started listing stuff he thought I might know in relation to anime and then he popped off the title "My Neighbor Totoro" and this was the first time I had ever heard anyone else mention this title in my small town. It's kind of funny in hindsight to think back to this and how now it seems like with the internet people know everything about anything. I think "cult classic" might be an outdated term in that regard as very little is truly left to obscurity or goes by the wayside anymore but I was genuinely shocked at the time to know anyone else had seen this film. Wanting to learn more about the film through him I got a cascade of knowledge dropped on me about Japanese animation at the time. This story and that friend ended up taking a bizarre turn for the worse, but that might be a tale for another day. Suffice to say that without my initial interest in Totoro I'm not sure I would give any damn's about anime at all. Needless to say it was an important film for my childhood and my life more broadly. Anyway, we seem to have reached our destination. So on that magical day in 1994 my mom had went out to rent some movies. I think my sister who is five years younger than me asked her to rent a Disney movie and I always asked for a video game. So my mom came back with just one movie and it was a strange title I had never heard of before obviously called My Neighbor Totoro. My mom explained that they didn't have the game I wanted to rent and the Disney movie my sister wanted was out of stock. The lady who owned are local rental store was Asian and she suggested to my mother that kids should give this movie a chance as it's really good, but nobody is renting it. I wasn't quite convinced but we put it on any way and Totoro was a very strange experience for someone who had only seen standard films and western cartoons for the most part up to that point. I might as well have been viewing an alien artifact. I think without even knowing the word anime as explained above I knew even then this was something distinctly different from anything I had seen before. I think it's hard for younger people to understand this because the world is so much more interconnected now, but back then this movie's foreignness was extremely apparent and I had nothing to really compare it to or try to make sense out of it. I remember my dad telling us it was "obviously" Japanese, but I'm not sure what was so obvious about that as my understanding of Japanese culture was about zero at the time and I think this was true for a lot of American's back then. Despite it's strangeness me and my sister did really like this movie and we proceeded to watch it again and then another rewatch and then another... By the time the rental period was over in a three day period we had watched this movie about ten times. This seems especially strange to me now because aside from the neighborly "creatures" in this movie and one mildly adventurous jaunt at the start of the film not much happens in this that seems like it should be especially exciting for kids or at least it seems that way now from the vantage point of viewing it as an adult. After these viewings, this film became a staple part of our childhood we rented it a few more times and the phrase "Next stop: little sister" became an in joke between us and there was a lot of singing of the theme song to be had. I'm sure nobody into Anime knows the name Hayao Miyazaki. Him and his work seem to be rather obscure. Despite what I said about the internet before I have been having trouble finding information about him for this review. I mean did he make other film's than this? I would like to think a chap this talented could get more work and some recognition at a place like this. Ok, so obviously I'm joking, he is one of the few people in anime that is so successful his name has become well known even to people not the slightest bit into Japanese scribbles. Is this reputation deserved or is he secretly a hack that we should all snidely call "overrated?" Well as I have said in other reviews here my understanding of anime is a little more limited than I would like it to be, so my points for comparison are also limited, but I do know about writing and films more generally so in the margins of these things I can see where some of his reputation for excellence is deserved. You know the phrase "slice of life" has now been tied to anime that are basically generic teen soap operas about young girls doing cliche anime things. Where as I think certain Miyazaki film's like Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and Porco Rosso come closer to what I would consider to be an actual look at a slice of someone's life. There is a great subtly to Miyazaki films concerning character emotions and the realism of the way people act. There seems to be very little done for "dramatic effect" in a lot of his film's, as in engineering contrived situations to try and make us feel something emotionally we wouldn't otherwise. It's like he found a person to focus the camera on and just followed them around for a few days... Except you know it's animated. Which makes it more impressive in the sense that he still manages to capture a realistic muted tone in these films and yet it also is a bit of a crutch in that in the absence of creating dramatic situations he has opted to create the situation whole cloth with animation. I'm also not sure a lot of his film's even have a defined arc or "point" aside from seeing what these people's lives are like for a little while. Even when his stories have magical elements like these Totoro creatures or witches in Kiki's Delivery Service, it's not so we can then learn why witches exist and get told from a fish out of water main character why these things need to exist, but rather the world just takes the existence of these things for granted and we see a realistic take on what life would be like with these elements added in. This is a very unique way of writing in films and I can only really think of one somewhat belabored point of comparison and that is his fellow Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. I think in both of their cases where their brilliance shines through the most is when they capture the extreme subtly and realism of every day life and make us notice things we wouldn't about it in a more standard dramatic story. One of the reasons why this is a unique way of writing is that it is very hard to write this way and still be interesting to an audience. An obvious criticism someone can have about this and one people even here have is that "What is the point of something like this?" I can see and understand why someone would find this type of story boring. It's not always for me either and I'm not always in the mood for these films. When most people go to write their own journals or they even just describe their lives orally to other people even then they tend to do so in a way that dramatizes and exaggerates the events in the hopes that this will make their lives seem more interesting, so it's not a big surprise that so much of writing even the best stuff is about over dramatizing the mundane, rather than focusing on the mundane and trying to find something interestingly about it naturally as these two directors do. This is also why it isn't a big surprise to me that some people don't like this. I can really appreciate this subtly though and each one of Miyazaki's films has caught me off guard at different times in my life when I see a scene he has done from a completely different perspective then I have had before, either because of new knowledge or from a new experience and I think a lot of it has to do with this slow burn realistic take on characters and plot structure. Again, I think the importance of this type of realism is to hold up a mirror to our lives and show us the things we wouldn't see otherwise and the fact that most films don't use this format just emphasizes it's nature as a mirror in comparison to other films. This is why I would partially disagree with people whose main interpretation of this movie it is just to capture the magic of childhood. If it was merely about that I doubt it would focus so heavily on the mom's illness and the little sister running away near the end. I think it's about the good and bad aspects of the limited viewpoint of a child. How the fun stuff is even more fun because you can be completely present in mind with less nagging worries and responsibilities when you're enjoying things, but seemingly real losses feel all the harder due to this same limited understanding and context given the situation. I mean the girls have a near existential crisis over what we learn is a minor cold their mother had. These scenes emphasize how childhood comes with as much trauma as it does with the fun. The film managed to find a way to perfectly balance the good and bad aspects of childhood emotions and again without over dramatizing them or dwelling on them with rose tinted glasses the way a lot of films about childhood do. One thing about childhood that I don't think we usually consciously remember but that I think this film manages to convey really well is how much a child's world is ironically centered around imagining what you do as an adult. There is a self centeredness and conspiratorial thought process you have regarding your parent's while growing up and this is a negative aspect of being a child that I also think this film manages to convey and that a lot of film's miss. Maybe it's just my withered old man mind imposing meaning where it doesn't belong but I also see a slight metaphor for an end to innocence in the ending of this film when I see it now. The fact that the children have embraced other kids and their implied separation from the Totoro creatures. At the very least I'm not sure how to feel about the ending when I see it as an adult. Where as when I was a child it definitely seemed like a "happy" one to me. All of this dry stuff is an explanation of Miyazaki's well deserved in my opinion place in the pantheon of animation let alone just anime, but this film is obviously not just that for most people who watch it. There is a lot of fun in this film and there is a lot of child like wonder about it. There is also a lot of heart and the family aspect of this film and the love they have for each other really comes across on screen. I mentioned the subtly of emotions earlier, but I should also note the quality of emotional depth and effectiveness in these films is really great. I'm not trying to diminish that aspect of this, I'm trying to explain why I think his stuff is brilliant beyond the surface level and also by not just appealing to arguments about the animation like most people do when trying to defend Studio Ghibli from detractors. Speaking of the animation. Even Ponyo what I consider the worst film by Studio Ghibli, has amazing art and artistically creative choices and editing. Totoro has all this and more. It's always a shock to me when I go back and see how much effort was put into things like plant life and rain in these films, let alone objects that are actually in focus and are supposed to be at the center of our attention. Ghibli film's place more of an emphasis on the environment and having accurate environmental details within than most animation studios can probably afford to care about. The house in this movie is truly it's own character. To the point that a real life version was constructed for people to visit in Japan. It just feels like it has more of a history and detail than most live sets do in film's. This film and some of the early Harvest Moon games made me wish I could grow up near a Japanese forest. That desire was most recently replenished by the brilliant anime works Mushishi and Logan Paul. I remember after watching this me and my sister tried to find those black dust creatures in our home, at the time I was excited by the prospect. Now I would immediately call an exterminator if I saw those and not be able to sleep for three weeks over the thought that some weird shiz might be crawling over me at night. This is an aspect of child like wonder that doesn't age well. The Totoro creatures fare a lot better, they just look so good and stylized. I like how like most animals their expressions and reactions to things are hard to read and they don't just mimic what a humans reactions to things would be. I think Ghibli is particularly good at animating hair and the creature's hair reacts to wind and light a lot better and more realistically than most animation. The cat bus is just awesome, I'm not even going to try and analyze it beyond that. Somethings just "are." The human characters look good, but the influence of Ghibli on broader anime has made them somewhat bland for me in hindsight, they work for the story but they're not a particularly strong showing of the artistic merit of this film. They do convey facial expressions and body movement well like most ghibli films and like the creatures their hair and appendages have movements that correlate better to reality than most animation. I can't buy a hot figurine of them though, so that basically makes them useless. Well for once I have something to say about a voice actor. The man who plays the father Shigesato Itoi is someone I'm familiar with as I am much more into video games than anime, I can say it was a pleasure to find out the creator of the Mother series voiced a character in one of my favorite childhood films. It also seems oddly fitting that a man who created the video game that best encapsulates the good and bad aspects of childhood would voice a character in an anime that does the same. I like film's about poorer struggling family's or a family in crisis and you can hear the struggle in Itoi's voice, while he also conveys a lot of the joy's of fatherhood really well. There is a flavor to his acting that just fit's his relatively small part well. The girls unlike a lot of anime and despite their age in the film manage to not sound annoying, which is an achievement of the highest magnitude. Not a whole lot of sporadic yelling and unnecessary squeals happen. I prefer the Japanese VA's now, but I still occasionally watch the original English VA's out of the old nostalgia. I absolutely detest the Disney releases English VA's, they seem to have just haphazardly cast anyone who was mildly famous at the time to fill in spots. I can say the same for most of Disney's VA choices in Ghibli films and I'm not even the type of person who cries over dubs. A few months before the end of the year last year my sister asked me what that movie was we watched as a kid about those girls who meet a giant raccoon thing and had the famous little sister line. I informed her of what it was and took a mental note and I bought it for her for Christmas this year. One of the reasons this film is important to me is it one of the only things that we have in common. Not everything from my childhood holds up, I already mentioned my disappointment in trying to watch Ren & Stimpy again in my first review on this site. I would like to think this film would lose steam with me now being an adult and having seen thousands of films at this point, but Miyazaki films tend to grow in my estimation the more I watch them. Some times the artist is just ahead of you and I wouldn't say everyone's life experience or knowledge amounts to much even if they have a lot of both, but I think he conveys a genuine "wisdom" in his art and that is hard to find. I don't think these movies are for everybody, but I still think this is a classic worth watching. I think the Studio thinks the same because Totoro is still the companies mascot. Ok, so now we're back to the present, if I take these ropes off and return your clothes will you not call the police? I mean that trip was fun right? Don't worry about those back pains... I swear it was just from sleeping in an awkward position the past three days. If that isn't a good enough explanation, well than make like Ghibli and use your unfettered imagination.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Feb 10, 2018
Kill la Kill
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
So I'm starting off this review by talking about another anime show, I was watching a little Darling in the Franxx, like I'm sure a lot of people are on this website currently and I started to remember a thought I had back when I first watched Kill La Kill a show that really makes me think deeply about a lot of issues. Like... Can humans and clothes coexist in a peaceful way? The answer as the show clearly shows us is they can't, which is why I'm writing this in the nude. The second thing it makes me think about is the nature
...
of parody and satire and this is actually something I think about a lot. You might ironically say that I take the idea of parody and satire very seriously. So what about this show makes me wonder about that? Well, because I'm the king of tangents and needless comparisons, lets talk about yet another show before we even leave this first paragraph. So One Punch Man (OPM) is about a hero who can defeat any opponent with one punch, hence the name of the show. If you grew up watching shows like Dragon Ball Z like I did or other long winded Shonen shows that came out before or since, the subversion or parody inherent in OPM is obvious, whereas some of the battles in those shows could go on and on and on, the joke in OPM is that the battles are already over before they even start. There is also almost a "blue balling" element to the hero's reaction to all this, like he'd like to have an epic opponent like heros in other shows but he cant. So the challenge inherent in a premise like this is how you make the show interesting when you can't milk the most obvious content an action show can milk which is the over the top and elaborate violence and the large amount of in built filler a lot of this brings. How it does this in OPM case is somewhat by sleight of hand you see. Only the first few battles actually involve the hero, a lot of the battles after the premise is set up involve him watching other people attempt to be heroes and then he is used as a last minute Deus Ex Machina to sweep up the trash once the traditional heroes aren't able to do much. The way this setup works is we essentially have a traditional action show by the end of the series, as the hero slowly recedes into the background becoming the framework rather than the actual driving point of the show. So the subversion, inverts back on itself and we're back to where we started with a regular action show in place. So what starts out as an interesting premise about a hero who comically can't find a worthy opponent to the extent that he beats people more easily than you stub your toe is long winding pathway back to a regular action show. This funny premise might lead us to an interesting place eventually, just reverted back into everyday action trope laziness. Granted, it's not a complete waste as some of the main character's reactions to all this are interesting, but the show never feels quite as interesting as it does from its initial starting premise, in fact it get's slightly more mundane and typical of its genre as the show goes on. I seem to recall that I was reviewing another show and I don't quite get what any of this has to do with ummm... What was the show I was reviewing again? Oh yeah Kill La Kill.
Ah, so now I remember why I said all that, you see I think Kill La Kill tried to one up a show like OPM before it even existed by being a complete farce of action and mech'ish type shows of its kind not just in one way but a few. It tried to parody the overuse of sex in these shows, it tried to parody the over the top violence and the overly dramatic reasons for it and it also tried to parody the high school/secondary school'ish elements these kind of shows have taken on. Now, this is where it get's tricky and where, I ask the fundamental question that will be my whole reason for doing this review. Is there a point when parody goes so far with its own conclusions and inversions that it essential steps back into being the thing it was attempting to parody in the first place? The more I have thought about this show over the years, the more this question has kind of put a an inescapable haze over it and I'd like to look at this show through the three lanes of parody I suggested it was trying to do above, the sex, the action/drama and the school life elements. Wish me luck friends. So dudes and dudettes put on some mood music, bring out the candles and turn out the lights. I'm about to give you some sexual analysis in the most loving way possible. So I talked about fanservice a little bit before in my Kantai review and I'm not adverse to the wiles of a "cute" character as the kids say. I mean I've seen some sad bears in my time. I burrowed the booru's if you catch my drift. What I am adverse to though, is a poorly written character, with poorly written motives whose one appeal is their looks. When characters are badly written it is my professionally amateurish opinion that the rest of the story by extension is badly written, because if you can't believe or relate to the characters, then you can't take their actions seriously in the world and hence there is no real reason to care about the story or anything that happens. Well, I wouldn't say Kill La Kill's characters one appeal is of the sexual variety, they all have pretty grounded well utilized reasons for what they do in the show's universe and everyone's role is pretty well established within the show, with enough directness that I understand who they are but with just enough additional information and personality that they feel real enough and not like signs with exposition written on their faces. So if I can complement the show this much then why did I bring this up at all? Well, if you remember this show is supposed to be a parody and one of the thing's it supposed to be parodying is fanservice and the overly sexual nature of shows like this. The parody goes so far in this regard that there is a consistent storytelling element of some clothes being evil symbiotic creatures from space that try to take you over. Like the Symbiotes in the Marvel universe Venom, Carnage, etc. For the shows additional credit I do think a lot of good and even memorable humor is gained from this. The problem is it starts to go really over the top, really fast with this, to the point that a lot of the main characters are basically naked for half the shows entire running time. What starts out a funny joke actually just becomes a non stop rendition of the thing it was supposed to be parodying. I mean the main characters costume designs constantly show almost everything. There aren't many action shows that show this much nudity on a consistent basis. I'm not trying to give every other show a pass in this regard either, there are a lot of movies, video games and other shows animated and not, that have women essentially walking around in cropped bathing suits of various types and we're all supposed to pretend this is a real outfit they would wear in an otherwise sane universe. I'm also not saying nudity or sexual content is the worst thing ever. I think it has a place in storytelling and it is part of the biological experience, so I'm not so much against it from a prudish or moral standpoint, but more from a bad or lazy storytelling standpoint. What I am saying is that when you're trying to subvert something or parody it, there comes a point where if you go too far with it, you might end up just being a more extreme version of the thing you were trying to parody. I would say this is true of Kill La Kill's sexual content and sexual chocolate. It goes so over the top that I think it bends back into itself and just set a new low bar standard for anime to try achieve on the fanservice levels and believe me those animators always want to limbo lower and lower when it comes to women's clothing. So while I thought the characters were good and the show did to its credit utilize the sexual content in a humorous way, I couldn't help but feel a lot of the time that the "parody" was just an excuse to be an even more extreme version of the norm only it got less funny and more desperate seeming as the show dragged on. The clothes or lack thereof just stopped being "ridiculous" and they started being "ridiculous." There is also another problem with an overruse of "fanservice" in this way. If I was standing next to you in a crowd and I pulled your pants down, it would be shocking. Maybe humorously shocking given the right context. If I pulled your pants down and you just stood there like that in the crowd with no reaction for forty minutes it would just start to become banal and weird in a bad way. Alternatively you might have that reaction because it's not shocking and maybe having your pant's pulled down is not the worst thing that could happen within our universe. It's not how thing's work here, but imagine for a second that it did. Now imagine a universe is setup where nudity is the norm and wearing clothes is bad... You know exactly like KIll La Kill's premise and you start to see how the premise undervalues the use of fanservice by making it another everyday facet of reality and hence boring in it's use. The "sexual" element's of it's universe are weird to us because it's not how are reality works, but the more you watch a show like this the more it starts to erode this schock or alt. reality appeal by pelting you with it constantly. Imagine for a second that reality worked the way it does in porn... Don't imagine it that much! Keep your hands up until the review is over. Being a pizza man or a plumber means you get "serviced" for every place you "service." Being a doctor or a nurse means it's perfectly acceptable to start doing sexual things to your patients, rather than result in multiple lawsuits that will probably get your medical license revoked and end with sexual assault charges. Imagine every life event could result in pixel perfect high resolution "action" the way it does in the reality of these fine pieces of art. Well if it was real you wouldn't need to imagine it as it would probably make sex a boring everyday thing if reality really worked this way. You see these things work the way they do in our world because these are fantasies that don't happen very often. For most people every day life events do not result in orgasmic bliss with absolute strangers for no reason at all. If thing's actually did work the way they do in the reality of these brilliant films we wouldn't have any need for this genre as we generally don't make a big hullabaloo in media about things that happen on a constant basis. There aren't a whole lot of anime about breathing, pumping gas, filing your taxes and taking out the garbage. In part because the mundane doesn't need to be put on a pedestal, it already is the pedestal, the shocking thing the thing we never see or do is supposed to be what's on display for all to see. This is why "fanservice" is supposed to be appealing. I generally don't get to see a person's pantsu very often, so it's kind of a pleasant and vicariously embarassing shock when I see it happen to someone in anime. If an anime was made where the universe was setup around a woman who cant stop showing her pantsu though on a near constant basis.. I'm not sure the fanservice premise alone would make for an interesting 12 episodes of this. In fact I'm dead certain it wouldn't. Similarly Kill La Kill drives this point into the ground, where most importantly it is no longer funny, shocking, or appealing. It just "is." So now we talk about the violence. So if you look at my favorite shows on this site and despite my harping against it in my Ergo Proxy review, I do like me some action, in fact, I would say a lot of my favorite shows in anime come from this genre so far. Violence feel's good on a visceral level and I can see why many people choose to depict it in the media. So unlike the characters that I think are about as well written as they can be given the premise and this world, I don't really think the action in this show is that great. I haven't seen Vegeta fight Freeza or more accurately see Vegeta get his ass kicked in the Namek Saga for almost ten years now, but I remember that fight pretty well, in fact I remember a lot of fights from that show. I also remember fights, from shows like Macross Plus pretty well, even though I haven't seen that show since the early 00's. I just rewatched some fight's from Kill La Kill a week ago for this review and aside from the fact that I remember that certain people fought each other, I can't recall much of what happened in each fight. Now parody's and things that can be ground down to "jokes" have a common in built defense about their quality in that anyone defending it can just say "It's a joke, it's not meant to be as good as the real thing. Stop taking things so seriously!" Well, I don't really buy into that way of thinking, I think in order to be a parody of something you have to be a good version of that something first and then you apply or gain humor out of the setting naturally. If you take the humor out of Space Ball's or Shaun of The Dead you still have a pretty good space action film and a pretty good copy of early Romero Zombie films with some nice drama added in. I'm not saying they would be the beloved film's that they're without humor, but they would be perfectly functional film's in their genre. Contrast that with some of the "Scary Movie" films and their bastard now thankfully dead children "The movie" movies. These just weren't good renditions of horror movies or anything really. So the humor applied didn't stick or work, because there weren't any real characters or context for the humor to apply to. When Weird Al goes to write a parody of a song he doesn't do so by singing off key and having the band fart out notes from their instruments. He aims to have a good cover of the song first and then he add's his own lines, jokes and ideas in. I also think this is true of other types of subversions like when a show or movie attempts to transcend itself and become something else entirely. Neon Genesis Evangelion established itself as a good mech show before it started to subvert people's expectations about that genre and anime in general, I've often seen people criticize the end of the series, but most people agree at least that up to that point it was a good entry in the genre it was attempting to be in up to that point. I mean I've seen some people like diehard Gundam fans and things of that nature who don't like it or think it's overrated, but most people in general think it was a good mech show up until the end. So I think the action in Kill La Kill needed to be a lot better and more memorable than it was. If you're going to parody action, you have to have good action first and it has to be a part of the show that I find endearing enough to care about the humor associated with it and I just don't think it was. Similar to my thoughts on the sex, the violence start's off funny and some of the exposition before it can be humorous especially from Mako and Ira. I would say given the immediate paragraph above and the failing's of the shows action overall and taken in consideration with what I said about OPM much earlier, the concept of this show's parody of action is funny. There is a lot of overly drawn out action in anime, sometimes to a point of absurdity. I can very easily imagine a parody of this... Which is a problem when trying to parody it. The fact that some of these shows already are so ridiculous is what makes it hard to actually parody them, because it's hard to parody or be a subversion of something that is already ridiculous to begin with. In fact the easiest way to do this would not be to have more extreme action and violence, but rather to put these already heightened over exaggerated characters into less tense non-combat scenarios. The funniest part's of Kill La Kill are the part's that do this, the moment's before a battle and the school life aspects I'll talk about later tend to be the most genuinely funny moments of the show. In part because they're placing over the top action characters in a non-action setting for a moment. It's funny to see a character like Ryuko trying to live a normal life in the same way that it's funny to see Goku and Piccolo who are more powerful than most people on earth attempt and fail at doing something completely mundane like driving a car. What gets old fast though as a parody is seeing these characters, fight and fight and fight. The problem is, even if you craft well laid out jokes in the fighting scenarios the problem is are brains are also trying to take the shows plot and action seriously and the more I watch Kill LA Kill the less the action seems funny and it seems more like a lame amount of filler to a poorly written action show. This is exaggerated a bit by the fact that the show also tries to parody these types of shows over dramatization of the events involved. The problem is it does this a lot of the time by having the same stupid type's of overly dramatic plot that these types of shows have. Well, seemingly stupid I should say. You can hate Shonen show's and you can hate older mech type shows for being formulaic and cliche, but one way in which I will defend them is they tend to pace their over dramatization of event's out more than a show like Kill La Kill does in its highly condensed by comparison story. You see in making some of the battles as long as they do and building up their characters to ungodly levels of importance, they're trying to engage the audience by showing the importance of things in the worlds they create. So all this perceived fluff has a purpose, it builds things up in a way that wouldn't necessarily happen in real life. In real life most sword fights end in a minute or less, most fist fights are between opponents of uneven skill who are raging in a heated argument, they aren't long drawn out matches of skill between two ungodly powerful beings who plan each move with immaculate logic and grace. Most gun fire fights in a war aren't about skilled marksmanship and gunplay between equal opponents of merit, it's usually about firing large amounts of suppressive fire from automatic rifles and you target literally anything that looks slightly like a threat. If you see anything moving above your waist level after you yelled for everyone to duck, you shoot it without question. The thing is, real life combat doesn't really offer us the drama and feelings of fairness and justice we crave from situations like this. It's about survival and pretty much only that to the extent that we deem it acceptable. There is something inherently unsatisfying to most people about a life lived only for survival, so through are stories and tales we give ourselves bigger more thematic reasons for why these circumstances have to exist. I think this has both positive and negative consequences for us as most delusions do, but those are bigger than the scope of this review. So the funniest subversion of the violence in these shows would be to go realistic for just a second. Maybe some big goon comes up to Ryuko is ready to fight the clothes off her and does a big dramatic speech about how he is the prince of all Saiyans and a blue eyes white dragon, then she immediately strikes them down with a sword. This is kind of like how the parody in OPM works at the start, but I think a better example of this is in a similar in concept show but that is a parody of western animation rather than eastern is the Venture Bros. In the Venture Bros they manage to make light of every aspect of western animations traditional penchant for over the top dramatics and violence, by having the characters, heroes and villains alike joining guilds that explain how you're supposed to act in certain situations. So being a villain or a hero is just another kind of job in this universe. Additional humor comes from the fact that not everyone is aware of this aspect of the world, so when a realistic person like Brock Samson with military experience is pitted against the shows fictional villains he actually bests them way too easily and the other characters get mad that he isn't "playing along" the way he should. You see being an overly dramatic mustache twirler is part of the bureaucracy of being a villain and the show counter balances how old this parody might get by having real villains and conflicts behind this facade that are much more threatening and less overly dramatic in their implementation. As well as a lot of other things that spice up this show's concept. You find that the worst villains in the show are like those in real life, not people concocting wacky over the top conspiracies behind the scenes, but people doing bad, but just boring enough things hidden in the details in plain sight that are the real villains. So Kill La Kill instead of just doing tropes from other anime action shows and playing them off to a "T." Should have done more to subvert them, by either having some kind of conceit for why they exist or by doing something else entirely in their place that is funny given the situation they're in. This underlies a related facet of the show and I might as well get this tedious part of the review out of the way here, while I think the animation was certainly good at evoking humor and some of the characters did have a nice look to them even when clothed. I think on a whole the animation was kind of bad and it certainly didn't lend itself well to the type of large epic in scope action they were trying to convey with it. The characters also came off disjointed at times and poorly animated when in fast paced sequences. So the High School elements... This is probably the part of the show I'm the most mixed on. As stated above in the action section I do like the juxtaposition of the action oriented characters in this setting, but much like the action I find this content on its own a little wanting. It's not good slice of life or high school drama content and unlike the other two things I have already talked about the parody elements of this aspect of the show are actually pretty thin to begin with. It kind of makes a little light of some of the school elements these shows have and how a seemingly normal school is somehow tied to a grandiose story. Aside from that it doesn't really do much and just like with the action the parody is so on the nose and overdone that I find that it just ends up being a worse version of these typical high school plots. What makes me a little on the fence about this is that unlike other anime shows, the characters are utilized well here and the lighter moment's of the show between battling do give us some good humor and character development. The problem is, that these elements never meet with the shows over the top rendition of action schlock to form a cohesive narrative that feel's both satisfying on a storytelling level and fit's its comedic nature. We're just kind of left with a vat of indiscernible sludge where a good story should be. I mean it's a funny tasting vat of indiscernible sludge and I can still stomach it to an extent, but it just doesn't go down easy. Food analogies, I know the internet loves these, just like you love harm to pets, pretension and the wrong use of comic sans. I think I have kind of touched upon this in all these sections, but I'll run the risk of belaboring the point a little here. I think all of the characters in this show are good and I enjoy them for their own sake. The problem is more the execution in applying them to this hackneyed setting. They just aren't fully utilized here and they hampered by the joke attempts at anime tropes like everything else. So in between me thinking about this show and not, I do remember that I like the characters and I kind of think fondly about it for a little bit before I start to remember all the bad details and everything around them. So the sound, it exists. Ok, so after my last review I tried to consciously care about this element of the next thing I was reviewing more and I can say that I do think the voice acting both eastern and western fit well enough. Mako's western voice actor get's a little annoying at times, but it's not as overly abrasive and obnoxious as some other shows. Which is funny because her Japanese voice actor... <Looks at MAL page> Hmmmmmmm. That voice, those looks... Forget everything I said in the rest of this review. This is the best show ever for this symmetry between character & VA, this women and her voice... I might die from an overabundance of irregular sized Doki Doki's, give me a second. S-so the music is pretty good for what it is but not that memorable. I think the first intro song to this show is a little uninspired and emotionally drained especially given this shows over the top content. The second one is a little bit better, but it doesn't quite catch what the show is about either. The sound in general is just kind of average. I can harp on things like sex and violence a bit for being too easy of a crutch in storytelling and how the added layer of parody has been often an excuse rather than a real justification for their existence, but at the end of the day I still really like both things and I can understand their use in a story. I would go as far to say that I don't think you can really be a fan of anime if you don't in some sense enjoy these things. I mean, if you didn't enjoy them, I would just have to sit here and ask "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?" Over and over again. You'd have to be pretty masochistic to not like some amount of fan service and needless violence and be into this sort of thing. It would be like being a "fan" of horror films, but not liking gore, blood, scary things and grossness. Unlike the other three things I have reviewed so far I don't think this show is a complete dud, there is still something to be enjoyed about Kill La Kill aside from these over the top parody elements that I think end up inverting on themselves. The problem is what is enjoyable about it is the same as what's enjoyable about the thing's it's attempting to make light of in the first place. It never really comes to grips with using the humor as a way of transcending its own shallow genre and it never really escapes the tropes it's trying to subvert. So it just ends up somewhere in the middle. The "joke" becomes an excuse for lazy storytelling and by the end of the series I just think this show is a slightly worse version of other action shows, rather than a really good comedy that has those action elements at the core of its humor. Which is what I thought of OPM at the start, but with that show the regression back to the mean is more obvious because the parody element only comes into play through the "one punch" story telling element. I think Kill La Kill ultimately has the same problem as OPM. It's starts off with an interesting series of premises and slowly pulls them back inward, to the general norm of the genre. I fundamentally see Kill La Kill as a comedy and as a comedy, it's disappointing, but it does have other merits as stated with the characters. I can go in circles and circles saying I want to like more of this, but I don't all day but that's just how I feel. This show and writing the review in the nude did give me the confidence to plan a trip to a nude beach though and live my life's dream of being a "model" for art classes. So I guess it was life changing in that sense... Ultimately, I do think parody can go awry and end up becoming what it was ultimately trying to be in the first place. So I answered my own question that I already knew the answer to in the first place.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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