The third season of Pri Chan was neither as great or as middling as previous seasons have been, but was instead perfectly solid. Though not necessarily as good, this season was at least as interesting as the previous ones and it attempts a lot in tying up all the loose ends. All kinds of characters from all seasons have had some role in this season and it feels like we leave off many of them in a much better place than where we found them. This season also introduced quite a few new characters, all of which were very welcome. Overall, the final season of
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Pri Chan doesn’t feel like it leaves off unfinished, but ends off leaving me perfectly satisfied. A solid end to an otherwise shacky, inconsistent series.
The first obvious difference this season, its gimmick so to say, is the addition of several new ‘mascot’ characters. They act as semi-protagonists for this season and learn a lot from the obviously more experienced established cast. It’s a similar situation to Akari in the original Aikatsu, but that show actually went through with a complete main character swap, which I appreciate for being pretty ballsy. The reason why I like this type of storytelling a lot is because it avoids a common trap a lot of shows like this run into. You create a show about characters becoming idols or doing something else, at the end of the season they beat their rivals and become the best idols in the region or the world and then season 2 happens. All of a sudden new rivals show up and nobody really recognizes the main characters for their achievements last season. The first episode of season 2 feels like it starts of in a slightly different place than where season 1 ends and it feels weird. This is the trap that Pri-chan season 2 falls into, though from the fact that I liked that season significantly more than the first one, you can probably guess I don’t actually think it’s as big of a deal as I’m making it out to be. But whenever I see it happen in a show, it’s just a little baffling and confusing. The shows feels slightly alien and you have to warm up to it again.
Pri-chan season 3, thankfully, goes the other route. It adds new characters who can do most of the growing, allowing the main characters to fill the role of mentor. Seeing how much the original squad has grown through how they teach the mascots is super satisfying to see and makes you really think about how long it’s been since the show started airing. It’s really great to see how far these characters have come and it’s a fantastic place to leave them off, just knowing they’ll be alright. As for the mascot character’s themselves, I’d say they’re alright. I liked them a lot, but I just don’t think they’re good enough to carry an entire episode. I preferred them when they were the B-plot of an episode, which often enough they were. In those episodes they didn’t have to carry the plot and got to simply focus on being goofy, which I appreciate greatly. Overall I liked the mascots a lot, I just didn’t like it when they replaced, rather than supported the main characters.
Aside from the new mascot characters there’s an idol that farms rice. You see, the kira-kira theme park has an entire section dedicated to several rice paddies that supply all the food stalls and there’s a rice-farming-idol to go along with it. The questing is then brought up: should we be using this ultra-valuable land in the middle of a big city for farming rice, rather than for expanding the theme park with new and exciting attractions? The resolution to this dilemma comes with the statement that the theme park ‘needs rice’. I love this stupid fucking show.
The most important new side-characters of this season were the black cat mascot luluna and the white mascot cat solulu, as well as their owners. As the season progresses they start taking centre stage in the seasons final plot-arc, which I can definitively say was alright I guess. I liked it enough and there were enough interesting moments that I can say that it was worthwhile being there, however I kinda wish the final story arc of the whole series involved the main characters more. Then it would have felt like a great send-off, rather than a random story arc at the end of the show, mainly there to facilitate a final competition. As it is, I just don’t remember what happens at the end of the show very well and if the final arc was just a bit more memorable and involved with the main characters, I might have left the show off being more excited, rather than merely satisfied.
I think the great irony of season 3 is that I’ve been labelling the show’s greatest shortcoming for the past two seasons to be it’s lack of consistency, however now that the most consistent season of them all has come along, it doesn’t excite me as much as the first two. It was very solid and I liked it quite a bit, but it never reached the highs of season 2 or even season 1. In hindsight I realize that the thing that I wanted out of the show wasn’t necessarily consistency as a whole. In fact, the unpredictable nature of season 1 really appealed to me. You never knew what something crazy or hilarious would happen. Rather, the thing that I wanted out of the show was for it to be more consistently what I wanted it to be. A goofy show with fun goofy characters and an occasional slightly more serious episodic episode. And that’s what the show was for most of season 2 and I loved it. What I liked about these episodes in particular was the cast consisting of the six main girls. I thought a lot of the episodes of season 1 involving only the kiratts were kind of dull, but whenever the meltic stars girls were also involved it was usually great. The chemistry of those six girls together was so good and fun I wish that was just what the show was about, instead of the meltic star girls being gone for large parts of the show. Ultimately I think the reason why this season doesn’t excite me is because it was too consistent and never fully dove into the elements of the show I loved. As a result I was never truly excited by this season, even if I liked how much the show did for it’s existing cast, showing them in their best light and developing them, leaving them off better than they were. It makes me happy that this show that I love was in good, skilled hands till the very end. But overall season 3 was solid. Just solid.
In the end I am very happy I picked Pri-chan back out of my dropped list 3 years ago. It’s a show that gave me a lot to love, but ultimately a hard one to recommend. The show’s being succeeded by ‘Waccha Primagi’, a show directed by the wonderful, the lovely, the legendary Junicho Sato. Though my first impressions of that show have not been any more than lukewarm. Perhaps I should be taking this opportunity to look into some of his enduring classics, like Crayon kingdom of dreams, goldfish warning or the ever praised Kaleido star. Of course I would like to take this opportunity to recommend some of his works I have seen and love, like Aria, Princess Tutu or Ojamajo Doremi, all of which some of the greatest works of the medium. Sadly I wasn’t that into his most famous work, Sailor Moon, but maybe I’ll continue that one day.
Ultimately the experience of watching Pri-chan was a positive one, even if not every episode was great. I got to learn a lot about the anime community, heard a lot of ‘interesting’ takes on anime and saw a lot of weird stuff I wasn’t expecting to see. Overall Pri-chan has a lot greater of a place in my heart than just the 153 episodes of it I watched. It’s an experience that’ll probably stick with me for a while. It’s a good example for me of how anime can be much more than a show, it can be an experience, it can be a community, it’s a way of life. It’s the work of a team of loving staff, many of whom probably still working their way up the ranks, but soon, ready to start shaping the future of anime. The director will likely continue to be one of the most consistent comedy directors in anime, maybe one day a well respected one. Kids anime are often the playing grounds for new anime staff and can be a good place to find up and coming future big shots. This eccentric anime, ignored and unknown by most in the west might have a much bigger footprint on the future of anime than anyone may ever realize. A little show like this could give a tremendous roar. In the end Pri-chan is neither the ultimate underdog of anime, nor the ugly ducking-turned-beautiful-swan I described it to be. It’s a serene dragon, hidden in the clouds, but clearly there if you know where to look for it. I’m just happy to have gotten a glimpse of it’s majesty.
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Feb 18, 2022
Kiratto Pri☆chan Season 3
(Anime)
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The third season of Pri Chan was neither as great or as middling as previous seasons have been, but was instead perfectly solid. Though not necessarily as good, this season was at least as interesting as the previous ones and it attempts a lot in tying up all the loose ends. All kinds of characters from all seasons have had some role in this season and it feels like we leave off many of them in a much better place than where we found them. This season also introduced quite a few new characters, all of which were very welcome. Overall, the final season of
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Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 11, 2021
Super Shiro
(Anime)
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Super Shiro might be the best thing Masaaki Yuasa has worked on since ping pong. In the past half a decade the man has worked on a ton of interesting projects, yet I don’t remember giving any of them anything but a seven. It feels like every anime he works on just coincidentally happens to not be my thing, which makes me feel left out when everyone around me manages to pick out an anime or two from his recent works to weave into their ever-growing favourites lists. Still, despite me being left out of a party that’s going on right next door, I believed
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steadfast that one day a show would come along to break the chain of sevens. Man, I should have guessed it was going to be god damn Shin-Chan.
I’ve vaguely known about Yuasa’s involvement with the Shin-Chan anime since forever, but it’s never really turned into coherent thought until this anime started airing. The nonsensical and experimental nature of the Shin-Chan TV anime and movies don’t surprise me to have been the playing ground for a director as eccentric as Yuasa, but I am surprised the producers of Shin-Chan have the gall to haunt the man for the rest of his years, even after he’s seemingly ‘made it big’. You can’t dispute the amount of love and attention that’s gone into this project, though. Despite having only managed to find an audience in the west just barely large enough for it to get subtitled, the show feels like a spirit bomb comprised of the love and devotion of millions of world-wide fans, with how much lovely animation and creative, wacky stuff the show manages to pack. This show doesn’t feel like a cash grab. It feels like a project that was conceptualized at the hands of skilled and passionate creators and brought into physical being only because the passion of its creators and a lick of common sense dictated that it had to be made. The official reason for its creation, that being the 60th anniversary of an old tv station, feels only secondary to this, like the ‘casus belli’ that poetically justifies a war declared to satisfy a medieval monarch’s greed. This anime is a work of passion, through and through, and despite me initially being somewhat concerned over its consistency, it managed to keep my attention all the way through. Despite this being a very eccentric show, the start of every episode seems very intent on convincing you that the dog of the very normal Nohara family itself is extraordinarily normal, just to reveal that the creature is in fact a super hero who protects the world. An artefact of unknown origin has been left behind somewhere in the world and whomever possesses it may use it to let others do their bidding and, potentially, take over the world. This bone-shaped doomsday device can be found somewhere in or around the city Shiro lives in and (get this. This is my favourite part) can be distinguished only by its ‘gorgeous’, ‘elegant’ and ‘wild’ fragrance. They say these three words in English, like kids would have any idea what they mean, yet it perfectly fits in with the silliness of the show and the fact that all the characters are dogs with very good noses. Every episode starts with Shiro being told of the new location of the legendary artefact known simply as ‘Bo-bo Bo-bo Bone’. A loveable antagonist named ‘Degapoo’ follows him there and the entire episode basically consists of the two of them trying to foil each other’s attempts to take off with it. Every episode has a new setting where they can get into each other’s way in a variety of different ways. One episode they’re both in lines for the swing, but because Shiro keeps getting through his line faster, Degapoo goes over to him to push him out, forcing them both to re-enter the line at the back. Another episode, they’re taking turns trying to descend down a bridge with a rope unto a small island in the river, but the one that’s left behind keeps making the other fall in the river, forcing them to continuously repeat the same spiel. As you can see, the two of them repeating what they’re doing is a common thing in Super Shiro and there are definitely times when they repeat the same action or animation a few too many times, but every time the show does get a little repetitive it’s back to doing something interesting in no time. These are some of the more normal settings for an episode, but there are definitely episodes that get a little more creative with their conflicts. Such as the episode where, instead of trying to get the Bo-bo Bo-bo Bone before the other does, they try to trick each other into going into a lake full of piranhas to go get it for them. At the end of this episode they both have lost all their fur, but are inexplicably unwounded. There’s also an episode where the two of them are in a cornfield and try to shoot each other with popcorn-machine-guns, all the while some western music is playing. There’s also an episode where they go into a library and a librarian dog uses philosophy to get their brains to overheat. Shiro eventually uses the super power of ‘turning your brain off’ to win the day. At the start of the show I was afraid the show might be too repetitive and might not stay fun for 48 whole episodes. Not only did this turn out not to be a problem, I even found that some of the most creative stuff in the show was near the end. There was an episode in the final stretch where all the music and sound effects had been replaced with á Capella, and it made me really impressed with the team behind this show that they were still pulling tricks out of their bag this far into it. Episodes like that really make me want there to be a season 2, but alas, I don’t believe we will get one. A major way the show brings variety to its conflicts, is through the introduction of a small but effective set of side-characters. The first side character introduced in the show is a big, muscled, hard-ass of a dog, who’s role is mainly to put a lid on the two main characters whenever they annoy him. He adds an element of danger to every episode he’s in, and the show then subverts that when he’s rudely notified, he’s breaking the rules and he politely apologizes. Turns out, this dangerous hard-ass is really just a stickler for the rules, who doesn’t appreciate other dogs acting like public nuisances. The other major recurring side character is called Kyan-Kyan. She’s the pet dog of a ludicrously wealthy bourgeois lady, who’s constantly away on expensive party trips across the globe. Kyan-Kyan is able to obtain any object she wants in the world, but the real thing she wants is to go along with her owner to these expensive parties and obtain the affection of all the other partygoers and the only way she knows to do this is through the power of the mysterious and odorous ‘Bo-bo Bo-bo bone’. She absolutely does not do this by getting her own paws dirty. Her feminine wiles are all she needs and are able to move the mountains, as Shiro and Degapoo and any other dog for that matter are almost completely incapable of refusing any of her requests. The thing about her character that most impresses me and the quality of the show that she is the best at exemplifying is her great character design. Even from the slightest glance at her character you can get a pretty good idea of what her deal is. You don’t need the characters in the show to say anything for you to know dogs find her beautiful, she is beautiful. Lots of characters in the show can be understood at a glance, yet they all turn out being just a little more loveable than you had initially predicted. The three main characters are of course the true stars of the show, that being our awkward but well-meaning hero Shiro, the intelligible, but certainly not intelligent, villain Degapoo and the narrator, who’s voicing of Shiro is a great cherry on top of this wonderful anime. Shiro and Degapoo are constantly fighting, throughout every episode and their back and forth is the bulk of what makes up the intrigue of the episode. However, after a while the way they go about doing this starts diversifying. There is a genre of episode where Shiro is trying to undo all the bad that Degapoo does in trying to find the B’Bone. Think of catching the things that he throws on the ground and putting them back in their place, or closing products that he opened in a factory. Sometimes Degapoo does these misdeeds not because they are efficient, but because they are evil. However, if Degapoo ends up in a bad situation near the end of the episode Shiro will be there to help him out. More interestingly so, Degapoo starts doing the same thing for Shiro after a while. Not just that, as the show goes on there are more and more episodes where Degapoo gets completely distracted by something else and forgets about the B’Bone. In one such episodes he becomes the hero of a colony of ants, by introducing social democratic policies and successfully demanding better working conditions through peaceful protests. If I haven’t convinced you of how charming this show is at this point, I don’t think I can help you. The aspect of the show that I love the most, has to be the visual presentation. The show stands out by having simple but very well-made character designs and it shows in the animation department too. There’s such a wealth of goofy animation that really makes the characters stand out and that wouldn’t be possible if the designs didn’t lend themselves so well to erratic motion. Yuasa is a master of creating interesting motion and therefore is a perfect fit for a show whose main appeal lies in watching two characters trying to pull each other down in a variety of different and interesting ways. The show never stops giving you great images and creative motions and is overall a blast to watch, though it does occasionally falter, in that it sometimes plays the same bit of animation a few too many times. But always when the show falters a little, it is back to being fun in no time and I always feel good about the episode by the time the lovely and adorable ending theme plays, charming me one last time before the episode ends. And that, I would have to say, is the main appeal of Super Shiro: Charm. I just can’t get over how much I love the cute characters, both heroic and villainous, the lovely art, the adorable ending theme and the narrator, who dictates an idealized story of what Shiro as a hero should be, often to Shiro’s chagrin. But he goes through with it anyways! Cause he’s a good boy! I watched Shiro a couple episodes a day and it would always brighten my day with how fun and adorable it was. I recommend this show to anyone who needs something bright and colorful in their lives and who is into cute and fun kid shows. I can’t guarantee you’ll think it’s as consistently great as I did, but you’ll definitely have a fun time. The exactly six-minute episode length allows for a super easy view, so an episode never feels like a significant time investment. Also, be sure to take your time with the show. There really isn’t any reason to rush to the end, especially considering the ending isn’t very definitive. If you were as charmed by Shiro as I was and you want more, I would recommend shows like Pokémon Sun and Moon, Ojamajo Doremi, Poyopoyo Kansatsu Nikki, aikatsu stars or the wacky and insane 100% pascal-sensei, the most underrated show on the interwebs. Other than that, regardless of whether you like this show or not, regardless of whether you’re a human or a soulless, android, zombified lizard demon baby, you should watch the lovely 9th Chin-Chan movie, which is impossibly good for a TV-anime tie-in movie and is a beautiful love letter to the nation of Japan and a counter argument to the nostalgia that many of its denizens withdrew into after the post-war bubble economy burst. It is the best piece of Shin-Chan media out there. Definitely go watch that movie. It is one of anime’s best.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Aug 28, 2020
Pandora to Akubi
(Anime)
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Pandora to Akubi is a very lovely surprise to a weary anime traveller like me. Very clearly a passion project, I’m sad to see it go unnoticed in the western anime sphere. I put a ‘maybe?’ next to this show on my list of 2019 movies I still want to watch and that ‘maybe?’ very much stands for ‘maybe this will get subtitled’. Yet, as it does time and time again, the passion of a small group of creators I know almost nothing about, manages to reach halfway across the globe through the power of the internet, reminding me in the process of the power
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of anime. I’m not making that up, by the way. This anime is very much a love letter to anime, with it proudly showing off a bunch of characters from old Tatsunoko Productions shows from the 60s and 70s. I have very little idea how a project like this could come to be, but It seems to be linked to the 50th anniversary of the anime ‘Hakushon Daimaou’, and I guess a bunch of other Tatsunoko characters got caught up in the mix in the celebrating studio’s drunken stupor. Still, what ultimately matters is that this production shows off some real talent on multiple fronts and, though its presentation is somewhat inconsistent, it’s a real joy to watch.
Pandora is a clumsy girl who, after opening a box, accidentally sends magical shards of ‘calamity’ across multiple worlds and, together with a goofy, magical girl named Akubi, travels through dimensions in order to collect these shards before bad stuff happens. This is very much not an original plot for an anime, but I don’t think it has to be. The creators of the show clearly just wanted a generic anime bullshit plot so they could fill it with fun stuff. Anime bullshit to facilitate more anime bullshit, that’s what this anime is and I love it. What ultimately makes this anime stand out, however, is that it manages to find an interesting balance between the goofiness of the premise and its main characters and some more serious elements. Especially episode one feels somewhat grounded in that the characters and setting are shown off more or less realistically. So when two girls claiming to be from another dimension to collect an evil stone that will do bad stuff, barge into town, no one takes them particularly seriously and the two of them are somewhat surprised about this. Yet no one makes a big stink about this and the only policeman in town, Speedracer, and his girlfriend genuinely try to be helpful, even if they don’t know what’s going on. What’s even more interesting is that Speedracer and his girlfriend Doronjo genuinely have some depth behind them. Speed put behind his dream of being a racer to protect the people of his home town, which is very much not a thing he would have done if he was anything like the speed we know from the original show. Doronjo wants to support his dream of being a racer, but she’s also being chased by her criminal past which might put the whole town in danger if she stays there. These characters feel very real and lived and put an emotional core behind an otherwise silly and baffling show. Sadly episode two isn’t as grounded and is overall a lot less engaging. What’s interesting is that the serious and silly nature of the show is present in the character designs as well. Our two protagonists are very cutesy and moe, but Speed and Doronjo feel like modern , mature renditions of the original characters in a similar vein to ‘The woman called Fujiko Mine’. I’m very impressed by how this show manages to fit these very opposite aesthetics under one character design style. And it’s not just the characters, the art in general in this show is stellar. The character art is very bouncy and animates wonderfully, the background art is gorgeous and stylized and the colour pallet is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Overall the art by itself is already wonderful, but then it’s backed up by a lot of fantastic animation, mostly of the very fluid, very web-gen kind. Seeing Akubi bounce around like a goofball was an absolute joy and there was some great action in the mix as well. At the end of both episodes the characters end up transforming into characters from gatchaman and yatterman and this results in some great fighting sequences accompanied by some equally fantastic music. I can very much understand that some people might not get into this anime the way I did, considering it’s very weird and it throws a lot of conflicting stuff at you. For me personally, this anime threw together a bunch of great things into a wonderful mix that really resonates with me. In an anime landscape that is dominated by very stale visual productions the colourfulness and the poppyness of this anime is a sight for sore eyes. The anime industry is composed of passionate people who row against the tide to be able to facilitate the creation of good anime, so when I see an obviously passionate production like this come out, I can’t help myself but be excited. Talented people making good shit, that’s what this show is. The world needs more passionate people making good shit. That’s what I preach.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jul 28, 2020
B-Legend! Battle B-Daman
(Anime)
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If you rewatch a lot of stuff from your childhood, you’ll find after a while that half the stuff you watched as a kid was really bad, whilst the other half is surprisingly still quite good. However, considering the amount of excitement you likely felt for these works as a kid, even if you still like it, a lot more than half the stuff you watched as a kid is not as good as you remember it being. I personally have only experienced a couple pieces of media from my childhood that I liked better as an adult, simply because I am capable of appreciating
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what makes it good on a deeper level. Even rarer, though, is when you revisit something from your childhood and, despite the fact that you have changed considerably since your younger years and your taste in media has had the opportunity to change beyond recognition a multitude of times, you still feel the exact same way about it you did back then. This is the situation I found myself in upon rewatching this old favourite of my childhood, where I didn’t just like it as much as I used to, I even felt very similar about what the show was and was trying to do.
B-daman is about a world where society almost revolves around B-daman: plastic marble shooting toys that, in the right hands, are powerful enough to smash rocks. What’s interesting is the presentation of these toys. They’re not just some toys that people have arbitrarily decided to deem important, B-daman very much take this world’s place of guns. In fact, the whole world is made to suit that, with most of the world consisting of desert and most of the characters dressed up as cowboys and renegades with B-daman kept at their sides, like revolvers. The whole show has a lovely western aesthetic to it, mixed in with some human-animal hybrids of various levels of anthropomorphism. There’s also robots, but, with a couple of exceptions, they’re never remarked upon. I do find it very charming, though, to see robots walking around dressed in cowboy outfits. Overall, I am just so thoroughly charmed by the presentation of this show, especially of the world, but even of the character designs, which are a little more shaky, but still quite good. Speaking of the characters, though this show is by no means a paragon of character writing in a post-yugioh world, I do still quite enjoy a lot of the principal cast and think most of them have pretty solid designs. Yamato is very similar to other shounen protagonists of this nature and suffers a little from the fact that as the main character he has to be broadly relatable, but I still quite like him and I laughed quite a few times at his antics. I grew pretty fond of his mom who he was always fighting with and who had the bright idea of starting a fish food restaurant in the middle of the desert and a lot of Yamato’s friends and rivals were fun too. Gray was a really aesthetically cool character and Armada is a funny goofy cat. I’m not as big of a fan of Terry, but he had his moments. The true MVP has to be Bull though, who has a whopping 3 personalities inside of his thick skull. The switching between these personalities during all kinds of moments could frequently amplify an exciting scene or undercut the tension of a serious moment and was pretty much always a fun way to shake things up. I really got to like that goofy son of a gun, which is why it’s a shame his presence tends to be undercut throughout a lot of the show. On the bad-guy side of things there’s the evil organization ‘The Shadow Alliance’, which is initially shown to be lead by a talking cat with a third eye, but later turns out to be lead by Sauron. Yes, Sauron. Sauron doesn’t have much of a motivation in this, nor are his goals terribly clear, other than that’s he’s trying to take over the B-daworld(Yes, the B-daworld) but he’s menacing enough. I don’t think his organization is very interesting and I generally only think the shadow alliance work as antagonists because they contain members who are great individual bad guys, but not because they work well as a unit. Wen and Li were pretty Menacing when they first showed up, but lost that pretty quickly, but are still pretty fun to watch even later in the show and Gray’s dynamic as a member who was forced into the organisation was pretty interesting. Enjyu was the real star of the show, though, being almost lovingly evil, but also being an edgy dork who I can’t help but love. Watching him makes me understand on a very visceral level why good girls always fall for bad guys. Yeah, if this is what bad boys have, us good guys simply can’t compete. This is the type of show where all the bad guys eventually turn over to the good side and Enjyu is far too embarrassed to actually approach Yamato and his gang, so prefers to tail them in secret and protect them from the shadows. God he’s such a stupid dork. I love him. Very few of the characters in the show have interesting arcs and even if they do they tend to be extremely short and come a bit late, but despite that, the characters do a pretty good job keeping the show fun for 50 episodes. I never got tired of any of the characters and generally thought they were fun to watch for the duration of the show, but I can definitely see some people getting a little tired of them near the last stretch of episodes. I personally think they do their job to keep the show fun, though, which is all I could ask of them. Another thing that might bother some people, is their appearance. I personally think their designs are pretty solid, but I also remember near a decade ago when I watched this show for the last time I was a little bothered by the fact that most of the main cast consists of three foot tall dwarves. I didn’t feel bothered by this as a kid and I only started noticing it as I grew older. I feel some people might be bothered by their short appearances, but I personally have started feeling quite amused at this fact. Seeing an adult male putting up a fighting stance against these dwarves or having to use a table made for toddlers always looks really off and makes for some amusing shot composition. This is one of those things you just gotta have fun with, for sure. Aside from the very solid character designs and the wonderfully crafted world that they populate, I think most of the visuals in B-daman are sufficient. My personal philosophy involving what I like in anime visuals tends to be a little different from other people, so take my words with a grain of salt, but I personally was pretty visually engaged by this show. The shot composition was really solid and there was a decent amount of animation for a long running kid’s show and there were lots of moments I recognized during my rewatch because they were memorable enough to stick with me for over a decade. One interesting part of the visuals is the usage of CG. This is before anime started cramming CG everywhere it could and so its usage was limited to the toys. Not that the B-daman are always 3D rendered, not at all. During fights the B-daman are often traditionally animated. It’s before a fight when they’re shown off from all sides that they use CG and the models they use here are surprisingly good looking for being from the mid 2000s. The B-daballs they shoot are usually CG as well and that allows them to have a glossy texture. I remember later in the show there is a very pretty looking B-daball that is shown both in CG and hand drawn and even as a kid I could tell there was something weird about it, but it took until I was older for me to be able to put to words what the difference was. One of my favourite parts of watching old cartoons from my childhood is noticing the usage of CG where as a kid I would either never have noticed it was there, or I would have felt there was something weird about it, but would never have been able to put to words what it was. It makes me realize just how much I’ve grown over the years in my understanding of media. One thing I did notice as a kid was B-daman’s best feature: the stellar soundtrack. Just like how Naruto mixes traditional Japanese music with electric guitars, this show mixes sounds that could easily be found in an old western movie with some good ol’ rock and roll. And also some keyboards, I guess. The western music is definitely the senior partner in this alliance, as most of the music in this show doesn’t build the way rock music tends to. Most of the songs tend to be fairly transient, even the exciting ones. One could argue that some of the climaxes in the show could be more exciting if the music was just a bit more climactic, but I personally don’t feel any need to speculate on such things. The music that is there is absolutely lovely and makes many action scenes very exciting. The quality of the music alone makes up a fairly significant chunk of my enjoyment of this show, especially because the action, which it frequently accompanies, is pretty darn shaky. The actual battles in this show aren’t terribly good, action-wise at least. During a direct hit battle there isn’t much strategy other than dodge or shoot when the opponent is reloading. There isn’t much of a sense of progression in the characters skills and battles often feel like you’re waiting for one of the protagonists to simply beat their opponents. That said, the battles don’t drag the show down terribly, simply because they’re short. Even if they’re not short, they’re only long because they’re interspersed with character-flashbacks or other stuff, which generally add a lot of meaning to the conflicts. Moreover, there’s a lot of variety in the types of battles you see. B-daman isn’t just about direct hit battles, there’s also other games that can be played with them. Shoot down a bunch of pins, shoot through the pins without hitting them, shoot through a spinning gate, etc. etc. These games add some much needed variety to the conflicts in the show and are often pretty creative. And if that doesn’t work, the makers of the show found all kinds of ways to keep traditional B-dabattles interesting by changing their setting around. This mostly happens during the tournament arc that takes up the first half of the show, where the producers of the tournament find all kinds of creative ways to have the tournament’s participants risk their lives to play a game about shooting marbles at each other. But even outside of the tournament, battles are rarely the same. In one episode the gang has a saloon shootout with a bunch of pigs who can create powerful winds with their snouts. In another the players have to feel out the winds to be able to shoot at each other, because the b-daballs keep going in weird directions. In yet another, two players try to defeat each other by shooting down gigantic pillars to try and crush the other. Though I think the battles could have been a lot better, all the other parts of the show are so solid that they make up for this weaker part. All that said, there is one big elephant in the room concerning what B-daman is, that I’ve barely talked about to this point. B-daman is an advertisement, plain and simple. You don’t fully grasp this when you’re young, but shows like this are set up on a structural level to sell plastic toys. They don’t just do this on a physical level, showing you merchandise you can find on the store shelf, or that your mom picks up for your birthday, because it’s from that show you always watch. No, these shows try to sell you on the idea that these toys are something more than plastic gunk you literally play with twice. These shows, after all, are about worlds where these toys have gone beyond even being life-style brands and have become the entity that all conflict revolves around. Of course you can be cynical about this, but, to put that aside for a second, the fact of the matter is that these shows generally do a great job selling the fantasy surrounding these toys and greatly amplify the experience of owning them. I very much remember as a kid opening a pack of Yugioh or Pokemon cards and the excitement I felt when I found a card or mon I recognized from the shows. And in a similar vein I remember how cool it was to own a B-daman that was owned by a cool character from the show. It didn’t matter to me that these toys were glorified marble shooters, the idea that I was holding a powerful weapon, capable of smashing rocks, was exciting. However, though I understand nowadays that these toys are actually the primary product of these franchises, as a kid I would never have guessed this. Even now, the shows are what I remember and the toys are but a distant memory. These shows outshone the products they were based on and outlived them in our memories and now that I have outgrown my cynicism I have regrown a fondness for B-daman and shows like it and feel that they are genuinely really cool. You know, it seems counterproductive, but as I’ve grown older, instead of growing further away from where I was as a kid, I actually grew back into children’s anime and I know a lot of people who did the same. The fact that a work is made for young boys is too broad of measure to ascertain its quality with, be that positively or negatively. As I grew older, the things I looked for in media became more specific and now I just kinda watch anything, so long as it’s good. That does mean that what a kid’s show has to offer does appeal to me, which would be enough for many people to label me a disgusting man-child. I personally try to take my status as a man-child with pride, though. There is no need to be affected by being called a word with negative associations, when the reason you’re called that is not because of those negative associations. Nor am I ashamed of liking what I like. The fact of the matter is that B-daman has marble shooters that are also guns that can crush rocks, has Scottish ninjas, has people known to suffer from multiple-personality disorder on the loose, has an evil organisation that acts evil, not out of efficiency, but just because it feels right to do so, has an absolute lack of any safety regulations when it comes to activities involving children and has a sassy black lady who is also blue, who looks over everyone from the sky on an old TV from the 70s and I think that’s all pretty sick. So the big problem with B-daman right now is consuming it. There is no subbed version whatsoever, though this is one of those rare occasions where people who have seen the English dub at all cannot sit through the Japanese Dub, in a very similar way to Dragon ball Z. Some of the voices just feel too off. Though this might not be a problem for someone unfamiliar with the dub, but like I said, it’s all unsubbed, so who cares anyway. The dub’s pretty good though, filled with both a lot of genuinely great voices as well as a lot of goofy ones. There’s a couple minor characters that sound pretty bad and even the better voice actors in the cast have a hard time with all the anime moaning and ad-libbing, which is a scourge to any good dub cast, but for the most part I think this dub should be pretty watchable for most people. Though if you are someone who dislikes cheesy kid’s anime dubs, like if you’re someone who doesn’t like the yugioh dub at all, then I recommend you don’t even bother with it. Sadly the dub’s only available online in over compressed 480p, so even then, it’s not going to look ideal. I recommend you watch it on YouTube though, as you often run into 360p on other sites. If you like B-daman, or if you like shows like it, I would of course point you towards Beyblade, which is the show that’s the most like it, but Yugioh or Pokémon or Bakugan should be fun as well. If you feel a little more adventurous and want to get a little deeper into children’s anime, I recommend you go on a pilgrimage to watch all of Ojamajo Doremi, an absolutely wonderful show that, despite being known for tackling pretty serious topics, is probably even more eccentric than any of the shows I just mentioned. Anyways, though I think my nostalgia for the show has affected the way I see it, I still think the 2004 B-daman show hold up wonderfully and is still worth watching and I encourage anyone with an interest in these types of shows to give it an honest try.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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May 31, 2020
Kiratto Pri☆chan Season 2
(Anime)
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Kiratto pri chan is an ugly duckling of an anime. Season 1 was packed with a lot of potential and a lot of insufficiencies. It was a series filled with interesting artistic choices and strange things to love about it, but it was marred by a sludgy stream of mediocrities. I think a lot of people have had that same experience of watching a fifty episode kids show, loving a lot about it, but ultimately giving it a 6 or a 7 because it had 30 episodes of bullshit holding it down. What a shock was it to me then, when, for a brief period
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in time, about half a year of airing, this show didn’t just deliver on its potential, it spectacularly over delivered. For a brief period of time it was one of the best anime airing on TV, with me looking forward to it every week more than anything else, and for a brief period in time, this ugly duckling spread its wings and flew off, a beautiful swan.
I am of course being over dramatic, as I was in my review of season 1, but I’m just so pleasantly surprised that the underdog I had almost jokingly been rooting for really did overcome the Chad Aikatsu. This season was an improvement to season 1 in pretty much every way, too. It’s not just that the central stretch of episodes was so solid, even the mediocrities have become less pronounced. Though there is still one tiny thing that this season doesn’t do as well as the first one. But we’ll get into that. To imagine what makes season 2 so great, you first have to imagine what makes the best parts of the show in general so great. Famously, pri chan and its predecessors have always had much lower production qualities than its rival Aikatsu. Moreover, Aikatsu is noteworthy for taking a much more serious approach to its idol activities. Though I can’t speak about its predecessors, pri chan is a lot less concerned about making sense, and a lot more about simply being fun. Whereas Aikatsu puts a lot of strain on the fact that being an idol is a lot of hard work, Pri chan forgoes all that ‘hard work’ crap and goes straight to the fun parts. Because Aikatsu is much more tightly written, the overall quality of episodic episodes is much higher. Pri chan has to hustle every episode to be engaging and, in season one, failed at that quite often. But there were all these eccentricities that kept me watching: Anna and Emo constantly bitching at each other, Anna’s maid sometimes having superpowers, Rinka’s pathetic brother being dragged around by Meganee-san, the leader of one of the group’s fan clubs being an 8 foot tall middleschooler, and who can forget about Meru Meru’s spastic antics and crazy inventions. Just now I opened a random episode of season one, scrolled through it a bit and landed on a scene where Emo and Anna were leading a tug of war battle between their fan-groups and when Mirai tells Anna to go talk to Sara, Anna has Mirai take her place at the rope, at which point Emo’s team start yelling at her that she’s a traitor and that they knew all along that she was on their side and Mirai is like: “You’ve got it all wrong!”, with this cute, dopey facial expression. Random moments like that, that come out of nowhere, always get me smiling from ear to ear and are what kept me watching the show, despite me recognizing its insufficiencies. Other than that, Pri chan has a lot of random interesting design choices. A lot of side characters have weird out-there designs, like the aforementioned 8 foot tall middleschooler, Anna’s petite dad, reminiscent of the dad in Minky Momo and Anna’s maid who has gigantic eyes, but no irises. There’s lots of side characters that have these weird character designs, and I absolutely love it. Of course I want to see weird, creative character designs in a funny and eccentric show like this! Why do you even have to ask? The designs of the main characters are a lot more ‘normal’, but they’re also unlike any other anime and very solid. You can definitely tell that the meltic star girls are a lot better designed than the main girls, likely because the main girls need to be more generic and relatable. Their designs have grown on me considerably, though. Somewhere along season two I grew a much greater appreciation for the character designs and the design of the show as a whole. I don’t know if that is just me or the show or what, but I’ve been enjoying the main characters a lot more this season. I also love how the rest of the show looks. A lot of the show will look somewhat generic, with very normal locations with very normal looking background characters, but sometimes you’ll see weird looking side characters or interestingly designed locations. The kirajuku square, where the pri chan studio, or whatever it is, where Meganee works, is located, is always a great location. However my favourite has to be Sara’s house, which is this weird round house with a flat roof, sorta resembling an old mill house you see in the countryside, but with the mill taken off and equally broad near the top. This house is located in the middle of the suburbs, surrounded by properties with totally normal looking houses on them, and every time I see it I’m absolutely delighted. Aikatsu has all of these well crafted locations and well designed characters and is very consistent with that, but pri chan, usually much more generic, can totally get one over on The Chad whenever it feels like it. And that shows what this show misses: Consistency. Because of that, I was very surprised to see that, starting just under a third of the way through the season, the show suddenly becomes consistent. Every single episode until the last ten is at least merely good and many of them are great. It was in the early twenties of episodes I noticed how every episode I had recently watched of the show had been a banger and as I continued to watch the episodes as they got translated, I was surprised to see how every single one of them continued the streak. I started looking forward to every new episode more than anything else. It truly was one of the best shows airing during that time. And that was all because it took what made Pri chan so great for me and made it most of the episode, instead of just the spice on top of an otherwise average episodic episode. To help you understand what makes these episodes so fun to watch for me, I’ll briefly go over part of an episode of the show. This is what happens in that episode: Daia-chan gives her intro OP Anno and Emo are on the beach of a deserted island, dressed in leaves Emo says this is karma for Anna being a bitch After Emo askes, Anna says they can’t contact anyone, because they can’t get a signal Flashback to everyone on a massive cruise ship Anna and Emo are scoffing at each other and everyone’s concerned, because they still haven’t settled their argument Flashback to Meganee excitedly telling them to go to this resort for a promotional event(to make her money) Maria states that it would be cute if the two of them would cutely make up Anna’s maid presses a giant doom button The gigantic cruise ship just splits in two and Emo and Anna are separated from the rest Maria surmises that the manner in which the ship is splitting in two is very cute Back to the deserted island, Emo calls Anna’s ship junk and they fight Emo heads into the forest and Anna follows her Emo gets mad about Anna following her and Anna almost lets out that she’s concerned about her and blushes. God these girls are cute. Montage of Anna and Emo having dangerous adventures in the forest and getting chased by animals and almost drowning and falling They come across some ruins and they both simultaneously say that some giant stone monkey head looks like the other. At this point we get to the scene where it turns out that this was all done on purpose to help these two make up. This is six minutes into the episode, four if you don’t count the op and other stuff, and the whole episode has been packed with stuff happening. There was lots of fun dialogue, some cute scenes with Emo and Anna secretly liking each other and two really crazy and funny moments. And the setting for the episode is really unique too with these weird Aztec/Easter island looking ruins on this deserted island. This episode then ramps up with the two of them eventually making up and deciding to do a song together, at which point they decide to make a raft to get off the island. This is of course bad because they get immediately attacked by sharks and Anna’s maid, who is shown to be on the other side of the island, comes falling from the air, presumably jumping from miles away, to kick the shark’s asses. The last bit of the episode is a bit slower and the dialogue is a bit less substantial, but regardless, this episode remains one of my favourites of the show because there’s just so much in it. In season 1 of Pri chan you don’t get a lot of episodes that are this packed with good stuff. This episode really shows that when Pri chan delivers, it’s an amazing show. God I hope season 3 is like this too. It’s not just this central stretch of episodes, even the rest of the show is a bit better than the last season. There aren’t any episodes in this season that are as horrible generic as the worst episodes of season 1. Moreover, the contest episodes, which I usually disliked, were absent, which was coincidentally also true for the seconds season of aikatsu friends. Because Maria and Suzu were there, there were just a lot fewer moments where the three main girls were on their own and as a result there was a lot less room for any episode to be too generic. You can’t be that bored when Maria is pasting stickers all over everyone as a reward for their cuteness. Speaking of her, the two new idols, Maria and Suzu are great. I was so afraid that Maria’s spiel would get tiring, but it never did, and there were some real good laughs to be had from it too. Suzu, who wants to be a cool dancer, is adorable, just as Maria says and the two of them have incredible chemistry together. Then there are the characters of Dia and Nijonosaki-san, who are the driving force behind the overall plot of the season, which culminates in the final ten episode arc, which is where this season, sadly, drops the ball again. There are a couple of great episodes in the last stretch, but for the most part, I find Daia and Nijinosaki’s episodes a lot less engaging. Her awkwardness doesn’t go too well with the eccentricities of the show, so when an episode is focused on her, it tends to be a lot less funny. She has a bit of a character arc throughout the season and some of it is very good, but it’s never quite enough to carry a whole episode. Overall, this season of Pri chan does a lot better of a job at delivering on the potential of the series, but sadly it flops a bit again near the end. I hope season 3 gets back on its feet and becomes the best season of the show by far. I have my doubts that that will happen though, but I’m sure it will at least be better than season 1. Some people actually liked season 1 better than 2, though. It’s clear that many people get something completely different out of pri chan than I did, but that’s okay. This is all just how I feel about the show and what makes it great. The show that was the underdog between two pretty good kid shows spread its wings and showed itself to be more brilliant than I could have ever expected. Season 1 doesn’t stand up to any season of Aikatsu, but season 2 crushes them all under foot. Of course I’m not talking about the Chad Precure, because Healin’ good Precure isn’t even the best Precure series airing right now. For as good as it is, Mewkledreamy has completely eclipsed it. Anyways. Just as I rooted for Season 1 as the ultimate underdog of anime, Season 2 turned out to be the ultimate ugly duckling of anime that, against all opposition, became a beautiful swan, completely defying all expectations. That is what I would say of course, if this season had delivered on the best part of the show. Why is there so little Meru Meru in this season? She was the best part of season 1 and now she’s barely there. Unacceptable! 2/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Apr 30, 2020
Paris no Isabelle
(Anime)
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When I was a child my uncle told me that when he was in college, he and his roommates, after a milk puking accident and a series of subsequent lab experiments, had discovered cheese. He told me that the only reason he’s not being paid licensing fees from all over the world, is because filling in the form to file his patent seemed like too much work at the time. In hindsight I can clearly tell this was a lie. I mean, my uncle went to college in the early 80s, but this anime from the late 70s has cheese written all over it. It
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was upon realizing this however, that my mind went in a completely different direction. Reader, may I ask you: have you ever seen a cheesy 70s anime? I hadn’t before this point. Surely some old-fags stumbled into some cheesy nonsense back in the day, some over the top super robot shows or whatnot, but the 70s shows that newer anime fans are getting into are usually a little too tasteful to put on a cracker half its own thickness. The only reason why I even watched this show is because Old castle, a group that had already subbed a few classic shoujo before this, had just started subbing this when I discovered them. Little would I know what a crazy ride I was in for. I don’t think they knew either.
In a way it almost makes too much sense: but a couple months before ‘A Rose of Versailles’ would hit television, one of the most iconic, classic anime of all time, based on an already popular manga and set during the early days of the French revolution, this anime would come out, set during a much shorter, much less well known French revolution, and just so, this anime would be much shorter and much more forgotten. Does it deserve to be forgotten? Well, kinda. I don’t think anyone is going to watch this anime and come out of it lamenting the fact that more people don’t know about it. But anyone who does delve into it, thinking it’s going to be boring and only barely coherently watchable, is likely to be pleasantly surprised. Before World War 1 there were but two examples of major, modern warfare: The American Civil War and the Franco Prussian War of 1870. It is often argued that the nation states of Europe at the onset of the Great War wrongfully looked at the latter of these two conflicts to figure out what war was going to be like in the 20th century. Despite that, though this war seemed like any old war of glory on the German side, the French didn’t experience it this way and this anime is not afraid to show the horrors of modern warfare and to quench the fantasy of glory. Despite being a somewhat silly show, its setting is filled with bloody battlefields, angry populations and corrupt nobles. The silliness of the show comes from the fact that this serious war drama is held up by a backbone of cheesy, girly drama and a bit of fun, over the top, boyish action. Considering the amount of historical young adult novels from the seventies I read as a kid, all of which were about tomboyish main characters, I feel right at home watching this show. Isabelle is all I could dare ask for as the main character of a show like this. Right at the intersection between childhood and adulthood, Isabelle is finally starting to appreciate the value of femininity, yet right when she finally wishes to join noble society Paris is disturbed by the nearing of an enemy German army and her family is almost torn apart. What makes her work so well is the fact that she is a very tough cookie. She doesn’t cower away in the corner when something dangerous is happening, but actively participates in the action. She stands up for what she cares for and is not shy for sharing her opinions, but she’s still somewhat naive at times. In the second half of the show she goes on an adventure with her weakling of a side-kick Jean and her chemistry with him is a lot of what makes the show for me. Similarly to A Rose of Versailles the beginning part of this show forgoes the military conflict at hand for courtly melodrama, which might put off some people. Just like in Versailles, I do think this part of the show goes on a bit too long, which is strange, because the rest of the show is constantly moving. The rest of the show goes from action bit to action bit, from location to location, never lingering in any location for too long before moving to the next and that’s probably what kept it fun for me. There were a few parts of the show that got me kinda bored, but it always picked back up pretty quickly and despite the low production quality, the action was usually pretty exciting. The action wasn’t all the same stuff either. There were parts where they ran away from the Prussian army, there were sword fights, there was an action scene in a balloon, they had everything. There were parts where an immortal, unintelligent Frankenstein’s monster went after them and just wouldn’t die, goddammit!. You know... all the regular action movie stuff. The production quality is probably the wonkiest part of this already super wonky production. There’s a lot of awkward of even downright bad looking shots in this show and the fact that it manages to make the action work despite that is pretty impressive. Because this is a seventies show, however, the way that it is wonky is completely different from a modern show that’s made of a shoestring budget consisting of whatever coins they could find in the directors couch. Modern shows often save their animation effort for scenes that deserve it. Even high budget shows will often look somewhat stale outside of action scenes. Maybe you’d get a few head bobs here or there, but modern anime rarely go through the trouble of animating something inane, like pulling back a chair. But seventies anime do that sort of stuff all the time, even when the animation comes out looking like it was someone’s first cut they ever drew. And I have to give my respect for that. Sure a modern anime might use what it has more effectively, but it’s nice sometimes to see small stuff like that being animated and to see animation being spread out over the episode. Even if that means we also get to see lots of awkward cuts, wonky perspective shots and one shot where the left half of some guy’s face looked like it belonged to another person... Oh God what have they done to that poor old man’s face?! The music on the other hand is pretty good. Half the score consists of piano tunes by Chopin, which I instantly recognized, because I had just watched Piano no Mori when I was watching the show, which has an entire season-and-a-half long arc about a Chopin piano competition. The other half of the score is generic anime orchestral music, which, I have to say, was pretty darn good. There were a few moments in this show where I went: “Hey, this music is pretty good”, which I’d be pretty proud of if some random guy on the internet said that about a piece of music that I made 40 years ago. Nothing is greater than having a scene be elevated by the selection of a good, fitting tune, rather than the background music being there for the sake of itself and this show nails that, sometimes. Also the show has two openings: one for the show and one for the block. And the OP for the block doesn’t fit the tone of the show at all. Ya gotta love that. So I started writing this review, about a month ago, with a whole sketch about how cheesy it was. And yeah, depending on your definition of the word ‘dairy’ this show is pretty cheesy in a quite few ways, but, like, I don’t actually have anything to say about that. There were times where I was enjoying the fact that the show was so silly more that the show itself, but there were also parts where the show was genuinely moving or exciting. Even if the show is more shaky than my body after I do five push-ups, it still manages to do a lot of things right to make up for its failures. I honestly wasn’t expecting to give this show anything higher than a 6 when I went into it, but it really hustled for its money. Whenever I was getting bored it tried something different, every time I thought the show was out of tricks something insane happened. And it’s short too, only 13 episodes. It’s not super hard to pick this show up on a whim, spend an afternoon watching it and come out of it thinking: “huh, yeah. That random mal reviewer was right. This show really is slightly better than expected.” Anyways I’m gonna go back to doing what I was doing before, which is listening to the Aikatsu song ‘Love Game’ on repeat, which I was already doing, but I’m gonna continue doing that now Bye.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Nov 3, 2019
Pokemon Sun & Moon
(Anime)
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I remember seeing the first few episodes of pokemon Black and White on TV when they were first coming out over here and I was rather upset about them. My biggest gripe was with Ash’s character design, which was made to look younger. So I can totally understand the mindset behind the people who are upset about the change in art style the show has made, which is much bigger in contrast than it was in Black and White. Yet I’m not on their side this time. In fact I really love the new art style and how colourful and round it is. In fact
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I love almost everything about the new Sun and Moon anime, so much so that it might be the most I’ve ever enjoyed pokemon. Even as a kid I wasn’t as entranced by pokemon as I am now; back then it was just day to day business. Yet despite how much I think it’s great, Pokemon Sun and Moon is very controversial amongst fans and there’s a lot of people who are very mad at it. Clearly these people, most of whom are certainly long term pokemon fans, have ideas about what a pokemon series should contain, that Sun and Moon isn’t living up to. So in this review I don’t just want to talk about all the things that I love about the anime, but I will occasionally also lightly touch up on some criticisms of the show and why I don’t share them. I’m hoping I can not only show people whether they fall into the group that would actually enjoy Sun and Moon or not, but also help some people to appreciate it, who didn’t already.
Naturally there is one aspect of the Sun and Moon anime that is immediately obviously different from the earlier installments of the show: the art style. Gone are the spiky haired shounen character designs of the original series, as they’re replaced by these new round and colourful ones. The water colour (or at least water-colour-looking) backgrounds of the original series are replaced by digital ones, that are even greener. Though that is an earlier innovation from long before Sun and Moon. The animation, too, has changed considerably. The animation is much more fluid now, with the animators having incorporated a lot more smear frames to make it more expressive. Everything about the look of Sun and Moon is much more poppy and expressive, which adds to the much more lighthearted tone of the show. But why did Ash’s character design change so much? X and Y seemed to be going excellently, with lots of fans loving it and lots of people in the industry praising it. Why suddenly make such a big shift in such a big aspect of a show that’s going really well? Was it an evil scheme by the producers of the show to make pokemon look more like youkai watch so they can make more money? Well, no, not exactly. The thing you have to realize is that Ash’s character design has always been changing and it has always been changing too slowly. Even during the original series you saw his design slowly change and the makers of the show have always been very careful to implement new digital technology as gradually as possible, so that people wouldn’t notice. The difference here is that there is suddenly a big change, instead of a gradual one. An often noted fact about X and Y was that though the battle scenes were able to look really great due to all the innovations the team was already starting to make back then, Ash himself was rarely animated and the team even had a couple of stock animations of Ash throwing a pokeball, because no one wanted to animate him. The thing that pushed the team over the edge to change the character designs so drastically now, was that OLM was experimenting with more modern digital animation techniques and simpler, more rounded character designs are useful for that. The reason why pokemon now looks more like youkai watch, is because the character designs in youkai watch were also made to fit the same criteria. Though the fact that people unironically and without question put forth the idea that the character designs were made to match those of youkai watch, as if pokemon is some cheap cash grab that’s trying to leach off the popularity of that series, is some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever heard. Despite that, I’m not actually a huge fan of Ash’s redesign. His original design came from a time of spiky haired shounen protagonists, animated with coloured cells. His design was made for a different era of animation and so when adapting his design for modern animation techniques, it’s impossible not to lose something along the way, especially if the priority was to make him easy to animate, rather than nice to look at. If you try to play a game of spot the main character in Sun and Moon, you wouldn’t be spotting Ash, as he just doesn’t look as well designed as the other major characters in the show. Then again, that might have more to do with the fantastic character designs the other characters in Sun and Moon have. So what’s up with the rest of the Sun and Moon character designs? The original series started in the 90s, when it was very common for TV anime to make up for a lack of animation quantity, with beautiful and detailed character designs. And pokemon has always had great character designs, even if they didn’t always animate as well. Sun and Moon takes the opposite approach, using very simple character designs to have them animate better. What you have to consider, though, is that when you make a simple character design, you draw significantly fewer lines, and as such, every line becomes more important and has to be more carefully considered. As such, creating a simple character design, that’s also really good and very memorable, is a lot harder that it may seem at first. It’s incredible to see just how many unique and extremely memorable designs Sun and Moon manages to have and how many designs from the games were flawlessly adapted for 2d animation. And the games themselves had a different design focus as well, moving away from their more anime inspired character designs, giving them a much wider appeal. As a result, Pokemon Sun and Moon has a completely unique look within the wider anime landscape. What Sun and Moon has actually retained from older pokemon, however, is that the character designs of the girls tend to look better than that of the boys. Suiren is a very cute and unique looking tomboy and Moa looks very sweet, but Kaki and Maamane look pretty boring in comparison, though certainly not bad. On top of that, there’s the ever adorable Lillie, who seems to be the unanimous winner among all the Sun and Moon characters and has a genuine cult following behind her. Sure, not every design in Sun and Moon gets to be that unique, but there are a lot of great ones, even outside of the main characters, and I personally think this season of pokemon might have the largest quantity of great looking character designs yet. So what about this animation that I keep mentioning? A lot of people didn’t just lament the character designs and the “graphics” of the new pokemon anime, when Sun and Moon was just announced, they also called out the animation of the show for being bad. Now, many of these people were the type of people who would pause on a smear frame and call it bad animation, completely negligent of the fact that animation only happens when you have multiple frames, or of the fact that the usage of smear frames is an industry standard, so don’t take them too seriously. But what would someone who actually knows anything about animation think about Sun and Moon? Well, mostly that it is extremely impressively well animated. You have to note, pokemon is a long running anime, so every episode has to be made, on average, in about a week. So the fact that it has been consistently one of the most impressively well, if not the most impressively well, animated anime of every season it has been a part of, is ludicrous. In fact, Sun and Moon might be the most animated long running TV anime of all time. And that is no exaggeration. I think the big disconnect people have with Sun and Moon is in the animation style. The focus of previous seasons has always been on the pokemon. If you look at the pokemon from Sun and Moon and from the original show you can barely see the difference, where if you look at the character designs between those shows, or even between the original show and X and Y, you see a much bigger change. The pocketmonster designs have always remained relevant and animating them has always been easy. Or at least for the small ones. The reason why Ash’s pokemon rarely evolve might partially be caused by the fact that smaller pokemon are easier to animate. Though the more important reason is because those unevolved pokemon might simply have better designs than their evolved counterparts, and one of the main purposes of the pokemon anime has always been to sell merchandise. The fact that the people in pokemon were rarely animated in any interesting way was never a problem, because it was always about the pokemon, even (or maybe especially) in battle focused X and Y. But Sun and Moon puts a much larger focus on the characters and wants to express a lot more emotions and a lot fewer battles. As such, goofy faces and all kinds of expressions and animations that leave or bend the limitations of the original character models are everywhere. In a show like X and Y, the characters will rarely move much and will rarely go off model; and a lot of people are into that. I think a lot of people just want their anime characters to be on model all the time and be more serious, most of the time, like the characters in a show like Legend of the Galactic heroes. Sure, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get what I mean. But as much as I like that show, and as much as I think that style works for it, I would usually much rather see creative, goofy animation, than stiff animation that’s unwilling to bend it’s character models(even if the show has fantastic visual directing that makes it work). I just love anything that’s goofy and creative. Goofy faces and smeary animation are my bread and butter. I can’t get enough of them. Naturally, if you have a lighthearted show like Sun and Moon, you need fun characters to populate that show. The main six at the pokemon school all have their goofs, at different levels. Ash himself is laid back at times, but easily excitable. Unlike Ash in the original show, he’s not very bratty and he seems to take life as it comes to him, not the other way around. He’s not as concerned about becoming a pokemon master, and really just wants to have fun and do a few island trials. I’ve seen a lot of people call him childish in comparison to his X and Y counterpart, but I think they might have the terms ‘serious’ and ‘mature’ confused. These two are not the same thing. I remember being a six year old, being annoyed at adults for acting in a goofy manner. Who do you think knew more about maturity? Six year old me, or actual adults, who thought it was perfectly fine to be an adult that still loves being silly? For the most part during the show Ash is understanding of people and pokemon and tries his best to make friends. This is a far cry from the stubborn Ash in season 1 who still has a lot of growth to do. If you compare Sun and Moon Ash to original Ash, he’s definitely grown a lot over the years and I personally even look up to his attitude. He’s really found his way and is enjoying the little things in life. He probably read all of “Á la recherche du temps perdu” on the boat over to Alola. And the way that he combines that attitude with him still being loud and funny and excitable is just really fun to watch. Then there’s all these side characters. Lillie is the most popular and the most developed. She is initially scared of pokemon and has a bad relationship with her mother, but works through that. She’s very reserved but it becomes increasingly clear as the show goes on that she does actually want to be a part of the main group and be goofy right along with them. And seeing her pulling goofy faces or trying to be brave is just so cute. She’s adorable. I can definitely see why she has such a strong cult following. My personal favourite side character might be Suiren, though. She’s a tomboy who loves fishing, but she’s much more than that. She’s one of the funniest characters in the show. Sometimes she just does really funny things out of nowhere, just to mess with people, and she’s always up for whatever cool things the guys are doing. She’s the most surprising character out of all and you just never know when she will do something completely insane out of nowhere. Though her tomboyish nature doesn’t mean she can’t be girly. She and Mao are best friends and she can be just as girly as Mao when she wants. It’s nice to see a tomboy in media who hasn’t completely rejected femininity altogether. I think that’s more a stereotype than anything. The only downside to Suiren is that she isn’t always doing funny stuff or saying funny things. I think a more consolidated cast, where Suiren had more focus put on her, could have made her an incredibly fun character to watch. As she is right now she’s kind of inconsistent. Her friend Mao is a little more boring. She’s cute and fun, but not extremely memorable. She runs a restaurant with her dad and is overall a good, hardworking girl. On the guy’s side there’s Kaki who is one of Ash’s rivals this season, though not his main one. Most of the time he’s acting more serious, but when the situation calls for it he can be the goofiest one of them all. There are lots of funny jokes and cool animation moments involving him and he becomes adorable when anything involves his little sister. Just like Suiren, he’s somewhat of a mixed bag, but I love him anyways. These characters make up the heart of what makes Sun and Moon so enjoyable. I’ve heard people complain that the characters in Sun and Moon don’t get enough development, but I have to disagree on that one. I don’t think developing a character significantly is necessary to create a fun and engaging piece of media. The fact that these characters are still making me laugh over 140 episodes in is a testament to how well they work. Though, sure, any character can always be better. I’m saying that these characters are vastly more than sufficient to make me thoroughly enjoy the show. Oh, also there’s Maamane. He’s fat. Also he likes tech. I think we can all agree that Maamane kinda sucks. Luckily there are enough other side characters that are fun to watch to make up for him. Now it’s great and all that the show has so many fun characters, but what is the episode to episode experience of watching it like? What is it like structurally? What is the story about? Of course you likely have already noticed that this part isn’t as important to me, considering how much I’ve been gushing about all the other aspects of the show, but naturally the structure is important to any show. And it’s extremely interesting to look at what parts of the original show Sun and Moon decided to keep or emphasize and what parts to lessen. I’ve said that Sun and Moon has less battling and that’s true, but when it comes to important battles, like gym battles or league battles, it’s not actually that far behind it’s predecessors. What it does away with is actually mostly team rocket battles and battles between Ash and random people he encounters. There’s far less of that in Sun and Moon and I think that’s good. Even in the original show team Rocket’s spiel got tiresome pretty quickly, so seeing their episodes be replaced with creative episodic episodes and them being relegated to comedic relief is fantastic. And the fights that are still there, mostly island trial battles, rival battles or league battles, are generally pretty good. Though even in the original pokemon series it took until the Johto league, 270 episodes in, before I saw any battles that truly excited me, and Sun and Moon was a similar situation. Sun and Moon got a lot of flak for focusing more on slice of life, rather than adventure, but I think that, in actuality, it doesn’t really matter. I mean, the gang can still go adventuring out in the woods or on other islands and is that really much different from the gang in the original getting lost in similar looking woods all the time? Structurally, all it really changes is that the main characters don’t sleep in the same location as each other and that they don’t have to go out looking for a pokemon center, every time they find a pokemon that’s hurt, which constantly happened in the original show. Really, it’s not even that much of a structural difference to the show. If the writers want the gang to go into some cave they go into some cave. It may be a slice of life show, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an adventure show. The only real fear is of the aesthetic, the idea of them being on an adventure, being lost. But I don’t think that’s even a problem, considering Ash is already far away from home here and the geography on the island seems to be much more varied than all those similar looking woods and plains from the original show. X and Y emphasized the battling aspect of the original show and tried to make it more exciting, but Sun and Moon emphasizes the episodic adventures and makes them funnier and more creative. It does focus a lot more on people than the original, though, which focused largely on pokemon and their relationship to human society, but other that that, it’s not even like Sun and Moon does a lot the original didn’t already. Sun and Moon and X and Y just emphasize different aspects of what made the original great. In that sense I think they are both great successors to the original pokemon series and should both have the right to exist. Pokemon Sun and Moon puts a lot of emphasis on episodic episodes, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any story to it at all. The overall narrative is about Ash going to a new region and trying to beat all of this island’s versions of gym leaders with the new pokemon he’s caught over there. This is typical of pokemon series past the original, but there’s one key difference, which greatly affects the tone of the series. Ash rarely, mentions the idea of becoming a pokemon master, unlike his first season counterpart, who can’t shut up about becoming one. From the very beginning his journey to Alola is never about beating some pokemon league. It’s purely about experiencing local culture, meeting new people, catching new pokemon, and maybe challenging some tough trainers he meets along the way. Ash in Sun and Moon seems to have realized that the adventures he has and the people he meets along the way are much more important than the end goal of his journey itself. He’s excited about every new thing he gets to experience, and welcomes every distraction along the way. And the show itself is similar. The show wants to do as many different things as possible and will actively avoid the trap of centering an episode on team rocket stealing Pikachu or relegating a large chunk of almost every episode to that. But besides all kinds of creative episodes the show also has some story arcs that can get very exciting and emotional. The show does like to pack an emotional punch from time to time, which I appreciate, and it’s not scared to talk about death. Sun and Moon is a varied experience, and because of that, doesn’t get tiresome or monotonous very quickly. Now, though these arcs and individual episodes can get very serious, for the most part Sun and Moon is still very lighthearted and casual. From the very beginning, Ash just wants to have fun and beat some island challenges. Participating in the pokemon league was never a part of the plan, because at the start of the show the pokemon league didn’t exist yet in Alola. In the original show Ash explicitly wants to go to Johto to participate in the league there. Ash’s focus has clearly changed and so has the show’s. To previous seasons the pokemon league was the goal and beating it the ultimate test. But in Alola, the league is a casual experience among friends and neighbors, likely a remnant of the earlier island trial tradition. So when the League in Sun and Moon came around and didn’t take itself as seriously as it had in previous seasons a lot of fans were upset. But I think this is a case of wrong expectations. The battles in the Alola league were good, even if they weren’t that big. There were a few comedy fights or fights with funny moments in them, and I can understand that someone who takes the league very seriously might be bothered by that, but those fights were all fun to watch either way. A show doesn’t need massive stakes for it to be enjoyable. It can just be about the personal stakes of a couple characters you care about. Ash facing off against his rivals this season wasn’t really any less exciting than it was in previous seasons, because rival battles have always been about personal stakes. The fact that the Alola league didn’t feel as grandiose and official points to the fact that this season of pokemon has a different appeal, and that’s really too bad for people who simply want out of pokemon what they got from X and Y. But the appeal that Sun and Moon is going for it’s doing fantastically. And with that we finally reach the end. Ash has said that he wants to see the rest of the world, and the next pokemon series is going to be about him travelling the world. Team rocket finally answers the question “What even is this feeling?” with “what a great feeling”, yet they only realized this right as they had to leave. I’d love to see where these characters go next, however it seems that Sword and Shield might become a reboot instead of a sequel. Either way, it seems that Sword and shield is once again going for a slightly different appeal from the last two series, and I think it will be a little less controversial because the appeal might lie more in the middle and Ash’s design is more pleasing to look at. To someone who doesn’t like Sun and Moon it might seem that their nightmare is finally over. To me it’s just yet another opportunity for a unique, new pokemon anime. Though I am sad to have to say goodbye to my favourite season of pokemon and I’m unsure if the next season will truly live up to it, but considering I haven’t heard anything about significant staff changes, I’m not that scared. You didn’t need to read all the way through this review to understand whether Sun and Moon was going to be your thing or not. You’d have seen whether you were on one line with me a few paragraphs in. If all that goofy fun stuff and those goofy faces and all that creative animation sounds great to you, you’re probably someone who is much more open about the fact that you like media that can just be fun and doesn’t need to be anything more. Otherwise if you still lament the fact that Sun and Moon doesn’t have as many battles, or if you want it to be more ‘serious’ and ‘adult’ you’ll probably dislike it. There’s a middle ground of people who think it’s just okay, but either way you can probably tell. But I’m not actually expecting many people to be reading this review to try and understand whether they’d like it or not. Most people have probably already seen it and made up their minds a long time ago. If you loved the show you probably wanted someone to talk about what you loved about it, in an endless sea of haters. And if you dislike it, you’re probably reading this review to discredit me. You probably, by now, think I’m a dipshit and this review is probably just making you angry. I just hope I got you to understand my perspective just a little bit. If 4200 words of a glowing review didn’t already tell you, I love pokemon Sun and Moon. I just have so much fun watching it. And that one word, “fun” speaks to the core of the show for me. The animators and writers of the show turned pokemon into what it is because that would be fun. Industry professionals from all over the industry praise the hell out of the Sun and Moon anime, and considering the amount of anime references that are in it, you can clearly tell that the creators of Sun and Moon still have lots of passion for the medium of anime and still have lots of fun creating pokemon. And I still have lots of fun watching it. The older I get the more I realize that the main thing I’m looking to get out of anime is fun. I love media that gives me joy, because there is no feeling I’d rather feel than joy. Sun and Moon’s fun characters, their funny expressions, the expressive animation, the references to all kinds of anime I love and the occasional emotional punch the show still has the weight to throw around, I love it all so much. There are few things in life that give me so much joy as knowing that pokemon is still fun to watch, 15 years after I first started watching it. Sure it isn’t perfect. Every episodic show, even something as prolific as Bebop or space dandy, is going to have weaker episodes. In particular I’d say episode 26 is kinda trash, though I’ll forgive it for how great episode 28 is. Still, Sun and Moon might be the best kids anime I’ve ever seen, and that says a lot considering how much I love Ojamajo Doremi. On that topic, If you loved Sun and Moon and you want to watch stuff like it, I’d highly recommend Ojamajo Doremi, which also has simpler more expressive character designs, with every facial reaction under the sun. You’ll probably also love Heartcatch precure and Sailor moon and you might even be into 100% Pascal sensei(and be a part of an exclusive club of like 3 people who like that show), and you’ll definitely be into Mahoujin Guruguru(2017). If you prefer X and Y, you’ll be delighted to know there’s an entire genre of anime that has the same appeal of that show. It’s called the “Shounen action” genre. You might have heard of it; it’s fairly popular. Of course that includes stuff like Hunter x Hunter(2011) and Fullmetal alchemist, that most people have already seen, but it’s a vast genre that you’re not going to watch all of anytime soon. If you somehow don’t know how to find that stuff, you can always PM me for recommendations. Anyways, I hope that regardless of whether you like Sun and Moon or not, we can all come to one agreement: Let’s hope Sword and Shield is going to be the best pokemon anime yet.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Sep 4, 2019
Kiratto Pri☆chan
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
When I first started watching Kiratto pri chan I had only recently gotten into shows for young girls. The realization had been half a decade in the making, if not my whole life, but only in late 2017/ early 2018 did I realize that I didn’t just like cute things in anime, but I also liked shows for little kids. So it was then, as I was watching and immensely enjoying the beginning part of hugtto precure, whilst I was hungering for more weekly kids shows to keep up with, that two little shows started airing named Aikatsu friends and kiratto pri chan.
You could almost ... say that these shows were the same show: They’re both game adaptations, with middle school idols, insert performances and collectable outfits. Both shows start off with two main idol girls and two rival idols and they both later add two more idols. Both shows also have some older idols, the greatest in the world, who occasionally interact with the main characters, mostly during competitions, and who must ultimately be overcome. Any time though, when you see two shows with the exact same premise, it becomes obvious pretty early on which is the better one: Aikatsu friends in this case. And so a lot of people who were watching both shows jumped ship on pri chan pretty early on, and so did I. Not for long though. There was a thing in my soul that believed I should continue it , and I didn’t understand why yet. Was it I, god or who, that moved this mouse to put Kiratto pri chan back on my watching list? Aikatsu friends was obviously better through more conventional means. It had good animation, great looking CG during the dance sequences, lovable and interesting main characters (though weaker rivals) and more consistency altogether. But I just couldn’t help myself rooting for pri chan. It was the underdog between these two, and like any good underdog it had it’s lovable quirks. Aikatsu friends was relatively consistent, but therefore also a lot more predictable; but you never knew when something insane and hilarious would happen in pri chan. It was just so much more eccentric and surprising. (though there were some very eccentric episodes and jokes in friends as well, don’t get me wrong) To me it’s pretty obvious where all these eccentricities came from: Director Hiroshi Ikehata. Ikehata has directed nothing but comedy anime, like Robot girls Z, sore ga seiyuu and akiba’s trip the animation. These shows are all considered good but not many people love them. That’s different for Mahoujin guruguru (2017), which has a strong cult following, which I am a proud part off, though that show is likely as good as it is because the source material is so strong. Point is, Hiroshi Ikehata is a comedy director through and through, though a fairly new and upcoming one. He is likely the reason why this show has all these random comedy bits, and I love him for it. The fact that Ikehata's style of comedy really works for me, is probably a good part of why I like this show. Sadly his eccentricities aren’t present in the main characters. Our three protagonists are fairly boring, which is likely my biggest gripe with the show. One of them has a somewhat funny rivalry with one of the rival idols, and it’s not as if they can’t be funny when the situation calls for it; it’s just that they’re all fairly lacking in personality. This isn’t true, however, for the rival idols. Sara and Anna have lots of personality and have great chemistry together, with Anna being this loud and bratty girl who’s constantly bragging about herself and showing off how ridiculously rich she is. Sara contrasts her immensely by being this cool easygoing girl, who secretly loves all things cute. They do their jobs as rivals perfectly, early on in the show, and later on they become good friends with the main characters. But my favourite character in the show has to be Meru-Meru, an old friend of Anna and Sara, who has been gone for years. Unlike the dignified Anna and Sara she is very childlike and wild. She is an incredibly smart scientist and inventor, but unlike most characters of that archetype, actually has a personality on top of that. Because she’s been in America for so long she’s constantly spouting Engrish, but it’s definitely some of the finest Engrish I have ever heard. I can’t not smile when Meru-Meru is enthusiastically spouting nonsense. She is the best part of the show for me and my only complaint with her is that she comes in far too late into the show. I need more of her! I actually feel similarly about the character designs as I feel about the girls. The main girls are pretty boring to look at, but Anna and Sara both look great. Anna has a very nice shade of red for her hair and somewhat goofy looking pony tails that roll up like a slinky near the end. This hair style is common for rich girls in anime, but I have never seen it done with this bright shade of red, only with blond hair, maybe black or pink. Anna always has a proud and sassy look on her face, whereas Sara has a cool, confident look on hers. You can definitely subtly tell their personalities from the way they look, and similarly when you look in the main characters eyes you can clearly see they’re actually dead inside. Sara has a very cute short, green haircut and often wears cute looking hats. Her fashion sense is definitely the strongest out of all the characters in the show. Anna is more into fancy dress, though she usually wears normal clothes throughout most of the show. Generally there’s a decent amount of cute clothes worn throughout the show, but not enough for it to be impressive. Aikatsu friends definitely has it beat in that regard. Though in both shows I much prefer their casual wear over any of their performance dresses. Main characters aside, the background characters can often have the most surprising character designs. Anna’s maid is introduced fairly early on in the show and looks hilarious. Unlike all the other characters in the show she has gigantic iris-less eyes, leaving not enough room for a nose. Because this is a girls show all the characters have big, colorful, well shaded eyes, but Anna’s maid has some of the simplest eyes you could draw, with just a few dots for pupils. The maid is a pretty funny character as well. She never talks, is fast and strong and at one point she effortlessly kicks in two giant, locked metal doors as if it’s nothing. Often when the show zooms in on a group of background characters, and especially if those characters are moving, the show will simplify them, giving them the same simplified eyes as Anna’s maid and they always look hilarious in my opinion. In aikatsu friends the crowds always look consistent with everybody being properly drawn, but in this show they look really goofy and funny and I like that way more. Please Japan, no more CG crowd scenes, just look at this show for inspiration! I’m always fascinated with anime that manage to look good, despite a low amount of resources available. This show is definitely a nice example of that, with a lot of goofy faces and funny looking shots, as opposed to the usually beautiful and well crafted look of aikatsu friends, and that just makes me root for it more. Ikehata and his team definitely put some love into this show and it shows. Just wish it was more consistent. The big problem with the show, despite how loveable it is, is that it ultimately isn’t consistent enough. The funny and wacky moments come out of nowhere, but not often enough. Too many episodes are kind of a snore, which is also true for aikatsu friends, which is why I, regrettably, can’t give either show more than a 6/10, even though I was really hoping to. If the show had lots of wacky stuff in every episode it could easily be an 8. Both shows even have 9/10 episodes, however rare they may be. That leaves only one part of the show to be discussed: The performances. To be honest, I’m not the guy you should be asking about this. I don’t care much for the performances. Some people only care about the performances and I don’t think I’ll ever understand them. The CG in this show isn’t as good as in Aikatsu friends and I don’t care about dancing. I usually space out during these sections, listen to the cute pop songs and browse some sites. But really think about it, if I give this show a solid 6, despite the fact that I didn’t care about the performances and you actually do care about those, and if on top of that you resonate a lot more with girly stuff than I do, then this show could easily be an 7 or an 8 for you, could it not? There’s always at least one performance per episode and they never re-animate them. They’re essentially CG, insert music videos. The disconnect comes when the characters talk about how good each others performances were, or how much better than usual they did. It’s hard to quantify their performances if they’re prerecorded. In a battle or sports tournament you can see that one opponent beat the other because he took his opponent out or got a better time, but in a battle of the idols you can’t see who wooed the crowd better, except when the show explicitly tells you. As such, the episodes focusing on these competitions are almost consistently my least favorite episodes. It’s weird to me, then, when I see people complaining about ‘filler’ in these shows. To me the filler is the best part. I love creative and funny episodes, where the creators of the show get to do whatever they want. My favourite episode of the show is likely the dolphin episode, which I’m fairly sure is filler. It seems there is just a crowd of people that is into these types of shows that gets something quite different out of it than me. All in all, I like kiratto pri chan quite a bit. I just wish I could like it more. Periodically on 4chan, you see a thread discussing all the shows for young girls in one go. These threads are usually dominated by precure and aikatsu friends, but you always see some people squeezing in a little bit of this show, as if to say: “Hey, we still exist. This show is good too, you know.” But no one listens as the Chad aikatsu and precure watchers waltz right over them. This show is the ultimate underdog. It’s a long, episodic kids show, and a girly one at that, and it doesn’t have any action, like precure. Instead it’s about idols, a genre that is quite niche, on top of the fact that most anime fans don’t watch kids anime. And on top of all of that, this show has a twin sister that is simply superiour. If season 2 could try harder to be more consistent, could stand up and fight even harder, like a shonen action hero, then season 2 could end up being better than aikatsu friends season 2. But that might all be but a dream. Could the underdog truly stand up to the superiour foe in real life? Or do miracles only exist in anime? Maybe I could give an update on this, when I’ve finished both second seasons in May(hopefully). Until then I’ll keep enjoying Meru Meru’s fun antics, for so far as anyone cares to translate hem. I keep talking about these two shows, instead of just this one, because I really don’t know how not to. I watched these incredibly similar shows at the same time, often got confused as to what happened in what show, and ultimately I can say that the experience of watching these two shows was one big experience. I can’t separate them in my mind and there’s no need to anyways. I’ll remember the experience of watching them for a long time and I’ll always remember Kiratto pri chan as the ultimate anime underdog. Until I find a new underrated anime to be all dramatic about.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jul 30, 2019
Yo! Daitouryou Trap-kun
(Anime)
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When I was a kid, I noticed a pattern, a law of sorts, that every so often I would look back on my self from 2 years ago and cringe. I would see my former self for a fool and be ashamed of how stupid he was. This law definitely didn’t keep holding true forever, but upon re-watching this weird anime I watched 2 years ago, I suddenly had that same feeling again. I don’t feel it quite as strongly; I definitely don’t feel I was an idiot for looking at this anime the way I did, but I do feel like I was far
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less worldly at the time.
This is an anime about American president Donald Trump going to a Japanese grade school as a transfer student, but that description could not be less helpful in explaining what’s going on. The fact of the matter is, that this anime is making fun of Trump. It can’t be called criticism. None of Trump’s political stances are named in it. Instead these two episodes attack Trump’s over the top character. Attacks on Trump’s character have always been common, but remain ineffective. To his supporters, you see, his personality is his strongest attribute and criticizing it is a worthless pursuit. As such, all that remains to be seen here is a shallow satire that’s somewhat baffling in it’s usage of comedy. Or at least, that’s about how far I came when I first watched it. And to be fair, at the time, that was enough for me to list it with a 10 out of 10 score and proclaim it to be the be-all-end-all of anime, that no anime would ever surpass. Fair. I can still kind of see that. But that way of looking at it was just as shallow as the show itself and both people meme-ing about how great it was as well as it’s detractors were just as shallow. But the thing is, I keep coming back to this anime, time and time again. Why is that? Why do I keep thinking about it? Why is Trump rapping in this? Why does he keep swinging his balls around? Who made this and why? And why is trump’s hair a lunchbox? Well it would be understandable to blame all this nonsense on the weird comedic style of it’s creator: Takashi Taniguchi. He’s been making weird animations like this for years. Before this he was most famous for Mori no Andou, a web short that is hilarious with friends and mildly funny without them. There’s a lot of lol-random style humor in his works, but they’ve always managed to find an audience by just being so out there that it didn’t matter. This one makes heavy use of Donald Trump to make that happen and I can see why. Taneguchi’s work is full of weird personalities and Trump fits right in among them. What’s more baffling is the way he’s introduced. The first half of the first episode is entirely build up. First the school bell rings, then the teacher tells his class that they are having a transfer student coming in today and then the door slowly opens revealing Trump: A long build up with an explosive punchline. His works may be weird, but at least Taniguchi knows what he’s doing. (That kinda reminds me of the time I went back to some old smosh videos and realized that, though I thought the substance of the jokes were incredibly unfunny, the comedic timing and pathos were masterful) I didn’t quite recognize this as a Taniguchi work, when I first watched this and when I did find out I felt stupid for not realizing it earlier. Taniguchi’s works are usually immediately recognizable. His visual style involves these weirdly shaded, dumb looking faces. The faces in this anime were less detailed, except for that of Trump. But Trump looks so different from Taniguchi’s other works, that It took me a while to find out this anime was his. Even so, as is true with this work, the faces are always the best part of a Taniguchi work, and are the factor that make the comedy work. If Taniguchi wasn’t able to draw this way, I don’t think his works would have caught on. It should not be understated how much I like his drawing style and how much personality it has. Trump’s character design is definitely nothing to be snuffed at either. He’s drawn short and stumpy, like a weird, humanoid cave creature. His upper body is too big for his legs, but not by a crazy amount. He’s wearing a suit on his upper body and shorts on his lower half. I’d assume the idea is to contrast his childlike attitude with his position as a businessman and President. He’s wearing a backpack on his back, a symbol of elementary school in Japan, and there’s a recorder sticking out of it. Trump may be here to make a mess of things, but at least he’s brought his stuff. The most striking parts of his character design are his dumb ass looking face and the fact that he constantly points upwards with his right hand. He’s not animated, except for a few lip-flaps here and there, and this is a staple of Taniguchi’s works. Taniguchi has to animate all his shorts entirely by himself, so he must have figured smoothness of animation wasn’t going to matter much, if the appeal of his works lay elsewhere. I’d say he was definitely correct in thinking this, and I even think the barely animated style makes his work funnier. Besides that there is one more noteworthy visual in this anime. Late into episode 1 there is a moment where Trump pisses all over the place. This drawing of him has far more work put into it than any other in the show. In fact, though it looks really gross, I definitely love Taniguchi’s unique shading work on this image. Regardless of whether you like what you see here, it’s hard to argue that this image in particular, isn’t well crafted, impactful and extremely memorable. And what an appearance he must seem to these poor children. The teacher announces that there will be a transfer student coming in today and the class is immediately excited. The trope of the transfer student is a common one in anime and is almost as iconic as the trope where characters eat and either hate the food or think it’s the best they’ve ever eaten. But unlike the food trope, a new transfer student can be absolutely anything. What a shock must it then be for the new student to come in and rap and piss all over the place. Donald Trump is definitely the last thing you’d expect to walk into your classroom. His appearance is preceded by several seconds of dramatic sounding music, clearly meant to build suspense as the door slowly opens and Trump comes in and I definitely think that without these few seconds of extra build up, the moment where he starts rapping and all hell breaks loose would have been less effective.. Again, though I don’t find this anime to be all that funny on it’s own, I do believe it to be well crafted. Taniguchi clearly is experienced in his craft and knows what he’s doing. But that brings me to the question. Why is Trump going to school? Is it a cheap jab at the fact that Trump seems to act in a somewhat juvenile manner? Is it just to say: “Ha ha, look at what a kid that guy is, look at how gross he is.” I mean that seems unlike Taniguchi. Sure he’s not beyond making childish jokes like that, but he seems to revel in gross and weird stuff. Why would he of all people criticize Trump for being obscene? I don’t see any references to what Trump has said or done either. This anime is solely about the ridiculousness of the idea of Trump coming into a primary school and making a mess of things whilst rapping. I don’t think this anime is a jab at Trump at all. I don’t think Taniguchi is pro Trump or anything, but I do think he appreciates his comedic value. I think he saw Trump not as a cultural or political icon to take down, but rather as a fantastic piece for his weird and obscene, animated art. And that brings me to my next question. Why make this? Why create such a weird and daring short? Was it just for attention? Around that same time Taniguchi would make a collaboration with Daimaou Kosaka, who in the west Is most known for a somewhat recent meme clip where he put to things together and people made all kinds of edits of it. It could be that Taniguchi is trying to expand his audience with collaborations and political anime. But just sit down and think about it for a second. For that to work, ultimately what would need to happen is for people to share these anime with each other. It doesn’t matter to me whether taniguchi is doing all of this out of a desire to grow his audience, or out of a love for his craft. I can’t figure that out anyways, because there isn’t enough information about him available in English. What matters is the fact that elements like Trump in his works, make them more shareable. And that’s what it’s all about: watching this weird anime together. This anime takes place in school and when I first watched it, I too was in school. I know how eerie that coincidence must seem to you, but hear me out. I was kind of a loner in school so I never got to show this anime to too many people, but showing it to people was always fun. Sure they always reacted somewhat aversely, but that was half the fun in it! I remember watching Mori no Andou with friends an it being way funnier than it was alone. And that was an experience that stuck with me forever. I see some weird criticisms of the show such as that it is dumb and repulsive(like, literally the point of the whole thing) or more bafflingly, that the characters are weak. The characters are weak? Trump comes strolling into school rapping about himself and pissing all over the place, showing no remorse whatsoever. That’s the most character I’ve seen in a character introduction since Bumi’s introduction in Legend of Korra. I mean there’s being weirded out by a show and not liking it and there’s having weird detached ideas about a show’s quality that don’t make sense at all if you actually watch it. Weird tangents aside though, the point I’m trying to make is that I think people woefully misunderstand the point of Trap-kun and other weird works by Taniguchi. The fun in it is not the actual experience of watching it. It’s about the experience of sharing it. Even just reading comments or reviews about it is participating. But the best experience to be had with Trap-kun is showing it to friends or cousins and watching them be weirded out, as they don’t know what to represent and what to repress out of their reaction. You put them on edge, into a weird social situation they were not prepared for; you laugh together; you’re grossed out together. You laugh at each other's reactions. You both go out to show it to more friends. And then you look up into the sky and you jokingly ponder what went wrong in humanities development that it would lead to this; and then you wonder if maybe the creation of Trap-kun was an inevitability of the universe and there simply couldn’t mathematically exist a universe that didn’t spawn this exact anime; and then you wonder if the universe was created by higher beings for the express purpose of creating this specific weird anime or if otherwise, humanity was by mother earth. It all seems so silly, but those moments spent with your friends are a valuable treasure you keep with you for your whole life. This anime, you could say, is a meta-modernist piece of work, where the point of it can’t simply be found in the work itself, but also in the people around it. What made this anime valuable is that people talked about it and shared it, so much so that you are reading this lengthy ass review about it. This review is a part of Taniguchi’s art and of your experience of it, that can simply not be denied. And this anime would be infinitely less valuable without the funny comments you read about them, without the people you share it with, without this review, that you’ve read all the way through, either because you’re intrigued by it, or because you’re bored out of your mind. What else could you think whilst watching this show for the first time but “Wow this is the weirdest shit I’ve ever seen. Can’t wait to see other people’s reactions to it.”, as you proceed to scroll down to read the comments. And in that sense, I argue that this weird, obtuse piece of art is just as valuable as a normal, conventional, well made 12 episode tv anime. The experience you had with this is not any less valuable because it’s weird or because your enjoyment of it was unconventionally obtained. I recognize that a lot of people genuinely dislike this show, and that’s of course acceptable but I couldn’t help myself but recognize a lot of the negativity towards this show to be shallow and poorly thought through in nature. What I want to do here is to help you, dear reader, cope with more unconventional ideas of how media could exist and how it could be enjoyed and thought about. But all that ranting aside, in short, I like this show, not because I think it’s enjoyable to watch, but because I like the idea of it and the surrounding culture. And now, having made this lengthy review that I conned you into reading all the way through I am part of that surrounding culture and as an extension, I’m part of this artwork and so are you reading; we are all art. But wait… I still haven’t answered the question: why is Trump’s head a bento? Ah shit this throws off all my calculations. All my theories are useless now. I’m gonna have to start again from the beginning and go back down the rabbit hole…Well, see you next time reader, if I survive another deepdive that is... Also, to whomever poor mod that has to read through this whole review… I’m deeply, deeply sorry. I’ll buy you a beer if we ever meet in real life, I promise!
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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May 25, 2019
Wonder (Movie)
(Anime)
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Mizue Mirai’s animations are noteworthy for creating the sensation of a digital-esque cleanliness, despite being hand drawn. Most of Mirai's works feel like they're proof of concepts, but Wonder feels complete and in my mind is his magnum opus. This film came together when somewhere in 2012 Mirai decided to start drawing one second of a short film every day for a year, with evey day continuing from the last day. Though some parts of the film feel much simpler, as if Mirai was too busy that day to create anything impressive, the vast majoritiy of this film is wonderfully animated, with an enormous amount
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of different ways Mirai finds to animate different coloured shapes bending, fusing, splitting, appearing and disappearing. Sometimes, when I watch this film, I notice a moment where there is such a wealth of stuff happening at once, that I sit there in wonder: how could Mirai possibly keep track of all this stuff?
When I first watched Wonder I didn’t really get it. I saw a few simple animations and I thought the style was interesting, but I didn’t get what the point was. The music that was playing was abstract and could barely be described as music. This could be said for most of Mirai’s works, except for his music videos. I was starting to get a little bored and as I was debating whether I would be able to sit through all of this, suddenly this goofy ass song started playing and it immediately put a huge smile on my face. It turns out that this anime short film about abstract animation is mostly kept strung together by one of the most fun and wholesome songs I’ve ever heard in my life, and I love it. Now that I was hearing this lovely song I was instantly hooked and the animations suddenly made a lot more sense to me. Before there had been a few bits of sound that seemed to be timed to work with the animation, but other than that these two elements seemed divorced from each other. Now I was watching a music video, where the music informs the emotions that the visuals portray or enhance. Not only that: there was now a theme. This goofy ass song now conveyed an air of goofy fun; and with that I was hooked on getting to know what out there visuals Mirai could create and let a dense atmosphere of fun wash over me. When you’re looking at abstract animations like this one, what’s most interesting about them isn’t how different it is from everything else, but what things from real life it decides to keep. Wonder portrays a few things you might recognise: vaguely animal or human like shapes, waves and flowing liquid and most strangely, puking. But the most noteworthy aspect of his style is his constant use of cells. Even if it’s just a strangely shaped splatter of paint, many of Mirai’s creations will have a coloured circle inside a different coloured circle inside of it. Most of these creations are coloured dots with tails that often swim around, so it’s clear they’re meant to look like cells; but he also sometimes uses what somewhat looks like naturalistic pencil drawings of plant cells. One of my favourite moments in the film is when a couple of green dots bounce around on a black mass of sorts and it both looks like they’re bouncing around on a piece of some elastic material and like they’re sinking into the black mass like your fingers would into a mass of watery foam. How exactly he manages to uphold both these feelings at the same time is still a mystery to me, but perplexing details, that you might not catch on your first watch, are what to me makes Mirai’s style irreplacable. Later in the film there is a moment where the music changes. Suddenly there is a spooky air to the film and the visuals change to match. Despite me saying that the music is what strings the animation together, the music hasn’t done that great of a job untill this point of matching big changes of what’s happening on screen. It doesn’t quite feel like it was handcrafted to match Mirai’s work. But this change in the music is different and properly signifies a change in theme that the animation was going through. I call it spooky, but if it’s that, it would be some of the most wholesome and goofy spooky music I’ve ever heard. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else would raise his eyebrows when I referred to it as spooky and would use a completely different word. That said, the visuals from this point on are definitely a bit more disturbing. There is a larger focus on human like shapes and there’s even some puking. One moment involves a cell swimming down a tight corridor and finding at the end of it a bigger cell without a tail, resembling insemination. Where as in earlier segments of the film there could be tons of colours on the screen at once, this part consistently limits itself to smaller colour palettes. This is also the part of the film where you might notice that the colouring job Mirai is doing is getting rougher and rougher and you can clearly see he’s using paint. After this section there is one more short, fun bit like the rest of the film, before there is another shift is music and visuals. The music is now accompanied by vocals. All they sing is: Wawwa, Wawwa. It’s very goofy. But whereas the music is being added to, the animation is devolving. Shapes are getting rougher and rougher and the transitions get less smooth and animated and random images start flashing across the screen. This is ususally the part of the film where I wake and realise what a deep trance I have been in. I let a slight sigh and as I slowly leave the trance, I feel as if I’m under the shower and the water is slowly getting colder. I decide to enjoy the last moments of the film as it quickly devolves into random splatters of paint and ends. I will also give an epilepsy warning for this final part of the film. Wonder is one of those anime I can frequently watch and once I’ve finished it, automatically sigh: “God I love this anime.” It’s not a perfect anime, but it also never gets old. It’s not an anime you think deeply about afterwards, but it’s one you will occasionally crave for that in-the-moment experience. Mirai’s craftsmanship is unique and I’m very happy it exists. If you want to get into Mirai’s other works, there’s a few recommendations I have. ‘Playground’ feels like it’s an earlier rendition of Wonder, made by a less experienced and established Mirai. ‘And And’ and ‘Poker’ are both music video’s like wonder, though I personally don’t like them quite as much. More famous earlier works of Mirai like ‘a log day of timbre’ and ‘Jam’ don’t give anything that Wonder can’t give you; that’s why I referred to them as ‘Proof of concept,’ but they’re not awful. I rated ‘The baby birds of Norman McLaren’ a 7 on mal, but I don’t remember why. A less worked out short that’s completely different from Wonder is ‘Modern,’ which has a very different, more geometrical, animation style. Lastly there is ‘Futsuu tte Nandarou?’ Which is a collection of 5 short stories, by random people, with accompanying animation from 5 different animators. Though I couldn’t find a translated version last I checked. None of these hold up, however, to Wonder. I love this movie and with this review I hoped to properly convey what I love about it so much, as I can’t find anyone else who has done so yet. And maybe if you didn’t get it and you read my review out of confusion, you might now be able to return to it and appreaciate it’s brilliance. Though probably not.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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