- Last Online41 minutes ago
- GenderMale
- LocationOxford, UK
- JoinedMar 9, 2010
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Mar 13, 2021
12 of 12 episodes seen
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1
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
6 |
| Story |
6 |
| Animation |
4 |
| Sound |
5 |
| Character |
6 |
| Enjoyment |
6 |
I ended up watching this after Crunchyroll's random feature landed me on its page. At the time of viewing, this show's rating average barely broke the 5 mark, so it's fair to say I didn't exactly have high expectations. Still, how painful could it be to sit through a series of sub-5 minute show? (Actually, I just remembered my experiences of grinding through "Teekyuu" so the answer would appear to be "very".)
Perhaps due to my low expectations, I ended up rather enjoying these shorts, finding the episodes to be silly and fun.
But what is Hakata Mentai about?
Uhh, I'm not entirely sure I can describe the
premise properly. From what little information I could find, the show is supposedly based on a shopping district in Fukuoka's Hakata district. The main character Pirikarako is some kind of ... fairy ... thing? Who, along with her companions - a red blob and three floating strawberries - goes around and ... does weekly weird stuff ...... Look, the plot doesn't matter okay? I'd no clue what the heck was going on at first, but I found it's easy to move past that and just sit back and enjoy the zany humour. The setup might be strange, but the individual stories are coherent enough to entertain.
Over the course of the series, Hakata Mentai features various food items that I presume the real life Hakata district is well known for. The series can come across as a thinly veiled advert for the local attractions, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I remember when I used to watch traditional TV a long time ago, I often enjoyed some of the adverts shown during the breaks for their creativity and sense of humour ... at least for the first five times or so that I watched them. Well, Hakata Mentai is a bit like those. Most of the entertainment value stems from the amusingly random nature of the show and the often well delivered punchlines at the end of each episode. For sure, some of the episodes are significantly funnier than others - in particular, a few of the episodes in the middle were duds - but with such short episodes, there's barely enough time to be bored before it's over.
The animation quality is about as cheap and static as you would expect for a series with such short episodes. It has a fittingly bright, childish colour palette, but beyond that there's not much more to say here.
Having watched it, I'm a bit surprised by the low ratings garnered by the show. It's true that no sane person's gonna unironically declare this as the epitome of anime, but I personally found it to be a charming, amusing romp. If you've got a few spare minutes, you could do worse than spend it watching an episode of this.
Personal rating: +0.5 (decent).
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May 30, 2020
22 of 22 episodes seen
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4
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
8 |
| Story |
8 |
| Animation |
9 |
| Sound |
9 |
| Character |
8 |
| Enjoyment |
8 |
Everyone loves a good underdog story, a story about some gritty protagonist who overcomes their disadvantages to climb to the top through a combination of superhuman effort and sheer force of will.
"Hyouka" is not one of those stories.
It's the opposite: a celebration of the sort of genius that burns so brightly that ordinary mortals like you and me can only sit back and admire, often with envy, knowing that no matter how hard we try, we'll never be the next Mozart or Holmes.
On the surface, "Hyouka" tells of the mystery-solving escapades of a student literary club. But like most anime involving detective work, this aspect
of the show is a bit rubbish. Underneath the dressing lies an intriguing character study of a genius and his effects on the people around him. The story centres on Houtarou Oreki, a high school student with Sherlock-esq powers of deduction. But while Sherlock Holmes puts his powers to good use, Oreki's philosophy to life is that of an energy conservationist: "If I don't have to do it, I won't; if I have to do it, I'll make it quick".
Then one day Oreki meets a girl Chitanda, who's fresh off of the conveyor belt of Kyoto Animation Studio's infamous moeblob factory, and the encounter precipitates a gradual change in his attitude to life.
A recurring theme of "Hyouka" is that of living a "rose coloured life", particularly in regards to highschool. Highschool life is something much romanticised in Japanese culture. A lot of how the west feel about university life - the plentiful club activities, the vibrant social life, and for some even the first steps of independence of moving away from parents - seem to apply with even greater force to how the Japanese view their high school years. And in the context of "Hyouka", the metaphor of a "rose coloured life" goes further than just the bright and beautiful: it encompasses not just the splendour of a rose, but also the prickliness of its thorns; it represents a high school life of many ups and downs, of experiencing joys and growing pains - in other words, a life lived to the full.
I'll be honest: I didn't approach "Hyouka" with high expecations, given what I'd seen of KyoAni studio's prior output consisted mostly of pandering moefests. But "Hyouka" - Chitanda aside - immediately struck me as a different breed, with character designs that aren't an immediate turn-off and skillful use of classical music lending an air of elegance to the production ("Legend of the Galactic Heros" eat your heart out).
Sure enough, the potential hinted at in the opening episode was brought to fruition. Perhaps it's because "Hyouka" originates from a series of novels rather than some disposable 4-panel comic or manipulative nakige (which I believe translates roughly as "crying-porn games"), but it's an anime that lacks neither substance nor good writing and characterisation.
The show's crowning achievement is its thoughtful exploration on the themes of genius and self worth against the backdrop of adolescence. Epitomising this is the fascinating dynamics between Oreki and his friend Fukube. On the surface, Fukube seems content to play second fiddle to Oreki's genius, often self deprecatingly labelling himself as a human database, a store of knowledge without the analytical ability to join up the dots. As the show goes on though, it becomes obvious that Oreki's effortless brilliance is constantly eroding Fukube's sense of identity and self worth, and he does not want to be stuck in this situation.
This theme also plays out in other character interactions, and it's interesting to see the different ways people deal with being in the shadows created by someone else's light. The side story involving Fukube's friend Ibara and her run in with Kouchi (a fellow manga club member) serves to illustrate this nicely: while Ibara meets these situations head-on with a mixture of earnest praise for the greatness of others and despair at her own ordinary-ness, Kouchi's reactions are a combination of outward denial and inward grudging admiration.
These vignettes of personal crises cuts especially deep in the high school settings. Adolescence is, after all, a turbulent time for a lot of people: it’s a time of emotional instability, of trying to discover who you are. And as much as I find teenagers rather trying at times, (who doesn't?) I can also sympathise with the amount of damage a sense of inferiority and big knocks on confidence can inflict on these young adults during this vulnerable time of their development.
The tragedy is deepened by the fact that we, as viewers, can see clearly see these characters are far from worthless. And not just us: each of the characters can cherish the values they see in others - Fukube's emotional intelligence, Ibara's endearing earnestness - but they cannot seem to appreciate the values present in themselves. Their mistake lies in trying measuring themselves against the geniuses' strengths and not seeing their own. The supreme irony is that even geniuses rarely thrive in a vacuum: Mozart’s talents was nurtured in draconian fashion by his father from a young age, and Oreki, without all his friends coaxing him towards a rose-coloured life, would have wasted all his talents conserving his energy and achieving fuck all - they may envy his brilliance, but he needs THEM in order to shine. And so beneath all the cheerful overtones runs a strong undercurrent of pathos as the characters flounder in the misguided perceptions of their own inadequacy.
Despite the mostly great character work and the sparkling interplay, "Hyouka" doesn't quite fire on all cylinders here. Though in Ibara we have a rare example of a decent KyoAni female character - a down to earth girl with a likeable streak of sincerity - the studio had to cancel it out with an opposite example in Chitanda. I could feel a certain tension within Chitanda's characterisation: on one hand her character clearly contains some complexity, given our glimpses into her family life outside of school, but on the other hand her creators really wanted to make her appealing in typical KyoAni moe fashion. This results in an odd character who's practically throwing herself at Oreki with wide, purple-eyed innocence while occasionally revealing an inner layer of maturity and capacity for subtle manipulation. These two facets comes together so poorly that you can practically see the fault line running through her characterisation.
Another shortcoming of "Hyouka" is that the mystery genre foil holding the real story together functions better for some scenarios than others. The foil works okay in the earlier episodes, but as the drama intensifies, the mysteries start feeling jarringly inane. The show sometimes also tries too hard to be clever, engineering convoluted solutions for problems that have far simpler fixes. But I get it - it can't be easy to consistently come up with stories that convincingly showcase Oreki's genius. My own fascination with the underlying themes means that I could look past this weakness in narrative for the most part, but your own mileage may vary.
Some of the conflict scenarios also feels overwrought. I don't know what it is, but KyoAni's sensibilities when it comes to depicting dramatic conflicts often feel a little too stilted to me. Even though the symptoms are much lighter here than in most of their other works, they're still present.
Thankfully, even though some of KyoAni's weaknesses still shows in "Hyouka", so do their strengths in emphatic manner. Their talents at capturing the vibrancy of school life is on full display - there is so much movement and bustle, with minute details crammed into the every frame. "Hyouka" is heavy on dialogue, but the studio even managed to make talking interesting through the use of dramatic angles, quirky framing, and interesting visualisations. I want to single out a particularly memorable visual metaphor for a rose-coloured life that turns up towards the end of the series, as the extraordinary use of colour and beauty of the scene was breathtakingly.
"Hyouka" was actually recommended to me through a secret santa event and, despite my initial reservations, the recommendation turned out to be a genuinely nice gift. To me, the series represents a turning period in KyoAni's output. Their anime I watched pre-Hyouka were mostly duds, while the ones I watched afterwards I've mostly liked. In fact, "Hyouka" is probably one of, if not the best anime KyoAni has ever done. With the studio's polished production applied to a story laden with fascinating ideas and themes, "Hyouka" is one classy anime.
Personal rating: +1.5 (very good)
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Mar 14, 2020
13 of 13 episodes seen
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1
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
5 |
| Story |
5 |
| Animation |
7 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Character |
4 |
| Enjoyment |
5 |
It's all too easy to make fun of an anime christened with an unfortunate name like "Wind: A Breath of Heart" (try saying the title fast) ... but that would just be immature of me.
"Wind: A Breath of Fart" is one of those patchy anime that feels like it got stitched together from three different shows. Starting off with some horribly crappy first scenes, it improves into a borefest with the occasional amusing moment, then magics in a dramatic story towards the end.
When I first watched "Wind: A Breath of Fart", I found its mix of highschool hijinks with a dash of magic rather
peculiar, but this was before the time when Kyoto Animation studios conquered the anime world with its adaptations of Key's haremy magical realist visual novels. Even taking that into account though, I still think the anime's poor execution of the premise added to my confusion. There's a scene early on where a group of friends were casually discussing their superpowers. I didn't really take it seriously, thinking that the girl who claimed she can jump really high was just athletic, and sympathising with the one who said she can create wind because I assumed she was simply suffering from flatulence. Either that or they're delusional chuunis who think they can do things like shoot ninja stars out of their arses just by yelling out the name of their special attack. Anyway, like I said, I didn't think much of it, particularly as the series plodded on as a dull highschool slice of life. Then it turns out those superpower are real. I was like "WTF?!" If the anime had been less casual about those earlier conversations then I would not have felt so shocked.
At around the three quarter mark, I started to wonder what's the point of this anime. I think the people who made it must have pondered the same question, cos the all of a sudden "Wind: A Breath of Fart" started breaking wind in a different direction and actually - to my utter amazement - began to carve out a story line. On one hand it's sure is an improvement on fuck all happening; on the other hand, the change of pace and direction made it feel like a completely different show. While I won't deny the newly made-up-as-they-went-along-story had points of intrigue, there weren't many episodes left to play with. Predictably, this resulted in a half-baked story that didn't feel like it's been thought through properly, and an ending that cuts off so suddenly it left me wondering where the rest of the story was.
"Wind: A Breath of Fart" then took the odd decision of making the last episode a recap. It flashed back to all the boring part of the show, and it's a testament to the extraordinary depth of the dullness that I don't even recall seeing some of these scenes, so they actually felt like new material to me!
Like the story, the characters are a bit boring, and could have done with better designs that distinguished them by more than just their hair colour. The character writing also leaves much to be desired, particularly around consistency. I struggled to discern convincing motivations for when characters do something unusual, like when a cheerless girl decided to break character by dressing up and going to a fair. Also, the main character has a habit of under-reacting to what should be shocking revelations. On the positive side, at least he isn't too annoying like a typical harem lead, though I am a bit puzzled by why his harem seem to look up to him as though he's a much older senpai rather than a peer.
Dialogue wise, "Wind: A Breath of Fart" tends to fail the hardest when the writers tries to go deep. For example at one point in the show a cat got stuck in a tree and they had this bizarre discussion on whether or not to rescue it, with the content of the discussion serving as a metaphor for something more serious that was going on in the story. Now, perhaps I'm just an uncultivated buffoon, but "to rescue or not to rescue a cat" does not strike me as an intellectual heavyweight question worthy of philosophical debate, so the aforementioned dialogue made no narrative sense, and I found the whole thing unintentionally hilarious.
As much as the last few episode jars with the rest of the series, I have to say I rather enjoyed the plot development and the unfolding of drama, and vastly prefer it over the pedestrian portion of the show. And for me, this last unexpected charge salvaged the show somewhat. I also quite like the music, though admittedly it had an easy job to do for most of the series as nothing was happening on screen. The opening theme initially made a decent match for the anime, though it matched less well once the anime radically changed direction towards the end.
I really struggled to judge this anime as a whole because the different parts of it is SO different. But on balance, "Wind: A Breath of Fart" probably averages out as a mediocre show. But ironically, despite its inability to do anything particularly well, I much prefer its incompetent mediocrity to the meticulously engineered terribleness of those KyoAni visual novel adaptions. In the very least, it doesn't make me want to throw things at the screen.
Personal rating: -0.5 (mediocre)
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Nov 30, 2019
26 of 26 episodes seen
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2
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
7 |
| Story |
7 |
| Animation |
8 |
| Sound |
4 |
| Character |
5 |
| Enjoyment |
7 |
"Witch Hunter Robin" is one of those anime which grabbed me from the get go. The engrossing atmosphere drew me in, and the realistic art style is just the kind that I favour. But as the show progressed, it became obvious that it simply isn't as great as it first appeared, and I became less and less enamoured with it.
"Witch Hunter Robin" takes place in a modern world where magic is a thing and an organisation called STN hunts down magic-wielding witches, often with the help of magic-wielding "craft users". The show focuses on the Japan branch of STN, where a young craft user named
Robin becomes a latest member of the witching hunting team.
"Witch Hunter Robin" came out around the turn of the millennium. Like a typical TV anime of the era, the series ran for 26 episodes and has a structure which starts off mostly episodic, establishing the settings and characters etc, but transitions to a second half more focused on a central plot. I found the standalone episodes quite enjoyable, but the second half disappointed me a little. Not because it became terrible, but because I expected the story to kick into a more exciting gear like other anime that followed a similar formula. With "Witch Hunter Robin", I didn't think the second half got much better than the first: the more substantial plot, while interesting, didn't quite reel me in, and I felt it told the internal political conflicts in a rather confusing manner.
The world building is also quite confusing. The story of "Witch Hunter Robin" features some intriguing parallels between craft users and witches, raising questions around why society accepts the former but not the latter. However, the effectiveness of the concept gets blunted by the anime's reluctance go into details about the difference in classifications. As a result, you can read reviews written by three different reviewers and find three different understandings for something that should have been easy to clarify.
One of my favourites parts of "Witch Hunter Robin" is the action. The battles can be quite flashy and tense, and the animation seems to excel particularly when the action involves flames. I wouldn't say the anime counts as an action-heavy show though, and part of me wishes it were. The battles tend to be short-lived affairs; outside of that, the plodding sense of mystery forms the main draw, but one that didn't engage me as much. The ending in particular failed to draw much of a reaction out of me, despite what seemed like an attempt to do something out of the ordinary.
I think the main reason I couldn't engage with the story more is the characters. I'm very much a character-oriented person when consuming stories, and "Witch Hunter Robin" disappointed in this aspect. While initially appealing, many of the characters don't get much development, and for the ones that do, the development sometimes feel stilted, their changing attitudes coming across as overly-sudden or out of character.
I do love the character designs of "Witch Hunter Robin" though. In a break from most other anime, the series goes for a more life-like look for the characters and for the most part pulls it off in style. Goofy anime staples such as super deformity and exaggerated expressions are nowhere to be found, which sits just fine with me. The designs also strikes me as distinctive, especially the titular character's hairdo. One minor grumble I have is the occasional stiffness in the characters' expressions, particularly around the mouth, although I suspect the only reason it's noticeable is because of the anime's realistic style. The characters' wardrobes frequently feature long, shadowy trench coats, and the anime's colour pallet consists of mostly dreary shades of dark and grey which complements the sombre atmosphere nicely.
That said, while the anime does "dark and gloomy" well, it falls over whenever it tries to lighten the mood. The humour in the show sucks particularly bad. The dry deliverance of flat punchlines results in jokes that are hard to pick up. The show does have some funny moments, but I found myself wondering whether the writers even meant them. For example, one of the characters cocks up so many times it's like a running joke, but the show itself doesn't seem aware of the joke.
The last complaint I have is regarding the music: I rarely complain about the music of a show because it's generally adequate. However, the music of "Witch Hunter Robin" is noticeably bad. The opening doesn't fit the mood; the background tracks are bland and not particularly pleasing to the ear; the ending track is okay until the singer tries to sing in English, and sings it so badly that I didn't realise the "English" parts existed until most of the way through the series.
But despite all my misgivings, I'd still count "Witch Hunter Robin" as a good anime. The show comes off as refreshingly dignified and mature without resorting to the "edgy and violent" shortcut that some other anime take. While I don't see myself revisiting the series, I enjoyed it well enough as I was watching. I guess I'm simply disappointed that, after such a promising start, "Witch Hunter Robin" didn't end up as anything better than just plain old "good".
Personal rating: +1.0 (good)
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Oct 19, 2019
3 of 3 episodes seen
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5
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
2 |
| Story |
4 |
| Animation |
5 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Character |
3 |
| Enjoyment |
2 |
Have you ever wondered who's the toughest waitress around, and wished there exists a martial arts tournament that can help you answer this intriguing question?
Well, me neither.
But apparently, someone had, as this is the premise for a fighting anime called "Variable Geo", which features said tournament of the same name.
I only picked up "Variable Geo" because I'd played the original SNES game before (a fiendishly hard game by the way - I couldn't even get to the boss on the easiest mode), and since the anime comprises only three episodes, I thought: why not?
I'd braced myself for a bad anime, but the shittiness of "Variable
Geo" somehow managed to surpass even my expectations. Its first mistake, like many other fighting game adaptations, is pretending to be something it's not. Instead of fully embracing its shallowness and concentrating on just being a great fighting anime, "Variable Geo" fancies itself as something deeper and more philosophical. As a result, you get meaningless pseudo-philosophical drivel such as "I'd like to see the petals in the tea" strewn all over the place, along with ill-judged attempts to do some soul searching on why the characters fight, like "when I fight, I feel like I'm communicating with them, that's why I fight." Yeah right. I guess no one told this character the existence of a communication method called "dialogue". Is it just me who get really irritated by fighting anime trying to come up with inane reasons to justify the fighting - no one fucking cares, start beating the shit out of each other already!
I also couldn't extract much sense out of the story, and the parts I did understand seems laughably flimsy. When a fighter in a martial arts tournament turns up for a match with glowing metal rods sticking out of her back, you would think that, in the very least, her opponent would smell something fishy going on, but no. Precisely zero eyebrows were raised at this strange occurrence.
If you're wondering whether you should pick up this anime to see some ass-kicking action, don't bother. None of the fights last long enough, and most of them quickly descend into dull affairs where the fighters start blasting energy at each other, and the fight would get resolved by who's got the stronger projectile attack. Have you ever seen one of those Street Fighter matches where it's Ryu/Ken vs another Ryu Ken, and it mostly consists of them throwing fireballs at each other from across the screen? Well it's like that. Going to the toilet and taking a piss feels more satisfying.
You might wonder what is the point of "Variable Geo". As the terribly uninteresting fights play out on screen, the anime finally reveals its raison d'etre ... in the form of girls getting their clothes ripped off by the attacks of their opponents. THAT's the kind of audience it's fishing for. And if that sounds like the kind of thing that floats your boat, then congratulations on discovering a new anime to watch. But for everyone else, "Variable Geo" is a hard sell: the series isn't just bad, it's ludicrously bad, and not even in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way. Its only redeeming factor is its length: at three episodes, the torture didn't last too long, fortunately.
Personal rating: -2.5 (abysmal)
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Sep 7, 2019
110 of 110 episodes seen
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5
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
8 |
| Story |
8 |
| Animation |
6 |
| Sound |
6 |
| Character |
7 |
| Enjoyment |
8 |
I first began writing a "Legend of the Galactic Heroes" review many years ago and couldn't finish. Now I come back and find my opening paragraph on how democracy is overrated and not a magic bullet that solves everything has aged rather too well to remain impactful. In the intervening years, quite a few political earthquakes have shaken people's faith in the system, highlighting weaknesses that they seemed blind to before.
At the time I started my reviewing attempt though, "Legend of the Galactic Heroes", or LoGH for short, provided a refreshingly nuanced commentary on different political systems that stood out amongst the monotonous chorus
of "more democracy needed" slogans thrown at any problems a country might have. In particular, LoGH poses an intriguing question: how does democracy stack up against a benign dictatorship?
The 110 episode juggernaut that is LoGH takes place thousands of years in the future, in an age where war is being fought between two factions who between them control most of the known universe. On one side we have the Free Planets Alliance, a democratic republic rife with corruption. In the other corner stands the Galactic Empire in which a young, upright noble with huge ambitions seeks to climb to the very top of the hierarchy. It's also an age when humans have spread throughout the galaxy, when battles are being fought by spaceships, a giant Death Star-esq space fortress, and ... battleaxes? Eh??
It didn't take me long to notice that a lot of details in LoGH seem kinda odd. For a show which has garnered such wide critical acclaim, it has more than its share of rough edges, particularly in the earlier stretches.
For starters, the world-building comes across as overly artificial and reliant on plot devices. The two factions in the story are connected by just two narrow "corridors" due to the "unnavigable space" around them, the nature of which never gets elaborated. The idea of unexplained, invisible but physical choke points in between two massive regions in space seems rather absurd. Then there's the mix and match of future and past elements. Though not necessarily a problem as the likes of "Cowboy Bebop" and "Gankutsuou" have pulled off similar stunts with great success, LoGH simply doesn't have the stylistic panache to make the combination work. What it ends up with is juxtaposed silliness like rebellions on distant planets by peasants with pitchforks, and troops running around on spaceships waving battleaxes (the latter courtesy of another overpowered plot device called directional Zephyr particles).
More than the world-building though, what really holds LoGH back is the storytelling. The director Noboru Ishiguro notably directed the original "Macross" series, which I enjoyed because of its human drama despite the silly story. In LoGH though, he initially seemed driven to abolish as much as he could the human touch that made "Macross" engrossing to me, deploying a method of storytelling which smacks of a history textbook: aloof and dry in a quest for objectivity. Unfortunately, this means for the first twenty-odd episodes or so, LoGH takes what should have been a compelling story and imbues it with all the compelling quality of someone reading off a historical timeline: in 795 UC, this happens, then that happens, and the fleet is commanded by Admiral Karlheinz Friedemann von Duchebaghoffermeister in the flagship PHXHFYAKJH ... [two scenes later] he was killed in this battle. Due to the stuffy nature of the narration, when occasionally LoGH does try to loosen up with some decidedly odd humour, the effect is tonally dissonant like a socially awkward professor telling a lewd joke at an academic conference. The occasional sensationalist scenes of cannon fodder yelling out "MAMA!!" just before they get graphically blown to bits also jars with the series' generally scholarly tone.
Those who claim that LoGH contains great characters are only telling you part of the story: they neglect to mention that most of the anime's 2763 characters are cannon fodder. Despite this, LoGH still insists on giving them VIP character treatment, providing them with the screen real estate to announce their title and full name, the latter of which is often so long that it'd threaten to run off the right side of the screen. Most of these characters are so shallowly written that you'd struggle to extract a single dimension even if you pooled them all together. They seem to serve no purpose other than as stepping stones for the more important characters, making them look good and helping them ascend towards their rightful, lofty place. As a result, while LoGH does have a decent amount of good characters, they end up getting buried under the sheer weight of the number of useless ones.
However, gold is still gold even if you take a shit over it, and eventually, the strength of LoGH's underlying story starts to shine through as the storytelling slowly improved. In the anime world, LoGH is perhaps unparalleled in its scope and ambition. At the forefront of this is its political commentary. I can't think of any other anime that approaches its sophistication in this area. LoGH recognises that the world is rarely made up of absolutes, and strives to highlight the shades of grey in the political landscape. In fiction, you can find plenty of stories that criticise autocracy and authoritarianism, but not so many that can articulate its potential advantages in areas such as speed of reform. Fewer still can point out subtleties like the paradoxical parallels democracy has with autocracy in its tendencies to follow charismatic leaders rather than ideas. LoGH may not always be eloquent in making its arguments, but its ideas do give you pause and make you think. That said, one subject which LoGH does deal with rather primitively is religion, for which the only representation comes in the form of a bunch of fanatic cultists. I'm not a fan of religion, but LoGH's portrayal seems excessively one-sided even to me.
Once you get over the first part of the show where every cannon fodder and their dog, as well as the fleas on said dog, are vying for your attention, the good characters eventually manage to scrape together enough screen time to distinguish themselves from the faceless crowd. People tend to summarise LoGH as the story of the rivalry between Yang Wenli, a military genius of the Free Planets Alliance, and Reinhard von Lohengramm, the rising star in the Galactic Empire. However, I don't think this is quite right. To me, Reinhard stands alone as the central figure of the saga - even if LoGH does tend to frame him as the antagonist - as the whole story revolves around the imbalance in LoGH's universe brought about by the weight of his influential life, with Yang Wenli acting as the heaviest counterweight to his rise. This interpretation makes particular sense when you consider how things pan out in the final season of the show.
Given Reinhard's importance to the story, it's fortunate that he's also the most complex, most fascinating, most well-written character in the series. As a victim of the aristocratic system, he wants to climb to the top and change the system for the better. But to get to the top, he often faces tough decisions that pit his ambitions against his sense of righteousness. This tension within him and the vastness of his ambitions is reminiscent of a flawed hero in a Greek tragedy, and it's what drives my interest in his character. Early on, I thought I could see where his inner conflict might lead him, but the story actually ended up in places I never expected.
Being an OVA produced over the course of a decade has benefitted the quality of the production. As a result, LoGH has aged pretty well for a 100+ episode old series. You'll not find howlers like headless or badly deformed character models here. That said, people singing the praises of its music to the heavens and back just because the soundtrack comprises purely of classical music seems to me to be doing rather lazy critiquing: "Mars of Destruction" also used plenty of classical music, and no one talks about the greatness of its music, at least not in a non-ironic way. How the music is used is as important as the quality of the music, and I'd give LoGH's usage of music a pass, but not much more - sometimes it enhanced the atmosphere but on other occasions LoGH's choice of music can also be distractingly inappropriate or painfully unsubtle and cliched. Anime such as "Hyouka" and "Nodame Cantabile" serve as far better examples of anime making great use of classical music. I also wish the space battles could have been more excitingly animated. Instead, we mostly get boringly plain lines of lasers flickering on and off amongst bulky ships floating around at snail pace, while commanders stand around looking at flat, monochrome, primitive geometric shapes on their screens. The unimaginative battles scenes are often dull enough to send people to sleep, so definitely don't approach the series expecting to be wowed by spectacles such as the Itano Circus.
Warfare forms a big part of LoGH, and the series is famous for its deep, strategic battles. However I regard this aspect of LoGH to be radically oversold, and while the story and characters do redeem themselves as the show goes on, I became only more disillusioned and disappointed by the warfare of LoGH. The praise seems to stem mainly from the tremendously detailed nature of LoGH's space battles, and their being modelled on real naval battles. Neither of the two reasons necessarily results in something great, but they're probably enough to pull the wool over the eyes of those who aren't looking too hard. But I personally don't think most of LoGH's battles stand up to scrutiny.
Like its world-building, LoGH does a poor job of integrating the old and the new when it comes to warfare. It's all very well taking inspiration from naval battles, but when the results are strangely two-dimensional space battles with the plot devices like the "unnavigable space" playing significant roles, then something's gone awry. When the show tries to get inventive, the results are usually … a bit strange. Ironically, there's an admiral in the series derided as "Succumbed to Theory Staden" because of his over-reliance on theory, and yet LoGH itself often feature whacky things like the "infinite walls of defence" formation and the "snake eating its own tail" battle situation which, though theoretically interesting, are so riddled with practical problems that I have a hard time envisioning their existence in reality.
As for LoGH's love of detail, the problem is that constructing large scale battles with convincingly good strategies and tactics is hard, and the more details you add, the harder it gets for those details to come together coherently. Sometimes, less is more, and I can't help but feel LoGH should have shown more of the forest rather than the trees. Instead, a typical LoGH battle will often feature details on the level of: a ship commander farts at just the wrong time, causing a crewman to accidentally press a button and fire a laser, which just happens to hit the weak point of their flagship, blowing it up and turning the tide of battle. Sometimes minute details and sheer good/bad luck can and do play a crucial role in battles, but I just feel this happens too much in LoGH. What's more, when two commanders clash, misfortunes only ever plague the one with less plot armour. Yang Wenli for example, with his colossal amount of plot armour, never seems to have to deal with random shit that's out of his control, whereas a key hallmark of a great commander is often their ability to adapt tactics to unfavourable turns of events - the battle of Dragon Fang from "Last Exile" being a prime example in anime.
This is not to say LoGH's warfare is uniformly terrible. One aspect I did like is how I could feel the difficulty of manoeuvring large ships in space. Perhaps as a result of being modelled after navy battles, the ship's movements feel lumbering and unwieldy, which strikes me as far more believable than typical visions of flashy space battles where nimble ships dodge and weave between laser shots like in a dogfight.
As much as I like to moan about the strategic shortcomings of LoGH, the show contain moments of genuine brilliance. My problem is that it doesn't contain enough of them - most of the battles comprise important characters using perfectly ordinary tactics to beat down idiotic admirals. I want to see more battles won through brilliance and not lost through utter stupidity. Instead, we constantly get TOLD about the fearsome reputation of a lot of these commanders, but I couldn't FEEL it through the battles themselves.
And that's a recurring problem in LoGH - too much telling, not enough showing. It's interesting to compare the series with the movie "Overture to a New War" which retells the events at the start of the saga. The movie fixes nearly all the problems I had with the main series: it's more tightly written, it humanises the characters with deft touches, and it quickly got me immersed in the story. Notably, the movie had a different director. Had the LoGH main series been more like "Overture to a New War", then it may well have ended up as one of my favourite series. As it stands though, while LoGH can sometimes live up to its billing as a sprawling epic, at other times it comes off as a galumphing, clumsy hulk of a story. On balance, I think LoGH certainly qualifies as a good show but falls short of being a great one.
Personal rating: +1.5 (very good)
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Aug 24, 2019
2 of 2 episodes seen
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11
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
7 |
| Story |
7 |
| Animation |
6 |
| Sound |
6 |
| Character |
4 |
| Enjoyment |
7 |
"Why the fuck does a 12 episode series need a recap?!" was my initial reaction to "Girls und Panzer: Introductions!".
"WTF? There are TWO of these?!?!" was my next.
The first half of the first episode seems to confirm my worst fears: its opening salvo serves as a crucial reminder for the mountain of material contained in the previous ... five episodes. Following this, we're "treated" to an introduction of the many moeblobs littered around the show, giving us the full information shower on their unique moe quirks, including such juicy tidbits as what flowers they like, their favourite classes, and maybe what coloured buttons they prefer
on their shirts. Those agonising minutes induced me to give a grand total of about ... half a fuck, maybe? No wait, I think it was zero actually. Yes, I'm pretty sure zero fucks were given, including for the moeblobs' favourite tanks.
However, from there on, "Introductions!" miraculously started climbing out of the depth of Tedium Valley. First, they introduced the main tanks used by the protagonist's school, which gave some context for the strategies deployed, for example why certain tanks are used for scouting etc. Then they went through the battles that had taken place, and at this point I realised I'd grossly misjudged the value of these recap episodes: far from being the most useless recaps ever, they're probably the most useful ones ever!
Here's why: while watching the battles for the first time during the main show, I did not think much of them. Too many inexplicable events that happened during the battles made me rant "what bullshit is this?!" For instance, one tank shot at another at point-blank range and still couldn't take it out, and these recaps explain that it's because the attacking tank was a lightweight, bearing a cannon not powerful enough to penetrate the heavy armour of the tank it shot at. In addition to explaining the WTF moments, "Introductions!" also highlights other small details which enhanced my understanding of the battles, such as how important it was for some tanks to get in close to their targets, a detail that went over my head initially.
So for anyone interested in making sense of the battles of "Girls und Panzer", "Introductions!" make for essential viewing. But here's a thought: like other recaps, these are forged in the fires of production hell. Had everything gone to plan, these would not exist, and I would have given "Girls und Panzer" a mediocre rating, never knowing the amount of thought and detail carefully plotted into the battles. And as much I applaud production team for taking advantage of a bad situation and creating something useful, this begs the question: if there's so much detail here crucial for understanding the battles of "Girls und Panzer", shouldn't they get incorporated into the main series?
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Jul 20, 2019
12 of 12 episodes seen
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3
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
6 |
| Story |
6 |
| Animation |
6 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Character |
5 |
| Enjoyment |
6 |
Are you into moeblobs? Are you a military otaku? Then this is the show for you!!
"Girls und Panzer", or "Moeblobs und Tanks" as I like to call it, came into existence back in the heady days when moe was the new black, and anime studios bolted it onto everything that went out of their doors in the belief that it's the magic ingredient that will make their work explode in popularity. After watching an episode and finding it about as bad as expected, I originally dismissed "Moeblobs und Tanks" as a tank-themed K-On clone. I was therefore surprised to see the show garner critical acclaim
in the anime blogosphere, and figured perhaps I should give it another shot.
Having now watched the entire series, I can conclude that firstly, "Moeblobs und Tanks" is a decent show, and secondly, it is no more than a decent show.
In the weird alternative universe of "Moeblobs und Tanks" historical tanks are used in a sporting discipline called "senshadou". When translated literally, the sport takes the fancy name of "Way of the Tank". Less fancily, it translates into plebspeak as "tankery". Tankery has prestigious inter-school tournaments where teams of girls from different schools compete to try and blow up each other's tanks (no, that's not a meant as a euphemism). But don't worry: these battles do not use live ammunition and take place in safe and control environments, so you can rest assured that no moeblobs were harmed in the making of this anime. And why do only girls participate in tankery? Because it's considered a feminine sport. In a less pandering show, that might come off as some misguided attempt at feminism, but in "Moeblobs und Tanks", it's just an excuse to enrich the moeblob scenery and preventing boys from cock-blocking your view.
As someone who subscribes to the mantra "moeblobs are the root of all anime evil", I started off suitably unimpressed by the specimens found in "Moeblobs und Tanks". They seem to conform to typical descriptions of cutesy, garbage-spewing cardboard cut-outs with appearances and personalities so bland that only the colour coded hair can help me tell them apart. And here I ran into some problems: "Moeblobs und Tanks" features so many moeblobs that their hair colours are not unique anymore, and therefore no longer a reliable tool for distinguishing one moeblob from the next. But despite the character designs being mostly of the type churned out by mass market moeblob factories, I did notice a few interesting ones lying around. In particular, the moeblobs from the historical society have rather striking appearances. But because they feature amongst the 50 or so fringe characters, the anime didn't really have time to focus on them. So for most of the three scenes they appear in, my reaction ran along the lines of "hey they look cool ... who are they again??"
In my fiery youth, much of the banal dialogue would have set my teeth on edge. But now, in my mellow old age, my eyes merely glaze over as they filter out the trite dialogues in the subtitles. It's not all bad: an occasional line may qualify as "funny" or "witty", but those are about as rare as girls in my computer science class. Taking most of the personal drama seriously also proves difficult. I mean, when they develop along the lines of a moeblob agonising over whether tankery will sully her soft, pure hands that were previously only used for flower arrangement, then ... well, can you blame me?
Fortunately, unlike "K-On", "Moeblobs und Tanks" can't be reduced to the synopsis of tea guzzling, cakie gobbling moeblobs sitting around doing fuck all - most of it IS about the subject matter of tanks. But before I dive into this, let me just say that while I have an interest in history and military strategy, I am by no means a military otaku, let alone a tank otaku, so consider me as only loosely qualified to judge the tankery aspect of "Moeblobs und Tanks".
Even to a non-tank-otaku, "Moeblobs und Tanks" comes off as an obviously well-researched project. I could see the impressive attention to detail lavished onto the tanks. The show features a variety of different WWII-era tanks from a variety of different nations, and provides a wealth of information on the specs, quirks and characteristics of the tanks. Though the anime isn't above info dumping you with tank trivia, it at least keeps that activity to a tolerable level.
Appearance wise, I'm guessing the tanks look like their real-life models, but they also look clunky due to the rather obvious CG used to render them; their synthetic movements often end up in uncanny valley territory where cheap CG tends to fall into. This is particularly true in the scenes from the "turret" view, where the pseudo-realistic-but-not-quite-believable camera effects could be mistaken for sub-triple-A video game footage.
The tank battles are where the moeblobs and their tanks start to shine. A lot of the different schools have their own national themes with matching tanks and stereotype behaviours: one represents the tea-sipping British, another the vodka-swigging Russians etc, which I thought was a fun touch. While the competition is marred by some astonishingly stupid rules (or rather the stupid lack of them), the battles are thrilling and strategic - more so on both counts than "Legends of the Galactic Heroes", though that's not setting the bar very high in my book. Due to the considerable pace of the anime, the battles seem to contain a lot of inexplicable developments at first glance. Dig a little deeper though, and what looked like plot armour driven events often turn out to be caused by real armour. For this reason, the two recap episodes make for essential watching as they break down the battles in more detail.
And that brings me to the problem with the pacing: it's too fast. I first noticed this when the moeblobs from the featured school began tankery training for the very first time. The anime takes mere minutes to go from training to skirmishes. Before long, tanks began whizzing around in battle, doing manoeuvres that wouldn't look out of place in a Hollywood car chase. Aside from the question of whether the tanks can move as nimbly as can be seen in the anime, the lack of training time makes driving a tank seem easier than riding a bike, and deprives "Moeblobs und Tanks" of a convincing sense of progression. The pacing also hurts the tank battles: while it's good that the recap episodes do more than just summarise, I do feel that too much of the battle analysis is relegated to those episodes, leaving the main episodes with barely enough to give me a good sense of what's happening on screen. Given the show didn't have a huge number of episodes to work with, I can understand the flaws in the pacing - but they are problems nonetheless.
But I want to end the review on a positive note. I recall the opening episode containing an amusing piece of tankery propaganda parodying war propaganda clips. The message was how tankery will improve the participants in almost every conceivable area. In a funny way, this is rather true in the context of this anime: tankery did improve the moeblobs to the extent that they almost resemble real characters. Whatever else I may say about them, their enthusiasm, the fun they have and the camaraderie they develop all feel genuine. And just as the show's infectious passion about tanks lifts its characters above mere blobs of moe, it also lifts the show above being just a tank-themed K-On clone. And for that, it deserves a certain degree of respect.
Personal rating: +0.5 (decent)
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Jun 29, 2019
49 of 49 episodes seen
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4
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
5 |
| Story |
4 |
| Animation |
9 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Character |
3 |
| Enjoyment |
5 |
Pop quiz time! What Alphaville song best describes the Gundam franchise? The answer is, of course, "Big in Japan"! And over the years, many people have tried many times to make it "Big in the West" as well, but it never really gained much traction. The small amount of success it did find mostly traces back to "Gundam Wing", which made a decent sized splash on American TV around the turn of the millennium.
And that's rather unfortunate. Because although I've only seen a handful of Gundam series, "Gundam Wing" ranks among the worst ones in my book.
"Gundam Wing", with its cast of characters starring mostly
angsty world-beating teenagers, is obviously a series aimed at teenagers. But the problem is that it feels like it's also written BY teenagers. The show kind of reminds me of "Code Geass": they're both ridiculous, over the top, and both seem more concerned with shocking the audience with twist after twist than anything else. Both resemble train wrecks, but here the similarity ends. "Code Geass" feels like a train wreck involving a train driven by James Bond: the carriages may be on fire and the some of the wheels may have come off, but thanks to some brilliant driving, the momentum ultimately takes it to its intended destination. With "Gundam Wing" the train seems driven by a teenager who THINKS he's James Bond. The result is a survivorless, smouldering wreckage on the side of the tracks still some distance away from its destination.
For a near-50-episode show, "Gundam Wing" certainly doesn't suffer from slow pacing. If anything, it has the opposite problem: it throws out plot twists faster than you can digest them, rarely following through on the implications of the new developments. Not many of the twists feel organic or thought through, and frequently the latest twists would cancel out the effects of the ones before it (even if they only happened within the last episode or two). It's as though the show had an army of (teenage) writers, and they took turns to slap their latest cool (at least to them) ideas onto the story with fervent zeal while impatiently doing away with whatever the previous writers wrote.
The characters, often wearing obscene amounts of plot armour, serve as slaves to the plot, regularly undergoing drastic personality changes according to its needs. Luckily the show can't be accused of wasting potential as the characters come across mostly as a bunch of one-dimensional posers whom teenagers would find cool, but almost everyone else would just find insufferable. Their fate is further sealed by the trashy melodramatic dialogues forced upon them. "Gundam Wing" takes itself very seriously, but alas, I could hardly take it less seriously.
Although "Gundam Wing" is a pretty dumb show, but it's also a PRETTY dumb show. The series has a lot going for it in the production departments. It leads with a catchy, iconic opening theme, features good action scenes, and the attractive character designs of its teenage Gundam pilots ensured the show gathered enough fangirls to make Elvis jealous. However, it's the Gundam designs that stole the show for me. The five Gundams piloted by the five main pilots are all very distinctive: they look different, their fight differently, and they all have different strengths and weaknesses. On top of that, the designs ooze style, with Deathscythe being particularly cool - no wonder it's one of the top-selling Gundam models of all time (maybe even THE top selling one).
I may not rate "Gundam Wing" very highly overall, but it scores decently on (unintended) entertainment value, at least for me. Your own mileage may vary: the absurdity of the plot, the ridiculousness of the characters and the terribad melodrama can often be thigh-slappingly funny to some, but frustrating and cringeworthy to others. I suspect it's the kind of anime that would be gloriously entertaining to watch in a group though. Oh, and you might also like it if you're a teenager.
Personal rating: -0.5 (mediocre)
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May 18, 2019
3 of 3 episodes seen
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109
people found this review helpful
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| Overall |
9 |
| Story |
8 |
| Animation |
9 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Character |
7 |
| Enjoyment |
9 |
There are two things you should know about "Flavors of Youth":
1. It's a great anime.
2. You probably won't think it's a great anime.
"Flavors of Youth" strikes me as an inaccessible anime - particularly to western audiences - and not just because of its meandering, introspective nature that would put a lot of people to sleep. I would describe it as a cultural piece that, to fully appreciate, you not only need to know about Chinese culture, you must have been submerged in it at some point in your life. On top of that, the anime homes in on a very specific Chinese generation: the generation who
grew up there around the 90s, the generation who witnessed China's rise to one of the world's largest economies. My generation.
Perhaps that's why I struggle to recall the last anime with which I felt such a deep personal connection. "Flavors of Youth" captures the nostalgic feelings of my childhood spent in 90s China with such authenticity that I was utterly unsurprised to find the chief director is a Chinese close to me in age. If you're not someone targeted by the anime's laser-like focus, if you haven't the life experience of a certain time and a certain place, then "Flavors of Youth" likely feels like a poor man's Shinkai anime. This view is no doubt enforced by its nature as a work co-produced by CoMix Wave Films, a studio with strong associations with Shinkai. But despite the obvious influences, this anime also stands on its own three feet (because it's an anthology comprising three stories). With subtle social commentary and Chinese culture permeating through every pore, "Flavors of Youth" is far more than a cheap Chinese knock-off; it possesses its own identity and its own goals, with even the main locations for the stories - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, the three largest cities in China - carefully chosen as the faces of China's economic boom.
The central thread that runs through the stories is "youth". More accurately though, it's about "seishun", or "qingchun" in Chinese (they use the same kanji). While those terms seem directly translatable and therefore interchangeable, that's true only in a literal sense. Words in different languages can have the same literal meaning but vastly different connotations; "seishun", made up of the kanjis for "green" and "spring", possesses a certain poetry and an association with a culturally romanticised view of the morning of one's life, and the word "youth" simply can't capture the strength of the meanings and feelings invoked by it.
The anthology opens with "The Rice Noodles", which isn't so much a story as it is an expression of feelings, subtly blended like the seasonings of a delicious bowl of the titular noodles. The bare premise is about a guy named Xiao Ming (which is, incidentally, probably the most common name for fictional protagonists used in the Chinese education system, frequently seen in example sentences and essays) yearning for the taste of the noodles of his childhood which he ate with his grandmother. The noodles do so much of the heavy lifting in this story that it's practically the main character - it has strong associations with the memories of Xiao Ming's grandmother and with the nostalgic days of his seishun, in addition to being a metaphor for the values eroded by China's rapid economic expansion.
While having practically zero plot, "The Rice Noodles" is thematically rich. To understand the commentary, you need a bit of background. China, like a lot of Asian countries, has a strong food culture - not in the French-esq, fine dining style, but of the local street food variety. The streets and avenues are often dotted with street food stalls and cosy, family-run restaurants serving startlingly good food within tight-knit communities. As the country embarked on a decades-long growth spurt, the local restaurants got gradually replaced by more commercial restaurants and chains, particularly in large cities. On the surface level, Xiao Ming laments that the noodles from the commercial restaurants just aren't as tasty as the ones he ate as a youth, as they have less of the wholesome ingredients such as wood ear mushrooms. On a deeper level, the anime laments the loss of old values as people chase after money in an increasingly materialistic society.
This isn't just a case of looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses: China's economic rise has very much been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty, and people's living conditions massively improved; on the other hand, since adopting aspects of a capitalist system, Chinese society has become a caricature of western consumerism, with people worshiping at the altar of money and material items, and scheming to become rich by whatever means, even at the cost of community, family and moral values. This is why the country's become plagued by scams and scandals in recent years. Where once people didn't even bother locking their doors, now they draw their curtains when counting their cash. But let's pull back from these dark reflections; "The Rice Noodles" does end on a positive note: even as the protagonist acknowledges that he can never recapture his seishun, the fate of the noodle shop brings hope of triumph through adversity, and of the return of non-materialistic values. Sometimes it takes a rough patch in our lives to makes us realise what is truly important.
The visuals play an important part in "The Rice Noodles", and it's a precursor of what's to come, both in terms of strengths and weaknesses in the animation and artwork. "Flavors of Youth" generally looks pretty, in a substandard-Shinkai kind of way, but falls short in the character animation department. This is particularly obvious in "The Rice Noodles", where the character animation lacks smoothness in some places, and looks overly smooth and mechanical in others. I remember in particular the scenes of people perfectly poised on bicycles, peddling in perfectly cyclical motions and moving forward in perfectly straight lines. But the weaknesses are more than compensated by the details of the background scenery, where the animators managed to capture the streets and buildings of rural and urban China with remarkable fidelity. Even in the visuals, the noodles steal the show: "The Rice Noodles" may not exhibit the scenery porn pervading Shinkai's works, but it can boast of food porn. I found myself salivating to the beautifully rendered noodles on screen, and could almost smell the aroma wafting from it. The strength of the visuals whisked me away to distant times and places and immersed me in its scenery and atmosphere ... but the magic only works because those times and places exist in my memory.
The second segment, "A Little Fashion Show", has more of a plot than the first, telling the story of Yi Lin, a fashion model worrying about becoming too old for her job, and her relationship with her little sister. While not bad, it's probably the weakest of the three anthologies. I found the story a tad over-dramatic, and it resonated with me less than the others, though the reason might be because I'm a guy experiencing a story dealing primarily with problems for women.
"A Little Fashion Show" tackles the loss of seishun in a more head-on fashion than the other stories, in particular its implication for Chinese women. Age-ism is a problem for women worldwide, especially when it comes to an appearance-based careers like modelling, but Chinese women feel it more acutely than most. While it may seem absurd to say that Yi Lin is raging against the dying light of her career, it's also fair to say that strong stigmas still exist in Chinese society for women like her, who have reached a certain age without getting married and settling down with kids. And as one of a vast number of career-focused, unmarried women in her generation, Yi Lin is certainly not going gently into that good night. Her story is one of defiance: defiance against an industry's bias for youth, and defiance against a traditional society's expectations for women.
But it's also a story of defiance against something else.
The other topic "A Little Fashion Show" deals with is of family and parenting. And if the first topic I mentioned didn't resonate with me personally, this one certainly does. Yi Lin lives with her younger sister as their parents had passed away. Tradition dictates that Yi Lin, as the eldest one, should play parent to her younger sibling and take good care of her. And Yi Lin tries to do exactly that. To a fault. During a heated argument between the two sisters, Yi Lin busts out the what is possibly the most memorable line in the whole anthology: "Who do you think I'm doing this for?" This line, along with its classic variant "I'm doing this for your own good" are immortal conversation enders weaponised by Chinese parents against their disobedient children, so I'm sure it triggered a familiar, visceral reaction in many others as it did in me.
Family and Confucian values underpin Chinese society, and children are always expected to be obedient to the parents who pour their souls into raising them, because parents always know best. Of course, that's not always true, and even when it is, sometimes children need to be allowed to make their own mistakes. The tragedy is that while many of us grew up knowing that, when we become parents ourselves, we often end up acting just like our own parents. In acting as a parent towards her sister, Yi Lin ends up making the same mistake as a typical Chinese parent: she does not realise her sister has grown up, and does not respect her rights to forge her own path in the world.
Ultimately though, "A Little Fashion Show" doesn't explore the theme of rebellion against suffocating parents too deeply. However, this rebellious spirit roars into life in the third and final story, "Love in Shanghai".
Better directed, better animated and better written, "Love in Shanghai" is in a different league to the other two stories. Like the headline act of a gig, it finally steps up after the supporting acts have warmed up the crowd. While Shinkai's influences are rooted in all three stories, they go especially deeply in "Love in Shanghai", all way down to the communication gimmick used as the central lynch-pin of the story. "Love in Shanghai" features the budding romance between the protagonist Li Mo and his classmate Xiao Yu, and its development across multiple snapshots in their lives.
The craftsmanship of the story is impressive, managing to spin an intriguing little mystery around everyday settings. Deliberately paced and carefully plotted, "Love in Shanghai" also delivers at its zenith a perfectly weighted emotional punch. For those reasons, a lot of viewers should find this enjoyable, and certainly more accessible in comparison to the other stories. Nevertheless, I expect those who grew up in China to feel a deeper connection. One reason is the familiarity of seeing overly demanding parents putting academic achievement ahead of everything else. Several scenes depict the literal heavy-handedness of Chinese parenting, and the lack of fuss over them - while may seem shocking or unbelievable to some - is exactly what makes the depiction feel genuine: it really isn't too far outside the norm.
Straining against the kind of parenting symptomatic of a culture that emphasises strict social order is the burning teenage spirit of rebellion, and it spearheads this last love letter to seishun. "Love in Shanghai" celebrates seishun in all its glory: its inherent ephemeral beauty as well as the emotional baggage; it embraces the flaws of that time in our lives: our hotheadedness, our prideful stubbornness, our naivety, but also acknowledges the purity, the idealistic dreams and fiery determination not yet dampened by the cynicism of experience; and it accepts all of that as part of growing up.
Like the other stories, a lot goes on beneath the surface of "Love in Shanghai". The spliced timelines exhibit the pace of change in Shanghai over a decade: some shots of the same scenery highlighting the rapid erection of high rises in the city, others of old town areas underlining the rate at which the old buildings gave way to the new. While I did not grow up in Shanghai, the scruffy outward and interior appearances of the buildings felt exceedingly familiar as the same scenes and changes played out in other cities across the country. Despite all the progress, run-down areas still exist in the latest timeline (and even now at the time of writing), their presence exposing the shabby underbelly of a developing nation hiding beneath the veneer of a glittering, modern cityscape. The regeneration of housing is a contentious topic, and one the anime also touches upon, with the sprinkles of dialogue hinting at the tension between the government's desire to modernise and the needs of people - particularly the older generation - to hold on to something achingly familiar. A brief scene of a TV showing the 2002 football World Cup gives a nod to the first - and so far only - appearance of Chinese men's team in the finals. Despite being only a couple of seconds long and lacking any related dialogue, the inconspicuous shot subtly marks the landmark event as a source of pride. The amount of information and feelings that "Love in Shanghai" manages to convey through minute details in animation, dialogue and story is simply astonishing.
After watching "Flavors of Youth", I was tempted to make a quip about how, despite being an anime heavily inspired by Shinkai, it affected me more deeply than any of Shinkai's works. But that's not really a fair comparison: Shinkai's anime aren't tailored to someone with my experiences, whereas this anime is. For example, while I may have understood on an intellectual level how "Your Name." connects with a people constantly battling natural disasters like the Japanese, as an outsider I can't really *feel* it. So it's worth noting the important meta-lesson that "Flavors of Youth" serves up: that our reaction to a piece of art isn't just down to the art itself, but its intersection with our identity and the lives that we have lived.
So for me at least, "Flavours of Youth" is a great anime.
Personal rating: +2.0 (great)
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