Karate Master: The Hunt for the Lost Classic. The Missing Link of Battle Shonen
Remember the ancient days of early MAL? It was mostly just some European guys acting snobby and dunking on Americans for having not seen all these “essential classics” that got widely released in Europe, but not in the US. We Americans had honestly never heard of Galactic Heroes, Rose of Versailles, Ashita no Joe, and a lot of beloved anime of the 1970s and 80s. We got so thoroughly embarrassed that it helped kickstart the trend of toxic elitism that was the scourge of the online anime community for several years. Of
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course, this isn’t 2009 anymore. I’m writing this review in December of 2023. American anime fans are much better educated now and are well aware of all the essential classics. If you want to hang out on R/anime, you better have heard of Nobody’s Boy Remi. Otherwise, you’ll be widely ridiculed and get some massive downvotes, which is a fate worse than death for Redditors. Surely there aren’t any historically important anime left that almost nobody has seen and that nobody ever talks about. Right? Wrong! There is the story of that one weird shonen that was REALLY popular in Japan and absolutely nowhere else. You’ve probably not heard of it, but it inspired a bunch of stuff that you have definitely heard of. This is the legend... of Karate Master!
The Karate Master manga started in 1971 and was written by Ikki Kajiwara, the same guy who wrote Ashita no Joe, Star of the Giants, and Tiger Mask. The anime started in 1973 and was directed by Osamu Dezaki, who also directed Joe, Rose of Versailles…oh and Remi. You see? There was a reason that I referenced that one earlier in the review! Karate Master was not only a heavy inspiration for later battle shonen, but it inspired the game Street Fighter 1. The character Ryu was visually inspired by the main character of this anime, and his palette swap was named Ken because the protagonist of Karate Master is named Ken Asuka. In the live action adaptation of Karate Master, Ken Asuka was played by Sonny Chiba, whose most famous movie is “The Street Fighter”. Yes, that’s the whole reason the game is called Street Fighter!
The story of Karate Master was directly inspired by the life of famous martial artist Mas Oyama. However, the character’s name was changed to Ken Asuka for…reasons. During the final days of WW2, Ken was fully prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and die as a kamikaze pilot. However, his plane failed to take off and Japan officially surrendered later that day. Now burdened with extreme survivor’s guilt, Ken wanders the desolated ruins of his former hometown and sees that the once friendly people have become bitter and cruel in their poverty and desperation. While the American soldiers are portrayed as utterly awful, the local Japanese people are portrayed being just as awful if not even more so. With no job, home, or family left, Ken turns to using his mastery of karate to become a yakuza bodyguard. While Ken attempts to use his newfound money and influence for good, this plan backfires and he ends up meeting a kindhearted doctor who convinces him to abandon the yakuza and read the book of 5 Rings by Musashi Miyamoto. Ken finds meaning to his life once again through martial arts and trains in the mountains until he can break rocks with his fist. Then he enters the national karate championship and kicks everyone’s asses. It’s one of the earliest tournament arcs in battle shonen…and it lasts only 2 episodes. Ken is deeply disappointed by how weak everyone was and decides “fuck it! I’m going to fight a bull and kill it with my bare fists”. Then after that we enter “the bear arc” in which he decides to fight a brown bear with his fists. The first half of the series has very short arcs! Unfortunately, it’s way better than the 2nd half!
During the 2nd half of the series, Ken tours around America after having beaten every strong human and animal opponent in Japan. Somehow, almost every single person he meets happens to have lost a brother, father, or uncle at Pearl Harbor! Considering less than 3000 American sailors died at Pearl Harbor and America’s population in 1941 was already over 100 million, I think the writer has some incorrect ideas about America’s genealogy. By this point in the story, it’s the mid-1950s and none of the Americans mention Communism even once! Also, black and white Americans have zero conflict. They just both hate Japanese people with an equal amount of burning passion for the 200,000 American lives lost in the Pacific War. By contrast, Japan lost 2 million soldiers in that theater of war and 500,000 civilians and yet none of the Japanese characters resent Americans unless the Americans are just being complete assholes. It feels a little heavy handed by the tenth time that an angry mob attempts to lynch Ken for the crime of being Japanese. There is a real scene in this anime where an 80-year-old grandma impales him from behind with an umbrella containing a hidden blade. All while screaming “Kill the Jap!” The anime and manga really wanted to deliver a message that racism is bad, and war shouldn’t lead to long term hatred between nations. The anime doesn’t exactly do this in a graceful manner, but points for trying. This actually would have been a great opportunity to bring up the fact that Mas Oyama was an ethnic Korean whose birth name was Choi Yeong-eui. Ken could bring up that his people suffered under the Japanese FAR more than the Americans did, yet he bares no hatred towards them because the average Japanese person isn’t worth hating. Unfortunately, the anime and manga never once mentions this. Instead, Ken just fights a different pro-wrestler in every episode and the crowd keeps trying to kill him. Halfway through it feels like Kajiwara got really bored of writing a karate manga and decided to make it about pro-wrestling. That would also REALLY explain why this series ends super abruptly so Kajiwara could write a new manga about…you guessed it… pro-wrestling.
So why is this anime worth watching? The answer is because Karate Master is absolutely fucking insane! He kills a bull with one punch and punches it so hard that one of its horns flies off! Then he gets bored of fighting bulls and decides to beat bears to death with his fists! Kajiwara definitely wasn’t trying his hardest with this one. It’s NOT as well written as Ashita no Joe. However, it still has moments that are genuinely powerful and interesting. Especially in the first 10 episodes. Karate Master doesn’t look nearly as pretty as Joe since TMS was spending all of their budget on Lupin. However, Dezaki still manages to make this one wildly entertaining. The pacing is spectacular, and every episode ends with a cliffhanger. It’s a VERY bingeable anime! The OST only has so many tracks, but it’s extremely catchy and gets the job done! This is a very fun anime and the entire series is free to watch on Youtube with English subs, posted by TMS themselves on their official channel! The series was also brought over and released on Bluray thanks to Discotek. The US got a physical release of Karate Master and there is STILL no legal way to watch Ashita no Joe here, let alone own it on physical media! So America may not have Ashita no Joe, but now we DO have Ashita no Joe at home!
BTW, another amusing thing about Karate Master is that TMS gave it such a small budget that Dezaki decided to insert 3-4 minutes of live action stock footage into every episode! Usually, it's the same clips of people practicing karate. This did allow him to save the animation budget for the big fight scenes, but it at the cost of making it feel like Ed Wood directed this anime!
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Dec 5, 2023
Karate Baka Ichidai
(Anime)
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Karate Master: The Hunt for the Lost Classic. The Missing Link of Battle Shonen
Remember the ancient days of early MAL? It was mostly just some European guys acting snobby and dunking on Americans for having not seen all these “essential classics” that got widely released in Europe, but not in the US. We Americans had honestly never heard of Galactic Heroes, Rose of Versailles, Ashita no Joe, and a lot of beloved anime of the 1970s and 80s. We got so thoroughly embarrassed that it helped kickstart the trend of toxic elitism that was the scourge of the online anime community for several years. Of ...
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Aug 31, 2023
Hoozuki no Reitetsu
(Anime)
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Cool Headed Hoozuki came out almost 10 years ago and to this day remains one of the most underrated comedy anime outside of Japan. The basic premise is that Buddhist Hell is an incompetently run bureaucracy and is only kept operational due to the incredible micro-managing and organizational skills of a single ogre named Hoozuki. Reception in the United States was mixed at best with many critics calling the series inexcusably boring, dry, and even "A Japanese Dilbert that requires a PhD in Japanese cultural studies to get any of the jokes. The series was licensed in the US and quietly given a physical release,
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but it never received a dub.
Honestly its reputation as dry, boring, and difficult to understand, is rather undeserved. Comedy is highly subjective, but I personally think Hoozuki is hilarious. The series does reference a lot of Japanese folktales and myths, but you really don't need a PhD in Japanese literature. All you really need is a cursory knowledge of some very famous Japanese stories that you've probably seen referenced in dozens of other anime and manga. The average viewer will have to look up a few of these stories if you want to fully appreciate every joke, but it's not that bad. It also references 1980s anime like Fist of the North Star and Urusei Yatsura almost as often as it does mythology! Let me give you an example. One of the jokes is that they meet Minamoto no Yoshitsune, who is a character from a Japanese epic poem called Tale of the Heike. Yoshitsune is a highly effeminate looking samurai who is secretly a badass and was trained by the tengu, who are Japanese mythical creatures who live in the mountains and according to tradition taught humans how to do sumo wrestling. Since Tale of the Heike repeatedly describes him as effeminate, the anime imagines him as a stereotypical "pretty boy" character with a large female following. However, he was raised by tengu and wishes to become fat so he can learn the ways of sumo, much to the horror of his fangirls. The joke isn't really hard to follow once you have a basic idea of who this character is supposed to be. This guy shows up in the game "Okami" as a character named Waka btw. I told you that you've probably seen these characters before if you consume Japanese media. Hoozuki is an episodic comedy, so of course it relies heavily on its colorful character cast to carry the goofy humor. Hoozuki is the very deadpan, loveable asshole. King Enma is the "boke" or funny guy who does the stupid shit that Hoozuki reacts to. My favorite character though is the rabbit from the fairy tale "Kachi Kachi Yama". There's this weird Japanese fairy tale about a tanuki who was caught by a farmer. The tanuki begs for his life so pitifully that the farmer's wife lets him go. The tanuki then repays the farmer’s wife by raping her, murdering her, and cooking her flesh into a stew. The tanuki then disguises himself as the wife and tricks the farmer into eating the stew before immediately transforming back and mocking the farmer for having eaten his dead wife. The farmer is so crushed with sadness and rage that he visits his friend the rabbit who agrees to carry out the wrath of heaven on the tanuki. The rabbit ends up playing a series of incredibly painful tricks on the tanuki including setting him on fire, rubbing pepper in the wounds, and eventually drowning him in a lake while bashing his head in with an oar. The rabbit appears in the anime as Hell’s most gifted torturer and like in the original fairy tale is kind of an unhinged psychopath. Even after centuries, the rabbit still holds a powerful grudge against the tanuki and is driven into a blind rage whenever anyone mentions the word “tanuki” in any context. For example, the rabbit carries out extreme punishment on corporate white-collar criminals when she is reminded by Hoozuki that they are referred to in Japanese slang as “clever tanuki”. Hoozuki also has a Chinese rival that's extremely similar to him, but they've hated each other for so long that neither can remember how it started, and of course it was over something extremely ridiculous. Japan's cultural rivalry and pointless antagonism with Chinese civilization is poked fun at frequently. Hoozuki could get into offensive territory for some, but it gives shit to everyone. Momotaro is a very important folklore figure for Japanese nationalists and the series jobs him out in the first 2 episodes and makes him a complete chump. Hoozuki makes Satan and the demons of Christian Hell into absolute buffoons and also makes fun of some Chinese figures, but it's definitely NOT a series that Japanese ultra-nationalists would appreciate. While Hoozuki may not be to everyone’s comedic tastes, I would highly recommend checking it out. The series is widely available with excellent subs that explain all the cultural references that non-Japanese audiences might miss. As for who I would especially recommend this to, the Hoozuki mangaka is a huge fan of Urusei Yatsura and this is immediately evident if you’ve seen or read that. This is definitely a must watch for fans of Rumiko Takahashi. Even if you’re not a big fan of Grandma Takahashi though, I would still recommend watching a few episodes and seeing what you think. You’ll know pretty quickly if this is going to be your kind of comedy or not.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jul 24, 2023
Astroganger
(Anime)
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Since there's a new Indiana Jones movie out, I figure now is the perfect time to do some anime archeology! Today, we're going to be examining the very first giant Super Robot anime that was produced in full color. Astroganger the anime was released in October of 1972 and beat Mazinger Z's anime adaptation to Japanese television screens by 2 months. The first super robot anime was Tetsujin 28 but that was in black and white like most all anime from the 1960s.
Astroganger was produced by Studio Knack, who is mostly remembered today for their less than stellar anime projects. The same writer, director, animators, ... and voice actors would reunite just 2 years after Astroganger to make Chargeman Ken, considered by most Japanese otaku to be the single worst anime ever made. While nothing can fully explain the magical disaster that is Chargeman Ken, today's anime at least gives some context and clears up a little bit of the mystery behind the worst anime of all time. Astroganger begins with a story that wouldn't feel out of place in the Silver Age of American comics or the Golden Age of science fiction. A famous astronomer notices that entire systems are disappearing all over the galaxy. One night, he sees a UFO crash near his observatory and meets an alien woman who is the last surviving member of her species. This alien woman named Maya tells him that an evil, shape shifting species known as the "Blasters" are wiping out entire star systems to harvest their energy and raw materials. If they aren't stopped, they will destroy all other sentient life in the Milky Way. Fortunately, she was able to bring a substance from her home planet before the Blasters destroyed it. This substance is a living, organic metal that can be crafted into a giant guardian robot and controlled by a member of her species. However, they didn't have time to make one of these robots before the Blasters invaded their peaceful world...apparently. Mayu and the astronomer, who is clearly modeled after Colonel Sanders for some reason, end up having a child together named Kentaro and building a giant robot that she brings to life by sacrificing her own. The robot is actually organic, fully sentient, and feels pain and emotions, but does NOT contain the soul of our hero's mother. Hideaki Anno is safe. Of all the old mecha he stole elements from I don't think that list includes Astroganger. Kentaro is able to merge with Ganger with a magical pendant, but he doesn't actually pilot the robot in a traditional sense. Ganger can operate completely autonomously, but he fights like an idiot. When Kentaro uses his pendent, he turns into energy and merges with the robot to lend his brains and creativity to Ganger. This allows Ganger to fight slightly less like a dumbass, which is always enough to win because Ganger is nearly invincible due to special material he's composed of. If you've seen Chargeman Ken, you should already be seeing the similarities. However, Astroganger actually explains shit since the episodes aren't all 5 minutes long. Chargeman was an ill-conceived attempt to recycle Astroganger (often literally in terms of tracing animation) as an abridged version but assumes that the audience has already seen Astroganger. Kentaro violently hates the Blasters and wants to wipe them out before they can wipe out any more species. This makes sense, since they wiped out his mother's entire species and he blames them for her death. Kentaro's father is less quick to violence and acts as a counterbalance to his son's brash youthfulness. Chargeman wants to wipe out the aliens invading Earth, but their background and motivations are never explained. Some are even shown to be good and Chargeman acknowledges this, but still jovially wipes out an entire species without stopping to consider any other alternatives for even a second. While Kentaro's father is a wise and noble guide, Ken's father is somehow even worse than he is! Chargeman Ken took a story and characters that were already bare bones and made it completely incomprehensible by removing all context and explanations for anything. Astroganger was a low budget anime created to sell cheap robot toys to small children. Having said that, it still looks ok for the time and for what it is. Some scenes even look better than the much more famous Mazinger Z from the same year. While the character art strongly resembles that used in Chargeman Ken, the animation and technical quality are lightyears ahead of its infamous successor. That's because Knack actually worked on this one. Most Chargeman episodes were apparently made in a single day so everyone could go to the beach! That's a direct quote from one of the surviving members of Studio Knack. While Astroganger is still fondly remembered in parts of the Arab speaking world, this anime is definitely showing its age. Unless you’re extremely devoted to studying the history of anime, you’re going to struggle getting through all 26 episodes of this. If you thought Ideon was dated and hard to watch by modern standards, this is a step below that. Fortunately, you can just watch episodes 1-3 and then 26 and you’re basically getting the whole experience. The other episodes are all essentially filler and follow the same formula. I wouldn’t exactly say Astroganger is a good anime, but it’s a masterpiece relative to Chargeman Ken and Invisible Detective Akira, which is another piece of shit that Knack made. I would highly recommend Astroganger to ironic fans of Chargeman Ken to shed light on the context and background behind that atrocity. I would also recommend this series to fans of Super Robot anime due to its historic significance. If you’re just looking for the greatest, most essential anime to watch from the 1970s, go watch Rose of Versailles or something. You probably want to skip this one.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Jul 8, 2023
Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san
(Anime)
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It’s become a cliché at this point to say just how powerful nostalgia is, but it’s all true. Once you get into your 30s, 40s, and beyond, you start to feel this longing for the things of your youth. Not just the most beloved things, but anything from your youth. My fellow boomers and I will dance to shit we HATED back in the 90s just because it’s from the 90s. Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs will set off an explosion of nostalgia for anyone who grew up watching shitty harem anime. This was made in 2018 but feels exactly like something that would
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have come out in 2001. The Yuuna manga ran in Shonen Jump from 2016-2020 and really wanted to pay homage to the romcom mangaka of the past like Rumiko Takahashi and Ken Akamatsu. To be fair to Yuuna’s author, Tadahiro Miura, that’s exactly what this feels like. If you were to tell me that Ken and Rumiko met on vacation somewhere and made the first few chapters of this manga together, I would genuinely believe it!
This is the story of a young man with spiritual powers named Kogarashi, who spent his childhood constantly getting possessed by ghosts. After the ghost of a failed day trader possessed him and made him go into crippling debt, he went into the countryside to find a Buddhist monk and master his psychic powers. After a few years of grueling training, Kogarashi is now a master exorcist and is OP as FUCK. When he hears about a haunted inn offering a room for dirt cheap, the utterly destitute Kogarashi shows up thinking it will be a quick exorcism and a peaceful life. Instead, the inn is home to a sexy ghost girl named Yuuna and a whole harem of supernatural babes. Unfortunately for this anime, audience tastes often change over time. The same show that would have sold 2 million DVDs and been a smash hit in 2001 was met with utter disdain in 2018. Funimation passed on it. Sentai passed. Aniplex got roped into licensing it, but then they just sat on the license and never released a dub or DVD/Bluray. Allegedly, this was after test audiences despised it. I can definitely see why Zoomers would hate this anime. This isn’t a “cool” ecchi like Mushoku where you can tell people you’re just into the magic system and the world building. This is the cringeworthy shit that your weird uncle that watches anime jerked off to 20 years ago. This is “guy slips on a banana peel and accidentally a grabs a boob” humor. In fact, there are SOO many scenes like that in Yuuna that it somehow becomes funny again! The fanservice in this show is relentless. Kogarashi is accidentally getting his face shoved into tits, ass, or vagina for what often feels like 30% of the runtime. It’s fucking insane! Despite all of this, I actually still loved this anime! Don’t worry, I’ll explain myself. So, what studio would put THIS amount of ass and titties in their anime? If you guessed Xebec, congratulations! You win a free trip to horny jail! This was one of the very last series that Xebec made before closing their doors forever. A fate that they shared around the same time as their longtime rival Studio Arms. Xebec burst onto the scene with the Love Hina anime and their entire history was mostly harem anime. These horny bastards did To Love-Ru, Shuffle, MM, Ladies Vs Butlers, Keijo, Mnemosyne, and a dozen others. This was their swansong and by God they wanted to go out showing as many titties as humanly possible. You know that really famous scene from Cinema Paradiso? The old film projectionist before he dies splices together all of the hundreds of romantic kiss scenes that the village priest forced him to cut out and it forms this beautiful compilation that represents his love for cinema and his life devoted to film. Well Yuuna is basically like that…only with titties. Xebec put in every single titty shot that they held back on in Shuffle and Love Hina and everything that came before. It is simply ludicrous how many titty shots are in this anime. I think you see every female character topless like 3 times every episode. This has to be the world record for a non-hentai anime. Interspecies Reviewers only has like maybe 1/4th as many titties as this show. Obviously watch the uncut version. Otherwise, what are you doing with your life? So why do I like this piece of shit? Firstly, a lot of the humor when not resorting to “oops I grabbed a booby” is actually funny. I was shocked that it managed to deliver so many genuinely clever gags. In one of my favorite episodes, Kogarashi is concerned about Yuuna’s lingering regret that’s keeping her bound to the Earth as a spirit. So, he takes her to an exclusive couple’s resort to try make her happy. He does this without thinking about the fact that nobody else can see her and everyone is going to think he’s just some loser who is SO lonely that he’s gone insane. The shenanigans that follow are quite hilarious. Part of what makes the humor work is that Kogarashi and Yuuna are actually likeable characters and their romantic chemistry together is sincerely good! As in better than 85% of romcom anime main couples. The side characters definitely borrow heavily from Love Hina and Ranma, but they manage to work. The cast has really solid comedic synergy and it makes every scene of them hanging out together enjoyable! Like their previous work on Shuffle, Xebec managed to squeeze in these really sweet moments that catch you completely off-guard because you’re just expecting some dumpster fire ecchi show. What is THIS? The anime that just showed me 300 mammaries in the last 15 minutes is actually making me feel things? So how does Yuuna compare to modern ecchi? I’m going to be honest here. Yuuna just beats the dog shit out of most modern ecchi anime. It’s not a fucking isekai. It’s not pretending to be better than what it actually is. Kogarashi isn’t just a “nice guy” who wants to help everyone around him with no ulterior motives. He’s much more than that. He’s also assertive, strong, and frankly admirable in his moral convictions. One girl desperately wants his seed because he’s super powerful and she will throw herself naked at him. He’ll calmly put her clothes back on and tell her that he’s only interested in doing that with the woman he loves. No nosebleed freak outs. No judgment. Just outright stating his feelings. Compared to most ecchi leads, Kogarashi is a fucking GigaChad. However, he also avoids being wish fulfillment bullshit. Kogarashi is not supposed to be us. He is an idealized positive example for young men to try living up to in the classic shonen sense. So many modern ecchi instead give us this lonely otaku who is “Just like me” but then he gains this power and starts desperately making up for all the ass he wasn’t getting in high school. Stories that mostly appeal to bitter, angry, single men in their 20s and 30s. That evolutionary tree within the ecchi family can pretty much directly be blamed on Rance, which led to Mushoku, which led to Shield Hero, Overlord, Redo of Healer, and SOO many others. I’m absolutely thrilled to see something that sprouted from the grandma Rumiko tree again. I’m sick to death of Rance and his offspring. Also, Yuuna is astoundingly wholesome compared to Higehiro, Domestic Girlfriend, Rent-A-Girlfriend, let alone anything from the Rance Family. The show with 500 boobies an episode is crushing modern ecchi in wholesomeness. That’s honestly very sad but it’s true. In conclusion, this absolutely should have received a dub and physical release in the US. If it really was a test audience that convinced Aniplex to do Yuuna dirty like that, I have something to say to them. In the immortal words of Michael Jordan, “Fuck them kids!” Yuuna frankly deserved WAY more love than it got back in 2018. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a masterpiece or anything. It is still kind of bad in some regards. Some of the running jokes do get a bit stale. The full-frontal nudity unfortunately extends to the 13-year-old innkeeper. Why Xebec? Why would you do this? The anime also left on a cliffhanger regarding Yuuna’s forgotten past that will never be resolved in anime form. The manga eventually answered all the questions, but this anime sure isn’t getting a second season. Yuuna does have some problems. However, this trashy ecchi is also worth your time. It’s only 12 episodes and it’s pretty damn enjoyable. I have to recommend this one.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jun 29, 2023
Tengoku Daimakyou
(Anime)
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Warning! This review will include spoilers. I really can't talk about this heavily plot-driven series in the way I want to without getting into spoiler territory.
Heavenly Delusion is the big budget, Post-apocalyptic survival sci-fi extravaganza that anime fans have been waiting for! Ok, besides Attack on Titan of course. Production IG have come to the rescue! The narrative in Heavenly Delusion swaps back and forth between these mutant children with superpowers living in a facility (The Heaven Arc) and 2 children on an epic journey through the wasteland of what was once Japan (The Hell Arc). Much like Baccano or Odd Taxi, the story is ... a puzzle that you have to put together piece by piece. Not everything is explained in the anime's first season but by this point in the manga we have basically all we need to complete the puzzle. Unfortunately, that puzzle ends up looking pretty messy. There's a good reason the manga's score has dipped so much. Sometimes with this series you find out the answer to a mystery that you've been wondering about for months and months only to be confronted with an idiotic answer that creates a massive plot hole. There's one example that I'll explain in detail that's SO stupid it left me feeling like Patchy the Pirate after watching the lost episode. Before we get heavily into the plot, we have to cover the tone. This series is kind of weird. At first it seems like it's taking the gritty and grimdark future setting very seriously, but then you're confronted with a super powerful laser gun powered by regular AA batteries, brain transplants performed on bodies that would already be brain dead due to blood loss, magical powers, monsters, and kids surviving for years by searching through ruined houses and eating canned food that expired over a decade ago. So now it's like The Last of Us if combined with the whimsical dream logic of Earthbound! This would be fine if Heavenly Delusion was a parody of survival sci-fi or some kind of political satire like Warhammer 40k, but it's not. It's entirely played straight, and all this goofy shit really undermines the serious portions of the series. There are a few episodes like episode 8 that are genuinely good and work well, but in a lot of places the show really struggles to find the tone and demographic it wants to go for. Heavenly Delusion is FAR from the only anime to suffer from this issue, but I really found myself getting frustrated with this one at points. I've mentioned that this series is extremely plot heavy and it's not that long, so most of the characters really don't get all that much time to develop. Maru is the main character and he's a kid with a special superpower that allows him alone to destroy these immortal monsters called "Hiruko" that are running around the future eating the human survivors. He was born around the same time as the mysterious event that destroyed civilization and was raised on the street by various gangs. One day, he met a mysterious woman who gave him a super powerful laser gun, explained how to use his powers, and immediately before dying sent him on a quest to find the remains of a facility known as "Heaven" and deliver a syringe to someone who looks just like him. To accompany him on his quest, he hires a bodyguard to take care of him. This bodyguard named Kiruko is the deuteragonist. Kiruko was born as a boy named Haruki, who was a member of the neighborhood watch before he unfortunately got eaten by one of the monsters during a street race. His sister managed to drag his severely bleeding torso away from the monster and take it to a back-alley doctor who somehow performed a brain transplant despite the fact technology has badly deteriorated in the future Hell setting and they barely have electricity beyond a few people with generators. Thus, Dr. Impossible was able to save Haruki’s life at the cost of his sister’s. So, one of the main characters is a male who is trapped in a female body. You might think that with transgender issues being all over the news that this series would take this opportunity to explore gender identity and what it’s like to be a woman in society vs being a guy. How are expectations different? How do people treat you differently? This series is NOT that smart. The only reason they did this sub-plot is just to let the audience know that brain transplants are possible in this universe. This is important because it clues the viewer into the motivation behind the evil secret society in the Heaven Arc. You may have noticed that the manga isn’t as highly acclaimed as the anime. Well, that’s because once you piece together the puzzle, a lot of the series’ mysteries aren’t given satisfying answers. There are a few lightbulb “Ah-ha!” moments that are satisfying like something you’d get in Odd Taxi. However, most of the answers just leave you thinking “…..ok” and a few will downright piss you off! The first few dots are very easy to connect. We learn very quickly that the Hell arc takes place at least 15 years after the events of the Heaven arc. That’s because the Heaven arc takes place before the apocalypse and in the Hell arc, they’re trying to find the ruins of Heaven. We learn very quicky that the super powered children in the Heaven arc keep getting this mysterious disease and dying. After they die, something emerges from their bodies and becomes the monsters from the Hell arc. We know that Maru has powers and only “Hiruko children” have powers, so Maru MUST be a Hiruko. Sure enough, there’s a girl in the Heaven arc who looks just like Maru and is revealed to be Maru’s mom. She gave birth to him at age 14 just before the apocalypse and Maru will eventually die and become a monster unless that mysterious syringe that he was given contains a cure. One of the biggest mysteries in the series is “How did the apocalypse happen?” None of the adults can remember exactly what happened to end the world. The show devotes an entire episode to this. One theory is that it was a nuclear war that instantly destroyed all communications, so nobody even knows who fired first or which countries were involved. Another theory is that aliens invaded, which would explain the monsters running around and the laser gun that defies physics by putting out WAY more energy than it’s taking in. 2 AA batteries can’t even power a Sega Game Gear, let alone produce enough energy to fire off Dragonball Z beams. I’m just going to spoil what happened because it is SO fucking stupid that you will be furious if you wait anxiously for season 2 and spend the next 2 or 3 years devoting mental energy to this shit. In the near future, a supercomputer at an observatory predicts that an asteroid will strike the Earth. The entire UN is informed of this and they coordinate a plan to launch rockets that will alter the trajectory of the asteroid. However, an evil secret society of mad scientists decides to tamper with the rocket trajectory data so the asteroid will strike Earth and wipe out most of Humanity. The Secret Society has a different plan for Humanity’s future. At some point in the past, they managed to recover some alien parasites from somewhere that’s not yet been explained. The Society decided to experiment with these parasites by implanting them into genetically engineered children that were grown in test tubes. The children quickly displayed incredibly random superpowers and a healing factor that makes them basically immortal. The leader of the evil society then immediately came up with the idea to transplant her brain and the brains of her elite acolytes into the bodies of these super children so they can emerge from the ashes of the apocalypse and rule what remains of the world as gods. However, they didn’t think this through at all because even before they fucked with the rocket data and doomed the world, the Hiruko children were shown to be highly unstable. The alien parasite ends up killing the host and gaining full autonomy as a man-eating monster. In the end, it’s the parasites that are immortal, not the host bodies. The word “Hiruko” is a Shinto mythology reference btw and literally means “Leech Child” because you know…alien parasite. The Society also created the laser guns through unknown means, but it’s assumed by fans they were salvaged, or reverse engineered from an alien ship where they got the parasites. These guns were meant to help them take care of anyone left to oppose them…even though at this point they thought they would be immortal with superpowers and would have no reason for this level of fire power. The reason the adults can’t remember that it was an asteroid strike is because….everyone just kind of forgot. That’s it. That’s really the answer. Fuck you Heavenly Delusion! The mysterious woman who gives Maru his gun and explains his powers is actually the head of the evil society who had her brain transplanted into a new body. She was never truly remorseful for wiping out most of Humanity but was a bit miffed at how badly she botched the whole bioengineering thing. The “person who looks like Maru” is actually a clone or Maru is the clone. We don’t know which yet, but Doctor Impossible cloned Maru as a baby for some reason that will probably be explained in the last part of the manga and will DEFINITELY be stupid. Doctor Impossible from the beginning of the story was the doctor hired by the evil Society in the Heaven arc to do the brain transplants because of course he was. Oh, and Kiriko’s missing big brother figure who taught him how to fight and was the Batman to his Robin just turned out to be a psychopathic rapist all along. Kiriko finally finds his mentor, and the mentor just rapes and tortures him for 2 straight days…because he thought it would be funny to rape his former male apprentice in the body of a hot girl. Why include this in the story? Well besides shock value, it gives Maru the chance to charge in like a heroic knight and beat up the big bad rapist man. Don’t worry though, Kiriko instantly gets over the whole 2 days of rape and torture business within 5 minutes, so it doesn’t have to take itself seriously or get too sad. Kiriko even stops Maru from killing the evil mentor immediately after being raped and tortured for 48 straight hours. Kiriko is in a calm, rational state of mind and is happy to spout off his “no-kill rule”. Um…ok. Good for you Kiriko. You truly are incorruptible. So why did I give this a 6? Didn’t I spend the entire review ripping on it? I mentioned before that some episodes are actually good and I really mean that. The animation is spectacular. I enjoyed the music. The monster designs were really cool, and the action scenes are very entertaining. This was a highly entertaining show most of the time and even with all of its flaws, I would still say it’s a fun watch that’s worth experiencing. Just don’t take the whole world building and mystery aspect too seriously or you might get disappointed. I also love how fucking random the superpowers are that the alien parasites grant. The mangaka needed a plot device for how one of the kids can sneak around the facility so the reader can see the test tubes and connect the future monsters with the Hiruko kids. So, one girl has the ability to be invisible solely to security cameras. Her power is that she can’t be seen by the human eye, but only when nobody is directly looking at her. I would say that’s the stupidest power I’ve ever heard of in my life, if I hadn’t actually heard that one before. The mangaka ripped that power straight from a 1999 box office bomb called Mystery Men. This series is honestly a fucking mess, but it’s an enjoyable mess. Sometimes you just have to embrace a piece of media flaws and all and this was one of those times for me.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Mar 26, 2023
Trigun Stampede
(Anime)
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Studio Orange director: “Man, I was watching this piece of trash Boomer anime the other day and all my buddies around me were laughing at it. Then it suddenly struck me. This is an absolute tragedy! This old piece of trash actually has all the elements there to be a masterpiece and it’s simply being handcuffed by all this hackneyed anime bullshit! Imagine if it cut out the stupid comedy, extra characters, pointless romance sub-plot, pointless fanservice, and just really doubled down on the psychological drama and grimdark elements. Those Zoomers who laugh at this shit right now and dismiss it will have their minds
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absolutely blown! They don’t even know! We’re gonna break this series free from its chains that have been holding it back and by God it’s gonna COOK!”
Me: “Say no more! I know exactly what anime you guys are talking about. You don’t even need to say it! God, it’s hard to be an Elfen Lied fan in 2023. People just don’t get it, but you’re clearly seeing what I’m seeing! Studio Orange: “Elfen what? Bruh, I was talking about Trigun! Me: “….are y’all serious?!” Welcome to Studio Orange’s well intentioned albeit often baffling attempt to “fix” Trigun by giving it a darker, grittier reboot that completely does its own thing and often flat out gives the finger to the original manga and anime. We all know Trigun is a Boomer anime with a cult following, but what is Trigun exactly? Trigun is a Space Western that at its core is a love letter to old cowboy movies. It takes place in a bizarre, steampunk setting on this desert covered alien planet that a colony of human pioneers have been stranded on. So, you have a mixture of crazy science fiction stuff and aliens with 1860s technology and old west gun duels. This is admittedly a silly premise. The original series and the manga are fully aware of this. The manga started out as a screwball action comedy that was published in a shonen magazine, but it went on hiatus and returned in a seinen magazine with a much darker and more serious tone. This gradual shift is emulated by the 1998 anime adaptation that starts out very funny and wildly entertaining before taking a more somber turn. The 2023 anime by contrast is a much more serious affair throughout. The first episode at least tries to capture some of the zaniness of the early manga and the 1998 anime, but if those were cranked up to 10, Trigun Stampede turns it down to maybe a 4 or 5. Then there are children being killed in just the second episode of Stampede and the comedy never returns. Trigun Stampede very clearly feels like the fun element and comedy was an impediment to the franchise’s quality. I feel like this is a deeply misguided take on the franchise. The comedy and fun elements of Trigun actually compliment the ridiculous setting and whole “Space Western” thing, which would be a mistake to simply make dead serious. The gradual shift from lighthearted to serious also works in the series’ favor by making the serious moments really stand out and giving them an added punch. To be fair to Studio Orange, there are series that have comedy that feels completely tacked on and the inclusion of these scenes does nothing but hurt the series. That’s a common problem in old anime. I joked in the opening paragraph about Elfen Lied in particular suffering from this, but Ashita no Joe part 1 suffers from this! Even some really good anime have this problem. It’s just that Trigun is NOT one of those series! Another massive departure from the source material and original anime is that Trigun Stampede never once feels like a Western. The original anime has over a dozen shots directly ripped from old Western movies. In one of the very first episodes, you have this longshot of a creaky windmill which is taken directly from 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West. There’s another shot from an early episode taken directly from the 1964 film Fistful of Dollars. The original anime is shot and framed like a Western. The soundtrack feels like a Western. Vash and Knives end up settling their differences in an old-time gun duel that feels straight out of a Western. The 1998 anime is proud to be a Western. Trigun Stampede has Knives hook Vash up to a supercomputer and hack into him using his weird tentacles in order to ascend to the “higher dimension” and make contact with the “Wave Existence”, Capital G God in order to give his fellow artificial life forms souls so that they can have freewill. I’m sorry, but what the FUCK is this?! The team behind Trigun Stampede has clearly played Xenogears before and watched Evangelion but I don’t think anyone on this production team has watched a Sergio Leone film, let alone loves those types of movies. There’s a weird scene in Trigun Stampede where a young Vash draws a parallel between Humanity settling space and the American pioneers of the old west, but this idea of a space western is brought up in Stampede only to be immediately ridiculed and dismissed. This is a thing that reboots do when they’re trying to be more “mature” and “gritty” than the original. It’s that trailer scene in X-Men 2000 when Wolverine snarks “What did you expect? Yellow spandex?” Trigun Stampede is a pure science fiction with weird JRPG pseudo-religious stuff that has zero interest in being a Western. Yet another massive difference can be found in the main protagonist Vash, who in the manga and original anime acts like a complete and utter goofball. He starts out as this Looney Toons character, but then you find out that it’s simply a persona that he shows to the public to hide his pain and loneliness. The real Vash underneath the goofy mask is a suffering, Messianic figure who doesn’t want others to have to share his burden. He essentially treats Humanity like a parent would treat their small child. This makes perfect sense given that he’s a 120+ year old alien with Godlike powers. Vash in Trigun 2023 is a much weaker and more vulnerable character. He’s not super OP in combat and emotionally he’s kind a mopey emo boy for almost the entirety of the series. Trigun 2023 believed they were making him more human and relatable, but I don’t feel like it worked exactly in the way that they wanted. If anything, it just made him much more forgettable. Most of the cast got shafted in Trigun 2023, but Meryl Strife easily got it the worst. Meryl in the original is a short tempered, no-nonsense girl boss who can hold her own in a gun fight, has hilarious chemistry with Vash as the straight man to Vash’s shenanigans and is also a romantic interest for Vash. Meryl in the 2023 reboot is basically April O’Neil from Ninja Turtles. She’s this naïve reporter lady who is simply looking for her big scoop but ends up largely being a spectator with no real agency and doesn’t really contribute much. Milly was entirely replaced by a grizzled old reporter named Robert DeNiro who is only 3 weeks away from retirement and is getting too old for this shit. Why is he named DeNiro? He should clearly be Danny Glover! Fucking Stampede can’t even make the right actor jokes. Although it is mentioned in the last episode that Milly exists in this universe and may appear if a sequel ever happens. Wolfwood is given a lot less time to shine here and just feels like a very watered down, shittier version of the original character. His motivations in Stampede are also a lot dumber. Wolfwood in the original series was raised in an abusive household and murdered his own father, thus becoming an orphan. He was then raised by one of Knives’ super soldiers as a possible successor and uses the skills he acquired as a gun for hire to finance an orphanage. Wolfwood is basically a sleeper agent since he’s in contact with someone who works for the main villain, but he doesn’t directly work for the main baddie or know his plans. He ends up refusing to go along with the main villain’s plans and to the end stays loyal to his orphanage and his friends despite his wrongdoings. Wolfwood in 2023 exists solely as a delivery boy to bring Vash to his brother Knives, which honestly makes the rest of the Gungho Guns and Legato completely pointless in the 2023 anime. Knives in 2023 didn’t intend for any of his super soldiers to kill Vash or force Vash to suffer by having to kill one of them, thus preparing him for their final duel. They are literally there for no reason. Wolfwood works directly for Knives and clearly knows that Knives will use Vash’s energy to do something absolutely apocalyptic and almost certainly wipe out Mankind, but he’s delivering Vash to Knives all for the sake of the orphans…whom Knives will kill the second he makes the delivery. Did they even think about this? Insert Biff Tannen and/or Omni Man clip. Now it’s FINALLY time to say something nice about Trigun 2023. They actually tried to make Knives a more complex character whose love for his brother Vash is just as strong as his hatred for Mankind. Knives’ motivation for hating Humanity is much more fleshed out in 2023 and he’s given a level sympathy that he never got in the original. In the last 20 years of movies and TV media, we’ve come to expect for villains to have more relatable motivations. Everyone wants to write MCU Thanos or Toguro from Yu Yu Hakusho and not the cackling madman who is just an asshole for the Hell of it. Knives in the original anime is an artificial life form who was created to serve Humanity, but from the beginning looked down on Humanity as his inferiors and wants to wipe us out. He’s a very solitary figure with a God complex and not a lot of love in his heart for anyone. OG Knives is basically just Sephiroth from the original FF7. That type of villain works best when you don’t see a lot of them. They’re this shadowy figure with unknowable motivations whom you are never asked to empathize with. All you know is that they’re going to be hard to stop. This is the Lovecraft approach to writing antagonists, and it’s widely considered antiquated. Trigun 2023 had an interesting take on Knives and I appreciate that they made the effort. The animation is..fine if you like Studio Orange’s approach to CG. This series had a budget. They put effort into it. It has some scenes that are very visually impressive. It also has some scenes I think looked like dog shit, but I digress. The music is fine. It’s definitely not iconic like the original anime’s OST, but it serves its purpose adequately. I also appreciate that while Orange’s vision of Trigun was radically, fundamentally different, they did keep it consistent. It wasn’t grimdark one moment only to be goofy the next. They didn’t go full science fiction one episode only to backtrack. They fully committed to their own interpretation of what Trigun should be. When you consider Trigun 2023 to be its own series that’s loosely inspired by Trigun, it begins to look a lot better. Instead of a replacement or a reboot, we can see this series as a sort of “spiritual successor” that takes some concepts from the original while comfortably being its own thing. That’s the takeaway point at the end of the day. I think it’s a horrible adaptation of Trigun that fundamentally misunderstands what made Trigun so beloved in the first place and why it worked. However, it’s also not a bad anime when you examine it in a vacuum and stop thinking about the original. If it didn’t have the Trigun name, I would say this is an above average anime that I could comfortably recommend to friends. It’s fine. It’s perfectly serviceable as a seasonal anime in 2023. That’s why I’m still giving it a 6 out of 10. It doesn’t deserve to be crucified simply because it’s not the original. The original already exists. It’s not going anywhere or being replaced on every streaming site and store shelf. If you’ve never seen either version of Trigun, I would definitely check out the original first, but you can also give this one a watch. If you hate old school animation and you’re only interested in new stuff, you can watch Trigun 2023 and just not worry about the original.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jan 23, 2023 Not Recommended Preliminary
(10/20 eps)
It's not often that I review anime that I drop. Typically, I wait until I finish a series to review it. However, this is a frustrating series that I feel I need to review but I also have zero desire to actually suffer through 10 more episodes. A friend of mine recommended this series after the Youtuber Mother's Basement hyped it up as a subversive dark comedy and brilliant parody of shitty, isekai power fantasies. Eminence in Shadow or "ES" as I'll refer to it from now on uses a lot of tired tropes and cliches. It's fully aware that it's doing so and intends
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to poke fun at poorly written isekai, but it doesn't actually do enough to distinguish itself as a parody. It ends up just looking like it's aping trashy isekai and becomes the very thing it set out to make fun of. The series tries to let us in on the fact it's a dark comedy and a parody because the main character is a "chuuni" sociopath with delusions of grandeur and megalomania. He's willing to slaughter dozens of people simply to role play as his favorite anti-heroes. Haha! the joke is that he's not actually a good guy like Kirito! This is ignoring the fact that Overlord exists, Shield Hero exists, and Mushoku exists. Nothing the main character does goes over the top enough to let the audience know that the writer actually looks down on these type of power fantasies and is just having a laugh at them while holding them in disdain. Redo of Healer actually accomplishes what ES wanted to accomplish far more effectively, even though Redo likely did it on accident and was probably just written by a complete degenerate.
The first episode actually starts out with some potential. Our sociopathic main character tries to blend in as a background NPC while secretly mastering dozens of martial arts and training intensely to become a crime fighting vigilante by night. He goes around beating yakuza and motorcycle thugs to death by dual wielding crowbars. So, at first it looks like it's going to be a darkly comic deconstruction of the concept of the Superhero and what would actually happen if a mentally ill person decided to go vigilante while LARPing as a hero. This concept has actually been done to death in the West with movies like James Gunn's Super and Mark Millar's Kick-Ass. However, I've not seen an anime take on this concept. Sadly, ES abandons this concept and has the hero intentionally throw himself into a truck in the hopes that he'll be Isekaid and reborn as an overpowered badass. HAHA! They referenced Truck-Kun! They're aware of the meme! Seriously, Konosuba did that joke over 10 years ago and did it better! Our hero gets his exact wish and is born as a noble with great talent for magic and physical combat. By 12 years old, he is using his OP skills to slaughter bandits and keep their loot to himself so he can eventually build a Bat Cave. One day after killing some bandits, he finds a girl who has been mutated by a curse and takes her home to perform experiments on. He ends up accidentally curing her and when she can't remember what happened, he creates a bullshit backstory for her and tells her that he's fighting a secret, evil organization. The girl happens to be a master assassin and recruits an entire harem of sexy female assassins offscreen to create an army for the MC. The MC btw has changed his name to Cid because Final Fantasy exists. Cid believes that he's just killing bandits and guards while pretending a fight a secret society, but since this world seems to grant his every wish, there actually is a secret society exactly like the one he made up. This is all in the first 3 episodes. By episode 10, I just feel like I'm watching Overlord again and wasting my time. It's not the worst anime ever, but it's not really doing anything for me. The animation is fine, but not stunning. The character designs are kind of bland. The music is kind of bland. Watch this series if you want a trash isekai that's aware it's a trash isekai but doesn't really accomplish anything with that knowledge.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Dec 26, 2022
Mad★Bull 34
(Anime)
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Recommended Funny
I knew I had to review at least one anime over the holiday season. Maybe I could review Tokyo Godfathers, the best Christmas movie ever made? Nah. Maybe I could review Akiba Maid War…but it’s just so hard to talk about that show without spoiling the fun. So, I decided to do something completely different and just re-review my favorite “So bad it’s awesome” anime of all time. I wrote a quick, shitty review back in 2014 or 2015 but I did NOT do this series justice. Now it’s time that I fully commit to spreading the gospel of the Mad Bull!
It's difficult to talk ... about Mad Bull without first bringing up the man responsible for it. That man being the legendary Kazuo Koike whom we lost back in 2019. Koike is best known for Lone Wolf and Cub, which is considered one of the most influential works of early seinen. Koike alongside Go Nagai are really credited with giving manga some balls and showing publishers that it doesn’t just have to be for kids. There’s a big market for adults as well. Lone Wolf and Cub is SOO well respected that it’s one of the sacred manga that’s considered acceptable to talk about on literature forums like /lit/ and you won’t be made fun of. That’s why it’s one of the 10 manga that MAL elitists will actually fucking read alongside Berserk, Punpun, Monster, Phoenix, and of course JoJo part 12: Balls of Steel. So why am I about to review one of the most laughably bad anime of all time? How did Koike go from an industry legend to a man whose latter works are a risible embarrassment? The rise and fall of Kazuo Koike almost eerily parallel that of American comic artist Frank Miller. He’s this guy who just shows up out of nowhere and absolutely kicked down the door with tits and gore and rampant misogyny and everyone was like “Holy shit! I thought comics were for little kids! This guy is actually making them enjoyable for men. That’s fucking bad ass! Much like Mr. Miller, Koike could actually be a pretty good writer when we wanted to be. However, both men let their fame go to their heads until their works morphed from cutting edge to a grotesque parody of itself. Koike went Lady Snowblood and Lone Wolf in the 1970s to writing Mad Bull, Wounded Man and Crying Freeman all in a row during the 1980s. Interestingly, the work that bridged his good work and his awful work was a manga that he worked on for 3 years alongside Go Nagai. While Koike’s latter works are indeed awful, they’re also undeniably entertaining. Mad Bull especially, which has been described as an escaped mental patient’s attempt at writing a buddy cop film. The other hero behind today’s anime is Satoshi Dezaki. He is the elder brother of Osamu, one of the greatest and most innovative directors in the history of anime. While his brother reinvented the anime industry, Satoshi founded a studio called Magic Bus and mostly directed utter schlock. They must have had some awkward family get togethers. However, Satoshi wasn’t without his triumphs. Sure, people like to laugh at Magic Bus for making stuff like Cipher and Wounded Man, but they also helped animate a little OVA series called Legend of the Galactic Heroes when most other studios weren’t interested. In 1990, the stars aligned, and Dezaki directed today’s MASTERPIECE of an anime. While the Mad Bull manga is entertaining, the anime is an entirely different level of awesome. The manga knew it was a joke. It’s supposed to be stupid. However, the anime often forgets this and plays the most ludicrous situations entirely straight. Half the time, the anime seems to think it’s a hard-hitting drama and brutal criticism of America in the vein of Chinatown. This blissful lack of self-awareness is really what helps cement the anime as an all-time masterpiece of schlock entertainment. Described by the official Anime Encyclopedia as an “odious, infantile, and puerile piece of shit”, Mad Bull 34 is the story of a 9-foot-tall police officer who cleans up the mean streets of 1980s New York City alongside his strait-laced partner, Daizaburo “Eddie” Ban. This name btw would make you think that his legal name is Daizaburo but he’s always called by his nickname Eddie. He’s never once called Eddie in either the show or the manga. Not once…ever. Officer John “Sleepy” Estes is a loose cannon cop who takes every opportunity he can to kill criminals and get them off the street. In his defense, he never kills anyone in the anime who was unarmed. However, he’s not the best cop when he brings in only one criminal for questioning in 4 episodes and kills about 87. It’s also probably a bad look in 2022 to have your anime start with a white police officer shooting a black guy’s head clean off within the opening 15 seconds. Don’t worry, Officer Sleepy also kills a bare minimum of 15 white people per episode. There is no discrimination or pattern whatsoever in his mass slaughter of New York’s criminal population. Officer Sleepy is also the biggest pimp in New York, but the anime presents this as a good thing since he uses the girls’ money to treat STDs, drug addiction and other medical expenses, so he spends their money more responsibly than they do and takes care of them. This anime has issues as you may have guessed. Each episode is a different adventure featuring an incredibly over the top villain including a cyborg mob-boss and female athlete who stole an alien super suit from the mafia and became The Predator. Daizaburo contributes to the show mostly by getting the living shit kicked out of him and needing to be rescued. A female cop Perine is introduced into the show although her contribution is much the same as every other blonde woman in this show. I’ll just let you guess what that is. There are only 4 episodes, but they are all completely insane and utterly hilarious. Mad Bull is the perfect show to watch with friends because no matter how many times I see it, I’m still finding new errors and goofs! You’ll notice the first time you watch it that every single English word in the anime is misspelled. Even Sleepy’s name tag when you first meet him is “Suleepy”. The episode title should read “Good-bye Sleepy” but instead reads “Good by Sleepy” as if he’s selling a perfume. Then you’ll notice the scaling. Officer Sleepy goes from 6 feet to 12 feet tall and everything in between. Often within the same scene. Scaling errors in this show are so bad that it often feels less like an error that was made due to crunch time and more like they actually didn’t know how to scale. They missed that day of art school. It’s common practice to not draw every character in every frame of animation during a group shot. After all, the human eye can’t pick up if a character is missing from a single frame and the animation moves at 60 FPS. Mad Bull leaves characters out of enough frames that they’ll often just blink in and out of existence. At first you think you’re just seeing things. There’s no way that just happened. However, it just keeps happening. In one scene, Sleepy shoots a goon wearing a hockey mask at point blank and the shotgun blast explodes his skull while leaving the mask completely undamaged. The anime even shows you this from a side view for some reason, so it looks like the blast of pellets just phase through the mask and liquify the head on the other side. There are just SOO many errors and things that go wrong in this anime it’s magical. You’ll never catch all the things wrong with Mad Bull. Its Cinema Sins score would be near infinite. The soundtrack of Mad Bull features officially licensed music from the legendary James Brown, whom I am 100% positive just signed off on it without ever seeing the show. The other wonderful thing about the audio is the English dub. You can still laugh at Mad Bull in Japanese, but the dub is the way to get the true Mad Bull experience. The dub was written in England by Manga UK and designed to have the saltiest script possible to punch up the rating and sell this as a very mature anime. This anime has easily some of my favorite quips and insults in the medium. “The man is so low he could parachute out of a snake’s asshole!” Although I will warn younger viewers that there are quite a few homophobic slurs in this dub. So don’t be surprised when that keeps happening. The entire dub is English actors trying New York accents with various degrees of success. Perine’s actress just flat gives up after one episode and reverts to an RP English accent. Everything about this dub is just spectacular. It is the whipped cream on the sundae. Sadly, I can’t bring myself to rate this higher than a 5, but I’m still DEFINITELY recommending that you check it out. I think the English dubbed episodes are still free on Youtube. If not, they can still be found across the internet. The series is also available on DVD through Discotek, although the Discotek DVD for the North American region is now out of print and sells for over 120$ due to the series’ relentless parade of police brutality. I’m pretty sure Discotek would be happy if every copy of this DVD with their name on it was destroyed. Needless to say, it is never going to be re-released. If you need some laughs and holiday joy this season, I can’t recommend Mad Bull highly enough.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Nov 1, 2022
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings Spoiler
When I heard that Cyberpunk was getting an anime produced by CD Projekt Red, I thought it was April Fool's prank. Why would they make an anime for a game that was financially a massive failure for them? That would be like Bethesda shelling out money for Fallout 76 the anime! So, the anime came out and I didn't watch it. Then I checked the rating one day and saw it's now considered one of the best anime of all time on MAL and Anilist. After seeing how critically acclaimed it was, I decided to check it out for myself and found an anime that's
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fun, colorful, chaotic, and also not really my thing.
Does the anime closely follow the plot of the video game? Not even remotely. Cyberpunk the anime is based on a 1980s American role-playing game that was basically Dungeons and Dragons set in the future. You can definitely feel the American 1980s vibes from this anime. Since most of MAL in 2022 is not American, I feel should probably explain myself. Cyberpunk takes place in a dystopian future in which the world is dominated by evil corporations, and everything sucks. The show is packed to the brim with anti-corporate satire and a critique of capitalism that's as subtle as taking a sledgehammer to the face. Have you seen Robocop? Have you seen The Stuff? Have you seen Blade Runner? They Live? Aliens? That's what this anime is really going for. The 1980s in America was when our wealth gap really started to increase. Reagan's tax cuts were popular with the wealthy and corporations but really pissed off leftie America. Our corporations experienced record profits while sending all of our best paying manufacturing jobs to China. American unions were pretty much destroyed. This was the decade that Hollywood took the gloves off and started making extremely blatant "Fuck You" movies aimed at corporate America, greed, consumerism, and America's system of capitalism. America is very fiscally conservative compared to most of the developed world, so we really didn't make many of these movies before the 1980s. Charlie Chaplin made Modern Times in the 1930s, got called a Communist and was chased out of the country. This anime has the flavor of an anti-capitalist satire, but it's also an Imaishi anime. That means it's primarily focused on visuals, being cool, gross out humor, and moments that make people say "Wow! That was so stupid it was AWESOME!" It's really not focused enough or clever enough to be a good satire. The tabletop RPG cyberpunk took heavy inspiration from the novel Neuromancer, which helped create the whole sci-fi genre of "cyberpunk". If you know anything about Neuromancer, you know it's an infamously tough to read, big brain novel. Most people who try to read Neuromancer don't make it halfway through. However, I assume that whoever is reading this has probably seen The Matrix. The Matrix took a lot of concepts from Neuromancer and kept some of the philosophy while dumbing it down enough for casual audiences like to me to enjoy! Also adding a bunch of John Woo style badassery. Cyberpunk takes The Matrix, dumbs it down even further, and adds Studio Trigger nonsense to the mix. The Matrix is like Neuromancer brought back as a zombie. It's not quite as sophisticated as the original, but a lot of the flesh is still there. It still looks like Neuromancer for the most part. Cyberpunk is like the shambling skeleton of Neuromancer. I think hardcore sci-fi geeks are going to have a sad time watching this. You guys would probably be WAY better off watching Texhnolyze or Lain or something. Now it's time to cover the plot and characters. David is an impoverished Latino American who lives in "totally not LA" and goes to a fancy private school thanks to the heroic efforts of his dedicated single mother. David is intelligent, hard-working, and also enjoys jerking off to illegal snuff films on his VR headset. What? Did you expect him to be likeable? Nah dog, you're thinking of Miles Morales! Seriously, this was such a stupid edition to the story. Not only does it immediately make the main character unlikeable, it also completely robs the impact of the flashforward when we see that David has become a hardcore gangster and ruthless mass killer. It's not shocking because we already knew he was fucked up in the head and we don't care about his fall from grace. We know by the 2nd episode that he's going to go "cyber psycho". which is an incredibly stupid concept that this show introduces. Apparently, if you replace too much of your body with robot parts and become a certain percent cyborg you just go crazy for no reason and go on a murder spree. David starts the series at least trying to do well at school and putting up with pure evil bullies who hate him solely because he's poor. They even call David to mock his mother's death after she's killed in a drive by shooting! The bullies from Elfen Lied would tell these guys to tone it down! David at the beginning of the series is following his mother's dream and trying to one day climb up the ladder of society and make it big. Then after he finds a rare robotic spine and decides to become a cyborg mercenary, he lives to help his new girlfriend achieve her dream of going to the moon. You would think that David has a character arc in which he eventually finds out that he can't live just for the dreams of others. However, that doesn't really happen. He does get to sort of redeem himself for all the awful shit he does by helping his girlfriend escape the final battle. However, he dies without really going through any kind of satisfying arc. In fact, none of the characters in this series have satisfying arcs. They're all these unlikeable bastards who do some cool shit, kill a bunch of random goons and then die. All except for Lucy who is given a tragic childhood backstory and gets to live at the end. Good for her! In a "Grimdark" story, characters will often die randomly without ever getting to complete their arcs, because life isn't neatly organized or fair. Life is chaotic and frequently sucks. However, the writer still needs to make you give a fuck about the characters, otherwise their tragic deaths won't have the desired emotional impact. When Grimdark is attempted and fails, it becomes Grimderp, which was my experience with this series. So why did I give this a 6? Imaishi's animation is spectacular. The action scenes are gloriously over the top with TONS of high pressure, stylized blood. The gore actually reminds me a lot more of the cartoon Invincible rather than older anime gore. The soundtrack randomly decided to use Franz Ferdinand of all things, which is a band my little brother loved when I was in high school. That was a nostalgic blast for me! The ED should have been Modest Mouse! What the fuck were you thinking Imaishi?! I also enjoyed the Netflix dub. The psycho loli character was given this hilariously annoying, super scratchy voice. I swear to GOD that actress was trying her hardest to impersonate Aisha Clan Clan from the old Outlaw Star dub! Also, I take my hat off to the absolute GENIUS who gave the white mad doctor a heavy Jamaican accent. I laughed every time he opened his mouth for 10 episodes! Cyberpunk is a joyride of WTF madness. They introduce a character that looks like Lobo from DC comics for no reason. The show acts like he's going to be a major part of the plot. Then he yells a hobo for taking a piss in the street and the hobo just blows Lobo's head off. This has no impact on the rest of the story. That's Cyberpunk. Stuff just sort of happens for no reason and it tries to be grimdark while also being all Imaishi. Speaking of Grimdark, the Netflix script writers MUST have been reading Warhammer Fantasy because anytime characters speak/talk telepathically they repeat/say the same word words! Every psychic cell phone conversation is spoken in Skaven Queekish for absolutely no reason! I guess Netflix writers were snorting warpstone when they wrote this shit! Cyberpunk may be a mess, but it's also undeniably entertaining. If you loved Cyberpunk, what should you watch next? That's easy. The answer is Cyber City Oedo. It's like Cyberpunk only better. It takes place in the same sort of shitty dystopian future, but it actually feels like the future. The entire world is now a monoculture in which all humans alive are a mix of 3 or more races and huge corporations rule it all with an iron fist. Do you want stuff that's so stupid it's awesome? Cyber City has cyborg saber toothed tigers that shoot lasers out of their mouths! Want a huge middle finger to corporate scumbags? Cyber City has an evil pharmaceutical CEO who turns himself into a vampire so he can live forever at the expense of others. Which is something Martin Shkreli would definitely do if he could! Lastly, if you want a dub making questionable choices, Cyber City has you covered once again! Even though I'm mixed on Cyberpunk, I'll ultimately recommend that people try it out. Then I HIGHLY recommend they check out Cyber City immediately afterwards!
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Oct 4, 2022
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Since I just reviewed an anime that started out weak and got way better, this week I'll be looking at an anime that started really strong and ended by being the most infuriating anime I've seen in years. Ranking of Kings is an absolutely GORGEOUS anime that uses a style inspired by Ghibli but also by American cartoons such as Adventure Time and Stephen Universe. The animation by Studio Wit is spectacular. The fight choreography, especially in the first half, is jaw dropping. I think this had the budget of about 5 normal anime because some person at Kadokawa REALLY wanted to bet on this
...
horse.
So, is the manga famous for being outstanding? Why would someone pull strings to give this one project so much money? Here's the thing. The manga is relatively unknown both inside Japan and outside. Only 1,000 people on ALL of MAL have read the manga. It wasn't published in any of the major magazines. It was this fairly obscure webcomic whose great claim to fame was winning 7th in a shonen competition and picking up a participation trophy. Ok, it was famous for one other reason. Back in 2019, the webcomic created a bit of a firestorm on the Japanese internet for trying sneak in ultra-nationalist and extremely racist anti-Korean talking points into a children's manga with half the comments being disgusted and half the comments applauding the manga for trying redpill the kids into hating Koreans as much as possible. I've heard some people like the Youtuber Hero Hei say this is all nonsense made up by anime hating SJWs who just want to slander this elite anime because they're butthurt it's so much better than recent American media. However, Japanese netizens had absolutely zero doubts what the mangaka was talking about it. When asked about it point blank, the mangaka simply said he had no comment but didn't deny the accusation. The flame wars in the comment section then got SO bad that the comments had to be closed on the site that hosted the web comic! There have been MANY anime that the internet has accused of secret far right messages. I remember when Sargon of Akkad said that Goblin Slayer was a metaphor for Muslim immigration to Europe as laughable as that is. It's actually about Dungeons and Dragons and how the NPCs suffer in the fantasy world created by a competent dungeon master and 4 incompetent players who keep making the powerful heroes go off on pointless quests and leave the civilians to all get raped and murdered by lowly goblins. The Goblin Slayer source material doesn't hide this at all. It really is all about D&D! Some of the denizens of 4chan say Attack on Titan is the only BASED shonen because it's actually about the German people getting over their white guilt and rising up to wipe out the inferior non-Nordic peoples. This is NOT what Isayama actually had in mind. He's not a German supremacist. He's a dork who likes the Avengers movies and the Walking Dead. Even fucking Beastars had a far-right interpretation that showed up as a greentext shitpost. However, this instance is different. If you're aware of Japanese nationalist talking points, there is really no credible room to deny what the manga was doing. A good and noble people who clearly represent Japan decide to colonize their savage and idiotic neighbors who are supposed to be Koreans. The Japanese teach the Koreans the ways of civilization and help them rise up, but the Koreans backstab Japan and side with the Americans because they are treacherous and ungrateful. Then they make up atrocities in order to paint themselves as the victims. One of the heroes then commits genocide against the Koreans, which is portrayed as a good thing. If you didn't know the mangaka's politics, you would think this is just a REALLY weird sub-plot. This is a manga in which anyone and everyone is forgiven no matter how unrepentant and awful they are, but it's randomly pro-colonialism and then pro-genocide. The anime could have omitted this plot point without losing much of substance. They could also have just made the ungrateful savages into Orcs or Demons, and it wouldn't have changed the storyline. Instead, the anime doubled down and used traditional Korean architecture for the villains just to leave absolutely zero doubt what they were doing. Funimation is a company with absolutely zero scruples when it comes to adapting stuff they think will sell. Which is why it was SO funny when they made a scene of being horrified by Interspecies Reviewers and canning that one. So, they decided to cover their bases by hiring a beloved Korean American voice actor to play a main character and just tell him "Hey buddy, we got this cool new anime that's like a Ghibli inspired fairy tale in the vein of Ni No Kuni! I know you've been trying out for parts for a long time so here's your big opportunity!" If Americans ever find out about the controversy, now they can say "Whaaaat? That's crazy talk! We can't speak for the mangaka but we here at Funimation don't condone racism and would never seek to profit from racist work! Why we even hired a Korean American voice actor to be in this show. When Manga UK licensed Angel Cop, they completely changed the script to remove all instances of Anti-Semitism and replace them with hilariously stupid lines and comedy. The Funimation approach would be leaving it all in but replacing the word "Jews" with some extremely obvious code word and then saying "Hey, at least we personally aren't Anti-Semitic! We tricked beloved comedian Stephen Fry into appearing in this shit! If we were racist, then we wouldn't have hired him!" Ok, so this godly animated series was based on a highly obscure, not very respected manga that was mostly just famous for being racist and some studio executive decided to throw all the money at this production for reasons that are questionable at best. So what? Is the story good? Well...sort of. It starts out great! You have this adorable little kid who is deaf, and the anime actually bothered to learn sign language so characters who communicate with Prince Boji use proper signs. That's really impressive and cool. Boji is bullied by his absolute brat of a brother and needs to find self-confidence by going on this epic journey of personal growth. Only then can he save the kingdom and become a true king. It's very typical shonen stuff mixed with some Western fairy tale stuff. What absolutely ruins it is the character writing. Boji's primary character trait is just being adorable. Then you have his plucky, best friend/side kick who is just there to support Boji. Then almost everyone else is a complete mess. Characters will do something hideously evil, then suddenly feel intense remorse, then immediately do something else evil, then change their mind randomly to try being good again, etc. This happens so fast and so randomly that many of the character actions make ZERO sense. The bratty brother ends up getting sent to the shadow realm by his evil father the old king. Then he sort of just turns good because he understands what it is to suffer. Then when he gets his body back, he immediately decides to marry the main villain for literally no reason at all. I guess he figured he wants a second chance and why not give the person who murdered Boji's mom, tried to kill everyone multiple times, and tried to kill the entire kingdom on 2 separate occasions another chance? Human beings are complicated so good characters are typically complex as well. A well written character can be moved by multiple motivations. Maybe they have an intense internal struggle because one of their strongest desires directly contradicts another one of their strong desires. I can see what Ni no Fashy was trying to do. They wanted King Boss (yes that's really his name) and the witch Miranjo to be these incredibly complicated anti-heroes like Char from Gundam. He lives only for revenge, but he also wants to make a place for psychics to live in peace, but he also defines himself by his rivalry with Amuro. He kills a LOT of innocent people fighting for Zeon, but that's only so he can betray Zeon, then he's flat out a good guy in Zeta Gundam, but then he wants to blow up the Earth in the next series. When you have Char on crack, you get the characters from the much-maligned Gundam Wing. If you take the worst characters in Gundam Wing and have them snort a 15-meter line, then you get the characters from this trash! If you're a Nobel prize winning author, you can try pull off an anti-hero like this. The main character of Quiet Flows the Don switches sides between the monarchists and the communists about 8 times and ruthlessly executes the people he called his brothers a few weeks ago and calls them scum with zero sense of irony. The way the novel is able to pull it off is that it's 1500 pages and we spend a LOT of time getting to know this guy. We know he's this stupid, blockhead of a warrior who is relatively kindhearted by nature but was raised in a brutal Cossack culture where rape, murder, and perpetual drunkenness is a way of life. He doesn't at all understand what's happening in either WW1 or the Russian Civil War. He's an illiterate horseman who has been swept up into this chaos and is easily persuaded by whoever is around him because he doesn't have any answers and is desperate for others to do his thinking for him. Then only after losing everything does he finally, FINALLY come to the conclusion that war can only lead to suffering and throw away his weapons forever. King Boss and Miranjo are NO Grigory Melekhov! We barely get to know them and their actions make no sense from our perspective. You can't give a character a single sad flashback and try have the complexity of a Melekhov. It doesn't work that way. They didn't fucking earn that! The characters face turning and heel turning every 5 seconds went from frustrating to downright hilarious. Then I remembered how highly this series is regarded it goes all the way back to infuriating. There are plenty of anime that get absolutely shit on for baffling character decisions and rapid morality shifts. This anime though might be the grand champion. To compare these characters to the ones in Gundam Wing is an insult to Gundam Wing! The only TV character I can even compare King Boss and Miranjo to is The Big Show from WWE. A wrestling character that the writers had absolutely zero idea what to do with, so he went from good guy to bad guy 23 times in a period of I believe 4 years. He changed allegiances 3 times in a single night. At one point he's really sadistically stomping some good guy, then he really randomly feels bad and goes to the good guy side, then 4 minutes later he learns he has to follow orders from the big bad and injure his new friend, so he follows through with tears in his eyes in what's supposed to be a heartbreaking scene and instead the audience can't stop laughing. That's what it's like to watch Ni no Fashy. It's a gorgeous looking piece of ultra-nationalist propaganda for kids in which half the cast is written like the worst highlights of The Big Show. I hate this show so fucking much! I had to absolutely force myself to give this shit a 4 purely to respect its objectively good production quality. I didn't have to force myself this hard to give Triumph of the Will 3.5/5 stars on Letterboxd. Ni no Fashy doesn't deserve to toss Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi salad. Fuck this anime!
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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