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Jan 23, 2023

Kage no Jitsuryokusha ni Naritakute! (Anime) add

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 ... 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.

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Dec 26, 2022

Mad★Bull 34 (Anime) add

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.

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Nov 1, 2022

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Anime) add

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 ... 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!

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Oct 4, 2022

Ousama Ranking (Anime) add

Not Recommended

Spoiler

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!

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Sep 28, 2022

Made in Abyss: Retsujitsu no Ougonkyou (Anime) add

Recommended

Spoiler

Warning: This review contains spoilers for Made in Abyss S2.

Where do we even begin? Made in Abyss is a very, VERY odd franchise. The premise is that there is this forbidden area called the Abyss and it's a truly terrifying place. It's filled with unspeakable creatures and the fabric of reality is warped so the threat of painful mutation and horrible death is omnipresent. Despite this, brave explorers journey forth into Abyss in search of powerful artifacts of possibly alien origin. Deep within the abyss there is even something with the power to grant wishes, however it's always a monkey's paw sort of wish and ... not what you say your wish is. This premise doesn't sound like it came from a light novel and that's because it didn't. Instead, the mangaka took heavy inspiration from the Soviet science fiction novel Roadside Picnic. Which means Made in Abyss takes place in the same world as Stalker. The Cheeki-Breeki-verse? Then throw in some Dante's Inferno, some Buddhist Hell and monster designs that would make HR Giger proud and you have anime that could convert even the most diehard of anime hating normies. At least that's what you would think. Made in Abyss is prevented from ever reaching Stranger Things level mainstream appeal...because the mangaka is just unbelievably perverted. He's a proud lolicon and will display graphic loli art on his Twitter. He also has an interesting fetish involving bodily waste. Cute lolis experiencing the intense relief of taking monster dumps is like this man's life essence. It is his raison d'etre. He gets out of bed in the morning to log on to his Pixiv account and look up images of this stuff. On the one hand, it's kind of sad that Made in Abyss could be a pop culture empire if not for how disgustingly perverted it is. On the other hand, at least Disney will never try get the rights to this beloved geek series.

After a very strong S1 and an excellent 3rd movie, S2 started out fairly weak. I was very worried halfway through this season. Masayuki Kojima is a very strong director and one of his strengths is that he can very accurately capture whatever manga he's adapting and follow the manga with very close attention to detail. This worked very well in Monster, because it's a really good manga and following it so closely turned out to be a great call. Made in Abyss in contrast has a lot of material that REALLY doesn't need to be in the anime. S1 managed to keep the creepiness of the manga under control for the most part. S2 just stops trying. He dedicated about 4 minutes of episode 1 to Riko taking a fat shit. Shouldn't he have used that time for world building or mourning Prushka or something constructive? Yes, he should have. After that, we immediately get some loli rape that's not really given the weight such a serious topic deserves and is just kind of thrown in there. We're still in the first episode. Then we're introduced to a whole city of "hollows", who are people whose bodies were mutated by the abyss and whose mental state varies from basically normal to animalistic. We're told that these hollows are all the survivors of an early expedition into the Abyss from 150 years ago. However, there are actually more hollows than we're ever shown of the expedition force. Here is where S2 begins to show its weakness with a fairly massive plot hole. In order to gain more "value" the villagers lure monsters into the village's protective barrier and slay the monsters. However, in just the couple days we spend in the village, monsters are able to kill about 2 dozen hollow villagers. The village should have been empty after about 4 months, but we're supposed to believe that this initial crew of maybe 75 at most has survived for 150 years taking casualties at that rate. They manage to beat one of the monsters because Riko formulates a brilliant strategy on the fly and immediately communicates this brilliant plan to the whole village as if she's telepathic. Riko has always been a highly intelligent and very capable little girl, but this moment seemed off. Part of what gives the show its appeal is that characters die and get hurt all the time. Nobody feels like they're absolutely invincible or covered with thick plot armor. S2 starts to feel a little bullshit sometimes. Oh yeah, remember that absolutely heartbreaking scene in S1 where Nanachi has to euthanize his badly mutated sister and put her out of her misery? Well, one of the hollows cloned his sister for... reasons. Just so the show could recycle that tearjerking moment again. However, this bombshell revelation packs no emotional punch because when it's revealed. That's because you're still trying to bleach your brain from the scene 4 minutes earlier in which Riko shits her guts out into a giant carnivorous plant and is aroused since the plant wipes her asshole with its tongue. Lastly, we get a nude loli monster girl who ends every single line with "Sosu" and is unbelievably annoying. I mean just incredibly obnoxious. Not quite Jar Jar Binks but we're in the same ballpark.

Then episode 7 happens and a miracle occurs. Made in Abyss S2 completely turns things around! The tear-jerking drama, stomach churning body horror, dark world building, and everything we fell in love with actually returns! They completely stopped the gross fetish scenes. Faputa the monster girl gets a tragic backstory inspired by Lady Snowblood and is at least less annoying. The sense of danger and feeling that anybody can die returns in full force. I was fully ready after episode 6 to give S2 like a 6 being generous. I think a 5 would honestly be more accurate. Then it pulled one of the best comebacks I've seen from an anime series in a long time!

The art and animation are honestly pretty solid. Yes, some of the CG isn't perfect, but it can still make you wince with its grotesque mutilations and gore and that's what's important. I would like to thank Kinema Citrus for putting all their budget into this and not Shield Hero S2! The music for S2 was excellent. Kudos to Kevin Penkin on a job well done! On a technical perspective, there really isn't much to complain about. This was a well-made season.

Should you watch S2? If you're a big fan of the first season, I'd definitely check it out. None of my offline friends want to touch Made in Abyss with a 10-foot pole and I don't blame them. I can't even describe how fast I would be fired if any of my Southern conservative co-workers ever found I watched this show and my boss saw a clip of it. I don't care how high MAL rates it or how ELITE it's proclaimed to be on /a/. Do not share this show with your friends and family. Just don't do it! If you're already a weaboo degenerate and you can sit through some loli scat without gouging your eyes out, I would recommend this one. At the end of the day, it actually is a good anime even with all its flaws.

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Sep 19, 2022

Mob Psycho 100 II (Anime) add

Recommended

Well-written

Since season 3 is right around the corner, I decided to give an overview of Mob Psycho 100 and what makes it one of the most unique shonen anime around today. If I had to describe Mob Psycho in just one sentence, I would say that it's a shonen that rejects the tropes and teachings of shonen SOO hard that it accidentally became an old school superhero comic. Shigeo "Mob" Kageyama is a genuinely good person who was born with absolutely incredible power, but only wishes to use that power to help other people and make the world a better place. He never has to ... train like crazy to be the very best. He starts out being the strongest just though his natural genetics. He makes friends throughout the series and greatly values friendships, but he gains friends completely independent of his powers. He doesn't use his powers because he's lonely and wants to impress people so he can have friends. He would have about as many friends and be just as happy if he never had powers. Mob doesn't define himself by his powers. He's just a really chill dude with a strong sense of morality who happens to have powers. Shigeo doesn't resemble any shonen hero I can think of in the history of shonen. He's Japanese Clark Kent.

To understand why Mob Psycho is weird as a shonen, you have to look at the evolution of shonen manga/anime starting in the early 1970s. One of the biggest and most influential shonen heroes of that time was Joe Yabuki. Joe doesn't start off the manga as a particularly nice guy. He's kind of an asshole antihero who starts out at the very bottom of society. However, he trains hard and along his journey he grows stronger, makes allies, and eventually transforms into someone you can cheer for. Devilman was another 1970s antihero. Amuro from the original Gundam is a depressed teen who is reluctantly forced into war and later gets screamed at by his mother for being a murderer since he's mowed down so many enemy soldiers. He's killed thousands of people by the end of that series. Once you get past the Astro Boy era, young man's manga/anime has traditionally been dominated by anti-heroes who don't start the series as nice people and often aren't truly "heroic" in a traditional Western sense. Kenshiro was a Mad Max/Bruce Lee ripoff who wandered the wasteland killing hundreds weak goons with zero remorse and was the most popular and influential shonen character of his decade. Goku was one of the first shonen heroes to even resemble a Western superhero, but that was mostly due to the meddling of Toriyama's editors. Toriyama always wanted Goku to be more like Sun Wukong from Chinese mythology. Sun Wukong the Monkey King is an arrogant, selfish little monkey jerk who just enjoys the thrill of fighting and isn't really a moral paragon.

Now let's step into the 90s. We begin the 90s with Yusuke Urameshi. He's a juvenile delinquent who likes to get in fights and smoke cigarettes on the school roof while he's cutting class. He doesn't see himself as a particularly nice person and doesn't usually go out of his way to save the world. He more often gets put into these situations where he has to fight in order to protect the few people he actually cares about and if you mess with his friends then he'll fuck you up! You guessed it! We're still stuck on anti-heroes! The mid 1990s are dominated by Shinji Ikari who is a generally nice boy with serious psychological issues and depression. Not exactly a traditional superhero. Naruto and Deku embody the shonen Jump hero of the modern era. They begin the series as losers who get bullied constantly. Then they start working hard and eventually gain tremendous power. Once they improve themselves and gain more physical power, only then do they start to gain friends and get a girlfriend and things go right for them. The moral message of modern shonen is that if you work hard, you can grow stronger. Once you become stronger either physically, academically or in some capacity, even the people that bullied you will reluctantly respect you. You can make friends and get a girlfriend and be a winner in society. It's supposed to encourage Japanese children to strive and seek self-improvement, which is a healthy message. However, it's often unfortunately mixed with a "Might makes Right" worldview. If Deku or Naruto had never gotten super strong, they would have continued getting absolutely shit on by everyone around them. Bakugo like Vegeta before him starts out as an outright evil bastard who hates the main character for being born inferior to them and daring to not bow down. Then they begrudgingly respect the hero only because the hero is strong. They never actually have to suffer consequences for their misdeeds or really have a moral epiphany. Usually, there's a time skip and suddenly the asshole rival is just kind of accepted as one of the good guys. If you're strong in shonen, that's ultimately what matters. So, as mentioned above the self-improvement message is kind of poisoned by this almost Fascist worldview.

Another way that Mob does away with Shonen's "might makes right" morality is that it completely gets rid of the biggest curse in all of shonen...power levels. Mob's teacher is the funniest character in the show and the most popular character in the whole franchise. He has no powers whatsoever. He's just a regular dude who cons people into thinking he has powers. This regular dude with a power level of 2 is able to repeatedly save Mob from danger, positively impact the story, and not get sidelined by a lineup of increasingly strong characters who have bigger numbers than him and therefore make him irrelevant. Mob genuinely reveres his teacher and in no way sees him as lesser, even though he's millions of times stronger than him. Naruto's best friend isn't some normal dude. Naruto's best friend in defiance of all logic is Sasuke, who is both a horrible person and also despises him. Why? Because Sasuke is strong! Krillin is officially still Goku's best friend when Toriyama remembers, but in reality, it's Vegeta. Why? Because Vegeta is strong! At no point in this series does Mob's respect for someone increase simply because they're strong. Mob meets someone early in the series who thinks psychics are superior to normal people and is SUPER strong. Mob just thinks he's some asshole. Once he sees the light, he grows to respect Mob. Not because Mob is strong, but because Mob changed his worldview, and he genuinely feels remorse for being an asshole.

Mob somehow manages to be subversive while also being incredibly traditional. Mob is storytelling SO old that it's new again. Shonen has never seen anything like it. Even American comics since the success of Watchmen in 1986 have at least partially turned away from inspirational stories like this. It would certainly be boring if every anime was like Mob and every comic hero was Superman, but after SO much subversion and anti-heroes, this honestly felt refreshing. Also, I hope all future shonen take note of Mob's success and FUCK power levels!

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Aug 9, 2022

Dirty Pair (Anime) add

Recommended

Informative

In my last review I covered a highly obscure anime that nobody has ever heard of. Today, I'll be looking at an underrated anime that most people have heard of, but relatively few have actually bothered watching. Dirty Pair is a 24-episode TV anime from 1985. It was animated by Sunrise, which is why it looks a lot like Zeta Gundam and other top tier Sunrise anime from the mid 80s. That's also why it uses stock Gundam sound effects in every single episode. Dirty Pair is considered a classic by Gen X and Millennial anime fans around the world. Sadly, the series never received ... an English dub and never aired on American TV. This is a shame since it would have done very well on Adult Swim. A dub project was successfully kickstarted a few years ago and has been in production Hell ever since. Hopefully it's released in the next couple years.

Rather than being based on a manga, Dirty Pair was actually based on a series of pulp novels. It was created as a love letter to "girls with guns" exploitation films, Golden Age science fiction, and women's professional wrestling. The original novelist REALLY likes women's wrestling. That's why the Dirty Pair have the outfits that they do. It's where he got the name "Lovely Angels". The organization the girls work for is the WWWA, which in real life stood for the now defunct World Women's Wrestling Association. If you haven't guessed by now, Dirty Pair isn't the most highbrow anime in existence. This could explain its unfortunate MAL score and hilariously bad Anilist score. Despite what the haters say, this series is very fun.

Dirty Pair is an episodic action/comedy about 2 female bounty in space. That's about as deep as the plot goes. In every episode, Yuri and Kei are hired to do some ridiculous job, kick serious ass, then accidentally cause an absurd amount of collateral damage. Their tendency to cause disaster is why they are feared throughout the galaxy as the infamous Dirty Pair. By the end of the series and OVAs, they have canonically destroyed at least 10 planets and are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. All of this completely on accident due to horrendously bad luck. It's never really their fault, which is what makes it funny. The episodes have a great deal of variety with a couple horror episodes, a jail break episode, a cowboy episode, a serial killer episode, and of course an episode where they need to find a super powered cat that ate a super strength serum. All of these episodes manage to work because Yuri and Kei have great chemistry together and are just plain fun to watch!

Kei is the fiery loud-mouth and tomboy of the duo while Yuri is the more effeminate one. They manage to play off each other very well and their friendship is rather endearing. Yuri and Kei are far from perfect heroines. They're greedy. They're constantly lusting over hot guys. They don't lose sleep over the immense amount of destruction they cause, which would put most Shonen villains not named Lord Freeza to shame. However, they're also highly competent badasses who are cool and confident in their abilities. They're likeable in the way that James Bond is likeable. Old anime often has a bad reputation for being sexist, but Yuri and Kei are never infantilized or put in compromising situations where they constantly need to be rescued. They're the polar opposites of Yuria from Fist of the North Star. While the series does have some fanservice, it's always done in a very light and playful manner that doesn't come across as lurid or creepy. Some of the most explicit fanservice in the whole series is in one of the first few episodes where Kei shows off a backless dress that's cut so low it shows the entirety of her ass crack. It's actually rather charming and funny that she struts around in that outfit with utter confidence and authority!

Should you watch Dirty Pair? YES! Absolutely you should! This anime is packed with solid comedy, cool action scenes, and very good animation for its time. If you like that classic 1980s anime AESTHETIC, you definitely want to watch Dirty Pair! In fact, just drop whatever seasonal you're watching. Do you really need to watch Overlord S5 when you could watch 2 bounty hunter chicks accidentally blow up a planet? I didn't think so.

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Aug 1, 2022

Oh! Edo Rocket (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

Informative

Now that helpful votes don't exist anymore, I'm completely untethered and can review the most obscure anime possible without feeling any pressure to review seasonal stuff. What better way to kick off the new MAL than with Oh Edo Rocket, an anime that you've never heard of, and nobody cares about.

Oh Edo Rocket was based on a stage play that heavily relies on political satire. It apparently used the Edo period as a metaphor for the Japanese politics of the 1990s and the reactionary policies that accompanied the lost decade. Basically, if you don't know who Yoshiro Mori is, just assume everything is going ... to fly over your head. Funimation figured this out quickly after agreeing to adapt this one, so by the 3rd episode the dub stops making any attempt to follow what the characters are actually saying. It never quite reaches Ghost Stories level, but a character will say "Even a mosquito can blow me down" then the dub will add a character screaming from offscreen "THAT JOKE DOESN'T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE IN ENGLISH!". I think the reason this series is so disliked online is that people watched the sub and just felt like "What the hell is this? I don't get it! Is this referencing something?". However, if you just watch the silly dub, you can actually have a fun time with this series.

Oh Edo Rocket's plot is very loosely based on the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. This story is interspersed with the story of young rebel who wishes to make fireworks, but everything is tightly regulated and repressive because it's the Edo Period. This anime is fucking bonkers with a tone that is all over the place. We could have predicted this since the anime was a Sho Aikawa script. This is the same gentleman who wrote such classics as Genocyber, Legend of the Overfiend, Angel Cop, and the Violence Jack film trilogy. I still remember a line from an old ANN review saying "Oh no! You've hired rogue anime writer Sho Aikawa! What have you done?!" However, Oh Edo Rocket has a double dose of crazy since the stage play was written by Kazuki Nakashima, who you probably know for writing Gurren Lagann and Batman Ninja. In one episode, a corrupt policeman murders a young mother and drains her blood for his vampire girlfriend, leaving her baby to freeze to death in her arms. 5 episodes later, there is a big dance party on the moon, and everyone is invited! I'm serious. It's that kind of anime.

This anime had zero ability to market itself to gaijin, but it actually wasn't cheap to produce. This was a 26-episode anime by Studio Madhouse that looks gorgeous and cost a pretty penny. The opening theme was sung by Puffy during the height of their popularity. You know, the JPOP band that got so popular that they had their own non-anime cartoon in America. That Puffy!

I would recommend this anime as both a highly unique experience and a time capsule of an earlier period in American anime dubbing. When everything under the sun still got a dub and often dub studios were forced to accept random anime that they didn't want so that Japanese animation studios could recoup their losses. In 2022, some of the best seasonal anime like Kongming can't get a dub. It's hard to even imagine there was a time when something like Oh Edo Rocket would receive a dub and be physically in America. My buddy found this in the bargain bin of an anime con and fell in love with it. None of us have seen a copy of it since in the wild. You can find them online, but if you go to anywhere that sells anime DVDs, you just don't see this one. I hope all of this was enough to convince some of you to give this one a try.

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Jun 28, 2022

Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

Birdie Wing is my vote for the most surprising anime of the season. This is an original property not based on a manga, VN, LN, etc. The script writer of Excel Saga just decided one day that he wanted to make a women's golf anime in which professional women's golf is heavily tied to the mafia. The mafia places bets on the golfers in order to settle disputes and the golfers compete in a massive underground lair based on the NERV GeoFront from Evangelion. This anime is fucking insane. You never know exactly what you're going to get from script writer Yosuke Kuroda. Sometimes his ... batshit insanity actually manages to work splendidly, as is the case with Excel Saga, Trigun, and Hellsing Ultimate. Unfortunately, he's also penned some duds like Goblin Slayer, Jungle de Ikou, and Valkyrie Drive Mermaid.

Kuroda's writing quality and consistency invokes the opening lines of A Tale of 2 Cities. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."

How do you convince people to watch an anime about women's golf? No seriously, I'm asking the reader! I know 6 guys offline who watch anime and I've failed to convince any of them to watch a single episode of Birdie Wing despite begging them for 2 months straight.

I know everyone else is going to mention this, so I may as well address it. Birdie Wing is officially the gayest sports anime ever made! Yuri on Ice has NOTHING on Birdie Wing. Yuri on Ice is the story of a depressed, down on his luck skater who has to recapture his passion for the sport and bounce back. He kind of has a thing for his coach, but there honestly isn't a lot of sexual tension in most of the scenes they share together. Birdie Wing feels like the main 2 girls are going to throw their clubs to the ground and frantically start making out in basically every scene they share. There was even a meme article called "There is literally no heterosexual explanation for Birdie Wing". However, Birdie Wing isn't tagged as a yuri. It was never advertised as a yuri. The studio has never said that it's a yuri. I thought that surely if this was intended to be a yuri, they would have said so at some point during Pride Month and yet they didn't. So, was this accidental? Is it all a joke? What the fuck is this? I have a hard time believing that this was done on accident. The first Top Gun was probably an accident. Birdie Wing was almost certainly on purpose, so I can only conclude that this is a stealth yuri that doesn't want to advertise itself as such. Possibly to avoid it getting banned in certain countries. That's honestly my best theory. Now fans in Indonesia can buy Birdie Wing. Fans in Saudi Arabia can buy Birdie Wing. Fans in Russia can...pirate it like you guys always do anyways.

Finally, I'll get to the conventional part of the review. Birdie Wing is a mixed bag overall. Firstly, I'd like to start with the positives. The characters are really fun. The plot takes turns going from predictable to being utterly insane. Birdie Wing is often laughably ridiculous, but that's the point and it doesn't take itself too seriously. I also really like Eve and Aoi as a couple. They are so cute together! The OP is also amazing, and I've not skipped it a single time. On the negative side, Birdie Wing's sheer stupidity can be off-putting to many people. I've never had to work this hard to sell my offline friends on an anime. Usually, I can get at least 1 of them to watch any given anime. The CG is also pretty egregious at times. This was not made on a high budget and certainly won't be winning awards as the prettiest looking anime of the season. Lastly, the relationship between Eve and Aoi at this point is simply bait with no official confirmation that they're actually a couple. I will actually be pissed if Eve and Aoi don't kiss at some point in S2. For the show to bait THIS hard and then chicken out because they're afraid of the show getting banned in countries that don't legally purchase or stream anime anyways would be pretty shitty.

Would I recommend Birdie Wing? Yes. This is definitely one of the must-watch anime of 2022, for the absurdity if for no other reason. I found it highly entertaining, and I hope anyone who I convince to try it out will be entertained as well!

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Jun 17, 2022

Sonny Boy (Anime) add

Recommended

Sonny Boy exploded on to the scene in Fall of 2021 and quickly proved to be amongst the most unique, challenging, and ambitious anime in recent years. If anyone asks me what my favorite anime time period is, I will quickly answer that it was the 10 years between 1995-2005. Evangelion was a HUGE financial success despite being weird, unconventional, and not at all holding the viewer's hand. This ushered in the most creative and bold period in anime history where TONS of weird, artsy shit got greenlit that probably wouldn't have in any other period. Especially original properties not based on a manga, LN, ... or game. Examples of anime from this period include the Satoshi Kon films, Paranoia Agent, Serial Experiments Lain, Texhnolyze, Haibane Renmei, Kino's Journey, Mushishi, Utena, Cowboy Bebop, Princess Tutu, etc.

Sonny Boy is a return to that level of creative freedom; financial losses be damned. It's the new Serial Experiments Lain in a sea of isekai and shitty gimmick romances. However, this is where the problem with Sonny Boy rears its head. Sonny Boy does not do a very good job being a gateway show for modern anime audiences to get into the more cerebral, serious anime. If you show Sonny Boy to your high school or college anime club, it's going to go very poorly. I have some offline friends who tend to shy away from so called "elitist" anime and Sonny Boy is one of the worst shows I could possibly show them to change their minds. If you love trying to interpret metaphors and need an introduction to existentialism, Sonny Boy is great. This is the perfect anime for people who already hang out on book forums to discuss Camus and Dostoevsky. For everyone else, I fear that Sonny Boy is going to be painfully slow, dry, often esoteric, and just not too rewarding in general.

Evangelion is philosophical, but it also has giant robots. It has waifus. It has action scenes. It has horror scenes. You don't need to be a snob to appreciate something from Evangelion. Lain has great atmospheric horror. Utena and Princess Tutu are funny. Haibane has warm, cute, slice of life moments. Sonny Boy after the first 5 episodes has endless metaphors for how adulthood sucks, but you can never go back to being a kid. Along with the repeated message that your life has no innate meaning beyond what you yourself choose to give to it, because you live in an uncaring, chaotic world. One example of a metaphor from episode 2 is that the kids are safe in the school and items duplicate themselves, but if they journey outside the school, they have to pay for items or else they burst into flames. You know, because stuff isn't free in the real world. Yeah, the metaphors are often this obvious. Sonny Boy has a few genuinely enjoyable episodes like Cap's character development episode featuring monkeys playing baseball. Most of the time, Sonny Boy is like if Angel's Egg was a 12-episode anime instead of a 1-hour experimental film. This is the anime that casuals would be forced to watch in Hell.

On a positive note, the art and animation are spectacular. This was written entirely by a lifelong artist with no prior writing experience, which shows immediately. It reminds me a lot of Haibane Renmei in that regard. The visuals are really well planned out and have a precise vision, but there are large gaps in the plot that aren't ever explained. The writer clearly didn't care that these elements weren't explained because he has a visual artist's mindset. The whole plot is that a classroom of students is suddenly teleported along with their school building into a bizarre network of parallel dimensions. What caused this to happen? It's never explained. It's possible that their principal is a sadistic God that did it as an experiment, but that's another sub-plot that's very much left up to interpretation. We do learn that the answer to one of the riddles ends up being that magical talking cats did it, but the solutions in Sonny Boy often just lead to more questions.

Sonny Boy also has a pretty nice OST. It's not the FLCL OST or anything, but it's pretty good. It adds to the atmosphere and playful visuals. It does its job without ever being intrusive. I don't really have all that much more to say about it.

The characters in Sonny Boy are honestly a mixed bag. Some of the characters like Nozomi and Mizuho are compelling characters with rich character development and neat arcs, but others like Asakaze don't add much. I hate the fact that douche wastes an entire episode and the most entertaining character Rajdhani disappears for the entire middle section. It's hard to fully flesh out 8-10 characters in 12 episodes, so of course some characters end up being better than others.

In the end, do I like Sonny Boy? Actually yes. Mostly because I AM one of those pretentious assholes who reads Camus for fun, listens to classical symphonies, and watches French and Soviet arthouse cinema in my spare time. I am the exact target audience for this show. However, even I didn't love it as much as I wanted to while going into it. Sonny Boy did manage to knock off Penguin Highway and get into my top 150 all time, but I'm honestly not sure how long it will stay. Would I recommend Sonny Boy? It all depends on how much you like slow, artsy media where the only fun to be had is trying to decipher it and taking in the visuals. The perfect litmus test would be "Do you like Andrei Tarkovsky movies?" If the answer is yes, then Sonny Boy is definitely worth watching. If the answer is no, I personally wouldn't waste your time.

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