What I watched in July: Digest Version

TRSI licensed Rose of Versailles.  Sentai licensed Mawaru Penguindrum.  Signs of the Apocalypse?  Excellent!

b Best Student Council:  My initial thought was, "What is with the puppet?"  I was having puppet flashbacks to Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.  Eventually, I realized, "This is just the kind of show where someone walks around with a puppet all the time; just deal with it or stop watching.  "You're with the Best Student Council now.  You shouldn't be hanging around with a no-good puppet like me."  The puppet does end up being more than just a gag, but you have to put up with all the general wacky hijinks until then.  Your call.  This one was a lot of fun to watch/listen to in the background while doing other things.  I don't know if I would have liked it as much if I had to concentrate hard on every minute of it.

b Cosmo Warrior Zero: Oh, Leiji Matsumoto and your MANime.  It's ridiculous, and I really like it.  Lest you think I'm talking about a comedy, Zero is actually supposed to be a manly space drama, I think, and it does take itself pretty seriously most of the time.  There are some moments where you'll have to just abandon your brain, but it's a fun ride.  Except for the bits about genocide, which aren't fun at all.

What about the survivors?  There's a whole world that needs you out there.. . . You're not the only one who lost a family.
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We have to do this.  That's the only way to mourn for the people who have died in the war.
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Poor fool.  Why do you have to blame it all on yourself?

b Mariaholic: Your mileage will very wildly.  If you can't stand bullying, especially when it seems completely misogynistic, then you shouldn't even try this one.  If you have a fairly thick skin about these things where your comedy is concerned, and you are a longtime anime fan who is knowledgeable about jpop culture, you might have an enjoyable time.  You will, of course, be offended sometimes because that's part of what this show is all about, but you might also be amused.

b Tatami Galaxy: How good are you with crazy?  If you don't mind the out-there art, the bonkers premise, and the wild execution, you might appreciate this one.  By the last episode, you feel like the ending is earned, gosh darn it, even if it doesn't, you know, totally make perfect sense.  This is the story of a loser guy who goes to college and keeps falling in with the wrong crowd and then calling do-over and trying different choices to see if his life turns out more the way he wanted it to be.

b Windy Tales: If you can deal with the sketchy animation and you don't hate slice of life and aren't completely against a bit of magical realism, you might enjoy this odd-looking little show that peripherally deals with some people and cats who can control the wind but mostly just deals with life and growing up.

b Young Animator Training Project: This series of shorts by different young creators is kind of fascinating, especially if you like random things and short stories and variety in your anime viewing.  The result vary in quality, but that sort of adds to its charm for me.

Why I love Otomen

The thing about big, goofy satire is that it can be accomplishing lots of tiny, subtle, serious things. Thank you, Terry Pratchett and Aya Kanno.

I've loved this series since the first volume; it's true, but I liked the author's other work, too (and am still bitter Soul Rescue never got to go all those intriguing places it hinted at). I think one thing that makes Otomen work so well for me is that the author is an avowed non-girly-girl who feels about all this froufy stuff the way one of the characters' manly, martial-arts-loving single fathers does (check out volume 4 for that revelation and bit of hilarity). Kanno's eye for cutesy detail and her flare for making it are all the more funny for me because I know it makes her cold, and she thinks it's all kinds of ridiculous.

It's so ridiculously over the top sometimes that you just have to say, "Oh, come on; we're not like that." Except we are, just on a smaller scale. It's that aha! moment when you realize what's at the core of the exaggeration that gets you thinking even as you're laughing.  I guess that's what separates parody from social satire? Maybe. I don't know.

I just can't wait to see if our intrepid main character gets outed in the next volume of Otomen, which is not coming out until May to my immense sadness.

Hayate what?!

I kind of can't comprehend this.  I mean, I love Hayate way more than the next person (how many volumes in one month?!), but, still, a live action version?  Really?

"Next week’s issue of Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine will formally announce the development of a feature film adaptation of Kenjiro Hata’s popular Hayate no Gotoku ~ Hayate the Combat Butler manga series. Manglobe (Samurai Champloo, KamiNomi) will animate with experienced Manglobe animation director Hideto Komori taking charge. The comedy has previously been adapted into two anime television series and three OVAs. A Taiwanese live action TV series adaptation is also presently in development."

For those of you who don't know what it is, I liked this reviewer's thoughts.

"Hayate is truly meta-anime. It is anime comedy for the advanced anime enthusiast. The show's better jokes don't stand on their own very well but hinge on the viewer's prerequisite knowledge of anime and manga series going back several decades. I am simultaneously impressed, depressed, and disgusted with myself when I get the jokes because oh my god I have watched so much anime. When I laugh, I'm never sure if I should feel proud or if I've wasted my life."

Um, pretty much true.  Especially now that I'm into the newer stuff, which has jokes I actually get too many of . . .

Where's my manga: radio edition

I would like someone to write a shonen manga about a boy with a burning passion for being a radio DJ and an unfortunate problem with burning chronic indigestion and acid reflux.  If you've ever worked in radio (or listened to it), you know how mortifying it is to not only have to pause (leaving dead air) but actually flub up by not covering or turning off the microphone quickly enough to smother the belch clawing its way up your throat.

(There is something wrong with me because I laugh so hard I cry every time I think about this.  Even at work, where I'm sure the cube-dweller next to me thinks I have lost my mind.)

So, would you read that gag manga if somebody wrote it?  (Couldn't resist.  Sorry.)

Fujoshi Rumi: What are those fangirls thinking?

Have you ever met a Hard-Core Yaoi Fangirl (HCYF) and been utterly baffled by what makes her tick (or tick you off)?  Fujoshi Rumi will not exactly explain the deeper psychological reasons for HCYF behavior, but it will give you some insight into exactly what HCYFs are thinking. 

Fujoshi Rumi is about a HCYF and the normal boy who gets a crush on her.  (Fujoshi is basically the term adopted by Japanese HCYFs.)  Trials and tribulations ensue as he tries to win the heart of a girl whose mind is busy trying to pair up the attractive young men around her so that they more closely match her inner, yaoi-fed fantasies.  It's pretty accurate from an outsider's perspective, and my HCYF friend told me it was embarrassingly accurate.

This manga kind of baffled me when it came out.  It was, hands down, one of the most consistently funny send-ups of otaku culture I've encountered, with just the right mix of embarrassing awkwardness and honesty.  It was highly educational and entertaining.  I liked it, but something was bothering me: I was having a hard time pinning down its intended audience.

The premise made me think it was part self-love letter for HCYFs and part education manual for those (males and females) who didn't understand what makes HCYFs tick. 

The art itself made me think it had to be aimed at guys. Though a lot of the plot is driven by perceived "yaoi" antics, the guys were decidedly sketchy.  You could tell that the art part of the show was all about the girls.  On occassion, the artist would do something nearly bishonen (usually during a particularly awkward moment easily interpretable as live shonen-ai), but the girls looked fabulous in every frame.  I decided it must be seinen. 

The thing is, the intended audience doesn't really matter here.  Anyone who is intrigued or even slightly interested and possibly also anyone just vaguely annoyed by HCYFs might really enjoy this story.  It lets you get into the heads of people you don't understand, to see life from other, very different points of view. 

Whether you still conclude that HCYFs are all particularly nutso or simply another form of "otaku," you'll learn (possibly more than you wanted to know) about how their minds work, and that can't be all bad, right?

Dai-Guard: Giant Robot Stomping and Office Politics Galore

Whether you watch this one in English ("Office Workers Saving the World!") or Japanese ("Even a salaryman can protect the peace!"), you're in for an entertaining take on the giant-robot-with-pilots anime.  Dai-Guard is kind of like what would happen if Dilbert married Megas XLR and a child was born: a giant robot action office dramedy. 

I still seem to get a kick out of it after all these years.  Here is one review, and here is another.

Basically, this security company was building a giant robot to fight off these strange, deadly creatures, but then the strange, deadly creatures sort of stopped invading, so the company was left with a pointless giant robot.  They decided to use it for marketing.  Then the creatures came back, and the public relations team in charge of the robot was the front line of defense against creature invasion. 

The military tries to be in charge, but that really doesn't work out well.  Their straight-laced representative ends up sort of blitzed by the burning and somewhat ridiculously enthusiastic commitment to saving lives that comes from kids who watched too much anime growing up and trainging in PR and getting to pilot a giant robot. 

Also, I feel compelled to mention that there is seriously a robot name Kokuboga. 

The pilots are all just somewhat average office workers with complicated, slightly-more-dramatic-than-usual regular joe lives (one of them doesn't get along at all with her step-dad, one seems like a total ladies' man but is hiding a rather tender secret).  Their co-workers are often a hoot; their boss is pretty great, and the company president could take the Pointy-Haired Boss in a duel in about 2 seconds.  They hate trying to save the world on a tight budget, but them's the breaks. 

Office politics cause problems, as do military politics and even politics politics.  It's all just another day at the job, except they're robot-jockeys instead of desk-jockeys.  I wonder if my job would be different if that were the case for me.

One of the things that makes this an enjoyable background show for me is the rewrite for the English dub.  It plays fast and loose with literalness (okay, it really just sometimes dispenses with it altogether), and the acting isn't great (I think it was one of Monster Island's first), but it's fairly amusingly quotable with its referenences to cow squashing, monster wrassling, and getting dunked in heterodyne coffee.  If that doesn't appeal to you, there's always the Japanese dub, which is fun, too.

Some people complain that Dai-Guard gets too heavily dramatic sometimes.  I know exactly what they mean, but I don't really care.  :)  Yeah, I may want to smack a pilot now and then (this would have been a very different show with Bright Noah in charge), but the hystrionics just make it work better for me.  When we get to that last battle, I am fully invested in these people; I know what struggles they've gone through to get here, how they've struggled to relate to each other, and I care how things turn out.

So if you want some giant robot action that doesn't get deadly serious (it ain't Full Metal Panic) but isn't all fluff, and you're hankering after a comedy that stars adults every bit as annoying as your real co-workers (only funnier), Dai-Guard is your new best friend.

Have you seen this one?  Any thoughts?

Shinesman: So shines a good deed . . .

Shinesman is the story of a bunch of quirky office workers who are also costumed superheroes fighting the forces of evil when their company calls.  Seriously.  It's a smart, cheesy anime that shows the sometimes "complicated" lives of these regular salarymen and women who also serve as a sentai team. 

Their colors are unusual.  Their enemies are ridiculous.  Their special abilities and weapons are unique.  Their personal lives are a bit dicey, too, because they can't reveal their secret identities to their loved ones!  Oh, the drama!

Really, it's a comedy.  A darned funny one, especially if you were ever into the Power Rangers or any other sentai stuff ported to American television.

One of the best things about the show is that the English adaptation and dub are funnier than the Japanese, so much so that the show's creators acknowledge that the English dub got something right that was missing from the original Japanese dub (if I'm remembering this right . . .).  It has its charms in either language. :)

It's cheap and funny and would probably make a great stocking stuffer for the otaku with a sense of humor in your life.  Don't just take my word for it, though.  Here's a review I liked.

Thinking about Shinesman is making me think about Dai-Guard, so I'll probably talk about that show next . . .

Do you know where this post's subtitle quote comes from?

Hayate no Gotoku (heheh, it's a pun)

I get a huge kick out of Hayate the Combat Butler.  Apparently a bigger kick than most, but I'm having such a good time, I don't care.  This show is having just as much, if not more, than I am, so we're a good match.

If you don't know, Hayate is the heartwarming story of a poor boy with loser parents who leave the country to flee their debts and, as a parting gift, sell their hard-working and responsible son's organs to the yakuza.  At his wit's end, Hayate considers kidnapping a young heiress he finds wandering around, but then he ends up saving her and getting hit by a car, and because she kind of misunderstood his kidnapping attempt as a confession of love and has a little crush on him, she hires him to be her butler and pays off his debt.

There are so many allusions to anime, manga, and video games that I really can't begin to describe them all.  Suffice it to say that there is an Evangelion reference so hilarious that I probably would have bought the first boxed set just so I could own that one episode.  Also, the opening episode's encounter with Santa is pretty much worth the price of admission.

I will admit that I really, really wanted some ADVid notes a la Excel Saga for this show because I know that I'm barely catching half of the references, and I know I'm missing almost all of the puns. I sort of wish it had a dub, so I could listen to it again while doing other stuff around the house, but I don't think I'd wish that ridiculously fast dialogue and all those jokes on any voice actors.  Plus, no one could do those intros better than Norio Wakamoto.

And it's still funny, possibly because it's moving so fast.  Manic is probably a good descriptor of the pacing most of the time.

Something about it all reminds me of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (The Power of Negative Thinking). (I mean, more than just the fact that the guy who created Hayate used to be an assistant to the guy who created Zetsubou-sensei, a fact which Zetsubou's cranky creator frequently makes pointed grumbled references to.)  They share a similar zany, moving-too-fast, incredibly wrong and funny, self-aware comic sensibility.  Or something.  You should see/read them both.  They are probably unrivaled in madcap (self)mockery.

I've seen mixed reviews for Hayate (mostly for the anime), and I'm curious about why people's mileage varies so much.  A lot of people dislike the value (no dub but the price per episode is too high).  I wonder if for others it's about expectations?  Difficulty keeping up?  Something else?  Do you have an opinion either way?