This Week in Anime

On the Last Day of Anime Christmas...

Nicky
Sometimes, a great gift is just a good laugh between pals and a bunch of people spectating over the internet! It's certainly better than getting a lump of goal. Following the same rules as Nick and Steve, we could pick three titles from the other's backlog or something we were certain the other one hadn't seen. Only Chris and I had a little twist in ours. We were able to meet in person and exchange pleasantries and presents for this one, meaning I couldn't miss the opportunity to "share" a specific "gift."

I hadn't seen them, but I enjoyed watching them! For Chris, I mostly picked based on things I knew he hadn't seen or stuff most people hadn't seen either due to being obscure or being stuck on certain streaming services.
My "surprise" isn't on streaming, so please read until the end of the column!

But before we get to that, I'll go first with Chris' first gift to me, Maquia - When the Promised Flower Blooms. This movie has been on my Backlog of Shame list for quite a while and is one of Nick's favorites. Nick and Chris had previously discussed this movie last year after it was made available for streaming on Crunchyroll.

It's a fascinating movie concerned with the topic of family. It's also the directorial debut of Mari Okada. Okada has fostered many anime titles as a writer, both original and adapted, but Maquia seems like a creative darling. It's a story about a young girl becoming a foster mother to an orphaned human child and is rich in both its direction and world-building. Maquia is from a clan of humanoid beings called Iorphs; her people are long-lived but typically remain isolated from humans to avoid prejudice, leaving her son Ariel as her only family.

It's also just a beautiful and atmospheric movie. I'm shocked that Mari Okada was able to turn herself into a double-threat as someone who started as a writer working in animation for a long time. Visually, the film is exquisitely animated by the people at P.A. Works. Akihiko Yoshida provided the original character designs, so the characters may feel quite familiar for fans of RPGs, but also necessarily soft and intimate for the kind of story that it tells.

I haven't always been her biggest stan, which is part of why it took me a while to get to Maquia, but I've come to respect her, knowing she can produce such gangbusters with moxie! O Maidens in Their Savage Season and The Woman Called Fujiko Mine are some of my favorites. I was once unsure about her as a writer because creatives don't always have control over everything they make, yet she's hashed out more works that feel very solid over the years. Maquia is a signal of how much Okada has "leveled up" as a visionary and a show of her creative power gained through all her experiences. It's also a great time to revisit as I'm looking forward to her latest film's release in the U.S., Maboroshi. It premiered in Japanese theaters in September and should appear on Netflix on January 15.

I would also have loved to see an actual theatrical release, given I was slow on the uptake for Maquia and all. I'm glad I'll be seeing it somewhat soon, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it more now that Maquia is fresh in my mind.

What better way to celebrate Christmas than to think about a steamy 4.5 tatami room in the summer? Ah, though, there isn't any castella cake for us to eat this time. Anyway, I asked Chris to check out last year's much-overlooked sequel to the cult classic The Tatami Galaxy, Tatami Time Machine Blues.

It's only a six-episode series, so you're about halfway there. Still, it was woefully trapped by the clutches of Hulu, ironically where I watched the original Tatami Galaxy on a whim back when they still had a free ad tier.

Tatami Galaxy has always been one of my favorites for just being a chaotic and abstract look at what it means to make the most of your young adulthood, even if it means having to relive your college life through repeated Groundhog Day shenanigans. It's also got a great cast of characters once you can glance them beyond the nameless main character's somewhat unreliable descriptions. "Watashi" thoughts are still running full speed, but it's more tongue-in-cheek that he's had two years to mature from his freshman days of college. As a pretty self-contained story, I didn't expect a sequel, but I was delighted to have a story where the whole gang became more involved.

As it was my introduction to Morimi's writing, the Tatami Galaxy also got me to check out The Eccentric Family, which is also a pretty delightful series with a woefully overlooked second season!

It's also got a couple of new characters, one of which might be the son of two of the cast members, at risk of creating a time paradox where his parents never meet after discovering how shabby their would-be-progeny would become, and another a serious bespeckled on-looker here to call-out all the plot holes in this story.

I was also thrilled to see Science Saru get another opportunity to use those minimalistic Yusuke Nakamura character designs. Nakamura is most famous for being an illustrator and graphic designer as well as a frequent collaborator with the band Asian Kung-Fu Generation for many of their album covers, giving the whole series a very sleek look.

Asian Kung-Fu Generation also played the opening for the original series, but I certainly wouldn't say no to hearing more of them. Unlike time loops, I don't need any fancy time machines or mystical tatami mat rooms to repeat one of my favorite band's music over and over.

I can only assume that would be the rockin' Princess Principal, the second of my co-writer's gifts to me.

This was another one I had been hearing high praise about but had been meaning to get to, and also funny enough, written by Ichiro Okouchi, who people may now know as the writer of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, but also hilariously the second mention of him during this whole Secret Santa shindig. Though, albeit more positively this time, as Princess Principal is not Guilty Crown.

Though, admittedly, it took me a bit to click what Princess Principal's goals were given how the first episode is all about introducing you to the cast doing their "thing." That thing is girls who attend high school by day but moonlight as deadly spy agents in a steampunk futuristic city called Albion.

The first episode is an entirely disconnected story set in a later time to show you what they're capable of, and the actual story is about how an operation to replace the Princess for a spy doppelganger leads to said Princess gaining her spy entourage whom she could have sleepovers and pillow fights with.

There's also that whole "Gals being Pals" aspect between Charlotte and her body double Ange, with the whole swapping each other's identities and reuniting their life-long friendship.

The royalty and the convenient look-alike from a poorer background also harken back to Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, given how most of the spies also come from orphaned or impoverished backgrounds and the overall theme of Commonwealth trying to tear down the literal and in this case physical barrier between the two classes, that a giant wall in the middle of London has separated.

Yeah, from the get-go, it's a pretty fun action show. There's a good balance between the character doing intrigue and cool tricks, such as Ange using her patented Cavorite-powered tech to do anti-gravity stunts, like doing kick-flips off a car or scaling the side of a flying air fortress.

The rest of the cast has some interesting chemistry/contributions, too, particularly the emphasis that even people you love most will lie and how that's not necessarily the same as a betrayal, especially by people who can only live an honest life by lying.

Overall, though, I had a lot of fun with it and look forward to checking out the rest. No lie!

This gift might not be very action-heavy, but it has some industry intrigue and Miyamori's speeding company car to get your blood pumping. When Chris told me he hadn't watched Shirobako, I knew I had to take action to fix that.

As someone with similar dreams of working in the animation industry, despite knowing how tough and awful it is, many things about Shirobako are after my own heart. Still, Miyamori's plucky attitude won me over first. As Musashino's rookie production assistant, she's the team go-getter and our star protagonist.

You'd be surprised how many come up in a pinch when it comes down to it, too, or at least become endearing in their incompetence, like the case of Director-kun, who ends up becoming another of my favorite characters. There are also all of Miyamori's friends, with whom she promised to someday make their dream anime movie in high school. Over donuts!

Yeah, the donuts are the pique cute girls doing cute things traits, but Shirobako and its central six girls take their dreams very seriously, in that sometimes your cute dreams aren't as cute as you imagined.

It's surprisingly "uncute" in a way that betrays its shiny P.A. Works branded exterior. It's still a very narrativized look at the industry, not a documentary. Even without going into all the horrible working conditions throughout anime studios, on a base level, anime is a harsh industry with high-skill requirements, tough deadlines, and a lot of cat-herding. So much that it's a miracle that anything ever gets done. That's the magic Shirobako sells.

So, while discussing our appreciation for anime as a medium with Shirobako, let's take it back a little. Most of our gifts have been fairly recent series, so to spread our love and good cheer further, let's move towards some classics. Chris' final gift to me is the first movie of the infamous Lupin the 3rd: The Mystery of Mamo, and it's both a treasure as it is a strange and esoteric artifact from years gone by.

This is also a great time to compare, as most people are way more likely to see The Castle of Cagliostro as their first Lupin movie, as it's Hayao Miyazaki's directorial debut, but they may never go back and check out this earlier movie or other things from red jacket Lupin era. Don't get me wrong, Castle of Cagliostro is a fantastic adventure film that would later color Miyazaki's career, but it's a very different kind of Lupin than Mystery of Mamo.

This creates the dual-identity split of Lupin as a brand. As I mentioned in the Zero column, Lupin can be a cartoon for adults or slightly edgy general audience fare. Mamo is a film for adults! They even look inside Lupin's dirty mind to reveal there are only thoughts of titties, other unmentionables, and Zenigata.

It's also totally not safe for most streaming services, nor for me to show on this column, so I'll leave it up to your imagination. The script in this movie plays into Lupin's more ignoble aspects more similar to his manga counterpart, with a screenplay written by Atsushi Yamatoya, who is known for his erotic films, or "pink films" as they're called in Japan. Some may find this a huge takeaway from the more loveable version in Cagliostro, but Mamo exceeds at showing off how dang weird Lupin can be, with its off-kilter jokes, conspiracy theories, and morally ambiguous cast. Take Fujiko, for example. She's hugely different from her Cagliostro counterpart and the catalyst for the plot.

Yeah, Fujiko gets brought on the job to nab a sacred stone for a man named Mamo and tricks Lupin into bringing it to her, knowing that he is sweet on her despite how many times she's betrayed him at this point. She plays the role of both love interest, damsel, and opposing force, depending on whatever suits her needs best given the situation. Though mostly to see if Mamo's promise of immortality could be true.

It also starts with Lupin hanging from the gallows and has several parts where Lupin tries to force himself on Fujiko for laughs. There should be a content warning on this movie that says "Psychodelic '70s Nonsense" on the front of it, but most crazy is everything in the third act, leading to various opinions on the more experimental aspects of the film.

There's also just a bunch of crazy action setpieces that don't really have much to do with anything but are super fun otherwise. There's a chunk of this movie where Lupin is almost murdered by Optimus Prime (actually a coincidentally colored huge semi-truck), or doing a Scooby-Doo chase through famous art pieces!

Why do so many things end up on Tubi without anyone's knowledge? I honestly didn't expect that. This was also streaming on TMS's YouTube channel internationally for a brief time.

Okay, while we're on the boat of throwbacks/Discotek love, it's time for my secret surprise!

When I handed it to him, I asked Chris, "Hey, what genre do you think this movie is?" because I knew he wouldn't guess the answer. When I first saw it, a good friend had brought her copy of the movie, having blind-bought it, and urged us to watch it together. Let me tell readers that this is an excellent movie to spring on people blind. If you thought Mystery of Mamo had a LOT in its 100-minute runtime, Flying Phantom Ship rivals that and is only about an hour long.

On the surface, Flying Phantom Ship is an unassuming 1969 Toei film for kids, but it's a horrifying sci-fi that'll make you think differently about carbonated drinks. The main character, Hayato, is having a happy fishing trip with his family until they seek refuge in a characteristic spooky house before being attacked by an even spookier skeleton ship captain.

Just like me, every night at 2 am. I never said it didn't have a few gags! I'm careful that I don't drink soda at night, though. Caffeine keeps me up.

Especially not after watching this movie!

The haunted house segment ends pretty anti-climatically and then transitions into some sci-fi surprise. Hayato's parents get injured, and his mother DIES, revealing that they're not even his birth parents. Afterward, Flying Phantom Ship becomes a whole rabbit hole of things getting worse and weirder. Suddenly, there are just GIANT CRABS stomping around the city, turning people into juice because of convergent evolution EVERYTHING BECOMES CRAB!

Yeah, the late '60s were a formative era for Toei as one of the leading production houses of Japan's animation industry. Unsurprisingly, many big names cut their teeth on stuff like Ghost Ship, but boy, it leaves a mark.
Especially that finale, who knew that giant crabs and lobsters were from a secret high-tech science base at the bottom of the ocean, shaped like a mollusk?

While it somewhat abandons its adventure roots in favor of sci-fi ones, it's not complete without a giant cephalopod.

Lotta good sakuga out of that one.

Oh yeah, I would totes be down if weird little one-off films like this were available to view more casually for those curious. Still, I also wanted to showcase it because I know a ton of people would overlook some classics without ever checking their contents. There are some real pearls in Flying Phantom Ship's one hour, and I wanted to crack it open with a rock, like a determined sea otter.

I chose Flying Phantom Ship to put the "secret" in "Secret Santa." Watching something, even a little bit, is always the best way to get someone to appreciate an anime. Sometimes, being able to get their feedback is its reward.