This Week in Anime

On The First Day of Anime Christmas...

Nick
'Tis the season of giving! 'Tis also the season of anime, but that's every season. Nevertheless, we decided to play a fun bit of Anime Secret Santa here at TWIA. Specifically, we elected to force each other to start some of our ever-growing backlogs, and I think Steve can attest that I only left him one lump of coal in his stocking this year.

I consider myself more of a Krampus, meting out punishment for all your many, many anime sins.

I knew why you picked And Yet the Town Moves just from one of the first shots of the OP:

Pictured: You about five seconds after making that joke in front of anyone but me.

Trust me, the SHAFT part became evident just as quickly as the maid service. They had exactly one way to direct a show for like 15 years, and this show was smack dab in the middle of that.

I wonder if I will end up on Santa's naughty list for watching this, but I'm certainly ending up on a list.

I appreciate the artistry. One of the funny quirks of the 2000s SHAFT style is that they certainly let their most talented fetishists work to their strengths. A lot of people on staff have an appreciation for the whole maid aesthetic, and they go for it full throttle. It's a shame nobody skateboarded in the first three episodes.

I'll admit, my biggest temptation to watch past episode three was to see more of Futaba. A short-haired maid in a choker playing bass is, in fact, a pretty good Christmas present.

I did find myself gelling with the humor as it went on, but I'm also familiar enough with this style that I couldn't shake the feeling of watching Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei but with a more subdued style and more frilly aprons.

If the goal was to get each other to crush on an anime girl with a guitar, I think I knocked it out of the park with your gift.

BECK is hands-down an all-timer for me. It was one of the earliest shows I checked out for myself when I first got into anime in high school, which is also the perfect time in one's life to watch it.

It's so good. Osamu Kobayashi had this incredible ability to capture the impression and atmosphere of any physical space, especially the backrooms and basements of small music venues. Even though BECK takes place in a different country and a different music scene from what I grew up with, the vibes of it all are perfect and universal.

Also, god damn, do I love the music. There's a lot of music-themed anime out there, but nothing has ever captured the sound and energy of the stuff that got me into music quite like this. I don't know how many songs you got to hear in just three episodes, but everything from the soundtrack kicks ass.

I imagine you also watched the sub initially, so I highly suggest you at least check out the dub version of the songs. Justin Cook's Yusuke Urameshi voice was made for rap rock.

I was pretty sure you'd like it, but I was curious how it would land now for an (ostensible) adult. I know a sizable part of my attachment to this series is catching it at the exact right moment in time, like all the '90s kids who discovered Radiohead.

That rules and I'm really glad you ended up enjoying it. So much of that story and soundscape has stuck with me since I first encountered them. The duet version of "Full Moon Sways" plays in my head during any romantic scene in anything I watch or read and probably will for the rest of my life.

In the industry, we call that "300 Komis", but Key is understandably new to how things work, what with being a robot and all.

Considering the kind of people she meets on her journey to friendship, she's lucky it's not 300 Yamadas.

Remind me to make somebody watch B-Gata H-Kei next Christmas so they can get that joke, by the way.

While there's a style to Key the Metal Idol, these intro episodes left me wanting in a way that was hard to pin down. While far from the worst of my three assignments, it was the one where I felt the least sure of whether I wanted to keep going with it.

I certainly got a buzz from just how goddamn '90s the whole experience is. Gawdy neon lighting, chunky computers that look like bricks filled with weird tubes. The psychic violence of imagining what eating at a place called PIZZA SHOCK would do to my intestines.

There's an odd atmosphere to it that isn't wholly congruous with the sleazy '90s OVA aesthetic. Several silent, lightning-fast montages are never explained in the episodes I've seen but built a sense of horror and mystery separate from the story. Key herself gives off an extremely surreal vibe. It's not even entirely clear if she is a robot or something else entirely is up.

It's also got a pretty interesting intersection, crossing the streams of "gritty sci-fi thriller" and "grimy backstage entertainment drama" in a way that hasn't fully congealed but has potential. It's funny to think this was coming out right alongside Macross Plus and treading very similar ground completely differently.

Hopefully, that song wasn't produced by a hyper-controlling tech mogul who wants to create an army of robot slaves AND robot singers to do his vague bidding.

For real though, the music in this is pretty slick. Miho's concert is probably the strongest sequence of these three episodes, where it felt like I could see the vision behind this weird, convoluted genre mashup.

That's a dangerous path to go down, Steve. Getting caught up in the past and trying to change the future to match it is precisely the kind of bad impulse I made you watch your second present to prevent!

So this one was a gamble. I like Noein - to your other self, but I also acknowledge that it's a finicky story that takes a good while to get going. Even when I first watched it, it was mostly because I was on an Escaflowne kick and wanted to see everything Kazuki Akane ever made.

I never said it was a risky gamble.

It rules so hard. It plays so loose and fast with its art style, making for great (if aged) digital animation while keeping the characters expressive and distinct. They also let individual directors and artists cut loose, with the same scene looking different between episodes.

It's no surprise a lot of the same staff would go on to make Birdy the Mighty: Decode, an equally audacious animation project. But Noein sticks with me more just for how wildly it swerves and how hard it pushes all that visual ambition into its original story.

Now, I'm not saying the second half of Stars Align would have featured some of the coolest sci-fi action sequences ever put to screen, but Noein certainly sets a good precedent.

Honestly, it holds onto those cards for over half its runtime, but at the very least, that presentation never slows down. It's such a wild, unique production that sadly got lost in the tumult of the U.S. anime industry at the time. Like with Key, I'm glad to have an excuse to go to bat for it.

If nothing else, we can at least appreciate the shows like these that we do have. This means it sure would be a bummer if, after talking about some interesting, ambitious, and distinctive projects, our last gifts to each other were total duds.

I'll give Majestic Prince this much: for as bad as its character designs are, they're still miles above the molten-rock bottom of the new Gundam Seed ones.

The man is my enemy, and I recall his designs being a big reason this show didn't take off when it started airing. No matter how interesting the rest of it may or may not have been, there was no getting around the fact that everyone had a permanent droopy dog pout and noses made of melted candle wax. I thank god he hadn't discovered giving all the women lip fillers back in 2013.

Honestly, the rest of the show is fine. The setting is fairly interesting, and the gimmick of the main characters' mechs linked to their Fight or Flight reflexes is cool. Outside of the human designs, the biggest flaw is that the characters aren't exciting. They've got pretty one-note personalities that, as of episode three, have yet to develop or charm much at all. Funny enough, the robots have the most appeal and personality.

To be fair, they needed the sponsors to fund their robot repairs. More importantly, this is a super early effort from Studio Orange, who partnered with Doga Kobo for the show and handled all of the CG animation. And even ten years ago, you can see them flexing on everyone else working in TV anime at the time. The robots move with a liveliness and heft that gives them a lot of character, and the fights capture the speed and dizziness of zero-g fights like some of the best 2D robot shows.

As somebody who remembers what most other CG mech looked like back then, it's wild this didn't catch more attention at the time.

Only if they have a thing for mechanics, big tiddies, and flesh flaps where her nostrils should be.

Otherwise, I want to see what today's Studio Orange could do if they animated a Macross Valkyrie Fighter. Which probably tells you how memorable the rest of MJP was for me.

Every time until Lynzee lets us do a whole column on it.

This is only making my theory that DARLING in the FRANXX is the Guilty Crown of the 2020s stronger.

Watching—nay, experiencing Guilty Crown is a rite of passage for a certain generation of anime fans. It was a huge, original project from some of the biggest names in the industry, many of whom went on after it to make even bigger hits. And somewhere across its runtime, it managed to crap its pants so hard and loudly that the echoes of its muddy butt cheeks could be heard years later.

Yeah, that's the rub of this experiment. Guilty Crown is a grower, not a shower. It takes until about midway for the full weight of its awful ideas to bear fruit. But if nothing else, it makes it nakedly obvious how tied up in bizarre ideas of masculinity it is with its main character.

Ah yes, Shu's girl-shaped sword holster. Like everything else, she becomes way dumber and funnier as the show goes on, but, amazingly, this show had the misguided gall to make Straight Utena.

I will say for as bad as most of everything in this show is, I hope you at least appreciate the OP. Because that thing still slaps.

My biggest regret is that you didn't get to the episode where Shu sees his not-girlfriend walk out of another guy's bedroom, and we see his entire psyche shatter like a Faberge egg.

It's a particular brand of sociopathy at play. We are meant at once to find Friendy McTraitor's betrayal insulting, but we also see Shu as a naive pawn for believing that anybody would be trustworthy or sincere about anything. Would you be surprised if I told you that eventually leads to a lot of morals where authoritarianism is the solution?

Well, I'm glad you... "enjoyed" is probably a strong word. I'm glad you got something out of it, I suppose. It feels like I gave you a graphing calculator for Christmas, though.

Well then, here's hoping somebody license rescues Earth Maiden Arjuna by next year so we can do this again.