Angel Beats (Anime): First Impressions

Sentai Filmworks, 2010. 13 episodes.

I don't know if any of you, Dear Readers, have ever worked with kids in a creative capacity, so let me share with you. They are overwhelmingly creative. They are endless fonts of insane detail and additions. Whether they are working with art, crafts or language they are on imagination overload. Ask them to invent a character for a story and you'll get undercover princes/princesses who are ninjas who work on construction crews and command animals telepathically and can also breath underwater and whose parents are astronauts who are stranded on a planet occupied by jelly monsters with a thousand eyes and lobster hands who can float through the air and live on lunchables (no punctuation!). And that's just for starters.

This is, sadly, kind of the feeling I get from my first viewing of Jun Maeda's Angel Beats. I am overwhelmed. The complications are illogical. In short, I am confused. 

Oh, so you say there's a high-school in the afterlife where: 

• The lead character "wakes up dead" with amnesia.
• There are school uniform wearing machine-gun hotties.
• There is a group of "rebels" having trouble with the name of their rebel troop ("Not Dead Yet Battlefront"). They are the expected, stereotypical cast of weirdos. I could go down a checklist. (Glasses guy, violent dude, precious girl, relax-bear, etc., etc.)
• Their mission is to fight against God. (???)
• There is a pretty girl with a sword-arm whose goal is to "kill" the dead. The anime uses the word obliterate, but still. 
• The dead are "obliterated" so that they may be (now this is just the presumption the rebel troops make) reincarnated as sea creatures. 
• They have a secret hide-out on campus with secret words and booby traps and espionage. 
• Everyone is ultra-violent, and there is copious blood loss, but all of the injured survive to fight another day (which makes me question the logic of any of it really). 
• Their enemy, sword-armed Angel (who may actually be an angel) is actually a digital creation in this semi-digital high-school purgatory. (When did it go 0s and 1s?)
• The first nefarious mission for Not Dead Yet Battlefront is to "shred school lunch tickets." (Yes, from the cafeteria in the afterlife.)
• The diversion they plan is an impromptu concert from an all-girl rock band. 

I have no freaking idea what is going on anymore. I am so confused! There seems to be some sort of "logic" that's either missing, or escaping me personally. It's a high-school in purgatory? Are there consequences for not attending? Who teaches the classes? Why the elaborate wait-station? Why does someone have to be "killed" there to be reincarnated elsewhere? Why would a dead person have amnesia? What about all the other people populating this "place?" When one character hypothesizes that the non-fighting characters might be NPCs (non-participating characters, like in a role-playing game), that doesn't make things clearer...only more illogical. Why would you need a diversion for NPCs? Why would a NPC, or any of you, need to eat? And if you did need to eat, why eat school lunches? Who is paying for them? Do you have to get a part time job in high-school purgatory? Do you live in the dorms? Who assigns them? Where is the administration? Are Japanese kids so education-minded that they could effectively run and organize a learning institution on their own? What does "god" have to do with this? Is that lady really a computer? Is this like a Tron thing?

I GOT A GUN, Y'ALL!
Is that Kyo from FuRuBu back there? No. Okay.

Cover Art by Sentai/Aniplex
courtesy of Wikipedia

Now, maybe, just maybe these questions are answered sufficiently in further episodes, but I will never know, because BLEH! Here's what's surprising to me. This is a celebrated anime with very positive reviews and that too baffles me. This review by Theron Martin on Animenewsnetwork.com applauds the complexity of the series. I agree it is complex, but for me...that complexity seems purposeless, and erratic, and just weird.

This one is a no-go for me, but if you've seen it feel free to chime in and argue for this series. I want to know what I'm missing.

Day 25 - Best Anime Villian: Dr. Muraki Kazutaka from Yami No Matsui (Descendants of Darkness)

”Best?” Yes. He is vicious. He’s also creepily calm and intense. I don’t like it. He is so creepy that Ms. Shakespeare and I have been known to quote him just to skeeve the other one out. Ms. Shakespeare, "do you remember our sensuous night beneath the cherry trees?" Mwahahah! Dr. Muraki is the best anime villain in that he is irredeemably evil, overtly predatory and still somehow charismatic and beautiful. So evil! SO EVIL!! Is he human? Is he demon? No one knows. He seems to have no motivation beyond just being evil (and attracted to our hero Asato Tsuzuki)...EVIL! Like a pretty, pretty snake who will tie you up and make sexually suggestive remarks before biting you.



A close second is Light Yagumi of Death Note (yet another Shigigami or Soul Reaper drama) he is irredeemably awful, and the lead character. I like the way Death Note sets up Light as the protagonist only to allow viewers to watch him fall further and further from his first purpose into a narcissistic villain who destroys pretty much everything he once believed in. He’s truly horrible, but he doesn't quite have the creep factor of Dr. Muraki. So despite playing God, betraying everyone he knows, and stacking up one hell of a body count, he gets bumped to number two.



I need to do a Death Note post soon. It is a pretty messed-up series.

Day 16 - Favorite Mahou Shoujo Anime: Ai Enma?

Mahou Shoujo Anime is, from what I researched, not a thing I watch. It's about magical girls? Like Sailor Moon, or something. The closest I get is maybe Ai Enma, Hellgirl, from the Hellgirl series. I am sort of confused by the definition of Mahou Shoujo, so I'm just gonna assume that this counts.

Here is my defense:
1. She's a girl.
2. She has magical hell powers.
3. She wears a school uniform that looks kinda like sailor moon's.

Let's compare:

They are like Yin and Yang.

Sailor Moon is all: "Whoop! There I is!"

And Hellgirl is all:

"Pitiful shadow cloaked in darkness.
Thy action cause men pain and suffering.
Thy hollow soul drowns in thy sins.
How would you like to see what death is like?"

So, because I haven't written about Hellgirl before I'll say a few things now.

The plot of the series revolves around a reporter who is doing a story on a website called "Hell Corrospondence." The "Hell Corrospondence" site is set up for vengence. Wronged persons can send a name to the site and Ai and her assistants will carry them and their soul to hell to fullfil the grudge. The price for this service is that when the summoner dies they too will be carried into hell.  It's a lighthearted musical  romp...okay, that's just a lie. It's pretty dark and heavy stuff. The reporter, Shibata Hajime, has a lot of his own problems, and it turns out his daughter has a strange psychic link to Ai. And the psychological torture some of the cursed go through is pretty fantasticaly intense. Ai too has her backstory, which is tragic and heartbreaking. It's not a happy series, but it is beautifully animated and complex. I like complex! I like tragic! I like schoolgirls who take jerks to hell!

Whether this is actually a Mahou Shoujo? I don't know.

Here's what I got from the wikipedia: "Magical girl stories feature young girls with superhuman abilities, forced to fight evil and to protect the Earth." Well, maybe I'm waaay off base here. But this is as close as I get...so. Hmmm.

Bleach (Anime) Thru 68

Yes, you can call me obsessive. I don't mind at all. I'm now on Bleach Ep 68. And, yes, that's 10 Eps since yesterday, but hear me out.

1) I slept a good night's sleep

2) I went to work today, got caught up in the commute, watched Jeopardy and ate plenty of food.

In conclusion: though I obsess, I still manage. It's all good.

Anyway, in the most recent 10 episodes, the show has finally gone back to being more of a teenage, highschool Soul Reaper "dramedy." Well, it did or it had for a couple of episodes, and I was really happy about that. I love the hard core fighting and the kind of heroic desperation that comes along with that, but I also like enjoying a few laughs and just catching a glimpse of the everyday realities that make the characters so endearing and well, so awesome when they do step it up.

I was happy to see that Renji was assigned to "the real world." I like him infinitely more than Rukia. Listen, I like Rukia too, but she did get kind of wussy in the last half of the Soul Society/execution story arc. I suppose she had every right (she was facing death), but I liked her so much more when she was just a bit more bad ass and self-confident. Few things are more annoying to me than strong women who just kind of disintegrate. I'm sure she will recover and return as awesome as ever, but like I said, I like the foil of Renji just fine.

The story is taking another turn I'm not so sure about. Just as we leave the turmoil of the Soul Society (along with the introduction of about a kigillion new characters), the plot is complicated by the introduction of three Mod Soul characters who play psychological tricks on our motley crew. Meh, I don't like these episodes at all. They are kind of high stress with little payoff, and I'm hoping the story line doesn't go on forever.

I'm way more interested in seeing Ishida deal with the loss of his Quincy powers. I'm sure that will come up soon.

***

In other news, I passed my Japanese class, and I still barely understand anything. Boo.

Happy Thanksgiving = Bleach (anime)

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm currently on Ep. 57 of "Bleach" an anime that may actually take me a long time to watch. With something around or over 200 Eps and counting, I don't see it going away anytime soon.

This is not a crappy anime. In fact, it's pretty alright. I really liked the first season the most so far because it did a good job of mixing "ordinary" teenage, highschool life with something supernatural. Now that all of the characters' special powers have been activated and they are hanging out fighting in the Soul Society, it doesn't feel as much like my kind of anime.

Before there were a lot of reasons behind things. The show was slower and Ichigo was discovering himself, and even fighting against becoming a Soul Reaper. Things have changed, and he is coming into his own.

There is a lot more fighting in the second and third season, well a lot more different kind of fighting. Instead of the fights being between Soul Reapers and Hollows. It's mostly Soul Reapers vs Soul Reapers or Souls/Humans vs. Soul Reapers. I love me some awesome fighting in my anime, but this is getting to be a bit much. If I hear the word "bankai" one more time I think I will scream. It took about 50 Eps before it was mentioned (this is the second, higher incarnation of a Soul Reapers sword), and now everyone is just crazy about bankai.

The thing is, I love Ichigo because he is different. I want him to be the great undiscovered, misplaced and superpowerful Soul Reaper, and I also like to see him struggle. It's not nearly as interesting when everyone around him is nearly as powerful, except maybe for Itsuda, who is powerful in a completely different not Soul Reaper kind of a way.

So in order to understand this post, you will probably have had to have seen a little bit of Bleach. I'll likely write some more detailed stuff later.