Shameful Otaku Secret!

With this, I take my leaf

Sometimes, even otherwise-good anime seasons will grace us with surprisingly good series that are a notch above what we’re normally stuck watching. While Kannagi may not have managed to make the top spot for Fall ‘08, it probably did manage to be the biggest surprise.

Story

Kannagi centers around Jin, who carves a wooden sculpture of a mysterious shrine deity he saw as a kid. When it comes to life as Nagi, eyes will roll, but what you’re predicting doesn’t ever really come to pass. In fact, somehow a hilarious show comes out of this clichéd and idiotic setup.

Rather than being the ultra-omnipotent type of god, or the typically naïve magical girlfriend type, Nagi is a pun-loving layabout who spends her time eating Jin’s food, watching TV, and very occasionally catching “impurities” with a dime-store Mahou Shoujo wand. The shape of the story is very much sitcom, so it’s more than a little off-putting to find the series ending on a serious note. The end just doesn’t work all that well. For 10 episodes, we’re given nothing but laughs, and if those 10 episodes make you a fan, why would you want to see a bunch of moping around (and sudden devotion to the supposed plot) for the other three? It’s not that I don’t care about Nagi’s identity crisis, it’s just that it’s foisted upon us pretty late in the game.

Characters

As Kabitzin mentioned, the characters are probably the primary strength of Kannagi — or for me, one of the two main strengths, along with the animation. The story is flimsy, not that interesting, and mostly unexplored until those last episodes, but the characters manage to be a huge pile of charm. Soft-spoken Jin is a bit more than your typical harem hero. Zange-chan the idol, who dresses like a slutty nun and can’t sing for shit, is funnier than the average interloper. Tsugumi is the kind of cute childhood friend that you can root for, just like you’re supposed to. And the art club’s cast of weirdos all generate their own kinds of laughs. At the center of that is Nagi, the pun-spewing screwoff god. Haruka Tomatsu (also great as Chika in Kyouran Kazoku Nikki and not so good as Lala in To Love-Ru) brings her to life masterfully — when reading the manga, it’s impossible to imagine Nagi any other way.

Animation and Music

The execution of Kannagi, by A1 Pictures and erstwhile Lucky Star director Yutaka Yamamoto, was the second of its strong points, and one you can’t just chalk up to good source material. Yamamoto proved himself brilliant at both LS-style fan-pandering and impeccable comic timing. Minimal background music and large periods of silence often reinforced the sly delivery of jokes. As far as the animation itself, it was true to the manga, looked good, and maintained a consistent level of quality throughout. I’ll just repeat myself:

Like Lucky Star’s cartoony-yet-realistic body language helped create a million Kagamin fanboys, the execution here makes Nagi more real when she scratches her leg with her foot while watching tennis on the floor, as Jin saws frantically at the glued-on wand behind her. Or, best of all, when she describes the circumstances surrounding how the wand got glued to the exact center of the table.

When combined with Nagi and Jin’s excellent voice acting, the animation style drove home their classic two-man comedy routines.

Bottom Line

Kannagi ended kinda poorly, all full of emo and previously-absent clichés, and that took it down from being one of the highlights of the year to a show that probably won’t be as fondly remembered as say, Toradora, with its more cohesive story. But I went back and watched a couple of the funnier episodes, and when this series was on, it was hot. In hindsight, I wish there had been more of a story, but at the time I was watching most of the episodes, the lack of a “point” didn’t bother me at all. It was just funny and entertaining. If Kannagi were to get a second season, I would most definitely watch more.

- otou-san out!

Auld Lang Mnemosyne.

With the exception of a brief period on Blogger and an even briefer period on wordpress.com (where I thought I could grab some inherent traffic but ultimately got too pissed off that I couldn’t make my own theme), this blog has been running more or less since the beginning of the year. So my end-of-year retrospective is really a retrospective about my first year of anime blogging. Let’s stroll down memory lane, in some cases to a place most of you haven’t been.

1. True Tears, ep. 9

Clannad was my first episodically blogged show, and ironically one of the last as well. Then came Shakugan No Shana, because I knew I would be forced to watch it until the end anyway. True Tears brought out the grossest in me, though, since I couldn’t be smarmy about something I liked so much. But it did net me my first real comment, which was from Kabitzin and was about hot pockets or something. I’m also particularly proud of this paragraph:

It isn’t long before Hiromi is the talk of the town, and soon she and Jun are both suspended from their respective schools. Damn, Japan is hard core. Here in this country, if you put a girl on the back of your bike and try to kill her by riding off into the sunset in the middle of winter, they give you a medal. I’ve seen it. It’s got James Dean punching kittens on it, and if you look real close Sinatra is fucking a bald eagle in the background.

God bless us, every one.

2. The H2O drinking game

CCY was probably the second guy who ever stopped by the blog, mostly to disagree with me about H2O ~Footprints in the Sand, which, bless his heart, he seemed to like. You want to talk about trainwrecks — at least Geass had some semblance of Just as Planned to it, while H2O was just all over the fucking place. At one point I drank my way through an episode and tried to pass the experience on to you. My favorite H2O moment, though, comes from the ridiculous pseudo-parody episode, #8:

Like a trip to visit your dying Uncle Bobo in the clown hospital, a bittersweet end to a random-ass experience.

Ultimately, blogging the adventures of Blindy, Platform Shoes, Uncle Dragonball, and the rest of the gang was the most fun I had episodic blogging before pretty much giving it up. I had hoped to pick something equally awful every season, but it just caught me by such wild surprise that the experience may never repeat itself. Sad.

3. I fixed the fucking industry.

I don’t know shit about any industry but my own, which happens to be publishing worthless content on the stupid internet. Hey, otou-san, isn’t it sad, that’s your hobby too? Yes.

I do know that what we predicted has come to pass, not that it was a really hard call since Gonzo had already started it. I didn’t expect licensing companies like Funimation to stream current series quite so soon, but I’m glad it’s happening. That’s not important though. What is important is that I went through that blogger rite of passage, to be ignored, dropped, twitter-blocked, and left for dead by Scott Von Schilling. It all happened because I might have sort of implied that he thinks he’s better than other bloggers.

It all ended with a simple emoticon. For the record, that was   (-_-)

4. The Yukan podcast

I’m not saying it was good. I’m not saying it deserved the sequel that it so far has not gotten. I’m just saying that it happened. Turned out it was mostly about Kurenai, which I’d barely give the time of day to a few months later. I’m trying really hard to find the outtake reel I put together, which is even more fun.

5. The reign of Oi, Hayaku! begins

I hope we take over the world, or whatever it is we plan on doing. I don’t know when or even quite how, but I do know I wrote a couple posts I am most proud of for that site. The first is my site debut, “It takes a fanboy,” thanks to which I take at least partial credit for creating the Frankenstein’s Monster of Love, ghostlightning (call me Igor to Lbrevis’s Dr. F). The second is “DMC: True?,” in which, for the first time, I successfully combined my love of anime and music to validate the best fucking show of the year.

6. Clannad Sucks.

This one’s still part of recent memory, so let’s not get too into it. I’m sure the show still sucks though.

Anyhoo, thanks to everyone who’s commented or even lurked over the past year, it’s been fun so far for this late bloomer and I look forward to the next year of rocking socks.

- otou-san out!

The world changes

Well, it didn’t happen. I had all my posts scheduled but one. The final one. Rather than making excuses, here it is, a few days late and a couple dollars short, since now I’m sick from my holidays and doped up on cold medicine and possibly unable to form sentences.

This year, regardless of your knowledge or opinion on the matter of fansubbing and its legality, you doubtless noticed that a few companies, all in different areas of the distribution chain, created online solutions to something they saw as a problem. Funimation has added legit streaming of a freshly-licensed, currently-airing show, Shikabane Hime, and [duh, Bandai] is airing a simlutaneous series (Black God) on American cable TV. TV Tokyo partnered with Crunchyroll to bring the mega-series Bleach, Naruto, and Shugo Chara! to North America in realtime with an HD stream. And Sony broadcast Xam’d all over the world through the Playstation Network.

But it all started with Blassreiter and Tower of Druaga by Gonzo. That sometimes-maligned, currently in-the-red animation studio with a penchant for “adult”-oriented violence series and overuse of CG suddenly launched itself — and the rest of us — into a brave new world where borders break down, regions transform from “Japan” and “North America” into “the world,” and a licensing company isn’t even needed anymore.

Of course, once the idea was hit on, the licensing companies (namely Funi) jumped on the stream wagon, but the TV Tokyo/Crunchy deal proves that we may still be able to break down the barriers. Fundamental problems, such as DRM, resolution, and availability outside of North America have yet to be ironed out, but when I think of how amazing Gonzo’s springtime announcment was, I get some faith.

- otou-san out!