Light my way.
Apr. 16th, 2008 15:42![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyI've been watching a lot of anime the last week or so, in a desperate and foolish attempt to clean space off my hard drive. Space which then gets sucked back up as I attempt to finish another AMV. I'm hopeless.
So here, in no particular order, is a lot about a lot of shows, some really old, others brand new.
I just closed the window for the second episode of Vampire Knight, so I might as well start there. It's nowhere near good enough for me to want to archive it subbed, but I find that watching the raws I can actually understand more than 75% of it. Woot! Yeah, it's about this school where the vampires wear white, the humans wear black, and they attend classes different halves of the days. The two human prefects have issues: one is more or less in love with the vampire who saved her life way back when, the other one hates vampires since they killed his family but oh snap! he's on his way to becoming one via an old vampire wound. Yup. Also he hangs around the random school stable with the horse a lot, and there is at least a hint of Utena influence in the opening animation. The guardians' dynamic is interesting--two adoptive siblings who aren't sexually attracted to each other, that's got to be rare in anime. The rest of the show is pretty average, especially given its school comedy elements, and we'll see how much longer I last with it. Also, what is with the whole guns with chains trope that's popped up recently? I want to credit it to Dogs; at least I'm not aware of it before then.
xxxHOLiC has started again and it's still pretty much the manga slapped onto my TV, but that's all right, since the manga is good and the anime doesn't let it down. I do like that the anime is introducing Kohane much earlier than in the manga. And I'm looking forward to seeing all the dreamy whatnot in volume 12 onscreen, provided they don't butcher it for the sake of cutting out the TRC references.
I watched Library War in the raw and that is definitely a show I will need to watch subbed, since I am too lazy to look up all the vocabulary I don't know, but it's Production IG and gorgeous; really, I would probably watch even if it wasn't good, but it is, though see above for why I am hazy on the plot: one government agency obstructing another to fight censorship laws? What? Whatever, the protagonist is taller than her immediate superior, and their dynamic is amusing. And hey, it's about saving books! With guns and helicopters! Where can you go wrong?
I finally got around to watching the last two episodes of Ergo Proxy, two years late. I still don't think I've seen Episode 21, the third-to-last; maybe I will re-download the last three at some point. But it actually all came together in a way that made me willing to overlook some of the pointlessness of the super-long middle section. Some of those episodes were brilliant, gorgeously animated mediations on the nature of existence. Others were pretty crap. But at the end it not only all came together, but made sense in such a way that I was able to forgive the literal, figurative and metonomic deus ex machina used for resolution. I guess Vincent can only manage one of each creature in his ark, not two. And thinking about that long journey...Vincent = Odysseus, Real = Penelope, Pino = Telemachus? Perhaps, distantly. But still, brilliant and flawed, and quite good.
I downloaded the two Tokyo Babylon OVAs, as well as the X-1999 movie, and I found the OVAs to be really disappointing. Aside from the fact that they're vintage 90s before the 90s got good, I realized part of why the manga is HOT LIKE BURNING is that the color scale is so restricted. With full color, everything seems much less sexy and more humdrum. Also, the OVA scriptwriters just pulled the good lines out of the manga and stitched them in to stupid plots. They may not even be worth keeping as AMV fodder, which of course is the reason I downloaded the X movie. Good god it is awful; it only comes with the English dub so I actually wound up disabling the audio track to spare myself the ear-bleeding pain. And yes the animation is pretty, but see above about the 90s, and what they had to do to the plot and the characters to fit the story in 90 minutes was criminal. Subaru and Seishirou kill each other in Ikebukuro in the first 10 minutes? Um, KTHXBAI. If/when Clamp ever finishes the manga, I hope they can find someone to re-animate the story in some other form, like they did with the TRC OVAs.
What else? I am slowly but steadily chipping away at Jigoku Shoujo. I love that show; it is the best way of critiquing Japan's social problems ever, and I thought that episode 12, in particular, was nothing short of brilliant: futoukou (non-school attending) student and her despairing teacher form a friendship over the Internet where each doesn't know who the other is; after they realize it the teacher asks the student to send him to hell, and she does (he doesn't realize the price). God it was touching and brilliant, and beautifully animated since most of the episode took place at sunset in an abandoned mansion.
Last but not least, CODE GEASS: THE SECOND COMING OF ZERO. Not that that is actually its real name (that would be Code Geass R2), but it is brilliant and amazing like always. The stakes are higher, everything is more ruthless and the characters and the Empire are much more hard-core. And they had another Nippon Banzai moment in the first episode! Code Geass: Intense! Sign me up for the rebellion!
So here, in no particular order, is a lot about a lot of shows, some really old, others brand new.
I just closed the window for the second episode of Vampire Knight, so I might as well start there. It's nowhere near good enough for me to want to archive it subbed, but I find that watching the raws I can actually understand more than 75% of it. Woot! Yeah, it's about this school where the vampires wear white, the humans wear black, and they attend classes different halves of the days. The two human prefects have issues: one is more or less in love with the vampire who saved her life way back when, the other one hates vampires since they killed his family but oh snap! he's on his way to becoming one via an old vampire wound. Yup. Also he hangs around the random school stable with the horse a lot, and there is at least a hint of Utena influence in the opening animation. The guardians' dynamic is interesting--two adoptive siblings who aren't sexually attracted to each other, that's got to be rare in anime. The rest of the show is pretty average, especially given its school comedy elements, and we'll see how much longer I last with it. Also, what is with the whole guns with chains trope that's popped up recently? I want to credit it to Dogs; at least I'm not aware of it before then.
xxxHOLiC has started again and it's still pretty much the manga slapped onto my TV, but that's all right, since the manga is good and the anime doesn't let it down. I do like that the anime is introducing Kohane much earlier than in the manga. And I'm looking forward to seeing all the dreamy whatnot in volume 12 onscreen, provided they don't butcher it for the sake of cutting out the TRC references.
I watched Library War in the raw and that is definitely a show I will need to watch subbed, since I am too lazy to look up all the vocabulary I don't know, but it's Production IG and gorgeous; really, I would probably watch even if it wasn't good, but it is, though see above for why I am hazy on the plot: one government agency obstructing another to fight censorship laws? What? Whatever, the protagonist is taller than her immediate superior, and their dynamic is amusing. And hey, it's about saving books! With guns and helicopters! Where can you go wrong?
I finally got around to watching the last two episodes of Ergo Proxy, two years late. I still don't think I've seen Episode 21, the third-to-last; maybe I will re-download the last three at some point. But it actually all came together in a way that made me willing to overlook some of the pointlessness of the super-long middle section. Some of those episodes were brilliant, gorgeously animated mediations on the nature of existence. Others were pretty crap. But at the end it not only all came together, but made sense in such a way that I was able to forgive the literal, figurative and metonomic deus ex machina used for resolution. I guess Vincent can only manage one of each creature in his ark, not two. And thinking about that long journey...Vincent = Odysseus, Real = Penelope, Pino = Telemachus? Perhaps, distantly. But still, brilliant and flawed, and quite good.
I downloaded the two Tokyo Babylon OVAs, as well as the X-1999 movie, and I found the OVAs to be really disappointing. Aside from the fact that they're vintage 90s before the 90s got good, I realized part of why the manga is HOT LIKE BURNING is that the color scale is so restricted. With full color, everything seems much less sexy and more humdrum. Also, the OVA scriptwriters just pulled the good lines out of the manga and stitched them in to stupid plots. They may not even be worth keeping as AMV fodder, which of course is the reason I downloaded the X movie. Good god it is awful; it only comes with the English dub so I actually wound up disabling the audio track to spare myself the ear-bleeding pain. And yes the animation is pretty, but see above about the 90s, and what they had to do to the plot and the characters to fit the story in 90 minutes was criminal. Subaru and Seishirou kill each other in Ikebukuro in the first 10 minutes? Um, KTHXBAI. If/when Clamp ever finishes the manga, I hope they can find someone to re-animate the story in some other form, like they did with the TRC OVAs.
What else? I am slowly but steadily chipping away at Jigoku Shoujo. I love that show; it is the best way of critiquing Japan's social problems ever, and I thought that episode 12, in particular, was nothing short of brilliant: futoukou (non-school attending) student and her despairing teacher form a friendship over the Internet where each doesn't know who the other is; after they realize it the teacher asks the student to send him to hell, and she does (he doesn't realize the price). God it was touching and brilliant, and beautifully animated since most of the episode took place at sunset in an abandoned mansion.
Last but not least, CODE GEASS: THE SECOND COMING OF ZERO. Not that that is actually its real name (that would be Code Geass R2), but it is brilliant and amazing like always. The stakes are higher, everything is more ruthless and the characters and the Empire are much more hard-core. And they had another Nippon Banzai moment in the first episode! Code Geass: Intense! Sign me up for the rebellion!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-16 07:30 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-16 10:10 (UTC)It WAS very heavy on the military jargon, and since a lot of the terms are invented for the show, following it without some visual reference was sort of difficult; I made up for my lack of knowledge by checking out the Japanese Wikipedia article during the commercial breaks, which helped clarify things for me. The premise still seems a bit out there, though. If I remember correctly, it's a central government versus local/prefectural government-type scenario, with the local governments attempted to combat the censorship squad established by the central government; since both local and national bodies are functionally independent, but have different degrees of jurisdiction in different areas, they're free to wage war with each other without any sort of outside interference.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-16 14:08 (UTC)i shall have to check out that wikipedia article. of course on one level local governments setting up armed agencies in response to the national government is absurd, but in reality, central control really isn't as strong as most people think if you actually look into it.