#its one of those 90s OVAs

[jack-in-the-dark]

"I have no idea why it's called 'Geobreeders,' it's about shapeshifting electromagnetic ghost cat terrorists." - actual thing I said today

[hotwaterandmilk]

I'm seeing "Wedding Peach was unsuccessful" trotted out on Twitter again and it's honestly kind of funny to me. You can dislike the series, but you're rewriting history if you suggest it was a massive commercial flop/astronomical failure — it simply wasn't.

The Wedding Peach TV series maintained viewership throughout its run which is why it aired an entire year's worth of episodes (the full length it was intended to run) and didn't get cancelled like Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, for example.

I'm not going to pretend it did Sailor Moon numbers, dear god, it absolutely didn't get close hence why it wrapped as it did. I would suggest looking back now, that it was the definition of a mid-performing title for the time period. It sold toys decently but not outrageously, it got viewers but not an outstanding number, and it garnered a small but dedicated fanbase of male otaku. All of which is par for the course when it comes to a mid title in 1995.

Wedding Peach DX was produced because the TV series LD sales were decent enough to warrant it. Children were not buying LD box sets at this time, adult fans were and it was this interest that justified the creation of the four DX episodes as direct-to-video releases. If a series doesn't sell well they don't make more episodes, let alone higher quality deluxe episodes specifically for the home video market (and thus for older audiences with spending power).

It is very important to point out that Wedding Peach DX had NO INVOLVEMENT from the original creative team. Tomita Sukehiro and Yazawa Nao did not contribute to its creation, Tadano Kazuko didn't provide designs. Yuyama Kunihiko was the driving force behind the production of the DX episodes and he served as both director and writer for all four episodes (bringing on Wedding Peach animator and soon-to-be frequent Pokémon collaborator, Ichiishi Sayuri to serve as character designer).

What inspired these to be fanservice dreck to the level they ended up being is honestly beyond me. I mean the otaku market definitely wanted more episodes featuring the characters (and more songs featuring the seiyuu, if you want to see how keen otaku were for FURIL please see this post) but part of what they liked about the characters at the time was their (barfbarfbarf) perceived purity and innocence. The DX including panty shots and swimsuits kind of threw them for a loop. Even now, if you look at discussions about the DX among otaku there's a bit of a divide in opinion.

The DX episode sales were (as far as I can tell based on magazines from the time) also mid, but enough to cover four episodes. Three and four don't seem to have sold as well as one and two, but again the stats from the time aren't comprehensive. I think the fact that there weren't any after episode four says it all, honestly. OVA episodes are expensive to produce and it was extremely common for them to stop immediately if the sales weren't there. DX didn't justify its existence beyond those four episodes and Yuyama moved onto a far more successful project in Pokémon.

On that topic, I think it's important to note that Wedding Peach was OLM's first television series (albeit a coproduction with KSS). If it and the studio's adaptation of Mojacko hadn't made some level of profit it would have been quite difficult for them to adapt Pokémon. Neither Mojacko nor Wedding Peach set records with their viewership or sales numbers, but they both did "OK". It was in Pokémon however, that that OLM truly found a successful property with the series still running today. Sometimes you've got to have a few runs at producing things before you find success. Wedding Peach was one of these early runs, a project where a lot of people cut their teeth but one that didn't justify its own continuation beyond a certain point. Just a very standard media mix from the mid-90s, in other words.

Wedding Peach is a problematic title with indifference through to outright objection to representing love outside of heterosexual romance. Looking back now it feels like an absolute dinosaur on so many levels. Between the anime's fatphobic episode and Momoko dropping some gender essentialism, I'm not surprised people want to relegate it to the dustbin of history.

However, I think it is very telling that Tomita Sukehiro, when presented with the opportunity to tell a similar story in the modern day, chose to represent not just queer love, but platonic and familial love in Wedding Apple. While he can't undo the regressive and cringy elements of the original series, as a creator he has progressed and I'd like to think we can all continue to improve our outlooks and output as we grow.

Disliking Wedding Peach in the modern day is completely understandable. I'm not going to pretend anyone should watch it in 2024 without knowing that it is a camp, cheaply made relic of a time when heterosexuality was considered magic. However, just because it pandered to all the worst things trending at the time doesn't mean it didn't sell enough products or hold enough viewers to justify its production. It did, it just wasn't a strong enough property to go beyond that and that's representative of mediocrity rather than mind blowing commercial failure imho.

[bozepomagaj]

ATINY/MOA/CARATS vs Made in Abyss was the last thing I expected and its hilarious

feel like I need to say something since twitter absolutely loves spreading misinfo and just accusing people of shit, how have you people not LEARNED your lesson yet? Since when is twitter such a trusted source, especially gossip accounts?

And before you braindead stans start calling me a d!ckrider, I promise you I do not care about these men cuz I've got better things to focus on and I'm making this because people are overreacting and it's getting annoying. It's so obvious 90% of you haven't watched the anime (and thats completely fine, I get you) and then ended up listening to someone who made stuff up and overexaggerated. I'm not here to defend the author because I hate him as much as you do and can absolutely recognize the dude is into some weird shit but saying people are ONLY interested in this series because of r@pe and p€dophilia is INSANE. So let me answer some questions as a Made an Abyss reader (not calling myself a fan because you'll catch me DEAD before you see me buying any merch or manga despite my love for the series), kpop fan second.

Does Made In Abyss contain p3d0ph1l1c themes, gore etc.?

There absolutely is because the author is a creep (refering to the nsfw however, most of the times it's very easily skippable. As someone who hates l0l1con cuz it creeps me out, I can tell you that I really didn't have a hard time skipping said scenes even in the manga which is far more explicit than the anime (Prushka asking about Bond's 'stick', Faputa looking into Regs pants, Vueko's weird comments) and sometimes, they're even added as extras (0.5 chapters) which certain sites that contain scans don't even include. I didn't even know about the existence about a few of these chapters BECAUSE they don't include them.

The OVA is a nightmare to watch and was not only unfunny but creepy as fuck especially when they try to boil down such an amazing character like Ozen into 'I like seeing little kids in pain'. Now I have no idea if this was made independently but I don't remember the author making any spin-offs that they could base this on so I can't tell you who wrote it but even then I doubt that the author minded it since the man himself had to include that Faputas behind smells like the 'Sun' so again, not here to defend him cuz he most definitely is a weirdo, no doubt about it.

Is Made in Abyss torture p*rn?

If MiA is torture p*rn then AoT is military propaganda and supports child labor, TPN is also torture p*rn, JJK promotes violence, Berserk excuses r*pe and Evangelion is also p*do bait. See how stupid that sounds? Just because an anime INCLUDES something, does not mean it necessarily supports it. Yes, r*pe is mentioned but it's not even SHOWN, and it's a cruical part of a characters backstory. The torture that happens, happens only once if we exclude Riko's 'experiment' at the very beginning of the manga. And Mitty's transformation can't even be classified as torture cuz it's a.... transformation. Prushka's death is very censored so its not like you can jack off to that anyways. Now the piss thing is something I have noticed but haven't really payed attention it because bffr why the hell would I so idk, maybe the author is trying to tell us something or the guy thinks pee pee poo poo funny🤷‍♀️.

Is there any plot besides the weird stuff?

See now this is the part that gets me most because the reason why a majority of people nowadays got into MiA in the first place is BECAUSE of the amazing plot. The world building, the mystery, the fight scenes, etc. It's amazingly drawn, nicely paced and unique in its own way. But of course, it's manga&anime and what's anime without fanservice? I already explained that in manga, said scenes can be easily skipped and the anime thankfully doesn't include a lot of these. I do have to admit thag I dropped the manga for now since the chapter where they were in a bath cuz it was another one of those 'here we go again' moments where it made me roll my eyes and just close the tab so I don't really know what's been happening recently and if things go weirder.

I'm also gonna tell you honestly that yes, the fandom is filled with sweaty dudebros itching to see these kids half naked and the author is aware of them and pondering to them because he too is one of them. But a large majority is back from when the anime originally came out and are mostly hiding on twitter so it's easy to avoid them and they've been pretty rare ever since people with actual interest in the series have begun watching it. A reason why back in the day I didn't wanna interact with the fandom at ALL was because the moment I tried to have a normal conversation about the plot and what might actually be going on, I instead get bombarded with "UWAAAA😭😭😭" and 'c*nny' comments. I also cannot defend and don't even plan on defending the fact that Faputa is pretty much naked the entire series. I get that she lives in the literal wilderness, but the very least you could do is put a cloth on her y'know. And mind you, I'm talking about the manga. The anime is a LOT more heavily censored, and from what I heard, even MORE censored in Korea.

To sum it up:

Do I think Mingi/Soobin/Woozi are p*dos cuz they watched the anime? Absolutely the fuck not. Considering Mingi is a big CSM fan, I can see why he watched Made in Abyss because I was in that same pipeline. I think some of you are going way too far with these comments, if you wanna call them weird, creepy, wanna unstan them for reading stuff like this go ahead, not gonna stop because in the end no one can but accusing people of crimes isn't funny and never will be. If they were exposed for watching shit like Kodomo no Jikan then that most definitely IS eyebrow raising. Maybe I'm slightly biased due to me only enjoying MiA for the plot so seeing people say the fans are p3d0s when the first time I watched this was when I was freshly 15.... yeah idk abt that one. Whether they liked the weird and questionable scenes, I have zero idea I'm just here to say that you can enjoy said anime without being a weirdo and you shouldn't begin jumping to conclusions and start calling people straight up criminals. If anyone wants to have a productive conversation and ask questions abt said anime cuz I doubt you're gonna go watch an anime over a Twitter drama, go ahead and ask. If you wanna insult me and call me a d!ckrider then go ahead and do that too, who am I to stop you?

[lemon-dokuro]

Yesterday, I watched Sound Holic's 2007 Touhou fan film, Touhou Project Side Story ~ Memory of Stars.

The plot is about Kaguya's father, the Moon's ruler, coming to take her and Eirin back. Makes heavy use of sci-fi aesthetics and is mostly set in space. Naturally, because it was released before Bogetsusho/Silent Sinner in Blue, all it had to go off of for the state of the Moon civilization and Kaguya's relationship to it were the 8th Touhou game and maybe Reisen's route/interactions in the 9th. It's a little interesting to see the creators' interpretation because of that, but... It was recieved very poorly by the japanese Touhou fandom in 2007 when it came out, you can even find comparisons to the infamous Cookie series. The reception is understandable — it really isn't good. I actually wouldn't call the story or the premise bad, they're just kitschy in a way characteristic of the otaku culture of its time, but they are ruined completely by the wonky presentation and especially the incomprehensible pacing. I don't want to recap it here because the anime isn't even that long or hard to find, but if I did, I'd have a fair bit of trouble. It feels like one of those 90s OVAs that tries to cram 4-6 volumes of a manga in about 40 minutes, so most things happen too fast to have an impact. There's a whole character that makes absolutely no sense because she has too little screen time and too little actually explained about her (Sphere Sieben, the redheaded space commander lady). Sakuya is there for a barely explained reason. Mokou comes out of nowhere in the middle (well, at least that had a point, ridiculous as it was). And considering this, bizzarely, the movie also has a lot of pointlessly drawn-out scenes where not much happens, like they were trying to pad out the runtime, even though there's a lot of substance they could have added. I have no idea what kind of constrains they were working with, but it's not like they couldn't have just written it more tightly. If not better, then, you know, at least. Even though I don't think the general premise and the story are bad per se, they are very unfitting for Touhou. The creators are obviously going for space opera aesthetics, which is a really weird fit for Touhou. They don't even really try to make it fit. Egregiously, Kaguya's presumably biological father, Luna Marius, has a sci-fi-ish western-style name for absolutely unexplained reasons. Of course, that kind of naming difference is not implausible at all, but it's a really weird creative choice, especially considering it's never adressed, not even in a throwaway line or anything. One could say it's emblematic of the work not compromising the conflicting aesthetics in any way. The visuals are often criticized for obvious reasons. They are great to me because I'm an oldschool doujin fetishist, but it's clearly all very stiff, mildly inconsistent, generally amareurish and feverishly oversaturated with bright flashing effects half the time. The backgrounds mostly consist of said effects. A lot of the animations are obviously reused. That being said, the original character designs are pretty well done. The bunny girl looks especially good, the artist absolutely nailed the early windows Touhou design style. Also, naturally, because Sound Holic is mainly a music circle, the soundtrack is decent. It's not remarkable, but there's nothing wrong with it, it's standard for 2007 Touhou arrange tracks. There's not much to say about the voice acting either — standard for doujin anime. The voice actors are inexplicably pretty well-known, but it's not that uncommon to see big names on the most random 2000s doujin projects. That's probably how these people become popular in the first place.

Well, what can I say overall. It's a weird little movie. I can't recommend it, but maybe you'll get a laugh out of it, or maybe you'll like the visuals as much as I did.

Also, that rabbit's names are both mochi types...

[canmom]

Animation Night 184: Mars Express

Animation Night is baaaaaack from Annecy break!

And yeah, the last couple weeks of this blog have been pretty Annecy focused here on the canmom entertainment sphere. And tonight that will continue! For tonight we shall right a wrong! And that wrong is...

...that wrong is that I didn't get to see Mars Express at Annecy last year. @mendely did and I was super jelly, OK!

For real though, this was among the hottest tickets at Annecy last year, and despite queuing a bunch of hours, I didn't stand a chance to get in without a reservation. But what is it? Well, it's a scifi movie directed by Jérémie Périn. Who's Jérémie Périn?

Well, the true veterans may recall Animation Night 1, when I showed you a certain music video for a song called Fantasy by DyE...

...that's not gonna embed, is it? But if you know, you know. (If you don't know, it's the one where the teens break into the swimming pool to make out and such and then a bunch of them turn into tentacle monsters.)

So Jérémie Périn is the guy who directed that! He's also well known for directing Lastman, a crowdfunded action series in which a boxer battles a bunch of superpowered agents to try to protect a psychic girl, not that you'd gather any of that from this trailer...

and writing for Crisis Jung by Bobbypills - don't blink or you might miss the boob-growing henshin and the guy with a chainsaw dick...

And while Crisis Jung isn't primarily his project, we can still definitely trust that when Périn is at the wheel, we'll seem some incredibly stylish, anime-inflected drama and also some proper freaky imagery now and again.

Mars Express, however, is Périn's first foray into film rather than TV animation, building on the big success of Lastman - and a pretty high-effort foray at that, taking some five years to make. And by all accounts it kicks total ass.

But what's it about? Classic cyberpunk noir material: a detective and the android replica of her partner return to their home planet Mars after apprehending a robot hacker. But the hacker is released, and they're given a new mission - to work with this hacker and go down to a colony where, ostensibly, humans and androids live in harmony, and track down a guy who jailbreaks the androids from their artificial constraints. That sounds pretty shady already, right? But the dirty secrets are only beginning.

Mars Express definitely pays its homages to those classic 90s anime films and OVAs like Ghost in the Shell and Armitage III, as well as games like Another World for the Amiga, but by all accounts gives it a fresh approach, with grounded characters - protagonist Aline struggling with alcoholism, her reconstructed partner Carlos with his floating holographic head carrying the whole identity issue of being a robot clone who's been rejected by his original's wife - which anchors plenty of juicy scifi concepts like renting out your brain as a computer, or something called 'resonance' which is how robots do it. What does that mean? The review I'm reading left it at that! Guess we'll find out.

Like most European productions it brought together a long list of production companies and it's a little tricky to figure out which ones are actual animation houses, but the main company seems to be 'Everybody on Deck'. They previously worked with Périn on Lastman, but otherwise largely seem to have worked on live action films. However, the animation was split among a variety of studios.

We can at least say that it brought in French animators from across the shop, some even on this very website. (At least I seem to recall seeing people having posted about having worked on it, though if I search now I mostly find peoples' reviews of the film). It's animation leans realist, with naturalistic motion taking advantage of anime-style 3s and 2s to give it a weighty feeling, embedding its characters in detailed environments with strong colour design...

And if we want to know more than that, we're in luck, since there's a pretty substantial 16-part making-of series partly available on Catsuka's youtube, starting with episode 1 showing the development of the script, with Périn and co-writer Laurent Sarfati bouncing ideas off each other. Only two other episodes are available: episode 11 shows some of the voice recording, and episode 16, which talks about the actual animation, interviewing various animators and showing some shot breakdowns. The last of these is probably the most interesting (to animators), talking about how the film went about realising Périn's 'precise, clinical' realist style.

The team were evidently very conscious of this being, for France, a first of its kind - a French-animated thriller targeting adults, with big ambitions to become a landmark film in French animation, able to stand up against the best anime. I'm not sure it's actually the first - for example, Summit of the Gods is also a tense, French-animated thriller with a realist art style! - but it's definitely a genre where there are very few examples to compare, and the team's ambition comes across as absolutely genuine.

That's probably enough to go on! We'll definitely also check out some of Périn's other work tonight, but Mars Express is our main feature! Starting in about an hour and a half at 8pm UK time, at our usual place, twitch.tv/canmom! Hope to see you there!

[radiantresplendence]

What Even Is a Kara no Kyoukai?

Kara no Kyoukai is a series of anime movies put out by Ufotable between 2007 and 2013 based off of the light novel series of the same name written by Type-Moon founder and creative director Kinoko Nasu in the 90s.

That's it, that's the post.

But seriously, if you're familiar with Nasu's other works, you'd know that they have a reputation for being rather inaccessible, especially to those in the west and Kara no Kyoukai specifically comes with some extra content warnings that aren't as prevalent in some of his other works.

Now, this would normally be fine, however a lot of content put to the forefront as "primers" to the show by the anime community either focus too much on the metaphysics and how it relates to other Type-Moon media or is a detailed thematic analysis that gives away too much of the sauce.

I plan to do neither here.

Instead, I'll give a brief rundown of the show's traits. Then, I'll talk about the main cast of characters and I'll finish it off by giving the general premise of each episode. (And I'll lump all of the Extra Chorus OVAs together for this purpose.)

So, Kara no Kyoukai sorta paved the way for the trappings you'd expect of modern Ufotable. Even over 15 years later, the show is absolutely gorgeous and puts a lot of modern anime to shame with its production quality. The attention to detail, shot composition and immaculate backgrounds that you'd expect of a Unfotable production are all here. Except this was really the first work to bring those traits to the forefront.

Just on the merits of that, as an anime watcher its worth the curiosity. The triumphs of productions like Demon Slayer and Fate/Zero clearly trace their DNA right back to Kara no Kyoukai.

The OST for this series is... basically unmatched. Kalafina was founded to do the music for this show, and the general consensus seems to be that Yuki Kajiura did some of, if not her very best, work on this show.

Admittedly I'm a not a big music analysis person, but I will personally attest that the ambiance and immersiveness of Kara no Kyoukai's score is some of the best in any piece of media that I have consumed. Also the big theme songs for each film all absolutely rock.

Doing a little background research, it looks like a lot of those theme songs are on the Kalafina album Seventh Heaven, so if you're a fan of high-quality J-pop/rock, give that a go maybe. I mean, they're really good in a vacuum, better in the context of the episode they were written for.

Its paced a lot slower than a lot of other anime movies, leaving a lot of room for ambiance and quiet character moments. Also quite a bit of the series is just characters talking, be it about philosophy or metaphysics, but it's usually not egregious and if you're into that sort of thing (which I am) it's a good time. Also the cuts can be quite creative, especially in Paradox Spiral.

So, now that a lot of that peripheral housekeeping is done:

What the Fuck even is a Kara no Kyoukai?

It's a paranormal mystery, dark urban fantasy thriller seinen anime that explores themes of humanity, identity, sin and dichotomy. Oh and murder. Especially murder.

The general plot setup is more something you'd expect of a shoujo. Boy meets girl, the complexities and trials of their relationship etc.

The big twist is that the girl in this trope is best described as "one who murders" and the story is told out of chronological order.

It's set in a fictitious city in Japan called Mifune, mostly between '96 and '99. Supernatural phenomenon exist, but aren't common knowledge and the main focus of the subject matter is individuals with some manner of ESP or active psychic ability, though there's significant representation from elements of mysticism as well as more archetypal wizard sorts.

I strongly recommend watching the films in release order because its better thematically, however there's a lot of value on a rewatch and doing so in chronological order could shed some light on things.

As I'm about to transition into talking into some of the show's particulars, here's where I'll put the content warnings for those who would prefer going in blind and would like to know what horrible imagery they're about to be exposed to or would maybe be dissuaded by.

CW, suicide, gore, horror, sexual assault, domestic violence, cannibalism.

Who are the main characters in Kara no Kyoukai?

Shiki Ryougi is our main character. A young woman with an attraction to death and murderous impulses. She presents as stoic, but she's anything but uncaring. She's very nuanced, but as the main character a good deal of the series goes into exploring her, so I won't delve into her complexities. After an accident as a teenager that left her in a coma, she gained the ability to see death in the forms of lines that act akin to the 'seams' of living beings, objects and even concepts. By cutting on these lines, she can kill anything.

Mikiya Kokuto is our male lead. An intelligent and excessively kind young man who became hopelessly infatuated with Shiki in high school, only to suspect that she was the one perpetrating a series of serial murders. When Shiki was comatose, he wound up working as a private investigator of sorts for the Garan no Dou agency, but continued to carry a torch for Shiki.

Touko Aozaki is our mentor character of sorts. More than likely the greatest doll and puppet maker in the world, Touko is also a mage and a lauded polymath, excelling in basically any field that proves of interest to her. She runs the Garan no Dou agency and employs Mikiya for his investigative prowess and later Shiki for her combat abilities as her sole employees. She's a chainsmoking girlboss who can be overly verbose and pretentious. Despite some unscrupulous morality, she legitimately cares about her subordinates.

Azaka Kokutou is Mikiya's younger sister who vehemently opposes her brother's relations with Shiki. Certainly the "4th wheel" of the cast made worse by the adaptation greatly condensing her chapter to laser in more on the Shiki and Mikiya dynamic. She apprenticed herself to Touko as a means of inserting herself into the workings of Garan no Dou. Azaka is smart, expressive, headstrong and funny. Touko is teaching her flame manipulation, as that's what she has the most affinity for.

I'll omit the antagonists here and encourage folks to watch the show as my little blurbs here give the jist of the cast, but really doesn't do them justice. The cast for the most part is really well characterized and much in Nasu's style, even when he plays to a trope there's a lot more to it than that.

What Exactly am I in for?

So, there's (depending on your definition) 8-9 films and a few ~10 minute OVAs. Unfortunately, the light novels have never been localized and there's only an incomplete fan translation and a somewhat inaccurate machine-assisted translation.

The film series adapts every part of the series except the side-story Final Record, albeit Azaka's chapter, Oblivion Recording, was greatly altered for the film adaptation.

The main series ran from '07 to '09 and includes episodes 1-7 and the Epilogue. Future Gospel and the OVAs came out in 2013 and they're a few side stories with the main act functioning as an epilogue of sorts to the epilogue.

So, the films post their position in the timeline at the end of each instalment, but I'll post them upfront here for the purposes of making it easier for one to keep track and using this piece as a guide.

I - Overlooking View (Sept '98) A series of suicides committed by schoolgirls jumping off of the roof of an abandoned apartment building catch the interest of the members of Garan no Dou. Some supernatural effect causes Mikiya to fall into a deep sleep and when Shiki investigates the building, she sees the ghostly figures of eight girls in the sky.

II - Murder Speculation Part 1 ('95-'96 schoolyear, ending in March) Mikiya becomes classmates with Shiki, who he immediately becomes infatuated with despite her less than accommodating personality. A series of murders happen in the city and Mikiya, suspecting her to be the perpetrator, tries to prove her innocence.

III - Remaining Sense of Pain (July '98) A young woman is viscously assaulted and the perpetrators are turning up dead, their bodies horribly mangled. Garan no Dou is presented with the case, but due to Touko's monetary problems, Mikiya resorts to freelancing in the short term. Shiki intends to put the murderer down, claiming them to be similar, albeit one of them is out of control.

IV - The Hollow Shrine (June '98) Shiki awakens from her coma after the accident, feeling hollow due to what she lost and now possessing the ability to see death. Mikiya is barred from visitation, as it's restricted to the family, so Touko sneaks into the hospital to check on her and takes immediate interest in Shiki's new perceptive abilities.

V - Paradox Spiral (November '98) A young man murders his mother in self-defense and winds up being helped by Shiki. Mikiya investigates some suspicious tenants of an apartment building that Touko designed and some old associates of Touko's are in town, one of them with a bone to pick.

VI - Oblivion Recording (January '99) Garan no Dou is asked to investigate a suspicious suicide at Azaka's boarding school and some lapses in memory around the incident in question. Shiki is dispatched, much to Azaka's displeasure and the two work to uncover a mage using fairies behind the two events.

VII - Murder Speculation Part 2 (February '99) Shiki, feeling perturbed, hasn't been frequenting her apartment. Meanwhile the serial murders from '96 start back up. Mikiya, trying to prove Shiki's innocence, begins investigating a drug ring related to the incidents and the events of the unsolved '96 murder cases finally come to light.

Epilogue - The Boundary of Emptiness (a few weeks after the events of Murder Speculation 2) Two people have a fateful meeting where they discuss some particulars of the events of the series, metaphysics and philosophy. It's literally a half-hour conversation. It's classified as an OVA, but it's almost as long as The Hollow Shrine.

Future Gospel (August '98 & Summer 2010) A serial bomber with the ability to see the future winds up targeting Shiki after proving unable to kill her meanwhile Mikiya has a chance encounter with a girl with a similar ability. Later, an elderly woman who tells fortunes attracts the negative attention of a crime syndicate.

Future Gospel - Extra Chorus (After the events of the summer of '98) A series of short vignettes, about 10 minutes apiece. Shiki takes care of a cat. A girl feels guilty over the death of her best friend. Mikiya and Shiki celebrate New Years.

The Future Gospel stuff, being a side story has a very different feel than the main series (I blame most of the events happening during the day and it being notably less gore-y than the earlier parts). But it's still a very fun watch. In a lot of ways it acts as a means of tying the series up in a bow with a nice "10 years later" segment and some flashbacks to the '95 school year. If you're going to skip something, skip it, but seeing as you've presumably made it that far already, you deserve a treat because it's just fun.

But yeah... this is my favorite anime series. I just finished a rewatch last night and felt urged to type this up. Hopefully it helps people or encourages folks to give the show a try if they've otherwise felt daunted.

[acquired-stardust]

Anime Spotlight #1: Sonic the Hedgehog OVA (1996)

Acquired Stardust's spotlights expand into the realm of anime! Join Ash as she takes a look back at 1996's Sonic the Hedgehog OVA, a fitting first entry in our anime spotlight series, bridging the gap between video games and anime.

In many ways the story of Sonic the Hedgehog mirrors that of developer Sega's due to how indelibly linked the Blue Blur's meteoric rise into pop culture relevancy is to the company at large. Sonic the Hedgehog, much like Sega, went from the cool new contender rivaling Nintendo's dominance in the early 90s to an underdog by the turn of the century, to an example of just how harsh the shift from 2D to 3D games could be to video game developers that struggled to make the transition with as much acclaim as Nintendo had, back to a beloved alternative underdog in recent years that represented a very particular style and sound that you couldn't find just anywhere else.

It's easy to see why Sonic the Hedgehog had such an impact in its initial boom period (which lasted roughly 8 years, from 1991 to 1999) with the strength of the creatives involved and inspirations evoked. Brandishing a visual and auditory edge along with its gameplay and level design that many considered on par with Nintendo's Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog helped propelled Japanese video game developer Sega into unprecedented heights particularly in America. Hot on the heels of 1993's Sonic CD and 1994's Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (& Knuckles)released on the Sega CD platform, 1996 saw the release of a two-episode Sonic the Hedgehog original video animation in Japan (that's OVA for those unfamiliar with anime terms, meaning a popular release method that's a sort of direct-to-video release rather than airing on television or in movie theaters). It was also compiled into a single 53-minute video and dubbed by ADV Films when it arrived in America in 1999, coinciding with the release of Sonic Adventure.

Immediately apparent is the retention of many of the elements that made Sonic so popular in this era. First you have the art style of Sonic CD, recreated faithfully by Studio Pierrot (also responsible for animating shonen anime classics Naruto, Bleach and Yu Yu Hakusho), with the even higher animation quality than the animated sequences of the then-new video game afforded by the budget of OVA format. There's also the soundtrack composed by Mitsuhiro Tada sporting an incredible blend of synthesizer, drums, keys and horns that's still stunning to this day and tragically never released in any official capacity (though an early production reel of the soundtrack, including its clever and catchy main theme sung by Riyu Konaka, was leaked in 2020 thanks to a Russian Sonic fansite). There's also the story and cast, an unthinkable (in 1996) teamup between Sonic and friends with nemesis Dr. Eggman rounded out by a few original characters such as the charmingly feral brat Sara, notably being the first instance of oddly human (or at least in this case humanimal) love interests for Sonic.

As previously mentioned, Sonic OVA nails a lot of things about the series that made it so popular at the time including the portrayal of its lead characters. Sonic has his cocky coolness, Tails lovable kid genius with plenty of vulnerability and Knuckles has both all the toughness and silliness one would expect. Aspects of all three of these characters would come to be either lost of hyperfocused on in the years to come and it's pretty great to have a piece of media capture the protagonist trio in such robust detail, with each character getting several moments to shine and their own significance in the events of the OVA as opposed to being ultimately completely beholden to Sonic to save the day.

Another retention from the video games of the time is the action and sense of speed with Studio Pierrot having done a wonderful job animating not only several sequences of traversal straight out of the Sega Genesis games complete with cameos of enemies along with several impressive fight sequences, as well as a few small instances of impressively thought out interaction between both characters and environment. In terms of the story and animation it's clear that the people involved in the project really understood the assignment and never phoned it in or lost sight of what they were doing.

While a wonderful snapshot of the series at the time, Sonic OVA also features a few interesting elements that look to the future. Planet Freedom, the world in which the characters inhabit in this particular incarnation of the series, features a distinctly New York City in post-apocalypse locale that would later come up again in 1999's Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast. Sonic OVA also positions Tails and Dr. Eggman as more direct rivals than previously seen, which would come to be a staple of the series starting again with 1999's Sonic Adventure. Sonic OVA is not entirely without its own quirks that would not be retained however, most notably referring to Knuckles as a mole and seemingly giving him the ability to outright fly as opposed to merely gliding.

Some may find the English cast to be annoying, but personally this is my favorite casting of the characters and the voices I always associate with them - they're teenage (and in the case of Tails, a child) cartoon animals after all. Regardless of which language you choose to watch in, Sonic OVA is a fantastic time and an interesting snapshot in time that effectively communicates why a lot people had so much fascination with Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog in its prime. It's also not everyday that this era of Sonic's music, largely featuring reworked compositions of Masato Nakamura's band Dreams Come True and later various songs by Michael Jackson (itself an interesting footnote of Sonic development lore), manages to feature tracks that stand up to the mainline games' quality, but Sonic OVA definitely includes a few songs that will stay with you and it's a shame that until recently the soundtrack has been almost completely ignored by Sega.

A gem hidden among the stones, Sonic the Hedgehog OVA is undoubtedly stardust.

-- Ash

[b-else-writes]

The Great CLAMP Re-Read Part 3: Tokyo Babylon

Part 1 (RG Veda) | Part 2 (Man of Many Faces)| Part 4 (Duklyon) | Part 5 (Clamp Detectives)| Part 6 (Shirahime)| Part 7 (X)| Part 8 (Chunhyang) | Part 9 (Miyuki-chan)| Part 10 (Rayearth)| Part 11 (The One I Love

The CLAMP 90s series. Perhaps their greatest work ever. Tokyo Babylon ran from 1990 to 1993, concurrent with RG Veda, the CLAMP School, Shirahime, Chun-hyang, AND X. It makes you wonder how X and Tokyo Babylon shaped each other (but more on that later). Tokyo Babylon (and X) is also set in the same universe as the CLAMP School reflecting CLAMP’s early interest in crossovers. Planned out as 7 volumes, it consists of 11 big stories and 3 annexes. I read the omnibus versions which contain lots of coloured art, but the original print run is a beauty in 80s and early 90s graphic design.

While I'd never read this before, it's famous enough (two OVAs, a drama CD, and a live action movie), that I went in knowing some of the big spoilers, but not details. So while my reading was coloured by the knowledge of its tragic end, it still felt revelatory to me. It is the first CLAMP work where I think they had gotten their storytelling pinned down enough to consciously think of how to write a story that ties together on a thematic level, in every stage, and it's phenomenal. Heavy spoilers.

Synopsis: Onmyoji and thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan, Subaru Sumeragi is called upon to solve occult mysteries in post-bubble Tokyo. It's a time of glittering lights, a rotten economy, and city populated by lonely people desperate for an answer to their problems as the millennium draws near. Joined by his fashionable twin sister Hokuto and the kindly but strangely sinister vetenarian Seishiro Sakurazuka - who is in love with him - the overly sacrificing and empathetic Subaru must solve these problems and learn how to live - but Tokyo is not a kind place, especially to those with gentle natures.

The Story: On its surface, Tokyo Babylon begins as a "case-of-the-week" style story, where Subaru has to solve an occult case and learns something. Its a deceptively simple premise that allowed for CLAMP to explore pressing social issues of their time (which still feel resonant due to the sensitive way they explored them), while also building upon Subaru's character development through this, and the suspense of Seishiro's true nature. We observe Subaru grow through his failures and learn more about the limitations of his empathy. No case feels pointless in how it develops Subaru as a person, and his relationship to Seishiro. The dread we feel about Seishiro's connection to Subaru grows that we almost believe we might just get out of this. It's just excellently plotted out.

The comedy is well-timed and CLAMP know when to pull back from it to allow the emotional aspect to come through. Every case is incredibly gripping and I even cried reading "Old". I have seen some suggest it would have been more effective to have a massive twist rather than seed Seishiro's psychopathy throughout, but I actually think this works on a thematic level, and finding out Seishiro is a murderer, the bet, and Hokuto's death, still hit like a gut punch. It's a brilliant usage of seeding information without the full context until the end. I have no complaints here. It's a poignant story of Tokyo in the early 1990s and its destructiveness, while never losing its humanity.

The Themes: Do you know why the cherry blossoms are red. Tokyo Babylon is a story about well, Tokyo. It's about how modern city living that pursues only personal gain and conformity leads to human loneliness, and loneliness is a trap that destroys us all. We can never know someone else's pain, which leads to loneliness - but to recognize that is also freeing because it means we cannot judge and be judged for it. Having empathy is good, but too much and for the wrong people and not for yourself, can only lead to death. Subaru forms his self-identity through others, in contrast to his self-actualized twin, remaining aloof and detached from his own self - this is why Seishiro's betrayal breaks him, because Subaru doesn't know how to live as his own person. It is also what causes his loved ones so much harm in how little he loves himself in comparison to others.

Its a fascinating interplay between community and individuality, the reality of modern life of trying to be someone while also needing to generalize, without ever really settling on either side. Hokuto is right that they're not the same person, but Subaru is also right that they are deeply connected, as all people must be. Where it does come down hard is that humans are not the villains but Tokyo is, in what it represents - greed, selfishness, cruelty, and apathy. "Things like this happen in Tokyo everyday". It is intensely tragic and yet, strangely, incredibly life-affirming. Despite everything Subaru suffers, people are not born and made evil and everyone should be taken for who they are, not a faceless mass. Including ourselves.

The Characters: Like the plot, everything in the characters is tied into the story of Tokyo. Seishiro is Tokyo: the slick, cool-cut well to do man in a suit with no empathy and a taste for violence. He's Subaru's mirror - charming AND connected to people, and yet not. Nobody is special in Seishiro's eyes, nobody deserves to be treated as anything but an object. And then we have Subaru, poor sweet Subaru who is so empathetic and yet so detached from the world and himself because he's so focused on only his job, on not being an individual. He is what Tokyo wants him to be, filled with self-loathing and frankly suicidal impulses that he shouldn’t be alive if others are not.

It's so tragic to watch Subaru finally grow into a person, but to do so to the one person who will hurt him. Subaru wants to to love Tokyo so badly, that it kills his sister, the one person he SHOULD have been pouring his love into, the person who could love him back and expect nothing in return, the person who would allow him love while not dissolving himself in it. And Hokuto is just a showstopper, funny, kind, witty and cool. She's Subaru's northstar, the empathy and humanity where he cannot, almost co-dependent. I love characters that reflect one another and the themes.

The Art: The visual storytelling and panelling are fantastic. Tokyo Babylon offers a sparser and more distinctly black and white look than RG Veda, with a stronger emphasis on emotional paneling that breaks into beautiful spreads. It creates an almost wood-block, timeless appeal (despite the fashion) that is neither too busy nor too simplified. Anything to do with the Bet and especially the finale is incredible. Subaru surrounded by cherry blossoms? Haunting. The fashion is impeccable, I love the bold design choices in the covers and spreads. The character designs in and of themselves are quite simple (and I don't love the seme-uke look of Seishiro and Subaru), but the personality-costuming is so well done and tell stories themselves. And the use of Hokuto and Subaru being identical to conceal the twist? Masterful character design. My only complaint is some of the scanned photo backgrounds are jarring against the lovely drawn art.

Questionable Elements: Subaru is 16 and Seishiro is 25. That being said, I do think from their interviews and the actual text, we aren't meant to ship them, and it's not unrealistic to be a teen and fall for an older person only for it to majorly fuck you up because they abuse their greater knowledge to harm you (which hey, might be a theme!). Some of the way issues are handled is dated, but not too badly. Again, I’m not going to comment on whether this is queer representation or not, since I don’t think that has ever been CLAMP’s intention. Despite the stereotypical seme and uke stuff, the relationship feels real and tangible (which is why the payoff works). My real gripe is Hokuto getting fridged, though it's handled better than expected (still. let's stop killing women to make men sad).

Overall: A beautiful tragedy and an ode to human alienation, identity, and empathy. I went into this expecting to like it, and ended it never the same. It is genuinely a fantastic, fully complete thematic work from them that speaks as a reflection of the time it was written, and yet remains resonant. I know some people find it edgy, but I actually don't think edge is its intention, it's dark and it's tragic but never misanthropic. Yes, Subaru enters the adult world broken, but his refusal to become like Seishiro and to continue to count himself amongst humanity despite everything, reaffirms that life and people have value (notwithstanding his behaviour in X).

You can see so much of their ideas crystallize here that they’ll repeat across X, Xxxholic, etc. We're all just lonely people and we hurt each other in our loneliness, and it's important to recognize that in ourselves and take care of ourselves for it. We have value as individuals AND through others. Read it!

[yaspup9000]

had a dream about an extremely violent and obscure OVA about Earth’s history however the segment was about dinosaurs. Tbh maybe it wasnt like too gruesome but there were some scenes that made you go, “damn!”

This anime film looked like it came out in early 90s or late 80s and there was some scenes that was seen as too graphic yet oddly artistic ie an example of a brontosaurus getting hit by lighting and when it fell down it transformed into a tree that had been falen. Also another scene where when the astroid hit in a bit of a cartoony way both Prehistoric aquic life and land life punches each other and other bits of astroid as they turn into fossil. And then it transitions into a cave where a bat flies out of it.

oddly enough there was a bit of a land before time refence in the astroid scene but its one of those blink and you miss it also there was a narrator who sounds like professor oak in the old pokemon animes (ie the little bits where he showcased a pokemon and gets injured)

Thought it would be interesting to share and all.

[cacaitos]

2023 manga list:

most of the manga i read this year. more or less around 90, but that's also counting short stories, and things i omitted.

bottom text.

beastars/beast complex [3/5] beastars as an action shonen (or a story anyway) is all over the place so don't get your hopes up to much on that front. beastars' main consistent strong point is being Horny and Weird. i've said that sometimes it doesnt compromise with the logical terms of its premise but exploring a variety of odd relationships is imo the most interesting and engaging element of it anyway.

chainsaw man [4/5] overall is a mostly normal shonen if you were expecting for something more alternative. to be honest a lot how you would feel about Pt 1 will be told by how you feel about having very consecutive character deaths, it can feel a bit rushed. but it is indeed a bit distinctive abt how it tackles the topic of intimacy/relationships esp predatory ones in jump-type shonen. can't complain too much on that front. fire punch [3/5] once the berserk-type edgyness aside on the story is aptly entertaining, tho by some stretches it can be disorienting plotwise, in a negative way. it drops Lots of plot points or rushes them... you can really grow to like some characters but there will be a point -you will know- that it just kinda disengages w you. Curious existential ending. good if you're bored.

golden kamuy [3.5/5] also more typical shonen-esque than i expected. it never gets That Much Dark imo, as in total slow downers i mean. although obviously it is 'dark' more on the bizzare part. fun characters.

kaze to ki no uta [4/5] to be honest it does live up to the reputation of making you generally emotionally Unwell. but on my experience the development of gilbert and serge grew more engaging than I expected. tragic banger. terra e... [3/5] also was more than i expected since the one time i tried with the anime i got bored 1 ep in. but the story and tomy as the mc also gave me more heartfelt emotions than I expected. the pacing and amount info conveyed can get exhausting tho. didn't care much abt the ending. natsu e no tobira [2/5] the ova is gorgeous so it has those points on its favour. otherwise the ova and the manga are almost identical. youth and death themes and all i did Nawt care abt that pedo woman. weird story to develop that shoujo theme abt allowing ppl to see your vulnerability but eh i'll take it.

YAMAMOTO: ichi the killer [3.5/5] frenetic and entertaining enough if you're willing to go through knowing the tw's. suprisingly fast to read. if you're looking for the yamamoto Experience, it's a must after hommunculus. voyeur/voyeurs inc [2/5] got awfully disappointed w voyeurs-inc; i got hooked on voyeur (ie the prototype) but the change of cast on inc was a total letdown. don't think it's worth reading of you're a ymmt casual. maybe just the prototype. okama report [0/5] don't even fucking bother. barely passable even for anybody that's very into ymmt. adam & eve [2/5] shit story, curious fights/interactions.

KATSUHIRO OTOMO akira [3/5] a lot of the military and persecution sequences get so annoying and boring sometimes but if you forget abt the adaptations it's a decent enough scifi-action thing. the movie is better at that. the relationship between kaneda and tetsuo- dont like rn to pit which of the two did it better, but from the movie to the manga it's deff not a letdown, especially for tetsuo that has a lot more time. he's interesting. domu [2.5/5] interesting action wise, but as for story I wouldn't bother. kanojo no omoide (memories of her) [3/5] ootomo himself said some of the stories are quite meaningless and nonsensical lol but if you've seen the Magnetic Rose ova you will like some of them. world apartment horror [3/5] 1st didn't care about. liked 2nd. 3rd i didn't get shit. 4th it was cute. visitors [3/5] liked it. short piece/short peace [3/5] i liked it. highway star [3/5] feels like that suicide episode of paranoia agent, that kind of humor lol. boogie wogie waltz [1/5] uncomprehensible. good weather [1/5] eh.

houseki no kuni [4/5] it isn't getting better, the tragedy doesn't stop it's not an understatement. whoa.

dorohedoro [3/5] entertaining seinen, tho sometimes it gets kinda confusing and convoluted. love the characters theyre fun :)

ajin [4/5]

i was surprised that it was a closed off story from what i expected coming from the anime haha. neat action panelling and art. I get the feel that some characters had more to give and develop, but not disappointing.

OSHIMI SHUZO flowers of evil [3/5] the romantic triangle didnt bother me as much as i expected. it is a weird manga know that up front. i'm inside mari [4/5] i quite liked it and was quite surprised abt that fact lol. blood on the tracks [4/5] good family drama at leaston my year'sranking; shuzo's art style does wonders and is v immersive. some said that it felt repetitive and while i can say at some point the went a bit ehhhh, but reading it all back to back instead of weekly i don't feel it's that draggy. backwards i think it could've used more chapters, or content rather. happiness [2.5/5] tbh got disappointed, kinda disperse. like half 1 and 2 don't have much to do... okaeri alice [2.5/5] some individual characters really do make the manga endurable but some bits from the main characters are so...? unnecessary, or unnecessarily long at least. not really shuzo's best work. avant-garde yumeko [-/5] odd.

NAGABE totsukuni no shoujo [4.5/5] i mean, for most of it that i can describe it well with heartwarming but bittersweet, about parent-child relationships, love, loneliness, sacrifice, it's pretty good at that. then It Gets You. monotone blue [4/5] refreshing bl, sweet, the art delivers and the sensitivity. and i say refreshing bl bc it's not weird abt sa or adjacent harrassment.

i read most of his shoujo works, but they're too many to mention if you liked totsukuni you will like them, nothing to lose. some uh moral objections on some..EAT [-/5] it's okay. if you don't mind horny furries. SMELL [-/5] errr..... ok.

RYO SUMIYOSHI/SUZURI MADK [2.5/5] good art as always. more fucked up background things as it goes on but the mako-J thing is kinda crayzay. it has some hasty character developments at important times... torso no bokura [2/5] also good art, nothing too upsetting if at least relative to MADK. kinda enjoyable and entertaining anthology.

NEMUI ASADA sleeping dead [3/5] imo asada's overall best work, or at least to beginners or if you plan to read just one of hers. since the translation of the work is not finished i don't wanna assume the ending, but the starting premise is interesting enough, although we're currently on a less eventful note plotwise which can feel a bit disappointing for the moment. my little inferno [1.5/5] not particularly interesting conceptually, or writing. madara moyou no yoi [1.5/5] noticeable premise for an asada work, it being more action oriented i mean, but it's still to early to say in execution. SKIN [1/5] what the hell. that's asada for everybody/ dear, my god [1/5] odd ending. didn't coincide with how the story was handling at least the preist, imo. i literally don't care about the cactus story. CALL [2/5] surprisingly not so harsh of an asada story. more of a normal kind of depressing bl. ai, sei [1/5] don't mind in any particular direction. loved circle [1/5] did not care for the setting. not as dark as you would expect but not particularly interesting either. whatever ending. to the sea [1/5] ...? that happened i guess.

hikaru ga shinda natsu [3.5/5] it's a manga that has earned a reputation and a set of expectations that (i haven't caught up w latest ch) that delivers on the visual and effective ambientation, but we're to see on the story but good so far.

double (noda ayako) [4/5] veeery expressive art from noda. if you let it be as a normal acting manga it can get you by surprise on some emotional beats. better go in with low expectations, different tastes and all.

my broken mariko [3.5/5] it's a short story, solid. gorg art that adds to the sorrow and bittersweetness.

gunjou [3.5/5] hmmm it can feel a bit repetitive the back and forth at several points of the story, depends of how you read that related to unstable relationships. i don't necessarily want to brand it mainly as a GL but all in all its still one of the most interesting entries on it, with a toxic relationship that commits to the complexity of the situation.

gunjou gakusho [2.5/5] a melancholic anthology with beautiful art. i got to like a pair of the stories.

omoide emanon/sasurai emanon [3/5] personally i preferred omoide emanon (the one the mangaka said was Twitter for people unfamiliar w emanon) and i prefer the lineal story tbh. sasurai ones can be hit or miss, some feel incomplete? or unconcluded. i mean sasurai was cancelled midway so.

bibliomania [2/5] cool art, intriguing initial premise and execution, but i didn't find it particularly interesting by the end part, like thematically.

banana bread no pudding [2/5] didn't care for the main relationship itself, but the protagonist ended up being more engaging than i expected. a mostly soft and bittersweet read, but i would wait ot read more of the author's works to say how recommendable i would rank it as.

petshop of horrors [2.5/5] the individual stories can be hit ot miss from one person to another but imo D is very consistently entertaining and likeable lol.

higashi nishida [2.5/5] not much consistency but they have a nice undertsated feeling personally :). some of its introspection catches you off guard. no high expectations though.

kodomo wa wakette agenai [3/5] it's a nice short story, it's funny if you don't come in expecting loud knee-slappers types of jokes. it's good if you're looking for something light to read.

she loves to cook, she loves to eat [3/5] also good if you're looking for something light to read.

tamen de gushi [3/5] wholesome as you would expect. nice art on later years. depends on your taste.

my solo exchange diary [4/5] actually liked and grew to appreciate the author's organized narration style. it avoids a lot of confusion and she verbalizes her feelings in a relatable way for somethings sometimes so awkward to say out loud.

seibetsu x [2.5/5] this one is much less organized temporally and thematically so it can get a bit confusing, but it's funny on it's own, since the author is very blunt on their feelings lol.

killing stalking [3/5] less Evil than i remembered, just as disturbing, just as mid ending as i remembered. maybe it's bc of being a reread -that helps pick some things better- but reading it out of the heat of the moment in its era it's not as ill intended or deliberately romanticizing as one might have led to believe; it understands that much at least. visually however, still often leans into more eroticism i call inappropiate and unncessary.

boy's abyss [2.5/5] it's a manga that drags and wanders aimlessly too much, it gets repetitive. there are some plots and elements i consider more consistent and interesting, like the family, predatory relationships and the town's seeming unescapability themes, but the suicidal thing gets a bit exasperating when it just goes nowhere. dont expect tooo much. kinda good to binge tho.

himegoto, juukyuusai no seifuku [2.5/5] if you see the premise i know it sounds kinda weird but as i said when i read it my only comment abt is that it's suprisingly more compelling than one would expect, if you dont question much the individual prompts. gets kinda heavy by the end w on character tho.

yuureitou [2.5/5] sometimes entertaining on an adventure mystery type thing. theme and writing quality varying for the first 2/3s, off it's shits by the third that's kinda ehh conceptually. read it for some crazy shit ending. trans-wise, on the mc side, well they're some consistently annoying things all throughout but technically good intentioned but the ending 1/3 is v transmisogynistic, heads up.

uzumaki [2/5] ito's art is good. didnt really get me going much but not hated reading it. didnt get the ending, or didnt like it a lot at least.

fetish, kaoru fujiwara [2.5/5] takes a turn in seriousness by the 2nd story. 3rd story is so 😖 err, and then the rest go down in tone again.

the view beyond, kaoru fujiwara [2.5/5] one of those wouldn't that be fucked up stories. like that sure happened. not precisecly im even a fan of the message of the premise, even if it's technically showing it's horrible results.

raise wa tanin ga ii [3.5/5] t'was funny. all in all, esp towards the last chapters their interactions turn more earnest, personally, than i expected.

crying freeman [2/5] major saving grace is the art, it's pretty good. dunno, it feels however you feel about edgy 007-type 80s stories. personally didnt care abt mafia-clan thing substainance plots.

devilman lady [2/3] lot's of SA till it gets a bit unbearable and boring, heads up. did not care about most of the plot itself but if you liked the og devilman characters, the mains of Lady have the same likeability. save from The Horrors of the end. -shin devilman [1/5] boring. don't lose nothing over not reading it. uh. that first chaper uh.... -amon - devilman mokushiroku [1.5/5] edgy in the usual way dvm is edgy in that usual measure,s o the story is nothing to die for lol. good art (save for Things) and cool visuals, body horror, etc more than anything. the silene storyline is the more interesting part, the other idgaf about. -neo devilman [2/5] it's an anthology. seeing different artist's takes is entertaining enough. usual dvm edgyness. -devilman saga [0/5] boring dear god. not one saving grace of entertainment even for a nagai dvm work.

tetsuo the bullet man [1.5/5] shot for shot as the third tetsuo movie. i liked the manga and its ending more than the movie's tho. not like the movie is good anyway.

dog ningen [1/5] don't let the premise scare you, it's pretty mild. and amateur. and boring.

[nanjokei]

i know ive said it before a few months ago but even though i dont go there i feel like people are pretty meanspirited towards genshin fans. obviously one of the biggest games around is gonna attract people who are new to geek ish shit like video games and anime. which means its likely their opinions are likely to be unseasoned. i think theres an entire world that exists for teenagers and normies with smartphones that we arent seeing, maybe its a generational gap idk

like the people who are super into webtoons and genshin and god knows what else, younger people and normies, lack the etiquette that was basically beaten into our brains through years of frequenting forums and microblogging social sites (livejournal, tumblr) (this is a lie because most people lack etiquette to begin with) so they act unbecoming, get into fights, make claims about skinny twinks being daddy or whatever. mostly cuz they know nothing else. is it annoying? yeah, but it feels meanspirited to write all of them off, and all of genshin off. i dont play it, i tried it close to launch and found myself completely disinterested so after not even completing the tutorial i ended up dropping it, but i have a lot of friends who are normal and find themselves enjoying it unironically and theyre surprised that they do due to the overly exaggerated reputation it has. im just speaking in general, of course they have the same issues a lot of people have with genshin, in fact i think most people who Actually Play Games would...

in general i dont get the catastrophization of genshin. i feel like so many people attribute things to it that dont make sense, like how suddenly all anime character design, especially fantasy, has gotten worse. my own feelings on the designs is pretty neutral. but at the same time its like, a fucking anime game, idk, i dont have feelings on it to begin with because it just looks like most other anime games but hoyoverse flare is hoyoverse flare.

to begin with i don't think hoyoverse is to blame for fantasy designs sucking. i think that is completely dishonest to suggest. as a fantasy fan, i think that its an issue of decay and lack of interest in the genre. i wrote about my feelings in isekai before (hint: mostly positive) but its a fact that most people have no interest in fantasy anymore. its seeing a slight genuine revival recently, but i feel like most of people's exposure is from isekai that take a very minimalist and "modern" sensibility to the designs so as not to be cringe and over the top. here is a google search i did in november 2022 with the search term "anime elf"

i mostly use this cap to show that 1) this is an issue ive been concerned about consistently and 2) if you search "anime" anything these days you get a lot of ai art and that is just noise to me in this context. by the way, in nov 2022 if you searched "90s anime elf", the results are entirely deedlit lol. she's very pretty, and every anime aesthetic page on social media is eager to reshare her and erroneously go "80s anime is the best 😍😍😍" you know, the ova series and tv anime that came out in 1990 and 1998 respectively. its just a complete and utter lack of disinterest in the fantasy genre all around that leads to fantasy anime being swallowed up into nothingness and not being present in any zeitgeist. even tales of, a series that seemed inseperable from the conventions of the genre, has forsaken it. the super tropey anime fantasy jrpg doesn't exist anymore. even fire emblem keeps hiring artists that have no business designing characters in a medieval setting (kozaki, kurahana, pikazo). granblue FANTASY has entirely shed its final fantasy tactics inspo aesthetic and is increasingly releasing more characters distant from those sensibilities.

anyway, my point is that for over a decade now fantasy as us nerdy 20 somethings grew up with has been considered owakon and blasé. nu anime fantasy is either informed by wanting to smooth out the fantasy element as much as possible (see: rezero's character design sense. i have no comment on the story itself) or inspiration from anime MMOs that usually had more simple armor and clothing designs for most players who didn't pay up. its a whole issue from top to bottom, and frankly genshin has nothing to do with it. there are modern series clearly made by people who love the fantasy we grew up with. even those that have a different world view, like tensura, lampshades the protagonist's view of fantasy to the world he actually ended up in.

if anything genshin at least feels like its calling to SOMETHING. im not sure what, to be honest i dont really get the design thoroughline of it, and a lot of the designs are overdesigned, but i think some designs do feel reminiscent of a more familiar fantasy aesthetic (venti comes to mind).

of course its true that a lot of young artists take inspiration from genshin, you know, its one of the most popular games in the world, its like mind boggling hearing how big its install base is, but also i keep hearing that it had some kind of ripple effect on all character design in every game and anime ever. can anyone actually show me like even 3 examples of this? like, be honest with me. is that not peak catastrophizing? game has barely been out for 3 years, its not really enough for its ripple effect to suddenly change the world.

what you are complaining about is an issue that has been an issue since the 2010s. maybe you are only noticing it now that you have a new mediore hatesink to invest in. anyway yes this mediocre and halfhearted defense of genshin's fans was an excuse for me to rant about fantasy as a genre being on its death throes and how people are misattributing the tragedy to rant about some mediocre anime gacha game. i hope the recent popularity of series like dungeon meshi and frieren (i mention them bc theyre currently airing right now) makes people remember that fantasy can be good and pure soul. i hope we get a real tales of game soon also.

if you read this far please let me know what you think even on anon. its a topic that greatly interests me (anime fantasy, not genshin, i have nothing to say about genshin)

[tenchiforum]

For the first time ever, the lost interview from the creators of Tenchi Muyo! has been found!

Original article here

You can watch the Tenchi Muyo! portion with English subtitles above.

For the original, untouched tape, you can watch here. You can also watch on archive.org.

If you’re interested in how and why this was lost, and how we found it, read below!

Part 1: (Space)ships Passing in the Night

It goes without saying that Tenchi Muyo! is a juggernaut franchise. Due to its popularity in the 90s as well as its multiple continuities, if there’s a product of any kind, you can find a Tenchi-branded version of it. From Sega Saturn soap to panty eyeglasses wipes, Tenchi Muyo! has it all. As a result, the phrase “I’ve never seen that before” gets uttered quite a bit when you’re on the hunt for something Tenchi related.

What also happens is that it is easy to miss something that you’re not looking for, because you don’t know it exists or what’s in it. Every time one searches through Japanese auction sites, you’re basically cutting your way through a dense jungle in the hopes of maybe catching a glimpse of what you’re looking for, while also catching glimpses of interesting curiosities, such as this:

PIONEER LDC – “OVA Operation Start” (OVA作戦始動)

This little black box, produced by Pioneer LDC was starting at over 100 USD. Upon closer inspection, you can see that the front pops up, and it has cardboard cutouts of Pioneer’s OVA properties as they were launching in 1992. According to the listing, the box also had a button one could press that would make voice lines play (presumably from each of the franchises featured). Green Legend Ran, Bastard!!, Kishin Corps, and Moldiver are all featured on the sides, but prominently featured in the middle was Pioneer’s bread and butter, the Zeus of their pantheon, their flagship series, Tenchi and Ryoko from Tenchi Muyo!.

For those who don’t remember or don’t happen to know, Pioneer LDC jumped into the world of Original Video Animation (or OVA) in 1992 with these properties (though Moldiver and Kishin Corps, of course would release in February and March of 1993) so this little video was more than likely a cool little showcase of what they had.

At first glance, while it is really cool, it’s not something one would immediately jump at to buy. Especially considering that the contents of the tape were unknown, the description did not offer any insight into it other than where it was from, the working condition of the box button and that it was “Not For Sale.” Which again in Tenchi fandom is not unheard of, nor does it mark something as particularly rare. For a price point so high, I just shrugged it off as a cool curiosity and continued my daily look through of aforementioned auction sites.

Part 2: A Crisis of Revelation

Because of the launch of tenchimuyowiki.com, I’ve been voraciously cataloging every piece of Tenchi media I own and any I can find in an effort to preserve Tenchi history. One night while I was working on one such project, I was looking through images and playing around in Photoshop, ripping Japanese text from images, when I inadvertently clicked the wrong button on an image I was looking at, and it popped over to this image:

This is not only the only known picture of the co-creators of Tenchi Muyo! together, but this is the only known image of Masaki Kajishima’s face. Due to Kajishima’s reclusiveness, he’s never shown his face in interviews, and only very rarely has he even done audio interviews. Everything about the man is kept at a distance from fans. The most high-quality picture of Kajishima that most fans know is from the back of his head.

I stared at the image again for the first time in a while. I’d looked at the first image of the two many times before, but on this particular night my brain clicked the right way, and I said to myself

“Wait a minute, this looks like it’s from a video…”.

If you’ve ever watched old Japanese game shows like Takeshi’s Castle or anything like that, the text is unmistakably made from video of an older time. But even with this idea buzzing around in my head, I was still at a loss. Considering how old this was, it could have been from a news report too, which if that was the case, no way would something like that have survived.

However, I wasn’t going to let this go this time, and I tracked down the source of this image: Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki Otanoshimi Ooemaki.

And there, right next to the image, was text talking about where this was from.

But wait a minute, I recognize that image above it… That’s the characters from the black box!

THAT BLACK BOX HAS THE INTERVIEW!

The title of the tape, translatable as “OVA Operation Start” was a promotional tape that Pioneer made and sent out to pitch their new line of home video products to potential customers. This box and its tape were not for sale, and unless you were lucky enough to be a Japanese Pioneer employee, or a Japanese video store owner, or be in Japan in the early 1990s, you never saw this video or its contents.

With this revelation freshly burned into my brain, I hurriedly moved back to the auction sites.

But it was nowhere to be found.

No, it can’t be…

I quickly inserted the Kanji into Google and found out that the box had finally sold… not even three weeks beforehand. It had been up every single time in the last eight months I’d checked while I was browsing for things, not knowing that the holy grail of Tenchi Muyo! interviews was on it. It even failed to sell on ebay, before finally being bought for around 10,000 yen.

To say I was devastated was an understatement.

Something like that did not come around every day. The odds of it ever showing up again were probably slim to none.

However, I didn’t give up, and then it appeared.

Part 3: Never Tell Me the Odds

After some searching, and with the help of Tenchiforum’s own Crazed, a similarly described VHS tape was found on auction sites. Unlike the black box tape, this one had a very old (but machine-made) label on it. Marked with Pioneer LDC’s logo as well as their signature LaserDisc logo, it had the exact same name with a slightly different description above.

Regardless, if what was on the tape was on the tape, the grail had been found.

And sure enough, that’s exactly what it was!

Curiously, it has a TCR time marker burned into the top of the video, meaning this could have possibly been an internal tape specifically within Pioneer. The seller also had many other promotional videos meant for stores as well. How they got this tape in their possession was not clear, but ultimately, it was the real McCoy.

While reading this, you may be thinking to yourself, “But Dagon, what makes this so rare? Why is this lost?”

Well, for one thing, this video has never appeared on any other release of Tenchi, ever. It is exclusive to these Not For Sale tapes and was not mass-produced in the way the actual episodes of the show were. The circumstances surrounding it also are probably why it never appeared anywhere else. This was made specifically to sell the idea of these properties to people. Also, as mentioned before, Kajishima doesn’t like his face being shown, and Hayashi moved on to El-Hazard after the two split up. Whether it was Kajishima, Hayashi, Pioneer, or a combination of the three, this interview stayed on this tape for 30 years exclusively, and the job it was supposed to do, sell Tenchi Muyo! to the masses, succeeded.

[magicalgirlagency]

You know of Crayon Shin-chan too?!? No way, I thought I was the only one who knew of it!!

Indeed I do! It's one of my core memories! I've watched three english dubs of it, too. There was even a reference to it back in 90's!Sailor Moon, back when it was at its peak. It's quite popular in Japan, and is still on-going even after the author's passing, much like Doraemon.

Though I really wouldn't recommend it to lots of people, since it's a product of its time and plenty of its jokes and gags have aged like milk, not to mention how some of its topics aren't exactly kid-friendly; but it's something that I certainly hold dearly in my heart.

I also remember that they have an in-Universe Magical Girl anime entitled Fushigi Majokko Mari-chan, which it was about a clumsy young witch travelling to the Mortal Realm as a second chance to prove her worth after failing in her magic exams (as well as accidentally transforming her little brother into an otter). The fact that this isn't a real anime is an absolute travesty in my honest opinion.

The artstyle is quite unusual and quirky, which it's a fresh breath of air in animanga in general and I love it when they get experimental and don't adhere to conventionally captivating artstyles; not to mention the animation that occasionally fucks hard in its specials and movies/OVAs, specially when Masaaki Yuasa is at work (you may know them from The Tatami Galaxy, Ping Pong: The Animation, Devilman: Crybaby and that Adventure Time episode Food Chain, just to name a few).

Oh, and one of my many dreams is to at least try those Chocobi cookies, which are Shin-chan's favorite snack. Yes, they exist in real life:

They're up there with Naruto's Ichiraku Ramen to me.

[kirnet]

🔥 :D

DING DING you are the winner of my blue submarine no 6 rant!!

For context: blue sub no 6 is a 4 part OVA from the nineties about a post apocalyptic world that was intentionally flooded by an evil scientist, leaving the vast majority of humanity dead and the rest living the best they can on the water. It kind of sucks? I am now obsessed with it. No one will know what the fuck I’m talking about.

Because there is only this OVA and an untranslated manga from 1967 that I can’t track down, another 5 part manga from the 90s that i dont think was translated either, and two untranslated video games, I am forced to scrounge the bottom of the barrel from fucking reddit for any sort of discussion. The following is my response to those overwhelmingly negative reactions.

All of the characters get criticized as shallow, which to some degree I can agree with because it is a short series (about 2 hours) with a lot of characters, but I think a lot of it is just a blatant refusal to engage with them in any meaningful way. Hayami isn’t a jaded asshole just bc his friend died, he’s a jaded asshole bc his trigger happy impulses directly led to his friend’s death! Because he’s actually a super sensitive and compassionate man as shown in the series even when he doesn’t want to be!! He’s an addict who has to self medicate to ease the pain because he cares SO MUCH. And a lot of blue sub’s characterization and world building is subtle, not a lot is really told to you. It has these beautiful moments of silence that just show you character and worldbuilding, which people hate bc I guess it confuses them? Did they pay attention?? And yes a lot of the other characters dont really get a lot of depth, but they still feel like real people in the little moments you get with them. It feels like a fleshed out world with real dynamics and real people that you were just dropped in the middle of, which many won’t like, but I think its better than spoonfeeding you every bit of information.

People also shit on the ending, which I get it is actually not an ending. It’s a very open ended end with really no conclusion. I think that fits with the uncertainty of humanity going forward in this world. There’s also a lot of criticism of the villain, who unfortunately is the the weakest part of the show when he should be the strongest, but I think a lot of this is bc of the above reasons. He’s an ecofascist who thinks that there were too many people on earth so he sped up global warming and flooded the majority of the world. Idk, maybe that hits closer to home now than it did in the 90s, but real communities are threatened by the sea and there are very real perpetrators of climate violence. His motivation is weak and kind of non existent- which is a fault of the story, but also like. what actual reason is there to justify something like this other than he was a rich powerful guy who could? Again, maybe it’s just because I’m looking at it in a very modern lens and reading too much into it (I surely am), but there’s a reason it doesn’t really bother me.

I’m gonna stop here before I explode. I dont think i can in good conscience really recommend it to anyone? but if someone does watch please tell me please

[canmom]

Animation Night 176: The Hedge-Pigge Whin'd

Thrice the brinded Cat hath mewed, Thrice and once the hedge-pig whin'd, Harpier cries, 'tis time! 'tis time! - Macbeth

For the fourth time, Animation Night encounters Halloween. What horrors yet await us? Oh, there are....... many...

I'm going to keep this writeup pretty short bc (as is probably evident from the Posting lately) I'm not in the best of sorts.

The traditional Animation Night halloween goes something like this: a vampire-related anime, some Yamishibai, and something weird and different. Sometimes that leads to discovering some truly great and unexpected films, like Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (Psiconautas) by Alberto Vasquez. I had been thinking of doing Vasquez's Unicorn Wars tonight, but I decided to hold off to rewatch Birdboy alongside it in a week or two.

Other gems we've encountered have been the Chilean stop-motion film obliquely about a Nazi cult The Wolf House, the 'gekimation' works of Ujicha, the gorgeous one-man adaptation of Suehiro Maruo's ero-guro manga Shoujo Tsubaki, and of course Phil Tippett's 30-year magnum opus Mad God. There's a reason I look forward to Halloween each year.

Animation is a tricky fit for horror stories, particularly traditional animation. The stylised and clearly artificial presentation intrinsic to animation can be distancing and make it hard to make things genuinely scary - so if anything, a lot of horror creators benefit from a deliberately low-fi style, which avoids being too obvious with displays of technique. But animation of all kinds loves horror images and themes, from gory OVAs of the 80s full of rapacious demons, to what you could call 'spoopy' works like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hotel Transylvania and Paranorman which play around with all the Halloween/Hammer Horror imagery - the Draculas and Frankensteins and so on.

So what's the recipe tonight?

Well, for our vampire anime, we have now worked through the obvious ones, so it's on to... the Darkstalkers OVA from 1997-8, adapting Capcom's series of fighting games. Though in Japan it's called ヴァンパイアハンター THE ANIMATED SERIES (Vampire Hunter: The Animated Series).

Fittingly for a late-90s OVA, this is full of crazy sick animation, notably including a number of cuts by Yoshinori Kanada. The story is basically: two vampire clans are having a war, but then aliens show up. Somehow that leads to battling atop exploding zeppelins. I'm curious.

For our Western Animation slot we have something by Genndy Tartakovsky (Animation Night 35). While Tartakovsky is best known for his 2D animation and hyper-simplified graphical style, he's also directed Hotel Transylvania in 3D. I was rather dismissive of this one at a glance apparently, but I've been told it's good and I mean, it's Tartakovsky right? I'm definitely curious to see how his style crosses dimensions.

Hotel Translyvania was created at Sony Pictures Animation, the studio that would later blow everyones' minds with Spiderverse. Their history is this: Sony, the international media and tech giant, had a visual effects studio called Sony Pictures Imageworks. They were considering selling it, but then came the wave of CG films beginning with Shrek, and suddenly the smell of money was in the air. So Imageworks was retooled into a studio for making feature-length CG movies. Their early films were pretty formulaic, but they gradually began to get more ambitious.

Hotel Transylvania, which depicts a hotel for monsters run by Dracula, has had a rough history, with Tartakovsky actually the sixth director to take on the project. His goal was to try and take the vibe of 2D animation, with its squash and stretch and variable timing, and bring it to 3D - a concept that was perhaps ahead of its time! How did he manage? Let's find out.

For our Yamishibai slot we have Yamishibai.

...ok, for those just joining us this I should probably explain. It's kind of like creepypastas for weebs. Yamishibai is a series of limited-animation shorts in the style of kamishibai paper theatre, telling short horror stories. In the first half of the 20th century, kamishibai performers would go around telling stories with illustrated panels, and the form was influential on the early days of manga. They're usually a blast so we'll definitely see a few of these.

...and, given the late start that will probably be all we have time for, but if we're in the mood, I can pull out a couple shorter animated horror works. Next week, we'll follow it up with Alberto Vasquez, revisiting Birdboy and also checking out Unicorn Wars.

Sound fun? See you at twitch.tv/canmom; we will start the spooky playlist soooooooooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnn...

[translationandbetrayals]

A totally normal look into some of Mamoru Hosoda's Early Work

It would no overstatement to call Mamoru Hosoda a household name in the current landscape of anime. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time(2006), Summer Wars(2009), Wolf Children(2012); The Boy and The Beast(2015); his film catalogue should say enough. The first two films in that list helped consolidate Madhouse as a safe-haven for creative anime projects & creators.

However, with all the attention and acclaim rightfully surrounding those works, its easy to overlook how this all got started. What was he up to before his big break-out hits? And most importantly, what other gems can we find there?

Hosoda started working in Toei Animation, where for a solid decade, he cut his teeth as key animator for various shows, starting with Crying Freeman(1988), and working on series like Slam DunkSailor Moon, Slam Dunk, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Dragon Ball Z, where he worked on the massively succesful Broly OVA. Somehow, in-between all of that, he found time to do storyboarding for seven episodes for J.C. Staff's Revolutionary Girl Utena. 

By the second-half of the 90s, he even nabbed a few directing credits for episodes of shows like GeGeGe no Kitarou(1996) and Himitsu no Akko-chan(1998), a mahou shoujo show. Even back then, it seemed like Toei knew the kind of talent they had on their hands, as little over a year after his work on Akko-chan, the studio put him in charge of his first major motion picture.

It was the centerpiece of an ambitious media-mixing initiative, with videogame tie-ins, an ongoing TV show, CD-Dramas. Toei was pulling out all the stops, and they had to, because they were about to step into the ring with a cultural phenomenon. A show that had exploded in popularity in the 90s and was on its way to become the highest-grossing media franchise of all time. They wanted to compete with Pokemon.

THAT'S RIGHT, THIS POST IS ABOUT DIGIMON

You read that right, Mamoru Hosoda's first major motion picture was the Digimon OVA. In fact, the man is a hugely important part of the series' history, being in charge of directing its two most iconic films, and what is considered by many as the best episode in the entire franchise. And now that I've succesfully conned you into reading this far, its high time we dive into these three landmark productions in the filmmaker's career and see what parts of his style we can identify from them.

Despite being only 20 minutes long, Digimon Adventure Movie(not to be confused with Digimon: The Movie) is probably the most important piece of media in the franchise. Despite having only directed less than ten full episodes of television at the time, Hosoda was asked to create a blueprint for the anime to follow, while also connecting the already existing videogame franchise to it.

However, the biggest hurdle it had to overcome was its timing. It had been three years since Pokemon Red had hit store shelves, and less than two since its own anime had started airing. The similarities of the names alone would draw comparisons. If Toei and Hosoda wanted to get in on the monster-collecting craze, they'd have to set themselves apart from the biggest game in town. So how did they achieve this? Easy, they made a Kaiju film.

Taichi and Hikari are two toddlers being raised by their single mom, when one night, an egg suddenly burst out from their parent's computer screen. Out of it bursts a small, adorable little creature. A digital monster. While they quickly begin to bond and play together, this being begins to transform, both inwards and outwards. With each change, its personality changes, first to the friendly and talkative Koromon, and then into the silent and more animalistic Agumon.

Rather than a story about building up a group of friendly monsters with fairly static traits, Digimon opted for the polar opposite approach as a starting point. .

For most of the film, we follow one of the titular Digital Monsters, Agumon, and unlike a Pikachu or a Butterfree, he is not subservient, or even entirely friendly to our human protagonists, Taichi and Hikari.

As Hosoda himself puts it:

"I didn’t want to take the easy shortcut where the Digimon = kids’ friends. At this stage, I wanted to keep some tension about whether the Digimon is a friend or an enemy. After all the film takes place before the protagonist becomes friends with Digimon, with all that implies in both good and bad ways. If he just looks up at it, it would just seem like they’re friends. I’d rather frame it more objectively, in order to question what that Kaiju is for them."

(Translated by NohAcro of WaveMotionCannon.com)

In a way, the story applies a bit of an urban fantasy twist to both the monster catcher and the kaiju genres. One could even call it an early example of the "Sekai-kei" genre. It takes place in this apartment complex, adding a backdrop of mundanity and "realism" to this otherwise fantastical story of a critter emerging out of your parents' old computer. This proves to be a staple in Hosoda's works, because, as he puts it in that same interview: (His) goal is to depict unrealistic things in a realistic way."

The choice of only using children also proves to be an astute one. It adds this air of whimsy at the start, with how adorable Kairi and Taichi are when meeting Koromon and reacting to the start. On the flipside, when the movie begins to shift into its second half and the newly-evolved Agumon begins raising hell across town, it ratchets up the tension to have these kids caught up in between giants. Hosoda, for his part, also adds that:

"I also wanted to only have children characters, to have that secretive sense of waking up at night, peeking outside, being the only one to see a monster walking, and feeling special about it."

It really feels like the movie captures both the hopes and the fears for the then nascent internet. A place that could bring about a never-before-seen avenue for creativity and unlimited creativity and wonder, but one that could also be destructive, unpredictable, everchanging, and even dangerous.

If nothing else, at 20 minutes, the film is an breeze and a treat to the senses. It has a certain vibe that is, for the most part, lacking in the rest of the franchise and even the genre. A feast for the eyes, everything from Botamon's blur-like movements to the sheer weight and scale behind Greymon's fight scene. Also, as a sweet bonus, there's a scene where they animate Toei's offices getting destroyed(sadly, I couldn't find footage of this, but the director talks about it in the aforementioned interview).

Since the movie was made in parallel with the anime, Hosoda and crew's film proved foundational to the franchise. Most of the things that set it apart from Pokemon were first showcased here. The more involved nature of humans in fights, the monsters' everchanging personality, and most importantly, the fact these could talk. All of that and more had its start here.

The short film released in March of 1999, and while I have no data regarding how well it did box-office wise, its said that Toei was pleasantly surprised with Hosoda's work. So much so, that they put him to work on a second one right away, but that story would have to wait, because in less than 24 hours, the Digimon Adventure anime would premiere.

Home Away from Home

I would love to sit here and tell you that Digimon Adventure was this ground-breaking avant-garde piece of television. That it was everything Pokemon should've been and the much more mature show some fans paint it out to be. The reality is that for most of its runtime, Digimon Adventure is... alright.

Despite the novelty of it being one of an isekai anime decades before SAO's release, Adventure is a standard fare monster catcher series. A bunch of kids get transported to a new world, they meet their new monster friends, now completely divorced from Hosoda's ambiguity, and they travel, discovering new evolutions as their bonds grow deeper. Fairly standard stuff.

In the way of visuals, its main selling point was, of course, the design of their brand of collectable gremlins. Since Pokemon had a chokehold on certain demographics, Digimon opted to aim for an older audience, but not that much older. From looking at the monsters alone, one can feel Toei trying to attract a shonen audience, whether it be through skimpier girls or extremely edgy designs which may or may not border on parody.

Save for the banging opening and evolution themes, there wasn't much to write home about, or at least, that was until episode 21, known in English as "Home Away from Home." And guess who directed it? Yup, its your boy, Hosoda.

To call this episode a change of pace is nothing short of an understatement. After defeating the previous arc's villain, Etemon(who in the English dub is changed to an Elvis impersonator), Tai and Agumon are sucked into a black hole. Instead of dying, the pair somehow find themselves in the real world. However, something is wrong...

I don't just mean "there's some funny business with digital monsters", either. The entire episode has an unnerving atmosphere to it. The backgrounds are all of these extremely saturated greys and whites and there's this unique sense of ennui that permeates throughout the runtime. Its as if the whole dream were some sort of dream, when in reality, it is anything but.

That leads me to another point, the quality of the animation is off the charts, at least in comparison to the rest of the show. It looks better than anything the anime had done before or since. Not only is the real world realized in such an eery way, but the fights themselves are a treat, featuring complex choreography and even some traces of sakuga in it.

At the center of this is Hikari, Taichi's sister, who for some reason, seems to remember Koromon from a previous encounter. Keep in mind that, at the time, there was no word on the OVA's canonicity, so the episode served to link the series and the short film, while adding a fresh mystery into the mix, "if Hikari can remember Koromon, then why don't Taichi and the other digidestined remember the Kaiju fight?"

Speaking of Hikari, her introduction to show-only watchers(and people outside of Japan) added an uneasy tension to the episode. This was not only due to her unnerving demeanor as the classic trope of "creepy child who knows more than she lets on", but also through a sort of competition she has for her brother's attention.

The central conflict of the episode dealing less with the specific monster fight of the week, and more with both ends of the protagonist's life tugging at him from opposite sides. On one side, there's Hikari, who has lost her brother to this unknown world, clinging to him in hopes of making him stay with her; on the other, there's Agumon, his connection to the digital world and the rest of the cast, who need his help. They both want his attention, competing for it, but with neither being "in the wrong", as it were.

The episode ends in a shockingly clean fight scene(seriously, the jump in animation quality from this episode is insane) and a heart-wrenching ending where Taichi leaves his sister behind to return to the digital world.

"Home Away from Home" is a turning point, both for the show and the franchise. It serves as a pallette cleanser after the decent but unimpressive couple of arcs that preceedes it, making it perfect as a stand-alone watch; it serves to connect Hosoda's directorial debut with the series, which becomes hugely important for the plot, and it kicks off the Myotismon arc, which is by far and away, Adventure's strongest run of episodes.

However, its most important for another trend that it started, one that would define the series to this day. It began to see the show's focus moving away from the idyllic vistas and fantastical fights of the digital world and into the all-too-relatable real life issues of its cast. More so than the edgy designs or the talking monsters, this is what I would say sets the show apart from its much more succesful competitor. And that all started with Episode 21 of Digimon Adventure.

Summer Wars Zero.

While directing an all-time great episode, Hosoda had something else cooking up in the backburner. I'm of course talking about that second OVA, one that would push the bar for Digimon's animation, while serve as the blueprint for one of his later works.

Almost a year to the day of the release of that first OVA, Toei would release Digimon: Bokura War Game. "Our War Game", as its known in the west, is a movie so good they had to make it four times. 

It picks up some time after the end of the show, with our characters back in their home world and dealing with the struggles of adolescence. However, during a summer vacation, a new virus-type Digimon emerges, penetrating every computer and eating through data like nobody's business.

As our heroes contact this new monster, it begins to evolve at an unprecedented rate, as it evades, outsmarts, and eventually beats Agumon and company at their strongest. Not only that, but the gang's meddling has caused the Virus to target them with a nuclear missile. So, with the clock ticking down to annihilation, Taichi and his co-lead Yamato must chase the now fully-evolved  Diaboromon to the ends of the Internet before it ends humanity as a whole.

If that synopsis seemed familiar to you in some way, shape or form, its because its also the plot to Hosoda's Summer Wars. It's also the plot to the second episode of the Digimon Adventure remake/reboot, titled "War Game". Like I said, this stuff is so good that both the studio and the director wanted another crack at it.

The similarities with Summer Wars don't end with the plot synopsis. The way the virtual world of the internet is animated in one film is analogous to the other. The way the backgrounds are animated, the outlines to the characters, and even some of the themes. In a lot of ways, watching Our War Game is like watching a battle shonen prototype for Hosoda's later work, both visually and narratively.

And while we're at it. I want to take a moment to gush about the animation, because it is at an all-time high for the franchise. The hilarious expressions of the digi-destined in the real-world, the tense editing, and the design of Diaboromon, they're all top-notch stuff. However, the movie's depiction of the world-wide-web takes the cake. I still remember being blown away by just how cool the internet looked in this movie, and even on rewatch, I still can't believe something this pretty was ever in Digimon. The best part, of course, being the fights.

https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/cf2e56e1394581e8c4be3f7d79c76402.mp4

Look at the missile rain, the fast-paced dodges, the impact on that punch. It's all so clean. Or look at this other example from 2/3rds into the film. Its so gorgeous, I don't even need to go into more detail here.

https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/e1b33b7085da91e11c415bf152c71586.mp4

Some other aspects of Hosoda's writing begin to peek through as well, with the director's style and core themes beginning to take form here, before blossoming in his work at Madhouse and Studio Chizu. Trends begin to form, starting with the first OVA in 1999, being fleshed out by his second film and continuing to this day.

One of the running ideas in Hosoda's version of Digimon is a conscious move away from the classic "Good vs Evil" narrative that everyone knows and loves. Its present in the first OVA, as the "villain" is merely another creature acting on self-preservation after being attacked, which the director described as akin to watching a lion and an antelope fight. In "Home Away from Home", the main conflict revolves around Hikari and Koromon's battle for Taichi's attention, one where no one really is at fault. Hikari is not evil for wanting to stay with her older brother, and neither is Koromon for wanting to get back with the rest of the gang.

However, nowhere is this running theme better embodied than in Diaboromon(or Diablomon in Japanese). As Hosoda puts it:

"Right, since the Net Digimon is more like some kind of bug, it’s closer to a natural catastrophe in that sense. That’s why we cannot consider it as a straight up evil, and Taichi doesn’t have any hatred toward Diablomon. He just wants to avoid a threat. The generation before us have grown only with stories about moral justice, so they cannot help but look for an antagonist, but that’s their problem (laugh). And I think people of the next generation are aware of the fact that they don’t live in that kind of world anymore. It’s not worth holding a grudge against the world, instead it’s more important to think about realistic ways to deal with it."

The Western Butchering of Hosoda's Digimon OVAs(or why you shouldn't watch Digimon: The Movie)

Now, despite this being a academically convenient excuse to gush about some of the best Digimon episodes every produced, I am not entirely being facetious by calling these "hidden gems". I'm aware that, some of you may have already watched these films in some way, shape, or form before. Probably without even knowing who directed it. It is part of a massive international media franchise, and it was distributed internationally. Hell, it was even shown in Theaters. The problem is... how they were distributed.

Enter Digimon: The Movie.

If you've watched either of the OVAs, chances are you watched it as part of the infamous feature-length film. See, by 2000, Pokemon had already turned the box-office into a money printer twice over with their first two films, and FOX, who had the licensing rights for Digimon, wanted to replicate their success.

What was their problem? Well, all they had were a bunch of seasonal OVAs, the ones Hosoda made, and a two-part film based on the second series. "Digimon Hurricane Touchdown!! / Transcendent Evolution! The Golden Digimentals", which, I must say, are both terrible names.

In contrast to Hosoda's earlier efforts, these were directed by Shigeyasu Yamauchi(the director for the first Broly OVA), had an entirely different cast of characters, and were god awful. For time reasons, I won't go into too much detail, but just know that these two movies barely make any sense on their own and would otherwise only be worth mentioning for the decent animation and the on-screen debut of Terriermon.

So there were these three Digimon stories that had nothing to do with each other, with one of them not even using the same characters, so what does FOX do? Well, of course, they go up to the dubs' writers and ask them to smush all of these into a 97 minute runtime, oh, and also, they added a woefully unfunny Angela Anaconda short to the start for... reasons that I cannot fathom.

The plots of the Digimon Adventure OVA and Our War Game are mangled to fit Hurricane Touchdown's uninteresting mystery plot.  New connections are established straight out of nowhere and given the vastly different animation styles of each part, the visuals clash with each other, especially as parts of one story as chopped up to fit into another. Not only that, but the pacing of the movie is all over the place, climaxing halfway through the runtime with Our War Game's buzzer-beating final fight, and then it just keeps going for the final third.

Worst of all, in the process of making this Frankenstein's Monster of a film, over 40 cumulative minutes had to be cut for time.

The resulting film was so catastrophically bad it veers on "so bad its good" territory. The writers try to inject it with the same kind of unhinged energy that lands the English Digimon dub into a lot of funny compilations, and for some parts, like Hosoda's comedy-filled Our War Game, it works. However, other scenes, well...(that clip was not altered in any way, shape or form). 

It is an ideal movie for groupwatches, especially if one's judgment is impaired by the use of certain substances(not that I'm encouraging such behaviors). However, it also ends up ruining two otherwise excellent pieces of media that are foundational to one of anime's best and most acclaimed creatives. For many years, western fans only had the FOX cut of Our War Game, and for most people, that may be the only versions of these films that they'll ever get to watch. And that is a damn shame.

However, I hope that, if you're still reading, that this post has inspired you into at least giving these three very special works a shot. Even if you're just a fan of Hosoda's other works, its still interesting to see some of his later ideas beginning to form with his work on Digimon.

Nicolás Izaguirre Gallardo.