x_los | Entries tagged with anime

“Blue Period” was a nice, tight anime about a high school boy who decides to stop fucking around and actually become a person, via the medium of painting. He pursues admission to a competitive art school, as do several of his friends. It’s kind of light, in something like a slice of life register, but it never struck me as badly structured or patronising. At its best, it was truly emotionally engaging. I’m sick to death of high school settings, but I still have time for the questions this piece used this time in a young man’s life to raise.

Some notes:

- A teen in "Blue Period": I should draw my girl’s bewbs, really blow this old lady's mind, haha.
Ancient art teacher lesbian: I love breasts. Do you prefer pillowy or jiggly? There are certainly arguments for both!
Teen:
Art teacher: Make sure to convey their smoothness, virgin.

- I did not twig that the protagonist’s friend was trans until she was dumped over it. Maybe that's more strongly indicated in Not the Dub. She's sort of romantic-interest shaped, and I wasn’t sure whether they were going to go there. Ultimately, it’s not clear whether more will eventually come of their relationship and not terribly important: their development as people and their friendship matters, whether or not it ends up having a romantic component. They took the time to really see one another, literally and emotionally. (Something similar could be said of the upperclassman who first inspires the protagonist to paint: this show is unique in that it gives a young male protagonist really central connections with women.)

- When they said that the trans character was studying traditional Japanese painting, I assumed that was going to involve some kind of identifiable heritage approach. The work she produced for that class seemed to consist of standard still-lives: nothing separates the assignment we see for that course from a Western art seminar equivalent. In Japanese art education, this term must refer to material use or technique? Whatever craft difference occurs must happen at a technical level, to the degree that there's not really a perceptible effect for a casual observer.

- It’s interesting that they build the large canvas. Western art students would rarely be asked to do that, especially at a high school level. My sister went through all of MICA and was rarely if ever asked to stretch. They seem to be working with pre-set parts, combining them to shape it thus? Maybe Japanese art supplies are more modular.

- “Did you guys know that SHARKS have EYELIDS? Sea creatures are WONDERFUL.” Aha, the energy the prep school art teacher has.

- The pastry chef friend is so good. The way he reached out to the protagonist was touching. I also found the protagonist’s ‘seeing’ his mom via sketching her moving.

Volume 3:

Missing Her. Mop slippers: what a concept!

"Roundness." In what SENSE??

Aisha's head-canon is that Cementoss really likes baroque architecture, but is cursed by his nature to be a brutalist.

Volume 4:

- Retrospectively, the way Todoroki dumps his whole dark backstory on Deku is extremely weird. "This is maybe our second conversation ever. Are you All Might's bastard son? I've been horrifically abused, you know."

- Shinso’s a bit meaner in the manga version of the sports day fight in a way I don’t love. It's in his internal monologue, so I can't entirely claim it's a ruse to draw Deku out.

- The translation of these early volumes is fairly uneven. I wonder if they weren’t being particularly careful with these because this wasn’t a major property yet?

- Plant hair girl, per Kaminari, has ‘such pretty, round, acorn eyes’. Sure, Ja(pa)n.

- I didn't get that Mina enjoys natto and okra because they're slimy. Aisha had to explain the joke to me. x_x

- Rereading these early arcs, you can tell they’ve retconned Endeavour significantly. His backstory and emotional journey, as presented in the season currently airing, don’t evolve very naturally out of this version of the character. The texture of their early interactions is, retrospectively, very weird. The guy who calls Shoto his greatest creation, praises him for surpassing his brothers and is very keen for Shoto to max out his firepower is not the man who got Dabi killed and still feels any kind of way about that.

I watched the anime version of this when it came out, so thought I'd give the manga a try because I hear tell it is complete.

This is an odd IP for me in that I like the story fine, but I honestly cannot understand its vice-grip on the Japanese market right now. "Demon Slayer" is stylish and aesthetically mature, but some of the shonen elements are deeply clunky (the tsundere wolf 🐺 guy, Death Camp Pedagogy and the Problems of the Girl Pretending to Be Her Sister Who Loved Her Smile: hi, anime. Hi.). In places, the material is rather thin. Someone was trying to tell me about what an exciting universe "Demon Slayer" is in terms of the villains and worldbuilding, and its endless franchise potential!! It's... all right? This is just like, a cultivation story? Mechanically, it's that + five other animes that did well in the 90s and aughties (which you may not remember, or may be nostalgic about). You can smell "Inuyasha", "Mononoke", "Mushishi", "FMA", maybe even something like "Castlevania" or "Vampire Hunter D"--I wouldn’t stake my life on these coordinates, but I indisputably feel a considerable familiarity with the constituent pieces. The person I was speaking to compared "Demon Slayer" favourably to other financial juggernauts like "One Piece", "Naruto", and "Pokemon" in terms of plotting. Maybe so (and admittedly, I have no handle whatever on the mood of the Japanese market in terms of overall contemporary offerings), but several of those offered something novel and catchy, and/or made their offer to rather different audience brackets. So while I didn't dislike this anime's first series at all, thinking it well-executed if not engrossing, I find myself slightly side-eyeing its hype.

I wanted to reread the 'last time on' portion so that I could come to the train arc that's since come out re-oriented.

Some notes:

- Jfc, were there six children in this family? Too many children! (I mean, I guess this is a problem the narrative swiftly resolves.)

- He can SMELL MURDER!! (Or that a cat broke this pot, anyway.) (There is a big song in "Operation: Mincemeat" involving the line, ‘you can’t smell murder!!’.)

- Tanjiro isn’t really that characterised, is he? Fuck me, I didn't even remember his name. Nezuko is interesting, but you must admit she has older sister syndrome (the protagonist is older than her, but the other four seem younger) and then becomes the most fridged female character ever. She's got a horsebit in her mouth all show, you don't get more fridged than that. This anime glides along on a strong sense of generic cohesion, but in terms of its characters it’s pretty reliant on Types and the plot to carry the story. Very little happens because of who any particular person is, with perhaps the exception of Tanjiro's tendency to pacifism (but by now, that just feels Steven Universe/Izuku Midoriya/ten other guys rather than particular to this character and deeply considered).

- I wonder if it’s true that sideways katana usage can break the blade, and that you have to slash down rather than sideways as with a western sword? That degree of fragility sounds impractical (and as though it'd leave the bearer rather unguarded against stomach wounds, which can offer perhaps the nastiest possible sword-related deaths). But then you do use a caidao with a different motion than a cleaver if you’re doing it right (which I don't, because I haven't practiced knife skills for over a decade because I am lazy), so maybe that's just how it is.

- Here we are back at Child Death Mountain, and it’s still peak anime pedagogy. After "Food Wars" I don’t know that they’re doing All Right, over there. (What was that expulsion rate for? What a massive waste of resources and everyone's time!) This is yet another anime where no one involved should be running an organisation.

‘Our graduation exercise is DEATH FOR NO REASON!’
Why?
'Because swords: are expensive.'
...

Everyone in this world is this stupid, though. The lead villain: ‘Minions, you’re not performing well. Maybe MASS DEATH would improve our organisation’s ability to meet new challenges??’

I don’t QUITE know where we’re headed in terms of shape at the end of the first season of the anime. They try to open up the world a bit with these other demon slayers, and the pan shot parade is all rather QUIRKY ACTION FIGURE ROLL CALL!1 I'm simply too old for that shit. 'Why don't you just read older-pitched content then?' Gosh, are they going to make and distribute some, then? Wowee.

"Spy x Family":

- I rec this. Sometimes sweet, usually pretty funny. Well-made.
- I’m constantly going ‘what decade is this?!’ because it’s Every Decade, and also every country in Europe (flashbacks to the Russian Sherlock Holmes). That is a personal issue, though. It’s fine if Japan doesn’t give a shit about the London-Austria frankenstreet scenes they have wrought here.
- It is weird how even in Europe everyone’s still Japanese, tho. Like the fuck is this omelet rice breakfast? Y'ain't finding that on a random table in Graz.

"Uncorked":

- Excellent, precise evocation of family dynamics and romantic relationships throughout, with banter that felt engaging, real. Lively, charming character work.
- Relatedly, a great, subtle interplay between white and black space in the South and depiction of its impact on power even in private relationships.
- The switch to French rap in Paris was great, as was the in-passing but astute attention to France as itself a raced, classed environment.
- An excellently written movie--to be honest this probably did the bulk of the work for me that "Whiplash" did for other people and then extended out in other directions, without relying on all of "Whiplash"'s fucking tedious, overdone, only-semi-critical portraiture of toxic masculinity (which it also lavished attention on, thus undoing the work of the film's only ever vaguely critical treatment).
- I love the attention to the craft involved in running this family restaurant, on the cooking and administrative ends.

While sick on various occasions, I made it through all five seasons of "Food Wars".

- While needlessly and boringly porny (as in, that's a huge component of this show), the program is surprisingly detailed in its description of culinary techniques. It introduced me to a lot of new-to-me foods, not all of which were Japanese.

- The end central couple (Erina/Soma) comes rather out of nowhere, given that all along, we've had a lesbian thing going on with Erina and her assistant. Soma, meanwhile, has largely been supported and accompanied throughout the narrative by Megumi. I guess the match-up makes sense, especially in light of the show's propensity towards gothic family saga shenanigans. Yet it does feel, in the way of much anime, rather arbitrarily picked out of a hat. Throughout the show, the interpersonal energy and point of view have been situated elsewhere.

- Soma veers between involving himself in everyone's problems and brushing them off callously, seemingly at random. The later is really unappealing, and it's especially strange that he acts that way towards the woman who we are given to understand he will eventually marry and 'devote his cooking to'. Is this inconsistency a translation nuance that escaped the dub team, or is it down to weak writing in the original?

- The show's funniest exchange (this is re: the Nakiri family's Hereditary and Traditional Power to Burst Bystanders' Clothes) is the very late 'what is going ON with the Nakiri family?!' 'Well, you know, these things happen--' 'NO!!' between Akira Hayama and Ryō Kurokiba. So earned.

- An improbable number of people in anime are half-Japanese.

- Japan is evidently obsessed with 'meat smell' and preventing it, a consideration never explicitly addressed in Western cuisine.

- The awful pedagogy of this school haunts me. Evil Dad is right that this fixation on elimination is pointless, even if his own scheme to destroy non-gourmet eateries sounds financially ludicrous.

- The show's 'constant battle' conceit wears you out a bit--"Dragon Ball Z" with mother sauces.

- With most shonen, it's fine that you can't do whatever the overpowered protagonists are doing. You don't expect yourself to get the best grades in the Hero Course at UA, because that is not a thing. With a cooking shonen, however, I get annoyed at my relative lack of ability (i.e., at my realistic human ability because I am not a shonen character).

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More Life

Entries tagged with anime

Review: "Blue Period"

Review: BNHA, Volumes 3 and 4

Review: Demon Slayer, Volume 1

Notes on "Spy x Family" and "Uncorked"

Notes on "Food Wars"