Category Archives: Anime

Final Impressions – Fractale

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I might be stuck in a terrible anime, but at least I have this bitchin' hat.

I really wasn’t expecting much from Fractale. We’re all familiar with the grandiose claims Yamakan made at the start of the Winter season… bloviating about moe killing anime and how he was going to singlehandedly save it with his incredible new show. He even promised to retire if it performed poorly. Now that Fractale has bombed, how long do you think it will be until he starts claiming that plebian anime fans such as ourselves are incapable of appreciating the brilliance of his work? In any case, I wasn’t fooled by Yamakan’s posturing; I expected Fractale to be yet another mediocre offering from the overrated director who brought us such turds as Black Rock Shooter.

For most of the season, my prediction bore out. Fractale was an incoherent mess that failed to develop its characters or maintain a consistent tone. There were little snippets of cogent material, but they were buried under mountains of frivolous nonsense. But in the last few episodes, Fractale did something utterly terrible that transformed it from a stalled-out steam train into a full-blown derailment; it decided to play the rape card.

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It Got Better – Nichijou 1

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Nichijou teaches about some of Japan's most famous souvenirs... by dropping them on Yuuko's noggin.

The most terrible thing that can happen to a fan is seeing their object of affection losing its touch. Hipsters cry indie tears when they hear the new ‘mainstream’ album by what used to be their favorite band. Film lovers pull the hair out of their heads when they see the person who used to be a great director releasing one piece of crap after another. And I suppose a lot of Kyoto Animation lovers felt the exact same when the studio wasted another 26 episodes on the Sakura High Light Music Club and dealt the death blow with the terrible abomination that was Nichijou episode 0. But worry not, fellow slice-of-life fans: the actual show makes up for this. Kinda.

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Working!! Second Season Announced!

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I don’t know about you, but April 1st always makes me twitchy. It is all too successful at drawing innocent yet naive otaku out of their shells, giving them a taste of the oh-so-sweet candy, only to fall over laughing as the aforementioned sweet explodes in the poor victims face. In this case, for me, the “candy” was news of a second season of Working!! (a.k.a Wagnaria!!), a delicious series that took me by surprise with its charm. Although I first believed it to be a prank, according to ANN the news is actually legitimate! Confirmation was posted on the official website today with a trailer.

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gweDrEoeLSY’]
(Edit: Subbed version available! Turn on closed captioning)

In case you didn’t know, Working!! is completely centered around a family restaurant, staffed by hyperactive and funny high schoolers. While there is plenty of moe to be had, somehow there is very little blobbery, making it a very enjoyable series to watch. Also on the good news front; the first season will be released onto Blu-ray on August 24. Now that the hype around April Fools has subsided for another year, I can really focus on looking forward to watching this series, and less about being pranked. What about you?

Bakacast of the Daleks

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Beware! Bakacast (and Paul “Otaking” Johnson) has fallen to the Daleks! I managed to hack into Project Haruhi with my sonic screwdriver just long enough to get this episode out.

If anyone is out there, if anyone can help, please, destroy this robotic-trash-can menace before it’s too late. If they succeed, Level E won’t get a chance to pull itself from its quagmire. Star Driver will never get the fabulous ending it deserves. And, most importantly, we won’t be able to mercilessly mock Fractale anymore.

So if you happen to know any time travelers with British accents or an immortal, omnisexual leader of a secret group of alien hunters, send them our way. We could use the help.

On this episode, we cover:

  • 2:30 – What we’ve been watching/playing
  • 12:35 – “Yu-Gi-Oh!” creator sues 4Kids
  • 18:44 – OreImo #13
  • 25:03 – Level E #12
  • 29:31 – Fractale #10
  • 35:34 – Wandering Son #10
  • 44:03 – Star Driver #24
  • 50:18 – Suite PreCure #7
  • 53:34 – Macross Frontier #19 & #20

If you would like to submit listener questions for a future episode, you can email them to bakacast[at]projectharuhi.net,@reply them to Project Haruhi’s Twitter account using the hashtag #bakacast, or leave them in the comments below.

Animated Ambien – Nichijou 0

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Warning: Action speedlines not indicative of actual content.

Talk about a disappointment. Kyoto Animation’s Nichijou, an adaptation of the 4-koma manga that ran in Shonen Ace, originally interested me because most sources described it as a mix between Azumanga Daioh and Cromartie High School. Both of those shows would make my top 10 anime list. Episode 0, however, contains entirely original content not found in the manga, and it doesn’t exactly speak well for the competence of the staff.

Simply put, Nichijou is one of the worst things I’ve ever watched.
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Bakacast – Sparking!!

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This week on Bakacast, we try something new for our opening segment and talk about what we’ve been playing and/or watching during the past week. Which means that I finally get to talk about video games on my anime podcast. Glorious freedom!

Anyway, Madoka didn’t air and Gosick wasn’t subbed in time, so we took the opportunity to catch up with Break Blade, fall asleep during Nichijou and discuss a K-On! doujin (yes, really). In other news, the Fractale hate train keeps rolling, the Star Driver love party returns and we give our advice for how you–YES, YOU!–can be Internet-famous podcasters (DISCLAIMER: May not actually make you Internet-famous).

We cover:

  • 2:27 – What we’ve been watching/playing
  • 15:27 – FUNimation backpedals
  • 21:22 – Deconstructing K-On!
  • 29:18 – Nichijou #0
  • 35:25 – Break Blade #4
  • 43:12 – Level E #11
  • 47:43 – Fractale #9
  • 53:07 – Wandering Son #9
  • 59:01 – Star Driver #23
  • 1:07:01 – Suite PreCure #6
  • 1:11:06 – Macross Frontier #17 & #18
  • 1:20:12 – Listener questions

Deconstructing K-ON! – The Takotsuboya Doujin Trilogy

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Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

-Kurt Vonnegut

The super-saccharine moeblob slice-of-life genre received a lot of attention, both positive and negative, during the run of K-ON!. This show is the archetypal example of that genre, easily outclassing any of KyoAni’s previous works in popularity. However, despite its immense celebrity and polarizing effect on the anime fandom, I have yet to see K-ON! receive a proper deconstruction. With Madoka making literary analysis of old genres cool again, as well as the recent announcement of a “K-ON! in college” manga, I feel like this is the perfect time for moe as a genre to be scorched and refined in the crucible of deconstruction.

Alas, the only media I’ve come across that comes close to accomplishing this is the infamous Takotsuboya K-ON! doujin trilogy. From a storytelling perspective, these doujins could not be considered good. They contain the requisite awkwardly-placed sex scenes and out-of-place pervertedness that is characteristic of doujins, making suspension of disbelief impossible. But they also contain several ingenious, even brilliant insights into how the HTT girls would fit into the real world. Many of these insights are gleaned from the author’s experience as a failed mangaka who repeatedly tried anything and everything to get his work published.

Dusty and Glen believe that these doujins treated the girls too harshly, replacing the fluffy, idealistic world of the show with an equally brutal and vindictive antithesis. I, on the other hand, think any good deconstruction has to put its characters through hell, in order to scour away their veneer and reveal their true quality. But I want your opinion, friend reader. In order to spare you the ordeal of reading this admittedly substandard doujin, I will describe the fate of each character below. You tell me whether you think it represents an accurate character interpretation, or an overly grim attempt by the author to soil these much-beloved moeblobs.

More after the break.

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Bakacast – NOT THE BEES!

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I want you all to know that I waited to play Dragon Age 2 so I could get the podcast edited immediately. You see the sacrifices I make for you people?

Anyway, we’re a little lighter on reviews and heavier on news because of the terrible one-two punch of natural disasters that recently hit Japan. If you’d like to help out, the link on the top of the sidebar will take you to a list of large and trustworthy organizations (such as the Red Cross and Salvation Army) that you can donate to. Since plenty of news organizations have covered the disaster better than we can, we instead focus on what it might mean for the short-term future of the anime industry. And on a lighter subject, we discuss FUNimation’s HorribleSubs gaffe. After our typical review segment (minus the Star Driver love party, sadly), we go off on some of our wildest tangents to date thanks to your seemingly straightforward listener questions.

  • 2:04 – Earthquake aftermath
  • 13:07 – FUNimation uses HorribleSubs
  • 20:15 – Madoka Magic #10
  • 25:03 – Gosick #10
  • 31:25 – Level E #10
  • 38:26 – Fractale #8
  • 47:13 – Wandering Son #8
  • 56:16 – Macross Frontier #15 & #16
  • 1:11:00 – Listener questions

I reference a couple things during the listener questions segment that you might like to check out. Fast Karate for the Gentlemen ripped apart both the anime and live-action versions of Blood: The Last Vampire (be warned that, unlike Bakacast, they use explicit language). As for the “Cage Rage” podcasts I mentioned, you can find every single one by clicking these handy links. Consider them your course materials for Nic Cage 101. There will be a test. It will not be open book.

If you would like to submit listener questions for a future episode, you can email them to bakacast[at]projectharuhi.net, @reply them to Project Haruhi’s Twitter account using the hashtag #bakacast, or leave them in the comments below.

FUNimation’s Hypocrisy Revealed

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Video in Funimation’s dubbing room as seen in America’s Greatest Otaku

Remember FUNimation, the moralist anime production company that tried to sue 1337 anonymous bittorrent users for downloading a One Piece fansub? Well, it turns out that for all their bloviating about piracy, they are nothing more than a bunch of filthy hypocrites.

The screenshot above is taken from the latest episode of America’s Greatest Otaku, Tokyopop’s attempt to emulate reality television with an anime spin. It shows a monitor in FUNimation’s dubbing studio, with episode 3 of Sora no Otoshimono playing for the benefit of the dub actors.

Keen eyes on the ANN forums quickly noticed something strange about the subtitle font being used. Turns out it’s from HorribleSub’s illegal rip of CrunchyRoll’s stream.

Sora No Otashimono, Episode 3, 08:42

The evidence here is irrefutable. Unless FUNimation went to great lengths to replicate HorribleSub’s unique font in Aegisub, there is no question that they are using illegal rips for their dubbing work. This is particularly damaging after they made such a grand show of suing thousands of people whose only offense was WATCHING FANSUBS. No question about it, FUNimation has had their ethical soapbox shattered.

More after the break.

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