“Ano Natsu de Matteru” (or “Waiting in the Summer”) is a different approach to the ‘fish out of water’ tale. It almost succeeds, but the last two episodes get hard to take.

Kaito Kirishima (number 4 from left) is a movie maniac, constantly lugging around an 8mm camera from his grandfather (Film? We are talking actual film?). One night, while filming something, he sees a blue light and thinks he was injured. The next day,  Ichika Takatsuki (the redhead), shows up in his class. He discovers that she has no place to live and offers her room at his house, as Kaito’s sister will be gone for three months (like, all summer?)

We learn that Ichika is a space alien, bent on trying to find something on this planet, aided by Rinon (that odd creature at the far right).

The others in the entourage are, left to right:

Mio Kitahara. She has feelings for Tetsuro, but wants to help him along in his quest.

Tetsuro Ishigaki. He has feelings for Kanna, but knows how she feels about Kaito, so he keeps it all hidden

Kanna Tanigawa.  She has had a crush on Kaito for some time, but, despite being outgoing, has never really confessed it to him.

Remon Yamano. This one is generally cold towards people, but harbors a secret that is revealed in the last two episodes. (more…)

I first ran into this show at an anime expo. I was taken in by the gorgeous artwork, the realistic settings, the magnificent music and the poised story telling with measured pacing. I had to wait a bit before I could fully track it down and when I was able to see the full run, I was disappointed beyond words.

The series is set in the 24th century on a terraformed Mars, now named Aqua, and follows a young woman named Akari Mizunashi (far right) as she trains as an apprentice gondolier for the Aria Company. Her two friends and rivals are Aika S. Granzchesta (far left, Himeya Company)  and Alice Carroll (center, Orange Planet).

Now, you don’t always need slam-bam, massive explosions, dramatic battle sequences, giant fighting robots and unrelenting carnage for an anime to work, but you do need SOME kind of action or conflict. Aria’s biggest drawback is that the worst thing that happens is Akari feels she will never be a Prima undine (the highest level of gondolier).

You feel really badly in smacking this show about. Seldom do you see such a wonderful convergence of character design, artistic output and music. Now, I know that the author wanted us to find happiness in the small things and not to focus on our failures, but you feel something MORE should be happening. I mean, you can’t make progress without understanding set-backs and this merely steels your determination to achieve what you want. (more…)

Sometimes you follow a show and you have no reason as to why you did, but you did. This show did that for me. Maybe I was lazy or maybe I was between stuff. Maybe it was the cat (that odd basketball in the lower left box). But I will assure you that I found out much later that it was actually a dating game, and I will bet you that Keima Katsuragi from “The World God Only Knows” probably blitzed through the thing in a couple of hours. Or potentially the title drew me in: “Mashiro-Iro: Symphony: The Color or Lovers” (also known as “Love is Pure White”).

The traditional girls-only Yuihime Private Academy is considering the possibility of starting to accept both genders and has thus made an agreement with a neighboring school (Kagamidai Academy) to receive some of its students as an experiment to see the reaction to this adaptation. Shingo Iryu (the brown-haired guy, lower center and to the left) is one of the many students transferred for a ten month experimental phase at Yuihime Academy. He, his sister, and his fellow relocated colleagues are impressed by the sophisticated campus, but even more by the resistance of many students who don’t want the boys over there.

The resistance is lead by Airi Sena (that loud-mouthed number in the lower right) who just happens to be the principal’s daughter. Well, you can bet the friction is going to be long and loud on this one. Adding to the consternation is that Shingo has this amazing knack of walking in on the girls while they are in various stages of undress, furthering the assumption that all men are perverts (Psst! All men ARE perverts. That’s a given). But he is able to marshall the guys to be courteous and act well-mannered and be gentlemen, which starts to soften opposition to the merger. (more…)

Certainly in the Halls of Anime, Romance Wing, Kaichō wa Maid-sama! (The President is a Maid!) garners high marks for the tale it tells, and what a tale it is.

Seika High School, once an all-boys school notorious for its wild students and for generally being a terrifying place for girls, has recently become a co-ed school. With the female population still a minority and living in fear of the over-the-top antics of the males, Misaki Ayuzawa (the fair one at the left) takes it into her own hands to reform the school and allow the girls to feel safe in the rough environment.

As the first female president, she has to take a very harsh stand against the boys to allow the girls to feel safe enough that they can thrive. This has, however, earned her the enmity of the boys for her dictator-like stance on things. But this façade is threatened when Takumi Usui (the fair one on the right) discovers her secret: she works at a maid café one town over to make ends meet.

But Takumi never spills the beans on her little secret, but this acts as a kind of ‘obligation’ that she owes him and she never wants to be in the debt of a man for any reason (partly derived from the circumstances that forced her to work at the made café). (more…)

This is one seriously off-kilter show. It follows the everyday life of Takashi Kamiyama (the guy dead center and not the robot dude) and his odd classmates at Cromartie High School, an infamous school for delinquents.

To start off with, EVERYONE is 16! Each person is identified with their name slug and age, but no one looks 16 or acts 16 or is potentially 16. In fact we don’t even know what they did to be sent to this school and, if they are delinquents, they do not act in a delinquent manner. I mean, they come to class (even though you never see a teacher or any other faculty member present) and stay the whole day, then go home. OK, they do nothing in between (no homework assignments, no lessons on the blackboard, no oral presentations; nothing like that), but we do not see them engaged in ‘standard’ delinquent activities (whatever that really means).

We see them on class outings and they even try to start a sports team, but they all lose interest pretty fast. Even when one of their mates is kidnapped and they go to their aid, they never seem to actually have a rumble. And Kamiyama is the most normal one about!

Of the team we have up there, left to right:

Takeshi Hokuto. He is the son of a chairman and uses his influence to take over and rule all the schools he goes to. Sadly, Cromartie is a municipal school and cannot take it over. He is, in fact, so clueless, he comes to school wearing the wrong uniform. This does not stop him from plotting how to take this school over, to no real success. (more…)

There are a variety of shows that tell a story, but don’t really go anywhere with it. I call them “Pointless Shows”. They aren’t really pointless (not like “Piano”, which was an exquisite waste of time), but go nowhere. “Pani Poni Dash” and “Lucky Star” are two, but rarely do you see one with boys.

“The Daily Lives of High School Boys” really is about (left to right) Hidenori Tabata, Yoshitake Tanaka and Tadakuni (the fourth guy up there is Motoharu, but more on him later) and their regular lives. The episodes are really disjointed, in that they don’t honestly need to be seen in order and they are presented in ‘skits’ (for want of a better term) and run between two and seven minutes.

You come to learn that they are just as perplexed about things (especially girls) as anyone else is. The cast is actually much larger and we don’t always focus on those three, but the results are more or less the same as they muddle from day to day.

Now, there is nothing wrong with the aimless story approach, as it does free one to chase down any angle they see fit and you know as they grow older, they will grow apart, but the journey getting there is fun to watch. You also see a lot of the malarkey and over-thinking that guys do in relationship to absolutely everything they do. It’s a wonder they can get out of bed in the morning, as they are sometimes rather conflicted. (more…)

I am not a big fan of ‘historical’ anime, as they always seem to play fast and loose with the rules. Modern sensibilities, placed on a different era, sometimes equal a show that just doesn’t make it, either as anime or history.

“Shigurui” plays out more like a Kurosawa film, akin to “Rashomon” or “Yojimbo”, but the level of mayhem and violence places it within the realm of “Gantz” or  “Deadman Wonderland”.

The story begins in 1629, as we are seeing a tournament between, perhaps, two of the country’s best swordsmen. However, they are using real swords and not wooden practice ones, so this will be a fight to the death.

The two men participating, Fujiki Gennosuke (who has one arm) and Irako Seigen (who is blind) not only have a history, but each has a history together. The show is a flashback as to how these two ended up here and in their current physical situation.

It all begins at the Kogen dojo, where Gennosuke is the star pupil and Seigen is the brash upstart who puts Gennosuke in his place. Kogan Iwamoto, the head of the dojo is, for most of the year, mentally unbalanced and is slowly rotting away, but for a brief period once a year, he becomes lucid and coherent and makes decisions that affect the dojo for the next year.

Seigen, blinded by his arrogance, carries on an affair with Lady Iku, who is looking for something away from Iwamoto. Well, the sensei finds out, which leads to their physical travails and both are sent packing. However, years later, Seigen comes back, seeing revenge by brutalizing the students of the dojo in savage ways. (more…)

OK, the series is perverted enough as it gets, as there are some major bust queens in this show. The series is now ‘between seasons’, so now would be a very good time to truck out an OVA and have ourselves a good laugh.

The club is going to the beach, but since they can teleport there, they change out in the club room. They call Issei Hyodo in on this and he, magically, busts in on them when they are in various stages of nakedness and they bust him up like a cedar plank at a karate club. Once at the beach, well, all bets are off. The president of the club, Rias Gremory, wears a Borat-style swimsuit (and if you have seen “Mahoromatic”, Shikijo Saori wears the same style in Season 1, Episode 4).

Rias lies down on the beach and there is no cloth touching her body from just past her ninnies all the way to her crotch, Wow, talk about a superstructure! Anyway, she asks Issei to put some suntan lotion on her and ‘not to miss any spots’. Well this is that suntan lotion that doubles as some kind of lubricant, so it pops out of his hands and Rias gets soaked while Issei is manhandling and fondling and squishing her all about. She is upset about this, but the more they struggle the worse it gets. (more…)

Did you ever see the “Shawshank Redemption”? What are the three rules you have learned about prison?

1)      Prisons are not nice places.
2)      The people guarding the prisoners are at least as psychotic and, in some cases, MORE psychotic that the people they are guarding.
3)      No one is truly your friend, just someone who won’t stick a shiv between your ribs.

The year is ‘the future’ and an incident referred to as the Red Hole triggered a massive earthquake that ravaged Japan’s mainland and destroyed most of Tokyo, sinking three-quarters of the city into the ocean. It also created a bizarre side effect in that some people were given unusual powers. Well, you know about unrestrained power: people go nuts and there seems to be no way to counteract these abilities.

To this end, a new prison is constructed on parts of ruined Tokyo and it would be Japan’s first, and only, private prison: Deadman Wonderland.

We now fast-forward 10 years. 14-year-old Igarashi Ganta, is a seemingly ordinary student attending Nagano 4th District Middle School. He and his classmate are working on the school field trip to Deadman Wonderland, as it is a prison-amusement park. While making their plans, a strange person, covered in blood and crimson armor, floats outside his classroom windows. (more…)

A similar problem horror shows encounter is taking things away too soon. I remember when I saw “The Shining” for the first time. I had Jack Nicholson come on screen and I already knew he was nuts, so his slide into insanity was not only not a surprise, but had me wondering why it took so long for him to achieve it.

This show is creepy right from the get-go, so the slide into uncertainly is effectively removed. That only leaves us with what I refer to as the Death of the Week…but I get ahead of myself.

In 1972, at Yomiyama Middle School, in Class 3-3, there was an honors student who was good at sports, very popular among his peers and even the teachers were fond of. However, when Misaki suddenly died, the shocked class decided to carry on as if Misaki was still alive. However, when the class’s graduation photo was taken, they saw someone in the shot who should not have been there—Misaki. (Enter kettledrums and violins.)

We now fast-forward 26 years. Kōichi Sakakibara is going to school there, but starts off the year in the hospital, owing to a punctured lung. Just about to leave the hospital, he sees a strange girl wearing an eye patch, who descends to the basement of the hospital to ‘see someone’. But on that floor is the morgue. What gives?

As Koichi goes to school, things take a turn for the weird. He sees the girl again, but no one talks to her at all. It is as if she does not exist. Well, nature abhors a vacuum, so he starts to ask questions, but is told to “stop hanging out with something that doesn’t exist”. So, does this settle the issue? Did Freddy Kruger stop at one? (more…)