The path to becoming a Manga-ka is one of sweat, tears, malnutrition, and lack of sleep
As we approach the Autumn 2012 anime season I found myself with the dreaded question once again. ‘What am i watching this season?’. As you can see from next season’s Animuchart we have quite a few new shows to look forward to as well as a few continuations. Upon seeing that Bakuman season 3 was being released I finally decided to get around to watching the previous two seasons and over the course of the last week I have been constantly doing so. Well, enough of my boring introduction here we go!
Upon doing initial research the first thing I noticed about Bakuman was that it’s created by the awesome team of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. For those who aren’t familiar with the names, they are the ones who created Death Note. Yes, the guys who were behind my all time favorite anime created another masterpiece and I am only now watching it. Sad huh? Also, while one may say that because of that fact I am biased towards the show i’d like to point out that since I came to expect so much from them, I was even tougher on it than I would be with the average anime.
The story revolves around two boys in their teens and their dream to be mangaka (manga artists). Seasons one and two highlights a chronological timeline of their journey beginning at the final year of Junior High and ends at the first year of university. There is a quote ‘The path to becoming a Manga-ka is one of sweat, tears, malnutrition, and lack of sleep’ and throughout Bakuman we are shown exactly that. From day one where they decide to follow their dreams, to the creation of their first ‘hit’ manga. Everything done in their life is portrayed in those two seasons. (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…)
Synopsis Every day life is harsh for high school student Kenichi Shirihama. Known as the “Olympic Punching Bag” Kenichi has to sneak in and out of school every day to avoid being ejected from the planet by angry martial art thugs, and members of the schools most notorious gang Ragnarok. While at school, he meets a new student named Miu Furinji, who offers to help him seek out the martial arts training he needs to take care of his ever growing problem of foes.
Weak Knees The weakest kid is school also happens to be the most naïve in school. Kenichi is a kid with many names, none of which are good for marketing value. The story starts off in a somewhat typical Anime fashion that gives viewers a prequel type of buffer for the first few episodes. The series itself doesn’t really have anything of special significance plot or action wise until around the 10th episode. However, Kenichi is also a comedy with plenty of ecchi that TMS Entertainment figures will keep people watching until the story picks-up some traction.
Kenichi takes a play from the popular 1984 Karate Kid movie where Mr. Miyagi offers to train Daniel Larusso after being beaten up by local high school bullies. This sets the foundation for the first half of the 50 episode series. After being bullied by the local karate club members, Kenichi gets the opportunity to train from six martial arts masters who all specialize in different styles ranging from Judo to Muay Thai boxing. (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…)
A few days ago, as usual I woke up and headed over to my favorite anime streaming site. First thing I did when I arrived there was to check for the recent anime updates (for the newest Naruto, Fairy Tail, One Piece etc) and saw something very… unexpected. Premiering on June 30th (subbed) was Code Geass: Nunnally in Wonderland. Seeing as the original Code Geass series is easily in my top 5 anime of all time I was obviously very excited. So there I went and clicked play…. and they could NOT possibly have destroyed my love for Lelouch (no homo) any more completely.
The plot is basically a spin-off of Alice in Wonderland with a comical and ecchi twist. Lelouch plays the role of Mad Hatter while Nunnally, C.C and Suzaku plays the roles of Alice, Chesire cat and the Knight of White respectively. All the other supporting characters have other mundane, sometimes even ironic roles (like Charles being the softspoken King of hearts).
To be honest after episode 1 I won’t even be giving the other episodes a second thought (update: its actually an ova so there aren’t any more episodes. Thanks to Son Gohan for pointing that out). Code Geass used to be a pleasant memory, it was always attributed in my mind with the tags ‘Kickass Story’, ‘Badass Main Charaters’, ‘Strategy worthy of praise by Light Yagami himself (Death Note) ‘ and ‘Huge robots kicking butt’. I now have to add ‘sappy characters’, ‘Fanservice’ and ‘Tries to hard to be funny’ to that list and believe me I want someone to pay!!! *HULK SMASH*. (more…)
Every season there is always for me this one great anime, for those who remember season before last, it was none other than Ano Natsu de Matteru. For this season that was none other than Sankarea, and I know this review is a bit late but.. oh look! a smileyface! 😉
The story revolves around Chihiro Furuya who has an obsession with zombies and dreams of having a zombie bride (to each own I suppose). He then has an encounter with the ever so popular Rea Sanka (see what they did there?… innovative right?). Whose life turns out to have its own fair share of problems. They begin talking and over time grew closer until her dad steps in, tradegy strikes and by a series of events she turns into a zombie. Aided by her new-found friend, Rea now struggles to live the life of an ordinary girl while battling her quickly rotting body.
The overall artwork was great and consistent throughout the show, there was hardly any spectacular scenery but I doubt that is going to bother anyone in the slightest. A point to note though, was that while there was quite a bit of fan service involved it was so meticulously intertwined into the plot that half the time you don’t even notice that you’re seeing a naked girl on your screen. (more…)
This is one wild and crazy show that needs multiple viewings to make certain that you can figure out what it all means. You may fail, but this is a show that keeps you on your toes.
The basic plot is about Naota Nandaba (he’s the one in blue at the bottom). He lives in Mabase, a suburb ofTokyo. The city scenery is dominated by the Medical Mechanica building, which looks like a giant flatiron and I mean GIANT. While standing on a bridge, talking with Mamimi Samejima (ex-girl friend of Naota’s older brother, the smoker at the far left), Haruko Haruhara bursts onto the scene, running Naota over with her Vespa scooter, then giving him CPR and finally hitting him on the head with a blue vintage Rickenbacher 4001 left-handed electric bass guitar (that dead-center maniac).
This creates a horn on his head, from which later on, a robot emerges from it. Now, if that wasn’t bad enough, Haruhara turns up to be a live-in maid at his house, making an already bad situation even worse for him. And from there, things get progressively stranger. Yes, it DOES get progressively stranger.
Can one really codify the show and not give away huge chunks of the plotting? I mean, it is only six episodes and it a show that requires a real intensity of watching, because if you miss something, you really miss something. And since it moves at this breakneck pacing, playing catch-up is something you really don’t want to do. (more…)
Ever had an experience where you decided to try something new and well after all said and done you think to yourself, “sigh, that was a waste of the last 23.5 minutes of my life”. Well that was exactly how I felt after episode 1 of this thing, true I not the biggest chibi fan out there but having chibi animation doesn’t give a show the leeway to create something completly ridiculous. Okay… maybe it does ( 😯 ‘LEEway’ … rock-‘LEE’ )
To those who are familiar with the original Naruto (and I’m sure all of us are) you will notice that they tried to keep the personalities of each character intact (key word here ‘tried’) and while the entire show seems like it’s going to be a spin-off of the very worst filler episodes, I will give them that because of the extremely lighthearted feel it radiates they have the potential to actually be…. funny. For example medium awareness seems to be a very prominent factor in these episodes “he is also the main character of the main Naruto TV show”, “Do we even have electricity and gas in this world?”. There is also bad guys who, well apart from the part that its practically impossible to make a chibi look evil we have them on the level where they can say in response to Rock lee pulling down the leader’s pants “if we’re just gonna get embarassed like this, we’re never comming to this house again”.
One last thing I can’t figure about this show though, where in the main series does its timeline take place, because while Naruto has abilities like multi-rasengan and Tsunade’s face is already engraved on the Hokage’s mountainside memorial thing, both which imply Shippuden. Rock lee seems to have regressed back to early Naruto days when it comes to his abilities. Maybe this was done to boost the entertainment factor but we’ll just have to wait till episode 2 to see.
To be honest while the concept of this show is great (ninja comedy, thats new… right?) I feel it’s going to make the average fan of Naruto a tad bit disappointed but hey, I feel that i’m somewhat biased against this as light comical shows are hardly ever my thing and chibi’s well… lets just say i’ve had one or two scrubs with my die-hard chibi friends.
Overall, I suppose I should be unbiased and give it a 6.8/10. Don’t think I’m being fair? well bearing in mind that I gave naruto 6.5/10 and Naruto Shippuden 7/10 and I still call myself a Naruto Fan, I’d say its score is pretty good.
