Now, I have a problem with gender-bender shows. I sometimes feel it is a way to do some kind of psycho-sexual profiling to determine that you would much prefer the company of goats because I happen to like this or that or the other thing. (Don’t laugh; I allowed myself to get one of these profiles in a class and the examiner felt I had the potential to be a molester or rapist. I certainly didn’t get a lot of dates after that!)

I was drawn to this show (which translates out to “The Maidens Are Falling for Me”; also known as “Otoboku”) because I really liked the initial idea:

Mizuho Miyanokouji is your typical male anime dweeb: nothing too flashy, but nothing too interesting. His grandfather passed away and made both a stipulation and provisions in his will for our young charge to attend and graduate from Seio Academy, as Mizuho’s own mother graduated from this very institution. This is great, as this guy would have problems getting back into grade school.

However, complications arise (and you ALL saw this coming). In the intervening years, the academy has now become a girls-only school. Determined to get an education, he decides to cross-dress. Now, he has a natural disposition to looking androgynous, so it makes the transitions a bit easier, although one of his female friends, Mariya Mikado, who also attends the academy, assists in these matters. (Mizuho is the perplexed one in the center; Mariya is winking at us).

Sion Jujo, another classmate, tumbles pretty quick to the fact as to what is going on, but decides to remain silent (she is just off Mizuho’s right shoulder). Now, there is nothing prurient in all of this. It’s not like they are engaging in illicit activities in hiding the truth. I think it is done more to put one over on the teachers. (more…)

The Japanese title for this is…(take a deep breath…) “Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai”, which means “I Have Few Friends”, but we know it better as “Haganai”. Look, it’s another school-based anime! How original! And we have a new transfer student! Doubly original! And he’s having troulbes fitting it! We hit the trifecta!

OK, let’s put the snarkiness aside. Kodaka Hasegawa (the guy in the middle) is a recent transfer student to St. Chronica’s Academy, a Catholic high school. As with every other school he has ever attended, he finds it difficult to make friends there because of his naturally-blond hair (inherited from his deceased English mother) and fierce-looking eyes, which make him look threatening.

While doing something on campus, Kodaka comes across the equally solitary and highly abrasive Yozora Mikazuki (the one to his right) while she converses with her imaginary friend, Tomo. Realizing that neither of them have any friends or social skills, they decide that the best way to improve their situation is to form a club, The Neighbor’s Club, intended to make friends and learn social skills.

They slowly start to acquire members, as these folks are also social misfits for one reason or another:

Sena Kashiwazaki, that busty blonde up there. She has a double whammy: she is rich and her mother is the school’s head teacher, so there is a seething arrogance about her and no one wants to be her friend.
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One feature of animes is that they sometimes drop you right into a show, so you may spend the first episode or two playing catch-up to figure out what is REALLY going on here. “Black Rock Shooter” is that kind of show, as it takes you a bit of time to realize that we are dealing with the reality of two alternate, but connected, lands, but it focuses around Black Rock Shooter, a mysterious black haired girl who possesses a burning blue eye and a powerful cannon that can shoot rocks at high speed.

Mato Kuroi is starting school and tries to befriend Yomi Takanashi, who is also new to the school. However, there is a problem and that is Kagari Izuriha, a friend of Yomi who is using an accident to make Yomi her emotional slave, preventing her from having friends and being cruel to anyone Yomi brings into the house.

They are connected by this very strange and depressing book “The Little Bird of Many Colors”, which acts as a metaphor for things that happen and occur, but it’s very obvious. What you learn is that the land of Black Rock Shooter is where the black persona and dark emotions of the people in the normal world go to fight it out. (more…)

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…)

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…)

Many times I have found myself starting an anime and thinking ‘hey this show is great!’ but then it drags on… and on… and on….. until it just becomes boring, repetitive and flat out sucks. Well this is exactly what happened with this season’s Accel World.

Accel World deals with the  rare MMORPG/virtual reality genre and had a ‘unique’ protagonist. At the start, I couldn’t wait for the following week to see the next episode, everything was just new fresh and exciting, at episode 12 (the perfect time for a conclusion) I was starting to get a little tired of the characters and now.. episode 22 I’m sick and tired of pretty much everything. The VR game which is the foundation for the show makes no more logical sense at this point. The majority of the characters are overly shallow, fickle and just plain stupid.

The only character who is even remotely worth giving any credit to is Kuroyukihime. (Xtra pic @ bottom of post *wink*), while she has extremely bad taste in guys (ie. liking Haru), she is intelligent, levelheaded and popular (not blonde popular but… ‘irie’ popular) all while still maintaining a certain level of complexity. If they spent anywhere as much of an effort on the other characters as they did on her, I personally think the show would be much better than the compilation of sniveling, estrogen overdosed buffoons that we have currently.

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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 10^th 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…)