Category Archives: Anime

Whiff it good

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Moyashimon tastes better than it smells!
By Bob Johnson

IDK My BFF Jill, sure this isn’t Hetalia: Tales of Portugal ?

This one really takes me back. Way way back, to before I even cared about anime all that much, when it was just kind of a sideshow to the tabletop and computer gaming circles that were my main jam. My university’s anime club watched this one almost right away, when “right away” meant waiting for Geneon to release a DVD box set, have someone in the club bring it over, and have everyone say, “ya sure you betcha” when the idea of watching it for the club was floated.

I was amused from the beginning to watch this university school life show called “Tales of Agriculture” in a university lecture hall, from the same projectors that handled the daily powerpoint slides mere hours before – and actually learn something! It is just as informative, and certainly more entertaining, than the average introductory microbiology course, and now… whoa, 16 years already since its release?? Well, it still holds up.

The show’s about a brewers’ son, Tadayasu Sawaki, whose folks send him to cow college to get his degree. Along the way, we meet a few colourful characters that help drive the plot forward, as well as a special situation that requires Sawaki to risk revealing his superpower: he can see and hear microbes, which appear to him as cute little anime chibis. Along the way, there’s much done to explain the science of fermentation and spoilage in food and beverages.

Our lead characters are a short-stacked, short-tempered Anime Protagonist, supported by a lackadaisical, weird-food loving professor, permagrads in three flavours, and some love interests for our superhero that are obvious but perenially and humourously deflected.

A lab is only as good as its staph… er, staff…

The real stars of the show are the chibi microbes, though. All of them are vaguely shaped like the real microbe and have a silly smile on their face unless they need to be in another broadly brushed mood. Generally they just sit there or float around, but occasionally they talk directly to or about Sawaki, or to each other. It’s a somewhat different approach than say, Cells at Work, which also turned bacteria into characters. But unlike the scary germs in that show, most of the microbes we see here are just little derps who actually help humans out, doing things like making sake boozy or cheese taste good.

The real MVPs.

I hate to call it “Old School” – as Moyashimon is available today as it was originally shown – in full HD – but it still harkens back to an older era, before moé took over everything, when vampy milfs could still be Best Girl, and CG was still pretty bad but could be put to effective use in certain situations. The mid-2000s still had a lively market for odd manga with a semi-educational message, and interesting shows could still make it to the US even without a dub.

Other folks saw Moyashimon and said “eh, that’s kinda weird” – I went and made Natto and Sake for real, because that’s muh freedom. Apparently that’s a bit lacking in Japan, which (as the show mentions) has strict limits on home and microbrewing, something that America rolled back in the ’70s. Thanks, Jimmy Carter! Homemade sake is awesome, and it’s easier to make than beer… I should do another batch sometime. Natto, on the other hand, well let’s be generous and say it’s just not going to happen indoors at my place. But hey, watch Episode 8 if you want to learn the recipe for yourself.

NO U

If you’re still thinking, ‘eww gross! germs!’ Well sure, Moyashimon won’t please everyone. It’s cute and silly and nerdy as all get out, with just a dash of spice, and that is certainly better than you would expect from a biology textbook masquerading as an anime. What this show is not (thank god!) is a shonen action adventure isekai, which is why I strongly, strongly recommend thoughtful, genuinely nice shows like this as an antidote to the braindead, same-y, copy-paste, slime mold matting every surface of the modern anime quarterly release schedule.

Fuck Yeah, Look it up:
Moyashimon (2007) 11 episode anime
Based on the manga by Masayuki Ishikawa
Produced by Shirogumi and Telecom, Licenced by Crunchyroll
Streaming (press time): Crunchyrol

A Shockingly Bad Anime

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Juden Chan Checks all the Wrong Boxes
by Bolt Vanderhuge

I’ve written before about Faito ippatsu! Jūden-chan!!, which you may know as Charger Girl Juden Chan or just Juden Chan, but that was based off of the first few episodes. Since then, I decided to subject my friends to this show as revenge for them showing me some of the shows they’ve made me watch, but in the process this meant that I had to watch the whole thing, too.

… Dammit.

So just to briefly summarize for those of you too lazy to go back and read my last article, this is basically a magical girl show crossed with a harem show. The magical girls in this case are the “charger girls” who come from the parallel world called Life Core and work for a company called Neodym to “cure” humans with depression by zapping them with giant plugs. So the gimmick here is basically anything and everything to do with electricity and electrical equipment, such as our main character Plug Cryostat having electrical prong bunny ears. Normally, these electricity-themed magical girls are invisible to humans and intangible to our world, and are thus able to hover, fly, and pass through objects like they got caught in the blast radius of an experimental Romulan phase-cloaking device. For reasons that are never explained, a human named Sento is able to see, hear, and touch these magical girls, and his natural inclination upon seeing them is to hit them in the head with a baseball bat he pulls out of hammer space, or anything else that happens to be within reach. This is what constitutes a running “gag” for this show, because thumping someone in the skull until they pee themselves is funny apparently.

Surprisingly, my attitude toward it really didn’t improve after actually watching the entire thing after all these years. This show is as unapologetically horny as it is misogynistic, and seems to exist solely to cater to as many fetishes as possible so as to attract as many horny otaku as possible. Probably the most notable one is the whole panty-wetting thing, which is also conflated with female orgasm for some reason, and is in every episode at least once, if not several times. There’s also plenty of loli-con and even some sis-con, because of course there is, which whoever made this show deluded themselves into thinking was less creepy if it’s a woman doing this crap.

Who says men can’t write female characters?

This show is basically just porn (the term is hentaiecchi, you uncultured swine) and isn’t even remotely ashamed of it. I’m not even just talking the amount or graphic nature of the nudity, but things like fun with naughty tentacles (the go-to dick stand-ins), and of course the aforementioned obsession with pee. Admittedly there were times I could almost forget about the cringey aspects of the show and almost enjoy it as the porn-with-plot that it is (it even gets somewhat romantic at times), but inevitably something would come along and ruin that.

For five minutes, could you try not being yourself? FOR FIVE MINUTES!?

The show does try to get semi-serious and dare I say even somewhat dramatic at times thanks to it using mental health and depression as the basis for its gimmick, and can otherwise be fun when it isn’t being completely horrible. Just as an example, at one point it completely lampshades the fact that everyone from Plug’s division actually all have the exact same face and just have different hair to distinguish them (a common criticism of anime in general), which is made a bit funnier by the fact they never bother explaining why and never bring it up again. It’s just that I can never get over the more disgusting aspects of this show (fuck you, I will fetish shame you).

Actually one of the more surprising aspects of this show is that it got an English dub and localization at some point after I’d originally watched this in 2010 or so. You can totally watch this show on Crunchyroll under the name Charger Girl Ju-den Chan, though as you might expect from a company owned by the prudish Sony, it’s been censored to edit out as much of the nudity and pee as possible. For the life of me I can’t understand why they bothered, though, because while sex sells and all, if they’re censoring it, I mean, that’s basically the point of the show, so there isn’t much left other than Sento beating the crap out of invisible magical girls.

In any case, I still cannot recommend that you bother watching this show. I mean, I guess if you like to intentionally watch bad anime to laugh at it like I do it might be worth it, but it’s difficult to find an uncensored version to do so with. Otherwise, unless the thought of beating women with a baseball bat gets you all hot and bothered, or you have Tom Hanks levels of pee obsession (seriously, pay attention to how many of his movies feature him peeing), I can’t recommend it for you.

Fuck No! Don’t Check it Out:
Charger Girl Juden-chan (Faito ippatsu! Juden-chan!!)
based on the manga by Bow Ditama
Produced by Studio Hibari, Licenced by Media Blasters

Redhead gets Boyfriend

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Hardly headline news, but Romantic Killer isn’t either
by Bob Johnson

Anzu faces down Man Mountain.

Anzu is a lady who doesn’t have any problems. Her folks take care of her, she loves her cat, she eats a fair bit of chocolate, and she plays dating sims, reasoning correctly that it’s cheaper than the real thing. Mendokusai!

However, a sitcom is defined by the hilarity that ensues from problems, and soon enough, Anzu’s problem is Riri, a flying fairy who shows up screeching nonsense about “Lie Back and Think of Japan” and an attitude toward consent that only a clickwrap corporate lawyer could love. Plus a magic wand to wave around! Suddenly, Anzu’s parents are inexplicably moving to America, chocolate and games have disappeared from the house, and Anzu’s treasured pet is nowhere to be found.

Anzu in her native habitat.

We are then introduced to a series of major and minor husbandos, each of whom offers Anzu an experience straight out of an Otome Game: the brooding hunk in need of healing, the childhood friend who grew up to be all big and muscly (or his trashy friend), the filthy rich brat who needs a tsundere to teach him real love (or his chauffeur, who knows what’s up).

I’M LATE!!! Rule 63 has a brand new look.

Most romance shows rely on a suspension of disbelief to the tune of, “Sure, I’ll believe that all of these coincidences could happen randomly in real life and not according to some screenwriter’s guide on putting a plot thickener just before the second act…” Well, the show prevents you from forming those thoughts; just as things are getting particularly good, Riri pops in to drop an “All According To Plan MUAHAHA”, and then everyone remembers that this is a setup, particularly Anzu.

It is a gameplay loop that lasts until they run out of the most obvious scenarios and theeeeeen, well that’s when you learn that Anzu is *not* the title character. For those who don’t necessarily like having a psychological thriller bolted onto your fluffy romance show, you could literally skip Episode 10, 11, and the first three minutes of Episode 12 and not really miss anything. But even leaving them in, I’m not left with the usual Gonzo Ending aftertaste that has ruined other shows forever. They had to put some denouement in there to set up the sequel, after all!

It is a pretty solid show by Netflix standards (i.e. ‘average’), but nothing to rush through before the password checks go in. I would recommend Romantic Killer for fans of visual novels, and it’s fine for any other bored anime fan looking for something a little fun and flirty.

Maybe look it up:

Romantic Killer 12 episode anime
Based on the manga by Wataru Momose
Produced by DOMERICA, Licenced by Netflix
Streaming (Press Time) : Netflix

If Anti-Climax was an Anime

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Night Head Genesis, An Interesting Concept in Search of a Story

by Bolt Vanderhuge

When a show is either very good or very bad, it will at least inspire strong feelings from a viewer, but then there are shows like Night Head Genesis which inspire very little emotion beyond disappointment. Calling this show boring is actually selling it a little short, but not by much, as it had a somewhat interesting premise and just failed to actually do anything with it.

This series follows two brothers with supernatural abilities – one who can sense the past, present, and future through touching people and certain objects, and one who can give people telekinetic bitch slaps from across the room. The first episode sees them sent as children to some kind of a secret research center in the middle of the woods by their parents, only to then skip ahead 15 years to see them escape, and somehow come across a classic Toyota they use for the rest of the series to get around in. If you’re thinking that the series might revisit their time in the research center, it does, but not very much, beyond explaining that the reason they were trapped there was because of an old man who also had supernatural abilities, and that they were able to escape when he died, they really don’t do much with that chapter of their lives, nor do they explain why the center allows them to just drive around on their own, and even gives them money so they can live in hotels, eat wherever they like, and pay assholes absurd amounts of money to change their tire.

The two characters do run into a lot of assholes, incidentally. I was almost starting to wonder if the show was just some nihilistic soapbox but this was explained as their powers somehow drawing negativity toward them. This ended up seemingly transitioning into the brothers, Naoto and Naoya Kirihara, driving around and investigating various supernatural happenings, at times at the research center’s request, which gave me some small hope that this would turn into Supernatural × X-Men or something like that, even if the show was taking its sweet time to get there. A mysterious schoolgirl was introduced and seemed like it might lead into a more interesting plot, along with hints of some evil secret organization called Ark that apparently was brainwashing people to go out and kill others who had supernatural abilities. It even seemed possible that the evil secret organization had disappeared the schoolgirl. After all, she claimed to be able to travel through time and space, made predictions to her friend that kept her and her family from getting killed, and write stuff down in a journal in a strange script no one else could read. It was this promise of something finally happening for all the long, drawn out plodding that actually managed to keep me watching. I sure was wrong.

As boring as this show could be, my main frustration with it was its complete lack of ability to actually do anything with what it set up. You have this research center that the main characters grew up at that not only let them go, but let them keep a car they stole and even paid them as they wandered around Japan, the mystery of what exactly happened to the main characters’ parents, the mystery of Japanese schoolgirl Nostradamus, the secret evil organization that calls itself Ark going around killing anyone who shows signs of having supernatural abilities, using people who have supernatural abilities, visions of an apocalyptic future, and all of it amounts to nothing in the end. Even on an episode to episode basis, the brothers set out to rescue people only to fail the vast majority of the time.

It doesn’t help that one of the brothers makes Shinji Ikari look strong and brave by comparison.

Outside of the pathetic main characters and the meandering plot that went nowhere, the most disappointing thing about this show was that it had everything it needed to actually maybe be good (or at least more interesting), but couldn’t be bothered to for 24 episodes. There’re shows out there that manage to do more than that in a fraction of that episode count.

It’s difficult to say where exactly this show’s failure came from. It was apparently based on an early ‘90s TV drama that focused on the brothers as they are basically continually on the run, and this was meant as something of a prequel to that show. It would be tempting to blame a low budget, because it was pretty obvious at times that there wasn’t much of one, but I’ve watched plenty of poorly animated, low-budget animes that were a lot more interesting than this one to watch, because that actually had a decent story. This does bring me to the most disappointing thing about this show, though – it has a sequel.

Sufficed to say, I would not recommend that you watch this anime. I can’t really say one way or another with either the original TV drama, Night Head, or its more recent sequel, Night Head 2041, but watching this one does not inspire me to want to watch either of them.

Fuck No, Don’t Check It Out:

Night Head Genesis
Based on Night Head created by George Iida
Written by George Iida, Directed by Yoshio Takeuchi
Music by Shigeru Umebayashi
Produced by Bee Media and Actas, Licenced by Media Blasters

Streaming (press time): Not streaming in the US.
Amazon Prime may have it in some countries
Media Blasters has re-released it on Blu-Ray

Nerves of Chrome

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Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a chip off the code block. Scroll it, choom!

by Bob Johnson

Don’t wait for me to rant about it. No need to invest 100 hours in the video game first. If you are even vaguely interested in gaming, computers, guns, science fiction, or metamodern romance, it’s time to chip in. That’s Edgerunner lingo for Watch! This! Show!

I can’t believe my eyes! It’s a half-decent game adaptation!!

New crew, same old Night City. Moments before V explodes on the scene in 2077, we take a close look at David Martinez, a kid who gets his pocket change selling exotic VR replays to smarmy corpo kids. The closest thing he has to a friend at school is some choomba who beats him up for being poor. His mom, Gloria, pays his school tuition with black-market implants she scrapes off carcasses as an EMT.

Dave’s life kinda sucks, and it pretty much doesn’t stop sucking, though it does happen to change when a certain high-grade military implant shows up in his life. Pretty soon, he’s bouncing off the walls with lightning speed, attracting the attention of a certain fatally cute edgerunner, who opens David’s eyes to subway scams and the world of merc work. It doesn’t take long for a job or two to get over his head, but as luck would have it, he lives to fight another day.

Lucy’s idea of a meet cute involves a deadly monowire whip.

For a while, anyway. As true as it’s been since the first edition of Cyberpunk in 1988, a runner in Night City doesn’t last long. If you honestly had the choice, would you let the bullets or the daemons take you?

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is in fact a good show, a show made by the best people, that evokes the gaming experience in just the best way. Even though I’ve heard a fair set of arguments that this show is ‘just an ad’ for the game, this is not remotely in the same category as your average dime-novel Halo Reacharound cash-grab. This is real art. It is completely cohesive, whether you choose to see it as a fully fledged anime or a glorified video game cutscene. And I’d strongly argue the former over the latter.

Speaking of art, I should mention how well done the animation is, 2D first with mostly seamless 3D elements, all steeped or borrowed heavily from the game’s aesthetic and art assets, with some wall-breaking Triggerisms tossed in that work amazingly well. 10 years ago, it might have been tempting to do a work like this as some low-grade machinima. They absolutely don’t do that here.

Gotta go fast!

Ultimately, the measure of a show is not how 2D or 3D it is, it’s the whether it was made with real, human emotions, and asks real, human questions. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has tons of those little zen moments that meditate on the nature of experience. In this glitzy, near-future, artificially-enhanced surreality, what does it even mean to be human?

Fuck Yeah Look It Up!

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
Based on the Cyberpunk franchise created by Mike Pondsmith
Produced by Trigger and CD Projekt RED, distributed by Netflix
Streaming (press time): Netflix

Waifu Wars

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These ladies are a bit much
by Bob Johnson

Too Dere

Belldandy (Ah! My Goddess!) vs Yura Onoda (Futari Ecchi)

Futari Ecchi is like the “Naruto” of sex comedies, having run continuously in Japanese lad mags since 1997 and spawned 2 OVAs. The essential humour of the series relies on Yura and Makoto being absolutely clueless but being unflappably tolerant of whatever kind of weird sex stuff starts happening around them, occasionally getting swept up themselves.

Ah! My Goddess! is yet another one of those “You Fail Theology Forever” mangas where western concepts of Heaven and/or Norse mythology get filtered through Japanese concepts of animism, bureaucracy, and the absolute necessity that all forms of spirituality be mediated through sexy shrine maidens.

Comparing the shows as a whole is like apples and oranges. However, these two characters are birds of a feather when it comes to being sweeter than a kilo of erythritol. I can no more imagine Belldandy leaving Keiichi than Yura leaving Makoto, and that’s a little more damning for Yura. Makoto can be a bit of a troublemaker in ways that would never occur to Keiichi.

What makes Yura so terrible, especially compared to other pure-type waifus, is her total lack of ability, ambition, or personality. Sure, she has household chore powers, but even her Office Lady skills are no match for the the other women in Makoto’s life. By contrast, Belldandy has ultimate cosmic power, she could do literally anything else, and yet she chooses to continue to stay with her husbando.

On the other hand, Belldandy is not commonly seen getting busier than a kiss. The one point I can give Yura is that she’s super DTF, a very healthy quality in a waifu. Still, it’s not hard to make a call here: Belldandy by a mile.

Too Freaky

Stocking (Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt) vs Darkness (Konosuba)

Konosuba is yet another genre-savvy isekai whose focus is on RPG mechanics and its over-the-top characters. So Darkness, as the fighter, is supposed to be the hit-point sponge and soak up battle damage? Wouldn’t it be funny if she was super *into* that sort of thing? Ha ha. Watermelons ensue.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is an irreverent ecchi action-adventure show where the drive-by sex jokes are just as important as the actual plot of the episode. Stocking is a gothed-out suicide girl nominally from heaven, but oddly well-versed in the dark arts, and an enthusiast of rope-and-whip scenarios. What could possibly go wrong?

Of the two of them, Darkness is more straightforward. There’s no hidden game scurrying somewhere behind her eyes. She honestly craves the sting of battle, to the point of letting bad guys win even when she could easily turn them into bloody paste. Often Darkness’ scenes are just plain embarrassing for everyone, and the show even indulges in how this same embarrassment feeds back into her complex.

Stocking is more mysterious: at first glance, she might seem to be the tame, sweets-loving alternative to Panty. In action, though, she proves to be diabolically devious, eager to thrust herself into mortal danger, and date shitty guys. As the series progresses, we learn that Stocking is simply more subtle about her sex life than Panty, rather than being a boring “pure” waifu. And Stocking’s dark streak takes a turn for the worse that the waifu-collector simply has to ignore.

It’s harder to make a call here as to which is truly worse, so I’ll declare them both bad waifus: Stocking’s inscrutable complex and poor taste in men making her a too-hard, trash waifu, and Darkness being a buxom beauty with a not-so-secret kink makes her a too-easy, trash waifu.

Too Tsun

Hayase Nagatoro (Don’t Bully Me, Nagatoro-san) vs Hana Uzaki (Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!)

Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! is a romantic comedy with ecchi elements, based around teasy-flirts and rotating forms of retail therapy, with the twist that Sakurai is the only one who doesn’t realize he’s Uzaki’s boyfriend for most of the show.

Please Don’t Bully Me, Nagatoro-san is about the kinds of low-grade torture that are common in a prison or school environment where people can’t easily escape each other, played off like a comedic ecchi and mainly inflicted by the title character, who truly enjoys the fact that sadistic humiliation is her chief export.

Guess which of these shows hasfirst got a second season?!

If you fail to see the distinction between Nagatoro-san and Uzaki-chan, you might chalk both of them up to simple pablum for the crush-my-junk-with-your-high-heels crowd. But comparatively, Uzaki has a lot going for her: 1) she’s actually been in love with Senpai for a long time, 2) she’s a 100% confirmed college-going adult, and 3) her massive chest chonkers, clearly advertised as SUGOI DEKAI, are the stuff of instant legend on par with the MEGA MILK of days gone by.

Now, Nagatoro might have the edge in cunning, but she only applies her powers for evil. Yeah, Uzaki might tease a bit, but at the end of the day she’s snuggling on her beau’s arm, whereas Nagatoro leaves a brother hanging, or worse. Playing hard-to-get can have its place – but straight-up sadism is another thing entirely. Getting off on torture is bad news! Don’t bully your senpai.

Unfortunately, I’ve spotted Nagatoro merch in the wild – and not just safely on a shelf at a con, but literally as a daily driver T-Shirt amid regular folks at the department store. I wonder, on the off chance you meet another fan, what kind of conversation is everyone else nearby going to have to suffer through? I mean, I did my 3EW of her garbage and I need therapy already.

So final call in this waifu war: Uzaki wins by default! Nagatoro’s antics are a hard DQ.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

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Since When does Production I.G adapt BL Mangas?
by Bolt Vanderhuge

I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t have bothered to watch Moriarty the Communist Patriot if not for my anime group voting for it. I had actually never heard of this before, so I went into it completely unbiased when I started. The fact that Production I.G had done it gave me some hope initially, because back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, they had actually made some pretty good stuff, even it was pretty obvious one or more people there had a huge anti-America boner. While the same attention to technical detail is still alive there, as someone obviously did their homework on Victorian-era Britain. But while the art skills are still there, the writing skill apparently is not.

At first I thought this series might just be some attempt to make the character of Moriarty more sympathetic (as the title calling him a patriot suggests), or at least an attempt to try some kind of a twist on the old Sherlock Holmes franchise by focusing on this character. Essentially, Moriarty shows all the same deductive skills that are stereotypically associated with Holmes, but the “twist” ends up being that the perpetrator of the crimes he solves are all rich aristocrats and the “service” he offers is to arrange for someone else to murder them.

While was not immediately apparent to my dense self, but after the opening monologue started in the second episode and the flashback featured therein, it became obvious that this series is really just socialist revenge fantasy, which frankly was quite horrifying for a freedom-lover like myself to watch.

The English dub of this scene is … less discriminate.

The strict class separation of Victorian England really lends itself well to socialist talking points, but the show really does go overboard on it. Part of me wonders if they are just using England as a proxy for Japan, given the taboo against criticizing the Imperial family, but that’s probably giving the writers too much credit given how cartoonishly evil all the aristocrats in this series are depicted. Except for Albert Moriarty, who proves his virtue by murdering his entire family after first talking them into adopting William and his brother Louis. Only after the senior Moriarty paid for Louis to get life-saving surgery, though.

The first part of the series was very formulaic, consisting entirely of some aristocrat doing something completely inhumanly evil, William showing how smart he is by figuring out who committed said wrongdoing and/or finding all the details he needs for him and his crew of fellow commies to murder said aristocrat without getting caught. These “perfect crimes” were to be part of some plan to somehow reform the British Empire, but it wasn’t really apparent how this would be accomplished since it really seemed to be all about the revenge aspect and just how smart William was. I would even have gone as far as to accuse him of being a Wesley Crusher level Gary Stu if not for the fact that he was basically just the pop culture stereotype of Sherlock Holmes but evil.

I was honestly getting bored of this series once the initial shock of Production I.G having gone full commie on me had worn off, but just as I was starting to zone out, the series changed things up by introducing the famous detective and archenemy of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes. It was at times actually somewhat interesting to see these two play off of each other, but it was also pretty apparent that the show was basically morphing into a yaoi fan-fic. It later became the ultimate crossover fic after introducing a few other characters from the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle series by doing some … interesting things with them. For example, Irene Adler went from being able to disguise herself as a man (somehow, in spite of being built like Danni Ashe), to being trans, and being able to beat the crap out of people, to actually being the first James Bond, and first agent of MI6, which was totally invented thanks to William Moriarty’s influence. Upon the reveal of her new name, I laughed my ass off. A character named Billy the Kid also turns up. Stuff like this was the only real entertainment I got out of this series. It’s literally the ultimate yaoi socialist self-insert cross-over fan-fiction.

Literally the ultimate yaoi socialist self-insert cross-over fan-fiction.

I guess another example of the hilarity of this show is that it seemed to be structured like the 1997 Berserk series in that it started in 1911 New York City (with a period-accurate skyline) and then flashed back to William Moriarty’s beginning in London, but it’s like the writers forgot to bookend the series, and rather than ending up back in 1911 New York City, it ended in Switzerland. This Rian Johnson level of subverting expectations may be accurate to the manga (I don’t know or care), but it is still pretty funny.

So should you watch this show? Well, that depends. Are you a communist BL fan who also likes Sherlock Holmes? If so, you’d probably like this show, and hijacking planes to get to Red Zone Cuba. Do you like watching absurd things and making fun of them? You will find plenty to make fun of in this series, but it only really picks up toward the end and you really have to wait for the laughs before that. If you don’t want to wade through propaganda to get to the stupidly fun second season, or were foolishly hoping this show might do an actual adaptation of a Conan Doyle mystery, I would recommend that you skip this one and maybe watch Sherlock Hound instead.

Maybe Check It Out:

Moriarty the Patriot
Directed by Kazuya Nomura
Based on the manga written by Ryōsuke Takeuchi and illustrated by Hikaru Miyoshi
Produced by Production I.G

Streaming (press time): Crunchyroll

Apocalypse Zero Sense

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The Horror… The Horror…
by Bolt Vanderhuge

This OVA is something of an oddity, and not just in a FLCL/Dead Leaves, “WTF is going on here?” sense (though there is no shortage of that). I’m honestly not sure whether Apocalypse Zero is supposed to be taken seriously or not. It’s like someone took elements of both Fist of the North Star and Neon Genesis Evangelion and mashed them together, but didn’t really care all that much about little details like plot structure.

What, you thought the fact there was an apocalypse meant you wouldn’t have to go to school?

The story follows a Gary Stu named Kakugo Hagakure, who poses as a transfer student so he can protect students and other innocent civilians living in the ruins of Tokyo. He wears the “Zero Armor” that gives this OVA and the manga it’s based on its name, which is a living exoskeleton made from the souls of deceased warriors. His main foe is actually his older brother, Harara Hagakure. They were both given armor by their father, but while Kakugo is able to keep the damned souls powering his armor in check, Harara isn’t, and turns evil, and also into a woman for some reason that’s never really explained all that well. Harara also turned into an environmentalist, which is why s/he has vowed to finish what the unexplained apocalypse started by wiping out all of humanity with his/her army of mutants and demons. Of course, in spite of having an entire army at his/her disposal, s/he insists on sending them one at a time. Worked for Rita Repulsa, right?

That being said, this OVA is a great example of weird old anime that is just so damn entertaining to watch. It is filled to the brim with graphic violence which includes things like a monster that is a literal man-eater, who will grab random guys off the streets and kill any woman who happens to be with him by squeezing them until their insides squirt out like toothpaste out of a tube.

It’s what’s on the inside that counts.

It also doesn’t shy away from gratuitous nudity, which is just as likely to be fan dis-service, like the six-breasted bear seen in the opening of the OVA, or really the majority of the monsters sent after Kukugo and his classmates. Most are dressed in very little, and one of them even uses his dick as his main weapon.

The weird visual design only adds to the oddness of this anime, and with the complete lack of story and plot structure it is very riffable. It is one of the most absurd animes I’ve watched, and it manages to keep just on the right side of funny while it indulges in its own stupidity. I would still recommend this anime, though, as long as you understand the dark weirdness you’re getting into. This is the kind of thing you watch with friends to get drunk and make fun of together.

Fuck Yeah! Check it Out!

Apocalypse Zero (2 episode OVA)
Based on the manga by Takayuki Yamaguchi
Animated by Ashi Productions and AIC
Produced by Big West Advertising, Victor Entertainment, and Tomy

Quiet Death, or Blaze of Glory?

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Yasuke has it all, just not all together. Not unlike its title character.
by Bob Johnson

Here’s a show that came out exactly nine days too late last year: Yasuke. I do not know what chemical blend fuelled the production of this technicolor blur, but my friend has this desperate need to get some of it.

Livestreamed from the editing room.

Since there’s very little I can say about Yasuke that hasn’t been said more rudely elsewhere, let’s just start with the positives: This is a beautifully animated show with a killer soundtrack. We’re talking tunes that make you forget how direly anime needs another Nujabes — Flying Lotus could very well rise to the call. Lakeith Stanfield nails the VA for the title role. And well, I can’t really remember the last time I managed to hear about anime on NPR – maybe the FuniCrunch merger made the business section – but they talked up some Yasuke for sure. So Netflix indeed put some weight behind this and marketed the shit out of it, this is not one of the obscure, back-burner titles.

But the plot? It is… hot garbage. It barely budges from the through line of the standard sword-and-damsel plot, plus or minus certain squiggly arrows doodled on the storyboard, all hastily drawn around boxes with fresh Xs drawn through them. This is so palpable I’m trying to spit out the taste of red Sharpie. There’s so much that seems to occur “in between” episodes, almost as if entire extra episodes were meant to have taken place in the meantime. I’d call it Gonzo Ending, but the whole show is this way.

Out of everyone available, I mostly blame Netflix: its famously immutable budgets were unlikely to have covered a full 10 or 12 episodes once the bills started rolling in from MAPPA to draw up LeSean Thomas’ vision. The rest of this show, however epic it was to be, found itself on the cutting room floor.

So, legitimate question: if you were in the same bind, would you decide to go with dull, cheap animation to tell your whole story – or would you turn every knob up to 11, break them off, and spam “robots versus katanas” until your cash ran out?

As odd as it may seem to say, this show’s incompleteness may make it uniquely suited as a “gateway anime” – something to get the new anime viewer hungry for more substantial shows. Anime may be more popular than ever, but there are still plenty of folks out there who don’t fully grasp the capabilities of the medium. One look at Yasuke will cure anyone of that.

Word is that more of this show is coming. I don’t think that, at this late stage, it would make any sense to try to fill it in, as tempting as it may be to complete “missing” episodes. My vote would be for a prequel, as Yasuke’s personal history remains shrouded in mystery.

I would mostly recommend Yasuke for people who are less familiar with anime and want something that can, in about three hours, introduce them to a wide range of anime tropes. And if you like watching anime for the background noise, this is a must-hear.

Maybe look it up:
Yasuke (6 episode anime)
Story by LeSean Thomas and Flying Lotus
Produced by MAPPA, Distributed by Netflix