Wow, a giant robot show that's actually good, unlike Dual (sorry, Dual. You had potential briefly, and then you turned into a loser-gets-harem show).
The dub's good. Yeah, you heard me. I watched the show in English, I watched it in Japanese, and liked both performances a lot. I like the characters, I like the art, I like the sound, I like the story, I like the robots. I'm buying these DVDs as fast as I can, pow pow pow, one after the other, because RahXephon gives Evangelion a run for its money as the best damn 26 episodes ever.
Is RahXephon better? I won't know till I've seen the end. I do know I'll see it soon. (posted 11/26/03)
update: Saw the ending. Yep, that was pretty weird. Not as satisfying as Evangelion, by any means, as an ending, but the romantic portion of the plot was tied up nicely. I need to watch RahXephon again, I think, and I'll enjoy it just as much the second time around. (posted 1/12/04)
Well, I broke one of my own rules with Generator Gawl. Normally, I'm a continuity freak. I have consistently found that watching anime out of sequence is a huge mistake. I chanced it this time. I bought these three DVDs for twelve bucks, total. These three boys from a couple hundred years in the future travel back in time to the year 2007. Yeah, it's all about time travel. There's the fey, shy guy, and the fey stoic leader, and then Gawl, who's a gluttonous scatterbrain. Why do they keep him around? Oh, yeah, he morphs into a superhuman monster, and fights other superhuman monsters from the future. Anyway, they end up as a platonic guy-harem in a totally-forgettable Japanese girl's house, as her zany lodgers. To prevent a future war, they sneak around, even though they know from the beginning exactly who is sending monsters their way.
Generator Gawl is the most thoroughly-mediocre series I've ever seen. I can't say anything positive about the character designs, the comic relief and token romantic elements are forgotten before the scene's over, the fights with the mediocre monsters were mediocre, and the music was standard, i.e. lame, J-pop. The ending was almost total crap, including all the trite time-travel bits (characters related to other characters, Trying To Change The Already-Written Past, surprises that weren't surprising, etc.), but also including a bonus "making it all better by wishing for whatever you want". To top it off, in the second-to-last episode, the Machiavellian villain also turns out to be a badass monster herself, with flight and attack powers far better than anyone/anything else in the series. Guh? If she could fly and had zero difficulty trashing Gawl at his most powered-up state, why didn't she do that, oh, exactly as soon as they showed up?
This series just wasn't very good. It's not bad-bad-bad, but seeing it once was absolutely enough for me, and I don't want to dilute my "street cred" by showing Generator Gawl to anyone else. I'm going to sell my copy quietly, and forget I ever watched it. Oh, wait, I already did. (7/28/03)
I keep finding cheap DVDs at Gamestop, and the first three DVDs in the Orphen series were part of that score. It's a high-fantasy series about a renegade sorcerer who is trying to free his girlfriend from a horrible curse while fighting an entire college of sorcery that have decided to kill them both. Oh, and it's a comedy. Weird, I know. The action goes from high-powered sword/magic dueling to low comedy based on pratfalls, which is not helped by an unfunny super-deformed pair of comic-relief characters. Orphen is a know-it-all braggart and jackass, but also a traumatized hero who is haunted by his past, and by his inability to stop the suffering of the person he loves. Cleao is a whiny, spacy brat, but she loves Orphen and knows he's in love with his lost girlfriend. The series doesn't completely succeed at blending dramatic aspects with comedic ones.
This series reminds me of two series I enjoy, Captain Tylor and Trigun. Captain Tylor also fluctuates between extremes: is the fate of the galaxy at stake, or is the bumbling idiot protagonist going to be a bumbling idiot? Trigun has a hero who's surrounded by folks less powerful than he, and who's also tormented. Oh, yeah, Trigun is also all about pratfalls. (Trigun is a schizophrenic series... a comedy with mass-murderers in it. That's mass-murderers, plural.). As I watch, I'm fascinated at how the woman Orphen loves is, well, a bad person. She's deeply flawed, and in some ways, deserves at least part of how she's ended up. Anyway, I know it's not high art, but I like Orphen.
The art in Orphen is mediocre. A too-low frame rate, generic fantasy townscapes, and cutting corners during action sequences hurts, too. I like some of the character designs, but I can't forgive the comic relief. Didn't care for the music either. The DVD extras are skimpy, but the dub isn't bad. There are occasional bursts of too-colloquial slang, but I can live with it.
Having a really, really irritating commercial break isn't a deal-breaker, but AD Vision should have cut the volume on it. I'm watching the episode, and all of a sudden, I get blasted at high volume by unpleasant staccato noise? Gee, can you make sure it happens without warning in every episode, and can't be shut off? You can? Thanks, ADV!
For all my kvetching, I like this series, and will definitely grab more DVDs, if I can find them on sale. The first DVD has four episodes, and the others so far have had three. That's not good enough these days, but hey, I did buy them used. (6/24/03)
Lee and I watched a couple episodes of this high-school romance series on Valentine's Day. Two unlikely protagonists discover their feelings for each other, and the depiction of the highs and lows of high school romance is so spot-on, it's almost unbearable. I watched the first two episodes subbed, and Lee and I saw all six of the episodes on the DVD with the English language track as well. Yeah, that's right, 6 episodes for the first DVD, and we both liked the dub enough to keep watching it. The series shifts back and forth between a few art styles, and I kept thinking... hmmm, symbolism... hmm... recycled footage... hmm... cut right out of Evangelion. Overall, the same artistic tricks from Evangelion show up, which is not surprising with Neon Genesis Evangelion's director Hideaki Anno at the helm. This is good. Buy this disc! Buy this disc! (posted 2/19/03)
Update: We watched the second DVD. This series takes all of Marmalade Boy's flaws (passive characters, lack of character development, endless subplots that never resolve, unlikeable supporting characters, mediocre art and music) and fixes them. Yeah, that's right, all of them. Buy this disc! Buy this disc! (6/24/03)
Update: We watched DVDs three and four. Way to not focus on the main characters! Gee, I thought I was watching interesting anime for a second.. (11/26/03)
Update: We watched DVD five right before Christmas. Lots of budget-stretching tricks, very little story, no real ending. Disappointing trail-off for a series I liked so much (1/12/04)
I'll just say it right now, I don't like Mahoromatic. It's icky-creepy. Roughly: 'An android girl decides to live out her last year of existence as a maid for a 15-year-old nebbish, and hijinks ensue.' I can deal with the premise, but the execution is basically a fanboy's wet dream: "automatic maiden" Mahoro, at least in the first two episodes, is doing her absolute best to wait on Misato Suguru hand and foot. She also bathes with him. I thought I would be fine with that, but then Suguru has a flashback of bathing with his mother as a toddler, and the scene flips back to the present day. The flashback underscores the Oedipal fantasy involved.
Suguru's teacher [she's got big boobs and loves showing them off to get reactions out of her students-yeah, you've come a long way, baby] also wants to jump his bones. Yuck, and I mean yech, blech, and all associated half-formed utterances of disgust. I hope she's intended to be a parody of something else I haven't seen and never will.
The only reason I bothered watching the second episode was to see if the series got better or worse. Worse, worse, worse. I know Piro from Megatokyo made some positive comments about this series, but 1. he's a completist. 2. he loves Japanese dating sims. Nothing wrong with either one, but I just don't swing that way.
I know that a maid-fetish is making the rounds in Japan, and there's another series called Hand Maid May, about which I've heard mixed reviews. It can't possibly be any more degrading than this. What the hell is wrong with these people? How hard can it be to make a romantic comedy? You take a spineless loser, force him to live with a bunch of women, and hijinks ensue! Fanboys are threatened by real women, I accept this. But to stoop so low as to combine the subservience implied by the girl being a robot with the subservience implied by the girl being a maid? How much lower could they sink? If she has a big lobotomy scar on her forehead and lives in the doghouse in the backyard?
There you have it. I hate this with the force of a thousand suns. (posted 6/29/02)
Full disclosure: I watched one more episode of this, about a month after that review, to see if it got better. It did not. The ending theme song talks about Mahoro's little breasts, and that was emphasized, not once, but twice in the third episode. Yeah, we get it, she doesn't have a massive rack. You know, this series probably cost the industry hundreds of dollars per fan. Just watching a few episodes of this made me want to sell off half my collection and throw the other half into a bonfire. Where are my damn hijinks, and why are they not ensuing? (update 6/24/03)
This series asks the tough question: "What if Batman was also James Bond, and he had a giant robot?" The protagonist, Roger Smith, is a Negotiator, which means he embarks on assignments Travis McGee style, in retro-futuristic Paradigm City. Everyone in the city lost their memories forty years ago, and every so often, a person will get flashes of their previous life. They use these memories, in the episodes I saw, to build big techno-monsters, which Roger Smith encounters. Fortunately for Roger, he's got a giant robot, named "The Big O." Hold your laughter, folks, they're as serious as ferrets down your pants! That is, it's deadly serious in and of itself, but a hilarious thrill-ride for the amused bystander.
Homages: Roger has a butler who looks and acts a great deal like Alfred, an underground lair where he parks his long black car which has armor and missiles, a grappling hook watch... the Batman similarities are coming thick and fast. Roger's personality owes a lot to Lupin III, an anime hero with a long history of being lecherous, having tons of gadgets, and making otherwise-awful villains look like idiots. One of the supporting characters, Angel, is a body double for Fujiko, a member of Lupin III's gang. Since Fujiko is a beautiful mercenary, it's not surprising they picked her over the other worthies of the Lupin cast. There's a robot in the Evangelion style in episode four, which has all sorts of weirdness in it, as well. The homages/blatant thefts work, because it's clear that the creator picked out the bits that support the cohesive world depicted.
The best part of The Big O is an android named R. Dorothy Wayneright. Her sarcasm acts as a perfect foil for Roger's womanizing, and tweaks the nose of the pompous, Bruce-Wayne-at-Wayne-Manor, rich-boy atmosphere of Roger's home. In a passing nod to reality, the petite Dorothy weighs a lot, and in a scene where she's been deactivated, is almost too heavy to carry.
The bad: as for the titular robot, I found it pedestrian. It's ugly, and a deus ex machina of the worst sort. The creators also chose to repeat the name about a thousand times during the opening song. Footage gets repeated every time Roger's in the robot. Still, it's not a deal-breaker. The fights don't last very long, and generally aren't the focus of the episode. Angel looks and acts a lot like Fujiko so far, and it's too early to tell if this is a problem or not. Outside the robot, Roger's been knocked unconscious twice on three cases. When you have Travis McGee's job, you take Travis McGee's lumps, I guess.
Overall, this was a blast to watch. The mysteries of Paradigm City are revealed at a reasonable pace, light-hearted character interaction is balanced by robot-fighting scenes, and the character designs aren't bad at all. The dub of the DVD is all right, although I admit I haven't watched the whole DVD dubbed yet. I'll be showing this to my friends as an example of good anime. Not necessarily great anime, but thoroughly enjoyable. (4/28/02)
Update: Bought DVDs 3 and 4, taking me through episodes 8-13, including a cliffhanger ending. A couple of good moments, more Evangelion-cribbed combats, and overall weirdness. R. Dorothy has a couple of great scenes... she's an incredible character. At least two of these episodes make absolutely no true sense... you haven't lived until you've watched the episode where a giant Christmas tree begins going berserk and attacks the city. (2/19/03)
Update: Bought DVD 2. One good episode, two eeh ones. I know a second set of 13 episodes got commissioned in Japan. I hope we get more character development and fewer retarded-looking giant robots. I'll buy those DVDs when they come out, too (6/24/03)
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I rented this at Planet Anime. Mayuko, a poor student with three jobs, has a lazy, freeloading alien girl named NieA living in her closet, and hijinks ensue. Every episode on the DVD had Mayuko and NieA in it, but beyond that, different supporting cast members were the focus of each episode. If you think Mayuko looks like Lain (that's good; see my review below), you're right-same creator. The obsessive talent that went into worldbuilding in Lain is obvious here. A town that's seen better days is shown in loving detail. Mayuko's struggles, heck, everyone's struggles, with money and finding meaning in life, are made believable, because their world is gloriously mundane.
The aliens have an elaborate ranking system, based partially on the antenna each of them has on their heads. NieA is an "under seven," the worst rank, and she also has no antenna. The other aliens in the show, including Karna, a elitist snob you'll either hate, or love to hate, give NieA no end of grief about her rank and deformity. Mayuko gives NieA grief about being a freeloader bum. NieA is spastic, loud, and generally acts like she's five. She begs for food, breaks things, whines, is petty, and builds UFOs out of junk in Mayuko's room. Mayuko and NieA aren't suited to be roommates, but they are. It's an old formula for comedy, and the formula still works.
I should mention that the DVD's English dub is good, maybe even as good as the original Japanese. There is occasional embellishing in the English version, so the English voice track doesn't match the subtitles. It shouldn't detract from your enjoyment. The dub is good. Accept it. Revel in it. Other items of note: the ending theme is passable, the opening theme is terrible. Extras on this DVD: a set of character sketches that I enjoyed, but nothing spectacular. The computer-embellished nature of the proceedings is obvious in scenes involving fire or explosions.
This volume is fun to watch, and every episode has a different mood, since the episodes are so driven by the supporting characters. The characters are firmly divided between the relatively-realistic humans and the wacky aliens. I'm not sure where the series is going, but unlike Lain, it has the potential to keep me involved. (3/31/02)
The romantic teen comedy genre bloodline exemplified by Tenchi Muyo, Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure, Maison Ikkoku, and all the rest in the previous generations have brought forth the GENETICALLY SUPERIOR child called Love Hina. I am here to tell you, just as Trigun was placed on this barren planet we call Earth so Mike Byers could run out and buy it, Love Hina has been engineered for the sole purpose of making me buy and watch every single second of Love Hina, repeatedly, until my eyes bleed. It's the dopest trip.
The setup: a dumb-but-sincere guy named Keitaro Urashima has been trying to get into Tokyo University. He's failed the entrance exams twice (they call him ronin, just like Godai in Maison Ikkoku), but he's going to keep trying. Fifteen years ago, he promised a little girl they'd meet at Tokyo U and be happy together. Time has faded his memories of the girl, and he doesn't remember her name, forcing us to see flashback footage of this moment repeatedly. His parents tell him he's a bad student and they can't afford to support his crazy dreams. He retorts that he'll move out and get a job, and they say, 'Great! Beat it!'
Anyway, hijinks ensue, and Keitaro ends up as the manager of a wacky inn (Maison Ikkoku)... but it's an all-girls inn... at a hot spring (Tenchi Muyo). The shy cook, weird spacy foreign catgirl, ultraviolent kendo aficionado, studious-yet-beautiful female lead, and mercenary kinda-slut aren't anything we haven't seen before, but they're handled competently, and in the classic style, not all of them are introduced at once (Tenchi Muyo, Oh! My Goddess, etc.). Love Hina is based on a dating simulation video game, if that combination of words makes sense in English. This means the creators understand what drives the characters (unlike, for instance, El-Hazard's Afura Mann... you know, not the fire one, and not the water one, the no-personality one). The weird foreigner is annoying at first, but I got over it.
Why? Every so often, there'll be an inspired moment. In the second episode, street signs with arrows on them keep reappearing in the background, and Shinobu, the shy girl who feels her path in life is fixed, is always walking with them or against them. The town elders mumble pseudo-philosophy at odd moments, and provide comic relief. At one point, Keitaro bemoans his fate, "Why does this happen to me?" The ancients explain helpfully, "You're a loser!". The kendo expert's sword techniques show up frequently, and at one point she announces "Final Succession Technique!" (complete with Rourouni Kenshin-esque kanji flashes) as she unleashes her whapping-people-with-sticks powers. Your mind is probably not going to be challenged to the utmost limits by Love Hina, but the plot moves along nicely, without endless stalling and suspense (I'm pointing at Marmalade Boy as a good example of that problem). Love Hina provides extra flourishes of parody, on top of the character interaction, decent background art, and attractive character designs (unlike Geobreeders).
I loved every second of this anime, except the progidous amounts of fanservice (y'know, showin' a little leg for the fellas, q.v. Tenchi Muyo). The first episode is bad, bad, bad. Like all loser-gets-girls anime, Love Hina should be watched at a single sitting until the house/inn/spaceship's cast has assembled. Let me make it clear, I'm a sucker for this genre. I own enough Tenchi Muyo to be classified as an ultra-loser without taking into account the copious time I've spent enjoying Dual, El-Hazard, Oh! My Goddess, and so forth. If you hate romantic comedies, you'll probably hate Love Hina. If you're on the fence, Love Hina is worth exploring. If you like romantic comedies, especially loser-gets-all-the-girls anime, then Love Hina is the next thing you should watch, assuming you can give it two hours to finish the first four episodes' story arc. It's definitely the next series I'm going to buy. (2/16/02)
Update: Was the DVD worth the wait? Yes, of course. What little I watched of the dub was horrible, horrible, horrible. Mitsune (mercenary kinda-slut) has a Southern belle accent. Kaolla Su (weird foreigner) has either a British, or Indian accent, or possibly both, or neither. I also noticed that the frantic Keitaro-running-away sequences have cut out his pathetic squeals of terror. In the Japanese version, he's squalling like a baby. In the English version, he'll yell, but without the extended panic and terror effects. I think the Japanese version works better, because Love Hina's chase theme goes about 120 beats a minute, and having a vocal counterpart to the music makes the music's driving pace less obvious. Anyway, I'm buying the next one as soon as I can. (3/30/02)
Update: I borrowed ep's 1-25, the full regular series, from Mike, and it was a big letdown. A couple episodes were promising; overall, the series just meandered to a non-conclusion. Too much goofy, not enough smoochy.. Any resolution of storylines was taken back in later episodes. Also, I don't like the characters' spindly legs or necks, especially certain angles where Shinobu is depicted. (2/19/03)
It took me a long time to watch Lain. I liked the first couple of episodes a lot. My favorite line: "You shouldn't be getting email from a dead girl. But there it is!" Lain Iwakura, the main character, is shy, withdrawn, and has a vulnerability and weakness that makes her fascinating to watch. I thought the second couple of episodes were all right. Somehow, I never got around to watching all of this series, until now. I know it is heralded by some as brilliant, must-see anime. I disagree.
I'd be enjoying the story, feeling like I understood the characters, even if their world was confusing, and then the characters or the world or both would be interrupted with unexplained strangeness. The story simply shifts viewpoints or starts over at another spot in the script. It's like a season of the X-Files, sped up. You get some story, then you find out your original impressions were wrong. Fun enough the first few times. Not fun twenty or thirty times.
Like the X-Files, Serial Experiments Lain delves into bizarre conspiracy theory, including a brief appearance of the classic short grey alien. Why? Beats me. Served no purpose except to be shocking and interrupt the narrative. Saw the grey guy twice in sixty seconds in the tenth or eleventh episode, and it never reappears. Around the final quarter of a series, I want to start having questions answered, not be distracted by random, non-recurring ephemera. Toward episode eight or nine, information is provided as a voice-over, and still images are thrown at the viewer, telling the story of some Internet pioneer, and his theories. Lots of this happens as the series continues. This information doesn't help support anything the viewer sees, undermining the focus of the work. I have to tell you, I've read the Illuminatus Trilogy, Foucault's Pendulum, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail. If there was a coherent conspiracy theory here, I would have found it. Serial Experiments Lain is telling an intricate yarn through the eyes of a marginal participant in the drama, not one of the principals. Lain wanders, as bereft as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, through a world-spanning computer network that she, and the viewer, never really sees completely.
The opening theme song's catchy enough that I watched the opening sequence about twice a tape. That's much better than usual.
Serial Experiments Lain is just weird, and it's just out there. Lain (the girl)'s experiences never seem to jibe with the heavy-handed theories. If the narrative were stronger and more compelling, then I could forgive these flaws. I loved the parts of this series where Lain was shown interacting with other human beings. The creators proved they could portray interesting and empathetic characters. They did not prove they could tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. My wife said, "When you stop the tape, the Lain characters don't exist. They also didn't exist before you watched that part."
If you like art-for-art's-sake movies, or are feeling adventurous and postmodern, give the first volume of Serial Experiments Lain a try. (2/5/02)
After my brain narrowly escaped total destruction at the hands of Tattoon Master, I gave myself a day off, and then jumped right into another "unknown quantity" rental, Eat-Man '98. I've never read any commentary on it, but I've picked up the Eat-Man manga, and it didn't seem to be too awful (unlike, for instance, Sorceror Hunters; browsing a single volume of the manga has given me the idea that I'll run screaming from a screening of the Sorceror Hunters anime). The clerk at Planet Anime said Eat-Man was okay, so I decided to give Eat-Man '98 a shot, passing up Eat-Man '99, since I prefer to see things in chronological order.
How was Eat-Man '98? Well, it wasn't awful, but I really can't say it did anything for me. The idea is, that this mercenary, Bolt Crank, wanders around in a post-apocalyptic setting. His shtick: he can eat anything, then produce it later from his body. So he wanders around, eating guns, swords, and in one instance, the wall of a jail cell. When Bolt needs a gun, foop, it grows out of his hands. Need a sword, foop, here it is. Need a wall of a jail cell, foop, I'm bored. Imagine watching Batman load tiny little pellets into his utility belt, with no explanation, no internal monologue, and no flashbacks, waiting for something to happen, for twice as long as it takes to be bored. There are just two episodes on the tape, and too much time is eaten up with filler shots of Bolt chowing down on gun parts.
The two episodes set up and resolve a noir story about a string of murders in a particular town (from my reading of the manga, Bolt gets run out of town a lot; the future has all kinds of goofy cities with improbable architecture and different climates, and they're close enough Bolt can walk between them... lake city, next to desert city, next to jungle city, etc). I had already figured out most of the plot twists by the end of the first episode, but I was non-repulsed enough to watch the second episode. My predictions were borne out completely. I'm no psychic--the whole resolution was mechanical at best. The ethical implications were more disturbing: the murdered scientists were playing God, therefore, they deserved to get shot in their own beds by a vigilante. I'm not going to talk about the portrayal of lesbians (Sorry, perverts, PG-13 rating, if even that. Couple of backlit nude shots from medium distance, one girl-girl kiss, not a nipple to be seen) as potential-or-actual vigilantes. Overall moral: 'Bolt Crank knows best.'
Eat-Man '98 has bigger problems than predictability. When reading manga, you can jump past the sequences when nothing is happening. In anime, you just have to wait it out. Bolt Crank has about six lines in each episode. He's brooding, mysterious, and stoically boring. His voice is so low, the first few times I wasn't even sure if his lines were being spoken aloud, or meant to be a voice-over. Even more frustrating are scenes where Bolt gestures to produce eaten items. They are clearly meant to be the high points of the episode, but they're drawn in a very static style. The animation just isn't very animated, and the still frames that should and could have been fantastic are visually disappointing. Translating 1:1 from manga to anime doesn't work here, because it NEVER works--read, then see the endurance-testing series Spirit of Wonder for a more blatant example.
The worst part about Eat-Man is that it's superficially similar to Trigun: a blond guy wanders around dispensing justice and demolishing city blocks. Trigun's protagonist Vash the Stampede is much more vocal, eccentric, and charismatic than Bolt Crank, so why watch Eat-Man '98? Whether you compare number of lines spoken by the hero, actual running time of the videos, or number of complete stories per tape, Trigun is clearly above Eat-Man '98. This may or may not be a compliment. "Near-invulnerable hero dispenses justice" is right up there with "schoolgirls transported to a magical world" as a venerable anime theme, making comparisons inevitable. If Vash the Stampede, the Fist of the North Star, or Kenshin were cut-and-pasted over Bolt Crank, the series would be more entertaining, but then, I honestly believe 'Kenshin knows best,' so take my advice with a grain of salt. That doesn't mean I wouldn't watch other Eat-Man '98 or Eat-Man '99 tapes, but at two episodes a tape, there's no reason to make this a high priority. See Cowboy Bebop instead. In fact, see Cowboy Bebop instead, then see it again. (reposted from email archive 8/25/01)
Update: I noticed recently that the Eat-man '98 collection is being offered in one DVD package. That might make it more tempting. At least it's not taking up lots of shelf space at your local retailers that could have spent their time/space/money/effort on stocking a better series. (3/12/02)
I really enjoyed the first volume of Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure... and then I watched the rest of it. The creative team that made Tenchi Muyo and El-Hazard has produced another uneven series that acts as a parody of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The show must have sounded like a great idea: 'We'll put a bland, unassuming boy and a smart, sassy girl in a parallel world sort of like in El Hazard and he'll have to pilot a giant robot like in Evangelion, and, and, and, um, lots of girls will live with him and be wacky like in Tenchi Muyo!' I imagine they drank a lot of sake after that. Not-Funny-Enough brand sake.
The problems arise with how the mismatched concepts are fitted together. The protagonist Kazuki Yotsuga travels to a parallel world where he discovers that: #1. giant robot suits are having fistfights downtown. #2. no records of him exist because in this world he was never born. #3. he's a natural at piloting a giant robot. #4. the other robot pilots are cute girls. So far, so good, because it's like Evangelion, minus the parallel world angle. Evangelion is a brilliant, gloomy series that addresses feelings of loss and alienation at both the individual and societal level. Scenes of death and betrayal are underscored by scenes of alien technology and cabalistic imagery. Along the way, Evangelion has hints of romantic attraction between characters, but love is muted by horrific events. Evangelion had the guts to let civilians, bystanders, and major characters die. Dual! doesn't, which limits the extent to which the parody can proceed. This derails the storyline halfway through the series; the plot then meanders until the series concludes, and a shadow-thin excuse is concocted to waste a half-hour with the special.
Because so much of Dual! is rooted in Evangelion, when the action focuses on Evangelion parody, it is great. When there are character-driven humorous scenes (as in El Hazard or Tenchi Muyo), the comedy just isn't funny enough, with the exception of the entire half of the episode devoted to transvestism (wait, that's actually Evangelion parody, too. Never mind). The characters in Dual! are awfully shallow, and their motivations don't seem to make much sense. Kazuki is the main character, and that means, in El Hazard and Tenchi Muyo tradition, all the attractive petite female characters love our hero at first sight. The only problem is, he's not loveable. He is likeable at best, but shows no actual romantic inclination to any of his admirers, instead preferring the one who spoils him the most.
I am not making this up: Two of the girls get in a fight over which of them gets the privilege of washing Kazuki's clothes, including underwear. They feed him, clothe him, and climb into his bed at night (nothing naughty happens). This becomes creepy at times, and is not helped by the weird alien girl named "D." I think that's short for 'Didn't need to be in this anime at all.' Maybe "D" was an interesting character in the manga who gradually became more talkative, but I didn't like her at all in the anime. She was opaque and unexpressive, really more of a plot device than a real character. She's the parody/homage of Evangelion's Rei Ayanami character, and that comparison does not weigh favorably on Dual!. Rei's silence conveys her deep depression, apathy, and introversion, but since all these elements of Evangelion were removed or downplayed in Dual!, "D" is just weird for the sake of being weird.
The series ending is bizarre, and sets up the special, which is not very interesting, but implies that a second series of Dual! might not be far off. If one came out, I would buy the first volume. I really liked Dual at first, but the last episodes seemed like a chore to watch, and I'm not sure I could point to individual reasons why this is so. If I think of some, I'll post them. (reposted from email archive 9/20/01)
Digi Charat is the best bizarre marketing ploy I've ever seen. An anime store in Japan sponsored this anime, which is all about the misadventures of two very hyperactive girl aliens. In the first episode, the girls land in Japan and rent a room above the store, in exchange for working there. The episodes are about five or six minutes long, and don't make any sense. More to come once I've finished watching. (10/21/01)
Update: Will I watch Digi Charat again? Beats me. I could trim the collection down and just have the good episodes (the episode where Petit Charat, the 5 year old girl, is trying to master shooting beams from her eyes like Digi Charat, is great, great, great), but that'd be work, and I hate work. Wasn't an editor supposed to cut out the junk? The whole tape feels like a commercial, even when they're not pushing the game-store connection into the viewer's face. The pacing of the episodes feels wrong; stories end without much resolution. Also, the series was drawn by monkeys. This is a failed experiment; sweep up the mess and learn what you can. (11/23/01)
Another failed experiment, D4 Princess is a mediocre setting and a great theme waiting for likeable characters. Doris Ruridou is a whiny, spoiled "princess" who goes off to a girls' school, and suffers horrible, gut-wrenching embarrassment at every turn. Many of the girls can change, with classic magical-girl transformation sequences, into goofy armored costumes. Doris looks incredibly stupid when she transforms, but that's the point: D4 Princess is about adolescent embarrassment, pure and simple. Humiliations great and small are heaped on Doris, but she's so unlucky, stupid, and helpless that I found it difficult to empathize.
The starting credits last about 1/10th of a second, and have a bunch of text that must not be important, because I never bothered to read it. The ending credits look terrible, and have a song that lasts too long. The individual episodes are only about six or eight minutes long; not long enough to tell the extended stories that are attempted. The creators solve this problem by just breaking off the story whenever they want, so about a third of the time, the viewer will be fast-forwarding through credits of one kind or another. This will definitely be improved by going to DVD, but this series is so lame that they'd better pack all the episodes onto one disk, since no one's going to buy D4 Princess twice. (11/23/01)
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