Recently in sci fi anime Category

With the new year just around the corner, I find myself mulling over anime I saw this year. Some were horrible, a few were excellent but most were entertaining enough.

I noticed many of the shows I watched had a supernatural or magical theme. I don't even remember seeing anything mecha-related. Sorry but giant robots leave me cold.

I have to feed the artsy fartsy side of moi now and then so I gravitate toward shows that look unique, tackle an unusual subject matter or tell a tale in a way I haven't seen before. "Mononoke", which deals with the adventures of an unusual medicine peddler, fit that bill. You should check out the show when you have the chance. I suppose you could say "Mononoke" was a spinoff of "Ayakashi" since the peddler was a character in one of the featured tales there.


Yes, I also saw my share of shonen anime from "Naruto Shippudden" to "D. Grayman" this year. The latter ended recently and was a letdown. Since the manga isn't finished, the animators decided to end the show just after the Black Order's headquarters get attacked. Lame. I hope they later come out with movies.

Do stay away from the mess that is "Le Chevalier D'eon". It is loosely based on a historical figure who was a spy for the king of France and who had a fondness for wearing women's clothing. In the anime, he dons dresses when the ghost of his murdered sister possesses him. The show is a mishmash of historical figures involved in conspiracies, secret societies and other arcane stuff. While the animation is beautiful, the plot is too convoluted and unbelievable. And anyone who loves history better steer clear of this anime which plays fast and loose with the facts.

Everyone has a list of their favorite anime shows. That's a given. But do you have a list of the anime you consider so pedestrian, lame or terrible you wouldn't show them to you ex ever?

Lemme share my lame list. It's not in any order by the way.

1. "Bartender" - Show about a mixologist who can ease your troubles with a drink. Each episode comes with a history or story behind the cocktail du jour. Employs fourth wall techniques. Verdict: bleah and just plain boring

2. "Boys Be" - Tales of boys at school and the way they drool, pine for and leer at girls and women. Contains fanservice which means scenes where female characters inadvertently end up showing their underwear. Verdict: sexist and dumb

3. "Diamond Daydreams" - Show about the lives and loves of several women who reside or work in the nothern part of Japan. At times seems like an ad for certain locations. The character designs are among the ugliest I have ever seen. Memo to the show's animators: Go back to art school and learn how to draw. Then smack yourself for producing what amounts to nothing more than a disguised travel brochure.

4."Haunted Junction" - Kids from different religious backgrounds attend a haunted school with well-known ghosts from Japanese popular culture. Well they focus mostly on spectres Japanese school kids yak about such as the girl who haunts toilets. Verdict: A big mess. Supposed to be funny but is excruciating to watch. Has disturbing characters like a teen-aged girl overly fond of little boys. Gag.

5. "Gregory Horror Show" - MIni episodes about a mouse the unseen protagonist encounters in a place full of "scary" characters. The segments are too short and choppy. The characters are NOT scary at all since they are drawn simply. Think of wooden blocks then imagine them with faces and stubby appendages. The premise isn't bad but the animators faltered in the execution.

6. "Oh My Goddess" OVA - The first installment in a series that should have been buried long long ago. Geek meets one of the Nordic goddesses of fate. She ends up keeping house for him and falling for this very common guy. This show is nothing more than wish fulfillment for the guy who cannot get a date and still lives in his mom's basement. This tripe is an insult to any woman who can think for herself.

7. "Onegai Teacher" or "Please Teacher" - Half-human/half-alien lands on Earth and pretends to be a teacher to gather data on humans. Circumstances force her to marry one of her students. She looks like a well-endowed woman in her mid-20s. He is actually 18 but looks 15 because he was in a coma-like state for several years. They keep their marriage a secret and eventually fall in love.

Skip this so-called romantic show. If you have the DVDs, burn them and fumigate the room where these were kept. I found the relationship between the main characters disturbing and just wrong. The creator of this show should be ashamed for producing this putrid excuse for an anime. He or she deserves a flogging.

8. "Rahxephon" - Show where giant statues ( actually just prettier looking giant robots) wreak havoc in a walled-off world. Hero is a teen with a murky past. There is also a mysterious girl and a woman who is more than what she seems. Great animation, nice CGIs and compelling storyline at first. But I found the plot too convoluted for my taste and the pace of the show can be glacial at times. I couldn't finish this out of frustration and boredom.

9. "School Rumble" - HIgh school anime about a clueless girl, the guy she likes, the bad boy who loves her and their classmates. Typical show where someone can't tell the object of their affection how they feel because of certain reasons and circumstances. (e.g. the person they love just doesn't get it). Some people like this show. I don't. I got tired of the main characters' inability to confess their love.

10. "R.O.D." the TV series - Three sisters with the unusual ability to manipulate paper. They solve cases and are called paper masters for a good reason. One can create paper animals that do her bidding while another can fashion weapons out of paper. This is the tv spinoff of the popular "Read or Die" OVA about a bookworm who is really a special agent for the British.

The television show buchers certain characters in the original movie much to its detriment. The plot is more complex and folks double cross each other out of the blue. The series also runs too long and gets bogged down by the different subplots. This is one sorry spinoff to a decent, original movie.

So Leonardo DiCaprio and Warner Bros have teamed up to bring a live action version of "Akira" to the big screen, according to the Hollywood Reporter. It's supposed to be a two-parter with the first movie possibly coming out in summer 2009.

I'm sure my friends who are fans of the manga and anime versions will be lining up to see the film.

I won't.

At the time it came out, "Akira" was considered cutting edge with its animation and some of its themes. I saw it and wondered what the big deal was about. I still do. Yeah I know I'm in the minority when I say that.

While I appreciated the attention given to details so the animation flowed smoothly and the action scenes were good, I never liked the character designs much less the plot. Another rebellious teen (this time a biker kid) living in a post nuclear world has to deal with a government experiment on children gone awry. And it was such a letdown to find out who Akira was.

The anime and manga has a lot of fans so a quick search of "Akira" on the Net will bring up all the info you want on said classic.

Before you hurl that tomato at me, I better come clean. I also didn't like "Princess Mononoke" maybe because I saw the horrible version dubbed in English. Then again, I doubt if the plot would make more sense to me if I saw it in the original Japanese with English subtitles.

And "Spirited Away" didn't move me either. I remember sitting through the entire movie out of some misguided belief that if one started something, one has to finish it. It wasn't a bad film by any means. I just couldn't get into it.

OK OK so it's been ages since I last posted. I've been on vacation (whine whine) and was out of the country too. Don't ask where. Suffice it to say I won't be back there.

Anyway, I've been watching this new anime called "Persona - trinity soul" which apparently is based on a video game. The show is set in Ayanagi City and happens 10 years after the last game. Our protagonists are three brothers who seem to lack the gene for expressing love. This trio of cold fishes are Ryo Kanzato who heads the local police department, his high school-aged brother Shin and their youngest sibling Jun. They had a sister, Yuki, who was Jun's twin but something happened and she's no longer with them. Ditto their parents.

I've only seen up to episode three and the show still hasn't explained if Yuki died or was kidnapped or got vaporized. Since I never played the game, I'm reduced to getting my info solely from the show.

In the first episode, Ryo gets summoned to check out a submersible where the crew vanished. At the same time, his two younger brothers return home after several years of living with another relative. He doesn't seem to relish seeing his brothers again.

There's a mystery with a capital M going on. People are disappearing. Folks have been found dead and turned inside out. There's a group of folks who seem to be grabbing certain young people and pulling out what looks to be their souls. Ryo keeps things from his own men much to the chagrin of one cop who thinks he's up to something. Ryo, who is as friendly as an iceberg to his siblings and underlings, possesses some sort of power that launches a transparent giant robot thingy that saves one of the kidnapped girls and slashes some giant alien thingy that comes out of the kidnapper.

At his new high school Shin hears about "shadow extraction" and sees students doing such a feat on others. He passes out after a classmate, Takuro Sakakiba, and he managed to pull out these giant robots from each other. It seems these robot things are called Personas.

Interesting that the robots look like the models Shin possesses and even dreams about.

Little Jun is weird in his own right, He keeps a dress of his missing twin with him and behind locked doors, Ryo overhears him talking to a girl.

There's some trouble brewing at a local karaoke bar when Shin and his classmates run into a group of young punks.

The show is interesting so far.

A co-worker asked yesterday why I don't update this blog every day. Hmmm. I'd love to just do this instead of covering crime but I think my boss wouldn't be too thrilled with that.

Besides, someone has to chronicle the evil things that people do. Might as well be me. I've been covering crime so long, I'm pretty much not shocked by anything anymore. But I wouldn't subject anyone else to this. The world I cover isn't black and white but shades of gray. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Now back to yakking about anime which actually keeps me sane.

I finally managed to catch up on all those episodes of "Naruto Shipuuden" I've missed. SPOILER ALERT. Naruto and the gang have recovered Gaara's body. Chiyo-baba, the Sand Village elder, is thinking of reviving him using her life force.

Yep, it took a long time for her and Sakura to get rid of her evil grandson, Sassori, who was a member of Akatsuki and a former partner of Orochimaru. And did we really need those clone fights with Gai-sensei's team? I like Neji a lot but their fights just dragged on too long.

Next episode is the manga chapter where Chiyo-baba uses Naruto's seemingly endless supply of chakra to revive the dead Gaara.

"Kekkaishi" or "Barrier Master" has grown on me. It went from a ho-hum monster of the week show to a more interesting show with sibling rivalry, angsty half monsters and an evil organization doing everything to take over Karasumori which is that patch of powerful land Yoshimori and Tokine protect as the current kekkaishi of their families.

The evil organization has launched an all-out assault against our heroes to wrest Karasumori away from them. Their leader, a fox spirit called Princess, isn't going to last much longer and their headquarters will fall once she's gone. Or so that's what one of her minions said.

Why Yoshimori's grandpa, who is way more powerful than him, is just sleeping at home is beyond me. At least his cunning and powerful older brother, Masamori, has an excuse. The evil spy in his group has seen fit to dispatch Masamori and his team away from the fray about to break out over Karasumori.

In "D.Gray-man", the Millennium Earl is peeved that another exorcist has come into being when her crystal ball turned out to be actually Innocence. It is a substance the Earl's foes, the Black Order, uses to fight against him.

In addition to the storyline, I also like this show's character designs. Fans were out in force at the last Anime Expo looking really spiffy in their exorcist uniforms which were probably bought from some store. They didn't look handmade.

Anyway, there's only four more episodes left of the first season. There's going to be a second season of "D.Gray-man." Ditto with "Kekkaishi." I can't wait.

I saw this cover of a PS2 "Naruto Shippuuden" game. I haven't played it so I have no idea if it's good. I was just looking for images of an older Naruto to use.

Ja ne.

Anime isn't restricted to shows about magical pre-teens with pink hair and cutesy sidekicks. It deals with a wide range of subject matter and uses a variety of animation styles. And yes, there are dreck shows as there are gems out there.

Since I burned out on shows featuring giant robots and spaceships as a child, I seldom watch mecha anime or anything that remotely looks mecha. But sometimes I make exceptions especially if the mecha elements do not overwhelm the entire story.

One of my favorite anime guys is Makoto Shinkai who created "Voices of a Distant Star" which every anime fan should see at least once.

It is the story of two young lovers separated literally by time and space. Shinkai used his Macintosh to create the anime. The character designs aren't so hot but the story and the background are wonderful.

Cell phone messages sent between the main characters, Mikako Nagamine and Noboru Terao, play a big role in the story. Yeah, it's a stretch to believe that a cell phone company would have such a coverage plan but let's just go with the flow, shall we?

The two last saw each other in middle school. War breaks out between Earth and a group of aliens called Tarsians. Mikako joins the UN forces and learns to fight the Tarsians using a giant robot. Somehow she still wears the same uniform from school. Whatever. She misses Noboru and experiences these moments where you know she's either dreaming or hallucinating.

Because Mikako is traveling light years away, she ages slower than Noboru and her messages takes years to reach him. He tries to hang on then gives in to the inevitable. He meets a girl called Wakana and it's hinted that he goes out with her in high school. The manga version further elaborates on this relationship.

Then like a bucket of cold water, he receives a message from Mikako who we last see is in a firefight with the enemy. Lysithea, the spaceship that carries her and the others, is damaged. Her last message ends in static.

Noboru drops out of high school and joins the space armada in the hopes of reuniting with Mikako.

The manga's ending is more satisfying since it has Mikako scanning a list of people who joined the armada and seeing Noboru's name.

This is a tear jerker of a show and could be too much of a chick flick for some guys. But give it a try. You might like it. Then give Shinkai's other works a look. The man knows how to tell a story.

Bandai will be releasing volume one of "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" on May 29. I highly recommend this 14-episode series which is based on a series of novels. It's very funny.

The heroine, Haruhi Suzumiya, is smart, athletic but easily bored. She introduces herself in her high school class as someone who only wants to deal with aliens, time travelers and folks with ESP. She forms a club at school, the SOS Brigade, and recruits - actually strong-arms - others into joining. The members include Haruhi's sensible classmate Kyon who gets dragged into her hare-brained adventures, placid Yuki Nagato the lone member of another club whose club room Haruhi takes over and the bosomy Mikuru Asahina who becomes their mascot gal much to her distress. Itsuki Koizumi is the only one who willingly joins. Haruhi zeroes in on him because he fits the bill of "the mysterious transfer student."

I won't spoil the series by revealing why Yuki, Mikuru and Itsuki stay in this club whose goal is to "bring more excitement to the world." Actually the club exists to keep Haruhi from being bored. Let me put it this way. The world is a much better place if Haruhi is kept entertained. That's how special she is.

She's relentless in getting her own way. Watch how she uses Mikuru to snag a computer from the computer club next door. Haruhi also believes in action hence the swift kick to the head she gives the computer club president when he later issues the club a challenge.

The SOS Brigade's contribution to the school culture fest is a movie featuring the adventures of Mikuru as a girl with super powers. Narrated and later edited by poor overworked Kyon, the film makes no sense and looks murky to boot. It's actually a very funny send up of those anime shows about magical girls with mysterious origins.

"The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" aired last year in Japan and soon became a fan favorite. I like the show because it's hilarious, doesn't drag and Haruhi is such a colorful character. My favorite character is Kyon whose real name is never mentioned in the show. Kyon is the nickname his little sister gave him which everybody now uses. He often gets exasperated with Haruhi and his side comments and inner thoughts make a perfect counterpart to her energetic declarations and crazy plans.

Bandai's Web site on the show is http://asosbrigade.com