Review: Tite Kubo, Hideki Tachibana: Bleach Movie 1: Memories of Nobody

Tite Kubo's Bleach, an action-packed supernatural adventure, has been a phenomenally successful manga series (approaching 40 volumes in English) and anime TV series (275 episodes). (The irony here is that when Kubo first offered it to a publisher, it was rejected.) Four feature films have been developed from the series. Memories of Nobody is the first.

The basic situation for the series is that fifteen-year-old Ichigo Kurosaki (his first name means "strawberry," for his red hair) has always been able to see ghosts. This has now made him a target for a kind of wandering spirit known as a "Hollow" -- souls that cannot enter the Soul Society and so wander the earth, feeding off the souls of the newly dead -- and the living. He encounters Rukia Kuchiki, a Soul Reaper whose job is to destroy Hollows and to send other souls on their way to the Soul Society. When a Hollow attacks Ichigo's home, Rukia is forced to try to give him some of her power to help fight it off; unfortunately, she winds up giving him all of her power, making him a Substitute Soul Reaper. After they defeat the Hollow, Rukia has to lay low until her power regenerates. But Ichigo is still a Soul Reaper -- and a very powerful one.

Memories of Nobody begins with a strange build-up of spiritual energy. Suddenly, Ichigo and Rukia are beset by "Blanks," souls with no memories. They are hard pressed until the advent of Senna, a Soul Reaper who manages to make short work of the Blanks. The only problem is, the Soul Society has never heard of Senna. And there's a crisis on the rise: the World of the Living and the Soul Society are being drawn together by a strange current generated in the Valley of Screams, which appears when Blanks reach, as it were, a critical mass. There's a plot involved, by a clan that was banished from the Soul Society a thousand years before, and Senna is a central part of it.

Where to start? The story is tight and engaging, with lots of action. The final battle between the Soul Reapers and the Dark Clan is great fun. I especially liked the way the Soul Reapers and their opponents aren't particularly bound by the laws of gravity -- there's something about a mid-air sword fight that's really appealing.

The animation is excellent. It's obvious the crew were able to take the time and care to create a fluent and seamless visual experience. Character designs are also wonderful -- the characterizations are strongly individual and fully realized, and faces and body language are very expressive. Settings and backgrounds are complete without being obtrusive, and beautifully rendered. From the standpoint of creative design, this one is top notch.

Which leads me to the character of Ichigo, on whom the whole story hinges. He's a remarkable young man, a saint with attitude, confrontational, idealistic, and with a streak of compassion a mile wide. Senna, likewise, is a very appealing character, a scatterbrained teenage girl whose memories are not all her own. In fact, the characters as a group are well-rounded personalities, including those Soul Reapers and Ichigo's school friends who make brief appearances. Even the villain, Ganryu, shows signs of humanity. They're all more than cartoons.

And I've got to mention Kon. Kon is a modified soul who takes over Ichigo's body when he is in Soul Reaper mode. (Remember, Soul Reapers are spiritual warriors and don't necessarily have physical bodies.) In between times, he occupies a stuffed bear. He's also one of the main sources of comedy -- he and Ichigo don't get along all that well, and their confrontations are pretty funny.

My one gripe is that this is a two-disc set, and the second disc is completely taken up with "special features," which are mostly storyboards and various trailers. The featurette on the making of the film, though, will be very helpful to those who are not familiar with the series. It contains commentaries by many of those involved in the production, including some of the actors from the English dub, explaining the background. (As always, I watched with Japanese dialogue and English subtitles. I just prefer it that way.) There is also a very helpful booklet that outlines the story and introduces the characters. I just wish they had put the featurette on the same disc as the movie and offered it at half the price.

This is an original story based on the characters and situations in the series. I have the advantage of having at least started the manga series, and I've watched the first few episodes of the TV anime, so I wasn't completely lost. I don't think I'd necessarily recommend coming into it cold, unless you're prepared to take a lot on faith. But you can always watch the featurette and read the booklet to get up to speed. I loved it -- I'll probably revisit it periodically.

(Viz Media, 2006)

Review: Mizuna Kuwabara and Susumu Kodo: The World of Mirage of Blaze

Another Epinions foundling. I think I need to watch it again -- it sounds a lot more complex than I remember.

Mirage of Blaze is the anime developed from a series of boys' love light novels that have never been translated into English. I first watched it with German subtitles (nope, I'm no longer that fluent, and I need to work on that), and liked it enough that I decided to buy the DVD when I found it at a good price. Even though there is no real resolution, either to the conflict that forms the main plot or to the relationship between the protagonists, it's definitely worth seeing.

Takaya Ougi is, to all appearances, a normal high-school student whose best friend, Yuzuru Narita, has been "acting strange." Takaya is concerned, and becomes even more so when he encounters Nobutsuna Naoe, a strangely compelling older man with mysterious powers who tells Takaya that he, Takaya, is the reincarnation of a feudal noble, Kagetora Uesugi, who had been born a son of the Hojo clan and "adopted" (meaning turned over as a hostage) by the Uesugi. Naoe and Takaya are "Possessors" who have taken over host bodies to keep vengeful spirits under control, and work with Haruie Kakizaki, who has come back as a woman, and Nagahide Yasuda. And now the spirits of the dead samurai of the Takeda clan have begun to assemble to reconquer their ancestral holdings -- and quite a bit besides. Word is out that the Oda are also assembling. And the Hojo and their allies, the ninja clan Fuuma, have their own ideas about who should be in charge. There is a wild card in here, too -- Kousaka of the Takeda clan, who seems to be on no one's side but his own. If this all sounds complicated, that's only because it is -- and it gets a lot worse.

There is a huge helping of Japanese history and magic here, but that needn't be a deterrent: it reads well either as historical drama or fantasy. And I'm enough of a military sf buff to enjoy the strategy sessions. It's a fairly talky series, but the talkiness is all back story and development, so in spite of my insatiable appetite for movies where everything explodes, I wasn't put off by it -- and there are plenty of things exploding, anyway.

As far as the BL element, it's very understated and ultimately open-ended: the relationship between Takaya and Naoe is far from resolved. Takaya refuses to accept that he is Kagetora and has thoroughly repressed his memories of his previous incarnations, and it becomes plain that Naoe is a big part of the reason. Naoe finally confesses his feelings toward Takaya, but to say that Takaya is conflicted is a weak description: as we see from a couple of scenes, Takaya has strong feelings toward Naoe, but they are all tangled up with the few memories that come back to him of his previous life and his relationship with his older brother, what he perceives as an injury that Naoe inflicted on him in the past, and his unsureness as to whether Naoe's feelings are for him, Takaya, or Kagetora. (This relationship has been ongoing for four hundred years now, and apparently has always been this difficult.) "Love-hate" might be an accurate take on Takaya's feelings. This all contributes to some major psychological tension as the story progresses. The creators have managed to hit some real emotional depth here, and those scenes have a fair amount of power, in spite of the melodrama. (And I should point out that the melodrama is not on the order of the bosom-heaving film dramas of the 1950s, but only the product of some real intensity.)


This set also includes the OVA Rebels of the River Edge, which takes Takaya, Naoe, and Haruie in a further adventure involving an ancient mandala, woven with the hair of executed members of the Araki clan, and the reincarnation of their lord, who deserted them at a critical time. This is all complicated by the Haruie's belief that the lord, Murashige, is her dead lover, Shintaro, lost these two hundred years. And the relationship between Naoe and Takaya is as spiky and unresolved as ever. Takaya has changed, though -- there's an edge of sadism in his exchanges with Naoe, and you can feel Naoe's helplessness in the face of his strong love for Takaya. I had seen Rebels as a stand-alone, and strangely enough, it works better that way than as a sequel, perhaps because it undercuts what little resolution there was between Takaya and Naoe.

A word about the music. The opening title song for the main series falls into the category of "misfit" -- while the lyrics (in English, for some reason) do tie in, sort of, the music is an up-tempo rock/jazz combination that misses the core of the story by a mile. The incidental accompaniment, happily, is in general more on point, and the closing title song is a beautiful string quartet that captures the tenderness, pain and sorrow in the relationship almost perfectly.

This set includes production drawings, textless opening, trailers, and the option of English dialogue or Japanese dialogue with subtitles. I chose the latter, simply because I enjoy the sound of the Japanese.

As I said, I wasn't really prepared for the impact this one had on me -- there are some very strong scenes here, and the portrayal of the relationship between Takaya and Naoe is certainly a cut above most BL anime.

(Anime Works, 2008)

Review: Aquaplus and Toyuki Kobayashi: Utawarerumono

Another originally published at Epinions and no longer available there.

It took me a couple of weeks to learn to pronounce the title of this series, Utawarerumono, but I was determined. It was another find on a recommendation by my manga expert, and it's a good one. (The title is translated as "He Whose Song is Sung" -- in Japan, just as anywhere else, if people sing songs about you, you're in.)

A severely wounded man wearing a half-mask is found in the woods by a girl, Eluluu, grandaughter of the village healer, Tuskuru, who also happens to be the chief. They nurse him back to health, but he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. He is soon accepted by the villagers and shows himself to be a natural leader. When Tuskuru is killed defending her other granddaughter, Aruruu, from one of the local lord's soldiers, the villagers select the man, who has been given the name Hakuoro, as their new chief. And when they decide that the death of Tuskuru cannot go unavenged, they, and Hakuoro, are set irrevocably on the path of empire. And as he goes, he collects a strong -- and more than a little eccentric -- group of heroes around him.

This is sort of an odd story. We eventually learn that it actually takes place in the far future, although the setting is fantasy-feudal, Japanese style, give or take the bipedal dinosaurs that are the main riding animal. And everyone has animal ears, and women and girls also have tails. Everyone except Hakuoro, that is. The reasons for that are revealed well into the series, and I don't want to give them away here: it's a nice little "Aha!" moment.

We also learn that Hakuoro is not exactly human, and that he shares a soul with someone who has become, behind the scenes, his worst enemy. That leads to a spectacular final battle and a poignant, bittersweet finish.

Speaking of enemies, one flaw in the story is that the bad guys -- and there are a series if them -- get crazier and crazier, until they turn into caricatures. Actually, it doesn't really take very long for that to happen -- the first really seriously bad guy, Niwe, has perhaps the most irritating villain laugh ever.

The graphic work is good, if not spectacularly so -- characterizations are solid, action sequences are smooth, and the general level of the animation is pretty high. One thing I did notice, which still puzzles me: the major characters fit into a sort of manga-standard template, with triangular faces, retrousse noses, pointed chins, small mouths, and large eyes -- sort of High Shoujo characterizations. Even Haruoko fits into that mold, and it's to the animators' credit that he is as visually expressive as he is -- remember, he's wearing a half-mask throughout. The other half of the puzzle is that the secondary characters are strongly individual and much more "realistic" insofar as a cartoon can be. It works, though.

The acting, as tends to be the case in anime, is very good, although it did take me awhile to get used to some of the voices. Half the central characters are girls, and young girls at that: the voices sometimes approach hypersonic ranges. Special mention to Rikiya Koyama as Hakuoro: he doesn't say much, but when he does, it's nearly perfect. This must have been an extraordinarily difficult role in which to develop a full character, but Koyama pulled it off.

I can't really explain why I find Utawarerumono so appealing. It's not perfect, by any means, but it is tremendously engaging -- another one that I found myself watching seven or eight episodes at a stretch. If it weren't for the violence -- and it's there, in many battle scenes with lots of bright red blood -- I'd recommend this as nice family viewing. There are many quietly humorous moments that project warmth and comfort, and the message is one of peace and doing the right thing. Even though there are a lot of battles, the message there is that war is only justified in self-defense and even in that case, one is stained by bloodshed.

(Funimation, 2009)

It's "What's New" Day at GMR

Which means newly posted reviews.

And if you're looking for mine, there's one hidden in the introduction this week.

Another Reviews Update

It's "What's New" day at Green Man Review, and I have a lot of stuff up, so go on over and take a look -- there's fantasy, art, comics, anime, and music.

Just for Fun

I love this:

Via BalloonJuice.

At Random

Just a few things that caught my eye this morning.

First, from Dave Dayen, the skinny on health-care cost increases vis-a-vis Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance -- the short form:

The New England Journal of Medicine reports that Medicare and Medicaid spending has decelerated in recent years, and not just because of the Great Recession. The public programs have seen their cost growth slow significantly compared to private health insurance. And this is expected to continue for the coming decade.

This is so important because, as Paul van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains, the public debate has focused on transforming Medicare and Medicaid in the coming years, constraining cost in the very programs that are the most cost-efficient. If anything, the opposite should be true, and more and more of the system should be converted into public programs to increase the risk pool, allow for greater bargaining leverage on prices, and provide stability.

From a couple of days ago, Equality Illinois has gone to the fair:

There is nothing so quintessentially all-American than the State Fair. Moms and Pops with kiddies in tow are treated to award winning sheep and cantaloupes, midway carnival rides, and food booths full of kettle corn, Belgian waffles, and deep fried artery-clogging delight.

And this year, along with listening to the sweet sounds of the Steve Miller Band or Blue Oyster Cult, watching the Twilight Parade, and betting on your favorite pony in the horse races, you can also stop by the Equality Illinois/Lambda Legal booth and pick up an “I Do” sticker to show your support for marriage equality.

You'll inevitably hear cries from the radical left about how gays are allowing themselves to be "mainstreamed," as though there were something wrong with being an integral part of the culture. That's the whole point, and it's been the whole point from Stonewall on. I think it's a brilliant move on the part of Equality Illinois.

The Perseids. Damn! I miss them every year. If you're someplace you can actually see the night sky, check this out. Chicago has too much ambient light, unless I want to hike over to the lake. (I actually did that one year, only to discover that the sky over the lake was completely overcast.)

And more science. If you thought your parrot was smart, you were right. From Smithsonian:

When we think about the smartest animals, chimpanzees are usually the first to come to mind. Experiments show that they can memorize sequences of numbers, learn the meaning of words and associate particular voices with specific faces. Crucially, previous studies have found that chimps and other apes are the only non-human animals capable of making abstract logical inferences based on cues from their environment.

A new experiment, though, might make us recognize that an entirely different species belongs in this exclusive group: the African grey parrot.

I don't do enough entries on science here. Have to fix that.

And finally, manga/amime. Jan Suzukawa has a good heads-up on the release of the new Ai no Kusabi. It's a solid, very informative post on the series. That's one that I've always meant to get to and never quite managed to -- it's not easy to find online, and I do like to check them out before I buy them.

Speaking of which, I really need to get back to my adaptations of the German editions -- Ze 7 arrived, and I'm still in the middle of Der Beste Liebhaber.

Rainy Sunday

I'm about to head out the door (I have editing to do today, and somehow it goes better out at the coffee shop), but I was just browsing around waiting for the rain to stop (or at least lighten up) and ran across this old post on "Top Ten Most Memorable Anime Characters" from Jan Suzukawa at Neo-Shonen Fujoshi. I particularly like her comments about Naoe Nobutsuna from Mirage of Blaze, which was also one of my early favorites -- very sensitive and solid description of his character.

I may do something like that myself one of these days -- maybe on another rainy Sunday.

A Heads Up

for anime and manga fans. I've been spending some time over at one of Jan Suzukawa's blogs, Neo-Shonen Fujoshi, and have to thank Jan for being a great source for what's coming up. If you don't know it, check it out.

Of course, the downside is that my list of anime to catch up on is now officially out of control.

Reviews in Brief: Akira Kurosawa's Samurai 7

That's the official title, but this is not Seven Samurai, although it is based on Kurosawa's original story. It is an anime adaptation set in a dystopian future in which the world, after the end of a ruinous war, is run by the merchants. Those samurai who became partly mechanical during the war -- call them cyborgs -- have become bandits who regularly confiscate the peasants' crops. The village of Kanna has had enough; their water priestess, Kirara, reveals the way they can escape the constant terror: they will hire a samurai to do away with the bandits.

The story line, in general terms, follows Kurosawa's original, with some interesting variations -- there is an emperor in this one (who, strangely enough, strongly recalls Michael Moorcock's God-Emperor Huon from the Hawkmoon saga), which leads to some very good action with Kanbe, the leader of the samurai, who comes close to being executed. There is also a group of intermediaries/technologists, the Shikimori, creators of the power cells on which the merchants and the mecha-samurai rely, who have their own agenda.

The design concept is a sort of Star Wars steampunk, at least insofar as the bandits and cities are concerned. Character designs are superb, seamlessly fitting together a range from highly realistic to cartoon-abstract without a blip.

Animation is also excellent. The CGI effects are just great, and very effectively used. Battle scenes, as might be expected, are particularly good.

The voice actors are superb, although the character of Kikuchiyo -- the mechanical samurai who winds up being one of the seven -- is pretty annoying: he's a loudmouth, shoot-from-the-hip sort of guy, superbly voiced by Kuwata Kong, but he's a little bit much. My favorites, after Masaki Terasoma as Kanbe, are Romi Park as the young samurai wannabe, Katsushiro (and Park does an amazing job with boys and young men -- she voiced Hitsugaya in Bleach) and Shinichiro Miki as Kyuzo, a deadly man whose goal is to cut down Kanbe, although for the time being they're on the same side.

It's a long story -- 26 episodes -- and there are occasional slow stretches, but on the whole it's an absorbing and engaging series. I'm lovin' it.

From Funimation. Credits can be found at Anime News Network.

Reviews in Brief: Utawarerumono (anime)

Utawarerumono was recommended by my manga sempai, and turned out to be much more engaging than I had expected. And just so you know, that impossible Japanese title winds up translating roughly as "Song of the Hero" or "He Who is Sung" or something like that.

An unconscious, severely wounded man is discovered in the forest by Eruruu, the granddaughter of the village healer, Tuskuru. He wears a mask that they cannot remove, and when he finally awakens, he cannot remember anything of his past life. Tuskuru names him Hakuorou, and he remains in the village -- he has nowhere else to go. He eventually becomes the chief of the village, and, due to circumstances beyond his control, embarks on the path to empire.

This one starts off looking like a fairly standard historical romance/fantasy, except the historical period is up for grabs: it's really more fantasy than history, even without the fact that the characters are all kemonomimi (animal ears) -- except for Hakuoro, a phenomenon which is explained later on, when the story starts to take on a definite science-fiction cast. (Hint: this is far in the future, and there's a mad scientist involved.) Then it goes back to fantasy, of a strange, almost mystical sort.

A big part of the appeal is the graphic work. It's nothing out of the ordinary in terms of character design, although very well executed. Hakuoro is exceptionally appealing, even with the mask -- I think it's a combination of his low-key personality and his large, expressive eyes: somehow the animators have managed to instill a great range of feeling into a character who is largely expressionless.

As far as the acting goes, it is, as seems to be the case more often than not, excellent. I'm not familiar with any of the seiyuu for the major characters, but they are pretty much right on target. Special mention to Rikiya Koyama as Hakuoro -- he does as much as anything else to make Hakuoro a real person. This is not to downplay any other contributions -- this one displays a full range of colorful, vivid characters, and the actors are up to it.

It's a two-season TV series -- 26 episodes -- and worth every second. I've been watching it online, but the DVD is on its way to me -- it's definitely a keeper.

Funimation has licensed it in North America. And rather than take up space here listing cast and staff, here's the link the to encyclopedia entry at Anime News Network, which is where I get all that information anyway.

Michiko Yokote, Kunihisa Sumishima: Nabari no Ou

The anime Nabari no Ou surprised me.  I had started watching it on Funimation's YouTube channel and decided by halfway through that I wanted my hot little hands on it.  It was worth it.

Rokujo Miharu has within him the Shinrabanshu, the most powerful ninja technique ever.  But he can't call it up or control it.  The leader of the Iga ninja clan wants it, along with the forbidden techniques of all the other clans -- he intends to appropriate the Shinrabanshu himself and use it to make the world a better place -- better in his eyes, at least.

The key here is the relationship between Miharu and one of the Iga Kairoshu, the Grey Wolves, Yoite by name.  Yoite is a sixteen-year-old boy who uses the kira technique, which is slowly killing him.  Both boys, orphans, have no memory of their pasts.  Miharu forbids himself to want anything; Yoite only wishes never to have existed.  The slow unfolding of the relationship -- not romance, something beyond friendship, an almost tangible empathy -- provides a surprisingly powerful story that leads to an ending that I can't call "happy" in the fairy tale sense that we always seem to want, but it is a happy ending from the standpoint of the logic of the story.

What's more, it left me completely emotionally satisfied, and how often does that happen?

It's a beautiful series.  The animators were not only on top of the visual characterizations, but even seem to have paid close attention to colors and how they worked together.  Gorgeous.

The Japanese voice acting is superb, the English-language, not to much.  I have a theory that the English voice actors are too worried about synchronizing with the lip movements to spend time digging into the emotional context.  Maybe, maybe not, but I recommend the Japanese language with subtitles.

From Funimation.

Reviews in Brief: Mizuna Kuwabara's Mirage of Blaze, anime dir. by Susumo Kudo

This is really more by way of a heads-up than an actual review: I'm watching a version of this one with German subtitles. Those of you who have been following my adventures in resurrecting dead languages (dead to me, at least) are aware that I've been working for almost a year (albeit in a fairly desultory fashion) to get some comprehension of German back. (I was once fluent enough that I could carry on a decent conversation, but that was thirty years ago.) I'm happy to report that I've gotten enough back so that I'm able to follow the story in this one, but please don't ask me for specific points of dialogue.

This is another one of those supernatural/reincarnation things that, to be quite honest, I tend to like quite a bit. So far it hasn't gone into any great detail on the previous incarnations of the characters, but I'm only up to episode 7. (Which means that at some point you can expect an update to this.)

The story so far centers on Takaya Ohgi, a high-school student, and his friend Yuzuru Narita, who start having bizarre experiences -- Yuzuru is beset by the ghosts of long-dead warriors (in his bedroom, no less), while they both see a girl burst into violet flames. They rush her to the hospital; when she regains consciousness, she has no burns, but doesn't remember anything.

The boys also encounter a stranger, whom Takaya almost thinks he's met before. This is Nobutsuna Naoe, a "Seelenwandrer" (wandering soul) who not only shows up in Yuzuru's bedroom to exorcise the ghosts, but also tells Takaya that he is also a Seelenwandrer and he is actually Lord Kagetora, the adopted son of Kenshin Uesagi, a feudal lord of several hundred years before. You can imagine how Takaya reacts to this, but his doubt starts to crumble when Yuzuru is possessed by the spirit of a long dead warrior chieftain, which marks the beginning of another stage in one of those ongoing Japanese civil wars that never seems to die, even though all the combatants have.

The drawing style is what I'm starting to call "high shoujo" -- definitely a bishounen aesthetic behind the character renderings, and enough differentiation that I can actually tell the characters apart. I'm realizing that one thing I like about manga and anime is the degree of abstraction in the character designs. I find it very appealing, but if you're really into the comic realism of American superhero comics, you may not enjoy it as much.

I'm told there's a BL element in this one (which actually comes out much more clearly in the sequel, Rebels of the River Edge, which I have seen with English subs), mainly in the relationship between Takaya and Naoe, but it's still pretty subliminal.

On the whole, the production values are fairly high -- the incidental music is unobtrusive, and while the opening title song (in English, for some reason) is a little over the top, the closing title is a nice, melancholy string quartet arrangement.

Part of the reason for doing this, aside from working on my German, is to help me decide if this is a DVD I want to own. So far I'm leaning toward buying the series, so I guess that makes it a thumbs up.

Can We Start Again?

A new video from my YouTube friend gokusanszokami. The anime is Code Geas; the song is "Start Again," by Red.



Maricela has a real talent for these, and she keeps finding anime and musical groups that I have to follow up on.

Check out her channel at YouTube.

Reviews in Brief: Embracing Love: Cherished Spring (anime)

Finally! Another Review in Brief after a looong hiatus. Maybe it'll become a regular feature again.

Embracing Love: Cherished Spring is the first installment of the anime adaptation of Youka Nitta's Haru wo Daite Ita. The story is unusual for BL anime in that it deals with the trials and tribulations of maintaining a relationship rather than the normal story line of connecting.

Kyousuke Iwaki and Youji Katou are adult film actors who want to break into "legit" film. Iwaki lands the lead role in a feature film, beating out Kato in the auditions; Kato lands a supporting role, and falls in love with Iwaki during the shooting. Kato winds up moving in with Iwaki -- Iwaki is aghast, but acquiescent. And then another film actor, who had to leave Japan because of his own gay love affair scandal, turns up in a role opposite Kato -- but his eye is on Iwaki.

What's interesting in this one, aside from the gorgeous drawing (more later on that) is the way character moves the story. Kato is wide open, somewhat of a bad boy, and a media darling -- he knows how to play the interviews and how to get to his fans. Iwaki is the quiet one, ducking publicity when possible, afraid that Kato doesn't really love him, and determined that Kato is not going to find out how much he cares for him. He's also older than Kato, and feels at a disadvantage both for that and because of his history in adult films.

The visuals are more than a little appealing. The animators have stayed true to Nitta's style, which is unique among mangaka doing yaoi. Spare and reductivist, it's nevertheless very expressive and appealing. I have to confess, though, that I find cartoon sex iffy -- it's never arousing, and often ludicrous.

It's my second DVD purchase (the first, of course, was Loveless), and I'm glad I bought it. It's distributed by Kitty Media. The DVD contains a couple of special features, including trailers from some of Kitty's titles.

Crew:

Director: Yoshikata Nitta
Script: Mami Watanabe
Storyboard: Yoshikata Nitta
Episode Director: Naosumi Ishizuki
Music: Sousaku Sasaki
Original Manga: Youka Nitta
Character Design: Hirotaka Marufuji
Art Director:
Mitsuharu Miyamae (ep 2)
Noburo Numai (ep 1)
Sound Director: Nobuyuki Abe
Executive producer: Masaki Kobayashi
Producer:
Saburou Oomiya
Toshiharu Tanada
Animation Supervisor: Hirotaka Marufuji
Casting Management: Kouta Suzuki (81 Produce)
Music Director: Atsushi Yabe
Music Production: Akira Yoshikawa
Production Assistant: Eiko Torikai
Theme Song Performance:
Shinichiro Miki (ED)
Toshiyuki Morikawa (OP)

Cast:

Shinichiro Miki as Youji Katou
Toshiyuki Morikawa as Kyousuke Iwaki
Chihiro Suzuki as Yukihito Sawa
Kazuhiko Inoue as Nagisa Sawa
Ken Narita as Katsuya Kikuchi
Kentarou Itou as Kazunari Urushizaki
Chihiro Suzuki as Staff B (ep 1)
Haruhi Terada as Female Reporter A (ep 1)
Tomokazu Sugita as Reporter B (ep 2)

Reviews in Brief: Mieko Koide's After School in the Teacher's Lounge (anime)

After School in the Teacher's Lounge is one of those YouTube finds that I happened across by chance and was captivated by. I dont know if I can honestly call what follows a "review," but I'm going to try to give you an idea of what it's like.

It's a short piece, two episodes, all taken up with the somewhat surreal courtship between two middle-school teachers, Kawase Mitsuro, who teaches art, and his older colleague Kazawa Toshiaki. The story opens with Kawase staring out the window after classes at Kazawa, who is swimming in the school's outdoor pool. Kawase's students, who all seem to be girls, are ribbing him about his fascination, which he vehemently denies. But in flashback, we learn that on his twenty-third birthday, Kazawa asked him out to dinner and proposed that they have a relationship. Kawase, not taking him seriously, said "Sure. Why not?"

The tension in this story all comes from Kawase's refusal to believe that Kazawa is serious and Kazawa's determination to prove that he is, even in the face of the principal's matchmaking efforts with Kazawa on behalf of a friend's daughter and a bit of jealousy from Kawase's brother. Characters are vivid -- Kawase is somewhat shy, quiet, fairly innocent, and quite passive. He finds it difficult to trust Kazawa. Kazawa comes off as quite self-confident, breezy, casual, and direct about his feelings, even though Kawase can't take him seriously.

The graphics are highly stylized, which I think is one thing that appeals to me. It's worth noting that the feel of the drawing in the second episode is much different than the first, a little softer, a little more finished, although I found the drawing in the first half perfectly acceptable and even appealing. The artists have used a fairly exaggerated bishounen type for the men, tall, very thin (but also muscular, as we see from Kazawa in his very brief swimsuit), with extraordinarily broad shoulders.

The music makes a great contribution to the feel, I think. It's also fairly unusual, at least in terms of the anime I've seen, in which titles are likely to be pop-song-inspired and the incidental music generally occurs only as needed. In After School, one is given an almost constant soft-jazz piano accompaniment which blends right into the title music and is quite beautiful in itself. It adds, I think, to the dreamlike quality of the piece and, in its sparse angularity, adds a sense of open space, even in intimate interior scenes, which, with the spare and sometimes elliptical dialogue and fragmentary scenes, reinforces the feeling of a dream.

I think it's the dreamlike quality that appeals to me the most. It's a work that could very easily seem choppy, confusing, and unfinished, but -- and perhaps it's the music acting as a constant here -- instead I read it as episodic, inferential, elliptical, and fairly powerful. There's a dream sequence at the beginning of episode two that encapsulates my feelings about this anime: rendered in green, black and white, it portrays a conversation between Kawase and Kazawa that is repeated in real life later in the episode. It plays a key part in both incarnations in bringing Kawase to the realization that Kazawa is, indeed, serious about him and sets up the final resolution, and it's stunning -- abstract, spare, intense, and very beautiful.

I have to give this one high marks -- it's unique and, to me at least, very appealing. The one drawback so far is that, as is too often the case with YouTube, you take what you can get -- in this case, the middle section of episode two is only available subtitled in Spanish, which is not a language in which I have a great deal of facility.

Not licensed in the U.S., unfortunately, and old enough (1994) that it's not likely to be. It's available online via AnimeGLore.com and, I believe, Aarinfantasy.com, and there is a manga series, also not licensed in English, but also available, at least in part, online.

Crew:

Director: Kazuyoshi Hirose
Music: Norihiro Tsuru
Original creator: Mieko Koide
Producer: Masaru Fukuda

Cast:

Hikaru Midorikawa as Kawase Mitsurou
Kiyoyuki Yanada as Kazama Toshiaki
Jun'ichi Kanemaru as Natsuhiko
Toshiyuki Morikawa as Kawase Hitoshi
Niina Kumagaya as Shizuka

Odd Morning

Ran across a post at AmericaBlog that looked like a good nut for a post of my own, on Sen. Chris Dodd saying that Obama has to show some leadership, complete with video and link. System froze up for some reason, and when I got the post back, no link, no video. Weird.

Anyway, he's right -- Obama has to show some leadership or lose the whole ball of wax.

On a real life note, I packed the CD player with a bunch of stuff I haven't listened to recently -- all art music from the last thirty or forty years, and wound up bringing some of it to work with me. Feldman's The Viola in My Life (a no-brainer: I really, really like that piece) and Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, which I've listened to before but never really listened to, you know? It's really engaging. Not particularly subtle, but there's probably stuff I'm missing on this player, which is not the best. Adequate for the office, but only that.

That one may be up for a Review in Brief sometimes soon. Another candidate is another BL anime, After School in the Teachers' Lounge. Very odd, highly abstract, very interesting. If I can find the complete thing, I'll do it.

Reviews in Brief: Kazuya Minekura's Araiso Private High School Student Council Executive Committee (Anime)

Kazuya Minekura is the creator of Saiyuki, one of my all-time favorite manga and anime series. Araiso Private High School, etc. is a comic anime that -- well, it's hard to describe, but I'll try.

The Executive Committee of the Student Council is the body charged with maintaining peace and order on the school campus -- the enforcers, as it were. Headed by Katsuragi, the group includes Kubota and Takitou, who travel together and are the focus of the story; Murota, a huge young man who always seems to be working out; Matsubara and Ainoura, whose specialties are hard to figure out; and Fujiwara, who is hopelessly in love with Kubota and winds up always being low man on the totem pole..

The first episode centers on the school ball-game tournament, and the efforts of Ootsuka, the leader of the school's less desirable element, to get revenge on Kubota and Takitou for repeatedly thwarting his petty criminality -- usually at great embarrassment to him. Needless to say, Ootsuka and his followers don't get things their way. The prize here is an appearance by Igarashi, the school's doctor, who obviously has the hots for Kubota and whom Takitou accuses of being a transvestite. It turns out she's into S&M, much to Ootsuka's dismay.

The second episode involves a rash of strange occurrences, and the inevitable ghost stories, on campus. It turns out that some of the ghosts are real.

I love the character designs in this one, which take Minekura's typical drawing style and add a little bit of clarity. One thing that struck me especially is the way characters smile -- there's is something fundamentally appealing about those smiles, even Ootsuka's. The contrast between Takitou, small, energetic, high-key, and Kubota, tall, taciturn, and quiet, is engaging. The subtext between them is interesting, and leaves a lot of room for interpretation -- they are either playing just to yank everyone's chains, or the play is masking real feelings. We never know, but it's fun to speculate. Igarashi is a delight, as are all the characters -- all the seiyuu get high marks for this one -- the delivery of the lines is half the appeal, and everyone is perfectly on target. (In fact, I can just sit and listen to the spoken dialogue on this one -- it's that appealing.)

Minekura has used Kubota and Takitou as the main characters in Wild Adapter a manga series of a decidedly dark cast. Their relationship in that one is very complex and somewhat tangled, and when I get around to finishing it (so many manga, so little time!), I may discuss it here.

This one is a treat, and only two episodes, running somewher ein the vicinity of 50-55 minutes total. It doesn't seem to have been released on DVD in the U.S., but there are fansubs online.

Here's the closing titles to give you a feel for the thing:



Crew:

Director: Shinji Satoh
Screenplay: Mami Watanabe
Music: Koichiro Kameyama
Original Manga: Kazuya Minekura
Character Design: Hiroyuki Horiuchi
Art director: Norifumi Nakamura, Takeshi Waki
Animation director: Hiroyuki Horiuchi
Director of Photography: Akinobu Majima
Producer: Sanae Mitsugi (Tokuma Shoten), Takeshi Oikawa (MOVIC), Takeyoshi Matsushita (Tokuma Shoten), Yutaka Takahashi (MOVIC)
Animation producer: Atsushi Tanaka
Assistant Animation Director: Kumiko Shishido, Yoshiko Nakajima
Color design: Makiko Nishidate
Production Administrator: Daisuke Hagihara (MOVIC), Kenta Nishikawaji (MOVIC), Ryouta Hayashi (Tokuma Shoten)
Production Cooperation: Sawako Oshio (Tokuma Shoten)
Sound Direction: Jun Watanabe
Theme Song Performance: Hideo Ishikawa, Toshiyuki Morikawa

Cast:

Hideo Ishikawa as Tokitoh Minoru
Toshiyuki Morikawa as Kubota Makoto
Akira Sasanuma as Matsubara Jun
Atsushi Kisaichi as Fujiwara Yusuke
Ken Narita as Matsumoto Takahisa
Kousuke Toriumi as Ainoura Seiichi
Nobuo Tobita as Tachibana Haruka
Tomoko Kawakami as Katsuragi Kazumi
Tomoyuki Shimura as Toshihiko Murota
Yuko Kobayashi as Igarashi Tohru

(Please note: The only cast list I can find seems to be incomplete. If I ever find a complete one, I'll add the missing names.)

Another one of those days. . . .

I've been reading the news and commentary, and there's nothing I want to discuss here -- I'd just be repeating myself, and even I get tired of that after a while.

But -- I found a new AMV that I like, so you get to watch that. My favorite anime, and a good song from one of my favorite groups:



It's another perfect pairing from this creator -- Soubi and Ritsuka from Loveless and "My Immortal" from Evanescence. The song catches the relationship almost perfectly.

Wait a minute. . . .

It's been that kind of week. Too busy doing the wrong things, to unfocused to do the right things.

and my damned cantaloupe froze.

I'm taking the rest of the day off. Tomorrow -- maybe.

OK -- I'll be nice. One of my first exposures to Evanescence, and a very nice AMV from Ai no kusabe: