Winter 2014 Reviews - Nagi no Asukara

Ok I'm bored and watching some Shojo, so I thought I'd cheat a bit and talk about one of the Autumn 2013 carry overs, Nagi no Asukara. 



The show is an attempt by PA Works to attain the levels of pointless emotional manipulation that they perfected with AnoHana. 

Ok that's a bit harsh on it, but emotional manipulation, or in this case constipation is a great way to describe this show I found. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.  I should actually talk about the show some I guess. 

I guess. 

See the thing is, I can't say much about the show without spoiling the fuck out of it. And it's a show that is worth not being spoiled for to be honest. The characters and story are so well drawn out at the beginning, and there is a definite payoff, but the show left we with such a meh feeling, I find it hard to talk about. 

To set the scene, Nagi No Asukara exists in a world where certain people live in the sea. 4 of those said people have to start going to the surface, and how they face off against racial discrimination on both sides, segregation and other social issues. 

At least when the show is at its best. 

At its best, the show takes a raw approach to laying out racial segregation issues that exst around the world, and rather than trying to explain them, just show them for all their honest concerns, unbased as they may be.

At its best. 

At the shows worst, it attempts to explain racial discrimination by way of supernatural elements, devolving the plot into a dodecahedron of love, and forgetting about our racial issues altogether. Looking over the series, it took a sharp nosedive around the end of the first cour. Hell, it feels tonally like 2 different shows. 

It's a real shame, because there is a lot of great stuff here. Our main character, Hikari (Nasuki Hanae) was annoying enough in the beginning that I actually considered dropping the show. His development alone across the series is teriffic, and his voice actor does a great job. In fact, most of the principle cast does a great job ( apart from the stoic one. he does a great job of being boring)

The production values on a whole are typically high, as you would expect from PA works. Smooth animation, pretty characters, and fucking beautiful backgrounds. The shows artwork really captures the feeling of living on the coast and I loved the atmosphere the art gave of. The music is wonderful, and there's a guitar player somewhere out there that I want to buy a drink for all the times their work had me on the edge of tears. 

See that's the thing with this show. It does so very much right, it's a real shame it gets the critical factor so very wrong. If this was purely a character based show, I would have been alright with the story getting lost. But in this case, I can't accept the way that the story basically forgot about the main theme about halfway through. Still though, the show is definitely worth your time. Just don't expect the second coming of Christ or anything, even if the author seemed to have a thing about that. 

Till next time, 

Toodle Pip

(A final note, this show does feature based Kana Hanazawa, so it also has hat going for it I guess)

Winter 2014 Reviews - Noragami

So Noragami aired last season. 

That was a thing apparently. 

I've always found it interesting to see how different fanbases react to a show, and looking at the reaction coming from those on reddit, and comparing it to that of the anime "celebs" on youtube, I was curious to see what the cause of all the division was.

Depending on who you spoke to, Noragami was either the most pointless, meandering bore of a show, or the glorious antithesis to that other action show that was on. 

What did I think? I guess lets find out.



Noragami follows Yato (Hiroshi Kamiya), a noragami, or stray god. Essetially, he is a god without a shrine. In order to work towards a shrine, he takes on jobs for a 5 yen fee, the jobs ranging from helping someone pass a test to defeating corrupted souls or phantoms. We also follow Hiyori Iki (Maaya Uchida), a highschool girl who's been turned into a half phantom and is relying on Yato to return her to her normal form. The other main character is Yukine (Yuki Kaji AKA dweeby prat) who is Yato's weaponized sould, or regalia. He has his own arc that we spend a lot of time on, but initially we don't get a lot of back story on him.

So far so good right? We have our main players, some plot points, and a decent world built already, what could go wrong?

The issue with Noragami has to be a lack of time. This was put together as a 12 episode show for an ongoing manga. On top of that, its a 12 episode show with an anime original arc. From a story direction standpoint, you have to wonder, what were they playing at?

Noragami leaves so much merely hinted at and undeveloped, we could have had an entire extra 12 episodes out of this. Characters fight but then are forgotten, or just forget about the enemy that was so important just in the last episode. Secondary characters, beautifully draan as they are, are quickly relegated to exposition bots. 

And all of this is a huge shame, since Noragami does so much so well. To start the animation is absolutely beautiful and the art has a tremendous sense of tone with greys and whites harshly contrasted to the garish and vomit coloured phantoms. 

Our main characters are all gorgeously animated, reminding me of the better days Studio Bones has had, when shows as striking as Fullmetal Alchemist or Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 were the rule rather than the exception. 

The VA's all do a great job, especially the perfectly cast Yuki Kaji as Yukine. Yukine's arc relies on a lot of typical teenage angst, and if there is something that Yuki Kaji can do well, acting like a stroppy teen is it. Sticking to the sound, the soundtrack for the show is amazing, with the rather well know Taku Iwasaki taking the helm. There is the standard dark thematic songs, but the standouts have to be the battle themes, which are often just plain funky. On a final production note, the OP and ED are amongst my favourite this season, really seeming to stick to the production qualities and themes the show sets out.



(I mean seriously, look at the use of colour in that.)

But like I said, the story lacks focus. What we do get are believable dynamics, a love story that I can understand and relatable angst that doesn't rely on the world being super dark mega evil like some other shows in this genre. Noragami is very atypical of a shounen show, but it does what it does with so much love, it really seems like a shame that it's main flaw is that it's just too damn short. The finale seems pretty darn conclusive in taking the show as far away from the manga as possible, all of which leads me to believe that we might not get another season of this. 

And that's a shame. I really loved this world. I'd happily trade a crappy show or five for a second season of this.

Winter 2014 Reviews - Toaru Hikūshi e no Koiuta / The Pilots Love Song

Hi internet! Gonna try and do a thing here. Like a thing with structure. Before I start doing episodic reviews/commentaries, I thought for pactice, I'll review what I watched over the Winter 2014 season. It was the first time since my return to anime that I was watching as shows aired. 

Watching a show as it airs definitely gives a different experience to marathoning a show. The spaces in time between each episode can give you time to analyse and really absorb a show, rather than getting carried away with emotions if you were watching episodes on a binge.

Anyway, without further ado, here's a review of:

The Pilots Love Song

So you see that trailer? Seems pretty action packed huh? Probably seems like its got pretty high production values. Seems like its got a lot going for it. Well that's all a lie. And the worst thing is, it took me 12 episodes to realise that it was a lie.

This was a show that I picked up on a whim. Just after the season started, I just saw it on the crunchyroll listings, and though, hey, how bad can it be. And hell it wasn't actually that bad, at least whilst I wasn't thinking about it. 

The Pilots Love Song tells the story of Kal-El Albus, as he embarks on a journey aboard Isla, to the end of the sky. Isla is a giant floating rock, ala Laputa, and it was one of the first things that drew me about this show. At times it could be very very pretty. Once on Isla, Kal and his sister Ari are enlisted in the flight school so that they can learn to fly planes so that they can protect Isla. 

The shows artwork is genuinely beautiful at points, and there is often a lovely sense of warmth used in the colour pallets. 

Once on Isla, Super Dumbledore meets Claire Cruz, and they fall in love in about 6 minutes of screentime. 

Yes, I'm serious. 

To be honest, that's not too bad a thing for the show to do (it does far worse) but in hindsight, that should have been the point where I started to question the quality of the series. The story floats along at a reasonable clip with predictable beats and a story filled with themes of revenge and love. If anything, this is what the show does best, giving us an introspection on the characters mindset, using flashbacks and experiences to illustrate them. The characters are well defined, if generic, and aside from one shounen style yell, I believed the characters for the most of it. 

You may notice that I haven't said an awful lot about the plot. That's because neither does the show. Until the info dump that is the final episode, we are like Isla, floating towards an uncertain point, with no real idea of what will happen there. And that is the biggest issue with The Pilot's Love Song. it gets lost in its lack of a plot, and when it tries to have one, it is far too little too late. Enemies will come and go, allies will arrive, and in all of that, you have to rely on our rather generic cast of characters to keep our interest. And they do until the plot shows itself and is shown to be a pile of poop. 

To go onto a technical level, so much of what is here is just so very by the numbers. The artwork whilst occasionally very pretty, is often just plain boring. Add to the murky and blurry draw distances, and those horrid bits of action where all the detail kind of fades away, and its not really that good a package anymore. 

The music is all pretty much stock standard stuff, and whilst the ED is pretty cool, the OP was skipped almost every single time for me. The VA's all did a reasonable job. Standouts for me were Aoi Yuki as the female lead and Kaito Ishikawa as the antagonist of sorts. Aoi's performance varied between delicate and firm, and it lent a lot of believability to her relationship with Super Dumbledore. Ishikawa as Ignacio was generic as hell, but he was enjoyable evil sounding for the most part. He also got to narrate the episode previews, which always put a bit of a smile on my face.

Overall, I still have mixed opinions about this show. On the one hand it had me very into it for the majority of its runtime, but on the other, the shortcomings once revealed were so glaring it pains me to see that I missed them. It's often said in criticism of media that the ending of a show is of paramount importance, and that is definitely the case here. The final act twist's and the ridiculous lack of plot really meant that this ended on a damp squib rather than soaring high.

6/10