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paulisweeabootrash · 3 years

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2020 mini-review pack

Di Gi Charat (1999)

Episodes watched: 7

Platform: VRV (Hidive)

Di Gi Charat (pronounced like “carrot”) is a series of fast-paced 4-ish-minute shorts nominally about Dejiko and Rabi-en-Rose, rivals trying to be Earth’s greatest idol. Who are, respectively, a catgirl and a bunnygirl. Oh, and also they’re aliens? That’s... uh... certainly a premise, I guess. The actual show consists of self-contained gag-filled episodes with no ongoing story, in almost a sitcom kind of way, throwing the characters into situations without context, but with a stable “baseline” situation (unlike, say, Pop Team Epic, where the characters serve more as stock personalities playing different roles in different sketches). Dejiko is a snarky schemer. Rabi-en-Rose is a snarky schemer whose main activity seems to be bothering Dejiko at work. Puchiko is a small and quiet child and behaves accordingly. And Gema is... something? I have no clue, honestly, and neither does the fan wiki. Other recurring characters fill stock roles such as “manager” and “otaku”. A lot of the humor centers around poking fun at fandom. It’s a show by, for, and about otaku from an era before our current internet culture, and since I’m a millennial and not from Japan, that makes it unusually hard to evaluate.

W/A/S: 8/2?/5?

Weeb: Chibis. Catgirls. Idols. Kappas. Kawaii verbal tics. Akihabara. Low-detail background characters who look like blobs or thumbs with faces. Kanji left on-screen but untranslated. Particular sorts of highly-exaggerated facial expressions we may have become familiar with through emoji, but which still haven’t made their way into American media generally. This is ludicrously Japanese.

Ass: This really isn't that kind of show. Although it is certainly designed for adults, as evidenced by the presence of phrases like “naughty doujinshi”.

Shit: The art is fun. It has style shifts from comic strip to watercolor painting to mainstream 90s anime, and looks better than some of its contemporaries that were, uh, “real” shows. The opening takes up about a quarter of the total runtime and gets annoying quickly (but that's because it’s clearly designed for being part of a broadcast block, not binge-watching). Still, unless I’m missing hidden cleverness on account of not having the background knowledge, there’s not much to it. It’s just okay.

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First Astronomical Velocity (band, active 2011-present)

Platform: Spotify, surprisingly

Okay, this one is a bit different, and I’m jettisoning the whole format for it. Remember how I said the music-centered episodes of SoniAni were actually pretty good, even though the modeling-centered episodes were so offputting I never finished the show? Well it turns out that First Astronomical Velocity, Sonico’s band, has released several IRL albums. Physical copies may be a little hard to come by, but official uploads of a lot of their music can be found on Youtube and Spotify. Do your musical interests include at least two of: string arrangements that would be at home in a particularly sappy movie soundtrack, 90s-00s alternative rock, synthesizer beep-boops, and that constricted cutesy Japanese women’s vocal style (you know the one I mean)? Then this is for you. They’re a pretty good... uh... alt-pop-rock band, I guess is what I’d call them.

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Interspecies Reviewers (2020)

Episodes watched: the entire 12-episode season

Platform: I plead the 5th. But it’s getting a video release soon, so it will finally be legitimately available in English!

I started this year with a plot-light fanservicey animal-people show, and now I’m ending the year with... a plot-light fanservicey animal-people show. But unlike Nekopara, this show had me cracking up, eagerly clicking “next episode”, and not complaining about the premise. I’m sure a lot of people do have a problem with this show’s premise -- which centers almost entirely on various forms of sex work -- and I understand and respect that they will want to skip this show.

But for the rest of you: Interspecies Reviewers is a wildly-NSFW comedy about a group of fantasy world adventurers who gain fame and fortune reviewing brothels of different species. I expected excessive nudity and fantasy tropes, but I didn’t expect to also get serious thoughts. Like showing, in the golem and Magic Metropolis episodes, some of the unsettling problems that are looming IRL as deepfakes and sex robots are in development -- note especially the contrast between consensually and non-consensually basing automata on real people in those episodes. Or the discussion in the last episode of how much riskier sex would be in a world without magic (i.e., ours). This is a much smarter and more interesting show than you’d expect, considering that it has so much sexual content that it got dropped by two of the networks airing it and even its US distributor.

W/A/S: 5/10/4

Weeb: Although heavily influenced by the Western fantasy media canon of European mythology and Tolkien and tabletop RPGs, familiarity with the tropes of fantasy anime will help you “get” this too, as will familiarity with the -sigh- character dynamics and censorship practices of hentai. Especially because it’s a comedy, there are probably also instances where I have completely missed topical references or wordplay that a Japanese person would get, but I can’t think of any specific instances right now of “there was clearly supposed to be a joke but I missed it”.

Ass: Look, this could not possibly have more sexual content without unambiguously becoming porn. Genitals are (almost) always carefully hidden by viewing angle or conveniently-placed glowing (something lampshaded in one episode as an actual feature of one of the species they review), but otherwise, expect lots of nudity and almost nonstop crude humor. Do not watch this with children. Do not watch this with your parents. Do not watch this with friends you don’t know well enough to know how they’ll react to something like this.

Shit: This show is better-made than it deserves to be. It’s pretty dumb at points, but it’s fun enough to make up for it. The art is consistent and pleasant, and the opening and ending themes are extremely fun, but it’s not a serious standout in any of those departments. Also, I swear the background music is stock music, but I don’t remember what other show(s) I’ve heard it in before.

Stray thought: Crim is a precious and relatable cinnamon roll and I love them.

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OreSuki OVA (2020)

Platform: Crunchyroll

So, I know I didn’t cover the whole season in my initial review, but I still want to mention the hour-ish-long finale of this show, which was released straight to streaming. Short version of the rest of the season: Joro starts to actually fall for Pansy, but a new challenger, Hose, appears. He is irritatingly attractive and effortless at maintaining the right persona for the situation, leading Joro to describe him as “the main character”. Hose is the sociopathic manipulator Joro wishes he could be, and Pansy, who has a bad past with him, clearly wants nothing more than for Joro to stand up to him. But, since this is OreSuki, it’s not going to be handled simply. No, instead, strap in for a grand finale of Joro and Hose competing in, and trying to manipulate through rules-lawyering, an absolutely ludicrous competition to win the right to date Pansy. And, on top of it, we also get to finally see how Sun-chan got to be the way he is and what happened at that pivotal baseball game that set off the whole plot. What has Joro learned from the experiences of the past season? You’ll see! And you’ll facepalm about it!

Really, you must watch this if you watched the regular season.

W/A/S: 6/5(!)/4ish

Weeb: Basically the same as I said before. Gags referencing other Japanese media, anime and otherwise, and it's better if you’re familiar with the high school romcoms and harem comedies Joro thinks in terms of.

Ass (and slight content note): -sigh- Why does the camera need to be there? Also, Joro, you just committed a little bit of sexual assault for the sake of this contest. Stop.

Shit: I want to rate this overall better than I did the regular season because I think it’s an excellent finale overall because, even though it ends in a very “let’s leave everything unresolved” way that’s common in media that rely on absurd relationships to propel the plot, it does so in a way that makes sense in character. I personally think it would’ve been stronger if it had, well, confirmed its title, and at least some of the other “challengers” had lost interest in Joro, but I guess they probably want a Season 2, since they have so much more source material to work from. There are... oh god 14 light novels?! That is too many.

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Your Name. (2016)

Platform: DVD

Two high schoolers -- small-town girl Mitsuha, from Itomori, and big-city boy Taki, from Tokyo -- find themselves in each other’s bodies for a day. They both think at first it must be a very vivid dream, but when it happens again, and they start finding clues like notes they don’t remember writing and comments by friends and relatives about their out-of-character behavior, they realize the body swap is real. This begins a relationship of mutual understanding that nobody else can really understand -- or would even believe (except Mitsuha’s grandmother, who is... familiar with this phenomenon) -- and the plot then pivots to a tense adventure where they use their connection, some crucial information Taki has, the skills of Mitsuha’s friends, and the intervention of Itomori’s patron deity, to save the town from an impending disaster.

And that’s all I’ll say about that, because I really do think this is something you should go into blind. My only remaining comments are that (1) the red string of fate is critically important imagery, and is particularly interesting to me here because, if I took a particular scene correctly, Mitsuha made her own red string of fate from sheer necessity, which is a very different twist on that trope, and (2) I am now curious about the history of the body-swapping phenomenon in-universe.

W/A/S: 4?/2/2

Weeb: As mentioned above, symbolism of the Red String of Fate shows up throughout the movie, as do the occasional distinctly Japanese quirk like a wildly out-of-place vending machine or a café with dogs, and but for the most part it’s a cross-cultural story of understanding and dealing with someone else’s life, and of forming a connection other people don’t -- can’t -- truly understand, and to some extent of divides between urban and rural and modern and traditional that I think could play out in any country with just the local symbolism tweaked. The significance and content of Shinto beliefs and practices depicted, particularly kuchikamizake, are made pretty explicit, so although foreign to the vast majority of the non-Japanese audience, I feel like this movie also has nearly no barrier to entry for people not familiar with the cultural context, so I don’t want to rate it very high on this scale.

Ass: Look. It involves teenagers switching bodies. What do you think they do? Especially Taki? But it’s played for laughs, not titillation.

Shit: This movie is beautiful and punched me in the feels and was very satisfying. The closest I have to a complaint about any aspect of it is that the musical breaks that I guess are supposed to mark acts of the movie almost make it feel like binge-watching a short series instead of watching a single self-contained movie.

#weeaboo trash #anime review #mini-reviews #happy new year #di gi charat #first astronomical velocity #super sonico #interspecies reviewers #oresuki #Are You Really the Only One Who Likes Me?#your name

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