Renaissance Josei

The last twenty years has been a good time for original anime films.  Studio Ghibli has (mostly) relinquished its dominance of the scene, thanks to the passing of Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki’s off-and-on retirement, and Goro Miyazaki’s fruitless struggle toward competence.  That’s left a space for a lot of up-and-coming directors and studios to try their hand at similar sorts of crowd-pleasing animated films.  One of the few to find true, lasting success at it has been Makoto Shinkai. Shinkai’s directorial career began quite modestly.   He first gained notoriety in the early 2000s for producing a series of delicately emotional, digitally-animated shorts entirely on his own computer.   While his productions grew in size, length, and scope over time, he never abandoned his focus on telling stories about young adults tentatively finding love against a backdrop of urban beauty.   This culminated in 2016’s Your Name , which became one of the most successful ...

You know, I've largely dedicated this column to document anime failures of the past but there are plenty of modern shows that are equally broken, thanks to the absolute glut of shows we get every season and the increasingly tenuous and untenable conditions under which they are made.  This is just one of them. For the last decade, countless anime studios have been trying to create their own version of Free! .   That’s perfectly understandable, considering that series not only brought a lot of acclaim to Kyoto Animation but also made a LOT of merchandise money thanks to its fervent fujoshi audience.   This wasn’t the first time fujoshi turned a sports anime into a success – this has been a phenomenon in Japan since the days of Captain Tsubasa , repeated time and again with the likes of Slam Dunk and The Prince of Tennis .   The difference this time was international audience responded just as strongly, in defiance of the common knowledge within the industry that sport...

AIC produced a lot of hits over the years, but few of them could compare to the success and impact of the 1992 OVA Tenchi Muyo! .  What began as merely a sitcom-inspired AU starring a minor character from Bubblegum Crisis made in part to sell Pioneer laserdiscs became a landmark in the growing genre of harem anime and an international sensation in its own right.  For AIC, it was the goose that laid golden eggs, and each new egg was a success in its own right.  One OVA soon became two, which was followed in turn by the full length TV series Tenchi Universe .  From there the franchise branched out into various films, specials, OVAs, and spinoffs. Sadly, no anime franchise can succeed forever and Tenchi Muyo was no exception.   It has stumbled many times over the last 30 years, and many of its latter day installments would be a perfect fit for this column.   That would be a little too easy though, even for me.   I was more interested in determining the ...

 Japan is famous worldwide for its ability to anthropomorphize anything for the sake of promotion.  People have written literal books on the subject, and the variety and specificity of their many, MANY mascots is a common subject of lighthearted ridicule online.  Not even anime is safe from this  phenomenon.  They’ve made anime about headphone mascots, pop cans, and the nations of the world, just to name a few.  There’s only one series that dares to give that sort of treatment to a Tokyo train line, though: 2009’s Miracle Train: Welcome to the Oedo Line .

There are many reasons behind what shows I choose to cover for Disaster Report.  Sometimes it may be due to its distasteful, even controversial content.  Perhaps it's because the show is poorly produced or adapted.  Occasionally it's because a show has a reputation for badness. Sometimes, though, you just randomly come across a show with a premise that demands you watch it, if simply to verify that such a thing actually exists.  That's the situation I found myself in when Anime Herald editor and bad anime connoisseur Samantha Ferreria brought up a long-forgotten harem series from 2001.  From the moment I heard the premise and saw its immensely cheap and shoddy opening, I knew I had to review it. After all, how could I resist a show about a hapless loser who gets a harem of girls who are both guardian angels and reincarnations of his dead pets with a dopey, childish title like Angel Tales ?

There are few stories that are more strongly tied to Christmas than that of The Nutcracker .  It has been impressed upon two centuries of children thanks to E.T.A. Hoffman's original story and Pyotr Tchakovsky's famous ballet.  It's been adapted dozens of times in just about every form of media you can think of, but few of those adaptations could hope to aspire to the beauty and strangeness of of the 1979 Japanese stop-motion feature Nutcracker Fantasy .

This story begins with a man named Takehito Koyasu. He's a prolific seiyuu best known these days as the voice of Dio Brando, but in the mid 1990s he was known and loved for voicing smug bishonen such as Hotohori in  Fushigi Yugi , Touga on Revolutionary Girl Utena , and Zechs Marquise on Gundam Wing .  He was enjoying a level of success at that time that only a handful of voice actors ever get to enjoy, but that was not enough for him.    He saw how much money producers were making off of the shows he worked on and wanted a cut of his own.  He also had an ego that demanded that the world recognize him and his other seiyuu friends not just as voice actors, but as superstars of many talents.  To achieve both of these goals, Koyasu need to create his own original work, and he already had a concept in mind.  It was a tale of four tormented young men fighting against the evils of the criminal underworld.  By day they worked as florists; by night they ...

This post is brought to you by this year's Anime Secret Santa.  Thanks to the folks at All Geeks Considered for hosting this year, and thanks to Evan Minto ( @VamptVo ) for the suggestion! For all the fuss that manga fans make over the Magnificent Forty-Niners, shockingly few of their works have made the leap to animation.  Keiko Takemiya has been the most fortunate, with three works total including two of her most notable manga.  Rikoyo Ikeda had two works that became landmarks in shojo anime.  Even Yumiko Ooshima got a lovely, lavish adaptation of her best-known work.  Meanwhile, Moto Hagio's contributions to anime have been limited to character designs for The Time Stranger (not to be confused with GoShogun: The Time Etranger ) and the 1986 adaptation of her 1974 short story They Were Eleven .

An anime based on the works of Junji Ito should be a success by any measure.  Ito's combination of Lovecraftian horror stories combined with his spooky, heavily textured art has been a favorite of many for decades.  His works have only increased in popularity over the years, making him one of the very few horror mangaka to enjoy success outside of Japan.  Yet translating those works to motion seems to be another matter entirely.

The story of Anime Strike is a short and frustrating one.  Started on New Year's Day of 2017, it was meant to be a way for Amazon to tap into the growing market for anime streaming.  Within a short time, they managed to piss off anime fans by locking their shows behind a double paywall, using poor quality subtitles (when they remembered to subtitle their shows at all), frequent and inexplicable delays in their uploads, and little in the way of promotion for themselves and their shows.  The service quietly shut down after a year, mourned by no one in particular and leaving little in the way of impact. Anime Strike was a bad idea for many reasons, but its greatest disservice was to the shows they licensed.  While some shows such as Made In Abyss or Land of the Lustrous were able to rise above Anime Strike's limitations, the rest were largely ignored by the service and anime fans alike.  It's only now that some of them are starting to be rediscovered as they ma...

It’s hard to come up with a new twist on shoujo romance. We have over half a century’s worth of manga and anime on the subject, and often it feels like virtually every twist and concept possible has been explored at least once. Good creators can overcome this sense of fatigue through thoughtful writing and new perspectives. Bad creators overcome it by adding sensationalist elements to grab the public’s notice, and more often than not this trick is turned until the sensationalist part becomes normalized. We’ve seen this happen before with lolicon. We saw it happen more recently with incest, particularly where little sisters are concerned. In the case of First Love Monster , based on the manga by Akira Hiyoshimaru, we saw it attempted yet again with one of the few taboos left in the world of anime and manga: shotacon. Shotacon, like lolicon before it, is a Japanese slang term for the sexualized portrayal of pre-pubescent children. In this case it’s focused on boys, but unlike ...

There are a lot of vampires in shoujo manga.   This is just a simple fact.   Poke around your local Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million and you’re bound to find titles like  Vampire Knight ,  He’s My Only Vampire ,  Honey Blood ,  Millennium Snow , and so many more.   They all tend to be populated by  beautiful and tormented young men who are all simply waiting for some lovely young thing to come wandering into their undead life to bring them the love and redemption they all seem to be seeking in various degrees.   It’s incredibly predictable, incredibly derivative, and it’s enough to make any seasoned manga reader cynical about vampires in manga in general.   Every once in a while, though, we get a manga series that manages to take an old idea like vampire romance and do something new and interesting with the idea. Amongst those select few titles is  Black Rose Alice , the latest series from  Afterschool Night...

It’s kind of shocking that it took Viz so long to start a yaoi imprint of their own, SuBLime. Over the years it seems that most of the major publishers have at least dabbled with the genre, if they didn’t have a dedicated imprint or were themselves dedicated to the genre.    SuBLime certainly has been far more wise in their title selection than most, and by being more selective about what goes to print, they can afford to explore more unconventional titles.    Amongst the most unconventional of the lot is  The Man of Tango  by Tetuzoh Okadaya. The titular man is Angel, a renowned tango dancer who himself has never experienced the sort of passion that tango is renowned for.   He’s become something of a heartbreaker over the years, and one of the few constants in his life is his fellow dance teacher/best friend/roommate Bene.   A performance at a local bar leads to the two of them meeting Hiro.   Hiro is half Japanese and half Latino, an...

Osamu Tezuka created many, many manga over the course of his career. Some were long-spanning and ambitious, exploring philosophical, even experimental ideas. Other were short and strange ideas seemingly done on a lark. Personally, though, I find that his best works were those that were simple, straightforward, with universal appeal. This is true for works like  Princess Knight, Astro Boy,  and the subject of today's review:  Unico. Unico  is the story of a lovely little unicorn who belonged to Psyche, an ancient Greek princess renowned for her beauty and gentleness. The love goddess Venus envies her and does her best to foil Psyche, but not even her son Cupid is immune to Pysche's charms. Thus, Venus decides that if she can't get rid of Psyche, she will get rid of her unicorn with a curse. She commands the west winds to steal him away and spirit him through time and space, far from where he could be loved. Regardless of where and when Unico lands, he always ends...

It's a difficult thing to write a story about sex workers. A big reason for that is that regardless of place or time period, prostitution is a distinctly unglamorous thing. The women who perform it often come from impoverished, abusive backgrounds. Their lives are often equally impoverished and abusive, not to mention short and tragic. In fiction, such women may be used to drive home some moral point, a demonstration of what happens to those women who stray from conventional morality. They may be the focus of some tragedy, showing the downfall of some poor noble creature who is either saved from her wretchedness by an outside force or by killing herself to escape her life with some sense of honor or dignity. More often than not, they're nothing but sexy, trashy window dressing for the real story. That's what makes a manga like  Sakuran  all the more unusual. It's not just about how the main character became a prostitute, but also how she rega...