Category: Ongoing Investigations

Ongoing Investigations: Case #121

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I know I could have talked about the shows that ended with the Winter 2011 season but this week I decided to talk about three really odd things and save my feelings on the shows wrapping up for next week.  My first pick is My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic because I had to understand the strange cult of the Bronies that has formed around this show. Let us get the most important detail out-of-the-way first. This is a cartoon for little girls. It is a very well made cartoon for little girls but make no mistake it is a cartoon for little girls. As someone who watched and loved HeartCatch PreCure! I have no problem watching cartoons for little girls but let us call a spade a spade. There seems to be this odd Touhou Project effect where fans have this strange obsession with filling in all the details of a world. It also creates this strange phenomenon where the fans of the show seem really proud of how ashamed they are of watching the show. That said there is a lot to like about the show. The animation is wonderful and really shows how far flash animation has come over the years. They do their best to make everyone extremely expressive which makes this show infinitely screencapable. The humor is often actually funny. The stories are often super simple considering its target audience but it is rarely patronizing though they do  restate the lesson at the end of every episode in standard kids cartoon style. And now some random observations. As One Great Turtle so succinctly pointed out Fluttershy is the most moe pony ever and I noted that Rainbow Dash is the Tomo Takino of the show. Overall it is a wonderful show to watch with any younger female relatives you have as it is a show you can enjoy together. Apparently it also appeals to older nerdier male audience and there is nothing wrong about that but it is so so very odd.

Twin Spica vol. 5, you surprised me! In a good way. This installment starts giving us some history and the revelation in it, while not totally clear yet, was not on my radar in the least. On that note, this book deals a bit less with Asumi though we do see the continued developement of Kiriu the boy protester she met in the last volume who is focused on quite a bit this time. At this point we know who Asumi is so branching out is nice. And the game of survival they are thrown in during the last couple of chapters adds some great tension while bringing the past and present back together.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #120

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Ah, Toradora!, chronicling the eternal struggle between Tiger and Dragon in the form of a spitfire of a tiny girl and a clean-freak boy with the face of a delinquent. Two misunderstood people come together to help each other with their respective love interests, but wind up getting what they never knew they needed: each other. Despite that last sentence, Toradora! is a comedic romance but there truly are very poignant moments. Of course, this is my impression from the anime, the manga maintains a similar feel, and I assume will follow a similar course. Right now it feels better than average, but nothing is particularly moving in this first installment, though I did enjoy Ryuuji catching Taiga on the stairs. Taiga has a bit of a light switch feel at the moment, she is misunderstood but she isn’t wholly unlike her reputation either so I hope that evens out. The cover of the Toradora! vol. 1 manga is striking for its style and design; the interior art is a bit more generic but still well executed. There is also a bonus chapter for Ryuuji’s mom, and in general she has more fan-service in here than the anime. My biggest complaint for Toradora! is how verbose the manga is, this isn’t the most complex of stories so it is unnecessary. In line with this, there is a lot of repetition from Ryuji’s narration creating a showing and telling of many scenes; can probably chalk this up from it being a light novel first.

Manga adaptations of popular series tend to be some of the most mediocre things you can read. So I went cautiously into the Toradora! manga hoping for the best but braced for the worst. My general feeling was it is nowhere as bad as it could have been. I have never read the original light novels but I did watch the anime so I found myself comparing it to that. Ryuji and Taiga’s antagonistic friendship and budding romance is captured fairly well. There is a greater use of minor incidental classmates in the manga so it feels like people exist outside of the 4 main characters. On the down side we see much less of Minori and Yusaku so it is harder to see why our main characters should be crazy in love with them. Minori and Yusaku were not super prominent in the anime so when you cut their time they even become more plot elements and less characters. The character designs are very different from the manga. The girls are clearly done by a different style but you know who is who if you watched the anime. The guys on the other hand look like completely different characters that just happen to have the same name. The biggest complaint is that while there are clear differences so far if you have watched the anime you have read the manga. It is the classic dilemma of what happens when you do an extremely close adaption. If you are a mostly manga fan who is curious why anime fans keep talking about Toradora! this is a good place to see a very well executed shonen romance. Toradora! does not do much new with the genre but it does it in a well executed and lively fashion. For everyone else it is matter of how much you want to reread what you have already seen in a new art style.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #119

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The last episode Gundam Unicorn left us with not so much a cliff hanger as a short pause before the crescendo that is the battle that opens up The Ghost of Laplace. While we get some conversation and character moments this episode is mostly a series of battles. Thankfully these battles are story relevant as opposed to lovely but time-wasting mecha porn filler. The battles are as engaging as they have been in the past although we don’t get much action out of Full Frontal. He mainly seems to be doing the Char the Manipulator not Char the Action Rival shtick this episode. We learn quite a bit about Marida Cruz and how she ties into previous Gundam material. We also get some mandatory Newtype nudity and trippyness as is a UC Gundam tradition. I did realize at the end of the episode that my Snarky Reductionist Theater title for the show would be Mobile Suit Gundam: National Treasure. It seems the main plot shall be Banagher Links pretending to be a calm version of Nicolas Cage as he goes around the historical sites of the Gundam universe solving puzzles that will unlock Laplace’s Box as he is chased by agents of various secret societies.  The end of this episode will seem VERY familiar to anyone who has seen a good deal of Universal Century Gundam but it continues the tradition of getting the audience excited for the next episode of Unicorn which is important in an OVA series like this.

I watched the short animation Out of Sight from Taiwan by recommendation from Twitter. It features a little girl whose bag is stolen, her dog then chases down the thief leaving the girl on her own searching the city for him. This is a brilliant piece of work incorporating all five senses in order bring the world to life. The design is stand-out while the little girl wanders the city as it comes in and out of focus. Beautiful, sweet, excellent.
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