Momo e no Tegami, “A Letter to Momo”, is a technically ambitious and heartwarming success by Hiroyuki Okiura (Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, Paprika) and Production I.G. that gives me hope for anime films in this decade. The film achieves what a good anime should aim for: fantastic and wonderful images which at the same time astound the viewer with their novelty and retain a touch of familiarity that makes them hauntingly real. It’s a meticulous effort that’s very much worth your time.

You may remember that I was underwhelmed by Shinkai’s Voices from the Other Side, which seemed be a hodgepodge of homages to Ghibli and surreal but poorly assembled spectacles. Momo e looks a little Ghibliesque on the surface, but this is really just because both Miyazaki and Okiura are drawing on Edo period grimoires for source material. Get into the theater and you’ll discover that the cinematography, character designs, and plot arcs are really quite different, and Momo e has its own personality.

The basic plot is rather predictable from the beginning, but it becomes fleshed out and made more engaging by a careful pacing. Unfortunately for me, this film contains a lot of dialect: the islanders speak a rustic, almost humorously archaic variant of Shikoku-ben, and the spirits speak a mixture of 19th century samurai language and other things I could not identify. The latter especially tripped me up a few times and probably requires a native grasp on Japanese, or familiarity with afternoon samurai dramas, to be enjoyed fully. But the archaicisms give the fictional setting a feeling of realism and physical location.

Language is far from the only aspect of the film where exhaustive research has born delicious fruit. I don’t need a “making of” video to know that the director and lead animators must have personally visited islands in the inland sea as a model for their setting. The streets and buildings boast accuracy at every curb, even moreso than Ghibli’s recent Kokurikozaka kara. See if you can spot the cleverly employed pillow shots. Every background has been based on real life reference down to the smallest detail. There must have been some serious observation of island life involved to capture all of the tiny moments we see in the film, such as families carrying water tanks up to their homes and gas-powered elevators running up through the terraced rice fields (棚田). The faces of the human characters also sometimes exhibit an uncanny realism, which can be seen in the trailer.

Another part of the film where background research was both complete and well-integrated is the aspect of the haunted house. The haunted house in Totoro, to use the most obvious example, is just a word used to introduce the cute characters. In Momo e, on the other hand, the number of parallels with real poltergeist haunting proves that the director and writers must have done some real research into the subject. Just as in a real-life poltergeist incident, the haunting begins with strange knocks from unoccupied rooms, then develops into spooky incidents such as invisible hands grabbing people, objects flying across the room, fires being started… or the weirdness witnessed by the adults in this film, which I will not reveal. The haunted family inevitably includes a young child age 6-14, in this case Momo. Eventually the child is named as the culprit, as is the case here (this is not a major plot point), but how a child could pull off such sophisticated conjuring undetected for such a long time, or why they undertook such an effort, is never explained. I don’t expect viewers to be familiar with this branch of parapsychology, but the touch of realism will surely strike a chord unconsciously.

These are just the aspects of the film that stuck out the most to me– I’ll leave other points to other reviewers. In any case, the film blended seamlessly with my experiences of rural Japan, with the result that when the drama reached its peak, I was completely submerged in its world. I was not the only one feeling this way–I could hear a lot of sniffling in the theater. It was one of those films that’s so good you lose track of time and you’re not sure whether you were watching for thirty minutes or three hours, even though in my case I didn’t understand all of the dialogue!

The feeling experienced by the viewer after the curtains close, in my opinion, is a crucial judge of the real quality of a film. When I came out of the theater I felt grateful and moved for having seen such an honest portrayal of life and death. I’m not sure if I would buy a DVD for extended replay, but I would definitely see this film again with friends. My reverie was temporarily interrupted by a theater employee handing out marketing material for the film, including a postcard inviting people to mail in letters they would want to send to lost family and friends. This struck me as a little insensitive, but it doesn’t affect my impression of the film itself, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

New Hori-ZUN 2, 44p, by circle ddiction (http://ddiction.org/index_en.html)

New Hori-ZUN 2, part of a series whose first volume I totally forgot to ask my bro @nforza26 to send me, is an attempt at an exciting and highly educational Touhou-themed English textbook series based on New Horizon, an actual exciting and highly-educational English textbook I am completely unfamiliar with.

As you may recognize from some of the e-famous artist names, several of the authors of this book are actually American, which is completely different from being Japanese, and yet it is one of the higher quality doujin I have seen!

The authors have mastered difficult doujin techniques such as 4komas, Arial, having a circle name even though you’re the only member of the circle, and Yume Nikki references.

However, as far as textbooks go it’s a little undirected. The text (the usual character comedy Touhou lends itself to, although decent enough) is more complex than volume 1, but how will the reader know if he understands all of it? I think there should be more exercises. Of course, the less useful it is the more like the actual Japanese school system it is, so either way they win.

You can find this circle at the upcoming Winter Comiket. In the meantime, the authors can be found on the Internet.

Fushigi no kuni no Marisa (Marisa in Wonderland), by circle COSMIC FORGE (http://www.cosmicforge.net/)

Available via mail order from Manga Pal!

(Japanese translation available at tsurupeta.info)

In which I basically just rant about Panty and Stocking

Theron Martin

Yumeiro Pâtissière Professional

Review: Let’s be frank here: this is a series (or, rather, the sequel to a series) about a girl who wants to become a pastry chef … all of the artistic style elements one would expect to see in a light-hearted shojo romance.

This series airs at about 7AM on a Sunday. The ads during the episode show 5-year-olds making fake pastries and playing with plastic jewelry. ANN doesn’t do fall previews of the latest exciting events on Doraemon or Heartcatch Purikyua, so why this? I realize I’m nitpicking, but more otaku watch Purikyua than Yumeiro.

Panty & Stocking

The artistic style has been accused of too much resembling some of Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s more crudely-animated fare, and that complaint is not without merit

“Homage”? “Riff”? What is this I don’t even

Carl Kimlinger

Squid Girl

Good thing you translated the title into English for us, because I might not have understood the

… Unfortunately, when Ika Musume takes human form she’s…

…oh, you know Japanese? Oh, that’s great too, you can

Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt

It’s like Hiroyuki Imaishi watched a bunch of American gross-out humor and decided to replicate it without understanding what makes it tick. There’s only one genuine laugh this episode (a glimpse of Stocking’s fan-base), and the show has to do better than that if it wants to keep its viewers.

…oh, you don’t know Japanese after all. It sure is hard to analyze how Japanese viewers will respond to a comedy where most of the humor comes from using slang and overly harsh tone in a language you don’t understand, but that’s cool too. Good for you.

Carlo Santos

The plot centers around a color-coded quartet of schoolgirls known collectively as Milky Holmes, who use their psychic powers (known as “Toys” in this universe, because apparently creators are running out of goofy nicknames for psychic powers) to solve crimes and stop a band of “Gentlemen Thieves.” However, when they lose their TO-Y powers several minutes into the episode,

heheh, your perfectly good review was screwed up by ANN’s autolinked index of 1980s OVAs. Okay, actually this guy’s reviews were quite decent and I’ll want to watch one of these shows when I get home. I should probably give up the pretense of writing a complete metareview of ANN’s reviews and skip to the end now.

Zac Bertschy

I mainly just wanted to respond to this guy, without making it look like I was caught by expert trolling. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a troll but merely pure ignorance, because Teh Answerman says this sort of shit as if he knows something about it all the time.

It should be mentioned that during the girls’ transformation sequence – a sex-drenched poledance wherein the leads molest themselves while removing their underwear – the character designs suddenly snap out of the Nickelodeon mode and become much more traditional sexy anime girls. This is Gainax, after all, and naturally they’re still sticking with the cynical marketing moves (if the streets of Akihabara aren’t flooded with ero figures based on these character designs by the end of next week, color me shocked). It’s kind of disappointing, really – the chunky stylized character designs are the one fresh thing this show had going for it, and they basically chicken out halfway through the episode. I’m surprised there isn’t a subtitle during this transformation sequence that reads “sorry, we have to make money on merchandising somehow with this thing”.

Dear Zac, I just came back from a mid-sized Touhou convention. There were a lot of quite excellent artists there drawing Touhou characters in the style of Panty & Stocking. No doujinshi on that subject were published, because the show is so new, but needless to say, the art style is clever, any merchandise done up in that style will probably sell briskly, and the transformation scene is a joke and not the covert otaku selling point you believe it to be. Ugh, bug off forever.

Working!!
A 4koma anime that feels like a 4koma anime, produced by A-1 Pictures channeling J.C. Staff. It has some nice character ideas, but the execution is a bit too straightforward, so it’s a little boring – still watchable, but I don’t love it. I wish it was by SHAFT somehow, even though I was very bored with Arakawa (dropped at 2 episodes).
The opening doesn’t really know what it’s doing – half of it is new and interesting, and half of it seems to be shots copied from Azumanga Daioh. My notes say “ed is stupid”, but I can’t remember anything about it, so let’s leave it at that.
I hear the later episodes are more solid and that there’s a new character with hime cut. Watching.

Giant Killing
A soccer anime by Studio DEEN with actual money. I thought it was really interesting that a DEEN show with a budget has better drawings and movement, but still has horrible washed-out coloring choices for everything. Actually, I thought that was more interesting than the show – I’ve never seen a sports anime before, so it’s kind of cool, but the early part is just the coach making up magic quirky strategies for everything instead of something more realistic.
I’ll have to look ahead and see if it goes anywhere, otherwise dropped at 3 episodes.

Sarai-ya Goyou / House of Five Leaves
A samurai show made by manglobe that’s REALLY BORING!
Nothing has happened in 3 episodes except for one swordfight, so it doesn’t matter how good the art is (it’s good). Dropped.

Senkou no Night Raid
Psychic superpower action series by A-1 Pictures channeling Bones. I’m watching this untranslated, and the fake Chinese politics sort of goes over my head, so without that it’s just a watchable but slow action drama – a lot of things happen, but not in a really interesting way. I’d rather finish Darker than Black, really. I’ve heard some other people say it was “awful”, but I can’t really tell what’s annoying them. Watching halfheartedly.

The OP is a really complicated animation that looks cool and doesn’t match the actual show at all.

They make it sound like the psychics are an important national secret, but then in episode 3 they’re teleporting bombs out of buildings all over the place. Won’t someone notice?

Now that I think about it, the only things I’ve seen in the last few weeks were Angel Beats! and K-ON!!. More about that later.

…I think I’m bored of Yotsuba now. Actually reading this again just made me want to get the new Azumanga chapters.

The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya (Nagaru Tanigawa/Yen Press again)
Kind of boring. The early stories are all better in the anime, though some later chapters are better, I’ve heard. Also the entire translation is written like this. I was going to make up something here about fansub translators not knowing how to write paragraphs, but I guess it’s light novel style after all. The anime episodes are better but are still boring.

The Summer of the Ubume (Natsuhiko Kyogoku/Vertical)
kransom told me to buy this before it came out here, and so I did. Unfortunately, not only is this a real novel, but it’s actually good and well-written, which left me totally unqualified to say anything about it. I will instead note that most people seem to have called it a “supernatural horror”, which it isn’t, and insist on comparing Kyogoku to nerdshoe authors like Neil Gaiman/Stephenson.
Personally, I thought the mystery solved through a very long history lecture at the end reminded me more of Umberto Eco, but there’s no reason to go around reducing things to comparisons like that. Just go read it, okay.

Kannagi v1/2
(I read the subtitles, you see.)
There wasn’t really enough plot to sustain this. The individual episodes were mostly good, but none of them actually led into each other at all, and you just had to pretend that the weird serious drama in episode 2 merited it suddenly coming back at the end of the show.
Maybe if the author had written more of the plot out it could’ve been interesting, since it was at least more leftist than Kamichu, but instead some completely different series about maid cafes got stuck in the middle. Yamakan’s director power somehow made this and Kanon watchable, but I end up regretting it afterwards…

Umineko no naku koro ni, episode 6
I can’t mention any plot details until it’s been translated, but after reading it I don’t think I got any clearer picture of the mystery. It looks like episode 7 will reveal a large part of that, so it’s just a little more waiting either way, but it made reading such a long episode seem a little pointless.
There were a few great scenes, but overall the whole thing is by design stuck until the actual end, and I think he’s just padding it out now. Watch out if you start reading it (e.g. if someone translates the prologue), because the first few scenes will just confuse you until you get to the end 15 chapters later.

The main character is wildly immoral, but as he’s supplied with both a good reason (the apparently ever-present mansions full of child torturing rich people) and some actual self-awareness and intelligence, it’s certainly better than most other popular games I could mention. And I thought the moral was pretty obvious, though well meaning, but obviously otaku haven’t paid any attention to it. Maybe they didn’t play it.

It also seems to have completely confused some people, but I didn’t see anything difficult about it at all. But nobody I know has finished it yet, so I can’t discuss it. Come on, guys!

Tanaka Romeo, beyond the pen name and his constantly making off-topic jokes, is a pretty good writer, so I wish he’d move to some other format. Beyond my feeling kind of silly about discussing literary merit in porn, it seems like it’s nearly impossible to have a single ending to one of these stories without invoking time loops, and I’m getting tired of them. It’s almost as bad as how all mysteries have to start with long discussions about locked rooms, as if they’ve all only ever read the same Agatha Christie novel over there.

UPDATE: Tower of Friends is pretty real.

1. Tildes mandatory.
2. Tildes optional.

Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei vol. 2 is a cool manga, you should read it. If you’ve already watched it, it pretty much covers all the same jokes, but personally I don’t care about that.

Faust vol. 2 doesn’t have Kara no Kyoukai in it. I guess everyone hated it so much in the last one that it’s gone now? I haven’t actually read this one yet, but Omo covered vol1 pretty well.

Gakuen Alice has a really unfortunate DVD cover but you should watch it if you like that kind of thing.

I haven’t done anything recently except play Umineko (which is more or less brilliant) so maybe this blog and that other blog will stay dead for a while.

the best episode (also the second-to-last episode)

I’d actually started watching this in 2005 but stopped at the low point, around episode 9 – I didn’t understand why it was suddenly about a terrorist squid – but now that I finished it I don’t think that was too bad. That wasn’t actually a drop in quality in the show itself, but the script constantly changes genres and the one from “drama” to “fake Imagawa show” took a while.

Unfortunately I think that’s doomed it over here – the middle part is a long slice-of-life show of the kind nobody around here wants to buy or watch, which probably means a lot of people wouldn’t sit through it even if they did like all the rest. Although ufotable did try to make an even more Western-style show and ended up with the boring and still weirdly otakuish Coyote Ragtime Show, so maybe it’s just as well?

Also please post if you got my joke in the first paragraph without looking it up.

Mozuya-san Gyakujou Suru, Shinofusa Rokurou. Kodansha/Afternoon. Vol 2 published 1/23/2009.

Volume 2 of this was pretty impressive for me since Shinofusa manages to take a pretty silly concept (tsundere as clinical disease) and actually make something other than cheap gags out of it. Volume 2 keeps the drama going strong as Kabashima tells Mozuya that he’s a masochist, which completely throws a wrench into Mozuya’s psychology of “I’m sick and hurt people when they’re nice to me -> people are still nice to me after i hurt them only because they know something’s wrong with me -> they’re looking down on me, thus i hate them more.” Of course, Mozuya also discovers someone she wants to feel bad for of her own, basically making a lot of the character interaction a look at the dynamics of the whole moe/amae thing. (has anyone talked about moe in relation to the concept of amae? I’d do it but I’m never writing a non-graded paper that has to do with psychoanalysis.) Of course there’s still some fanservice and even a weird reader stand-in Sexy Otaku Nurse character, but overall it’s shaping up to be a very interesting drama, kind of along the same thematic lines as NHK. Time to wait another 5 months for volume 3 :(

Moetan, illust. POP. Sansai Books. Vol 1 published 6/1/2006.

This was given to me as a birthday present from a fellow internet illuminatus who I met last semester, so I haven’t actually had the opportunity to read volumes 1 or 2, or watch the anime, so I’m not exactly an expert on lolicon English manuals. That said, this is a hilarious lolicon English manual. A little over half of the book is ostensibly an attempt to teach English to Japanese nerds through sentences and examples that they use in their daily lives! Thus, the example sentences are mostly nerd jokes (You said you don’t like crowds. But somehow you casually endure the crowd in Comiket. / She doesn’t recognize the existence of girls who dislike homosexuals.) and there are also some conversation examples, one that’s nothing but tsundere lines, and another that’s a conversation between an American and Japanese otaku in Japan. ( That’s the coolest thing ever! The maids out front of the station waiting to greet you! Let’s go into one of those places! Hey Sam, look at this picture of the dolphin! Is this also one of the “Moe”? Wow, Akihabara is really a cool place!), and so on. In between language examples is a story about Nijihara(虹原, o hoh hoh hoh) Inku’s attempts to bring her friend back from his secluded otaku world by shattering all of his silly nerd dreams and illusions by doing things such as showing him what the person who plays the cute female character in the dream-world MMO he’s addicted to really looks like, or calling the police on him for the books he’s selling at his dream-world Comiket shutter booth. (There’s a certain sense of hypocrisy in that one when you realize that POP illustrated this thing, but never mind that). Of course, the sentences all appear to be J->E translations, so I imagine that this would actually be more helpful as any sort of learning tool to an English speaker at an intermediate level of Japanese language experience than to a Japanese person trying to learn natural-sounding English. Either way, don’t take it so serious.

Obaachan ga Shitai Kusai Yo, Shintaro Kago. Kubo Shoten. Published 2/1/2009.
Cover (semi-nws)

I probably shouldn’t admit to buying Shintaro Kago comics since I am not writing for a blog called Same Hat!, nor do I read Vice, but I like living on the dangerous side. The volume is a collection of shorts by Kago, most of which were surprisingly non-pornographic. That is to say, there’s no real focus on sex, but, as in all good Kago stories, on pooping. To be honest, I was not aware that one could make so many poop jokes, some of which were laugh-out-loud funny. Of course, that probably says more about me than about this book, but I mean, these are really top-tier poop jokes that also reference old zombie movies, and classic rakugo skits while being painfully satirical of modern events. Beyond the Life is Poop and Die nihilism that’s fairly standard in Kago stories, there’s stories like one near the back of the volume, Mirai Eigyou-ki: Kinyuu Kaisha-Hen (Future Business Report: The Finance Industry) about investing in promising young criminals, who currently show signs of future criminal activity, which you can cash in on when they make it huge on the news media after committing terrible crimes! To be specific for this chapter, after running people over in a truck in Akiba and stabbing them! oh, wait. too soon, dude. :(

Itsumo no Hanashi, Akino Kondoh. Seirinkogeisha. Published 9/25/2008.

I really should do a longer article on this since there’s a lot of blog buzz about the upcoming Ax anthology, which I believe Kondoh is doing the cover art for, but I really need to get to doing my homework, sorry! I first became interested in Kondoh after getting hooked on Nicovideo classic Densha Kamo Shirenai a while back (look at how low that sm number is!), but didn’t give Kondoh’s other works a whole lot more thought until this magically appeared in front of my face when I was looking around at Taco Che over the holidays. Itsumo no Hanashi is a collection of shorts from about the last decade by Kondoh, which range from somewhat light-hearted slice of life-ish stories about getting letters from old classmates (Itsumo no Hanashi) to seemingly drug-induced dream stories about talking to your legs and furniture (Kotatsu no Mawari de). Kondoh’s style is whimsical yet mysterious, but at the same time her art can get intensely unsettling and destabilizing. In terms of storytelling and overall effect, Kondoh reminds me a lot of Nekojiru at her best, using a very accessible style to get at some normally unaccessible feelings. Looking forward very much to getting her other collection as well as the English version of Ax (more info here, also here) once I get it through my head that buying one 1300y volume of absolutely beautiful manga is better than buying 13 volumes of fist of the north star at Book-Off. Well okay, maybe they’re about tied, but I ought to keep a good balance.

Film wa Ikiteiru, Osamu Tezuka, 1958-1959　1 vol comp, 130pgs. Serialized in Chuugaku 1nen Course/2nen Course.

For the synopsis, I’m going to defer to the spoilerific one that shows up at the beginning of every Tezuka Osamu Manga Zenshuu:

• The Film Lives On

  This is the story of two animators during the period of the dawn of animation films.
  Two boys named Musashi and Kojiro, respectively, who were very fond of drawing cartoons, left the countryside and journeyed to Tokyo where they eventually became cartoonists.
  But the dream of Musashi and Kojiro was to create animated films. The two vied with each other in the production of such films. Musashi first created a full-length animated film based on the Story of the Yearling while Kojiro followed suit by producing a film whose theme was centered on Tiny Black Sambo.
  During the process of producing the film, Musashi loses the sight of his eyes but his girl friend Otsu comes to his rescue and Musashi finally manages to complete the animated film on the Story of the Yearling which becomes more popular than the film produced by Kojiro.

If the summary makes the story sound fairly simple, that’s because it is. Not necessarily in a bad way (I mean, it’s 130 pages), but overall what interested me most when reading the manga is seeing the way that Tezuka intertwines a whole mess of obvious and disparate references that end up being fairly central to the story, which otherwise is a fairly standard shonen hard work -> success story: the Miyamoto Musashi/Sasaki Kojiro rivalry, the history of animation, the life of Beethoven, and his own experiences, including what could be read as a foreshadowing of his future experiences in the world of animation. Oh, also this manga editor who reminds me of SSJ2 Carl Horn for some reason.

If I were doing annotations or something on this manga, I’d probably elaborate on all of these, but I’m not, so I’m just going to talk about the ones that I find most interesting, specifically the stuff in here explicitly about animation.

To begin with, there’s this graph, which shows up in the third chapter, which spends most of its time away from the action of the story in order to explain some basics of animation, like the phenomenon of persistence of vision, the phenakistoscope, and the animations of Emile Cohl. The graph was interesting to me because it shows that Tezuka is definitely familiar with the world of animation at the time, (for the katakana-challenged, some highlights: Norm Mclaren under Canada, Disney, Quimby, Bosustow, Terry, Lantz, Fleischer, Iwerks under America (I was hoping for some Harry Everett Smith myself), Trnka and Hoffmann(?) under Czech, and so on.) but he doesn’t seem to have much of an opinion on Japanese animation at the time, and doesn’t mention a single Japanese animator by name. In fact, just a few pages prior he mentions that domestic animated films (called manga eiga the whole work) never really took off in Japan.

There’s also the matter of Musashi and the old, grumpy anime director that he meets, who seem to foreshadow a lot of Tezuka’s own career in animation. I’m going to warn you that it’s been a while since I’ve actually read a book about this, so please correct my horrible mistakes. On one hand, there’s Musashi, who is young, talented, original, and able to produce drawings at an incredible speed, but there’s also the animation director who is constantly telling Musashi that the motion in his drawings is “dead”, and that, as the title of the work reminds us, film is alive. In sticking to this philosophy, the director ends up being ruined because he always goes over budget and can’t meet deadlines. I guess I won’t tell you how this problem is solved in the manga, only that it involves dream sequences and being in love with a horse from your home town.

Overall, I’d say that this is a very competent Tezuka shonen manga, with some pretty interesting subject matter, if you’re into animation and Tezuka in general. I know I’m not really in a position to say this, considering that the only Tezuka I’ve read other than this are the one-shots that Vertical put out so it’d be like me talking about a “average Hitchcock” film after just watching Rope or something, but while it doesn’t really blow me away, it certainly kept me entertained and reading. Not to mention that it’s a pretty easy read, and that you can find it at Book-Off for like 100 yen. Maybe next I can buy some Tezuka that people actually talk about…