Spring turns to Summer and so it might be time for another Season Review! This time around, Chris sits down with reviewers Bryan Morton and Greg Smith to look over the highlights—and the lowlights—of the Spring 2013 season.
A Season of Riches
GBS: You know, I think this was one of the best seasons of anime I’ve seen in some time. I can’t remember another season where I was trying my best to keep current with 15 or more shows. It’s not that they were all instant classics, but there was a critical mass of good shows that I wanted to see every week. It may also be that the season seemed more heavily weighted towards comedies, which I’ve increasingly found amusing, though sometimes humor does not always cross the Pacific so well.
BM: I’d have to agree with that. There were many shows that exceeded my expectations of them, so by a long way, that it was a huge surprise to me – certainly not the typical run-of-the-mill season. And for the humour department in particular, a number of small changes from the usual anime formula for such shows made them stand out all the more.
CB: I’m actually going to go the other route and say that it’s one of the weaker seasons, and definitely a weak spring season. Spring 2012 still holds the highlight for me for amazing material but this season just didn’t do it for me outside of a few short form shows that I watched and some ongoing series.
Season Trend: Unusual Protagonists
My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU
GBS: Not that anime is suddenly awash in innovation or true originality, but this past season was in some ways notable for having unusual centers of attention leading us through their lives. Perhaps the least likely male lead in some ways was Hachiman Hikigaya of the oddly renamed in English My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU (the show, Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Come wa Machigatteiru already had an English secondary title, My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong As I Expected, which while clunky, is somehow more expressive). The isolated loner in the lead position is not new, but it is somewhat unusual to have such a cynical and jaded loner as the lead without having him also be completely cut off from normal high school life. It’s more common for his type to be a hikikomori, to emphasize his complete severing of social bonds. Hachiman, however, attends school regularly and even provides wickedly funny commentary about the social relations and dynamics of his peers. The theme of social isolation was further heightened by one of the two female leads he was paired with, Yukino Yukinoshita, who while beautiful, intelligent and extremely capable, was just as isolated and alone, though for different reasons. The third lead, Yui Yuigahama, was a much more traditional type, being a bubbly outgoing girl. The trio made for an odd group.
Another show that presented us with a somewhat unconventional male lead was Henneko (The Hentai Prince and the Stony Cat). Youto Yokodera is an admitted pervert, and while he’s shown being punched and kicked as we always see such characters treated in many shows, he is also presented as being a fairly nice guy. It’s somewhat rare to present a character of this general stereotype in such a sympathetic way. And then there was the all-powerful demon king who became a fast food restaurant employee (The Devil is a Part-Timer!) and the angst-ridden teen who reads too much 19th-Century poetry (The Flowers of Evil) to provide us with more examples of somewhat more unusual leads. On the female side, leads were in general more generic, with the notable exceptions of Yukinoshita noted above and also the wisecracking, flighty teen girl wearing fins that was the mermaid Muromi (Namiuchigawa no Muromi-san “Muromi on the Shore”).
BM: Teen SNAFU didn’t click with me, I’ll have to admit – after the opening two episodes I didn’t have any connection with the characters and passed on the rest of it. But Hentai Prince and Maou-sama are two examples of the point I was trying to make about comedy this season. As you’ve pointed out, Hentai Prince differs from most recent service-oriented anime by both making the male lead a genuinely nice guy, and by making the fanservice an added extra to the story rather than the main point of it. By comparison, as much as I enjoyed Highschool DxD, I suspect the ratio of people watching it for Rias’ tits was way above those watching it for plot. As for Maou-sama, it was the great unexpected of the season, taking the basic sitcom approach to a humans-versus-demons tale and making it almost unique as a result.
As for Flowers of Evil, that merits its own section below. And I don’t entirely agree with Greg’s assessment of it.
CB: Teen SNAFU definitely worked for me, though that was more in the first few episodes than as it progressed, simply because by that point, Hachiman had softened a bit and his background and style played less and less of a role. And the show just started to feel more unfocused to me with what it wanted to do. The more that it dealt with the other two girls, the more that Hachiman’s role felt like it was more out of place and less his story. The male lead that made me grin a lot this season was that of Takkun in Muromi-san, since he wasn’t shoe-horned into every episode and was kind of just dispassionate about her in general, hoping more often than not that she’d not show up. The balance between the two worked very well for the comedy side. On the drama side, I really liked Hinohara in Arata – The Legend, since it gave us a seriously bullied young man who really had to struggle in the new world with what he dealt with. And it brought his antagonist over later on and it was good to see that he had a natural reaction of cowering before him, even after acquiring some of the skills that he did.
Comedy Assault
The Devil Is A Part-Timer
GBS: This past season practically blitzed us with comedies, but that was a good thing. They were not all laugh-every-minute fun fests that made it hard for us to breathe, but for those seeking humor of various sorts, we got a very good assortment. Personally, the best of the lot was The Devil is a Part-Timer! When I first read the premise, I was left wondering how it would actually pan out, but the execution was near-flawless. What helped greatly was that they played things absurdly straight. That’s sounds odd, but it’s the best way to describe it. The situations themselves were utterly absurd (a demon king becomes a measly shift worker at “MgRonald’s” and a beautiful half-human, half-angel heroine becomes a call center customer service worker in modern Japan, after both had traveled from another dimension/whatever where they were engaged in a brutal war), but the characters treated their roles seriously, in fact too seriously to be taken…seriously by the audience. A few action segments were mixed in, but the show never abandoned its main focus of comedy.
On the more slapstick and hectic side were shows such as Muromi-san and Haiyore! Nyarko-san W, and, at times, Henneko. Perhaps one could also include the short form charmer Aiura in this broad category. While they all varied in terms of character and setting, what these shows shared was the use of quick visual and verbal jokes. Not all of them hit their targets, but on balance they succeeded more than they failed, though of them, Henneko was not really a “pure” comedy, as it often ended episodes on a downer note and injected a more maudlin sentiment at times.
On a slightly different plane was My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, which relied more on the outsider observations of its aloof leads Hikigaya and Yukinoshita, whose observations about high school life and its various events were both insightful and funny at the same time. These were the comedies (there were others, but I didn’t find any of them amusing) that caught my attention this past season.
BM: I loved the first season of Nyaruko-san – it was a little uneven, but when it was good it was very, very good – but this season felt like it ran with all the bad aspects of the first instead of the good. It was one of the shows I was reviewing for FP, so I watched it through to the end, but it was a real chore to get through. Hopefully they won’t be going back to that particular well without a rethink. The sort of humour it plays with is really subjective, though, and just the sort of thing that some will love and some will hate, so your mileage may vary with it. Muromi-san was one of the unexpected highlights of the season for me, though, with its rapid pacing and slapstick being consistently funny, largely down to the OTT personalities of the mermaids and creatures of myth and legend that Takkun managed to surround himself with. The only thing I’d ‘complain’ about (and it isn’t really one) is that the saving-the-world plot that the OP sequence was built around never actually happened. Hopefully in the second season, which must be a given, right..?
CB: Muromi-san was a real winner for me overall, pretty much the best one hands down on a consistent basis, which was helped by its run time. Yuyushiki had its moments, but it devolved into too much of the show about nothing mentality that too many do. Sparrow’s Hotel had some great moments sprinkled throughout a mediocre at best run, as the show just didn’t know how to handle the format right and the animation style definitely didn’t help with the gags. And I suppose Hayate the Combat Butler – Cuties! is supposed to be a comedy, but it didn’t click for me for the majority of it, once again.
You Want Action? We Got Action
Attack On Titan
BM: We probably can’t mention action this season without mentioning Attack on Titan. For set-piece epic battle, this is definitely the one to watch, and it seems to be trampling all before it in terms of building a following. There are downsides, though, in that it spends a little too long in exposition scenes, while it’s too easy to pick holes in if you sit and think about it for more than a few minutes. There’s a visceral appeal to seeing bad things being happen to people, though, and there’s certainly a lot of that here. On balance, I like it, but can’t quite see why it’s as popular as it is. I would say, though, that if you only buy one anime OST this year, make it Titan’s. It truly is epic.
GBS: In addition to the headliners, there were other great action shows this season. While the first season of A Certain Scientific Railgun was evenly split between the everyday life comedy of title character Mikoto Misaka and her friends and the complex story of Kiyama, Kihara, and the Child Errors, the follow-up season A Certain Scientific Railgun S has been much more action oriented with the still-in-progress Sisters Arc. For those interested in seeing Railgun vs. other espers battles, this is definitely not a show to miss. For those wanting a balance of mystery and mecha action, there was Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. Starting off with a spectacular space battle, the scene shifted to a planet reminiscent of Waterworld, but with 90% less stupidity. Mecha pilot Ledo had to discover how he got there, while also making friends with some of the inhabitants (who live on ships) and battling others, in defense of his friends. It was an interesting ride, with the expected twist near the end from the pen of Gen Urobuchi.
BM: I found my interest in Gargantia was pretty much in direct proportion to how much screentime Amy and Melty were getting, which probably explains where my priorities were. I enjoyed it, but I suspect it’s not going to stick in the memory for too long. There was plenty of good action, though – Railgun S as mentioned, so I’ll not recap that, but for mecha fans (like me) Majestic Prince and Valvrave the Liberator are welcome entries in the genre – Majestic Prince takes the more traditional route with its storyline, with the Fail Five (the show’s lead pilots) being great fun to watch and bringing a good sense of humour to the more serious overarching plot; while Valvrave throws everything at the wall to see what sticks – which so far has been working surprisingly well for it, one or two iffy scenes notwithstanding. Both continue into the summer season, and I’m happily sticking with them.
CB: I didn’t get too much action this season, beyond the ongoing series. Of those, both One Piece and Hunter x Hunter served out material pretty well. But of the new shows, I ended up with Majestic Prince, which does some fantastic action sequences with mecha and absolutely uninteresting characters and a dull as dishwater storyline, while Arata – The Legend played to the usual tropes with a few flares of decent animation and execution. The other show that had some action was Devil Survivor 2, which started off strong and had a weak middle act. But it ended in a big way and had the advantage of having the whole season taking place over the course of a week, allowing for a large disaster to happen and for it all to be crammed in quickly. It was a big, dark and murky work, one that I think really got overlooked this time around. The action side just wasn’t a big part of the season for me.
The Season’s Most Disturbing Entertainment: The Flowers of Evil
Flowers Of Evil
GBS: This show deserves its own section. Based upon the manga The Flowers of Evil (Aku no Hana), the anime adaptation caused its own controversy by using a very striking visual format: strong photorealism achieved through using rotoscoped live-action actors and real world settings, but combining that with visual effects (such as having faced be blurred, obscured, or lacking detail unless they were close to the camera) which gave the show a slightly surreal tint to it. The visual choices caused something of an uproar among many who refused to watch such an “ugly” anime. Those who passed missed out on one of the most psychologically complex and thought provoking shows of the season. The deeply flawed characters (Kasuga, Nakamura, and Saeki) and their intense interactions mixed with the surreal visual presentation to present a vile and repellent production–intentionally, in my opinion, so that’s not a criticism, this is praise. We are not meant to like these characters once we get to know them better, though that does not mean that we, the audience, are not capable of sympathizing with them and their situations. In fact, the characters are quite sympathetic, even as we recoil from the poor choices they make. It was the most compelling drama I have seen in some time from anime.
BM: Ah, Flowers of Evil. I wanted to love it, I really did. But unlike many, it wasn’t the rotoscoping that put me off – instead, it was the genuine real-world nastiness of it. Ramp characters being cruel to each other up to levels that you know are fiction, and I’m all for it – that visceral appeal of bad things happening to people comes into play again here, and OTT levels of meanness and nastiness can be surprisingly fun to watch. But pitch it at a level that’s within the believable, that the audience may have experienced themselves (I was lucky enough to get through high school without suffering bullying, but I know enough people who weren’t so fortunate), and it becomes… uncomfortable to watch, at best. In the five episodes of Flowers of Evil that I watched, Nakamura was pitched at just the level where I found it really difficult to deal with her, and that eventually led to me dropping the series. That may possibly be an unfair reason for dropping the show, but I have to call it as I saw it.
As for the rotoscoping, though… it fitted the realistic tone of the series perfectly, and I was all for it. It certainly made a change from the usual visual aesthetic that shows have these days.
GBS: I can understand that reaction entirely. I sat through most of the show cringing, wishing the most unpleasant scenes to pass by quickly. But I also couldn’t help watching it, just as people cannot look away from a bad accident or other disaster. It was as you said: the nastiness was not at some fictional or unbelievable level, it was all too real and all too possible, which made it unnerving. It’s definitely not for everyone.
Passing Peak “Cute Girls Doing Nothing”
Yuyushiki
BM: It’s been a long time since K-On! kicked off the girls-doing-nothing thing, but at least for me the appeal of the genre has finally gone – this season’s most popular entry in the genre was YUYUSHIKI, with the USP of its lead girls playing on Google and talking about what they discovered via it, but continuing a recent trend with me it just didn’t click – been there, seen that too many times, and it failed the ‘put me to sleep’ test several times before I finally gave up. If there’s a future for this type of show, it’s in the short-form, which this season also gave up a great example of in the form of Aiura – perhaps only 90 seconds of actual content per episode, but it proved to be more than enough to bring a smile to my face every time. And at that length, there’s pretty much zero chance of it getting boring. More of that, please – but I think for full-length shows, this type of series has had its day.
GBS: I agree entirely, though the appeal for me started wearing thin with the earlier Tamako Market, which was developed by the creative team behind K-On! For me, Yuyushiki lasted only a single episode before I abandoned it. I think the genre can still amuse on occasion, but again, you’re right that it has to follow what Aiura did this season. Set up the characters quickly. Tell a quick joke. End credits. While I’m not convinced that the full-length version of this kind of show is entirely dead, they cannot just put together a cookie-cutter cast of stereotypes, give them cute, eye-catching designs, and then expect the intended audience to lap it up when they basically throw them at you without a thought about why we should care. That was the problem with Tamako Market. That was the problem with Yuyushiki. Contrast the earlier Yuruyuri, where they managed to establish the characters in such a way that you could come to care at least a little about them and their antics. The lesson is that this genre of show does not succeed merely through cute character designs. You need to make characters that interest the viewer enough that the viewer will actually give a damn whether they do something cute or not.
CB: Aiura really was a saving grace of the season for me. I enjoyed parts of Yuyushiki, but like previous entries such as Yuruyuri and others, it’s really wearing thin and I’m finding far less patience for it these days. Which is unfortunate since there may be some good shows that get overlooked in the future.
Worst of the Rest
Zettai Boei Leviatan
BM: While this season produced some really good shows, it also produced some terrible ones – my list of dropped shows was longer than it’s been for a while (although that’s probably also down to me just getting fussier). Lowlights for me would be DATE A LIVE, where the live-life-as-a-dating-sim idea was certainly curious enough, but where the level of stupidity in the way they went about it was just too much; Photo Kano, which took the basic idea of Amagami SS (a decent if unspectacular show) and imbued it with much creepiness, in the process putting me off ever watching it; and Samurai Bride, which managed to bypass my guilty love for the first season by being a pale imitation of its former self. Special mention also for Red Data Girl, the season’s entry from PA Works – usually a mark of a certain level of quality and attention, but while RDG certainly looked the part, it was simply dull & uninteresting.
GBS: For me, again, the worst show of the season was the Hayate the Combat Butler-flavored (can one call it a sequel without feeling that one is insulting the two regular television series?) product HTCB! Cuties. Instead of providing a proper continuation to Season 2, we have another showcase of just about everything that is least interesting about the franchise, which now must include the overload of cute girl characters. Inane humor (lame is a standard the show cannot reach, it’s too high) and boring characters who never develop is not how you engage viewers, except for a zombie audience. The word “stereotype” must be insulted by having to be invoked so often when analyzing the last two animated products of this franchise. I think I’ve made my position clear.
I agree with you entirely about Photo Kano. It was an incredible shame in that the show featured some of the best vocal talent currently active in Japan. It featured them, unfortunately, in a show that was just one step away from being hentai, though that comes as little surprise considering the source material (an erogame). I watched most of it because I wanted to hear some voice talents who were not in anything else this season, but at times I was certainly put off by the photo-voyeurism it descended into. I’m not about to watch it ever again. If you wanted fanservice guilty pleasure, then Samurai Bride was certainly the better choice. I agree, it’s largely a re-run of the first series, same basic formula with little change, but at least it continued to be fairly cheerful and not offensive in the ways Photo Kano was.
Date A Live was pretty stupid in the end. While the initial leading pair was able to spark some interest, once they starting bringing in more and more girls who fit more and more stereotypes (I almost feel like this was assembled by a committee, and the leader was there with a clipboard checking off boxes “Tsundere, check. Yandere, check. Loli, check. Incestuous Sibling [But not really! Ha Ha!], check”), it got old very fast. More surprising was Red Data Girl. It managed to set up an aura of mystery fairly well in its early episodes, but then it fell into a rut and got very boring. This was not the only series that showed some promise at the opening, only to fail to live up to that promise. The other one that stands out in that vein is The Severing Crime Edge. After an intriguing start, it then floundered all over the place, not able to make up its mind whether it was a camp horror show verging on the unreal, or a serious horror thriller. It never firmly established its tone, and therefore made it difficult at times to understand just what reaction one was supposed to have to it. Be shocked or laugh? That kind of confusion really put me off by the end.
CB: Similar thoughts and approach here, with shows like Hayate the Combat Butler – Cuties! really driving me nuts overall, though it worked better than the previous season which was just awful on so many levels. I caught a few episodes of DD Hokuto no Ken and just couldn’t connect with it. The show that really killed me this season, and killed me that I stayed with it for the whole season, was Zettai Boei Leviatan. It was just so painful, slow and predictable that it became a series I dreaded but couldn’t look away from, with awful animation and an execution that makes fanfic look amazing.
Final Thoughts: State of Anime
BM: One of the things we often hear is that anime isn’t what it once was, there there’s a dearth of good shows. I don’t think that’s the case, and that it’s more a problem of nostalgia and looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses – and there were enough good shows this season to prove that point, if you were willing to look at them. Some fun (Muromi-san), some touching (Henneko), some action-packed (Attack on Titan), some outright crazy (Valvrave), there was a better range of shows this season that I can remember seeing in a while, and that, combined with the quality of some of those shows, made this a season to remember for me.
GBS: Indeed, those who say that there’s nothing good anymore don’t seem to be looking very hard or without a mind already made up to dislike everything new as opposed to “the good old days,” which never were as good as people remember. This past season really delivered in terms of quantity and breadth of offerings. Perhaps not every single niche was catered to (I can’t think of a good shoujo show from this past season, but then that genre was well served a couple seasons back), but there was a truly broad range of offerings at a fairly high level of quality across the board. A memorable season without doubt.