Mahou Meido Meganekko

Steven made a comparison between Shingu and Evangelion today. On the face of it, that’s rather absurd; Evangelion is considered an iconic series, often even by those who hate it–because it is iconic. Shingu is relatively unknown. In fact, had Steven not written about it, I wouldn’t have a clue it existed, unless I was bored enough to browse through all the series starting with the letter S over at ANN. (It might take a while…) Yet neither he nor I dispute that Shingu is the better series. It was made, as Steven points out, by an accomplished director, who was at the top of his game. Evangelion was made by a relatively inexperienced director, who didn’t yet have the professional tools in his kit to make such a grand, reaching story.

There was another key point to how Shingu turned out, although it isn’t so much in comparison to Evangelion, nor is it a straight comparison of the two directors. Rather, it is a comparison to all the other dreck out there this year. Sato Tatsuo had the artistic freedom to make the show he wanted to make in Shingu.. He had a specific vision of the story he wanted to tell, and how he wanted to tell it, and that’s exactly what he did.

There was obviously never a conversation with the Marketing department, that went anything like the following:

“Look Sato-san, we’ve been running the numbers and looking at the competition for the upcoming season out there right now, and we’ve got some serious concerns about this show. We think it’s going to need, you know, a little sprucing up. Nothing major! We don’t want to interfere with your creativity after all…just make a few, ah, tweaks. Minor stuff, really.”

“Like for instance, we’re thinking about the character design — these girls, the breasts don’t work. They’re just too small. Complete non-starter for the 15-22 male demographic. If you were to enlarge them just a little, not much, say, to about watermelon-sized, it would raise the appeal of the show. Five or six points, minimum.”

We’re also concerned that there’s no loli anywhere in this show. That’s a whole fan segment that we’re overlooking right there, so we were thinking, whatshisname, that really fast kid, you know, make him a girl instead, that looks about 8-10. Oh, don’t worry that it’s junior high and the other girls are all, ah, somewhat more developed. We thought of a perfectly logical explanation — you see, she’s a loli and really, really fast because she’s actually an android under that skintight outfit–see? What? Not a problem. If you don’t like the painted-on jumpsuit look, we could go for something more gothic-looking. Oooh!. And maybe she fights with cute little grenades, painted pink!

Something else we want you to think about. Just consider it, for now. Muryou and Haichi… shounen-ai! It’s really hot this season! What? Right, Haijime, yes, that’s what I meant.”

“So anyway, moving on to these mecha designs… yes, yes, we know they’re not *really* mechas, but have you considered high heels and more, ah, female proportions for the robots….”

Nope, that conversation never happened. Or if it did, Sato politely listened, told them he’d think about it, and then hired ninja to assassinate the entire marketing department, their wives, and their descendants down to the nth generation.

Well, that’s how I’d write it anyway. Goth loli catgirl ninja, of course. With glasses. Disguised as meido.

Robert kicks ass. Have I ever mentioned that? The massive order* that I put in back in May and wasn’t expecting it to ship until July 3rd (supposed release date of MoHS DVD 2) has just been sent today. Should be here for my weekend viewing pleasure. Poor Dr.Heinous, I can’t get up to his place for a while. Although, actually, only one of these is new to me or him.

Nao Nagasawa — XOXOXO (Kiss Kiss Kiss) Divergence EVE Theme
Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Vol #2 DVD Limited Edition
Vandread Stage 1 & 2 Complete Collection DVD Bundle Pack (Contains All 8 DVD’s!)
Ikki Tousen (Battle Vixens) Complete Collection DVD Boxed Set (Thin-Pak)

I hope the DE theme includes the Misaki Chronicles ED. That is a beautiful piece of music, which panders to my weak point: certain instruments (in this case a piano) doing wistful music in a minor key. Melancholy was a given. Vandread is to replace the execrable bootleg I bought by mistake last year, and Ikki Tousen is to fulfill my craving for brainless animé with lots of fanservice. Of course, I’ve already filled that taste for a while with He Is My Master (C- - in the new system, I think), so it will sit on the shelf for a while until I get around to it.

Oh, and I rewrote the previous article and stuck it on it’s page. I’ve begun writing the brief reviews to go with actual ratings, but I’m not happy with how it’s looking. Don’t expect it too soon.

*valid for certain values of massive. Look, it’s $200 and about 12-14 disks. That’s massive enough.

UPDATE: In over 45 years, I’ve written a few things that I wasn’t happy with later. This article may beat them all. It’s poorly organized, wordy, and I’m really not liking it much now that I’ve read it with fresher eyes. I’m currently reworking it, and the permanent version that will be placed here should be far superior. I ought to engage in a cover-up and remove this one, but I think I’ll let it stay as an object lesson to me that when I don’t feel the muse speaking, don’t force the bitch. Or something like that.

I’ve been mulling around trying to formalize my system of reviews for some time. It’s been difficult, because I’m not an organized person to start with, and I tend to write about a series as I’m watching it, or just after I finished it. I’ve been prone to tossing off statements like “I’ll give it a C,” or “This is at least a B+.” Scoring right after I see the series is difficult, because it’s so subjective — I’m grading on how I feel about the series.

Recent discussion of Shingu and Misaki Chronicles led me to decide that the minimum qualification for a B was that I’d re-watch at least my favorite parts of the show immediately. Doing that doesn’t mean it is a B, but if my reaction to the show upon finishing it is to shelve it and not even go back to look at the “good parts,” then obviously the show didn’t have many.

Once I decided that much, the rest of the ratings started falling into place over the last few days. Pretty soon, I had a system, and here it is.

Ubu\'s Animé Scoring System

“+” or “-” may be assigned if I feel the base grade didn’t really fit the show fairly.

I’ve decided to take that subjective “feel” and run with it. The entertainer’s core job is to entertain me: I pay my money (assuming I purchased instead of downloaded a fansub) and I expect to be entertained in return. (Exactly what I mean by entertainer could be the subject of of a long-winded digression, but let’s not go there. Just substitute “studio”, “director”, or “writer” if it fits better.) It can be base entertainment (any harem or fanservice show), it can be thoughtful entertainment (Simoun, Lain), emotional entertainment (Simoun agan, Misaki, Angelic Layer), intrigue (Noir), fun and adventure (Outlaw Star) … well you get the idea. Whatever the hook, it’s got to capture my attention and make me feel that the time I spent in the entertainer’s world was not wasted. This table summarizes how well I feel the entertainers did their job.

Since it is subjective, the final score is not the average of the scores for individual categories, and might not even be closely related to them. The process of breaking down the series and scoring individual parts only influences the final overall score I give the show. It does not determine it directly. The overall grade is a highly subjective rating of how the series impacted me emotionally. Was I entertained? Did it rivet my attention, and draw me into the entertainer’s world? Was it something I want to watch again? Or was it total crap that I wish I’d never bought? These are the questions I ask myself for the overall rating, and that’s what I give the overall score on. A series that receives objective category scores that average much lower than the subjective overall score may be a case of the direction, voice acting, and writing coming together to create something that really is “greater than the sum of its parts.” Or maybe I was just easily entertained that week, who knows?

As I note, it’s highly subjective, but it’s also subject to change, which happens through the process of breaking the show down and analyzing it. A lot of things just don’t survive the trip to the refrigerator. When I have just finished a show, I tend to be very positive about it, because I enjoyed it — while I was watching it. Later, the emotional “afterglow” fades, and the rational, analytic side kicks in. Sometimes, negative aspects of the show that I overlooked (sometimes deliberately) may come back to bug me. I start dissecting the series, breaking down the individual categories, noting which ones did a good job and which ones were bad. This is the point where I start engaging the left-brain, and it’s a bad sign if this phase starts before the series has ended; it means that I’m not caught up in the world the storyteller is trying to create — in other words, I’m not being entertained — I’m just being diverted. (Shows like this might get a C from me.)

This means that the emotional side is stronger at that point, and a lot of my early reviews got messed up by my writing them just as I finished the series. Of course the problem is, if I wait, I’m likely to lose interest in writing about it at all. That’s one reason why less than half of the series I’ve watched have been reviewed.

When I do review them, the format has varied a lot, but I generally look at the following things:

Art and Animation
Voice Acting/Dubbing
Plotting and Logic
Storytelling and Pacing
Characterization
Fanservice
Music
DVD/Packaging & Extras (or Fansub Quality)

Lately, I’ve not explicitly broken these categories out like I did when I first started writing about animé, although I’ve often mentioned what I thought of those things. I hope to get back to that, and eventually review (or re-review) all the series I have on the summary page, with a bit more in the way of analysis. The problem is, going back and looking at the series now, I know that the objective view is going to contaminate the subjective scoring. For instance, right after watching Yumeria, I’d probably have given it a C+ or a B. Looking back a year later, I just can’t. Part of it is that I’m a bit more knowledgeable now, and I know the animation was sub-par. A lot of it is the fact that the most memorable character, the one that stuck in my head, is a pedophile I didn’t like. That definitely affects the show negatively for me, and impacts the scoring, whether I want it to or not. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this overall, since what will happen is that series I go back and re-score will tend to have lower grades than series I score going forward. To prevent “grade inflation,” I might have to write up a review right away, let it sit a week or two, and then see what I think.

Here’s some examples of series, and the overall grades I give them (as of now). Note that this doesn’t include any + or -. This is just a general example.

Scoring Samples

I’ve created a new page that will be the permanent home of the system outlined above, as well as a summary of the score I give each series, although right now, it’s just a placeholder with no information.

Update: And I’ll re-write the above when I do. I posted it, didn’t like it, edited, it, and still don’t like it. But it’s late and I need to go to bed.

No matter how powerful you and your enemy are, you can always decide the issue by hitting each other over the head.

Well, over at Steven’s place, I remarked, “And that dangling question they left open for the sequel? I don’t think so. I think I know the answer, and I’m going to go back through the series for the next couple of days to see if I’m right. Of course, the last time I came up with a bit of wild speculation, I was way off base. And the time before that too. And probably the time before that…”

One of the really nice things about Shingu’s thinpak is that they didn’t use it as an excuse to strip all the extras out. The discs had a number of the usual extras like production sketches and character bios. They weren’t bad about including heavy spoilers in them (though there were some minor ones.) The real prize was the inclusion of a 40+ page booklet with a lot of extras explaining some of the puns and jokes in the show, including Nautya’s most horribly embarrassing moment, and a couple of jokes at the end about giving someone cushions (or taking them away). Reading them in the booklet saved me the effort of asking about them here — it almost feels like cheating.

However, it also contains a lengthy interview with the director of the series in which he also addresses the “dangling question” at the end of the show. It is a HUGE spoiler, so I’m hiding it both below the fold AND behind the spoiler tag. If you haven’t seen the series, do not go there. For one thing, you won’t understand it if you haven’t seen it. For another, if you plan to see it, reading this first will mess up your expectations, as well as how the ending plays out for you.

(more…)

Another quick post, because I’ve got too much going on today. Managed to get through the third DVD. I’ve been expecting one of the major revelations since the first DVD, but not the full extent of it. I’m cutting the show some slack on the whole “I’ve got a seeeeeecret” angle now because it’s beginning to look like nobody really knows what the hell is going on. There’s a lot of maneuvering going on behind the scenes and we’re just seeing the surface. People who thought they were in a privileged position are having to scramble; conspiracies are becoming obvious, yet remain hidden. I think the count of four conspiracies might be low. (The last time I saw anything this complex and mysterious, I was bitterly disappointed. Yes, I’m still bitching about Simoun.)

And throughout it all, the characters are the real treasure. They do change and grow, yet they remain themselves without being caricatures, and without overly dramatic battle scenes being when it happens. I’ve always thought that the changes a character undergoes shouldn’t happen in those melodramatic moments during action sequences, when characters are shouting “ganbatte!” In reality, they happen afterwards, when the person processes what happened and internalizes it. Perhaps they seek or are given assistance, through talking it out with someone senior. Or perhaps they work through it themselves. That’s the moment of actual change — until then, whatever happened was just a fluke. Shingu understands this subtle difference, and we see both Harumi and Nayuta working through such moments.

Steven said:

There are so many things that are just right in this series, and by far the most important is that the characters are so vivid and well conceived. Sometimes a series will have one or two memorable characters. This one has a lot more than that.

Spot on. I can’t think of anyone that hasn’t turned out to be really memorable in some way so far. the only characters who fade into the background are meant to, and even then this show never treats them as nobodies. They’re characterized like they should be, whether it’s the crew of a spaceship doing the “Hwot” dance (a tiny piece in the background that will slip by if you’re not alert), or a couple of random kids on the beach.

Up through DVD 2, the annoyance factor over the secrets was really aggravating me, and I wasn’t willing to give the series more than a B or maybe B+. Halfway through this DVD, I was thinking “you know, at this pace, it’s definitely an A-, if it keeps it up.” I’m now beginning to think it’s going to take an A or A+. I hope I don’t have to start doing like Taniguchi in Melancholy and making up ratings like “Triple A-plus!”

It’s very late so this is going to be a few quick notes.

Worst. OP. Ever. ED, likewise. Really annoying me is that for some reason, I can’t skip the ED. “Next” option is unavailable. I have to exit to the root menu, pick Episode Select, and go to the next one manually.

Slow buildup. By end of 2nd episode, I was wondering “what’s the big deal?” By the end of the 4th — the council meeting to decide the athletic teams — I was cracking up at the humor. By the end of the 5th, I love the characters.

Hajime is a bit too chirpy and optimistic at times, but it works. His fourth wall breaks invariably crack me up. “Just for the record, my stomach is fine!”

I like Nayuta. I really like Nayuta being seen through by Hajime.

I REALLY like the way the “romantic” subplot is developing at this point and the kids at the school are acting. The gossiping and teasing is so on the mark!

The backstory is being rolled out VERY slowly. I’m a bit frustrated by that; I generally don’t react well to the writers going “I’ve got a seeeeeeeeecret!” Well, I do and I don’t. I like shows that keep me guessing, as I noted before. But the last time I got into something like that, I was sadly disappointed (Simoun, *cough, cough*). It’s enough to raise my hackles a bit here, and I’m not sure if I’m being fair to Shingu.

And now I’m sacking out. Tomorrow I’ll be busy, so poor Steven’s just going to have to be tortured.