Edited by The Davoo

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Can you tell the difference between these three currently-airing shows? [Pan de Peace, Anne-Happy, and Sansha Sanyou] I’m sure that some of you can, and that a lot of you can’t–and that’s perfectly understandable. Admittedly, they do all look pretty similar; and if you’re not interested in watching a show about characters who looks like this going to high school, then you probably don’t have much interest in learning anything about them.

That said, I find myself bothered by the pervasive notion among anime fans that all of the shows in this genre of cute high school girls doing cute things are exactly the same; or that there isn’t a very clear distinction in quality between the best and worst of the genre. It’s odd to me that so many viewers are willing to make the logical leap from not having any interest in a certain type of show, to feeling like they know what that type of show is about. I mean, if you’re not watching any of these shows, then what can you possibly say to someone who’s seen all of them? And sure, there is a contingent of viewers who will watch all of these shows for their common elements of cute girls and lighthearted fun, and maybe won’t bother defending them as anything greater or worse artistically–but for the sake of those of us who care about whether our cute girl shows actually mean something, or reach us on some kind of emotional level, I think it’s worth explaining what makes some of these shows so damn good for those people who can’t tell the difference.

So for starters, let’s take a look at Pan de Peace: a series of three-minute episodes starring four cute highschool girls who are weirdly fanatical about bread. If I could pick any show to represent the most stereotypical and cynical idea of what these cute highschool shows are all about, then this would likely be one of my go-tos. It is every bit as vapid, pandering, and pointless as critics of the genre would expect this kind of show to be; and if you require anything more to satisfy you than just seeing cute girls on screen, then you probably won’t be able to sit through it.

Of the four main characters, three of them have so little personality that you have to be kind of genre savvy to even figure out what they’re supposed to be like. The main girl is the energetic one, the glasses girl is the kind of reserved voice of reason, and the girl with the big boobs is the one who puts on the front of being a proper lady, while having a personality full of eccentricities. These personality types would already be pretty generic, but I don’t even think that I’d be able to call them out so easily if I didn’t know that those are the kinds of characters who tend to appear in shows like this. The actual dialog and scenarios are so basic and devoid of personality, that if the characters didn’t have different voices and appearances, then I’d probably get their lines mixed up half of the time.

The loli girl who shows up in episode two has a more distinct personality, but is equally generic. Like every loli in this type of show, she’s upset about her height and her breast size–and in this case she also happens to view the world around her in terms of video games. These types of gamer characters and the general chuunibyou ones have started popping up pretty much everywhere in the last five years–and at this point they’ve gotten to be miles past overdone.

I’m not really sure what, if anything, I’m meant to connect with in this show–aside from having a very broad and general appreciation for cute girls and bread. The bread theme is barely explored at all to begin with anyways, and it’s not as though the characters have any kind of bread-based goals–in fact, none of the girls have any apparent goals at all. It’s really more like the show just happens to be focused on the times that bread comes up within the girls’ day-to-day lives.

Meanwhile, most of the dialog feels as though it exists in service of the audience, rather than having come naturally from the characters. In episode one, the main girl sees two other girls hugging and immediately asks if they’re in “that” kind of relationship. Aside from this being the kind of question which you’d only ask immediately of two classmates that you don’t know if you happened to be the main character of a cute girls comedy; it only serves to put that question into the viewer’s mind so that they can start shipping the characters themselves. We then get consecutive lines hinting at some level of each character being into other girls–but without ever actually crossing over into any of them being clearly gay; because in this kind of show, lesbianity is constantly implied for the sake of the viewer’s imagination, but is never actually explored, for the sake of keeping things breezy and unromantic–and leaving the possibility of them actually being straight open for the sake of the viewer’s imagination.

If nothing else, the main character does seem intended to play the role of an audience surrogate: half of her dialog in the first two episodes consists of repeatedly exclaiming how cute the other girls are–particularly the loli in episode two, whom we’re told is cute by the other characters about ten times before we have the chance to decide that for ourselves. The rest of her dialog is all about how much she loves bread–which I’m sure is relatable for someone.

Pan de Peace is difficult to get too offended about when its episodes are only three minutes long, and when it so clearly isn’t trying to appeal to anyone outside of whatever audience is into horrifyingly cynical cute girl yuri-bait comedies–but it’s important to clarify that the runtime isn’t any kind of excuse. Yama no Susume was exactly the same kind of show as this, at exactly the same length–and, while I don’t think that that show was necessarily amazing, it had a much more in-depth take on its subject matter; characters with actual personalities and goals; and a hell of a lot more in the way of production detail. Pan de Peace feels like the kind of show that last-season’s Oshiete Galko-chan was taking the piss out of–and it reminds me of why that show was so refreshing, while this one is a huge waste of time.

Up next, let’s have a look at a regular-length series called Anne-Happy. Much like Pan de Peace, the primary thrust of this show is in observing cute highschool girls in lighthearted scenarios–but in this case, there’s a lot more going on with the setup than simply tossing cute girls and bread into a show together. The main conceit of Anne-Happy is that all of its characters are terminally misfortunate–and that they’ve all been gathered into a special class for misfortune-dogged students with the goal of teaching them to be happy… or something, it’s pretty vague.

The series kind of goes all-out with this premise, using it to craft a bunch of wacky scenarios in which the students are tested on their misfortune–and in which each of their particular brands of misfortune are made to interact with the scenario. I won’t say that the series usually does anything particularly clever with its setup, but there’s definitely a few sparks of creativity in there–and your mileage will vary on how much entertainment value you can get out of it.

The three primary characters in this show have nearly the exact same personalities as the ones which I described before–one is a ball of energy, one is the more reserved voice of reason, and the last is a more proper young lady who happens to have an eccentric personality–although this one’s eccentricity is much more unique, in that it mostly takes the form of her being extremely down on herself. In episode three, our cast is rounded out with a ridiculously prideful girl who’s in love with her best friend, and said best friend who’s personality is generally lackadaisical.

While it’s true that the personalities of these characters are not much less cliche than those from Pan de Peace, this show goes a hell of a lot farther in strengthening those personalities until each character feels totally distinct from one-another–performing in ways which naturally reflect their personalities, as opposed to speaking for the sake of the audience and blending into one-another.

Each of the girls in Anne-Happy also comes with some kind of gimmick–aka misfortune–which plays off of their character. The energetic girl is gifted with uniquely horrible luck, which contrasts with the way that she’s able to stay upbeat and enjoy herself in any of the terrible situations that she stumbles into. The proper lady is excessively brittle, suffering constant injuries and having to bandage herself up, which has caused her to regard herself as useless. The reserved girl is secretly in love with a mascot character used at construction sites, which caused her to be bullied and harassed in middle school, ergo leading to her determination to keep up a facade of normalcy.

None of these characters has much more going on with them outside of their basic personalities and gimmicks, but since the show actually takes the time to explain why they act the way that they do, and how these gimmicks have affected their everyday lives, the characters at least feel alive and complete, and like they might exist in a space outside of what is seen within the story. Their interactions with one-another have some level of verisimilitude. You might have some difficulty buying into the idea that anyone with these personalities could ever exist; but in the context of the universe in which they live, their interactions feel natural and sensical.

While there is a fair shake of contrived pandering sprinkled throughout the series, most of it is treated diegetically and played for laughs, as if those scenarios mean the same things to the characters as they do to the audience. Your mileage will vary on how much any of this mitigates the obnoxiousness of noticing how the story is clearly pandering to the audience; but at the very least, I don’t think anyone can deny that the series puts way more effort into justifying itself than Pan de Peace does. After all, in this show, they at least went all-in on making the one girl legitimately in love with her friend.

Where Anne-Happy falls short of being particularly good is simply in that there isn’t very much going on with it. Once you’ve been introduced to each character, you pretty much know everything that you’ll ever need to know about them–and from then on it’s just a matter of rehashing the same interactions between them in different wacky scenarios.

Funnily enough, the series which Anne-Happy most reminds me of is Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei–another show in which each member of the cast was defined by their one gimmick. But in the case of Zetsubou-sensei, the entire presentation was meant to be sarcastic. Zetsubou-sensei was intended to parody a certain style of harem show wherein each girl is given a specific charming character trait by having each of its girls be defined by their horrible personality disorders. Every character was deliberately made to look similar and to be difficult to respect, because the goal of the series was to be a satire of the kind of show that Anne-Happy ultimately ends up being. In spite of also characterizing its cast by way of negative gimmicks, Anne-Happy’s intent is clearly still for all of the girls to be cute and likable–whereas Zetsubou-sensei’s characters were only either of those things incidentally. None of this is to say that Anne-Happy couldn’t still have been a great series if it used its gimmicks in stronger and smarter ways, but I think that comparing it to Zetsubou-sensei makes the general lack of vision for the series a little bit more clear–and reminds us what a comedy show can be capable of doing with these kinds of gimmicks.

The last show that we’ll be talking about is Sansha Sanyou–and if you can’t tell what the three main girls’ basic personalities are just by looking at their hairstyles, then I’m afraid that you haven’t been paying enough attention. Comparing these characters to any of the ones whom I’ve talked about so far, though, would be massively selling them short, because Sansha Sanyou is gifted with the mythical quality which most of these garden-variety cute girls shows lack: its characters are multi-faceted.

If it seems like I’m getting ahead of myself, it’s only because the narrative of Sansha Sanyou is entirely character-driven. Rather than centering around some theme or gimmick, such as bread or misfortune, Sansha Sanyou simply follows the budding friendship of three high school girls, and bases its scenarios around their personalities, lifestyles, and struggles.

The main character, Yoko, had been, until recently, living in the lap of luxury as the daughter of a major business owner–but since her father’s corporation has gone bankrupt, she’s now bottomed out to living the life of a commoner and barely scraping by. Because of having grown up in such a posh environment, Yoko now struggles to understand the culture and mannerisms of her peers; and as such has come into difficulty with making new friends. Most of the comedy surrounding Yoko presents her as a fish out of water, trying her hardest to maintain friendships with the other girls without accidentally scaring them away because of her cultural handicap.

A lot of the jokes about Yoko trying to understand what it means to be a normal highschool girl are pretty funny–but what makes her character endearing, and what makes the series work, is that there’s a lot more to her personality than just being ignorant of her surroundings. Yoko is way overly eager, overexerting herself to try and impress her friends and desperately clinging to any approval which she receives for her actions. She’s impressively dedicated to doing whatever she can to get by, and to trying to make others happy–to the point where she takes up a job working for her former maid just because the maid suggests that she would be helpful. She’s also so afraid of the idea of being wasteful, thanks to her newfound appreciation for the value of money, that she often takes the sunk cost fallacy to its furthest extreme.

What interests me the most about Yoko, though, is how different she is from other characters of her archetype. This isn’t the first time that I’ve seen a rich girl attempt to understand the ways of her commoner friends–but it is the first time that said rich girl has not only been put into a much lower class than her peers, but has been a part of that class for long enough to have totally changed her lifestyle and mindset from how it was before. The real tragedy of Yoko’s character is that she isn’t a rich girl who has it all and is trying to make friends for her own amusement–she’s actually a kind of desperate poor person who needs to make friends in order to better understand her situation. There’s just a bit more gravity to her character than is usual for this type of girl, and I really appreciate that as a longtime viewer of these kinds of shows. For that matter, it’s also rare for a character who starts out shy and reserved to so quickly and completely open up to her friends, and to be so clear about her desire to have them. Usually these kinds of characters, like the ones from the other shows that I talked about, are too proud to admit their desire for friendship–but in Yoko’s case, making friends is her explicit goal from the very beginning.

Futaba Odagiri is broadly characterized as an energetic and active girl with a giant appetite, who spends much of her time eating enough bread to put the whole Pan de Peace cast to shame; but while being 2016’s second attempt at translating the perfection of Kirby into an anime girl is Futaba’s main gimmick, it is far from the defining feature of her character. While she does have some rather offbeat opinions regarding food, Futaba’s personality is very straightforward and expressive. She whines when she’s bored, she gets excited when she’s enjoying herself, and she will tell you exactly what she’s thinking if she thinks you’re doing something weird. She can a bit blunt and a little harsh, but also very compassionate when it comes to her friends. The fact that she’s not an idiot is also kind of playing against type, since the gluttonous balls of energy in shows like this are usually pretty dumb–but Futaba seems to be of normal intelligence, and possibly even a lot more self-aware than Yoko is.

Rounding out the main cast, Teru Hayama is described as having a dark personality underlying her helpful, smiling facade–which manifests itself as being somewhat manipulative and aggressive with anyone who tries to mess with her, or to make her do things that she doesn’t want to. In other words, she’s got a bit of a savage streak; but, once again, this is far from the only thing worth knowing about her. Not only is she a compassionate friend who participates in bringing Yoko out of her lonely shell (albeit with some teasing along the way), but her affection for cats runs deep enough that she practically transforms into a different person at the mere sight of them. She also has a close relationship with her somewhat bumbling older sister, with both of them looking out for one-another in each of their own little ways. In terms of breaking from type, Teru is just about as unique as her compatriots–and I’ve gotta say that it’s more than a little refreshing to get one of these characters without the giant breasts.

What’s great about having such well-rounded characters as these, is that there are so many more ways for them to interact, both with one-another and with the situations that they find themselves in. In fact, it’s precisely because each of the characters in Sansha Sanyou is so multidimensional that the series is able to be entertaining in spite of its total lack of any central narrative or gimmick. Whereas the characters in Pan de Peace are boring because they don’t have any personalities, and the characters in Anne-Happy become boring because their reactions to different situations are always exactly the same, the girls in Sansha Sanyou are constantly showing new sides of themselves and their dynamic–leading to curiosity on the part of the viewer about how they might react to new situations as the show goes along.

None of this is to say that Sansha Sanyou couldn’t have been strengthened by having a little bit more in the way of a main narrative arc, or in presenting a draw that’s more clear than just enjoying the company of this trio of friends. I do think that if the series has any major weakness, it’s that there isn’t any particular goal for the characters to be moving towards, nor any readily apparent dramatic stakes which might come up in the future. So far, each episode has mostly been focused on learning the basics of the characters, or introducing various side-characters who tend to be a lot more gimmicky than the main cast. While it can be fun to see how the main girls react to these more basic characters and scenarios, I have my doubts about whether the series will ever get to be much better than it currently is, in the way that a show like K-On was able to grow so much over the course of its run because of the strength of its central arc. Nevertheless, I think that Sansha Sanyou exemplifies some of the biggest strengths of its genre, in how it can present a group of multi-faceted characters in such a deeply understood way, that they can be entertaining to watch in even the most mundane scenarios of their everyday lives.

Hopefully this video has helped you to understand some of the ways that these shows about cute highschool girls are distinguishable from one-another–and why some of them can be so much more satisfying to watch than others. If you want to learn more about how one of these shows can be great by studying what I consider to be the high watermark of the genre, then I highly recommend reading or listening to my loving thesis on K-On–which is about an hour and a half long. If you enjoyed this video and want to see more like it, then consider donating to my channel via patreon, or simply sharing it to anyone that you think will enjoy it. If you want to hear more of my voice, then check out the Pro Crastinators Podcast which I do with my friends every week, or watch my let’s play show, or follow my weirder stuff on my other channel. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

Edited by The Davoo

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Welcome everyone to Cool Character Designs, a new series in which I’ll be highlighting shows that feature what I find to be interesting or exceptional character designs. To start us off, we’ll have a look at last year’s uber-raunchy high school comedy/dystopian social commentary light novel adaptation, A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist, or Shimoneta for short.

The theory behind Shimoneta’s character designs is tied directly into the show’s concept: in Japan’s future, censorship has become overwhelming to the point that people can be arrested just for saying dirty words, as monitored via collars around their necks; or even for drawing dirty images, as monitored by bands around their wrists. These bands are the first important design element, as they communicate visually the idea that in this world, everyone is directly shackled to and controlled by the moral system of their society. In particular, these band communicate subservience and obedience, as we typically associate them with pets or slaves.

As is the case with most anime in general, given how much of it takes place in highschool, the most prominent outfits which we’ll see our characters wearing in this series are their school uniforms–but while the grey and blue uniforms of Tokioka Academy would seem pretty typical at a glance, what makes them interesting is the length of the girls’ skirts. Most anime school uniforms aim to hike their skirts up as high as they feasibly can–but given the focus on chaste morals in the world of Shimoneta, it only makes sense that their uniforms tend toward the opposite.

Being the paragon of mental purity that she is, at least in outward appearance and common understanding within the show’s universe, Anna Nishikinomiya naturally sports the longest skirt; and from there, the lengths could be seen as a gradient corresponding to the character’s self-perceived lewdness. Hyouka Fuwa and Otome Saotome wear their skirts fairly long, whereas Ayame Kajou wears hers shorter than anyone else when she’s not at school, barely compensating by wearing thighhigh stockings in full knowledge of their true lewdness. These skirt lengths end up being hilariously subversive in the long run, as each character’s actual lewdness is inversely proportional to how they first appear.

Ayame’s design is overall the most interesting, as she transforms her appearance during and after school, as if assuming a secret identity. She puts her hair up in a tidy braid, wears her skirt longer, and puts on bulky glasses to look more serious and studious as a member of the student council; but literally and metaphorically lets her hair down at the end of the day, transforming into the more free-spirited girl that she really is. But of course, this isn’t even her final form.

Blue Snow is Ayame’s terrorist alter-ego, and easily the most memorable design in the series. It’s simple enough–white panties over her face, and a white smock covering her naked body; but what’s great is how it simultaneously communicates the idea of a superhero dressed in mask and cape, which is exactly how Ayame sees herself, as well as the idea of a huge pervert, which is what she’s the hero of. White panties are a universal symbol of sexual purity in the world of anime, which gives this design an interesting level of depth. Ayame believes her ideals to be pure, even if her ideals are that dirty jokes and perversion should not be censored. She’s directly subverting the idea of purity in both ours and her society, by suggesting that true purity comes from embracing sexuality, rather than from trying to hide it. Her outfit manages to be a powerful symbol, and Blue Snow is both the hero that we need and the one that we deserve.

Continuing on the purity train of thought, we get Anna, whose hair is not only a shimmering silvery white, but whose eyelashes and eyebrows are colored lighter as well, giving her whole face a shining, sort of angelic appearance. I wonder, though, if her hair doesn’t turn to the darker shades of silver to reflect how much her purity is to be tainted across the series.

Fuwa Hyouka has one of my favorite designs in the show, being as I’m a big fan of that tired look–and does appear that way for a reason, as it reflects her tireless pursuit of scientific knowledge. Her sickly green, seaweed-looking hair in combination with the dark circles under her eyes gives the impression of something like rotten or bruised fruit–which suits her character well as someone who’s sort of turned away from the purity of her society and slowly gone bad. Her oversized lab coat goes a long way in making her look goofy at times, yet strangely professional and cool at others, which reflects the way that her character appears in different scenes throughout the show.

Rounding out the main students, Otome Saotome is nothing special in terms of meaningfulness, but her design is pretty cute nonetheless, and the image of her in a headband and robe drawing porn with her mouth is especially memorable. Raiki Goriki is obviously meant to look like a gorilla, and to be somewhat imposing at first, only to have that image flipped on its head when he becomes attached and attracted to the main character.

Which reminds me: the main character, Okuma Tanukichi, is also a guy! His overall design is pretty generic and typical. When he develops his own terrorist alter-ego, it pretty much just riffs off of the Blue Snow design, but kind of has a more mischievous and burglar-esque look to it, perhaps meant to evoke a Robin Hood kind of feeling. Overall, though, it’s less of a powerful design than that of Blue Snow.

Oboro Tsukimigusa shows up later in the show and has a pretty basic, unremarkable design, which is most likely on purpose as their lifestyle involves swapping out characteristics to match the missions given to them by their boss.

Moving on to characters outside of the school, Kosuri Onigashira’s outfits and design are fairly unremarkable besides the fact that they’re usually kind of cute. The main point of attention is her pink hair, which, as Ayame points out, resembles the head of a dick. Kosuri’s hair can actually be seen inflating and deflating in accordance with her energy level and happiness, which is obviously meant to mirror the states of male arousal. I don’t know how much I’d say this reflects her character uniquely, though, so much as it’s just one big dirty pun on the part of the show.

Lastly, we’ll have a look at another of my favorite designs from the series: the head of rival terrorist organization Gathered Fabric, named White Peak. What’s fascinating about this design is its contrast with Blue Snow. Both terrorists aim to utilize the purity of white panties in sending their message, but whereas Blue Snow is modelled to look like a superhero, White Peak’s twisted and haphazard placement of panties makes him look like a psychotic villain. The way all of the panties are stitched together is reminiscent of things like the sewn-together face of modern Joker incarnations, or the look of Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Right from the first time he appears, it’s obvious that he’s perverted the message and goals of Blue Snow into something corrupt, which turns out to be exactly true of his long-term goals.

That about wraps up this rundown of what I find interesting and memorable in Shimoneta’s character designs. I’ll be putting out other videos like this in the future, so stick around on my channel if you’re interested in seeing more along these lines. If you’d like to support me in being able to create more content like this, then consider donating via patreon by following the links below, and if you want to hear more of my voice, then subscribe to the Pro Crastinators Podcast which I do with my friends, or to my let’s play channel which I do with my brother. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

Edited by The Davoo

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Evangelion never ceases to amaze me with the inventiveness of its visual flow. For instance: whereas most shows and films would typically resort to shot–reverse-shot when depicting a conversation, Evangelion often frames both characters in the same shot together. Not only does this allow us to witness both of character’s expressions and reactions at the same time; but by having the character in the background speak first, and then having the character in the foreground respond, our eyes are drawn across the frame, which is more visually stimulating than a typical static shot.

Often times a shot will start on a very quick spurt of movement, which gets our attention and holds it over the length of the shot; before another quick spurt of movement occurs at the end, leaving us anticipating what will happen next. Sometimes these movements are cut off so suddenly that they create tension when sequencing into an action scene.

A lot of those sudden movements depict characters shifting their gaze very quickly, often to clue us in that the next shot will be in the direction where the character is looking. This keeps the viewer informed of where every shot is in relationship to one-another, which can be very important in moments like when Misato looks out a helicopter window and we understand that the next shot is of the place that she’s flying over–as opposed to another, unrelated area.

In spite of having been broadcast in a 4:3 aspect ratio, Evangelion often moves its camera to follow the characters, suggesting the existence of a space beyond the frame. To accomplish this, the backgrounds would have to have been drawn larger than the frame–either with character animation moving through it, or the background being shifted during photography–which is an appreciated effort in the name of livening up the camera work.

Nearly every explosion in the series is preceded by a flash of light, serving as the set up to the explosion’s punchline. Likewise, when an Eva unit pulls back their fist to throw a punch, we often see their victim’s face for a second before the fist enters the frame, which creates extra buildup and makes the impact that much more intense.

Eva uses a lot of ten-second countdowns and on-screen timers to generate suspense, or even to sell the magnificence of Shinji and Asuka’s synchronized combat in episode nine. These countdown timers also serve to enhance the militaristic realism of the series, as they’re often used to convey the limitations of the show’s technology.

Among the weirder, more fascinating tricks employed by the series is the use of the bottom of the screen to represent the foreground–through which objects may disappear in one shot and then reappear in the next. It’s common knowledge in film that objects leaving through the left side of the screen should reappear from the right and vice-verse, but I don’t often see objects travelling from background to foreground, and then from foreground to background again.

A lot of Evangelion’s conversations end on a troubled facial expression, suggesting that one of the characters may have some unspoken ideas about what the other is saying. These expressions allow us to understand the thoughts which the characters might not speak out loud, and to continue the dialog in our own heads as we might do in real conversation.

Sometimes, an exposition scene is broken up across two different spatial and temporal locations using the cheeky technique of having characters finish one-another’s sentences. Not only does this allow for scene transitions without any breaks in the stream of ideas being presented to the viewer, but it lets us know that all of the characters are on the same page without having them directly interact. This can also be pretty hilarious when the two characters have different manners of speaking and are explaining the same concept in different ways.

Evangelion is infamous for its static shots which drag on for upwards of thirty seconds–but equally interesting is its use of sudden, flashing images which seem to test how fast your brain can process visual information. Whereas the longer cuts force the viewer to think back on everything leading up to that point and to try and draw more meaning out of what’s on-screen, the shorter cuts have a visceral, gut-punching effect, forcing the viewer to think back on and try to recapture the images which have just been blasting through their eyeballs.

All of these techniques play a big role in setting Evangelion apart from other TV anime–but Eva isn’t the only anime series to feature interesting directing techniques. Stick around on my channel, cause I’ll be talking about a different show this way every few months; and if you want to help me make those videos, then consider supporting me via patreon, or by sharing this video with anyone whom you think it will interest. And if you just want to hear more of my voice, then be sure and check out The Pro Crastinators Podcast which I’ve been doing with all of my friends. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Edited by The Davoo

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So far, the 2010s have been a fascinating decade for anime. We’ve had more new shows coming out each season than ever before, with fresh talent emerging onto the scene faster than I can even keep track of it. Some of the most groundbreaking films and TV shows ever put to animation have come out in the past six years, while the fundamental nature of how anime is consumed and marketed has massively shifted under everyone’s feet. In this video, I’ll be taking a look at ten different ways that this decade has been exceptional for anime and the industry surrounding it, and celebrating the ways that the medium has continued to excite me over these last six years.

10. Twitter

In the 2010s, anime gained a face. Sure, there were plenty of well-known and beloved directors and staff members working on anime before 2010, but with the emergence of twitter, the relationship between audiences and creators has opened up all across the board in every creative medium. As more and more studios and staff members have taken to twitter and other social media outlets, they’ve been able to effect the manner and level of engagement which fans can have with their works in countless little ways.

Take, for example, the directors and key animators who have been tweeting out gifs of pre-coloring animation work, and clarifying who did on what in which episodes of their shows– which has been vital to the growing sakuga community. Or look at studios like Kyoto Animation tweeting out adorable little celebratory shorts after reaching follower milestones, or just generally posting really cute character gifs. Also, how about that time that Urobuchi Gen spent months convincing everyone that he was turning over a new leaf with Madoka Magica, and that it was totally just going to be a lighthearted magical girl show, no really guys I promise? I don’t know if it can be considered a positive, but Wit Studio taking to twitter in search of animators to help them finish Attack on Titan was certainly interesting.

Twitter has also allowed for a lot more ease in crossing the Pacific cultural divide, as many tweets are translated into English, while others just are posted that way by those who can speak it–and a growing number of studios are outright making English twitter accounts. Even looking back a few weeks ago, we got a treat like key animator Bahi JD answering questions about working in the industry to English-speaking audiences. Reddit deserves a shout-out as well, for all the lengthy AMAs with producers and directors that have been conducted over the last few years.

9. Serialized Films and Web Shorts

From the mid-eighties up until the late 2000s, anime was typically released in three different forms: as TV series, feature films, and OVAs–the latter of which would be released straight to video, often one episode at a time. With the growing ease of finding everything that you want to watch online, though, the medium of original OVAs has all but completely died, with OVAs now almost exclusively being relegated to ongoing series tie-ins. In place of OVAs, we’ve seen an emerging trend of serialized film releases and original net animations, called ONAs, which represent two sides of the same coin in responding to the growth of internet viewership.

Film serials offer an interesting answer to piracy, in that they can make their money back thanks to being released to theaters which audiences have to buy tickets for, and in that they don’t typically get leaked online until the Blu-ray releases. What excites me the most about the growth of this style of release is that we can be treated to long-form stories without compromising on their production value or on the runtime of each chapter in the way that TV shows or OVAs have to. Each film can be as long as it needs to be, and while these film serials aren’t typically as beautiful to behold as the major theatrical releases of yore, they nonetheless offer a welcome level of quality above what you can usually find on television.

On the opposite end of the coin, we’ve also seen a dramatic increase in relatively inexpensive and often incredibly brief TV and internet shows built specifically for online streaming. A lot of interesting and fun little ideas get to be explored in this style without having to turn everything into a fully-fledged TV series; and some of the most surprisingly fantastic shows of the last five years have been released in this format.

8. The Monogatari and Mobile Suit Gundam Release Schedules

In my video explaining the appeal of anime, I talked a lot about how anime has experimented with what kind of shows can be released in which formats more so than any other kind of film; and I think that the Monogatari franchise embodies this fact more than any other. After its initial twelve-episode TV run in 2009, the last three episodes of the first season were released on the internet one at a time over the course of nearly a year. There was then an 11-episode TV sequel, followed by a four-episode mini-series released both on TV and online at the same time, followed by another twenty-six episode TV series, followed by two more mini-series which were released both online and on TV at the same time, but now with all of the episode dropping in a cluster, followed by the first part of a serialized film, and a series of twelve short web animations being released right now.

The Monogatari release schedule excites me to no end in how it allows for each arc of the light novel series to be adapted in whichever way the showrunners find most appropriate. Each TV series has its own sort of character to it, and is allowed to receive the emphasis that it deserves. Something like the Koyomimonogatari story would probably be completely skipped over if the entire thing was one ongoing TV series–yet it makes perfect sense as its own internet offshoot. Meanwhile, the Kizumonogatari films allow for the series backstory to be fleshed out without breaking away from the core narrative of the main series. It’s such an inventive method of adapting the light novels that it really gives me hope to one day see something like a properly-handled adaptation of the Boogiepop novels, or something else of that nature.

Another franchise which has gotten into an interesting rhythm over the past decade is Mobile Suit Gundam, which has arguably reached its peak in terms of quality across the board. Over the last few decades, Gundam has awkwardly tried to balance its original, more serious Universal Century timeline against its myriad alternate universe offshoots and more family-oriented programs, culminating in a clear system that they developed towards the end of the last decade with the release of the Gundam Unicorn OVAs and the Gundam Age TV series.

Studio Sunrise has made a very clear decision to relegate their most serious Universal Century stuff exclusively to super high-quality films and OVAs, wherein they can really bring those stories to life in as much detail as possible, while finally coming up with a formula to make solid alternate universe content alongside their more family-oriented stuff, in the form of Gundam Build Fighters, as Build Fighters is the perfect vehicle to make a kid-accessible version of Gundam without compromising on a gripping war story in its mainline AU shows like Iron-Blooded Orphans. Seeing the gorgeously-produced Gundam Thunderbolt mini-series released directly to youtube, and Build Fighters being released on youtube with subtitles in like five different languages right from the get go, has also been pretty exciting as an indicator of where anime might be moving in the future.

7. Digital Effects Work On TV Shows

Every couple of years, I feel like there’s a TV anime which comes along and totally raises the bar for what TV animation is capable of, setting a new standard for everything else to be held up to. In 2011, that show was Fate/Zero. UFOTable’s breathtaking digital effects work made a TV anime series look like what we thought only films and OVAs were capable of until then, and the studio has kept up that level of mind-blowing quality ever since, while groups like Kyoto Animation and Studio Bones have risen to the challenge, and others like PA Works follow closely at their heels.

The difference which good digital effects work can bring a series’ overall look is so monumental that I feel like a fjord has opened up between the higher and lower quality products being rolled out each season–at least, more so than ever before. Looking at shows like Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, Bungou Stray Dogs, and Kiznaiver next to shows like Netoge no Yome and Big Order honestly makes it feel like they’re not even from the same decade.

The proliferation of digital effects work hasn’t been entirely positive, admittedly, as many shows have tried to use basic digital effects as a shortcut to looking flashy and enticing; but when I look at clips from Space Dandy where high-quality animation, composition, directing, and design work are all coupled with high-tech digital effects work, I feel like I’m looking at the future of TV animation.

6. Awesome Remakes

As long as anime has existed, incomplete and lackluster manga adaptations have been a part of its life’s blood. No shortage of ultra high-profile adaptations, from the twenty-six poorly animated  episodes of Berserk which cover the first thirteen of its now forty or so manga volumes, to the original Fullmetal Alchemist series which, while beloved by many, adapts very little of its source material before going off entirely in its own direction, have left fans craving a more proper and complete adaptation of these manga which might deliver on their property’s full potential–and in the 2010s, that’s exactly what they’ve been getting.

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood started the trend in 2009, and has become one of the most critically and commercially acclaimed anime series of all time, taking a full sixty-four episodes to completely flesh out the manga’s epic story. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure soon followed suit, having only been adapted into two ultra-truncated OVAs in the mid-90s, and now evolving into four-and-counting twenty-six episode seasons adapting the manga in its entirety. Hunter X Hunter was re-adapted from the beginning, with its previous adaptation having cut off before diving into the biggest arc of the manga, and achieved newfound acclaim among a much wider audience.

Ushio and Tora, while less of a high-profile property, has also been receiving a long-form adaptation after having just a short OVA series in the 90s, and studio MAPPA president Masao Maruyama has expressed interest in doing the same for other hot-blooded 90s and early-2000s manga such as Shaman King in the future. Meanwhile, Berserk’s Golden Age arc was re-adapted into a film trilogy, with a sequel TV series set to finally continue the manga’s story this spring, though, uh… no one’s really sure how to feel about that one. Still, it’s been exciting to see so many of these classic manga sort of achieving their final form in animation and bringing so much fresh attention and acclaim to some of the best stories which manga has to offer.

5. Anime Studio Diaspora

In the midst of the economic collapse of the late 2000s, a lot of anime studios seemed to completely fall apart. Gonzo went bankrupt and most of its people left, Madhouse went bankrupt and its president went off to form his own studio, and the best guys as GAINAX took off to go be rebels somewhere else. At the time, this was all a scary prospect–it wasn’t clear yet what might happen to some of the most acclaimed studios out there, or what all these creators were going to do once they set up their own places.

The answer to those questions is that a ton of new studios opened up, and everything got really interesting. Hiroyuki Imaishi’s Studio Trigger immediately solidified an identity for itself as an even more punk version of GAINAX, while Masao Maruyama established MAPPA as a studio somehow even more willing to bank everything on high-risk projects than Madhouse before it. The staff who’d been making Saki with studio Gonzo went off and formed Studio Gokumi to keep that show going and try to perfect the art of the cute girl, while the Strike Witches team seemingly scattered to the winds of wherever they could continue the series, and some of other producers went off to form David Productions and make Jojo.

Meanwhile, we’ve got Wit Studio being formed out of Production IG runoff to make some of the most popular shows of the decade, and Studio 3hz newly emerging from the same place and getting their weird-ass action show on Toonami somehow. We’ve got the entire Durarara team breaking away from Brains Base to go make studio Shuka and produce three more seasons of Durarara, while studios like Lerche, Liden Films, Production IMS, and 8-bit have all sprung up doing all sorts of dubious but occasionally great stuff; while places like Doga Kobo, which have been around for a little while, are all of a sudden ramping up their production quality with a seeming influx of new talent.

All the while, plenty of the old studios have only been getting stronger and better, with directors like Shingo Natsume seemingly making an effort to track down all of the cool young animators that they can find to work on shows like Space Dandy and One Punch Man right out the gate. All in all, it’s an exciting time to be following the behind-the-scenes element of anime production, with so much shuffling of talent and resources going all over the place.

4. The Japan Animator Expo

You know that meme that gets thrown around about whether or not each new Trigger show is going to be the one that “saves anime?” Well I think that’s what Hideaki Anno was actually trying to do when his studio Khara teamed up with Dwango to produce the Japan Animator Expo–a series of thirty-five short films released over the course of a year from 2014 to 2015, which may have been the best thing to happen for experimental, expressive, and original animation in the last fifteen years.

Each of the animator expo shorts showcases the talents of directors, writers, animators–basically everyone from every corner of the industry with a talent to be showcased, from seasoned veterans to unheard-of newcomers. If you know anything about the Animator Expo, then you probably know ME!ME!ME! and its sequel, Girl, which were among the most exciting and popular short animations of the last few years. If you’ve missed out on the rest of the short films, then I encourage you to hunt them down. Unfortunately, they no longer remain on the original website which hosted each one as it came out week by week, and even had English subtitles for all of them, albeit confusingly activated by way of Japanese buttons that most people never figured out.

In a world where so many anime fans are dissatisfied with the stagnation and normalcy of lowest common denominator light novel adaptations flooding the market every season, the Japan Animator Expo was a definite breath of fresh air, and hopefully can be a springboard for some of these newer artists to have long and illustrious careers in the future. As to whether or not it helped to save anime, only time will tell.

3. The Young Animator Training Project

The Young Animator Training Project, also known as Anime Mirai and now Anime Tamago, is one of the most bizarre and exciting projects of the current decade. This government-funded program has essentially been handing money over to four different anime studios each year to put together a team of their freshest talent and produce a totally original episode-length short film in whatever style they want. The results have been all over the place, and always interesting.

By far the best known of these are the 2013 shorts Little Witch Academia and Death Billiards–the latter of which was spun off into its own twelve-episode TV anime called Death Parade, which was among the most popular shows of 2015. Spectacular as these shorts are, though, there are plenty of others worth checking out from the collection, including the adorably badass kung-fu short Kizuna Ichigeki, the quietly melodramatic Harmonie, (which came from the same director as The Time of Eve and Patema Inverted), and even my favorite thing to come out of studio A-1 Pictures in the last five years–the so-cute-it-hurts pastel adventure of Ookii Ichinensei to Chiisana Ninensei. I’ve got some catching up to do on the Anime Mirai shorts myself, but between the ones I’ve mentioned, the series has already been responsible for a handful of my favorite short films.

2. Anime Crowdfunding

Speaking of Little Witch Academia, one of the most exciting results of that short film’s existence had to be the incredibly high-profile kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel episode. Anime crowdfunding became a thing which people discovered was possible after Masaaki Yuasa’s successful campaign to fund the Kick-Heart short film in 2013–and since then we’ve seen the emergence of many other projects–some completely unsuccessful, and some which have been funded, but with yet-unseen results, such as the Under the Dog OVA, which you may remember me campaigning for in the most popular video that I’ve ever made.

Crowdfunding represents what I see as a coming future for artistic mediums on the whole–a future wherein fans will start to fund art not in the name of owning a copy of it, but in the name of promoting its existence–whether in allowing for it to be created in the first place, or in allowing for it to persist. Speaking as someone whose livelihood is based around a patreon campaign, it’s hard for me not to appreciate the potential which crowdfunding has to offer in allowing creators more freedom to make new and exciting properties with the blessing of their audience. I’d love to see a future in which anime studios can go all-out with this and open up patreon-style campaigns or donation boxes so I can just straight up send them ten bucks every time I watch an episode of anime that I really like–but for now I’m just watching the evolution of crowdfunding very closely.

1. Online Streaming

I’m sure you saw this coming from a mile away, but online streaming is by far the most important thing to happen to anime this decade, and probably to the entire medium of film. For audiences outside of Japan, it has become the primary mode of anime consumption–and the easy access to pretty much every single show that comes out each season has all but eliminated the obscurity ghetto from existence. When I first got into watching fansubs, there were usually a few shows that either never got subtitled at all each season, or did so over the course of entire years after airing–often with audiences of less than a couple thousand people. Now, between Crunchyroll, Hulu, Funimation, Netflix, and even Amazon, the only thing we still have to rely on fansubs for is Precure, and the least popular things that aren’t kids shows or shorts are averaging a minimum of ten thousand viewers apiece just on MyAnimeList. By the way, if you still don’t have a Crunchyroll account, then use this link with my name on it to sign up and make me five bucks.

The biggest problem with anime streaming is that it still doesn’t seem to be panning out as a good way for anime producers to actually make money. An individual streaming subscription is still making less than pennies for the producers of these shows, whereas a single blu-ray sale is worth tens of thousands of views by way of ad revenue. Still, it’s pretty clear that online streaming isn’t going anywhere, and that the market is slowly shifting to meet the demands of this new brand of mainstream viewership. If there’s a future for anime to grow into, then it lies in figuring out how to monetize online streaming effectively, and to get the fans voting with their wallets on what they want to see coming out of studios in the future. It’s a road that looks scary and dangerous in every direction, but considering the quality of animation which has been coming out even just in the current season, I can’t help but be hopeful for the second half of this decade, and for the future of anime still to come.

Tell me about how the current decade of anime has kept you excited in the comments below, and if you enjoyed this video and want to help support my channel, then share it to anyone that you think will enjoy it, and consider donating to my channel via patreon. Go subscribe to my podcast and my let’s play channel if you want to hear more of my voice, and to my vlogging channel is you want to see more of my terrifying face. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

I’ve never really understood the point of the three-episode test. For those who’ve never heard of it, the three-episode test is a common practice in anime communities, in which viewers will allow any show three episodes to hook them in, supposing that a series with a slower buildup may not really get interesting until after a few episodes. However, in my experience, I’ve never actually seen a show that I ended up loving in the long run which didn’t have a good first episode–the only exception being Gintama, which infamously started off with a two-part anime-original filler episode that bizarrely fell short of the entire rest of the show. Beyond that, though, I’ve never experienced this so-called “it gets good later” effect.

Sure, there’s a lot of shows that get better across their run, given that basic narrative structure usually dictates a rising action in the story–but I’ve never seen a show that started off bad and ended up being great. Hell, the fact that something starts off bad is a pretty huge detriment towards being good on the whole anyways; especially if you find yourself annoyed with the story and characters, or have your suspension of disbelief broken early on, causing difficulty with taking the story seriously or caring about it once it gets dramatic. More often than not, the weaknesses that a show exhibits in the beginning are indicative of the weaknesses which it will continue to have across its run–just as the opposite is usually true of shows with strong opening episodes.

Now, I have seen plenty of shows which had really strong openers, only to go downhill later thanks to writing, structure, and production issues. A good first episode isn’t always indicative of a good series overall–it’s just that I’ve never seen a show that I thought legitimately started off poor, and then became great later. This seems to be an unpopular stance, though, as I’ve been told countless times by other fans about how certain shows have weak beginnings and then get good later on; for instance, this seems to be a commonly-held opinion of Steins;Gate–one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed anime TV series of the last five years.

Personally, though, I loved the first episode of Steins;Gate. In fact, I loved the early part of the show so much that I considered it to be a member of my favorites list after only four episodes back when it was airing. Obviously I must have seen something in the show that others weren’t seeing at the time–and perhaps this is why my perspective on the idea of shows getting good later on is so different from others, and why my policy of dropping most stuff after only one episode is so confusing to some. After all, I asked on twitter for my followers to tell me what shows they loved in spite of disliking their opening episodes, and all of the shows that I liked which were named, were shows that I liked by the time the first episode was over.

So, in the interest of helping some of you to understand my perspective when it comes to dropping shows early, and in being able to identify a great show after just one episode, I’m going to write a ridiculously long about some great–and some terrible–first episodes of anime–and hopefully give you some tools as a viewer to distinguish the cream from the crop even faster than you might already; bearing in mind, of course, that this is all a matter of personal taste in the long run.

So for starters, let’s take a look at the opening episode of Steins;Gate. To some extent, I can understand and forgive a lot of viewers for having difficulty parsing this episode, because it is kind of confusing–especially if you haven’t seen the show already. The episode is full of little hints towards things that happen later, and some of the events won’t really click into place until you’ve had a better understanding of the series narrative. This actually makes the episode even better on the rewatch, since there’s so many little “a-ha!” moments sprinkled in that you wouldn’t have noticed initially–but for a first-time viewer, parts of it can throw you for a loop.

To a lot of people, including elements that the viewer can’t possibly understand into the opening episode might seem like a bad thing–but to me, it serves a massively important purpose in helping to set the tone for the series. Steins;Gate is a sci-fi mystery thriller with a fairly dark tinge, and the elements of mind-fuckery in the opening episode go a long way towards establishing this air of narrative unreliability and tension–as well as in putting us in the same position as the lead character. If we’d completely understood the fact that Okabe had slipped through time, and the mechanics by which he’d done so, then we would’ve spent a good chunk of the story waiting for him and his friends to figure out things that we already knew, which could get annoying. Instead, we start off the show just as confused as Okabe is, and have to solve the narrative riddles at the same pace that he does–making each of his revelations throughout the show that much more impactful. Then, when we come back for the rewatch knowing everything that’s going on, we’re treated to all these little tidbits that we didn’t get at first, which keeps the show feeling fresh.

Opening up a series in such a bold way can be a double-edged sword. After all, can we really trust that the show is going to deliver on its promise of a gripping narrative which can justify the confusion we felt at the start? Well, this is where the first element of learning to identify a show’s potential comes, in the form of looking at the staff list–and having some context into who the creators of the show are. Steins;Gate was co-directed by Hiroshi Hamasaki, who previously had directed another sci-fi mindfuck in the form of Texhnolyze–along with the starkly brutal short anime adaptation of Shigurui. Both of these shows had also started off with really bizarre, confusing, and thickly tonal opening episodes before diving further into their stories.

It’s not exactly a guarantee that every Hiroshi Hamasaki-directed show would follow the same trajectory, given that he didn’t write any of them, and that Steins;Gate came from a different studio and was based on a visual novel–but when this show came out, seeing the name of such an interesting director attached to it, who previously had worked on one of the most bizarrely fascinating shows that I ever considered a favorite–inspired a lot of confidence in it on my part.

Diving into the episode itself, the opening scenes are incredibly stark and thickly tonal; starting with a sequence of semi-transparent images that look vaguely like the inside of the internet, shots of TV static, and pictures of various locations in Akihabara, all laid over heavily grainy shots of telephone wires against a stark white backdrop. All of this imagery immediately establishes Steins;Gate as a techno-thriller–calling back to the visual trademarks of shows like Serial Experiments Lain, and giving a sense that this story takes place within the more mysterious and abstract parts of our technological landscape. While most viewers probably wouldn’t recognize Akihabara just in the few obscure glimpses of it in this opening scene, those who do might also get an even deeper sense of the show’s focus on technology, given the city’s reputation as the “electric town;” as well as the show’s heavy emphasis on otaku culture, given that Akiba is widely regarded as a sort of mecca for otaku.

From there, we transition into a couple of shots of Okabe standing on the roof of a building which are filmed at uncomfortable dutch angles, further establishing this sense of tension and stress, which is only amplified by the lack of music and abundant atmospheric sound effects, which will be common elements throughout much of the episode. When we finally see head-on shots of our main characters, it is with harsh, blown-out lighting, and against a pale sky–and each shot is framed in such a way as to make them look overly white and washed-out.

This aesthetic of harsh, blown-out lighting is upheld as we transition to the streets of Akihabara, filmed once again at dutch angles–wherein some of the buildings seem to simply evaporate into the atmosphere as they get further from the camera. There’s something unsettling about how this entire scene is colored, as though the boundaries of reality have become opaque and uncomfortable. All of this is to say that Steins;Gate does an excellent job of generating a sense of mystery and suspense in its audio-visual design alone–which sets you up for the unnerving nature of the episode’s midsection as soon as the episode begins. It’s pretty rare for any anime series to put so much effort into setting such a thick and unique audio-visual tone right off the bat–and most of the ones that do so are fantastic–so at this point it’s already pretty clear that we’re potentially looking at an ambitious project.

After a very brief moment that you probably won’t understand until near the very end of the series, Steins;Gate then gets into some of what I think the show does best–its natural-feeling and casually hilarious dialog. Mayushii and Okarin’s brief conversation by the gachapon machines gives us a lot of insight into their personalities and relationship, while also managing to feel like a normal conversation about a subject which the characters are interested in. While you could say it’s a little forced that Okarin frames a sentence around the fact that he and Mayushii are childhood friends, the rest of the following things are established without being spoken in the dialog:

Firstly, that Mayushii has a very childish personality. We can gather this from the way that she refers to herself in third-person, squats down and stares longingly into a machine that dispenses cheap toys, is disappointed when Okarin refuses to buy her one, and becomes exceptionally excited at the sight of a rare one. Secondly, we learn that Okarin is a bit of a brat. He laughs at Mayushii over the fact that he refuses to buy her a toy, and then goes out of his way to buy one in front of her face just to tease her. Later into the scene, he also insists on being referred to by his chuunibyou made up name, Hououin Kyouma. However, thirdly, we also learn that Okarin does seem to care for Mayushii and to be probably a pretty nice guy for the most part, since he hands over the Metal Oopa once he sees how excited she is over it. Lastly, aside from telling us about the characters’ personalities, the scene also gives us just a tiny bit of insight into their hobbies, as Mayushii is deeply knowledgeable about these tiny trinkets, whereas Okarin doesn’t even recognize when he’s picked up the rare one.

What makes this dialog so great is that it can teach us so much about the characters, without being about the characters. In a lot of shows, this would’ve been a wacky, high-tension comedy scene, wherein, after Okarin bought the gachapon in front of her, Mayushii would’ve yelled about how he’s such a bully, and how he’s always been a bully ever since they were little kids. Instead, this scene is presented without any music or fanfare, and is resolved emotionally through a brilliant piece of sound design–when a chipper-sounding intercom jingle is played just as Okarin’s heart is being warmed by the sight of Mayushii’s face. [roll clip] This is the kind of joke I’d be expecting from an Edgar Wright film, and not from a typical TV anime.

This whole scene is also propped up by the phenomenal voice performances on the parts of Mamoru Miyano and Kana Hanazawa–at least if you’re watching in Japanese. While HanaKana is clearly using an unrealistic cute and ditzy voice in this role, she nonetheless manages to sound far more grounded than a typical moe girl character would–and Miyano brilliantly balances the wacky side of his character against a deeper, more sobering voice. Considering that Miyano usually plays far more flamboyant and wacky characters, it’s kind of amazing to realize that this deranged, conspiracy-obsessed otaku with a penchant for dramatic flair is actually one of his more restrained and down-to-earth performances.

If I had to describe the overall aesthetic of Steins;Gate in terms of realism, it would be “almost anime trash, but not quite.” The look of the world is mostly realistic, but with a slightly off-kilter color palette that would be unusual in any medium. The character designs have a very pixiv-esque feel to them, being based on the super-detailed original designs from Black Rock Shooter creator huke, yet the tall bodies and relatively normal proportions of the characters make them feel fairly realistic–not unlike the designs in shows like Durarara or Kara no Kyoukai. The voice actors are clearly doing anime voices, yet they perform them with more subtlety than they typically would; and the sound design skews so sparse and foley-focused that the events feel like they’re being recorded right there in the world, rather than dramatized for television. It’s an aesthetic that allows for the show to at once be loaded with beautiful anime girls and light otaku genre trappings, while also feeling grounded and physical enough that the drama can really hit hard in the later episodes.

Following the Metal Oopa scene, the next six minutes or so would probably be especially confusing for first-time viewers–but they do provide some little hints as to the nature of what’s going on. For starters, Okarin is attending some sort of panel on the nature of time travel, which ought to clue us in right away that this will be a relevant aspect of the story. Particularly of interest is that Okarin brings up the John Titor story, which was a real-life internet hoax of the early 2000s, perpetuated by a man who claimed to be a time-traveller from the year 2036. Aside from the fact that certain elements of the story in Steins;Gate are directly based on the John Titor story, making references to it gives us an interesting frame of reference into where the series is coming from–i.e., that it’s the kind of story where an internet sci-fi hoax from the early 2000s would be relevant to the plot and characters.

Internet and science-fiction culture both play a very big role in Steins;Gate, and a huge part of how the main characters interact is based on their breadth of pop cultural knowledge and vested interest in the subjects that they find themselves involved with in the story. Knowing that Okarin is obsessed enough with time travel to be so familiar with the John Titor story is a telling part of his character, especially for any viewers who have heard of the story prior to watching the series.

Okarin is then dragged into a particularly confusing conversation with Makise Kurisu, which is mostly confusing for the reason that all of the characters involved are as confused as the viewer is. For whatever reason, Kurisu seems to think that Okarin was trying to tell her something fifteen minutes ago, whereas Okarin doesn’t seem to remember anything of the sort. Neither one of them really knows whom the other is, and Okarin’s reaction to the situation is to play up his persona as a mad scientist on the run from an evil organization, which Kurisu seems to see through pretty easily, but still doesn’t get any answers out of talking to him.

As weird as this scene feels in the moment, I think that the rest of the episode makes a pretty good case for the viewer to try watching it over again–especially for viewers who were watching the series at the time it was airing. As the episode goes along, we can piece together that what we’re experiencing is an unclosed time loop, wherein Okarin witnesses Kurisu’s murder, then goes back in time to warn her about the murder, thereby causing her to take an action which ends up preventing it. If this all seems terribly confusing, that’s because Steins;Gate operates on the parallel universes theory of time travel, and the time loop fucks with our basic understanding of events as happening in a linear sequence. If you can figure this out just by watching or rewatching this first episode once or twice, then you’ve pretty much figured out exactly what this show is about–and from there it’s just a matter of having the dramatic stakes ramped up later on.

Even amid the confusion of these scenes, we still get a lot of insight into Okarin’s character. For one, we get the sense that he’s a total weirdo and social recluse who’s trying very hard to be cool; but it’s obviously just an act, which Kurisu easily sees through. Coming back to this episode after knowing more about Kurisu’s personality makes it obvious that she probably deals with people like this all the time, given that she’s big into Japanese internet culture.

We also get a sense of Okarin’s social class when Mayushii tells him that the Metal Oopa can be sold online for 10,000 yen–which is less than 100 US dollars. This number doesn’t just excite Okarin because his lab is apparently dirt broke, but he even considers it enough money that he can buy what he describes as “science equipment” with the money. You might not come to this conclusion immediately, but given what legitimate science equipment would probably cost, it’s pretty obvious that he’s talking about thrifting around for random bullshit that he can use for his home experiments. Again, this is all dialog that tells us about Okarin’s character without really being about him.

Finally the scene rounds off with Okarin witnessing Makise Kurisu’s dead body, and then a bunch of trippy imagery back in the streets of Akiba, wherein time and space seem once more to evaporate around the edges, as Okarin loses grip on and trust in reality. This is the last piece of the puzzle for setting up what Steins;Gate is–a technology-based thriller, with an emphasis on time travel, characters who are strange, obsessive otaku, and a bit of murder mystery and psychological mindfuck thrown in for spice. It’s only appropriate, then, that with all of the pieces in place, we finally cut to the opening theme–which is energetic, fun, and cool, and has a video that suggests all kinds of trippy time and reality fuckery yet to come.

After the opening video, Okarin provides a more proper introduction to himself, his friends, and what all of them are doing, in the form of what looks at first like a fourth-wall-breaking monologue, as he addresses the audience on the other side of the TV screen. While this dialog is very obviously forced and expository, I think that the scene manages to work exceptionally well thanks to all of the stylistic layers which are stacked on top of it.

For starters, the fact that Okarin is talking into the TV seems like a pretty clear nod to the classic dystopian novel 1984, in which Big Brother watches over everyone in society by way of TV monitors in the corners of their rooms. Considering that Okarin is a conspiracy nut who thinks that he’s living in a dystopian society, it only makes sense that he’d believe there’s someone watching him from the other side of the TV screen. The fact that the show which he’s talking to is some kind of bizarre program where an alpaca with a man’s face stares into the camera absently forever, honestly makes it feel like maybe Okarin isn’t wrong to think so.

Aside from being a cool nod to classic dystopian literature, and a great visual shorthand for once again reinforcing the show’s emphasis on technology, this scene also is just really visually interesting. The fisheye lens perspective allows us to see the entire room all at once, and Okarin moving around the foreground so much allows him to alter the blocking of the shot and transform it over the course of the minutes that it stays on screen: when he’s the only one talking, then he gets in close and hogs the camera; when we need to see someone else, then he backs away, and sometimes moves to one side or the other to highlight one character at a time. It’s all around just an incredibly cool shot, and what it loses in the fact that the dialog is overly convenient, it regains in how much character is packed into each line of it.

Okarin’s acting here gives us a pretty clear portrait both of how he sees himself, and of how his relationships work with his friends. Mayushii seems eager to go along with Okarin’s persona in the name of having fun, whereas Daru sees it cynically as a chuunibyou character setting and blasts him constantly with troll comments. Something which could be somewhat muddied in translation is that Daru speaks almost entirely in 2channel lingo, which is basically like if you hung out with a 4channer who was constantly spouting memes. [Best Guy Ever] Daru’s dialog particularly brings home the fact that this show is deeply steeped in otaku and internet culture with his talk of waifus and settings–and we also learn that Mayushii is a resident cosplay expert to boot.

Sprinkled throughout the following scene is a mixture of offhand philosophical dialog, as the characters ponder whether their reality is real, or if they’re really the ones inside a monitor being watched by Alpacaman; character and relationship building between all three of the lab members as they bounce insults and ideas back and forth; and important plot details, as Okarin becomes disturbed by the discrepancies in his memories while looking at a news report about a crashed satellite. My favorite detail in this scene, though, is when Daru breaks out a toy laser gun and uses it to change the channels on the TV. In this brief moment, it becomes apparent that for all of these characters’ goofiness, they probably do know at least enough about engineering and technology that they can build rudimentary devices in special DIY fashion. When Okarin refers to this laser gun as “futuristic machine #1,” it starts to feel like what these guys probably do most of the time is scavenge random appliance parts and repurpose or modify them into fun, wacky gadgets.

The rest of the episode mostly serves to reinforce all of the things that I’ve talked about with even more fun dialog and minor character details; such as Okarin trying to argue with his landlord over a less than ten dollar TV repair fee, and Mayushii revealing that she’s the only one in the gang who seems to have any sort of allowance. Minor stuff aside, there are two other important pieces of information to pick up before the climax. Firstly, that when confronted about why she continues to hang out with a loser like Okarin, Mayushii claims that she serves an important role as his hostage. This at first seems like just some ditzy character setting aspect–but then later on, when Okarin sees her looking up at a tree, we get a flashback to her doing the same in front of a large headstone. From this, it seems likely that Mayushii hangs around with Okarin and acts so childishly out of some kind of emotional trauma that she’s experienced due to someone’s death; and that maybe Okarin is playing more of a caretaker to her than it first appears. Secondly, the scene with the gel banana makes it evident that, as goofy and ridiculous as the lab’s machines may be, they do seem to be producing some kind of unnatural results. The gel bananas are taken as equal parts useless and harmless by the characters, yet they still work as evidence to the fact that these kids might be onto something.

From there, the episode rounds off on a couple of quick twists and turns. It’s revealed that Okarin’s text message seems to have travelled a week back in time, having been cut into thirds in the process; and then we find out that Makise Kurisu is very much alive and kicking. This is what I meant when I said that the episode gives you enough to go on that you might have gone and rewatched it to try and figure out what was going on before episode two came out. Knowing what we know at the end gives a lot of insight into what was going on before, and makes it a lot easier to pick up on where the story is going after just this one episode.

So, taking stock of what we’ve discussed so far, I think it’s pretty clear that the first episode of Steins;Gate had a lot going for it. The characters were firmly established in their personalities and relationships from the get-go, and their back-and-forth rapport was a blast to listen to thanks to excellent writing and voice acting. We’ve got call-backs both to classic science-fiction stories, and to more contemporary internet conspiracy stories and message board culture, which creates a fairly unique kind of tone for a modern sci-fi story. There’s a plethora of well-directed scenes, memorable imagery, and even funny moments of sound design, suggesting a carefully-handled production–alongside bold choices being made from very early on in the name of creating the kind of atmosphere which would be most beneficial to the storyline. Top all of that off with gorgeous character designs, a pretty cool setting for those who worship at the altar of otaku, and all kinds of hilarious details like the Alpacaman TV show and Scientific Device #1, and there’s more than enough going on in this episode to suggest the possibility that this show was going to be great.

Now, none of this is to suggest that it was obvious just from this one episode that Steins;Gate would eventually be as good as it ended up being–nor is it to say that I even picked up on half of this stuff when I watched the show for the first time. The post that I wrote about it back in 2011 mostly talks about how cool it is that the show is weird and confusing and reminded me of Welcome to the NHK; but then my writing was pretty fucking terrible back then. Still, the point I’m getting at here is more that if a new season of anime started up, and I was looking at this opening episode next to all the other ones that came out, I’m pretty sure that this one would’ve blown just about everything else out of the water. Even if I had no idea what was going on in the story and was just kind of drinking in the episode’s wall of eccentric information, the fact that a show would start off with so many points of interest would’ve had my attention immediately. There’s no way in hell that I ever would’ve dropped Steins;Gate after just the first episode, because it probably would’ve been one of the most interesting things on TV at the time. (Although, in fairness, Spring 2011 was actually a really solid season with a lot of really good first episodes to go around.)

So, alright, we’ve made the case now that the first episode of a great show will probably lay a lot of groundwork for what’s good about the series as a whole; but what about when the first episode is something really weird that throws the audience for a loop and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the story, even though it turns out to be a good show? And what would an unconvincing first episode look like from a show that never quite makes it to the level of being great? I’ll be tackling both of those questions as this video series continues, so be sure to stick around on my channel if you want to learn more. If you haven’t had enough of my voice yet, then be sure to check out the Pro Crastinators Podcast which I do with my friends once a week, and subscribe to my vlogging channel, where I constantly bitch about everything. Also, if you want to help keep my channel going, then consider supporting me via patreon by using the links below. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

If you ask me, the best way to watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is in its original broadcast episode order. Here’s why: the first season of Haruhi is an adaptation of three volumes of the light novel series–the first of which consists mostly of character introductions and long pieces of exposition before jumping into a big emotional climax; and the third of which is a handful of short stories which are mostly focused on fun character interactions.

If these stories had been adapted into anime chronologically–as a lot of people seem to be insistent on watching them–then you’d reach the story’s biggest emotional climax halfway into the series; before jumping into a bunch of random side-stories, leading up to an unceremonious ending. Kyoto Animation obviously recognized this problem, and decided to shuffle the episodes on their broadcast so that the character introductions and exposition would be broken up by all the fun side stories, leaving the biggest emotional climax to come near the end of the series. Said climax is made even stronger in the process, as the viewer has a lot more time to form emotional connections with the characters over the course of the show, meaning that they can really feel something when that climax occurs.

This format was able to make sense because so many of Haruhi’s episodes worked so well as stand-alone stories, and were able to keep the viewer curious about the elements which they didn’t quite understand yet until those things were explained. Like in the case of Steins;Gate, this also lead to the effect wherein watching the series over again was even more rewarding because of all the little things that you’d notice which you might not have otherwise.

One of the major factors which is often cited in the defense of watching Haruhi chronologically is that the first episode of the broadcast version is very bizarre and confusing, and doesn’t offer a lot of explanation about what the show is actually going to be. I distinctly remember when the first episode dropped, reading speculation on anime forums about whether this was going to be a show about amateur filmmaking–and I don’t think it would be at all unreasonable to make that mistake. However, the idea that this doesn’t make for an excellent opening episode for the series, or that it doesn’t tell you exactly what you’re in for as well as an opener possibly could, is where I have to disagree.

The most prominent thematic aspect of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is exploring and playing with the meta-textual elements of anime as a whole. The main character, Kyon, has grown up into a cynical person who’s long stopped believing in the kinds of fantasies which would be portrayed in anime, video games, and sci-fi stories; yet ends up coming into contact with three different people who each represent some kind of classic sci-fi cliche. Meanwhile, Haruhi, who gathered all of these characters together, wants desperately to believe in the existence of these cliches, but isn’t allowed to know about them. From there, hilarity ensues.

While the chronological beginning of the series does indeed start from the beginning of the story and informs us of the goals and personalities of Kyon and Haruhi before diving into the main point–which is why it made for a great second episode in broadcast order–it doesn’t really capture a lot of what the story is actually about or what makes it good. We only meet three of the main characters, and we don’t learn any of the important parts of the plot; nor is the meta-textual comedy element made immediately clear. It kind of just feels like any old opening episode of a light novel series; especially nowadays when such a thing comes at a dime a dozen.

Meanwhile, the first episode of the original broadcast starts off firing on all cylinders with an utterly bizarre parody of the moe and magical girl genres in the form of this badly sung, hilarious opening video which you can immediately tell was made up by the characters in-universe before we even know anything about them whatsoever. The very first seconds of the show are one of its biggest moments of genre parody–which sets the tone for the entire series perfectly.

Over the course of the episode, we see the main characters acting out a silly, cliched anime plot for the camera, while Kyon delivers sarcastic narration and constantly breaks the film’s fourth wall–which is pretty much what the Haruhi experience is all about, only without the context of being a mock student film. Of course, we can’t know this at the time, but all of the cliches which the characters are performing match up with the cliches that that actually turn out to represent in reality–as the show itself is about a bunch of anime cliches pretending not to be cliches, while ending up in cliche scenarios. There’s so many layers of irony to this series that it’s hard to know where to begin with unravelling them; but this episode makes that aspect of the story abundantly clear, even if only in its ludicrously ambitious production design.

Kyoto Animation put an astonishing level of effort into making this episode mimic the look and feel of a low-effort and low budget film–which is, in itself, some kind of irony ouroboros. I could probably go on for half an hour about every hilarious audio hiccup, background detail, lighting mistake except it’s not a mistake because the animators deliberately made it look like a mistake, bad acting except that it’s bad acting on the part of characters being played by real actors, which in turn makes it amazing acting, et cetera. There is no end to the layers here.

Even if this episode didn’t perfectly convey the general thematic ideas and feelings of the series as a whole, it nonetheless would’ve made an incredible first episode just on the back of how unique and ambitious it was. It’s definitely not like anything I’ve ever seen before or since, and the attention to detail in its production design is still impressive to this day. Even more so than Steins;Gate, I feel like if this show came on at the start of a new season, I’d be amped for it straight from the starting gun–which I honestly don’t think I’d be able to say about episode two. Haruhi pulled out a lot of ambitious tricks over the course of its run to keep itself exciting and interesting, and I think it’s for that exact reason that it became the massive success that it was.

Another series which played around with its chronology in similar ways for similar reasons, and which has also taken some flack for its bizarre opening episode, is Baccano! Not unlike Haruhi, the Baccano anime adapted four volumes of the original light novels–a story about immortal gangsters, a two-part story about a crazy-ass train heist, and a story about a big gang war–all set over the course of a three-year period. The anime adaptation mixed them all together into one spiralling storyline for the same reason that Haruhi did–so that all of the climaxes would come at the end of the series; instead of awkwardly reaching minor climaxes and then building back up from the bottom as many light novel adaptations tend to do every few episodes.

But whereas Haruhi was able to mix up its episodes with near reckless abandon thanks to many of them making for such great stand-alone pieces, the winding narrative of Baccano’s three stories is a lot more complex. Each one of them has its own sizable ensemble cast, and the combination of all of them leads to a roster of characters so huge that you need the entire OP just to keep track of them. It takes a while to fully appreciate how each of these stories intersects and interacts with one-another, or even to figure out what any of the characters are really all about. As such, the first episode makes the interesting decision not to start with any of the stories or characters right away, but instead to spend the first half of the episode establishing the mindset with which the series should be approached.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t out of character for the source material; the first book of the light novels uses the framing device of being told as a story from one character to another at a much later point in the timeline. Jumping between characters and points in time is a common element even of the original story, which is meant to play off of the fact that a lot of the main cast is comprised of immortals, who go on getting themselves into all kinds of mischief over large swathes of the 20th century.

The anime series in particular seems to borrow a lot structurally from the films of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino–with Baccano’s OP having been very obviously based on the same sequence from the start of Ritchie’s Snatch, and the aftermath of the Flying Pussyfoot incident echoing the opening scene from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Both of these are anachronically-told, ensemble gangster films, which are all about putting their smirking style first and portraying a cast full of wacky, colorful badasses–which is exactly Baccano’s raison d’etre.

So the first episode opens up on this conversation between the vice-president of a newspaper group and his assistant discussing the nature of storytelling; and trying to determine which elements of this story would be necessary to its conveyance, or what would make for the best starting point–ending with the very meta conclusion that they, themselves, could be that. It’s basically the show’s way of informing you that its plot is complicated and has lots of moving parts, and that there’s no one starting point that necessarily makes the most sense. If you’ve ever seen Mr BTongue’s video explaining the concept of Shandification by way of the Fallout games, then you’ll really get where this conversation is coming from–and if you haven’t seen that video, then I highly recommend doing so, because it can double as a great Baccano analysis in this regard.

Understandably, this scene could be pretty confusing for new viewers, and it doesn’t really do a lot to establish the actual story or characters. For me, a lot of the appeal of this scene the first time through was just in listening to Norio Wakamoto droll out the word “Carol” while talking to Chiwa Saito; and staring at the gorgeous character and setting designs. But what this scene does accomplish is a lot of establishing the general tone and feel of the series. We start off with some fun, weird characters who feel very strongly about oddly specific things; flashes of intense violence and gore; an establishment of the setting of Prohibition-era New York; some really badass animation of something very supernatural happening to a guy’s fingers; and a chronology that you’d need a map and a compass in order to track. Do I even need to mention at this point that this episode is a lot of fun to go back to on the rewatch?

The second half of the episode isn’t so much built around conveying plot information, as it is around setting up certain ideas. It cuts together a spattering of events from all over the timeline to communicate some of the most important plot elements, just so that we’ll have them in mind for the future. We learn that there’s a mafia turf war going on; that a guy named Dallas Genoard is in some deep shit with one of those mafia families, while his sister is worried about him; that there’s a bunch of characters who can be riddled with bullets and still manage to survive; and that some crazy ass shit went down on this train that half of the cast just rolled in on. A surprising amount of these scenes actually take place at the very end of the story, with almost none of it happening at the chronological beginning–yet they create some sense of what we’re going to be getting out of the series eventually when things come to a head.

Now, I’m fully willing to admit that the first episode of Baccano is not one of the best first episodes of anime out there, and certainly not one of the best episodes of the show. I think that it possibly goes too far with showing so many scenes that the viewer has no reason to care about or understand yet, and that it wasn’t totally necessary to put these exact scenes at the beginning. All of the things that I just described could’ve been accomplished with a different scene selection, and perhaps fewer moments that outright don’t mean anything yet.

However, I do think that the first episode of Baccano did more than enough to show that it had potential to be an amazing series. Hell, the OP alone would have been enough to convince me that this show was worth watching to the end, cause Christ if it didn’t kick ass. The first time I saw this episode back when it was airing, I was really excited to be getting what felt like the anime version of some of my favorite stylish gangster movies; and the level of badass violence, cool looking characters, and sleek animation was more than enough to hook me in. I don’t know if Baccano would’ve had my favorite opener of the season in every season that I can imagine like the other two shows that I talked about; but looking at Summer 2007’s showing, the only thing that I remember liking more on the basis of its first episode was Zetsubou-sensei. In any case, I certainly didn’t drop it.

So alright, up until this point I’ve been playing defense for opening episodes that I think do more to accentuate the positive qualities of the shows that they come from than they’re often given credit for–but now I wanna take a look at an opener which was not only controversial at the time that it came out, but which may have played a role in getting the show’s director fired. I’m talking about the infamous first episode of Lucky Star–a show whose director, Yutaka Yamamoto, was let go after the first four episodes and replaced with another KyoAni staffer, Yasuhiro Takemoto.

Now, before I go making too much of a big deal out of the director change, I think it’s important to assess how much of a difference this actually made, and why it may have happened. For one thing, it’s most likely that the script for the show was already completed before any of it went to air, so it’s not as though giving Yamakan the axe meant that the entire nature of the show was going to change. If you didn’t know about this alteration, then you could probably watch the entire show without noticing that anything had happened. Yamakan is even credited still on some of the storyboards and scripts that he provided for later episodes in the series, so it’s not as though they threw out all of his creative input.

Moreover, from what I’ve observed over the years, Kyoto Animation seems to be a pretty tightly-knit studio with a clear voice that tends to come through no matter who’s directing their shows. While I, having studied their work for a decade now, could probably break down all of the subtleties in the directing styles of Naoko Yamada vs. Tatsuya Ishihara, it wouldn’t change the fact that even a casual viewer can tell when a show was made by Kyoto Animation at little more than a glance. I also suspect that Yamakan being let go may have only had as much to do with his performance as a director as it had to do with the fact that he’s a volatile, pretentious asshole, who has achieved a degree of infamy over the years for his controversial statements.

The point I’m getting at here, is that Lucky Star’s first four episodes aren’t *that* different from the rest of the show. However, it is definitely true that the series gets a lot more comedy-focused and generally better as it goes along, so it’s understandable that some viewers may not be able to warm up to the show until it reaches the point where things get a bit more exciting.

I would also make the argument that pretty much every slice-of-life show gets better over time, as it has the chance to flesh out and endear you to its characters–and to gradually make you feel like you’re watching the interactions of some friends that you know and love, as opposed to a bunch of strangers whom you’ve just met. I think it’s for this exact reason that Lucky Star’s opener was risky and off-putting for a lot of people, because it doesn’t make for much of an easing-in period. It feels like the viewer is plopped right into the middle of a show that they were supposed to have already been familiar with and just runs with it. Like every other episode that I’ve talked about, it’s another one that’s a lot easier to parse on a rewatch, but it’s more difficult for me to blame someone if they didn’t get what the appeal of this series was after just this episode.

Still, it would be difficult for me to think of this episode as being very far below the baseline quality of Lucky Star episodes; and the sheer notoriety of it as an event piece has definitely made it one of the most memorable opening episodes of any series I can think of–which I’m sure is exactly what Yamakan was going for, given his penchant for great marketing gimmicks. This was the guy who choreographed Haruhi’s famous Hare Hare Yukai dance, after all, and then went on to popularize Lucky Star with a high-energy opening dance of its own. Either one of these has a cultural footprint on anime history which is deeper than a lot of complete series.

Lucky Star opens up on a nearly eight-minute scene of its characters sitting around in a classroom talking about food. It’s very cleverly directed, with the characters seamlessly weaving between literal and figurative reality in the middle of the conversation, and there’s a few moments of dry comedy sprinkled in that do legitimately make me laugh out loud. It’s hard for me to step outside of myself on this one, though; if you’re a fan of my let’s play channel, then you’ve probably listened to hours of me talking about food in much the same way, because eating is my favorite pastime and I have a lot to say about it.

A couple of years ago, I made a video about the similarities between the appeal of slice-of-life anime, and that of podcasts and let’s plays; and I think that the first episode of Lucky Star conveys this kind of appeal perfectly–which is probably deliberate, given the origins of the series. Years before the manga was adapted into animation, Lucky Star had already been adapted into a set of drama CDs–which are basically like a scripted radio program. Moreover, leading up to the release of the anime series, there was a tie-in radio show called Lucky Channel, which would turn into a segment at the end of each episode of the anime. Knowing all of this, I think that what the anime series was going for was a cross between the style of a four-panel comedy manga adaptation, and that of a more free-form radio program–wherein the characters could engage in longer, more detailed conversations, as opposed to just setups and punchlines. In a way, I’d even say that the series was ahead of its time with this idea, and I’m surprised that another big series hasn’t come along to try and deliver on that premise in an even bigger way.

Between the hyperactive opening title sequence, the perhaps overly ambitious episode structure, the bizarre Lucky Channel segment, and the bit wherein the characters are overheard performing karaoke in lieu of an ending theme, the first episode of Lucky Star was definitely nothing short on ideas; and a lot of people continued with the series at the time out of sheer curiosity over where it was planning to go with those ideas. For me personally, I was pretty new to the whole slice-of-life genre at the time, and was wowed enough by the cute designs and vibrantly well-chosen color palette that I was on board for the ride. It took a while for me to really get into the series myself–to the effect of watching the entire thing twice before considering myself a fan–but I definitely think that if something like this dropped today, I’d be intrigued by its ballsiness right from the get-go.

Glancing over the stuff that I’ve been getting out of this genre over the last couple of years really makes it sink in just how inventive Lucky Star really was when I look back on it today. After rewatching the first episode for the sake of writing this video, I immediately found myself wanting to marathon the series all over again, even more so than I did for Haruhi or Baccano. That whole scene where Kagamin feels like she’s in hell listening to the aimless small talk between Tsukasa and Miyuki has more self-awareness to it than anything that I’ve seen in the current season’s moe offerings, and I feel a burning need for that kind of quality right now.

By this point, I really hope I’ve made the case that a great show is usually recognizable from the very beginning. Even if the first episode might be a little bit confusing, or might not necessarily be indicative of how good the series will eventually be, it usually makes for a great showcase of the show’s core essence, and gets you in the right mindset for approaching what will come later. In the next video I’d like to present the flipside of the coin–a first episode which raises all of the warning flags that what I’m about to watch is probably going to suck–even if those flags aren’t immediately obvious to most viewers. Stick around on my channel if you want to see that, and consider supporting me via patreon if you want to help these videos to get made. Check out my podcast if you can’t get enough of my voice, and follow my vlogging channel for a frankly disturbing frequency of content. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

Over the last two videos, I’ve spent forty-five minutes or so playing defense for some relatively unpopular opening episodes to some widely-acclaimed anime series; under the premise that I don’t believe there’s ever been a great anime which started on a bad first episode (other than Gintama). What I haven’t really addressed, however, is the root cause of why these first episodes didn’t click for those people who failed to recognize their greatness on the initial viewing. There may be any number of factors which play into these reactions on a case-by-case basis, but if I were to boil it down to the one prevailing element which I think blinds a lot of people to recognizing the quality of a series from the start, it would be the premise. You’ll notice that the common thread in all of the episodes that I’ve talked about so far is that the premise was either unclear, or seemingly inane–and I think that this is where the whole idea of the three-episode test comes from; because that’s about how long it sometimes takes to figure out a show’s premise.

But if you were to ask me what the absolute least important factor is in determining whether a show is likely going to be great or terrible, it would be the premise. Not only has it been proven time and again that any premise can be made interesting if it’s executed well enough; but also that no matter how good a premise might seem, it can make for a terrible series if executed poorly.

Some of the best anime ever made have had some incredibly weak and boring premises. His and Her Circumstances is a high school romantic comedy about two really smart kids who start dating; that premise tells you absolutely nothing about the show’s quality–but watching the show tells you that it’s one of the most impeccably directed and written romantic comedies of all time. Ping Pong is a show about high school Ping Pong; you’d have no reason to believe that it was any different from any other high school sports anime if you didn’t watch it. Meanwhile, Aldnoah.Zero is about a war between the citizens of Earth, and the descendents of a group who colonized Mars–which sounds pretty cool; but the show is a bunch of dogshit, for reasons that were pretty apparent right from the first episode if you were paying attention. Go watch Turn A Gundam instead. Sources.

The thing about premise is that it makes for really good marketing–especially if it can be understood immediately. I don’t think it’s at all surprising that three of the most popular anime of the past decade: Death Note, Sword Art Online, and Attack On Titan, each have an incredibly striking premise which is made clear from the very first episode. Of course, the execution of the premise in each of these cases varies wildly–and one of these shows is probably the worst popular anime series of all time.

In retrospect, it’s a lot easier to notice that the first episode of Sword Art Online dedicates nearly ten minutes to an exposition scene between a big floating cloaked dude and a bunch of gormless noobs who are just standing around the whole time–and that this was probably indicative of what most of the show was going to be. At the time, however, the premise of a survival game set inside of a MMORPG was such a cool idea that I can’t blame anyone for thinking it would probably be awesome. That, of course, is why I’m here: to help you to recognize the signs of poor execution before you get hooked into a show that’s going to drag you through the depths of boredom and bullshit for 53 goddamn episodes.

So to start with, let’s take a look at a show with an immediately striking premise, and one of the worst opening episodes that I’ve ever seen: GATE. The premise of this series is that a gate opens up in the middle of Tokyo which leads to a world of classical swords and sorcery–and the armies of that world end up going to war against Japan’s self defense force. Right away, a premise this batshit crazy is bound to turn some heads and to excite the imagination. How many wizards does it take to shoot down a helicopter? Can a tank hold its own against a gigantic dragon? Just how many dudes in armor can one turret mow through? These are questions which man has toiled with for decades! You might think of the possibilities of large-scale tactical battles involving the logistics of complex magic systems and supernatural terrain effects against the power of modern technological might; or maybe dream about the idea of a fleshed out set of fictional government factions trying to interact and come to terms with the real ones that exist in our world. It’s the kind of premise which really gets you wanting to see where the writer might go with it.

If you’re anything like me, then those hopes carried you about eight minutes into the first episode, before it was pretty clear that the execution of this narrative would be lackluster at best.

The first fifty seconds don’t seem so bad, as a cold open teases at the hilarious premise we’re all waiting for–a horde of fantasy creatures facing off against a bunch of military dudes with assault weapons. The visual aesthetic is about as perfectly generic as it could possibly be, but at least it seems to be going right for the jugular on putting its campy premise front and center.

Then the opening theme starts up, and the part of your brain that remembers seeing the word “light novel” next to the picture of the show on anichart starts groaning. Mother’s Basement made an entire video about how interchangeable the godawful Akeboshi Rockets openings are, so I won’t get too into that; but then we get our parade of equally interchangeable cute girls with candy-colored hair, and the illusions of a possibly gritty military or political drama start slowly wafting towards the window. The rest of the OP plays out like some weird combination of a cheesy military recruitment ad and a Sword Art Online trailer. See if you can spot the split second of hideous CG dragon spliced in there as a subliminal warning.

Once the OP is over, we’re taken to this weird bit wherein a narrator introduces us to the main character as an otaku who works to support his hobby. At this point, I’ve got sirens going off in my head about where this is going. I’ve seen approximately sixty thousand different anime shows about self-defined otaku being overly adamant in their hobbies; and more often than not, I see those characters being defined entirely by the fact that they are an otaku and nothing else. The fact that this show immediately hammers us over the head with the fact that this guy is an otaku, only makes that fear more prominent. He also just kinda seems like a lazy, stupid asshole, bragging about how his hobby takes precedence over his job.

We’re then told that it’s 11:30 on a Saturday for no particular reason, before being shown around a very bright and sunny Tokyo, populated by jarring CG pedestrians, weird rotating camera angles, a totally random shot of a dropped ice cream cone with a gross lens flare in the corner, and, finally, a little girl so comically, cartoonishly, generically adorable that my immediate thought was, “what kind of terrible shit is gonna happen to her?” Just for the hell of it, some of these shots have a random, jarring and hideous split screen applied to them for no discernable reason. I have random places in Tokyo, or really what the hell the point is of any of this. no idea if all of these

When we finally reconvene with our protagonist, he has become determined to make me hate him as much as possible by having the single most boring and cliched imagination of all time. What perplexes me the most about this scene, is that the point of it is obviously to introduce us to the fact that this guy is an otaku who escapes from reality by projecting himself into his generic fantasy cell phone game–but if they were going to have a scene like this, then what the hell was the necessity of outright telling us that the main character was an otaku just a minute ago? As generic as this imaginary segment is, it’s easily a more natural way of getting us into the character’s head then just having him state the fact that he’s an otaku directly to the camera. At this point, it seems kind of redundant to include a scene like this–and the fact that it’s awkwardly paced in such a way that it feels way longer than it actually is only makes it that much weirder.

The pacing and editing of this episode, and of the show in general, is really the thing that bothers me the most about it–even beyond all of the plot and characterization and presentation stuff that I’m going to talk about. Almost every shot in this episode seems to linger just a little bit longer than it needs to–and as a result it feels unbearably slow and weirdly quiet. The fact that everything drags on in this painful and ugly way had a lot to do with why I made it so little distance into the episode the first time through, because it’s not the kind of problem that I could imagine just going away as the series goes on. Just as the directing style of Steins;Gate immediately intrigued me to that show’s unique atmosphere and tone, the directing style of Gate immediately made me want to locate the nearest kitchen utensil that I could use to gouge my eyes out.

Next we learn that this show takes place in a world wherein perfectly generic character designs can be popular enough to have ads on the sides of buses. I know that might be the most pedantic complaint I’ve ever made, but I have a lot of respect for a show that goes the extra mile in making the in-universe fiction actually believable. To go back to Steins;Gate once again, those little Oopa toys are something that I could easily imagine people actually collecting, because they’re unique and adorable. I don’t think that modern gamers are going to be wowed by monster designs which look like they’re deliberately made to convey the idea of a generic video game. I digress.

Around this point is where the editing really starts to lose me. We keep arbitrarily cutting back and forth between the place where the gate is starting to appear, and the place where our main character is getting off the train, with absolutely no sense of distance between them. Maybe if I could read these road signs and had a better knowledge of the layout of Tokyo, then I could tell how close the main guy is to where the action is gearing up; but as it stands I have no reason to even think that he’s heading in that direction, except that it makes the most dramatic sense.

If things didn’t feel random and disconnected enough already, there’s then a cut wherein the main guy is on an escalator, and then it cuts to black, and then suddenly he’s on the ground with an injury on his head. It’s quickly revealed that he hit his head on a pillar, but the first time I saw this episode, the sudden jump from the escalator to wherever this shot takes place was so jarring that I legitimately wasn’t sure what just happened. The moment is timed like a punchline, but it has no setup–it comes out of nowhere at a moment when we couldn’t even logically expect it, which elicits nothing but confusion. The weird timing of the guy’s groans as he lays on the floor seizing out just make it feel all the more gross and wrong. Then it cuts to some cinematic shots of the three cute girls from the opening, and the only way you can possibly know that the main character is supposed to be “seeing” these shots, is that we hear his voice offering reactions. I really can’t tell if these are supposed to be like visions that are being beamed into his brain or what the hell they might be, because it just looks like the OP started playing out of nowhere.

Rounding off this bit, a random guy comes to make sure that the main dude is okay, and, recognizing the otaku bullshit stickered onto his phone, asks if he’s heading to the doujin event; to which the main guy proudly acknowledges that he is. Once again, I feel like this moment is trying to tell us something which was already spelled out in that opening piece of narration. If you pulled that part out, then it would seem like this episode is wordlessly building up to the idea that this dude is an otaku–but since we were already told that at the start, the entire thing feels about as redundant as this sentence is to this video.

Over the course of the next minute or so, the tone of this episode becomes completely incomprehensible. I’m going to make the case for it now, but if you have the time, I would love it if you went and watched this scene for yourself and then tried to describe to yourself what the tone of the scene is supposed to be before I can influence your opinion of it; because I really am not sure that it’s doable. And I’m not just recommending that because I want you to sign up for a crunchyroll account by using my promo code and making me five bucks, but I certainly think it’d be cool of you to do that if you haven’t already.

So a bunch of crazy monsters and dudes with spears come barrelling into Tokyo. The scene is brightly lit with the same flat, daytime look that the show has had all along–so maybe it’s gonna go for something like, “horrifying atrocities in broad daylight.” But then we get all these really goofy shots of monsters posing and yelling, with action lines all over the place, and people with silly expressions on their faces while they run away. The monsters definitely seem to be killing people, though, even if the camera keeps cutting away before we see anything, so is this supposed to be dark, or funny, or what?

When the main guy notices that something bad is going on, he yells about how it might interfere with his doujin event, which obviously seems like a joke–but then with total seriousness, he picks up a knife and violently gores a guy. It’s not like they’re playing the viscera of this murder against the goofiness of the characters, either, because everything has this same flat directing and emotionless shot composition that doesn’t communicate anything.

I don’t think I need to remind you of how Steins;Gate made the middle of Tokyo in broad daylight feel disturbing and hazy through just clever use of color and shot compositions–but for a comparison to a show that I think was going for a similar tone and actually worked, let’s look at the first episode of Highschool of the Dead.

The opening scene of this episode is set in broad daylight, and features a dichotomy between the goofiness of a bunch of highschool girls in uniforms with giant tits flopping around, and the very serious threat of zombie action. The camera work here is kinetic and full of energy, with all kinds of unique perspective shots and visceral moments of violence; but more importantly than that, the way that the characters move and emote gives the imagery a palpable sense of urgency. Even though this situation is hilarious to us as viewers, it’s clear that this is legitimately terrifying and serious for the characters–which makes it tense and exciting.

There’s a shot in Gate wherein a bunch of terrified pedestrians are piling into the imperial palace while escaping from the attackers, and their facial expressions are like if they’d just slipped on a banana peel in a comedy scene. Compare that against the looks of utter terror on the faces of the students being attacked by zombies in Highschool of the Dead, and the depth of difference in the skills of these production teams to create a recognizable tone becomes apparent.

This was about where I stopped watching Gate when the show first came out. I could go on and on about all the little weird things, like those terrible-looking effects that they slapped onto the dust clouds, or how awkward it looks when the main guy has that dude in a headlock and the guy just doesn’t even seem to be moving, or how it keeps telling us what time it is for no discernible reason, but we could be here all day at that rate. The point is that at this moment, I realized that there was no way that I’d be willing to sit through an entire show with this look and feel–this awkward pacing, this indecipherable cinematography, and this obnoxious main character. Even if it somehow turned out that the rest of the series had a surprisingly interesting story and great writing, I think I would’ve been pretty comfortable forgoing the anime series in favor of the need be, just so I wouldn’t have to put up with this godawful presentation.

Of course, it wouldn’t really help my point that you can’t have a series that starts out bad and then gets good if it turned out that this show did get good; so I eventually watched more of it for the sake of argument, and it went about as well as I expected. Aside from the doubts which I was given by the scenes that I’ve talked about already, the rest of that first episode showed a lot manga if more of what would be wrong with the show in the long run. Let’s try and get through it .

When the JSDF finally shows up to take care of the invading army, they pretty much just mow them all down without a fight. We probably could’ve imagined that this would happen with the foot soldiers, but all these monsters and dragons are instantly demystified as the soldiers make child’s play out of wasting them. The case could be made that this was just a scout group or something, and that they weren’t fighting on their own turf, and that maybe there’s all kinds of other crazy shit waiting beyond the gate; but then in episode 2 they go into the gate and mow down 100,000 men worth of fantasy armies, and then in episode 3 they fend off a greater dragon–so this is pretty much just par for the course.

If the show had any intentions of involving some kind of interesting fantasy tactics, then it probably would’ve shown some of that in this episode to butter us up–but it didn’t, because it’s really just a show about making the JSDF look like overpowered badasses. You know, funnily enough, there was a 1979 live action film called Sengoku Jietai, or G.I Samurai, wherein a JSDF force got teleported into the sengoku era and summarily got their balls rocked by samurai tactics. They even remade it into another film and a manga adaptation in 2005, called Samurai Commando: Mission 1549. I don’t know why I know these things.

Over the course of this episode, we repeatedly see the main guy exhibiting exemplary military prowess, as well as gazing affectionately at this loli girl, clueing us into the idea that he’s got a big soft heart underneath that dumbass otaku exterior. Considering how many times this episode goes out of its way to reiterate both the idea that the main character is an otaku who cares more about his hobby than his work, as well as the idea that he’s actually a natural at his job and totally cares about people, I began to suspect that these were probably his only defining character traits, and that the show was going to remind me of them over and over again ad nauseum without adding anything new to his personality. I was right.

When the rest of the episode isn’t continuing to reiterate the points that it’s already made, it’s just flat-out wasting time. There’s almost an entire minute dedicated to a gay joke, wherein the joke is that the main guy is getting too physical with this other guy, and therefore is making him uncomfortable because he’s not gay. Riveting stuff. Later on, there’s about a minute of just gratuitous shots of tanks driving through the gate, set to completely unfitting epic music. There is no point to this scene other than to show off the tanks; but I guess that’s a pretty good indicator of the show’s priorities, considering the massive amounts of each episode which are seriously dedicated to dicking around in military vehicles. The only thing this episode doesn’t prepare you for is all the cute girls and fanservice dicking around yet to come; oh, and also that the slight subtext of nationalism is eventually going to blossom into full-blown main-text insane jingoism.

Now look, I know that a lot of people like Gate, and that they probably don’t care about none of this shit. I think for most viewers, the episode probably didn’t really start until the main character guy stabbed that soldier dude–and in that same moment, they were completely sold on everything else; and that’s fine. The people who liked this show probably didn’t even think that this episode was bad, unless they only liked it because of some specific character or plot moment that came later on. I’m a lot more of a complete package guy, myself–if my entire channel hasn’t made that obvious. Not only am I at risk in that using this episode as an example might alienate a lot of this video’s audience, but considering my reputation for not liking anything that A-1 Pictures has put out in half a decade, there’s probably already a comment on this video about how I went into this episode expecting to hate it because I’m biased and my videos aren’t very objective and I can’t believe you spent 15 minutes just reviewing the first episode of Gate I thought this video was about something other than what it’s obviously about, et cetera. So for the sake of argument, let’s also take a look at what I thought was one of the worst opening episodes of the Spring 2016 anime season–which just happened to come from the show that I was actually the most excited for going into it: Joker Game.

When it comes to the seasonal chart test, Joker Game passed with flying colors. The premise was on point: a historical spy thriller set on the cusp of World War 2–something I’ve never seen in anime before, and which I could easily imagine being badass. The character designs are sleek and stylish, yet realistic and serious, giving the impression that maybe this was going to be a fairly ambitious, gritty, and adult-oriented product. Studio Production IG has always been setting the high watermark for animation quality, with a history of having produced some of the best high-concept, mature anime in existence: from Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh, and Psycho-Pass, to Eden of the East, Usagi Drop, Seirei no Moribito, and Real Drive. Even when they handle shounen and shoujo manga adaptations, they bring some of the best production design is modern anime to the table, as with Haikyuu, Kimi ni Todoke, and Kuroko no Basuke.

None of that is to say that Production IG haven’t produced their fair share of clunkers over the years, like Blood-C–but when I look at a show with visuals like this and a plot description like that being made by this studio, then I’ve got to be a little bit excited. I wasn’t familiar with any of the director’s past work, and the writer has an even split of shows that I like and dislike, so those were all a gamble; but the cast list even included a number of my favorite actors, such as Takahiro Sakurai, Tomokazu Seki, and Kazuya Nakai. This one really looked like a winner.

The earliest cause for concern was the very first line of dialog–spoken in English by an American character with a voice actor who is obviously Japanese. I don’t want to be too harsh on this point, because it’s very common practice in anime, and the actor that they found has better English pronunciation than the vast majority do; I could understand everything that he was saying, even with the goofy vocabulary choices–but it was pretty obvious when he switched over to his foreigner voice for the Japanese lines that he’s definitely not an American guy speaking Japanese. It’s not that I think this is a huge knock against the show, but if this was going to be a seriously all-out production, like the kinds that Production IG have been known to pull in the past, then they would’ve actually hired an American actor for this role. From this point, it’s easy to conclude that this ain’t gonna be no Ghost in the Shell–or even no Eden of the East.

The opening song and video are pretty fun, and have that jazzy vibe with period-appropriate iconography, but there obviously isn’t nearly the level of vision here that we got in something like the Baccano opening. Whereas that show went for an actual jazz song, and one of the most brilliantly-edited character introduction sequences ever conceived, this one is really just a pop song with a bit of jazzy-sounding instrumentation involved, and a video comprised more of overdone visual effects than actual character. Again, this isn’t so much to say that this is a bad opening theme, as it is to say that it doesn’t speak to the kind of vision that you’d find in any of the OPs of the first four shows which I talked about in this series.

Our first dialog scene between this episode’s important characters presents a very immediate and straightforward ideological conflict–this guy is a spy, and this guy thinks that spying is a cowardly business. Coming from a show that’s about spies, it’s kind of jarring to have a our first conflict spelled out in such clear terms–but then it would be possible to think that this is a deliberate misdirect–which kind of defeats the point of a misdirect when you can see it coming. Not that it matters because it’s not a misdirect–this show is just always embarrassingly hamfisted about its messages, and the entire episode is going to be like this.

Over the next few minutes, we receive an exposition dump explaining the nature of this spy organization, concluding with an introduction to our nine-man spy team. When I first watched this episode, I was immediately struck by how strange it was that all nine spies apparently underwent the same training, all having their identities removed and their minds imbued with the exact same skillset, and that all of them basically look the exact same aside from minor differences in height, hair, and, hilariously enough, the hues of their suits. Immediately following this introduction, we see all of the spies moving in a cluster–and over the course of this episode and the next, we only ever see them operating as a group, as if they were some kind of hivemind.

This would all be well and fine, but it really clashes with the presentation of the characters in the OP, and later in the entire structure of the show, as nine different distinct cool guys with their own names. All of the spies are completely interchangeable, with personalities that do not extend beyond “is a spy.” We’ll get to this scene in a minute, but the moment that really drove home to me that this show was never going to characterize these spies at all, was when all of them laughed at the same time for the same reason. It’s one thing for all of them to have to same skillset, but at that point, they were all just basically the same guy.

After a few more minutes of rattling off exposition and really hammering in the idea that this military guy thinks that spies are dumb and weird, we finally arrive at what I would consider to be one of the most laughably badly-handled scenes in anime this year: the joker game itself. The stage is set when the military guy finds the spies all playing poker down by a bar, and he decides to join them. What follows is several minutes of the least dramatic poker montage I’ve ever seen.

We don’t really see enough of the game to follow it properly, so it’s not engaging on the level of watching a tense poker match; we don’t get enough sense of what the characters are feeling, or what kind of tactics they’re using, so it’s not engaging on the level of human drama; and most of it consists of lifeless panning shots of everyone just kinda playing the game, while unfittingly energetic music plays over it, so it’s not engaging on the level of entertainment. The only thing worth getting out of this scene is the result–that the military dude lost. You could just as easily have smash cut from the moment that he decided to play the game, to the moment that the last of his chips were being taken from him, and you would lose absolutely nothing in the narrative.

Here’s where it gets idiotic: as the military guy is leaving the room, one of the spies informs him that what he lost wasn’t really the poker game, as everyone else in the room was cheating–but the joker game, which is a chaotic roundabout of signalling, wherein the spies try to form alliances and dupe one-another until achieving victory. As a viewer, you probably figured that out, since it’s a show about a bunch of fucking spies playing a game which is already about duplicity in the first place; but the real icing on the cake is when one of the spies says that it’s “just like international politics,” because I don’t even know what a metaphor is.

First, let’s consider the actual logic of this joker game. If the game was actually a complex battle between all of the spies at the table, then why is the military guy the only one who lost? How much more interesting would it have been if he had actually won, only to learn that the reason he won is because some of the spies were working in his favor, in an evolving competition against one-another? Maybe through that, we could even get the idea that there’s a gradient in skill among the spies–or that some of them may have fucked up along the way, leading to their loss. The joker game which the spies are describing could actually have been massively interesting–but what actually seems to have happened is just that one guy was reading the military dude’s cards, and then everyone collectively fucked him over, even though he wasn’t even competing.

Next, let’s consider the presentation of this joker game. During the game, we see a few characters fumbling around with objects, which we could possibly assume was some kind of signaling. In the middle of the spy’s explanation of the game, we are then shown a bunch of other signals which apparently were used during the game, which weren’t even shown to us, so we couldn’t have ever assumed that those signals were happening while the game was being played. Even at this point, we are not invited to any context as to what any of these signals actually mean–we are only shown the fact that signalling was happening.

Now imagine if this scene had been written and directed in such a way that we could’ve watched the characters actually acting out the joker game, and then tried to pick up on who was doing what. We could try and decipher the signals ourselves, and to figure out who is on what side and what they’re trying to accomplish. It wouldn’t even have been difficult to clue the viewer into what was going on even without explaining the concept of the joker game to us first; we already know that these characters are spies, and that poker is a game about duplicity, so we would probably as would catch on immediately that something was going on, and then try to decode it for ourselves learning the truth that we’ve been aching for along the way. Instead, we get an explanation of the the scene went along. Then, when the characters finally explained what each of them was up to, we either experience the satisfaction of having our suspicions confirmed, or the satisfaction of incredibly obvious fact that spies are sneaky. Riveting stuff.

Once the game is over, the leader of the spies comes into the room and launches into what I can only describe as an explanation of what each of the characters metaphorically represents. He basically tells the main character that his values are representative of the attitude of Japan in the world of international politics over the last few years, and how the spies represent the nation’s realization of the joker game that they’ve been made a part of. I can’t help but feel like there were plenty of ways that this episode could have been written which made us realize for ourselves that the military guy was supposed to be an everyman representation of Japan’s military attitude, but instead the leader of the spies very literally spells it out. Aside from having no faith whatsoever in the viewer’s intelligence, the worst part about this entire scene is that it’s just fucking boring. It’s nothing but obvious information being relayed to the viewer by characters who are just sitting and standing around in a room doing nothing.

The rest of the episode is a pretty straightforward setup for a cliffhanger ending, leading into the joker game that the main guy will have to stake his life against in the next episode. You don’t need to watch it, because you can write the thing in your head: the main guy is gonna use what he’s learned so far to get himself out of this predicament and come to understand the spies. The end.

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if I saw someone claiming that Joker Game was a perfect candidate for the three-episode test, because the real nature of its premise only becomes apparent in the third episode. Whereas the first two are mostly about framing this ideological conflict between Japan’s moral attitude of the time, and the tactics by which they would try to become a world power from there on out as a backdrop for the setting, the other episodes each focus on one spy at a time in episodic thriller scenarios all around the world.

If you watch any further, though, as I did, you’ll find that every single episode suffers from the exact same problem in their writing and presentation. The morals are always hamfisted, the plot twists never have any proper setup and just feel pointless and out of nowhere, the characters never have any personality, and the cinematography is always woefully flat, as characters sit around dumping uninteresting exposition on one-another for minutes on end. If you had the same problems with this episode that I did, then you will not enjoy the rest of Joker Game.

When you stop to think about it, it doesn’t make sense that any creative person worth their salt would let their series get off to a bad start. The opening act of a story is by far the most important in establishing its nature and hooking in the audience–and every professional writer and director is very, very acutely aware of that. You’re not going to find someone out there who’s goal in creating a story is to have people say that it “gets good later.” Not every creative project is going to come out good, and some of them may run into problems when they get rolling, but presenting a good start to a series is bound to be the top priority–especially of any producer who’s working with an expensive, mass-marked property like a TV show. Yes, it’s very possible for a series to “hit it’s stride” as it goes along–and in some incredibly rare cases, it’s possible that something might change so fundamentally between the first episode and the rest of the show that maybe in some freak accident, the first episode isn’t all that great. But I really don’t think it’s even slightly common for a great show not to display a lot of it’s greatness right from the very beginning, or for a show which starts off with lots of huge, obvious problems to suddenly become amazing at some point.

I know that a lot of what I’ve talked about here won’t have applicability to a lot of you in the audience. To some of you, watching the first three episodes of everything seems like an easy enough tradeoff to making sure that it’s going to be a good show–so why not do it? Well, the reason I don’t do it is that I know that there are hundreds and hundreds of excellent, worthwhile anime out there in existence; and I want to watch them all. Even though it’s my job to watch and talk about anime, I don’t have unlimited time to consume everything that I want to see, and I certainly don’t want to be wasting my time on a bunch of bullshit instead. I don’t trust anyone else’s opinions enough to only watch the consensus masterpieces, so the only way I can be sure that I’m gonna see everything I’ll like, is to watch absolutely everything–and if it’s possible to figure out whether I’m going to like a show before the first episode is even over, then that’s going to help a lot in saving me time in the long run.

It’s not like every show is clear-cut great or terrible right from the start–there’s a lot of shows out there which seem like they could go either way at first, and I might spend a little more time with them to see how it goes. But if a show has an episode that’s shitty enough that I can’t imagine myself liking it later, then I’m not going to sit through another two episodes because the collective anime fandom has arbitrarily concluded that that’s about how long it takes to understand the least indicative aspect of a show’s quality–it’s premise.

I hope that this series of videos has been helpful for those of you who wanted a better way of identifying a show’s quality from earlier on–and gratifying for those of you who already felt that way about watching new shows. If it was, and you’d like to help me in bringing you more content like this, then consider supporting me on patreon to keep the channel going. Subscribe to my podcast, let’s play, and vlogging channels if you want to hear my voice so much that it plays in your sleep; and as always, thanks again for watching; I’ll see you in the next one.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

So I just finished watching Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, and it was a preeeetty good time; I’d give it a six… hundred and seventy five, out of a thousand.

I can’t say it had much in the way of an interesting story or characters, or that much of it made a whole lot of sense–but that’s kind of okay, ‘cause it had a lot of other stuff going for it: Heart-stoppingly beautiful character designs by Haruhiko Mikimoto animated with a level of detail that his designs would’ve gotten in a late-80s OVA series, fantastically choreographed action scenes–lots of stuff that’s just straight-up badass on a conceptual level. Like, I don’t really need any context to know that a guy bolting huge pieces of iron onto his chest while screaming over epic Hiroyuki Sawano music is awesome; it’s pretty fucking awesome just by itself.

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress is like an artbook. There’s countless individual frames of Mumei’s face just looking adorable that I wanna print out and pin up on my wall, and just stare at for an amount of time which long exceeds my memory of even having seen the show.

I can easily understand why a lot of people wouldn’t like the show if those aren’t the kinds of things that they value. If Mumei’s opening scene didn’t make you want to dedicate your life to following her, or if the prospect of super-powered human-zombie hybrids and samurai fighting against giant zombies with swords doesn’t excite you then, well, you might need to look somewhere else.

What does confuse me, however, is the huge negative reaction that I’ve been seeing to this show’s trajectory. Namely, a lot of people claiming that, for one or more of any myriad reasons, the show got dumb. That’s where you lost me.

Kabaneri was always dumb. The premise is dumb and makes no sense, the story and characters are openly, unabashedly cliche, the monsters, the weapons, everything is dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb and stupid. If your problem with this show is that it got dumb, then all I have to ask is: what the hell did you expect?

So the show is set in samurai times, but on the cusp of an industrial revolution, so we’ve got trains and guns, and also steampunk stuff–cause nothing looks cooler and more satisfying in animation than huge puffs of steam billowing out of weapons. There’s a zombie apocalypse, but the zombies are super strong, and they’ve got glowing weak spots protected by an iron cage. Why does that make any sense? Because, as I just said, nothing looks cooler than a huge amount of steam billowing out of a weapon–especially if every shot has be by fired at point-blank range. This is what they mean when TV Tropes people invoke the, “rule of cool;” the rules of this universe are literally defined by what will look the coolest in animation.

I’m willing to bet there was a production meeting for this show where someone said, “we want there to be lots of big explosions of blood and gore. What can you think of which would create the biggest, most satisfying explosion of blood and gore?” “Well, how about driving a massive fucking train through a horde of zombies?” “Yeah, that works.”

“We also wanna have people fighting the zombies up close and personal, but there’s a limit to what we can do if those people are bound by the laws of physics and logic.” “Well, if we introduce a race of super-powered zombie people, then we can pretty much animate whatever our imaginations can conjure.” “Yeah, that works too.”

Now, I’m not saying that Kabaneri couldn’t have possibly had a better story or more interesting characters and still have been exactly as badass as it was–I mean, you can look at anything Gainax has ever made and see that the rule of cool can be paired exquisitely with excellent storytelling; but I do have to wonder how anyone made it three episodes into this show and thought that it had any priorities other than animating cool shit. By the end of Gurren Lagann episode three, Kamina had already been through a whole character arc and Simon was balls deep into one. By the end of Kill la Kill episode three, Ryuko and Satsuki were in the midst of a big-deal ideological conflict. By the end of Kabaneri episode three, we were finding out that the main characters have to drink human blood in order to keep their powers going, and Mumei was stabbing a pregnant woman to death because her unborn baby was infected with a zombie virus. The priorities were pretty different.

I don’t think it’s wrong to dislike Kabaneri for the fact that its story and characters are dumb, and I don’t think it’s wrong to want every show to have some depth and intrigue to it, and to hope that what you’re getting is going to be more like Brotherhood and less like Akame ga Kill. But I really do have to wonder if a lot of audiences are going into stuff with way too high of expectations and missing the forest for the trees when it comes to a show like this.

When the first episode of Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress came out, my biggest concern was the question of how they were going to keep this show interesting. When you’ve got a show that seems to be banking everything on over-the-top action sequences and rule-of-cool setting design, then there’s really only two ways you can keep it hyped up over the course of the show; either you can continually up the ante on each action scene, making every scenario even crazier and more exciting than the last; or you can try to have a plot with some emotional stakes to it which keeps the viewer invested in the characters.

My biggest fear with Kabaneri was that it was going to try and go for the latter, because as of episode one, I really didn’t think the show could pull that off. There just wasn’t enough depth to the setting or characters that I could imagine a story comprised of anything other than boring, hammy political conflicts and random asspulls–which is what I felt like I got out of Attack on Titan. If the narrative wasn’t going to be interesting either way, then trying to force a narrative into the show was just going to make it boring. Better then to focus on what the show does well, and just have lots of kick ass actions scenes and keep Mumei on screen for as long as possible.

For the first half and some change, that’s exactly what I got–and it was good. Every episode would introduce some new, crazy facet of the setting in order to make the action even more intense than before. Now the kabane can use weapons and have higher resistance to bullets! Now they can morph into giant kabane monster balls that you have to fight with a canon! Now the kabaneri can be injected with special blood that makes them turn into super-monsters which can apparently shoot laser beams when they’re in trouble!

And I mean, the question I have to posit to anyone who doesn’t approve of these things is: why not? Do we really need a justification for why a virus that gives people superpowers and makes them live off of blood and is only limited by wearing something around their neck can also be turned into a super-virus that makes it so they can shoot lasers? Can it really be called a logical leap when nothing about it was logical in the first place?

The last five episodes inevitably introduced a dramatic plotline to the series–and I say inevitably for several reasons. Firstly, that there was no way they were going to keep up the obscene level of animation quality of those first few episodes for the entire show. If they weren’t going to be able to animate a constantly escalating level of threat for twelve whole episodes, then inevitably there would need to be a conflict which can be communicated through dialog. Secondly, that the show was going to need some kind of ending. Maybe it would’ve been cooler if they found some way to actually eliminate all of the kabane and really ramped up the action stakes to the maximum, and if this was One Punch Man, then that’s exactly what would’ve happened. Kabaneri was a relatively small-scale story from start to finish, and the second half didn’t have nearly the production polish that the first half did, so instead we got a conflict which was introduced so it could be resolved.

I get why people don’t like this. Biba was a weird villain with motivations that weren’t spelled out clearly enough to completely make sense, and it’s a little too obvious that his entire existence is just so that the series can have an antagonist that can give Ikoma a girl to save and a bad guy to kill. The second half of Kabaneri isn’t as good as the first half; but, again, it seems to me like all of this stuff was inevitable.

As soon as we learned about Mumei’s brother and the fact that she’d never been bitten by the kabane before, and then saw her recognizing the girl at the heart of the black cloud, the rest of the show was pretty much set in stone. Mumei’s brother was gonna be the antagonist, Mumei’s loyalty to him was going to be her downfall, his ideologies were going to clash with Ikoma as they both have different philosophies about how to reach the same goal, and Ikoma was going to have to save her after she got turned into a kabane monster. If you didn’t get all that by the time they introduced the idea of the white blood, then you might not have been paying attention.

None of this came out of nowhere. We didn’t know about the exact way that kabaneri transformation works until later into the show, because that’s when the characters who knew about it entered the story–but it’s not like it wasn’t obvious that this was going to be a major plot point from the second we heard about Mumei’s fear of being weak. We could probably figure out from the way that pretty much every military leader in this world seemed to be horribly corrupt aside from the one who’s a cute girl, that there was going to be some kind of major political power play going on later. Again, yes, Biba’s actual motivations and actions are pretty weird*, but I don’t think it would make a gigantic difference in what the show actually is if they’d been more clear.

*[Biba wanted to tear down the walls so that everyone would be forced to fight the kabane, instead of huddling up in order to protect those who couldn’t fight. His idea was “either you get strong and fight [the kabane] or you die.” They didn’t make that clear enough, but you can put it together pretty easily.

The reason he injected Ikoma with the white blood in the last ep was to weaken him. Biba was too much of a coward to use the black blood on himself, so instead he tried to make Ikoma human so that he could kill him. That’s why he tells Ikoma that he killed a coward afterwards.]

The second half of Kabaneri didn’t surprise or disappoint me, because I didn’t expect anything other than what I got. It’s not as good as the first half, but it’s not bad. It still has some pretty cool action scenes, ideas, and character moments. It was still a pretty good artbook in parts like where Ikoma makes his big transformation into like a half-Guyver and blasts an entire fucking train off the rails, or when Mumei turns into a giant Princess Mononoke thing. Of course, it could have been better–the first half could’ve been better–but it also could’ve been so, so, so much worse.

What bothers me about Kabaneri’s critical reception is neither the fact that a lot of people don’t like it, nor the fact that there’s a lot of elements to it which I think are worth celebrating; it’s mostly just the fact that people are acting so surprised that they didn’t get the next FMA: Brotherhood out of it. I feel like everyone has in their heads this mythical idea of the perfect anime that starts out hype and cool, and then develops a huge cast of memorable, lovable characters, and a winding narrative full of epic twists and reveals and emotional character moments, but also badass action scenes and hype, and it’s dark, but not grimdark, and funny, but not goofy, and it’s only just convoluted enough that you can kind of look past it–and I really think that we only got that show once, and we got it because it was a re-adaptation of a show which had already proven such a massive worldwide success that they would’ve been crazier not to make it all over again. And as much as I appreciate Brotherhood and how well it captures the seemingly worldwide shared idea of what a perfect adventure story should be, I also think there’s a million other kinds of stories which are maybe not so perfect, but are worth telling anyways.

Kabaneri was fine. It was dumb, but it wasn’t broken. It didn’t ask you to accept a plotline which was completely at ends with the rules of its own universe, or to enjoy watching your favorite character get sexually assaulted, or to sit through the same goddamn light novel trash that you’ve seen a hundred times before, or to buy into the logic of a scenario that literally doesn’t make any sense even in context. It’s a cool action show that doesn’t bore you to tears with too much rote dialog and convoluted bullshit–it just gets in, does what it needs to do, and gets out. It also has an actual American actor playing an American character who is fluent in both English and Japanese, and it didn’t even really need him; and that’s something which I can appreciate.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

A very commonly held belief amongst media critics is that the quality of narrative and character construction are what really matter in a story; and that aesthetic elements, such as visuals and music, are mere enhancements–window dressing to the core ideas of a work of art. Speaking for my personal taste, I can’t even really disagree with this notion–but I do think it’s far too hasty to espouse these values so loudly without questioning them. I mean, I am, myself, a writer–as are most critics. Is it much of a surprise that we value writing more than anything else when we do it professionally? Even if you drew a picture whose purpose was to critique art, a writer would come along and explain that image to other people who value language the most, in an attempt for our group to wrap our heads around it. I’ve written a lot about how Hideaki Anno doesn’t need to explain Evangelion–he already said what he had to say in pictures. I’m really just explaining the messages myself because a lot of us learn better through words; and the fact that I’m doing so at all gets away from the main point, which is already right there in the pictures themselves. If you looked at Evangelion, then the point was already communicated to you. If you didn’t understand it, then that says as much about you as it does about the work.

As a huge fan of illustrative art and music, there are countless ideas in my brain that I’ve never been able to express, because words will not express them–and words are my only expertise. I’ve never taken up drawing or composing to such a degree that I could express all the ideas that I have in those mediums–and that will torture me forever, because there simply are not words that can do those ideas justice. I could explain the logic behind my ideas until I’m blue in the face, but the ideas are not verbal, and therefore are not really being expressed.

Nevertheless, I can’t very well put a picture on screen and say: “you feel something? Good. You get it now.” I don’t think you’re watching my videos to hear that you should have gotten the point already–I’m supposed to explain the point–and so at best, I am a translator. If you know anything about translation–and as an anime fan, there’s a good chance that you do–then you know that there is no perfect translation, because different languages contain ideas that simply do not correlate to ideas in other languages. It took me a whole paragraph in my K-On video to try and get across the feeling of what Fuwa Fuwa Time means, but that paragraph still doesn’t quite mean the same thing as the phrase “Fuwa Fuwa Time”–itself a crossbreed of two different languages, composed that way because the words that comprise the phrase have no real cross-language parallel.

Am I breaking a few writing rules in this video so far? Good. Rules are an afterthought to expression. We come up with rules to figure out how the expression worked–what it did to make us feel what we felt–but those are merely justifications, not truths. Writing itself is aesthetic and has different meanings in how it’s presented. My Cowboy Bebop video gave a lot of people the feels specifically because of how it was delivered–and it was delivered that way because I felt that a rigid script wouldn’t communicate the emotions that I wanted it to in the way that a drunken, unscripted ramble would. Likewise, I can’t rightly communicate the idea that writing has an aesthetic, or that there are forms of art which can’t be explained in the straightforward use of language, while straightforwardly writing a script explaining everything in clear terms.

Still, again, I have to relate to you. My goal here is to prove a point, and so as much as I can prove it in one way, I also have to prove it in the way that feels “official” and “convincing” to the kind of person who likes their answers to come in the form of an analysis video. So let’s do that.

What does this image make you think about? What does it make you feel? The answers will be different for everyone, and you can feel free to pause the video and stare at it for a while if you want to form your own, but I’m going to explain what it makes me think about and feel:

The subject of this image is Lain Iwakura, protagonist of the 1998 cult-classic anime series, Serial Experiments Lain. Both in the context of the TV series itself, and among those who are aware of it, Lain is a powerful symbol, representing, literally, the Goddess of the Internet; someone who arrived at the logical conclusion of technological singularity, becoming omnipresent both in the Wired and, by extension–since the internet eventually becomes indistinguishable from reality–within the physical world.

Lain’s reputation within the show’s narrative was able to become synonymous with her reputation amongst fans because of the potency of the show’s presentation. It was released at a time when the internet was barely understood by most people, and came to be proven prophetic of what it would eventually become in many ways, giving the show survivability as an almost paranormal symbol of futurism. Lain herself is a very sympathetic character with a personality and struggles that many fans could relate to, and has an incredibly striking and memorable design–which has also made her a fairly popular character in her own right. Phrases which exist as memes within the show’s text, such as “let’s all love Lain,” eventually became memes in reality; and the idea of what Lain represents in that world leaked out into representing the exact same thing in real life.

Lain is a goddess of the internet not only because of what she does, but because of who she is. In terms of her personality, Lain is shy, standoffish, and hard to communicate with, seeming to have difficulty with understanding those around her. She escapes into the internet, wherein she develops a different, more outgoing persona, and ends up becoming powerful within that space in a way that those outside of it couldn’t understand. But with the inevitability of the fact that there really is no such thing as “outside the internet,” since the internet is really nothing more than a layer of our own world, her power eventually translates to power over the real world.

Now, knowing what we know about Lain, let’s return to the picture of her laying in bed, halfway lit and halfway buried in shadow, surrounded by stuffed animals. What I find most striking about this image, and about many of the images which artist Yoshitoshi ABe has drawn of this character, is the sensation of loneliness and anxiety. Lain is a character who spends most of her time alone, unable to form meaningful connections with people inside or outside of the internet, and there’s nothing which quite captures that sense of loneliness and emotional longing to me more than being awake in bed.

Being in bed most likely means that you aren’t doing anything. If you’re not sleeping, then it means you probably don’t know what to do with yourself. You’re trapped by yourself with your own thoughts, unable to force yourself to go to sleep and to escape the loneliness of reality, yet also unable to conjure the will to get out of bed and to go do something. Knowing that Lain is a high schooler, whose life is regimented around a schedule that probably puts her in bed when she isn’t really tired, and forces her to think about the next day of walking around confused and scared, wondering when the people around her are going to start becoming intelligible, really takes me back to some of my lowest points in high school and college–grappling with depression, anxiety, and perpetual sleeplessness.

Yoshitoshi ABe was my favorite artist for the majority of high school, and continues to be one of my alltime favorite character designers. The first artbook I ever bought was for Serial Experiments Lain, and I long considered her to be one of my favorite characters, for a cocktail of all the reasons stated so far. Because of that artbook, I’ve read ABe’s one-shot manga, The Nightmare of Fabrication, which presents a far more mentally unstable and paranoid image of the character than what was presented in the show–one who ends up dismantling the very same plushy which is sitting next to her in the image we’ve been talking about.

There’s something fundamentally haunting to me about the idea of this girl–a virtual goddess, revered and even worshipped by many–nonetheless laying in her bed after logging off, trapped by anxiety–nothing more than the scared child that she always was. Her being halfway draped in shadow only intensifies the idea of this duality, as harsh light and shadow contrasts are often used in the series itself to symbolize the idea that the internet is nothing more than a layer on top of the real world–as much a part of its existence as shadow is to light.

ABe nearly always drew Lain with very pained expressions–dark circles under her beautiful eyes which evoke some space between insomnia, insanity, and fragility. She has the face of someone who’s always right on the verge of slipping away–which is why the duality of her omnipresent nature is that much more fascinating. In the same way that a human being can have all the strength, power, and money in the world, and still die out of nowhere in an instant, there’s something chilling about the thought of a young, fragile girl, who is also basically god.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning that what I’ve been showing you all this time is not actually the original Yoshitoshi Abe illustration from the Lain artbook, but a modified version of it made by a fan for use as a wallpaper. It’s been cropped, flipped, and had the lighting altered, as well as photoshopped to include a different version of the floor. If you haven’t seen the original illustration, and found it strange all this time that there were other pictures of Lain on the floor, those are actually the four illustrations which were used on the show’s US DVD covers. The reason I chose to show this one is because it served as my desktop background for nearly two years, and as such has more significance to me than the original, because I’ve stared at it countless times. As for the reason that I chose that wallpaper, that would be pretty much everything I’ve said so far.

And that, my friends, was 1,038 words–slightly in excess of what a picture is supposedly worth, but then I’m sure whoever started that phrase didn’t realize that it only takes like five minutes to say a thousand words; not that I couldn’t have probably been a little more concise.

A lot of what I’ve just described was very personal, and probably didn’t relate to your experience of the image at all–at least not immediately, and especially if you didn’t have any context into the character. I think that this is more or less the case every single time that anyone talks about art, and that many of us are very quick to take it for granted that other people feel similarly to ourselves. In the same sense that the colors green and red mean little to the colorblind, a spear to a nomad might be a symbol of safety and the means by which food is gathered–while to a civilization it symbolizes war and death.

Much of art criticism seems to be dedicated to defining the lowest common denominator elements of what the largest number of people can relate to about a work, and then evaluating the work’s ability to incorporate those elements well. I find this to be the most boring form of criticism. The place for defining basic rules of art is in textbooks, encyclopedias, and classrooms. Journalism, when it comes to the realm of judging art, is always gonzo, and should be treated as such.

This is not to begrudge the short-form written review; but I do think that any critic who takes for granted that their audience is going to follow the same standards that they do–as well as any audience member who takes it for granted that a review is going to pander to their interests–is lazy. Critique is its own art form; and as an artist, a critic has a voice. In the same way that I have my favorite directors, musicians, illustrators, and writers, I have my favorite critics, because they are the ones that I relate to and glean insight from. It is not because of their ability to speak to the greatest shared experiences of humanity, but because of their ability to speak to me, personally.

I’m not sure if this video will mean much to someone who’s never seen any of my videos before, and I’m okay with that. I have plenty of videos that make for great hooks, and even a few that are so broad that they can probably be easily appreciated without digging any further. As an artist, though, I also have a vision that I’m hoping for my audience to understand, which is built upon by every piece that I produce. My goal is rarely to write a video which the audience already agrees with, or which reflects a stance that I expect to be broadly accepted–my goal, instead, is to be understood in my positions well enough that they can be applied to your own. I don’t want you to agree with me, I just want you to get something out of my videos that you can use for yourself.

I’m talking about all of this because in my video on Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, I insisted on referring to that show as an artbook, while extolling the virtues of its aesthetic strength and the show’s ability to connect with visceral emotions through music and pictures alone. I provided examples such as Ikoma’s transformation into a half-Guyver towards the end of the series, but in the name of maintaining an aesthetically brisk and fast-moving script to reflect the show’s pacing, I may have undersold it.

In Japanese media, a character having their hair cut off is a very common symbol for conquering some kind of emotional burden and re-emerging with newfound resolve as a butterfly from their hair’s cocoon. Speaking as someone who only gets his hair cut once every few years, I appreciate why this symbol works–long hair very literally weighs you down. In the first place, Ikoma’s design was meant to make him look like an outsider–he’s hidden behind long hair and glasses, has nerdy, obsessive interests, and no one ever listens to him–and then he gets turned into a monster and has the living shit kicked out of him by the very society which he’s trying to protect.

The character whose entire existence symbolizes the strict moral code of that society spends most of the early part of the series acting as Ikoma’s chief aggressor, only warming up to him after Ikoma proves himself in several big ways. This very same character is the one who offers both acceptance and faith in Ikoma during his darkest hour, inspiring him to re-emerge as a confident protector of his society, now sans his glasses and most of his hair.

Ikoma’s raised-hair appearance is badass in a way which is almost specific to late-80s and early-90s anime, when greased-up high-school gangsters were the in crowd of shounen protagonists. For an example of this as even more of a plot point, look at Parasyte–a manga from that time period recently adapted to animation–in which the main character starts off wearing glasses and looking average, but develops into a muscular badass with naturally sticking-up hair as a result of the powers granted to him by his alien host. Sound familiar?

It is no accident that this show would utilize the aesthetic sensibilities of 90s anime for a pivotal moment of characterization. The show’s character designer, Haruhiko Mikimoto, is best known for his work as one of the most iconic designers of the 80s and 90s, who provided the designs for the original Macross, Gunbuster, Gundam 0080, and Macross 7. Kabaneri’s production team didn’t stop at using his designs to create a throwback aesthetic, though: they went all-out on animating these characters with a level of shading which is almost never seen in modern anime.

If you’ve ever heard of the anime youtuber and writer Otaking, then you may be familiar with a series of rants that he did in the late 2000s about how 80s anime was way better than modern anime because of how much shading it had, before going on to spend five years animating a Star Wars fan film in the style of an 80s OVA. The 80s OVA look isn’t just a time and place thing, but an ongoing cultural idea–and one which Kabaneri is deliberately playing into. If you want to see what Mikimoto’s designs would look like in a more typical modern anime production, just look at Tytania.

Every aspect of this image is designed to evoke the sense of 90s cool–and that only becomes amplified after Ikoma makes his transformation into a fully-formed Kabaneri. Back in those days, one of the popular genres for badass, high-intensity action scenes, was the transforming hero genre. Shows like Generator Gawl, The SoulTaker, and Guyver featured heroes who transformed into brutal bio-engineered beasts–themselves a grittier take on the more kid-friendly transforming heroes of the 70s like Casshern and Yatterman. By the time Ikoma completes his transformation, he is a walking symbol of an idea of badassery which has all but been lost to time–restored, now, in glorious high-definition and spectacular digital effects work, and ready to pummel the shit out of everything in his path–such as a whole goddamn train.

Not all, or even much, of what I just described might be meaningful to the average viewer. For some, none of this context is needed to appreciate what’s so cool about this artwork–after all, it came to be popular in the first place because it was cool-looking in the first place. To those who never appreciated this artstyle to begin with, it probably means less than nothing. Nonetheless, there is meaning here.

Is there as much meaning as I might have gotten out of a brilliant script which weaves a great story full of memorable characters? Probably not. Is there more meaning here than there would be in a mediocre story which breaks neither rules nor conventions? Possibly. There certainly is enough meaning for me in the images of this show that I was able to enjoy it in spite of the lack of a great narrative. Had the series contained both a great narrative and amazing artwork, then it would be that much better in my eyes–but I don’t think I could even begrudge someone if this was legitimately their favorite show, above others with phenomenal screenwriting, just because they like the art so much. The art is fucking awesome.

This video is not a cry for critics to start incorporating more aesthetic analysis into their reviews, or even to take aesthetics into account when giving a score to something. At most, it’s a cry for critics to recognize that prioritizing the script is a bias–even if it’s a widely-shared one–and that it may be helpful to address it as such. At the very least, it’s an explanation of why I might claim that a show deserves credit for being an artbook, and what kind of values I might get out of something like that. I would love to see a critical landscape emerge in which more critics are able to explore their ideas about a work in a more personal way, with less concern over the perceived opinions of the consensus–and to see audiences embrace the idea that a review which doesn’t agree with their preconceived notions is often even more interesting than one which does. If I’ve made you appreciate either of the images that I’ve talked about in this video any more than you might have otherwise, then I’ve already proven the worth of that kind of analysis.

More than anything, though, I hope that we can come to respect the idea that there are concepts which exist beyond the ability to be put into words–and that the impact of these concepts may be felt to an extent beyond what we are able to explain with language. I think if we can recognize this, then some of the frustrations and tension between people who engage with works on fundamentally different emotional levels can be mitigated.

Thank you very much to anyone who made it through this entire gauntlet of pretentious-sounding esoteric complaints regarding the nebulous concept of aesthetic criticism. This kind of stuff probably only matters to people who spend way too much time consuming media reviews, but thankfully I think a lot of my audience is comprised of people like that, so I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, consider supporting my channel via patreon so I can keep writing stuff like this, and subscribe to my vlogging channel for even more stuff along these lines. In the process of developing this video, I ended up making whole separate vlogs analyzing the aesthetics of Sword Art Online, and why they elevate that show above The Asterisk War, as well as theorizing about the reason we have more movie critics than we do music critics. Check out my other channels while you’re at it, and as always, thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Edited by The Davoo

Text version:

“Why can’t you just turn your brain off and enjoy something?”

Ask any critic for a list of their top 5 most annoying frequent comments, and this question is sure to be on there. Aside from the fact that it basically undermines the entire practice of criticism, what makes this question so frustrating is that it’s bullshit. No one is actually able to just turn their brain off and enjoy something–and if they were, then they’d have no reason to consume media in the first place–they’d be perfectly entertained by staring at a fucking wall.

Not having any critical judgement about anything is the same thing as literally having no taste. As soon as you’re able to distinguish between things that you like, and things that you dislike, then you’ve proven yourself to have a standard of critical judgement, even if you can’t define it.

But as much as I’d love to keep pulling this phrase apart and making fun of it, there’s another, slightly more nuanced question which critics get asked all the time that I think gets closer to the heart of what these people are really asking.

“Do you hate fun?”

There was a moment towards the end of the Winter anime season when I was watching Myriad Colors Phantom World and I legitimately stopped, took a step back, and asked myself, “do I hate fun? Because it’s pretty clear that this show has no real intentions of being anything other than fun; and yet I’m not having any fun, and I hate this. Is something wrong with me?”

Later into the show, there was a specific moment when I realized entirely why this show was not fun. It was during a scene wherein all of the main characters were being dragged into performing a school play by the head of the drama club, and where at some point it was revealed that the standoffish loner character who’d never been made an official member of the group was also there for literally no reason–at least in the context of the narrative. The meta reason for this character to be there is that it would theoretically be fun to have the entire primary cast participating in this play–but what I realized in this moment is that the prospect of having this character around meant nothing to me.

I did not care about this character at all. She had never done anything cool, she didn’t have an interesting personality or backstory, and she overall left very little impression on me. The idea that having her play a part in this school play would somehow make the episode more fun was totally lost on me, because I didn’t give a shit.

While ruminating on that, I remembered a time in which I did indeed have fun. It was in December of 2006, when I first marathoned the first season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. In that show, there was an episode wherein Haruhi and Yuki were recruited for a school festival performance by a band who’s guitarists were both out of commission. The main emotional crux of the episode revolved around Haruhi’s involvement with this band–but Yuki was pretty much there just for fun; and her inclusion was absolutely genius.

That’s because Yuki is an incredibly fun character. She’s basically an alien with the power to bend reality, who uses those powers to do hilariously mundane things in everyday scenarios; and she’s got a really memorable personality and does all kinds of super-badass things. There’s a moment of realization when Yuki picks up the guitar and starts shredding these huge-ass riffs and solos that of course she can play the guitar perfectly, because she can learn pretty much anything; but the setup for it is so well-earned that it goes a long way in crafting what is overall one of the most legendary scenes in anime.

Fun is not something that you get to have without trying. Fun has to be earned. You don’t get to have fun by sitting around on the couch doing nothing; to have fun you have to do something–and likewise, if you want to make others have fun, then you have to work for it. You can’t just dangle keys in front of someone’s face and expect them to be entertained if they’re over the age of 1, because they’ve seen that shit before and they’ve got standards.

There are no shortage of ways that a series can achieve fun–even without the use of brilliant writing, deep characters, or profound themes. Sometimes, the key to making something fun is just to not fuck anything up. Recently, I encountered a pair of shows which both took a very similar approach to trying to create the pure sensation of fun–but whose level of success in doing so came down largely to each show’s margin of error.

Heavy Object is a show about a small team of soldiers who are tasked with trying to take down these gigantic metal war machines called Objects through the use of knowledge and tactics. The appeal of each arc was just in watching these characters try to distinguish and then exploit the unique weaknesses of each enemy Object–all while running around and wisecracking with a brisk, light tone. There is no reason that Heavy Object couldn’t have been a fun show, and it very nearly succeeded at being one for me. However, what kept taking me out of the experience and spoiling the fun was all the little piece of dumb bullshit.

Like how in just about every firefight, there’ll be a scene wherein the characters get spotted by the enemy, but have just enough time to wisecrack back and forth before the enemy starts shooting. Or how most of the time when they’re being shot at, they seem to be right in the enemy’s line-of-sight, and pressured under heavy gunfire, but miraculously never get hit, while constantly taking out enemy soldiers. Or how in this scene wherein their teammate accidentally fires her anti-personnel guns at them, they stand there staring while an epic rain of bullets falls all around them. Or how in this scene, the characters are sneaking into an enemy base while the guards aren’t paying attention, and the one guy just leaves the door open like he’s asking the enemy to notice. Et cetera.

On their own, none of these moments are that big of a deal–but what happens when all of them are stacked on top of each other is that they keep me thinking about things that I shouldn’t be thinking about, and slowly eat away at the dramatic tension of each scene. How am I ever meant to believe that the main characters’ lives are in danger, when they can make enormous tactical mistakes on a constant basis and never suffer any repercussions? If the appeal of this series is meant to be the use of strategy to overcome seemingly impossible odds, then why does it feel like luck is always on the side of the main characters, and like they can’t possibly lose?

This isn’t to say that I’m totally averse to shows that are just about crazy ridiculous bullshit–but this show isn’t nearly over-the-top enough to be fun on that level. If you’re gonna have a story where the rules of reality barely apply, then you really have to go over-the-top for it to leave any kind of impression. At the very least, if this show had been really nice-looking, or had well-directed action scenes and great animation, then it might have been cool enough to look at that I’d want to watch it anyways–but given that the show is uglier than sin, it has no such qualities.

Which brings me to a show from last season that succeeded in all of the places where Heavy Object failed, called High School Fleet. This one is about a bunch of cute high school girls who end up commanding a battleship, which they use to fight against other student ships while some light mystery plot unfolds around them. The story is nothing noteworthy–but it is very tightly paced and written, without any parts that drag or get boring. Its characters are simple and easy to understand, but all of them work to keep the series brisk and enjoyable. Its themes are as basic as they possibly could be, its action scenes aren’t particularly clever or tactical, and there’s not really any deep, philosophical, or unique reasons to enjoy the show.

However, High School Fleet is hella fun–because as long as you can buy into the central conceit of a bunch of cutesy moe girls running a battleship, the show doesn’t have any bullshit. Every action scene poses a legitimate threat to the characters’ lives, and there’s even some tension in the early part of the show over not being clear on how dark the series might eventually get. Each scene is paced and directed in such a way that the action is satisfying and engaging, even when there’s not a whole lot really going on; because it’s easy to understand the circumstances of each situation, and how those situations are affecting the characters.

And a lot of how the show accomplishes that is simply through the use of excellent visual design and animation. When there’s an action scene that’s meant to be frenetic and confusing, then we’ll get a shot of the ship’s scaredy-cat navigator frantically spinning the steering wheel while her eyes transform into spirals. When the crew are about to fire off a big fuck-off missile to assure their victory in a battle, then that missile launches with an impeccably staged and animated smoke effect. The music, voice acting, animation, and dialog all march in lockstep to create a tense and exciting scene in a show that you’ll probably never give all that much thought to when you’re not actually watching it–because the appeal of the show is that the actual act of watching it is fun.

And I love fun. I don’t think you’ll find a lot of people who actually hate fun. There are plenty of other things that media can to do be interesting besides being fun, but when something actually pulls off legitimate fun and does it well, then it’s worthy of being celebrated–and I think it would be insulting to the accomplishment of those works to suggest that the best way to appreciate the fun that they provide, is by turning your brain off

If you watched this video with your brain on, then I hope you still managed to have fun with it; and If you did, that you’ll consider sharing it around, or supporting my channel by donating to my patreon. Check out my other channels for more stuff along these lines but with different video structures–and thanks again for watching, I’ll see you in the next one.

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The 2010s have been a pretty solid decade for sports anime: older classics like Hajime no Ippo have continued running strong alongside new contenders like Baby Steps and Chihayafuru while artistic experiments like Ping Pong take the genre in new and exciting directions, and others such as Free signify the slowly shifting demographic of who seems to be the most interested in the genre on the whole. In the midst of all this have emerged two of the most successful and popular sports anime of the last decade: Kuroko no Basuke and Haikyuu.

It’s almost disturbingly easy to draw comparisons between these shows: both are based on manga which originally ran in Weekly Shounen Jump, the most popular manga magazine in the world, and both were adapted to animation by studio Production I.G., who’ve long had a reputation as one of, if not the best studio for producing high-quality TV animation. Both anime adaptations have run for three seasons at the time of this writing, though Haikyuu’s third season is shorter and doesn’t reach the manga’s yet-unseen conclusion as the Kuroko no Basuke adaptation does. Each series has been both very popular and highly beloved–appearing on plenty of favorites’ lists and achieving high scores on aggregate websites.

Diving into the stories themselves, both shows focus on a team sport which take place in a gymnasium and involves a large ball which is handled entirely with the players’ hands. Both take place in high-school and are focused on tournament play between the main team and the teams of other high schools. Both shows start off by focusing on a duo of new players whose particular skillsets feed into one-another very well, making them better as a pair than they would be individually–and then later continue to develop the rest of their team, emphasizing the idea that they work best as a unit.

Both shows are populated primarily by beautiful boys, with barely any women ever appearing in the stories, and the ones who do assuming supporting roles at most. Both are structured around games that typically last for two or three episodes, but get longer as the story goes on, bookended by an episode or two of training and/or hanging out with the main characters off the court.

Opposing teams in either series tend to consist of characters who parallel those on the main team and can counteract their talents in very specific ways; and those teams usually end up comprising the supporting cast as the series goes on, slowly becoming friendly with the main characters.

Now, a lot of what I’ve just described is simply typical of the sports genre, and if I broke down every general anime convention which each story follows, such as the constant cut-aways to the supporting cast to analyze what’s happening during each match, then I’d be here all day. But while it may seem like I’m just accusing these shows of being purely formulaic and indistinguishable, it’s when we start diving deeper into their similarities, and then finding all of the ways that the two series diverge from one another, that we can start to see how, in spite of looking identical from a distance, each series actually has a very unique character–and it may even be that a lot of people who would totally love one might utterly despise the other. Let’s break them down as thoroughly as we can!

–Part One: Design–

By far the biggest and most important difference between these shows is their overall attitude, which permeates every aspect of their presentation and characterization. For instance, let’s have a look at each show’s designs.

Both basketball and volleyball are sports wherein height is a major advantage (as each show is quick to remind the viewer time and again). In Haikyuu, the shortness of the main character, Hinata, is a major plot point–and the titular Kuroko of Kuroko no Basuke is one of the shortest players in his series as well. While Kuroko is two inches taller than Hinata, and while the very tallest characters in Kuroko no Basuke do tower over their sports anime contemporaries; for the most part, both shows are comprised of players who stand at around the same height. Having said that, one could easily be forgiven for assuming that most of the players in Kuroko no Basuke were actually a hell of a lot taller than those in Haikyuu, because they all just look enormous. For example, Imayoshi from Kuroko no Basuke is actually .6 centimeters shorter than Kageyama from Haikyuu–but Imayoshi could easily pass for an adult, whereas Kageyama could probably pass for a middle-schooler.

The reason for this perceived difference is simply a matter of proportions. Characters in Kuroko no Basuke all have broad shoulders, big, well-defined muscles, and proportionally smaller heads. A lot of them could easily pass for grown men, and almost all of them are meant to be able to cut an imposing figure out on the court. Meanwhile, Haikyuu’s characters are skinny, pointy, sleek, and bigger-headed. They look like a bunch of kids–especially in comparison to the adults in the series.

This difference in the physical imposition of each show’s characters makes a lot of sense sense in the context of how threat is communicated in each sport. In volleyball, each team is on the opposite side of a net, and each player is mostly surrounded by their own teammates. While there is some squaring off at the net, wherein height often becomes a big deal; a lot more of the pressure from an attack comes from the unique skill required to pull it off, or the tactical decisions of each team’s players. We don’t often see an attacker and defender in the same frame together, but instead watch separate shots of opponents interacting with the ball.

In basketball, play is a lot more confrontational and in-your-face, as players spend most of their time squaring off against opponents one-on-one. Players have to constantly bump into one-another and knock the ball right out of someone’s hands, or to jump high enough to clear a shot right over their heads. It would be difficult to imagine that the kids from Haikyuu would come off nearly as threatening on the basketball court, wherein a player needs to be able to block a pass using their body as a shield. Likewise, if you had six Kuroko no Basuke players standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a volleyball court, they’d probably look pretty slammed-in.

I’d be willing to bet that these differences in design sense were equal parts the result of each manga author studying the builds of professionals in their sport of choice, as well as their own individual art styles; but the effect of this extends beyond merely reflecting the different natures of each sport–it also plays into how the characters in each series are perceived.

–Part Two: Narrative–

Both Haikyuu and Kuroko no Basuke center their narratives around a newly-reformed high-school team growing stronger and stronger and taking on tougher and tougher opponents–but the level of play happening in each series is totally different. Haikyuu’s characters are presented as relatively normal athletic high schoolers competing on a relatively normal high-school level–whereas the cast of Kuroko no Basuke is loaded with basketball prodigies who are said to be so good that they could change the entire nature of the game after going pro. Even though both teams start off unproven and have to fight their way up through the ranks, the main team in Kuroko no Basuke would probably have been the best team around right from the start if not for the fact that they have to compete with a generation of unnaturally gifted players.

Most of Haikyuu’s important characters are very earnest; they have to work hard to be good enough to compete at all, and they discover their unique talents along the way. Kuroko, meanwhile, is recognized as one of the best players in the story from the very start, and makes it his mission to help his already hugely-talented teammate Kagami to be able to compete against the five members of the Generation of Miracles–a title given to the most talented players. Every member of the Generation of Miracles is exceedingly arrogant and punishingly talented, and Kuroko and Kagami approach their competition against them with plenty of their own cocksure arrogance as well.

In other words, in spite of every character in each show having their own distinct personalities and traits that make them stand out, both shows have an overall character that permeates the way they carry themselves and really sets them apart. Haikyuu is about young men discovering their passions and talents and working their way up to compete on a national level, whereas Kuroko no Basuke is about a bunch of naturally talented and ludicrously skilled players trying to see who can unlock the most over-the-top potential and utterly crush their competition.

Everything about each show’s presentation feeds into these identities. Haikyuu’s gymnasiums are always brightly-lit and full of life–its characters’ facial expressions open and emotional. Kuroko no Basuke colors its stadiums with dark, oppressive atmosphere, and its expressions are often tense, pained, and angry. Haikyuu’s soundtrack sounds like a motivational video, with huge, sweeping orchestration that reaches a crescendo at the emotional peak of a match. Kuroko no Basuke is backed with pulsating, intense hard rock and electronic music in its first season, and then a suspenseful mix of electronic and orchestral instrumentation in later seasons–both soundtracks packing in tons of attitude and aggression during matches.

What all of this feeds into is a fundamental difference in philosophy between the two shows: Haikyuu is an underdog story, whereas Kuroko no Basuke is an overdog story; or to put it in clearer terms, Haikyuu’s development tends to focus on the weakness of its main cast and their learning to overcome it, whereas Kuroko no Basuke focuses on the overwhelming strength of its antagonists, and the main cast learning to overcome that.

Haikyuu spends the majority of its time focusing on the Karasuno team and getting into their heads. We see lots of their off-the-court training and day-to-day interactions, and the matches that they play focus on how they can improve themselves in dealing with the opponent’s skills. Not nearly as much time is spent on showcasing their opponents’ teams, and a lot of the time, only one member of the those teams really gets any backstory or development. Other teams are mostly important only when the matches are actually happening, or when the main characters are thinking back on how those opponents have defeated them previously as a way of getting motivated to train harder and learn new techniques.

Kuroko no Basuke, on the other hand, puts a ton of emphasis on the Generation of Miracles right from the beginning, with an opening monologue that establishes them as the sort of big bosses that the Seirin team is going to have to compete with. Once a Generation of Miracles player has made an appearance in a game, they tend to show up pretty consistently outside of matches or as commentators during them, and their personal development is as important to the overall narrative as any of the main characters–especially because of their unique relationship with Kuroko. The series actually takes this so far that it’s not until late into the first season that the Seirin members other than Kagami or Kuroko start to get any real attention–whereas the opponents are all highly memorable and important as soon as they’re introduced.

–Part Three: Characters–

Both Haikyuu and Kuroko no Basuke focus primarily on a very powerful duo of freshmen who work best in combination. Haikyuu has the genius setter Kageyama, who can get the ball to any precise location on the court with lightning speed; and Hinata, a shorter player who can jump incredibly high and fast, allowing him to hit Kageyama’s best passes. Kuroko no Basuke has the genius passer Kuroko, who can get the ball to any precise location on the court with lightning speed; and Kagami, a taller player who can jump incredibly high and fast, allowing him to catch Kuroko’s best passes. The fact that these players’ heights are flipped, though, is kind of integral to how each is interpreted narratively.

Hinata’s shortness makes him barely able to contend as a volleyball player. If it weren’t for the fact that he can deliver on some amazing fake-outs and high-speed spikes, which only Kageyama can set him up for, then he would essentially be useless. Kagami, on the other hand, is enormously skilled all on his own, and could utterly destroy all but the best players in the game by himself. The only reason he needs Kuroko’s assistance is because his opponents are just that strong.

Similarly, even though Kageyama is amazing as a setter, his perfectionism and harsh personality make him difficult to deal with, and he needs a player with the speed and jumping ability of Hinata to bring out his full potential. Meanwhile, Kuroko would always be a lynchpin in any team he was a part of, though he does need the rest of the team to be great in order to be able to win. The differences between these duos are fairly subtle, but those subtleties alter the tone of each show, along with the way that the relative power levels of the players are perceived.

Haikyuu puts a lot of emphasis on getting characters into the game at all. An early arc revolves around a third-year student who’s given up on volleyball after losing the year before being convinced that he’s needed on the team. Later on, an opposing team has to work up the will to take their game seriously even when they know they’re going to lose. In season two, a new manager is added to the team who never felt passionate about anything in her life up until this point, and learns about how to be driven from watching the team. There’s always this sense that the characters are starting from the bottom and working their way up, and that even their opponents are still training and getting better with a long road ahead of them.

Meanwhile, one of the central conceits of Kuroko no Basuke is that the Generation of Miracles have all been crippled by just how overwhelming their talents actually are. Each one has gotten so conceited and isolated that they believe they can take on the world all by themselves–and for the most part, they are correct. It takes the fact that Kuroko and Kagami–both already very powerful on their own–can work even better as a duo, to start showing them up. Much of the dialog in Kuroko no Basuke revolves around various meditations on the nature of talent and skill, and the limits which can be reached or overcome through each. It very much gives the sense that all of these characters are competing for the title of absolute best, and that to even be compared with one-another at all means that they are nearly at the level of professionals.

None of this is to say that there’s an absolute dichotomy between the two shows. Haikyuu’s characters still do have some incredible talents, and Kuroko no Basuke’s main team is still struggling to take down much more powerful opponents. Haikyuu does have at least one enemy team who stands out with a bunch of memorable characters in the form of Nekoma, and Kuroko no Basuke does explore what happens when certain teammates or entire teams have to grapple with whether they want to continue with the sport after losing. It’s not that the shows are taking an opposite approach, so much as that the many subtle differences between them give them a different kind of vibe. It also seems as though at least Kuroko no Basuke intends to comment on the nature of underdog narratives, with such great lines as one wherein a character points out that it isn’t the stronger team who wins, but the winner who is the stronger team.

–Part Four: Realism–

Feeding further into this tonal divergence is the second most-important difference between the two shows: their level of realism. Haikyuu rarely comes all that close to straining the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Each of its characters has a unique talent, but they’re all pretty normal aspects of volleyball: Hinata’s thing is just that he’s fast and jumps really well; and while Kageyama’s skill is certainly above what most normal humans could have, it doesn’t seem like an unrealistic talent for someone who is considered a sports genius. At most, the skills can be a little bit goofy–but the series goes out of its way to show the characters failing all the time anyways, either through bad execution of their techniques, or through being outdone by an opponent’s skill.

Kuroko no Basuke, meanwhile, is barely contained within the realm of human possibility. All of the major characters have absurd special moves which, while explained well enough to work in the context of the narrative, could probably never be done in reality. One guy can perfectly copy nearly any move that he’s seen at least once. One guy just never misses a shot, with the caveat that it takes him a little more time to wind up. Characters often completely change direction in midair, or utilize tricks of perception which are presented in such an over-the-top fashion as to seem outright ridiculous. In the second season, when characters start busting out even crazier super-moves, and when “the zone” is introduced as a sort of super-saiyan state that characters go into wherein their animation quality spikes and they can basically do anything, the show rides the line of unreality pretty hard, if never completely falling off the wagon. The only things which are literally impossible are some of the midair direction changes, which come off less as any kind of actual skill that the players have, and more as the animation presenting those moments awkwardly.

The drama in Haikyuu feels very grounded and human, as characters are faced with predicaments that the average sportsman in high school could probably relate to. Kuroko no Basuke instead makes it very clear that its characters are outliers, and asks questions about the nature of talent which only one in a million players would ever likely have to deal with. Again, this isn’t to say that the two shows don’t share a few of the same scenarios, but on the whole Kuroko no Basuke has more in common with the themes of a superhero narrative than it does with the average high school narrative–whereas Haikyuu’s conflicts are fairly pedestrian.

This separation in realism is perhaps the most tangible difference between the two stories, and the one that is most likely to effect the viewer’s enjoyment of them–though personally, I really think that each show’s level of realism does a great job of feeding into their overall attitude, and will probably appeal to the same kind of audience who would appreciate the rest of their presentation.

It feels right for the characters in Kuroko no Basuke to be over-the-top arrogant badasses, because the show is about the way that people are affected by developing over-the-top badass talents and arrogant personalities. Meanwhile, it would feel very wrong if some of the humble kids in Haikyuu were suddenly using ninja arts out on the volleyball court.

But while this difference in attitude might be the biggest contributing factor to an individual audience member’s engagement with each series, there are still plenty of other differences in construction quality which might sway viewers towards one series or the other.

–Part Five: Quality–

In terms of the visual component, both shows are overall incredibly strong for shounen manga adaptations, and are peppered all over with highly memorable spikes in animation quality at some of their most important moments. Both shows continue to get more consistently impressive with each passing season, though I do think that the first season of Haikyuu is unquestionably more consistent than that of Kuroko no Basuke, which can be pretty janky in some of its worst moments. Neither show is ever outright ugly, though both of them do seem to allocate their best animators to where it counts–assuming more of a typical moving-manga aesthetic during most of the off-the-court scenes.

Either show has a handful of really strong edits alongside a handful of utterly baffling ones, and a couple of truly cringeworthy montages per season. Kuroko no Basuke leans a lot harder on visual metaphor and crazy effects, and makes pretty fantastic use of them during a lot of its biggest scenes. Comparatively, Hakyuu’s visual metaphors are usually pretty boring and lacking in impact, with some of the crow imagery getting run into the ground pretty quickly. Overall, I think that Kuroko no Basuke both achieves much higher highs and much lower lows in its presentation, whereas Haikyuu is a lot more consistently impressive. I also think it’s fair to say that Haikyuu’s character designs are overall a lot more uniquely stylish and memorable, whereas a lot of those in Kuroko no Basuke are fairly generic.

Each series does falter majorly in one area where the other more-or-less succeeds, though; and whether or not these elements dramatically effect the viewer will probably come down to how much they buy into the show’s overall attitude, or care about these specific attributes.

Haikyuu’s biggest failing is in its overall dramatic structure–which it almost doesn’t have. The series rarely does a good job of setting up future matches or making its opponents interesting–and at times, its most important matches seem to start out of nowhere, with it only becomes apparent just how important the matches are once they’ve suddenly been going on for seven episodes. It’s often difficult to keep track of which team is winning or how well they’re doing over the course of a match, and we see so much filler play while also skipping over large chunks of matches that it can be very difficult to follow the dramatic tension. If not for the viewer’s knowledge that there are certain tournaments which the team is going to compete in, then it would be difficult to get a grasp on what we’re meant to expect in the story’s future–and even then, the series does a poor job of generating hype for itself.

Kuroko no Basuke, meanwhile, makes it very clear that the point of the story is to put the main team against each of the five teams led by the Generation of Miracles; and it immediately gets us curious about who each of them are and what they can do. Every match has a ton of buildup and dramatic weight, with opponents getting introduced long before their matches happen and having their talents established early-on. If a match ends before the episode is over, then we’re almost guaranteed to find out who the next challenger is going to be by the time the credits roll, which keeps us anxious about what the next match is going to be like and how the main team is going to develop the skills necessary to win it.

As for maintaining dramatic tension in the matches themselves, Kuroko no Basuke focuses only on showing the most important parts of each match and makes it very clear which teams are doing well and what the score is at all times. Even when it cuts out parts of the match, we can easily follow how it’s going and who’s been doing what. Thanks to the fact that basketball games are broken into four different ten-minute sections, the changing tides of battle are pretty easy to chart across the length of the game–and since those games are essentially the same length as how long they take to happen across two or three episodes, it feels like we’re seeing the game in its entirety–even though we’re really giving a lot of time to important moments and speeding our way through less-important ones.

Unfortunately, Kuroko no Basuke also has a major narrative weakness, which is the nearly constant retconning. Because the series is always moving at a brisk pace from game to game and keeping its energy up, it often takes a while before we learn certain elements of the backstory–which, in many cases, are crucial to the nature of the narrative. Learning about a character’s backstory will often lead to them suddenly knowing or being able to do things which it seems like they should have known or been able to do before. It’s not so much that any of it completely breaks the story, but it can really feel like some of these things would’ve been set up earlier if maybe the author had planned them from the beginning and accounted for them in the way the story was presented. There’s only maybe one or two minor instances of something reaching the level of an outright plot hole, but it can definitely be distracting to have a new character appear in the story who it turns out was important to half of the other characters all this time and they just never mentioned him.

Haikyuu doesn’t really face this problem because its backstory isn’t nearly as complex. Most characters have pretty individual narratives which aren’t intertwined in the way that those of Kuroko no Basuke are; and most of the development is based around characters building from one-another in the present rather than dwelling too much on the past; whereas the main thrust of the story in Kuroko no Basuke is a direct consequence of how the characters’ pasts have shaped each of them.

Those issues aside, I would also argue that the characters in Kuroko no Basuke are vastly more memorable and engaging than those in Haikyuu–with the caveat that their personalities are also a bit more quirky and less relatable. Most of the characters in Haikyuu simply have one defining personality trait and one general overall skill, whereas each character in Kuroko no Basuke expresses a broader range of emotional moods and has more than one gimmick both in their personalities and skillsets. The characters in Kuroko no Basuke are certainly a lot more cartoony and unrealistic, but they offer a lot more opportunities to be empathized with because we get to see them in a greater number of emotional scenarios. That said, I could easily see some viewers preferring the more straightforward characters in Haikyuu, as they might be easier for the average person to project themselves onto.

–Conclusions–

All in all, as with any matter of taste, I think that a viewer’s ability to engage with either of these shows is really going to come down to what they value from entertainment. Personally, I found that the attitude and vibe of Kuroko no Basuke jived with me perfectly, and I was able to relate to most of the characters pretty easily; whereas Haikyuu kind of bored me to tears overall. I’m sure that some people would be a lot more bothered by the super-powered shenanigans and all of the retcons and asspulls that Kuroko no Basuke runs with, but personally I was so engaged by its strong narrative arc that I was on-board for all of it from pretty early on; whereas Haikyuu had me really struggling to care about anything that was happening, even as I was being impressed with the visual flair. If neither one of these series really seems like your cup of tea, though, then may I suggest some shows that I think handle the same kinds of feelings as these ones much better.

Baby Steps follows a character with a lot of the same earnest optimism that Hinata from Haikyuu has–but who is a much more deeply fleshed-out and lovable character that I could watch forever just because I want to see where his story is going to go. The series follows Ei-chan from the ground up as someone who wasn’t even physically fit enough to consider playing tennis, but eventually strives to go pro; and who rises through the ranks to become all that he can while making friends and rivals along the way. It’s not a team-sports narrative, but if you like the emotions, optimism, and relative realism of Haikyuu, then you might enjoy Baby Steps as well.

As for a show that handles pretty much all of the same themes about talent, skill, and competitiveness that Kuroko no Basuke does in a vastly more mature fashion, I would highly recommend checking out Ping Pong. This is a show that stakes everything on the intense passions of its characters’ talents and is ruthless in its presentation of competition; with unparalleled levels of visual metaphor and epic music to back it. In a way, you could say it’s Kuroko no Basuke for adults, and while it’s characters may not be as imminently lovable, it delivers on some much more hard-hitting and heart-stopping scenes.

I hope you enjoyed this rundown of the differences between these popular sports anime, and that you’ll share this video to anyone whom you think it may interest, and subscribe to my channel for more content like this in the future. If you want to help that content to get made, then consider supporting me via patreon as well. I also recommend following all of my other channels which are linked in the description and on-screen if you want videos that aren’t as polished but upload waaaay more often. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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I’ve got a bone to pick with a certain kind of anime protagonist. You know the type: they’re mopey, unpersonable, and have no social acumen–yet, because of their inexplicable special powers, they constantly save the day and everyone loves them. They’re a vehicle for wish-fulfillment–suggesting that even though you’re a boring, average person, you can still be popular with the ladies as long as you’ve got some kind of secret ability that makes you special. Mob Psycho 100 has a bone to pick with this kind of character as well.

Shigeo Kageyama, also known as Mob, has a very simple desire: he wants to connect with people–namely, the girl he likes. Mob happens to be an insanely powerful psychic who can wield unstoppable force over anything he chooses–but, early into the series, he comes to the realization that this power is really of no use to him in pursuit of his goals. The girl he likes isn’t impressed with psychic abilities–she’s impressed with big muscles and a charming personality. Ergo, Mob sets out to acquire these things by joining the Body Improvement Club.

Self-betterment is the central theme of Mob Psycho 100. Its villains are all people who want an easy route to happiness, or who feel entitled to the love of others because of their talents. In episode three, Mob fights against a cult of people who try to delude themselves into thinking that they’re happy just by laughing, rather than trying to work out their lives. Most of his battles are against psychics who aim to take over the world because they believe that everyone else is worse than them; ignoring the fact that all of them have developed twisted personalities, intense inferiority complexes, infantilized interests, and sociopathic tendencies–none of which has actually made them happy, or convinced anyone to like them.

Mob doesn’t feel any sense of entitlement as a result of his powers–if anything, he sees them as a burden which prevents him from reaching his actual desires. Rather than trying to take what he wants by making everyone else bend to his will, he instead decides to achieve his goals through sheer force of effort–which flies in the face of the entitled beliefs of his enemies, putting them into conflict. What Mob forces his enemies to see in themselves–and what his de-facto life coach Reigen later spells out for some of them–is that none of them are actually hot shit. They’re all just humans who happen to be a certain way, just like anyone else is–and the only way they’re ever going to find satisfaction in life is by coming to terms with their humanity and working towards their own betterment.

Reigen himself is a world-class bullshit artist who strings Mob along to help with his money-making schemes–all while imparting golden nuggets of real-world life advice along the way. Even though Reigen’s practice is totally dishonest, his approach is weirdly kind-hearted and understanding. In essence, he is a psychologist, who is able to judge people quickly and to tell them what they want to hear, or to put on the act that they want to see, in order to make them happy–and most of the time it seems like it really is important to him that the customer is satisfied. The kind of people who visit him are the sorts of idiots who would seek out psychic and spiritual advice anyways–and if they were going to be conned no matter what, then it might as well be from someone who can legitimately cure their ails with a firm massage, under the pretense that he’s exorcising the ghosts that their goofy asses are bound to go on believing in. Reigen doesn’t have any kind of special powers, but he does have incredible charisma and social skills, which allow him to effortlessly feel the kind of human understanding that Mob so desperately longs for.

Whereas the original author’s previous work, One Punch Man, was an outright satire of the formula of shounen fight manga, Mob Psycho 100 is more predominantly a character-driven story full of comedy, action, and drama–but it does incorporate satirical elements to stunning effect in making its point about self-betterment. One of the best scenes in the show comes in episode two, when the Telepathy Club is trying to recruit Mob as a member. It’s pretty clear that the Telepathy Club mostly exists for its members to shit around in the club room and take it easy; but their leader tries to frame it as though the club exists in the name of youthful companionship and creating fond memories together. In a world filled to the brim with anime about do-nothing clubs wherein high school friends hang out, it seems like Mob is bound to join them–I can even think of several shows specifically about Telepathy and other supernatural studies clubs which have the same feel to them. But Mob, being the badass that he is, completely rejects them in favor of actually getting shit done by joining the Body Improvement Club–the members of which are pretty much all the coolest and nicest people in the known universe, and have no interests in anything other than making themselves better.

Mob Psycho is the hero story that our generation needs. It has no patience for people who are willing to sit around and wait for something to happen, or to waste their time forming pointless memories instead of getting what they want with their own two hands. It doesn’t forgive Mob for being physically weak and personality-deficient–Mob sees these as weaknesses on his part which he needs to work to change. His development is not left up to the whims of how the story affects him–it is taken upon himself to enact. In a time wherein so many people come to feel that the world owes them something, or that the system is unfairly stacked against them, and therefore they’re not willing to bust their asses to head for their goals, Mob shows us that even if you start off with unparallelled talent, it doesn’t mean shit if you can’t impress the girl you like. Forget about your destiny as the name which everyone in the world will one day know for your hidden talents, and hit the fuckin’ squat rack.

If you still haven’t seen this show yet, and you want to witness one of the best animation showcases of the year, as well as a fun and at times emotionally poignant action-comedy story, then I recommend checking this series out on crunchyroll after signing up with the link that makes me money. You can also help support my channel via patreon if you want to help me to make more videos like this, or by sharing this video around. Check out my myriad other channels for more frequent uploads, and as always, thanks again for watching–I’ll see you in the next one.

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Akiyuki Shinbo has gotten to be one of the most widely-recognized and controversial anime directors in the business over the last twenty-five years of his career. Best known for his omnipresent influence over the works of studio SHAFT, Shinbo became a household name among anime fans after the one-two-punch of success that came with Bakemonogatari in 2009 and Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica in 2011. However, while Shinbo’s signature style may be better known for its influence over SHAFT and the directors who trained under him [Tatsuya Oishi and Shin Oonuma], his origins as a director date all the way back to the early 90s, whereupon the seeds of his techniques were first sewn and began to grow.

Over the course of this rundown of everything that Shinbo worked on in the 90s, we’ll be seeing the origins of the countless visual trademarks and stylistic flourishes that the director would later become known for; and how they’d be incorporated into shows from a huge variety of genres. Unlike other beloved directors, Shinbo isn’t really known for any kind of thematic, genre, or storytelling consistency across his work–even if we will find a few common threads among those aspects of his shows. Rather, Shinbo has always been a workman of a director, stating that to him, anime is a product, and that his job is simply to provide a product which the fans will enjoy. He seems ever eager to bring his unique brand of visual presentation to whatever show he’s asked to work on–which can be a damn good time for those such as myself who really gravitate towards his aesthetic choices. So let’s dive into his history!

Shinbo’s earliest known credits are as a key animator working on the OVAs of the classic long-running 1980s series Urusei Yatsura, which he got started on soon after graduating college. He’s also been credited for art work on the 1989 Osamu Tezuka series Aoi Blink, though in both cases, examples of what he worked on specifically are unknown–at least to me. Shinbo would get his first major credits as an episode director working on the fifty-episode 1990 series Karakuri Kengo Den Musashi Lord with Studio Pierrot alongside some other former Urusei Yatsura staff. (Over the course of his career, Shinbo would find himself working with a lot of the same people on multiple shows, so I made a gigantic spreadsheet of who worked on what that you can follow via the link in the description if you’re interested.)

After Musashi Lord, Shinbo would do his last minor key animation jobs for the 1991 Urusei Yatsura film Always My Darling, and the 1992 Madhouse OVA Tokyo Babylon, before taking on the first major production role that would get him recognized.

Most of the main staff who had worked on Musashi Lord would go on to take up major roles in the production of Yuu Yuu Hakusho from the same studio, which ran from 1992 through 1995, with fellow Musashi Lord episode director Noriyuki Abe taking up the helm as lead director. Shinbo would storyboard thirteen and direct nineteen episodes of Yuu Yuu Hakusho, with most of his work being during the Dark Tournament Saga; and it would just so happen that he be given a ton of the biggest and most memorable episodes of the series, and that his distinct style would begin to shine through more and more as it went along.

In episode seven, we first witness Shinbo’s love of intense shading and single-color palettes during this shot with Yusuke and Kurama, which is the technique that we’ll be seeing the most over the course of this exploration of his work. Episode twelve features some animated backgrounds, which are pretty common to the series overall, but would later be used in a lot of Shinbo’s future work as well. It also features one of the first somewhat gruesomely violent scenes in the show, with a brutally anatomical shot of Kuwabara’s arm breaking, which is the kind of thing we’ll see more of from Shinbo long into the future

Episode thirty is the first one to feature Shinbo really going all out with his trademark style, as a result of Hiei using his Dragon of the Darkness Flame attack for the first time. Things very quickly get trippy as hell, with tons of single-color backgrounds, flashing lights, crazy effects animation, unique colors and shading, inverted colors, weird perspective shots, a fixation on eyeballs, spot coloring, and some neat lineart effects to depict Hiei being on fire. It’s a smorgasbord of cool-looking stuff, all of which does a perfect job of selling just how special this attack really is.

Episodes thirty-five and thirty-seven are less Shinbo-gasmic overall, but are noteworthy in that one features an evil doctor, while the other features an evil nurse–both archetypes which will pop up a lot in Shinbo’s future work. Episode forty-one features more of Kuwabara’s bones breaking, this time with a brief x-ray shot, which is also something that Shinbo has a predilection for across his career.

Episode forty-five sees Shinbo directing yet another of Hiei’s fights, and bringing with him some of the same tricks for portraying their dark and powerful nature. This episode also includes some of Yusuke’s torturous suffering in the cave, which has some very Shinbo-like coloring, though it goes on throughout some of the episodes that he didn’t work on. Shinbo then handled the epic climax of Yusuke’s cave training in episode forty-seven with some more trippy imagery, and the first of a handful of animation cuts by Atsushi Wakabayashi, whose style of exaggerated movement and simplified character designs really stand out whenever they come up, and are used in several of the Shinbo-directed episodes.

Episode fifty-two is another big important one with some pretty cool cuts, but the most noteworthy Shinbo-like element is the brief use of cinematic widescreen aspect ratio, which has remained a trademark of his–and, later, Studio SHAFT’s work–to this day.

Episode fifty-eight is the one that seemingly put Shinbo’s name on the map, and is always mentioned when people refer to his work on the series. Once again, the episode centers on Hiei using the Dragon of the Darkness Flame–only this time the attack takes up the majority of the entire episode, and Shinbo pulls out all of the stops on making it as trippy and intense as possible. This episode features tons of killer key animation from Atsushi Wakabayashi alongside others such as Masayuki Yoshihara and Shinsaku Kozuma, all coming together to create one of the most memorable battles in animation history.

Rounding out the Dark Tournament saga, Shinbo was in charge of the incredibly strange episode sixty-six, which features totally different-looking character designs animated in often fairly strange ways, and a melancholic tone which doesn’t quite feel like any other episode in the series. In a lot of ways, this episode sticks out like a sore thumb, but it’s pretty interesting to see that an episode like this even exists in the middle of the show.

From this point forward, Shinbo became far less involved with Yuu Yuu Hakusho–possibly as a result of taking on his first job as a series director around this time in early 1994. The last episode to be especially Shinbo-like is number seventy-four, which is possibly the most obviously Shinbo episode in the entire series. Besides featuring yet another evil doctor, the entire episode is filled with really intense shading and heavy use of black, giving the entire thing an almost gothic feel which is reminiscent of his work on shows like The SoulTaker. If any episode could be pointed to and called the first ever example of Shinbo’s signature style, then this would probably be the one. He would only direct three more episodes of Yu Yu Hakusho after this, but none of them were nearly as stylistically identifiable as the ones he’d worked on up to this point.

Shinbo made his debut as a series director working on the thirteen-episode TV anime Metal Fighter Miku produced by J.C. Staff in 1994, and a majority of his work throughout the 90s would continue to be done with this studio. A few of the minor Yuu Yuu Hakusho staff members would come to do minor work on this series as well–most notably key animators Atsushi Wakabayashi and Shinsaku Kozuma whom you’ll remember from the Dark Tournament saga.

One could easily be forgiven for not realizing Shinbo’s involvement in this cute but very corny show about women’s pro wrestling in power suits–especially in the early episodes which, while well-made in terms of storyboarding and animation, don’t carry many hallmarks of Shinbo’s style. From episode five onward is where Shinbo’s trademarks slowly begins to bleed into the series, with a lot more dramatic shading and colors in certain scenes, as well as moments wherein the art and animation style suddenly change, or wherein there’s a greater emphasis on effects animation. Episode six even contains a scene of a character using a special attack which bears some slight similarities to the animation techniques used for the Dragon of the Darkness Flame.

In addition to this being Shinbo’s first series about transforming superheroes–a genre which he’d find himself involved with a number of times, especially in the 90s–episode ten features the first ever of Shinbo’s trademark crucifixion images–possibly the most common and striking motif in all of his work across his entire career. Episode thirteen is by far the most Shinbo-tastic in the series, depicting an epic fight scene using almost as much trippy and cool imagery as the Dragon of the Darkness Flame attack (albeit with a lot less context to make it as memorable). Signatures such as the changing aspect ratio and bold use of colors make huge returns in this fight as well.

While Metal Fighter Miku would be difficult to recommend as a whole because it’s fun ideas and solid presentation are undercut by corny writing and lukewarm characterization, the last episode is worth checking out alone for anyone looking into Shinbo’s style. It represents by far the best of what the series has to offer, and is pretty entertaining in its own right. It even goes into a little bit of weird film noir style towards the end for no particular reason.

Around this period in late 1994 and early 1995, Shinbo directed a few episodes Montana Jones with Studio Junio (tho I couldn’t find any information on which ones exactly) before going on to direct the sixth and final episode of Studio Madhouse’s Devil Hunter Yohko OVA in 1995. This episode could be seen as a sort of crossroads between different parts of Shinbo’s career, as it featured not only a lot of key animation from staff who’d worked as animation directors and key animators on Yuu Yuu Hakusho, but also featured a number of minor staff who would come to work on Shinbo’s later output throughout the second half of the decade.

Devil Hunter Yohko was an interesting OVA series in that each episode was handled by an almost entirely different main staff–with a whole new director, storyboard artist, and screenwriter almost every time. For the most part, the series was an utterly terrible action exploitation piece about a young girl constantly losing her clothes and getting molested in the process of fighting against demons–but it often featured some pretty decent animation in its action scenes.

Fans of Shinbo’s work on Yuu Yuu Hakusho will instantly recognize the same style of effects animation used in Hiei’s fights appearing all over this episode, as well as plenty of the harsh single-color shading which the director is best known for; however, this episode isn’t nearly as over the top in its action as the ones that I’ve talked about before. While probably the best and most entertaining episode of Devil Hunter Yohko, and closer to cute fun than the gross exploitativeness of some previous episodes, I still wouldn’t say that this episode is really worth seeking out, as it doesn’t bring anything to the table which Shinbo’s other work from the period didn’t do better.

Back at Studio Pierrot in 1995, while Shinbo had taken a smaller role on Yuu Yuu Hakusho and gone on to direct for other studios, the majority of Yuu Yuu Hakusho’s major staff, including director Noriyuki Abe, had moved straight into the production of another fifty-episode shounen action series called Ninku without Shinbo’s involvement. However, when it came time for a Ninku film tie-in, Shinbo was brought on-board as a unit director, and even seemingly brought with him a couple of key animators who had worked on Metal Fighter Miku and Devil Hunter Yohko.

It’s difficult to say whether Shinbo actually had any creative involvement with this film, since none of it really reflects his style, but it might be worth checking out in general anyways. I watched it knowing nothing about Ninku and left kind of wanting to watch the series, thanks to its consistently beautiful animation and fight choreography, and a fun personality that kind of reminded me of the One Piece films.

In 1996, Shinbo would begin directing short OVAs left and right, starting with the single-episode Debutante Detective Corps, which seems to have been the first and last anime to come from Marcus Production. Despite a handful of nicely animated cuts, courtesy of Shibo once again bringing along key animators from Yuu Yuu Hakusho and Devil Hunter Yohko, I can’t say I’d recommend this incredibly stupid spy comedy OVA to anyone. The full extent of any remotely Shinbo-like moments are what I’m showing on screen right now, and nothing more whatsoever.

Later that year, Shinbo got his first directing job with Tatsunoko Productions handling the two-episode OVA New Hurricane Polymar–a gritty reboot of the 1970s transforming hero anime Hurricane Polymar. While the script for this OVA is terrible, it nonetheless stands as possibly the first thoroughly Akiyuki Shinbo series of his career, carrying much of the visual style that would come to define his work, and especially bearing a ton of similarity to his later, more popular series with Tatsunoko, The SoulTaker.

Right off the bat, the opening credits introduce some of Shinbo’s most important trademarks: the use of chains and statues to create a gothic atmosphere. This leads right into some off-kilter, boldly colored cityscape shots, followed by the hero, shrouded in darkness, perched on a building, with dark foreground objects flying by, and a zooming shot–all of which would be used plenty of times in future work across his career. Once again, the motifs of doctors and scientists appear heavily throughout this OVA, as do the usual dark and harshly colored frames that you must be quite used to seeing by now.

New Hurricane Polymar features a bit more violence and nudity than any of Shinbo’s previous work–not that these elements weren’t present before, or that they could be considered atypical of 90s OVAs–but Shinbo would gradually incorporate these features more over the course of his career, especially in his darker and more gothic works. Some of his more uncommon trademarks make their first appearances too, such as the use of pained, screaming faces to show the hero exerting his powers. Throw in some eyeball fixation and cross-shaped grave markers at random, and you’ve got an OVA that positively screams Shinbo across a lot of its run. While I can’t really recommend this OVA to general audiences on account of it being stupid and boring, I’d encourage hardcore Shinbo fans to give it a go just for how much of his signature style first appears here, and for the fact that it does contain some pretty alright fight animation.

Even later into 1996, Shinbo would begin directing a series of back-to-back OVAs about cute action girls with J.C. Staff over the next two years. The first of these was a three-episode sci-fi OVA called Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko, which is about a team of four girls from the present who are taken to the future to become space racers (among other things). Each episode is pretty different from the last, in a way that would be typical of OVAs from this time period, and especially of the ones that Shinbo directed. It’s easy to draw parallels between the four girls in this series and the ones from Metal Fighter Miku–and that trend will continue in Tenamonya Voyagers a few years later, borrowing a style of characterization that feels influenced by the likes of Bubblegum Crisis from earlier in the late 80s and early 90s.

Whereas Shinbo’s earlier work seemed to utilize his trademarks in big concentrated bursts, or to otherwise permeate the entire atmosphere of the series, Yamamoto Yohko begins a period wherein Shinbo’s style becomes more of a flourish which is seen all over the series, as opposed to ever hogging the spotlight. The entire OVA uses colors very boldly, but the really crazy single-color monochrome shots are used more sparingly. Shinbo’s aspect-ratio changes come up here and there, and we also see the emergence of a new technique wherein foreground objects are used to create a change in the aspect ratio diegetically (which is pretty damn cool). It’s also in this OVA that we start getting tons of really inventive screen wipes and transitions, which will become a repeating element in the next few OVAs. Aside from these, the most Shinbo-esque element of the OVA is just how bizarre and surreal it can get at times, which is characteristic of all of his work from this point forward on some level. Later on, we’ll be looking at a sequel to this OVA as well as a full-blown TV series which came out in 1999, but this one is worth a look for anyone that enjoys happy-go-lucky 90s OVAs about cute girls adventuring through space. At the very least, I’d say that episode two is worth your time.

As an aside from Shinbo’s chain of JC Staff OVAs, he would also direct five random episodes of The Magnificent Zorro between 1996 and 1997. Honestly though, I strongly doubt that he had any meaningful creative input on the series, which itself is a bizarre and kind of hilariously terrible Italian/Japanese collaboration which was apparently very popular in certain parts of Europe. I watched one of Shinbo’s episodes in its Garzey’s Wing-tier English dub form and had a laugh, but nothing about it remotely suggested Shinbo’s involvement. The only personnel connection I could find to Shinbo’s other work is that the writer was also the animation director on Metal Fighter Miku; but otherwise I have no idea why Shinbo ended up on this series.

So anyways, back at J.C. Staff, Shinbo’s next three-episode OVA would be Galaxy Fraulein Yuna Returns–a sequel to another two-episode OVA which he hadn’t been involved with. This OVA is packed with Shinbo-isms, but what struck me the most when watching it is that it’s pretty much just proto-Nanoha. I mean that on such a level that I can’t even get into the similarities here because it would take too long–the plot and the personalities of the characters are nearly identical to those of the original Nanoha TV series with a little bit of A’s mixed in, right down to the way that it has the atmosphere and attitude of a cutesy magical girl show, but involves a bunch of really intense action sequences and an outright tragic narrative. Given that Shinbo was the director of the original Nanoha TV series, I found this connection incredibly interesting, and I would encourage any diehard Nanoha fans to give this series a look just for the sake of knowing about it.

A lot of the Shinbo-isms of this OVA are front-loaded into the opening theme. We’ve got harsh single-color frames, foreground objects shaping the aspect ratio, and one hell of a fully animated crucifixion image. Over the course of this OVA, Shinbo’s experimental use of aspect ratio would grow more and more unhinged, with segments wherein the action is pushed entirely into the top quarter of the screen, or boxed into smaller frames within the screen space. This level of crazy aspect ratios would become almost par for the course in SHAFT’s comedy shows from the mid-2000s, so it’s cool to see where they got their start. This is also the first series wherein Shinbo seems intent on making sure that his characters all have really distinct and interesting bedrooms, as well as little flourishes to their homes such as solar panels, that make the environment stand out. Not to say that there weren’t any interesting locations in the previous OVAs, but the idea of characters having strangely ornate or architecturally experimental houses gets taken to increasingly bizarre extremes over the course of Shinbo’s career with SHAFT. We’re also treated to a number of super-wide frames, which will become something of a staple in the future.

Aside from those things, a lot of the trademarks we’re familiar with make a return. Once again, we’ve got a team of transforming heroes, the same style of lightning effect animations we’ve been seeing a lot of, a handful of unique screen transitions, background animation, some brutal moments of violence, and even a couple of techniques that I only realized were trends in the course of watching this OVA. One of them was the setting of a harshly-lit hallway, which we’d seen in Yuu Yuu Hakusho’s doctor scene, and will see again in the likes of the Yamamoto Yohko TV series and The SoulTaker. Another is this shot wherein we keep zooming into one character’s eye as well as the thing they’re looking at, which I’m pretty sure happened in the Yamamoto Yohko OVA as well, and fits in with Shinbo’s general fixation on eyeballs. It’s worth mentioning as well that even though this OVA mostly didn’t involve a whole of of the staff that Shinbo worked with before or after it, Yuu Yuu Hakusho director Noriyuki Abe actually storyboarded episodes one and three. All in all, Yuna Returns is a pretty enjoyable OVA with some of the best action animation in any of the shows I’ve talked about yet by way of sheer sakuga. If you like the idea of watching a version of Nanoha that doesn’t take itself as seriously or take as long to get to the point, and yet is somehow even more tragic, then I’d recommend giving it a look–though it’s probably entirely forgettable.

Shinbo’s next three-episode OVA with J.C. Staff would be the fantasy adventure-comedy Detatoko Princess; which, oddly enough, is the first thing which Shinbo directed that was based on a manga. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the manga anywhere online and it’s never been licensed, so I have no idea how closely the OVA follows along with it; but it certainly doesn’t stick to a moving manga aesthetic, and if anything is rife with as many inventive and exciting visuals as anything which Shinbo worked on in this era. In fact, while this one isn’t as heavy on obvious Shinbo-isms as the previous OVAs, it may yet be the outright best-looking one of the bunch, and is chock full of adorable designs, awesome settings, and otherwise funny visual tricks–such as the persistent use of non-diegetic signs which comment on what’s happening. Again, though, I can’t speak to how much of this was present in the source material.

Once again, the main character in this series has a sort of magical girl hero transformation, and the single-color monochromatic frames make their return, along with weird aspect ratio changes, super wide shots, fire effect animations, a gigantic eyeball, and inventive transitions. We also get an x-ray shot for the first time in a little while, coupled with background animation, and all in the process of a bath scene. While there were brief shower scenes or open-air bath scenes in Yamamoto Yohko and Yuna Returns, this is the first time Shinbo uses one of the ornate stand-alone baths which will become something of a staple in his future work as well, culminating more than a decade later in one of the most over-the-top and infamous bathing scenes in anime history in Nisemonogatari.

This is also the first instance of Shinbo having the main character speak directly into the camera from a distorted fisheye perspective. I’m not actually sure that he’s used this a lot, but I’m certain that it appears at least once in his future work, as well as in other studio SHAFT shows, so I think it’s worth taking note of. Shinbo-isms aside though, Detatoko Princess is a very cute and fun OVA that I can easily recommend to fans of the fantasy-comedy genre. It’s paced well, peppered with fantastic animation, and is all-around quite pleasant.

Rounding out this series of three-episode J.C. Staff OVAs is a second batch of episodes for Yamamoto Yohko released in 1997. Story-wise, this OVA is more of the same, if a bit slower and more focused than the previous one; but it also introduces a few more of the visual tricks which Shinbo would be using from this point forward. One is the presentation of a huge blown-out window, which turns out to actually be a monitor screen, which we’ll be seeing again in the SoulTaker. It’s also the first instance wherein we see a character’s face reflected in a multitude of glass surfaces all at once, which will start popping up in different forms from here on out. There’s also a glasses-wearing character who is often presented with one eye hidden by a light reflected on the lens, which will come up again in the SoulTaker as well.

But whereas the first and third episodes of this OVA utilize Shinboisms more as window-dressing in the same way that the last few OVAs have done, episode two is the first ever example of what I like to refer to as a full-blown Shinbogasm. In this episode, the cast find themselves lost in a trippy gothic castle, and Shinbo pulls out just about every single aesthetic trick in his book. Nearly all of the things that I’ve talked about in this video so far come up again here, often in combination with one-another. By now you can probably figure out most of them, but some noteworthy appearances include: an incredibly ornate bathing scene that comes out of nowhere, the uses of candles, statues, chains, crosses, stained glass, skulls, and blood to create a gothic atmosphere, a character speaking directly into a fisheye lens, and some eyeball fixation. There’s even a moment wherein a character yells out “transformation!” for seemingly no reason other than Shinbo likes transforming heroes. This episode is easily the most thoroughly Shinbo thing to come out of the director’s early career, going toe to toe with episodes of The SoulTaker or Petite Cossette in terms of sheer aesthetic overload. If you’re a big time Shinbo fan, then I’d definitely encourage giving it a look; otherwise, though, this OVA is hard to recommend. It’s less fun or adventurous than the previous OVA, and outside of the crazy Shinbogasm of episode two, is completely unmemorable.

Now that we’ve blown our Shinbo load on that episode, I think it’s time to take a small break and pick this up again in a couple of days. Stick around on my channel for part two of this video, and in the meantime, share this video with anyone whom you think it may interest. Support me on patreon to help me make more videos like this, and check out my other channels for more frequent uploads. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in part two.

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This past week, the music video for Porter Robinson’s Shelter was garnering lots of attention in the anime sphere; so I thought, what better time than now to talk about anime music videos? Considering that I’ve seen pretty much all of them, I do know of a few that I think are worth sharing and perhaps talking about.

Thanks to their typically short length and the lack of need for much in the way of narrative or sound design outside of whatever song they’re set to, anime music videos tend to be a hotbed for experimental animation techniques and concepts that we’d just never be able to get out of TV anime. A lot of it is really just experimentation for the sake of itself, and there aren’t a whole lot of truly standout videos, but personally I’ve always found it worthwhile to explore the world of anime music videos just for the chance to see new things and to broaden my perspective on what the medium is capable of. Having said that, in the process of exploring every anime music video that I could get my hands on, I did come away with a handful of truly impressive pieces that I think everyone should check out, regardless of your interest in boundary-pushing art; and I’ll be linking all of them in the description!

The world of anime music videos is fairly small, and a lot of it is interconnected. There’s a handful of directors and animators who work almost exclusively on anime music videos, and certain musicians who have a tendency to commision animations for a majority of their singles–not to mention all the Hatsune Miku musicians who have full-blown 3DCG videos for all of their major songs. Out of everyone working primarily in this tiny industry, my favorite person would probably be director and animator Kousuke Sugimoto.

Sugimoto splashed onto the scene in the late 2000s with his highly colorful and energetic animations; the best of which is The TV Show–a lighthearted satire of modern society as nothing but a sequence of shows within shows which all start to bleed into and subvert one-another. The tiny scenes in this video all have a tight, rhythmic flow which they cycle through in time with the music, growing increasingly frenetic as the video goes along and ultimately leading to wide-scale chaos. This is the kind of music video that first leaves an impression with how goofy and over the top it is, and then continues to leave an impression on repeat viewings with just how detailed and funny it is, packing so many ideas into such a short space and communicating all of them well.

It would be hard to pick my favorite Sugimoto video between the TV Show and this next one, but his video for Sing In My Own Way by Handsome Kenya certainly has the more imminently memorable concept. The singer-songwriter goes about his day normally as the representations of himself as a bunch of different instrumentalists split off from himself and end up getting caught up in their own business. It’s like a day-in-the-life story that ends up showing us half a dozen days in the life, reaching various levels of abnormalcy, and all culminating, once again, in wide-scale chaos; seems to be a hallmark of Sugimoto’s, and rightfully so, as he’s damn good at portraying it.

If I have one complaint about The TV Show and Sing In My Own Way though, it’s that I didn’t really care for the music in either video. Sugimoto’s next work, though, with a Russian alternative grunge band, has an awesome and hilarious song that the video adapts in a pretty literal way. It’s nothing all that complex, but the chorus is a sort of punchline that I just don’t want to spoil. This video is a lot more subdued both in color palette and animation than Sugimoto’s previous work, but I still had a lot of fun with it; just make sure you have captions on when you watch it.

Sugimoto has produced a small handful of other music videos, some of which are a bit more normal and at times not even animated, but his last one that I’d fully recommend is yet another Handsome Kenya song, this one called Tooryanse. It uses a mixed media approach of what seem to be animated photos of the actors overlaid with these really beautiful and trippy color textures reminiscent of something like Mononoke or Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei. This one sees Sugimoto revisiting his propensity for the epic in a big way, but unfortunately I could only find it viewable on Nico Nico Douga, so I hope that you can figure out how to navigate the site and to make an account to view it.

Another music video director of whom I’ve become a big fan for his unique and vibrant style is Wataru Uekusa, whose choices of color palette speak directly to my soul. Uekusa’s videos typically follow a clear formula–an adorable, precocious girl is hell-bent on accomplishing some sort of esoteric and self-destructive activity. There’s usually a bunch of crazy monsters and wild palettes, and the storylines communicate more emotionally than logically. That’s a fancy way of saying that I have no idea what the hell is going on in some of these, but I nonetheless feel like I “get it,” so to speak.

Mukougaoka Chisato Was Only Gazing is a trip and a half of a video, but more so than any of the other esoteric arthouse stuff that I watched while putting this list together, I actually felt some connection to it. The Tender March gave me similar feelings, and I would give anything to get a full blown anime series made with this aesthetic. Some of Uekusa’s later work includes two music videos for a cool Japanese rock band called A Crow Is White, those being fake!fake and Himitsu Spark, which each star a character that I assume is related to the band in some way, as she turns up in some of their other videos as well. Uekusa was also responsible for the ending video for the anime series Punch-line, which is obvious in retrospect.

Now, I’m sure that some of you coming to this video off of having seen Shelter might be looking for something a little bit more narrative-driven and emotional than what I’ve presented so far–so here’s a few stories which fall more into that vein.

Kanamewo is a tragic love story about a young woman who finds this weird alien frog tree girl thing laying around, takes her home, nurses her back to health, engages in a burning, passionate romance with her, and then learns that for this creature, life may yet be fleeting. It’s a very simple story, but presented with a really rough and raw aesthetic that makes all of the emotions feel intense and heavy, and it’s set to a fucking incredible post-rock song which is probably my favorite musical accompaniment for any of the anime music videos I’ve seen. I’m sure it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but if you’re looking for something a little bit more raw and intense than the typical anime pop fair, then you should definitely give this a look.

If you’d prefer something more conventional and direct, however, then you might enjoy this video for the song Mudai by Amazarashii. In this case, the song itself very literally tells a story in its lyrics, and the video is a literal representation of the song, albeit with some very cool and slightly abstract watercolor artwork. This one tells the story of an artist who rises to popularity with the help of his loving partner, only to find that when he tries to express something different, everyone ends up turning their back on him. Personally, I found a lot to connect with on it, though I’m not sure how I feel about the ending. Let me know if it worked for you in the comments.

If neither of these was enough of an emotional gut-punch for you, then maybe you’ll deal better with some stuff that gets kind of heavy in context. Hana wa Saku is a song that Yoko Kanno wrote for the relief effort in the wake of the 2011 Tohoku triple-disaster which Japan is still not totally recovered from. An anime video was made for the song a couple of year later, and even though the song and video are almost painfully saccharine and go right for the bicuspid when it comes to trying to pull your heartstrings, it’s hard not to fall for it when you know that it’s speaking to something so immediate and real.

Likewise, By Your Side couldn’t be more blunt with its emotional attack of adorable stuffed animals crying over their destroyed lives; but thanks to the absolutely gorgeous-looking stop-motion work, it’s hard not to appreciate. Each of these videos has an uplifting slant to it, so it’s not like they’re going to leave you an emotional wreck afterwards, but I think both do a fine job of aiming for the feels while still making a pretty good video.

If you want something that is really gonna wreck you though, then you can’t go wrong with this classic minimalist short called Furiko, which is famous for its ability to make people cry on command. I’m not going to say too much about it since Demolition D already gushed over it in his video on short film recommendations, but suffice it to say that the hype is warranted. The guy who made this thing went on to make a bunch of other, similar videos for other Muse songs, but personally I found that once the endearing clockwork gimmick of Furiko was removed, the exceedingly overt emotional scenarios of these videos became a bit cloying. That said, there’s a similar video that I don’t think is even related to this artist for a song by Denki Groove called Hikenai Guitar wo Hikundaze, which I managed to enjoy because it had much more of a rough, rock-and-roll edge to it which made the bluntness more effective–plus the ending is awesome.

Now, on the flipside of the coin, I’ve got a few recommendations for those of you who like your emotions to be more subtle, veiled, and metaphorical. Monotonous Purgatory is an aesthetically gorgeous video made entirely using the same style of oil-on-glass animation that got so much attention in Mob Psycho 100 this year. This is a pretty dark, atmospheric, and somewhat unsettling video whose storyline, if unclear, feels like it’s probably deep if you, like, think about it and stuff. I’d say the same about the artist’s other short films as well.

If that video wasn’t artsy and esoteric enough for you, then perhaps Airy Me will be enough to hit your sweet spot. This video is just goddamn visually incredible, with an animation style that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before and really took my breath away when I first saw it–not to mention the music is really great as well. If you’ve ever had one of those experiences with a piece of art where you’re not really sure that you understood what the hell was happening or what the point of it was, yet you couldn’t help but feel like it was probably the best thing ever and you just know that whatever it was, you loved it–that’s how I feel about this video. I’m not going to pretend that I get it–only that it made me feel some emotion that I don’t have the words to describe. It’s great.

Alright, enough of that artsy crap, let’s get to something that’s just pure, dumb, awesome fun, by looking at the work of Fantasista Umetaro. You may be familiar with this guy’s work if you’ve seen the music video for It Girl by Pharrell, which apparently a lot of people didn’t like for some reason. Personally, the only thing keeping me from stewing in bitterness over the fact that I could never become the most famous person living in Virginia Beach as long as Pharrell is around, is the knowledge that he, too, has dedicated his career to spreading the anime loli gospel around the world. Seriously, this video is adorable, and I can’t get over the fact that this is a real thing that one of the biggest pop musicians working right now used as a music video.

But that’s not the one I’m here to recommend. Umetaro’s much more interesting video is called Transfer, and it’s about the endlessly repeating cycle of the high school girl just trying to get to school on time–here represented with a constant repetition of the same handful of animation cuts with an evolving background, which changes between all kinds of cool and interesting styles, often with hilarious little alterations to the context of the girl’s run. This video is just a goddamn blast to watch and I’m glad that it exists. It’s worth mentioning as well that this video is for a livetune song, and that livetune probably has the most anime music videos of any musician out there–granted most of them are Hatsune Miku videos, but some of those are pretty okay. Also worth mentioning is that Umetaro, as well, has made a video for A Crow Is White, tho it’s not as good as the others.

Maybe you want your adorable fun with a little bit more of an underlying narrative, though, in which case I recommend She’s A Zombie, which comes from the guy who makes Teekyuu and is every bit as frantic and hilarious as that show can be. Honestly, if you’d told me that this was something which studio Trigger put together in-between episodes of Space Patrol Luluco then I would have believed you–it’s got that same kind of adorably pure romantic heart mixed with crazy action and hilarious gore. Unfortunately, only the first half of it is up on youtube, so you’ll have to hunt down the full version if you wanna see the best parts of it.

Something a lot less manic, but every bit as much fun, is probably the first purely comfy slice-of-life anime music video I’ve ever seen, Korekarasaki, Nando Anata to. Never before have I so badly wished that a music video be turned into a full show than in the case of this video. Its fantastic setting and character design work and overall pleasant atmosphere won me over so quickly that I was really sad when I remembered I wasn’t watching the first episode of a cool new slice-of-life show. More of this, please!

So alright, most of what I’ve talked about in this video has been independent animations and music videos that were made-to-order for the songs in question. But how about some cases wherein big-name animation studios went out and made music videos just for the hell of it in the name of doing something cool?

If you’re a hardcore aficionado of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli–or if you’ve seen that Demolition D video I mentioned earlier–then you may be familiar with a video that they put together called On Your Mark, which is awesome for the obvious reason that it’s a goddamn Miyazaki joint. If you love that mid-90s Ghibli aesthetic and you haven’t seen this thing yet, then you should definitely give it a look. Since a lot of you have probably seen that one, though, I’m also going to recommend this other Ghibli music video called Dore Dore no Uta. It’s nowhere near as ambitious and high-concept as On Your Mark, but it is incredibly goddamn adorable and lovable and puts a really big smile on my face.

Continuing on the subject of stuff that you’ve probably seen before, but I have to talk about it because it’s awesome, is Me!Me!Me!, the music video from studio Khara’s anime expo that made a huge splash around this time two years ago. Vibrantly sexual, intense, and wild, this video is an audio-visual assault of awesome stuff and probably has a deep message about being an otaku or some shit, I dunno man, have I mentioned how much I love teddyloid’s music and Daoko’s voice? It’s a good thing this video loops in on itself cause I could watch it all day. And if you’ve already seen the video before, but you haven’t yet seen the My Japanese Animes take on it yet, then you owe it to yourself to give that version a watch as well.

Speaking of stuff made by GAINAX but not when they were called GAINAX, I wouldn’t be able to let this video end without recommending what is not only far and away my favorite anime music video of all time, but also just one of my outright favorite anime. I am referring of course to Daicon IV, which combines the incredible, newly-discovered talent of director Hideaki Anno with every piece of awesome action animation and nerdy cultural reference that the early 80s could muster. There’s a ton that could be said about this video, from how it basically has half of the most memorable imagery from the End of Evangelion in it but fifteen years before that movie was made, and how Twilight by ELO is one of the greatest songs ever written, but Mother’s Basement already made a twenty-minute video about it, so I’ll defer you to that. Just whatever you do, make sure you don’t live too much more of your life without indulging in this masterpiece of good times.

Anywho, that’s… probably like ten or so music videos? And this video is getting long, so let’s call it a day. Support me on patreon so I can keep doing crazy shit like watching a hundred or so anime music videos in two days just for the sake of a recommendation list, and share this video to everybody. Check out my other channels for more of me and, as always, thanks again for watching–I’ll see you in the next one.

Kousuke Sugimoto
The TV Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ9YtJC-Kd8
Sing In My Own Way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygECmAslHCI
Dusan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIi7jV1CCxQ
Tooryanse: http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26173979

Wataru Uekusa
Mukougaoka Chisato Was Only Gazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnMMZDNPMY
The Tender March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vQ5SwncXrY
fake!fake!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-M7cvJy1IY
Himitsu Spark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_26_gR7Vs8

Kanamewo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RzNDZFQllA

Mudai: http://kissanime.to/Anime/amazarashi-Untitled-Mudai/Special?id=108397

Hana wa Saku: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EjeLyHI144

By Your Side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTOcoDfbAu4

Furiko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=137JwofLr60
Hikenai Guitar wo Hikundaze: https://vimeo.com/100700183

Monotonous Purgatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaVu3IxxavA

Airy Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ5QvrGxTnQ

Fantasista Umetaro
It Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPZDBF0kei0
Transfer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayL4pzictu8

She’s A Zombie (incomplete version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyjsGstKHpg

Korekarasaki, Nando Anata to.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGfbkRm1avc

Studio Ghibli
On Your Mark: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2y2269
Dore Dore no Uta: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/mo0IvypNeU4

ME!ME!ME!: https://vimeo.com/146687239
My Japanese Animes: Me!Me!Me!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Qb4TAO0dc

Daicon IV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-840keiiFDE

Other Good Stuff I Showed In The Video
Nihonbashi Koukashita R Keikaku: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGgBk3icgi4
Hoka Hoka Oden no Uta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duV_Po5SzvY
Behind A Smile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_eqDbmOiRQ
6 Princess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoTP5Aig-wU
FR/DAY NIGHT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJaT4-EYzZI
Nimrod: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2uih8y
B Who I Want 2 B: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAGwY9ODTEQ

Text version:

This video is a continuation of Shinbo in the 90s Part 1, so watch that video first if you haven’t yet.

Shinbo’s next project would see him returning to work with Studio Madhouse for a fifty-minute OVA called Twilight of the Dark Master. This one is a quintessentially 90s dark urban fantasy, rife with gory violence, nudity, demons, and badasses with psychic powers. It feels like a Yoshiaki Kawajiri OVA by way of X/1999 if that makes sense to anyone. Sparse on plot, dialog, and anything happening, this OVA is mostly just a collection of really nice-looking vaporwave aesthetic backgrounds and cool imagery; weirdly enough, however, not much of it is all that Shinbo-like. There’s plenty of bold color and framing choices, as well as some inventive aspect ratio changes, and even another scene of a character’s face appearing on many surfaces at once; but for the most part this OVA is far more tame than Shinbo’s standard fare–perhaps because it was able to achieve aesthetic beauty anyways without having to do anything all that weird. Still, I can’t really recommend this as much of a vehicle for Shinbo appreciation, and on its own merits I could only recommend it to the most hardcore fans of violent 90s anime schlock.

Over the next couple of years, Shinbo’s rate of production would seem to slow down a bit–but he’d also start popping up in small ways in other people’s work on the side. There are four different cases of Shinbo working as an animation checker under the pseudonym Futoshi Shiiya in 1998 and 1999; first on the Silent Mobius TV series, and then on three different shows by studio Triangle Staff: Aoi & Mutsuki, Magic User’s Club, and Space Pirate Mito. In all of these cases, several of the staff members whom Shinbo had worked with on previous shows were among the main creative staff on the series, so it seems likely that Shinbo was brought on via connections to help out with their production, if not to offer any creative input.

In 1998, Shinbo would also turn up as a storyboarder for episode 12 of Saber Marionette J to X; a show whose director, Masami Shimoda, had worked with Shinbo on five different shows across his career dating all the way back to Urusei Yatsura, as well as whose writer had written most of Yamamoto Yohko and Detatoko Princess; those, among plenty of other shared staff between Shinbo’s other work going back to Yuu Yuu Hakusho. While this episode isn’t particularly Shinbo-like, besides in the inclusion of some single-color shots and weird picture-in-picture framing, the editing style of the episode is nonetheless incredibly bizarre. It seems to come from the early days of digital cell manipulation, and for whatever reason the team thought it would be a good idea to have images constantly sliding all over the place and on top of one-another. It’s honestly kind of nauseating and horrible to look at, and not something I’ve ever seen Shinbo do elsewhere; but this episode is weird enough, and different enough from what I could tell by looking at other episodes of the show, that I still think it’s worth mentioning. Don’t watch it, though.

1999 would see the debut of Shinbo’s biggest project yet and the last one that he’d do with J.C. Staff–a full-blown 26-episode TV version of Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko. While retaining the basic character and plot aspects of the OVA series, this TV version takes a lot more time to flesh out its characters and to tell a more straightforward, long-form story, with a lot less emphasis on adventure, and a greater emphasis on interpersonal melodrama and starship battles. Like the OVAs, it uses Shinbo’s stylistic trappings more as window-dressing than as a constant focus, though the sheer length of the series allows for most of his techniques to make an appearance by the end, and even for a large handful of new ones to emerge.

The most prominent Shinbo-isms throughout this series are the harsh lighting and bold monochromatic frames that he’s best known for, which are persistent to the point that at times they can actually feel oppressive. Given the relatively lighthearted nature of the series, it can feel strange at times that the visuals are so dark for such long stretches of time, and I can’t help but think, even as a fan of Shinbo’s style, that he overreached a bit in this case. His bizarre choices of aspect ratio and windowed framing also come up a lot of times throughout the series. Besides those things, we can find at least one example of each of the following:

Harsh hallway lighting, cool lightning effects, a face appearing in multiple reflective surfaces, inventive transitions all over the place, a bath scene, a character looking into a fisheye lens, that thing where we go into a character’s eyeball to what they’re looking at, and crucifixions.

Aside from those, the series also introduces a bunch of new techniques which will come up in Shinbo’s future work–most especially in his long-form comedies which he’d make with studio SHAFT in the mid-2000s. Firstly is the near-constant gag of drawing attention to the size of one character’s forehead in all kinds of unique ways. This gag was used in the original OVAs, but not nearly to the extent that it is in the show, which pushes it to the extreme. This would be done again with a big-foreheaded character in Pani Poni Dash in 2005. This show also introduces the use of eyecatches during which the character depicted says the name of the show in different ways every time, as well as the first instance wherein eyecatches are used after nearly every scene throughout a certain episode, which both become common Shinbo trademarks later on.

Episode two has the first instance of a super-long shot wherein the characters in the foreground are talking about one thing, while an unrelated scene is happening behind them, which Shinbo does in a lot of his comedy shows. This is also an example of a lengthy wide shot which repeatedly cuts to close-ups of a character’s face and then back out to the wide, which we’ll be seeing used in the next thing that Shinbo directed as well. Later episodes introduce a repeated animation that we see many times throughout the series, which is something Shinbo would use in most of his longer-running TV series. Finally, towards the back end of the show, we start to get a bunch of random cut-aways to a relatively unimportant older side-character who fills a sort of mentor position in the story, just going about their everyday life and doing random stuff. This is, once again, something that persists in all of Shinbo’s comedy shows in the mid-2000s. In fact, the general pacing and editing style of Yamamoto Yohko grows to increasingly resemble the feeling of SHAFT’s work in the later part of the series, and gives much more of the vibe that I best know Shinbo for than any of his other work up to this point.

This series was also the first time that Shinbo worked with one of my favorite character designers, Akio Watanabe, who would not only provide the character designs for the SoulTaker, but also, much more famously, for the entire Monogatari series. It’s kind of trippy to see his very cutesy and modern design sense applied to a cel-animated 90s series, especially since the designs have been modified from the much more era-indicative designs of the OVAs. Also worth mentioning is the mechanical designer, Noriaki Tetsura, who would do the same job on Shinbo’s next two projects, and had previously worked as a key animator on Yuu Yuu Hakusho.

As for whether or not I’d recommend Yamamoto Yohko, it’s kind of a tough one. The storyline is incredibly bizarre and takes more than half of the series to really take off; and I could see a lot of viewers being turned off by its frequent tonal shifts. This series definitely leans into bathos territory as it goes, with scenes of high melodrama sometimes punctuated by weird slapstick humor. It’s also very, very slow, and feels like it wastes a lot of time, especially in the first half. There’s a decent handful of really trippy and esoteric scenes and episodes, but none of them are trippy in a way that screams Shinbo, so much as just generally weird and even sometimes incoherent. It’s definitely the kind of story that asks you not to think too hard about its mechanics and is more dedicated to the moment-to-moment enjoyment of watching its story unfold. I can’t say that the characters were interesting enough for me to form an attachment with them and I didn’t care for the setting at all, but it would be hard for me to say that the story is without merit, or that I couldn’t easily imagine other viewers buying into it more than I could. If you dig the show’s aesthetic, or you’re just easily won over by 90s shows that are set in space and by cute, earnest characters who feel lots of big emotions, then by all means, give this one a shot.

Shinbo’s next OVA, Tenamonya Voyagers, is a lot easier to recommend. Produced by studio Pierrot, whom you’ll remember as the Yuu Yuu Hakusho guys that started this whole journey, and released over the course of 1999, this comedy space adventure series is lavishly designed and produced, with its first episode being among the nicest-looking things that Shinbo’s ever been involved with. I really got a Cowboy Bebop vibe from the visuals of this series, with its highly detailed and lived-in cities on other alien planets, and the utterly gorgeous character designs from Masashi Ishihama, who would later design for the much more famous Read or Die OVA.

Tenamonya’s rather strange opening video, set to a tune that sounds like a marching band, bears a lot of resemblance to the style of the early Pani Poni Dash openings–and this brand of bizarre imagery in a comedy OP is something which studio SHAFT would later be known for. Early on, we also get an example of these walls of one repeated image, which also showed up a few times in Yamamoto Yohko, but I hadn’t picked up on the trend until now. Monochromatic frames and strange aspect ratios are here as you’d expect; and the first episode also features a scene wherein a car’s headlights are used to cast harsh lighting over a scene, which we’ll be seeing again in the SoulTaker. Framing through foreground objects, background animation, and flame effects all show up throughout, as well as the return of the going-through-an-eye thing, stained glass, candles, cutting back and forth between a long wide-shot and close-ups of the characters’ faces, and even the use of cut-aways to a support character doing a bunch of random stuff, particularly in the last episode. The only technique which is more or less introduced by this series is depicting a group of faceless individuals, which will be more prominent in future series.

Tenamonya Voyagers doesn’t lean all too heavily on Shinbo-isms until its final episode, which uses them very effectively to create the wackiest and funniest episode of the show. Whether Shinbo-y or not, the series is consistently visually engaging thanks to its strong animation and designs, which allow it to flow from normal-looking scenes into Shinbo-looking scenes without the transition feeling jarring, cause everything just always looks cool as hell. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with this OVA is that it’s woefully truncated. By the end, the characters have only barely gotten off their feet on the start of a big adventure, and the series just kinda ends unceremoniously without any semblance of an ending. This really feels like the first four episodes of a very fun 26-episode series that just never was. It’s more than a bit of a shame, and the overall feeling of this OVA is bittersweet, as it starts so strongly, but doesn’t really go anywhere by the end.

So at this point, we’ve covered every single thing that Shinbo worked on up through the end of the 90s–but there’s still one more show that I feel the need to talk about in order to put the capstone on this era of Shinbo’s career; I am of course referring to the one that I’ve been making reference to throughout this entire video: The SoulTaker.

The SoulTaker represents a kind of integral turning point in Shinbo’s career. Released in 2001 by Tatsunoko Productions, it would be the last series that Shinbo did with many of his returning staff members from the other 90s shows, as well as the last thing that he did with any of the studios that I’ve talked about so far. Immediately following this series, Shinbo would seemingly blink off the map for three years before returning with an OVA and another TV series in 2004, and then finally joining studio SHAFT–but we’ll have to get into what he was really doing for those three years if and when I get around to making Akiyuki Shinbo in the 2000s. As for why these things happened, I have no idea–but more importantly, The SoulTaker makes the perfect capstone for this part of Shinbo’s career because it’s just the most thoroughly SHINBO thing ever made.

It wouldn’t feel fair to say that The SoulTaker uses a lot of the bold, monochromatic coloring and harsh lighting that we’ve gotten used to, so much as to question if the show even has a base color palette to begin with. At no point does the series ever settle on one look, and it goes a lot farther than ever before on making this coloring style look sleek and stylish. The move to digital coloring seems to work wonders with Shinbo’s style, as does the use of 16:9 aspect ratio which gives a lot more breathing room for these esoteric shots to feel coherent. Suffice it to say that this series elevates the techniques that we’ve gotten used to into really coming into their own, and actually working as the basic look of the show instead of as window-dressing to certain shots.

Up until this point, I’ve tried to show you the majority of the Shinbo-centric shots in each of the shows that he worked on, and to present each of his stylistic trappings therein; but doing so here would just about require me to play the entire show. Whereas some of these techniques would’ve shown up once or twice in previous shows, here they are all used continuously. Remember how Shinbo used to work in a crucifixion scene maybe once every-other show? Now, one of his transforming hero’s main special attacks literally allows him to crucify his opponents in mid-air before impaling them through the chest. Remember those cross-shaped grave markers that he slipped into Hurricane Polymar? Now, the show’s first major action scene takes place in a graveyard; fighting against a doctor, with one of his eyes covered by a shining object; and using constant background animation. The SoulTaker doesn’t so much feature the occasional gothic environment, as it is simply that the world it takes place in is inherently gothic in nature. The color design of this series actually reminds me a lot of the comic series Hellboy, which Shinbo would later pay outright homage to in one of the Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ending themes, leading me to wonder if it wasn’t a big influence on his style.

Much of this show will look and feel familiar to fans of Shinbo’s later work, and especially to some of his opening and ending sequences which seem to pay homage to it. Our main character practically starts the show off hanging suspended by chains in mid-air, which Shinbo will do countless times again–as he will also do with bloody teardrops, and representing characters by on-screen text instead of actually showing them. In this series, Akio Watanabe’s designs much more closely resemble those in Bakemonogatari–especially the girl in the first two episodes who is at times a dead ringer for Senjougahara. It even has moments which nearly resemble the infamous head tilt which studio SHAFT are so known for these days.

The storyline of the SoulTaker can seem nearly as abstract as its backgrounds sometimes, but the heart of it is a simple action-adventure story about a guy who gains special powers after getting stabbed by his mom, then finds out that he’s got a long-lost twin sister who’s in love with him, and she also has a bunch of pseudo-clones who also are sometimes in love with him, and all of them are being chased down by these warring factions of science and medicine corporations who use all kinds of robots and mutants to fight with him. It’s kinda weird, but the bottom line is that the best reason to watch this show is for the twenty-wallpapers-per-minute artstyle. Plus, it has the distinct honor of hosting my personal favorite anime opening of all time, by JAM Project. If you’re a fan of Akiyuki Shinbo’s aesthetic, then you absolutely owe it to yourself to watch this series; but if you’re not a fan, then there’s really not much of interest here to make it worth seeking out.

Certain aspects of this show’s Shinbo-ness are a little bit more abstract and harder to quantify. A lot of its animation and sound design has this weird, floaty feeling to it, like the show is moving slightly slower than real-time, and a lot of Shinbo’s future work will have moments like this. There’s also a stronger focus on atypical sexuality in this show, given how many of the characters are some brand of incestuous; but there have been tiny hints of this all along. Nearly every series up to this point has had at least one line of dialog which might suggest that one character was gay, and at least one case of interesting gender and sexuality dynamics in the later episodes of Yamamoto Yohko. The reason I hesitate to call this a Shinbo thing is that it would pop up at such random times and never really get explored, and it’s not as though Shinbo wrote any of these series–but in the future, there will be no shortage of gay characters and atypical romances in all of his work, from age differences to incest and all sorts of others. It also seemed as if the designs in all of his shows put some emphasis on designing really cute and realistic casual outfits for the characters, to the point that it’s hard to imagine that it was just a coincidence.

Suffice it to say that if there’s a moment wherein Shinbo really seemed to have come into his own as a director, it would be with The SoulTaker. All of the stylistic, thematic, and directorial flourish which he’d used up until this point, and would continue to use in the future, was represented in this series. From the transforming heroes, to the tragic, atypical romance, to the insane, experimental gothic visuals laced with hints of fanservice, this show had it all.

So what I’m sure a lot of you are wondering is why I would go to the trouble of cataloging Shinbo’s techniques and their histories so thoroughly (other than to show what a massive fanboy I am). The reason is that from this point onward, Shinbo’s career becomes a little bit more complicated and draped in subtle mystery. After teaming up with studio SHAFT, Shinbo would start collaborating with other, equally experimental and insane directors who would change the inherent style of the shows that he was in charge of, and even start to get his name associated with techniques that he may not have had as much to do with. In turn, his stylistic attitude would permeate the studio so thoroughly that many of his understudies would come to resemble him to the point that many viewers wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.

I think that by taking a look at Shinbo’s past, and seeing which techniques he’s been prone to using from the start, or has continued to use across his entire career, we can get a better idea of which elements of his future work he was actually responsible for. I would love to eventually catalog everything which Shinbo worked on from this point forward, but that would be an even bigger project best saved for another day. For now, I hope you were able to get something out of this massive rundown of Shinbo’s career in the 90s, and that you’ll share it around to anyone whom you think would appreciate it. Support my channel on patreon if you want to see more videos like this, and check out my other channels for more frequent content. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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When I ask myself which anime has the outright best character designs that I can think of, I inevitably come to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Let’s list the reasons why!

#1. Readability

Gurren Lagann’s characters were designed from the ground up to be easy to animate, meaning that they couldn’t have too many intricate details in their clothing, and had to be easily identifiable even when chaotically darting around the screen. In order to make each of them recognizable without going too heavy on details, designer Atsushi Nishigori instead focused on giving each character a unique body type and some kind of highly noticeable piece of clothing or accessory. Yoko has a flaming bikini and a gigantic sniper rifle, Kamina has his cape and famous sunglasses, and Simon has his jacket and goggles. None of these are too difficult to draw, nor do they need to be drawn in full detail in order to be recognized–which means that the characters are incredibly readable even when animated frenetically.

As the great Gin-san once explained in Gintama, a good character design should always be recognizable by its silhouette alone–and this is certainly true of the main cast of gurren lagann. Kamina’s sunglasses and Simon’s goggles point off of their faces in a very recognizable way, and Yoko’s giant rifle as the only thing adorning her barely clothed body is unmistakable. This is without even getting into how distinct the shapes of these characters are, with just enough defined musculature to look human and realistic, while still being able to deform into highly animated modes without looking like a different character. Even with a mostly-clothed and typically-of-anime skinny character like Nia, the incredibly distinct shape of her hair makes her silhouette stand out. All told, these are characters whom you can recognize immediately, and who don’t quite resemble any other characters out there.

#2. Versatility

Each of the characters in Gurren Lagann can be drawn very realistically at times, and have less exaggerated features and body types than what might be considered typical of the medium; but they can also be made incredibly cartoony and stretchy without really changing the fundamental nature of the designs. They still look like themselves, whether they’re being drawn in a highly detailed static harmony shot, or in a much looser and more animated action sequence. The characters don’t have to become super-deformed to fit into a comedy scene, nor do they seem to drastically change when drawn more seriously–they are capable of fitting into any emotional scenario in animation.

This is kind of the opposite of how Nishigori’s designs would later be used in Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, wherein the difference between each emotional mood of the designs was highly exaggerated, switching between extremely super-deformed characters, somewhat more normal designs, and ludicrously detailed ones during the transformation sequence–almost as if director Hiroyuki Imaishi had specifically asked Nishigori to do the opposite of what he’d done for their previous show.

#3. Unity

Each of the main characters’ designs in Gurren Lagann sort of flow into one-another in ways that are obvious when you think about them, but not so glaring that they feel overly apparent from the beginning. Kamina, Simon, and Yoko all follow a clear blue and red color scheme, with inversions in places to reflect that they aren’t all from the same hole, even if Yoko is simply from the next hole over–i.e. all of them are pretty similar in worldview and unified in their goals.

The flames and skull patterns from Simon’s jacket and Yoko’s bikini top fuse together on Kamina’s cape, and each of the three carries some kind of oversized crude weapon–a huge katana, a huge rifle, and a big drill. They all wear light clothing because they come from underground, and both Kamina and Yoko have highly impressive physiques, which Simon will eventually grow into one of later on, while adopting a sort of combination of his and Kamina’s wardrobe styles over time.

Then we’ve got Nia, who shows up at a major turning point in the story and completely breaks all of the conventions established by the other characters. Instead of bold primary colors, she is made of pastels. Her hair is two-toned, her eyes have their own unique shape, and she’s dressed head to toe in pink. Nia comes from a completely different culture and background, and as a result looks almost alien amongst the rest of the series’ cast. This goes a hell of a long way in matching what Nia’s place in the story ends up being, which is to provide an alternate perspective from Kamina and the others whom Simon has grown up around, and to help him to learn a more balanced way of looking at the world. Nia’s design does become more unified with the rest of the cast after she properly joins the Gurren Brigade, however, and is adorned with the trademark skull.

Later into the series, the skulls and flames are slowly traded in for a star motif, which all culminates in the moment when Simon’s sunglasses turn into the star-shaped visor–a symbol of how the spiral warriors have already risen high above the flames below into the stars above.

The beastmen, meanwhile, are a much bigger hodgepodge of design elements, given their nature as sort of weird chimera creatures; but where they are more unified is in the way that they’re drawn–often being portrayed with enormously thick, rough, painterly lines, as if a calligrapher was outlining them with a huge brush. Lord Genome brings this to the next level, as the king of all the beast men with the biggest, most outrageous lines of all.

The anti-spirals then turn to even more abstract and alien designs, to give a sense of their barely-comprehensible, almost lovecraftian nature. This is reflected in the designs of their ships as well, which are either CG UFOs that look nothing like anything else in the show, or just really trippy bizarre ships out beyond the reaches of space and time.

#4. Everyone Stands Out

Not every character design in Gurren Lagann is equally memorable, and they certainly aren’t all equally appealing, but not a single one of them is boring or generic. Every single character has a unique design that communicates their personalities effortlessly, to the point that some of these supporting characters who get less than ten lines across the whole series and maybe have their names shouted out once, still feel like distinct characters who have entire stories of their own that we’re only seeing a small part of.

Kittan’s sisters, Gimmy and Darry, and Leite all have strong enough designs that they could be main characters in any other series–to the point that it’s easy to forget how little each of them actually appears throughout the story, since each of their appearances has so much impact. The series villains are all highly memorable as well, and have a great sense of variety among their designs. Supporting cast members like Leeron and Attenborough whose designs are so different from the main cast or much of anything else in anime lend the series an extra depth of character, like there might be as many different body types and features in the world of this series as you could find in the real world.

#5. Evolution–by the way spoilers, if you haven’t figured that out already.

Every major character in Gurren Lagann undergoes a massive evolution in their design across the series–and not just because of the seven-year time skip that happens in the middle. Kamina starts out as more of a teenaged ruffian before he comes face to face with his father’s failure and takes up his cape to assume the visage of a great leader. Nia has her hair blasted off and then shapes it into her adorable short-haired look to signify her finding her place as a real member of the Gurren brigade. In the future setting, many characters undergo major costume changes several times to reflect their current place in the story–such as Yoko evolving from a schoolteacher into the biggest set of stars in the sky, and Viral going from roughed-up prisoner to starship co-commander.

Some of these characters grow in ways that we expect, while others really show how the times have changed them. Rossiu becomes far more masculine over time, and Kinon totally changes her image in order to follow him. Darry goes from a deadpan little girl to a passionate warrior with the best body in the series, I’m just saying; and then, at the end of the series, we get to see these characters grow up all over again into epic old badasses, which I wish every single anime ever would give us the courtesy of.

None of this is even to speak of the many subtle ways in which the characters’ designs allow them to change with the different emotional moods of the story; such as how Simon can hide behind his goggles in times when he’s feeling the most powerless and dead inside, or Yoko can retreat into her scarf when she’s feeling shy. Even though these characters have so few pieces to their costumes, those pieces are used in as many ways as you could imagine, like the team behind the show wasn’t willing to let a single aspect of the show’s design go unexplored.

#6. Accessibility

Gurren Lagann is a show for everyone. It’s got hyper-masculine guys, cool-looking and smooth guys, busty, voluptuous girls, small cutesy girls, and so on–and somehow, all of them naturally fit into this universe and the tone of this series together. You could show this series to someone who says that they just can’t get into that anime look, or that they hate the aesthetic of modern anime, and they’d probably still be able to appreciate these designs. Likewise, you could show it to the most hardcore moe afficianado, and he’d have bought figures of half the girls before he was done watching it.

Because the characters are drawn with realistic body types and musculature, all of the main cast have been massively popular for cosplay since the series came out–and anyone with the body type to pull off these cosplays at their full potential is bound to be one of the best-dressed people at the convention. These outfits look as cool on real people as they do on the characters in the series, and if you wanted to do a big group cosplay with all your friends, you can probably find someone in the series for each of them to pull off–albeit not necessarily ones that they’ll be happy to hear that they’ve got the right body for.

Even when it comes to fanart and porn, this series has one of the highest cross-gender appeals that I’ve ever seen. There’s as much gay art of Kamina and Simon as there is artist alley airbrushings of Yoko, and it’s not like these designs only appeal to the opposite gender either. Yoko seems to be an insanely popular design with women, especially for cosplay, and Kamina is such an inspiration to any man who values aesthetic excellence that some of my friends have modeled their entire lives after him. Suffice it to say that these are some of the sexiest, coolest, and most widely beloved character designs in the history of the medium.

So there you have it: the six reasons that Gurren Lagann has, at the very least, some of the greatest character designs in the history of anime. And those aren’t even the only noteworthy design elements–every incarnation of the robot itself or any of its main opponents are toy-worthy in their own right, and the setting design has moments of incredible inventiveness. Gurren Lagann is easily one of the most visually stupendous animated series that I’ve ever laid eyes on, and perfect in every other way to boot. Holy shit, what a cool series!

Anyways, if you enjoyed this video, be sure to share it with anyone whom you think will appreciate it; and if you want to help me make more videos like this, then consider supporting my channel via patreon. Check out my other channels for more of me and, as always, thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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Anime and high school are practically inseparable. Anime that don’t take place in high school or feature high school-aged characters are far and away the exception to the rule; and the medium seems intent on finding ways to work a high school setting into every conceivable plot or genre. A post-apocalypse show wherein vampires have taken over the world? Better make sure there’s a high school. Bunch of dead teenagers in limbo? Limbo is the high school that my life as an anime journalist takes place in. Why not do a zombie apocalypse in high school? Why not do another one? This isn’t even accounting for the sheer wealth of shows that are just about normal-ass high school, by the way.

High school is so ubiquitous in anime that it’s almost unreal. I’m sure you can think of a reason or two that this would happen off the top of your head, but the sheer omnipresence of it all makes me suspect that there’s a lot more going on here than merely what’s obvious–so I’m gonna break it all down, from the most obvious factors, to the least.

We’ll start with the fact that a huge part of the audience for anime is teenagers; teenagers being people who’ve generally got less going on in their lives than a typical adult, and whose rigid structure of high-school life gives them free time allocated in very regular and predictable bursts; so the act of something like watching a weekly TV show fits right into their schedule. Aside from having the right lifestyle, teenagers also have the right mindset–they’re at an age that turns them into living vacuums of ideas and perspectives, trying to shape their identities and to prepare to embark into the world of adulthood. To put it dramatically, teenagers need art more than anyone else does in order to help them to contextualize their lives and the world around them. They’re the right people to enjoy anime, and have the right schedules to watch it.

But what about marketability? So much of anime is marketed to a niche that’s expected to spend a lot of money on it, so wouldn’t it be more profitable to market to adults who make way more money? Well, the thing about high schoolers is that their money isn’t likely going towards anything important. Whatever money they do make is going to be spent on the things that they care about, rather than on keeping their lives together. [Live action clip.]

If teenagers are the best market force in support of anime, then it only makes sense to try and make anime as relatable for teenagers as possible; and this comes with the added bonus that anything which is relatable for teenagers is also going to be relatable for adults, because adults have been teenagers before. A teenager might not be able to relate to certain adult issues, but an adult can easily put themselves into the shoes of what their own teenage life was like–albeit with increasing difficulty as the years go by.

But all that aside, there’s one really huge factor in what makes high school such a lucrative setting that never gets mentioned, and it might even be that this factor is most potent in Japan specifically: which is, simply, that high school is quite possibly the most interesting time in most people’s lives.

High school is a place where everyone is forced to interact with a huge number of people whom they never would encounter normally. It’s a place where everyone is only expected to do the amount of work that they’re given, and everything else in their life is largely free-form. It’s a place where everyone is trying to figure out who they are and where they’re going with their lives and what they’ll be doing from here on out, and basically making what are probably going to be some of the biggest decisions in their lives.

It’s a hotbed of possibility–and as a narrative backdrop, it’s a place wherein characters can just entirely be themselves and not have to deal with anything; because the experience of school is so universal that it doesn’t even need to be addressed. Like, in spite of how many high school shows there are, almost none of them are actually about doing high school. The reason high school is there is so that we don’t have to ask what the hell these characters are doing when they’re not doing the story–we know exactly what high schoolers would normally be doing.

High school in Japan isn’t quite like high school in America, though. Here, it seems like most kids do all their stumbling over what their future is going to be about either in college or as they fumble into the job market–whereas in Japan, you’re really expected to have your shit figured out by that point; and once you’ve got your shit together, then your life is pretty much just that.

The Japanese work ethic is not to be understated. I mean, if you’ve actually seen one of the couple dozen workplace dramas in anime, then you’ve seen them all. Everyone works–everyone overworks–constantly. “Life,” is just doing your job; and it’s not that you can’t make a great story out of that–plenty of these are great shows–but they really do all tell the same story about the Japanese workplace, no matter what kind of job it is. Most of these shows chose to focus on artistic jobs because those involve more individuality in all the decision-making that goes on, but you’ll never hear about a Japanese artist who made one hit and then rested on their royalties for the rest of their lives. To the Japanese, working and living are basically synonymous–if you’re not working, or at least parenting, then what the hell are you doing with your life?

Well, probably watching anime. About high school. And if not about high school, then about being a deadbeat adult otaku who isn’t doing anything with his life but watching anime about high school–’cause if you’re watching anime and you’re not in high school, then that’s probably a lot more relatable for you. I mean, the guy from I Can’t Understand What My Husband Is Saying makes money from running an anime blog, so that’s basically my life story put to animation–and I’m pretty sure that show is stealth propaganda to try and convince otaku that they’d be happier if they married a hot blonde. It fucking worked, and now I’m depressed.

My point is, that high school occupies this perfect interstice between appealing to the core demographic and customer base of the medium, as well as making it really convenient to write a story about anything other than either working constantly or being crushed under persistent monetary concern, or being a degenerate otaku–which are the three states of Japanese adulthood. And yeah, it’s not like there aren’t tons and tons of manga which are actually about adult issues and aimed at an older audience, but it’s also a hell of a lot easier for an adult to sneak in a chapter of some political gag comic while they’re on a two-hour Tokyo commute or taking a shit or something, as opposed to watching a whole episode of anime.

But thankfully, I think that this is slowly changing. A lot of these three-minute shorts seem to be branching out to an older audience, and as my generation enters the workforce as the first generation to whom watching something on a mobile phone with headphones in public is totally normal, I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more anime that panders to our demographic, without having to cast a net over the younger audience as well. Those shows will be much more cheaply made and shorter, but at least they won’t be about high school; not that I won’t keep watching all this high school shit anyways.

Because the other thing is that at this point, high school in anime hardly means anything. I really think that half of the time, high school is just an excuse to set something in a contemporary setting while accounting for the characters not having jobs. But then again, I think a huge part of what makes a show like Durarara so goddamn great is that it has the balls to make this ridiculous urban fantasy wherein most of the characters are adults with superpowers but they’ve all got comparably mundane and normal job–because it’s not like these people can just exist in a void. I’d love to see more stuff that’s willing to make inventive considerations like this, but then again Durarara is probably the least relatable thing to ever be set in Tokyo in the modern age–and that’s kind of the point in and of itself. Whatever.

Would I like for there to be less anime set in high school and more shows that deal with adult issues? Yes. But I also appreciate that the logistics of that are pretty limiting if you want to keep your story in the scope of reality. Adults have jobs, and lives, and often kids, and all kinds of concerns that would make it hard to bum around with a bunch of sexy girls and fight demons or whatever the hell teenagers are up to these days. Writing a show about adults just requires that much more nuance and attention to detail, and for writing conflicts around the setting and the lives of the characters–which, yes, are all things that automatically make a story more interesting and are traits of many of the best-written stories in existence, but I think we’d be losing something of value if loose, goofy stories that wouldn’t work outside of high school stopped existing. I certainly don’t want to live in a world where anime becomes like American TV dramas which pretty much have to focus on crime and/or law enforcement if they want their adult characters to have lives that are at all interesting.

So yeah, I think that’s why so much of anime takes place in high school; but if you think I’m missing an even bigger detail then let me know in the comments. Check out my other channels for more of me, and support me on patreon if you want to see more videos like this. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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Shirobako definitively became one of my favorite anime series of all time in the wake a certain story event; but like with the show itself, so much of what’s great about that scene has to do with the context surrounding it–both within the text and within the show’s exterior meta. Let’s break it all down, with spoilers up through episode twelve; if you haven’t seen this show already, I recommend it more than I recommend breathing.

The scene in question involves the main character, Miyamori Aoi, who is an animation runner for a TV show that’s nearing the end of its production cycle and in dire straits over finishing the biggest piece of animation for its grand finale, which had been altered at the last minute. Aoi is running all over town in desperate search of anyone who can animate this scene on ludicrously short notice during the holiday season, passing by and jealously gazing into parodies of real-world giant studios like Sunrise and pining for the beautiful mechanism of a well-planned production.

By way of random chance encounters and connections, Aoi finds herself at the home of what is unmistakably a cartoon parody of the one and only anime legend Hideaki Anno–director of Neon Genesis Evangelion and, at an early point in his career, a fantastic key animator.

This is the first point at which the episode really hits me at my core, because it’s fucking Anno. In the context of the story, we’re told that this guy is a legend of the industry, and it’s easy enough to read what you’re meant to think about him and his attitude without having any idea what an Evangelion is–a show which was released when Aoi herself was only two years old. But if you do know who Anno is, then holy shit! It’s really Hideaki Anno!

And of course it is, because what more recognizable face and name is there in the anime industry, besides perhaps the truly reclusive Hayao Miyazaki? What could be more climactic an appearance–who could be more of a final boss for the cour-one climax of a show about anime production full of character parodies of real-life industry figures, then Hideaki Fucking Anno? I mean, you don’t even have to like the guy to appreciate this on the meta level–but coming from someone who wrote a video term paper about him, I think my excitement is understandable.

But it’s really everything that comes after Anno’s appearance that goes so far in not only justifying it, but making this show’s purpose oh-so-clear and saying so much about the anime industry and its history and its current state of being and what any of it is all about. It’s not just that he’s Hideaki Anno, infamously notorious director; it’s also that he’s Hideaki Anno, massive otaku and animation aficionado. It’s Hideaki Anno who would be as excited to meet and to work with a legendary animator as anyone might be to work with him; and it’s both of those Hideaki Annos whose advice is imperative to Aoi at this crucial moment.

Anno points Aoi in the direction of one titan of an animator who just happens to work at Aoi’s studio, and who’s mostly been doing assistant work for other studios’ shows because he isn’t good at the moe-style drawing that his studio’s current show is utilizing. Of course Anno can easily rattle off this guy’s prior work and where his specialties lie, because that’s the kind of knowledge that Hideaki Anno has; and if Aoi had known the first thing about Anno as an animator, as I do, then she’d know that he’s mostly good for explosions and debris–not so much animals or humans.

But that older animator, Shigeru Sugie, is not just a character in the show either. He isn’t directly based on a real-world figure in the same way that Anno is, but when we actually get to watch the scene which he animates at the end of the episode, it all clicks together to realize that it was in-real-life animated by one Toshiyuki Inoue–a real-life veteran of the industry who also is best known for his extremely realistic movement style and not really for having worked on anything moe–more like, so many of the most beautifully realistic films of the 90s and early 2000s.

It was in researching Toshiyuki Inoue after seeing this episode, that I found an interview with him conducted by the president of P.A. Works himself, Kenji Horikawa, who was of course the producer of Shirobako as well. In it, Inoue not only talks about learning from the techniques of people like Hideaki Anno, but also about how important it was for him to learn how to draw fast, and to be able to animate as many cuts as he could as quickly as possible–which mirrors the advice that the character Sugie gave to Ema in one of the early episodes: that it’s important to develop speed while you’re young and full of endurance, and to make up the difference in skill later; advice that I personally feel very strongly about and have relayed to many other creatives who were in search of guidance while directly quoting him.

I was lucky enough to meet Kenji Horikawa at Otakon this year, and got his signature on this reprint of an original genga drawing from Shirobako. He was personally very interested in the opinions of the American audience on the productions of PA Works, and had a questionaire for us to fill out on what we wanted from anime. I wrote that I want more Diesel-san.

If it seems like I’m spiralling away from the topic, it’s because this is exactly what Shirobako is all about–threading a needle through the endlessly rip tapestry of anime production. So much of anime creation is so tightly woven, as this small medium evolves so much in on itself and produces so many noteworthy figures and such passion from its audience. Somewhere between the fact that there’s all these awesome people in real life who made all these awesome shows together, and then some of them made this awesome show that features animated versions of so many of the other awesome people doing awesome things, is just fucking… awesome! To think that a few weeks ago, I was in a theater watching an excellent live-action Godzilla movie directed by Hideaki Anno, and that this guy who who signed this printing that I got at Otakon called in his friend, who once animated this scene in Jin-Roh and this scene from The Sky Crawlers, to animate this shot from Shirobako, under the pretense that in the story it was being animated by this guy, whom the main character was guided to by Hideaki Fucking Anno, is kind of destroying my mind right now.

Rewatching this episode again, it’s actually incredible how Anno is only onscreen for maybe two minutes or so–but there’s so much impact in the details. Of course Anno has a gigantic model battleship in his living room; of course they’d give him a stupid ass couch with the color scheme of Unit 01; and of course, he’d rattle off anime trivia and recount the impact of a piece of animation with the kind of passionate movement that… well, that I would. And yeah, when Miyamori makes the connection that Sugie must have animated this other, similar-looking scene from one of the dramatic moments in her favorite show from her childhood, in the same way that I was learning about Toshiyuki Inoue’s catalog of work after watching this show, is something that still brings a tear to my eye.

Shirobako episode 12 is a damn good episode of a damn good series, and every second of it reminds me of why I love anime so stupidly much in the first place. I know this isn’t a scene that everyone could relate to, or even that this video will mean much of anything to a lot of people; but for anyone who’s spent their days excitedly tracking down everything that your favorite director ever did, or brimming as you thumb through an animator’s tag on sakugabooru, this episode is practically the story of your life written lovingly by your very own idols.

Great Scenes In Anime is hopefully a video series that I’ll be revisiting in the future, and maybe next time with something not so intimately personal and more conventionally impressive. Until then, I hope you’ll share this video with anyone whom you think would appreciate it, and that you’ll check out my other channels for more of my passionate ranting about anime and stuff. Support me on patreon if you want to see more stuff like this and, as always, thanks again for watching–I’ll see you in the next one!

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Of all the myriad criticisms I’ve seen of Kill la Kill, one that’s never made sense to me is the suggestion that this show features lackluster or inconsistent animation. What for my money is one of the overall best-looking and most inventively animated TV anime ever made, others have specifically called out on its visual presentation–which strikes me as something akin to a misunderstanding. It’s one thing to feel that the series’ visuals aren’t to your taste, but to suggest as some have that the show underwent budgetary issues because certain scenes used limited animation, or that any of the choices in this series were made without specific aesthetic interests in mind, strikes me as ignorant to the creative intentions of the show’s staff.

Before I really go in about Kill la Kill’s style, let me start with the declaration that most TV anime is pretty boring to look at. In general, TV anime tends to gravitate towards the aesthetic of non-moving images which are individually pretty to look at–with an emphasis on making sure that the character artwork is all on-model and attractive. This style can be fine in itself when the staff really delivers on great character designs, shot compositions, and artistry–but most TV anime don’t really deliver on that stuff. The general experience of watching TV anime is a whole lot of static shots of characters standing around and talking.

Now, I know you’re probably thinking that some high-quality action or sports anime that you enjoy totally isn’t like that because the animation is totally insanely awesome; but I want you to run a little experiment and try watching one of those shows with the subtitles turned off. With nothing to distract your eyes and thoughts during the more talkative scenes, you’ll slowly come to notice how much of each episode is occupied by totally uninteresting shots of characters standing around and talking–and the fact that their mouth movements barely ever actually match up with the voices will slowly worm its way into your brain stem and kill you.

What I’m getting at here, is that EVERY TV anime is inconsistent with its animation. Even the highest-quality TV shows typically feature short bursts of really incredible animation spliced into a million shots of characters doing basically nothing. This is why shows with really excellent digital effects, highly detailed backgrounds, and beautiful character designs have started to be heralded as the best-looking shows on television–because these are shows that do everything in their power to make even the most static and boring shot something pleasant to look at.

Kill la Kill does not have patience for these kinds of shots; not to say that there aren’t plenty of static shots in the series, but Kill la Kill more often chooses, instead of pretty shots where nothing is moving, to have things moving around as much as possible at all costs. It still features tons of excellent backgrounds and gorgeously awesome character designs, but it isn’t content to rest on its laurels. Instead it barrels over itself, firing on all cylinders, to convey as much movement as it can possibly cram into the frantic production schedule and regular-sized budget and staff of a TV anime–and all of it works gangbusters because the team behind it are all about this.

There are plenty of shitty, low-quality anime out there which try to convey movement through still images sliding across the screen that come off as totally inept and cheap, because it’s all too obvious that the staff just aren’t all that competent at creating good visual flow. Meanwhile, “visual flow” is Hiroyuki Imaishi’s legal middle name, and limited animation used for comedic effect is Studio Trigger’s game.

Okay, let me just get this off my chest: if you think that this shot of Sanageyama falling off of this platform happened because of budgetary issues, then you are a human idiot–or at the very least, you haven’t seen Inferno Cop. If the staff behind this show didn’t want this shot to look goofy and ridiculous, then they wouldn’t have even bothered having it move. They easily could have communicated this scene in still images, or simply have changed the nature of the scene to not look so goofy. The fact that this shot is just a 2-dimensional piece of paper flying backwards and then falling is literally the joke. It was meant to make you laugh–because it’s fun, and fun things are fun, and if this seems really patronizing then I’m sorry but there’s some things that I struggle to figure out how any intelligent person couldn’t recognize.

Kill la Kill uses limited animation in so many inventive ways that it truly astounds me. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the shots of Satsuki growing bigger and bigger over Ryuuko in episode two, and how it was simultaneously so funny and so fun, and yet really did communicate how Satsuki was becoming scarier and more imposing by the second, and how literal size was being used to communicate power in this crazy-ass visual metaphor that’s actually just one object being scaled up while another is being scaled down, and holy hell, this is one of my favorite shots ever.

Being able to animate a show this way is a skill in its own, and one which I personally find more value in than just being able to animate a scene fluidly. I’ve seen so much sakuga animation which is praised for how much movement is happening, even though none of that movement is actually interesting or meaningful. How many goddamn flashy action scenes with spinning cameras and characters just kind of bouncing and flailing swords around am I supposed to pretend are cool-looking? Meanwhile, there are countless scenes in Kill la Kill that aren’t even animated at all, but are timed so perfectly that they put the biggest, stupidest grin on my face.

And that’s what good filmmaking is about–it’s about good editing, and creating emotions through the way that images flow into one-another–and animating emotions, not just movement. Nothing compares to the catharsis of a punch that’s timed in just the right way, even if only a few frames of it are actually animated. And even when it’s not about the bigness of the emotions, just seeing something really creative and new being done in a medium that I’ve grown so familiar with can really light a spark inside of me.

This little shot of Harime Nui spinning around is one of my favorite moments in Kill la Kill. It’s all at once a hilarious bit of slapstick, a reinforcement of Nui’s character and place within the story, and a genius piece of animation ingenuity that doesn’t look like one at all.

Harime Nui is basically a Looney Toon. She skips around the show’s world like Pepe Lepew, and is indestructible and always smiling like the Roadrunner. Her existence defies even the insane logic of this wacked-out show, as she seems to be able to play with the fourth wall at will. There’s a reason that she mugs the camera in her first on-screen appearance, and continues to be animated in ways which defy logic–because she, herself, defies logic.

So it’s not too surprising that Nui can turn into some sort of flat object in response to an attack–but it’s also funny because at this point in the story, Nui is such a 2-dimensional character. Turning her into a flat piece of cardboard only seems appropriate for a character who lacks dimensionality both figuratively and literally.

But what gets me the most about this scene is how it’s so much more complicated than it looks. I mean, think about what it means to depict a 2-dimensional object rotating within a 2-dimensional space. The only way that this could happen would be if the animators had drawn every single frame of that 2-D object turning through the air, which would be just as time-consuming as actually animating the character. What seems more likely to me, though, is that the animators created a 2-dimensional object and then placed it inside of an empty 3-dimensional space, wherein they filmed the object flipping around, and then superimposed that film into the 2-dimensional scene. This wouldn’t be difficult to do–in fact, here’s footage of me throwing such a thing together in like 2 minutes–but just the idea of it is so inventive that it blew my mind as soon as I thought about it.

Kill la Kill is always like this. It always seems like the team was asking themselves how they could animate the scene in the most creative way possible; not the way that would take the longest to do, or be the most technically impressive, but the way that would make it the most fun to watch and to have the best visual flow. I really feel like Hiroyuki Imaishi’s entire directing style is based around that idea, and that he’s formed his studio around teaching others how to do the same; and it’s because of that that we could get to be treated to shows like Little Witch Academia, which actually did get to cram animation into every single one of its thirty minutes of runtime without compromising on inventiveness either–or even something like Kiznaiver, wherein the characters look so detailed that surely there’s no way they could be animated as much as Kill la Kill and then WHOA! How did they even do that?!

Anyways, I know I’m like two years late on playing critical defense for Kill la Kill, but I really wanted to set the record straight about this because people keep giving me weird looks when I say that I think Kill la Kill is one of the best-looking TV anime ever made. I even think that in spite of everything, the color design and backgrounds are so much more interesting than those of Kiznaiver that it’s better-looking than that show too. There’s no other studio out there who animates things in exactly the way that I love to see them animated like Trigger does, and I’ll be damned if no one’s going to celebrate that.

I really hope that this video helped you to appreciate the animation style of Trigger’s work even more so than before–and that if it did, then you’ll share it to anyone whom you think it would interest–especially if they’ve been talking shit about Kill la Kill’s visual presentation. Support me on patreon if you’d like to see more videos like this, and check out my other channels for more of me. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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Whenever a conversation arises about what makes a cool character design, there seems to be two competing schools of thought with regards to what qualifies–a competition which fascinates me, because I can kind of see it from both angles.

On the one hand, the majority of anime designs tend to come from a pretty well-defined aesthetic sensibility, and many of the medium’s detractors are highly critical of the samey-ness that appears so rampant among them. However, to aficionados of that design style, every little subtle nuance and difference between two shows following a similar philosophy can make them feel wildly different, and can build or break your ability to fall in love with them.

Look at the Monogatari series, whose designs no doubt communicate many of the common trends in modern anime–and yet are celebrated to an insane degree more than anything else on the market. That’s because fans of this style can recognize all the subtleties which set them apart from the other stuff in the mainstream, as well as which elements of each character’s look gives them a unique charm and feel–a fascination, if you will.

I would of course argue that the Monogatari series is rife with fantastic designs, because I find the overall aesthetic sense of the artist, Akio Watanabe, to be so palatable. I feel similarly about the styles of other designers whose aesthetics are consistent, yet overall standout, such as the work of Yoshihiko Umakoshi on shows like Casshern Sins and Heartcatch Precure.

But the competing school of thought is that the individual designs should be more tailored to the personalities of the characters, and to display more variety and realism, so as to better reflect the fact that, in reality, people don’t all look like PVC models. I can certainly appreciate this mindset, and I think that works such as those of Satoshi Kon benefit greatly from the realism and variety in their designs, as they allow for a bigger range of individuality, emotional representation, and nuance. Having said that, however, I would never even think of buying a model of one of them.

So how can these different schools of thought be reconciled? Is it possible to make designs which are at once true to life, full of variety and character, and nuanced, while also being appealing, memorable, and cool enough to make you buy a statue of them? On the last installment, I talked about how I think Gurren Lagann pulls this off well–but even that show still has an otherworldly anime style to it, with its unnatural hair colors and exaggerated features. Today we’ll take a look at a show that managed to lean all the way on the side of realism without losing an ounce of awesomeness in its aesthetic–the 1998 animated masterpiece, Cowboy Bebop.

But before I even go in on Bebop itself, which has received no shortage of praise for its designs over the past two decades, let me start by introducing the artist who brought it to beauty, by the name of Toshihiro Kawamoto. Kawamoto’s designs generally feel true to life with realistic body types and facial features; but his people come from an alternate, much sexier dimension, wherein everyone looks very sharp and mysterious and cool, and every woman is a femme fatale, and every man is a badass with a tortured soul. There’s an unmistakable touch of anime in the way that he draws their eyes, and in the generally thick and rough outlines that make up the lineart, but everything always comes to a sharp point, giving his characters a trademark sleekness.

What most viewers might find tangibly outstanding about his characters is that they look adult. In his drawings for the early-90s Gundam OVAs Stardust Memories and 08th MS Team, he shows us a team of pilots who look like the handsome movie stars of an 80s popcorn film; but ones with enough realism in both appearance and quality script writing that their emotions feel earned in a way that anime so rarely does. In Golden Boy he proved that no one else in the history of ever could draw more erotically beautiful women. Golden Boy is a sex comedy that’s sexier than reality–because the designs are just real enough that they harken to an era when women in movies were impossibly good-looking and hardly prudes about it. Your mileage may vary on whether or not you think that’s a good thing, but the craftsmanship on display in drawing erotic scenes of godly quality cannot be denied.

And this brings us to Cowboy Bebop–a show wherein the leading lady is not merely sexualized, but is a sexual character, and is believable because she looks and acts and feels like a real person, with a clear agency in the way she’s chosen to present herself. Yes, from a marketing perspective, Faye is sexy because sex sells–but Cowboy Bebop is a show about sexy people living a sexy, romanticized lifestyle–even if a big part of the show is also about undercutting that sexiness and presenting the raw, beating heart at the center of it all that draws us to such romanticism in the first place. I’m not saying that all of this text is present merely in her character design, but I’m saying that we couldn’t get to this place of real, raw, human pathos if Faye was a moe girl–unless the writing really bent over backwards to convey it, instead of how this show can ooze its message in every single second of its screen time just by force of its perfect presentation.

A lot of what Bebop is, is in how the characters look like real adults, and how Jet isn’t conventionally handsome, and Ed looks but doesn’t animate quite like a human usually would, and every single side character is totally distinct from the last. Faye may have a perfect body, but there’s not a single other woman in the series who looks exactly like her; no two characters could that be said about in the entire series. Vicious is such a strong aesthetic villain that you probably forgot he only shows up like three times in the whole show and has less than ten speaking lines.

Like in Gurren Lagann, there is a throughline of color theory among the main cast–the yellows of Spike’s shirt, most of Faye’s dress, and the little buttons on Jet’s vest; the blues of Spike’s suit, Jet’s vest and jeans, and Ed’s spats; and the red of Ed’s hair, Faye’s… jacket? And Jet’s undershirt. They all look great on camera together, without it being too obvious that they’ve all been coded as a group with primary colors once again. And if you’re an aspiring designer thinking, “wait a minute, that’s literally the same color scheme and cohesion as Gurren Lagann! Holy shit, is that the secret to good designs?!” the answer is yes. If you want to know why cohesion of colors is important, look at any shot in Show By Rock wherein all four girls are in one frame together, and feel your eyes rip themselves apart trying to process all of that visual information.

Bebop’s characters pass the silhouette test so easily that when looking for pictures of the crew online, you’ll probably find several wallpapers where they’re already like that–notwithstanding how often they appear in monochrome across the show or in the OP. The characters in Bebop wear outfits that really make no sense as anything that a real person would wear when you stop to think about it, but in the context of who they are, it feels totally natural. That first time you see Spike with his feet kicked up on a table, or Faye going apeshit with an SMG and sunglasses on, these characters just click and you know exactly what they’re all about.

And the funny part is that the writing in this series is so strong that it didn’t even necessarily need the designs to be able to tell half the story by themselves–but it still was smart enough to give so much breathing room to the aesthetic, with its lived-in backgrounds and lived-through characters. Even without the script to back them up, those things could carry a show halfway there–as would be proven after Kawamoto helped to co-found Studio Bones, and then designed for Wolf’s Rain.

I know that some viewers may relate to or find more worth in the story and dialog of Wolf’s Rain than I did, but if there’s a reason I could sit through all twenty-six episodes of this show, it’s because the series is aesthetically unbelievable. Kawamoto trades in his sexy, buxom femme fatales for something of an Asian boy band squad, but with little more than an ounce of cheesiness in how he goes about it, and a deft understanding of why boy bands are attractive in the first place. Where you can look at many shoujo anime with squads of hot guys in them and immediately make a rough estimate of what year they came out, you’d only know that Wolf’s Rain’s characters had to have come from 2003 because you know that the show aired that year. If I have any complaint about Wolf’s Rain, it would be that drawing and scoring a show as lavishly as the team had done with Cowboy Bebop set my expectations to a level that was bound for disappointment when the writing was anything less than perfect.

Nowadays, even if you’re one of the ten people who watched Ghost Slayers Ayashi, it’s been an awfully long time since you’ve seen any original designs from Toshihiro Kawamoto, and if you’re me, then you might have even hated the way that he adapted the designs for the TV version of Gosick. However, even modern, mainstream anime viewers who maybe don’t know most of the shows I’ve talked about are probably familiar with his recent work adapting the designs from manga series Noragami and Kekkai Sensen to animation.

The importance of a character designer, even to a manga adaptation, really cannot be understated, as it’s their job to essentially turn characters who are designed to look cool posing on a page into characters who can move effectively and do cool stuff in animation. (You can check out this recent video by the Canipa Effect for more on that subject.) But even neverminding that, it’s pretty obvious that the manga version of Kekkai Sensen bares a much stronger resemblance to the same author’s Trigun manga than either adaptation does to one-another. You could even be forgiven for not realizing that they came from the same guy if you’ve never read either manga, even if you did watch both anime adaptations.

Noragami may see Kawamoto adapting more to the rounded, teenaged look of modern anime, but he does not do so flippantly. His designs are attention-grabbing and sleekly cool in a way that deserves mention between breaths of Bleach and Death Note more so than between your typical high school rom-coms; but even that show hardly holds a candle to Kekkai Sensen which, when I first saw it, had me thinking, “hey, this looks kinda like Guilty Gear.” And nothing is cooler looking than Guilty Gear. It’s a natural law of the universe.

Toshihiro Kawamoto is, for my money, one of the greatest character designers working in the industry to this day, and integral to so much of my visual memory of animation. Even as a key animator working on Bones shows which he didn’t design for, he’s been responsible for such iconic moments as this cut from the first Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood OP. On a larger scale, he also co-founded what is still one of the best animation studios in the industry, whose dedication to producing the most aesthetically interesting and experimental shows in the medium is worthy of the highest commemoration.

If you wanna spread the gospel about how cool this guy is, then be sure to share this video with anyone whom you think would be interested. Check out my other channels for more of my impassioned babbling, and support me on patreon if you want to help keep me doing it. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.