I tell myself that I never intended for my “favorites” lists to get this out of hand, but I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m 4 posts in and only now winding down. There’s a lot of good anime every year, as I always say, but the past year has been exceedingly fruitful in terms of great, unique, or just entertaining anime series. It’s difficult to stop talking about them all!
Aside from a couple in this group which were listed here due to space restrictions on the previous post, these are series that I didn’t have a chance to finish, either due to timing or other factors, but which I wanted to talk about anyway. In some cases I will likely get back to them later and close the loop; in at least one case that’s questionable, for reasons that I hope are clear. In all cases, though, there was something about these series that caught my eye and excited my imagination, so I felt it would be a failure on my part to ignore them.
Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku
One thing that I’ve noticed recently is the influx of anime focused not on teenage characters, but on characters in their early 20’s or who have already entered the workforce. It’s not a sweeping trend, but it has become more regular as of late. While there’s nothing in the anime rule book that says adult characters are inherently more interesting, as an adult myself I usually find their experiences more relateable to my own. There is something great about seeing your experiences represented in a type of entertainment that you love.
Wotakoi goes further by featuring a cast of adult otaku, including two women, who are lovingly depicted as capable of juggling their two identities (public and private), engaging in relatively successful romantic relationships, and balancing their needs and responsibilities as both workers and denizens of fandom. The series would likely be amusing to anyone with fandom experience, especially those who have to hide it sometimes. It’s particularly enjoyable to me, a woman, worker, wife, and weeaboo.
The series does trip itself up a bit with the secondary romantic relationship, in which the characters sometimes go beyond bickering and cross the line into angrier behavior a time or two and can be uncomfortable for those of us who’ve experienced similar situations. Overall, though, it was fun being able to see pieces of myself in characters whose lives weren’t complete and total disasters.
After the Rain
My relationship with After the Rain is extremely complicated. I’ll say upfront that it’s a beautiful series and I’m glad I got the chance to watch it, but my viewing experience was so fraught with uncomfortable expectations that I was hoping and praying wouldn’t come to pass. Because of that I don’t think I ever engaged with it as deeply as I would have wanted.
For those who aren’t familiar, the series tells the story of a middle-aged male restaurant manager, Kondo, and his teenage female employee, Tachibana. She has a crush on him for reasons that turn out to be unromantic in the end. It’s a very nice story about two people with similar issues meeting and reminding one-another of what they have to live for. It’s beautifully-rendered and poetic, and its two protagonists are interesting and sympathetic. It’s a series that seems particularly aimed at viewers like me.
The reason why I stressed over this series so much was because it meandered around the elephant in the room and refused to put a definite stop to the suggestion that it could turn into a highly inappropriate romantic relationship. Kondo is never firm enough to concretely deny Tachibana’s affections, and Tachibana doesn’t have the self-awareness to recognize her feelings for what they actually are until late into the series. I tried my best to quell my fears by looking up manga spoilers, but never found anything definite early enough for it to have made a dent in my anxieties.
So listen to me now: no, the characters don’t end up together and this story about two people at a crossroads is actually very good and kind and moving.
Golden Kamuy (Season 1)
I unfortunately haven’t had the chance to watch the second season of Golden Kamuy yet, but I found the first season to be entertaining in a lot of different ways. Though survivalist stories are common in the childhood literary canon (think “Hatchet” and its ilk), they’re conspicuously absent when it comes to anime (at least modern anime). While I have my opinions about “literary canon” anyway, those stories still drum up a lot of nostalgic feelings for me, and I think that’s part of the reason why I’ve taken to Golden Kamuy so much.
The series is a little bit of a travelogue, a little bit of survivalist storytelling, some cultural exchange, a food blogger’s wet dream… there are a lot of story-related things going on (and that’s even before mentioning the latent homo-eroticism that suffuses many scenes and situations). It builds its fascinating tale from many different pieces, allowing viewers with various interests to partake and enjoy.
The series itself doesn’t look that great; the early episodes featured a deadly bear whose presence became unintentionally comical due to the way it was rendered in CG (I didn’t personally feel like it looked that bad, but it definitely looked out of place). The character animation tends to stumble through moments of inconsistency as well. There’s also some criticism that the incorporation of Ainu culture is incomplete and unhelpful in regards to the Ainu relationship with the later-arrived Japanese colonizers, which I can’t really speak to with authority. Even considering these things, the series is darned entertaining if you can tolerate a little bit of guts, gore, and goofiness.
Mr. Tonegawa: Middle Management Blues (1st Half, up to the “bonus” episodes)
Kaiji was an anime series I originally watched because it appeared on the scene soon after its spiritual brother, Akagi (a series I also enjoyed from the same author and production team), and was unique-looking to the point of ugliness. Ten years ago when it originally broadcast, its weird-looking characters were honestly enough for me to take notice. I was a bit of a pretentious twerp at that time and had decided that character designs that pushed back against the “norm” (something that I doubt I could define for you even today) elevated their accompanying product. I was lucky in that Kaiji is a darned good anime thriller, full of intense and ridiculous mortal and spiritual suffering for its protagonist. I’ve come to avoid that sort of material as I’ve gotten older, but I still think about Kaiji fondly (especially the part where the titular character bites someone right in the leg… it’s ridiculous).
Mr. Tonegawa, despite being an offshoot of that property, is a completely different animal. It’s almost a parody; its protagonist is constantly suffering under the thumb of a maniacal CEO and tasked with assembling a sadistic test-of-wills for debtors – the sorts of people who we ought to be rooting for to win. The series is also much more comedic than its predecessor, a decision that initially feels inappropriate considering the high background stakes. It references its predecessor enough that one really needs to be at least familiar with Kaiji‘s major plot arcs. It took a couple of episodes for me to get into the show’s rhythm, but once I could see what it was trying to “sell,” I suddenly couldn’t get enough of it.
I work in management, so the office politics stuff (despite being skewed towards Japanese culture and completely over-the-top in addition to that) hits me just right. There’s a hilarious bit about the persuasive power of PowerPoint presentations that’s made even better by the show’s absolutely overpowering narrator. Tonegawa calculates his chances of success based around the angle of the CEO’s eyebrows. This series is ridiculous and awesome and I wish more people were watching it so I could laugh along with them. I don’t know that I could call Mr. Tonegawa “good,” but it’s terribly entertaining and I’m looking forward to watching the rest of it soon.
Banana Fish (1st Half)
Banana Fish is a real tough cookie. There’s a lot to like about the series – its animation and characters are nice to look at. Its action takes place in places like New York and California, and the depictions of those iconic American places don’t seem outright wrong like they do in so many other anime productions. It’s a story originally aimed at women that’s directed by a woman. There’s even a same-sex relationship at its center. And still, I wonder if I’ll ever actually choose to finish the series.
Because the story carries with it so much inherently violent, cruel content, I wanted to spoil myself for the second half of the story in order to prepare myself. It was there that my suspicions were confirmed – the “tragic gay ending.” The staff of the anime made it clear that the only aspects of the manga they intended to change were the time period and the character designs, to make both more modern, and that the story itself would remain untouched. That, I feel, is a wasted opportunity.
To be honest, I’m kind of done with stories that either heavily queer-bait, or confirm their characters’ homosexuality only to steal away their happiness through a death or other tragic separation. I’m sad that this anime adheres to a story that doesn’t offer an incredibly downtrodden main character the opportunity for happiness. I think what makes me sad is that I really liked the show a lot up to the point I stopped watching. Maybe I’ll eventually watch the rest of it. For now, though, I think I need time to mourn what I see as a lost opportunity from a series that could have done much better.
Attack on Titan (Season 3)
Attack on Titan is sort of easy to dunk on; it’s incredibly popular, is frequently pretty grotesque and melodramatic, and has a protagonist that’s the epitome of screaming shounen ridiculousness. It’s not really my typical style of anime series. And yet, when the first season aired I was as smitten as many other viewers and couldn’t wait for each week’s new episode.
It’s been a few years now and you’d think my passion would have waned, but that’s not been my experience. AoT is a unique kind of anime with a story that’s able to shift focus as needed and provide a lot of variable experiences. The first season is built from intense action, iconic character introductions, and (mostly) straightforward conflicts. The second season muddies the waters and turns more inward, revealing secrets about incomplete truths and characters who we thought we knew. The third and most recent season (which is apparently only halfway finished, which is why I’m slotting it here), shifts gears again in order to focus on the political fallout of all the new information Eren and crew have been uncovering.
There are some pacing issues this time around (though from what I understand, the quickness of this most recent storyline was preferable to its incredible slowness in the manga), and there aren’t as many incredible action scenes, but there’s a sense of progress, and I can appreciate that. Hopefully when the season returns for its second half, we’ll finally make it to that basement!
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Okay, that’s really it! I’m leaving 2018 in the past and rolling full steam ahead into 2019. Thank you for reading and commenting, and here’s to another excellent year of anime to watch!