Bakemonogatari

Do you ever watch something with a heavy heart because the show you're watching is so good, that you wish you had written it yourself, and now feel sad that it already exists, unavailable for you to create as your own? I recently began watching Bakemonogatari, and that is how the direction and writing of the show makes me feel.

I'll never probably never get the chance to be a screenwriter or a director. I dabbled a little in directing before and it was really fun, but the fact of the matter is I'm not really in a position to do it again, but this show resonates with me on a level I've only enjoyed a few times before. The irregular cuts, the murakami-like writing, the clean feeling that the art gives off. I never realised I'd have such trouble putting it into words, more so than I usually do.

Bakemonogatari has seemed to be a bit of a hipster anime to me. I saw a lot of people singing it's praises yet I was cynical. I'm usually cynical, it's not a trait I enjoy about myself, and I was wrong to be cynical about this show, it's up there with some of the best anime I've ever seen. Or at least it is so far, I'm on episode 6, and it could all go downhill from here.

The main character Koyomi has a lot of personality, and I like that after sitting through a lot of shows lately with your typical Mary Sue protaganists. He's not a pleasant guy, he punched a little girl in the Mayoi Snail arc, but he's entertaining and an interesting narrator. I'm going to start the Suruga Monkey arc later tonight, and at this rate I'll finish Bakemonogatari and watch the sequels.

Should I be giving a rating here? I don't know how to write short blogs. It's really good man, I don't know.

Death Note

A death god drops a notebook in the path of genius student Light Yagami. Upon picking it up, he discovers instructions that whoevers name is written within will die. Despite initial disbelief, Light decides that using the Death Note, he will purge the world of criminals, writing the names of those who appear on the news. Soon enough, the media has named this mysterious force Kira, and parts of the population has grown to support and revere it. Opposing Kira is L, a world renown reclusive detective who has taken a special interest in solving this case.

Writer Tsugumi Ohba and Artist Takeshi Obata also teamed up to create Bakuman, another very good series but not one I've followed all the way to the end yet, and Obata also drew the manga adaptation for Hiroshi Sakurazaka's All You Need Is Kill, otherwise known by the name of it's hollywood remake The Edge of Tomorrow.

Me! Me! Me!

I had absolutely no intention to blog about Me! Me! Me!, the music video accompanying the single of the same name by Japanese Electro Pop DJ Teddyloid until the urge to do so came over me all of a sudden. Me! Me! Me! is a short film/music video animated by Studio Khara that's picked up a lot of heat and attention due to it's perceived controversialness and shock value. The reactions of those viewing it as cheap and shallow is perplexing me a little and I took a while to think about why some people found the video this way whilst others have found it to be extremely deep and thought provoking.

The first big barrier seperating the two aforementioned groups is the maturity of the content. Despite being a 5 minute music video for an electronic pop song, it contains a lot of mature images including nudity and gore. What sets Me! Me! Me! aside from other things controversial for containing these things however is that none of these things are used for the sake of it. The sexual explicitness is a key plot point in the story the song and video is trying to convey and the more gruesome action scenes are to be taken as metaphors. From being naturally exposed to peoples opinions on the short, and from listening to the lyrics of the song and thinking about the animation, I've pieced together a few interpretations of it.

My 2014 in Anime

As far as things go, 2014 has been a good year for anime. It's not over yet, but with just a month to go, we're halfway through the fall 2014 season and there'll be no more newcomers, so we should be in a position to make our judgements by now. My favourite part of watching anime as a hobby is making judgements up front before a season, picking what I think will be the most interesting and then losing interest in them as they air only to find a show about trains was the sleeper hit of the season. Here's a breakdown of what I watched this year from the ones I dropped to the ones I've picked up late. This is no "best of 2014" mind, and it's all my personal opinion. So, in no particular order:

Guilty Crown

     When Guilty Crown first aired in 2011, I dropped it after the first few episodes. If it wasn't for the fact that Supercell and EGOIST weren't so heavily featured in the soundtrack, I would never have picked it back up and wouldn't be writing this blog on it. A year after it finished I took another shot at it, but got bored again around episode 6. Eventually though, I felt wrong calling My Dearest one of my favourite songs in the world whilst being so quick to ignore Guilty Crown that I decided I had to sit down and watch it all. Having done so I am filled with many mixed feelings.

There are a lot of spoilers below and this entire blog post will only make sense for those who have finished Guilty Crown.

Sword Art Online

I'm going to go right out and say it, SAO is my favourite shounen animé in years. One day I'm going to run out of series of stuff that I'm blinded by my own bias with and perhaps talk critically on a subject, but that'll have to wait for a day I'm not talking about Sword Art Online. Or Metal Gear. Or Dragon Ball Z.

Other than Shingeki no Kyojin (which I do love, but not as much as SAO), I've lost interest in shounen animé, all I can bare nowadays is DBZ out of nostalgia, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, SAO and Shingeki. A younger me was obsessed with hits like Naruto and Bleach, and I mean no disrespect to shows of their ilk, but I just don't have the energy to keep up with convoluted plot lines like who has what sharingan and why anymore.

I feel like Sword Art Online is an entirely different breed of action show to those two. There are similarities, but all in all it's undeniable that the pace is much faster due to it's season-based format and the story arcs being far more condensed and streamlined, even when the Aincrad arc takes place over 2 years.

Dragon Ball Z Kai 2014 - The Great Saiyaman and World Tournament Sagas

I've been a fan of Dragon Ball Z since I can remember. Alongside Pokémon and Cardcaptor Sakura, it was one of the first animé shows I watched as a child, long before I knew what animé was. As soon as I was old enough to stay up as long as I wanted to on weekends as a child, I would stay up long past my parents so that I could watch Dragon Ball Z on Toonami at 1:10AM for years. In that case, I probably should have been more attentive about the remastered series DBZ Kai, but in reality I only watched the remastered episodes whenever I visited my mother and managed to stick it onto the magic Sky+ record thing.

So after taking a hiatus in August 2011, DBZ Kai resumed at The Great Saiyaman Saga this April just past. For exposition, Dragon Ball Z Kai is a recut HD remaster of the original show, slimming down on filler content and providing a story closer to Akira Toriyama's manga. Because of this, new scenes have been animated to bridge the gaps left by removing some content, and due to being created with the classic style in mind, they fit in rather perfectly.

The following contains a rundown of the events of the first two mini-sagas of the Majin Buu era, so there are spoilers, but these episodes originally aired 20 years ago now.