Anime Review Roundup

It looks as if my anime slump might be coming to an end, although you won’t get that impression from the first show that I reviewed this week. Heavy Object Season 1 Part 1 is another light novel adaptation, this one from the creator of the Raildex franchise. It’s not quite as esoteric as that fan favourite though. This show’s about a not-too distant future where the nature of conflict has changed. If you want to go to war, you have to have balls, really big balls, gargantuan balls. It’s tank warfare taken to the extreme, and follows two young soldiers and a pilot of one these spherical Objects, as they find a way to shift the odds. It’s a fun if somewhat ephemeral show. Click on the review to read more.

Next it was the turn of Tonari no Seki-kun: The Master of Killing Time. Okay, this one doesn’t count, as it’s from my own collection, but a show like this will lift anyone out of any slump. It’s a short format animation that has just the one joke to it. Yokoi wants to study in class, but the boy sitting next to her is a timewaster of epic standing. Invariably she gets drawn in and distracted by his schemes. Just look at the opening credit sequence to get some idea of what he does in the back of class. Would you believe there is a live action version of the show?

If there is one show pretty much guaranteed to get me de-slumped, it’s the further adventures of the Straw Hat Pirates in One Piece Collection 16. Ironically this is usually where this show tends to slump, the between arc slowdown, as the crew get over their last battle, and prepare for their next adventure. But once again, One Piece manages to deliver the unexpected, as when you think it’s all over, the battle turns out to have some steam left in it. The victory celebration turns out to be perfect moment to reveal a character back-story, and their new destination turns out to be even weirder than any place they’ve visited before, including Skypiea. It also looks as if One Piece is going to take a turn for the dark, given the tone the story takes as these episodes conclude.

Stepping away from anime for a minute, I took a look at the other of my favourite Disney animations, The Jungle Book. Even after fifty years, it’s still magical, charming, and wholly entertaining, with great characters, and great songs. Of late, Disney have started remaking their classic feature animations as live action, and after re-watching the perfect original, I have to ask why?

Appleseed. The latest iteration of Ghost in the Shell may be in cinemas now, but I felt the urge to go back to one of the earliest adaptations of Masamune Shirow’s manga, itself subject of many remakes and re-workings. The Appleseed OVA comes from a time when Manga Video was releasing anime to the late night, kebab and lager audience, and they took a fairly family oriented animation, and fifteened it, inserting profanity into the dub in excess. Unfortunately, that comes through in the subtitle translation as well, which is loose enough to seem from a different movie altogether at times. You can read subtitles when there is no corresponding Japanese dialogue to translate. Appleseed is an odd beast in that it’s a classic cyberpunk story, but the production values of the anime may as well be downtown Shinjuku in the late eighties. It has some daft moments but it’s also a great hit of nostalgia. I couldn’t find any trailers for the OVA on Youtube, although I did find three versions of the full movie (you have to love Google’s antipiracy measures), so here’s that classic Manga Video trailer.