Review for Hetalia Axis Powers: Complete Series 2

Introduction

Hetalia Axis Powers' first series showed up at the end of last year, with its anthropomorphised nations embodying all of the national stereotypes, and Japan's comedic prejudices about the world, albeit filtered through a US dubber's mindset, to short and sweet effect. 26 mini-episodes of hilarity as cowardly Italy tried to make friends with gruff Germany, and inscrutable Japan, in their conflict against the Allies. I guess that I missed the joke, as over two hours of this stuff did little more than get me smirking occasionally. So when Hetalia Axis Powers: Complete Series 2 showed up for review, I was torn between getting it out of the way first, or pretending that it didn't exist, in the hope that it would vanish. Typical! I opt for option one, and two days into my viewing, it transpires that issues with authoring the DVD mean that Manga Entertainment have to delay it for two months. Now I can either finish off the review now, or complete it closer to the release date. Of course that would mean that I would have to watch it again from the beginning to do that. Which is why you get a heads up on Hetalia: Season 2, two months in advance.


It's still World War II, and Germany is all set to conquer the world. The bad news is that Italy is his ally again. The good news is that this time he has Japan on his side. With his skills at discipline and efficiency, and Japan's skills at miniaturisation and inscrutability, they surely can't go wrong. And Italy has come with a ready supply of white flags. But on the other side there are the Allies, with youthful America dominating proceedings, much to the consternation of England, and of course France annoys everyone, while friendly amiable Russia is secretly planning to stab everyone in the back. These personifications of nationhood relive key events through world history in Hetalia Axis Powers.

All 26 episodes of the second series are presented on this disc from Manga Entertainment.

Picture

The 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer is an odd bit of betwixt and between. The episode content itself is a native PAL transfer, and you'll find that the disc's runtime is five minutes shorter than the US disc due to PAL speedup. Given that Hetalia is a cheap and cheerful animation; bright, colourful, and simplistic, it doesn't make too much of a difference. But still the absence of ghosting, judder and blended frames is a positive, and the anime flows very naturally in this form. Having said that, for some bizarre reason, all of the closing sequences are NTSC-PAL conversions, where you will see all the ghosting and blended frames that are thankfully absent from the episodes. It's an absolutely bizarre way of doing things, and the only reason I can think of is to avoid the fast paced and high-pitched closing theme sounding even more helium induced.


The image is clear and colourful throughout, with a hint of moiré on finer detail. It is quite soft though, which appears to be a creative choice to reflect the quite childlike and friendly character designs, and the straightforward animation. The Chibitalia segments have excessively cutesy characters, with more of a paint-brushed feel to them. Generally the animation is good enough for a set-up, punch-line format, and doesn't need to do more.

Sound

You have a choice between a rather unnecessary DD 5.1 English track and a DD 2.0 Stereo Japanese track, with optional subtitles and signs. I say the English surround is unnecessary as this isn't the most aurally significant of anime, just an ephemeral gag-fest. I tried the Japanese track first, and found it to be acceptable if unremarkable. I don't have enough experience of Japanese to know if there are regional accents at play, but the voices are well defined and suit their characters. I then gave the show a shot with the English dub, expecting a plethora of accents to go with the national stereotyping, and hopefully bring out the comedy more. Accents there are, but quality isn't always apparent, and neither is clarity. I wound up leaving the subtitles on, as some of the accents were impenetrable. That didn't help much as there were different jokes being used in the English and Japanese versions of the show. The subtitles were clear and error free, and you'll be using the pause button, as there is a lot of on-screen text that is translated and just flies by. This season also sees alterative end themes, sung by Germany and Japan, China, USA, England, France and Russia, as well as the usual Italy song.

Extras

Once again, the UK release condenses the US release from 2 discs to one (they have the extras on a separate disc), and the US release itself distils its contents from 4 discs worth of Japanese release. Still, 2 hours plus worth of anime, and over half an hour of extra features works out to be pretty good value, if you do indeed value these things by runtime rather than content.

And once again, we have Funimation commentaries for four of the episodes on this disc. Christopher Bevins (Japan), Patrick Seitz (Germany), and Todd Haberkorn (Italy) chat around episode 31, Christopher Bevins also pops up on episode 36 alongside Eric Vale (USA), ADR director Scott Sager joins Jerry Jewell (Russia) on episode 42, and finally J. Michael Tatum (France) and Scott Freeman (England) comment on episode 46. All of the commentaries barely have enough time to get beyond the silliness stage and are fine for a giggle, but not very informative.

In terms of extras ported over from the Japanese discs, we begin with a 13-minute interview with Director Bob Shirahata and voice of Estonia and Prussia (Atsushi Kosaka). They chat about the show, and the episodes on that particular Japanese DVD, 27-33.


Atsushi Kosaka returns in a 6-minute featurette to promote the forthcoming Hetalia feature film. Yes, if 5 minutes of random national stereotypes isn't enough, there's a whole 80 minutes worth in a cinema feature film version of the show.

Director Bob Shirahata then has a chat with the voice of Chibitalia, Aki Kanada, and of comic value is the fact that the actress often found herself confused with the Canada character. This lasts 10 minutes.

Bob Shirahata also has a 10-minute chat with the voice of grown up Italy, Daisuke Namikawa. These interviews are pretty interesting for the most part, certainly more so than the commentaries, but unlike the first season featurettes, they also spend a fair bit of time heavily promoting the feature film and the Hetalia World Series third season.

Finally we get the textless closing, and only the normal Italy one, which is a shame as there are seven others to appreciate in this collection.

It's also a shame that there isn't a Hidden History of Hetalia section this time around, as I found that was by far the most interesting and useful of the extras on the first disc.

Conclusion

The first series of Hetalia Axis Powers didn't do a lot for me. I found the humour crude and limited, the short episodic format didn't do the show any favours, and kept the characters one-dimensional and little more than simple caricatures, and above all, the most damning indictment… I didn't find it funny. This second collection of episodes does little to alter that opinion, once again delivering on the simple, national stereotype humour with the subtlety of a mallet. There's not a lot that can be done in 4-minute chunks, especially when those chunks are further divided into small, sketches, a quick-fire gag and punchline format. Some of the jokes hit, most of them, for me at least, missed the mark by a fair margin, and some were downright incomprehensible.


Yet nowhere more than Hetalia is the recommendation 'If you liked the first series, you'll probably like this' more appropriate. After all, my opinion must be a minority opinion if the series is still ongoing, and the quick-fire sketch format has successfully translated into a feature film. I have to say though, that I did find this second series more approachable than the first. Perhaps it's because I had become accustomed to the format and the characters, or perhaps it's because there were small tweaks to the format that made it a little more approachable. Certainly the fact that the Chibitalia segments are conspicuous by their absence for much of this season played a part. Or perhaps it's just the sketch format beating me down by its continuous repetition. After all, it takes more than a couple of episodes of shows like The Fast Show to really reveal their funny side. I have to admit that I was smirking a lot more with this season than the first, and I may even have chuckled at one point.


Ironically for a show that's built around the Axis Powers and the Allies that faced each other in World War II, it's when the show gets away from that format that it appeals more. There's only so much of the desert island gag that one can take for example, with the Axis camping on the beach, and the Allies futilely attacking from the jungle each episode. Italy's worthlessness at training also grows thin very quickly, and it's these mainstays of the first season that quickly make an exit from this one. Besides, there's a rich vein of history, both modern and ancient to draw on, and this collection of episodes does venture further afield for inspiration. There's the G8 conference, where no one can remember who the 8th member is (It's Canada by the way). Similarly, poor Canada takes a beating from Cuba when he keeps being mistaken for the United States.


There's a little cultural education at the World Powers Academy, when the homework is to find out how everyone celebrates Christmas. We get some Japanese history, with the arrival of the Americans opening the country up to the world, and later in 1902, the Anglo Japanese agreement is marked by a rather touching episode as well. It has Japan, racing into the modern world, forgetting his culture and roots, while England, who is paying a visit, encounters all sorts of supernatural beings from Japan's cultural heritage, beings that Japan can no longer see. There's also a sketch in here marking the rebirth of the Olympic movement, although as usual, France takes it too far and winds up being arrested.


Back in the colonisation of America, we see Finland, Sweden, Holland, France, and England squabbling over who will get the biggest chunk of land, when France and England run into a little babe in the woods, the infant America. Soon they're squabbling over who gets to adopt the little tyke. Meanwhile on the other side of the Pacific (or in Sarah Palin's back yard), we meet Russia's siblings. The Baltics are terrified of Russia at the best of times, but poor Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia find that is all that they have in common. But Russia has his own fears as well. Big sister Ukraine (with the comedy boobs and the kettle drum accompaniment) can't decide whether she likes her little brother or not. But that's nothing compared to kid sister Belarus, who likes Russia a little too much. There's also another sweet episode with siblings Switzerland and Liechtenstein.


Now that I think about it. This really ought to be funny stuff. I mean, writing about these gags, I'm actually chuckling a little to myself, and intellectually at least, I can see where the humour lies. It's just that I wish that I had chuckled while I was watching the show, rather than when I was writing about it. I liked this second collection of Hetalia Axis Powers more, because there is a lot more variety to the comedy here. But I still can't recommend it any more than the clichéd, 'If you like this sort of thing, then you'll like this.' Funimation are streaming the next series, Hetalia World Series as well, so this may not be over just yet.