Anime Review Roundup

I got a little ahead of myself, getting excited about Manga’s forthcoming release of Terra-Formars, hoping that it meant that Manga were getting back into gear. It turned out in Manga’s official Tweet announcement, that Terra-Formars is a Kazé release. Still stuck in idle, I’m afraid. Speaking of idling, with most of May’s anime releases shunted back to the end of the month, I’m still indulging in clearing out my own backlog, and last week I reviewed Dusk Maiden of Amnesia on Blu-ray, having imported the release from the US after falling in love with the show after watching MVM’s DVD release. If you need reminding, it’s the unconventional tale of a school’s Supernatural Research Club, a club whose president just happens to be a very cute looking ghost. The club began when a boy named Teiichi first encountered the ghost, Yuuko, and started an unconventional relationship. The club is filled out by the forthright and disapproving Kirie, and the spiritually dense Momoe, who can’t even see Yuuko. Ostensibly their reason for existing is to uncover Yuuko’s past, learn what originally happened to her, but things are little more complicated. It’s a wonderfully atmospheric and stylish show, which starts off in a light and comedic vein and gets gradually darker. The US Blu-ray release from Sentai is even better value in that it includes the show’s music soundtrack on two CDs.

Two shows really, and two doses of disappointment for differing reasons. I finished a rewatch of Madlax for one thing, the 26 episode ‘girls with guns’ assassins series from Studio Beetrain, the middle part of the trilogy bookended by Noir and La Cazador de la Bruja (and with the unofficial fourth instalment of Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom). The more often I watch these shows, the less I get out of them, with their cookie cutter character stereotypes, and their abject pretentiousness. Madlax might be the most pretentious of the lot, with an elaborate storyline where books and words of power can distort reality. And where a girl in evening dress can dance through a hail of machine gunfire in the middle of a jungle, come out without a scratch or a mud stain, and kill a whole army squadron. I’ve come to understand that shows like Madlax are very much a onetime only deal, the anime equivalent of event TV, that doesn’t bear scrutiny after the fact.

I also watched Evangelion 1.11 again. At which point I discovered that I no longer care if Evanglion 3.33 is released or not. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great film, a visual spectacular, retelling as it does the start of the Evangelion story, before it drastically diverges in the next film. The epic soundtrack, the amazing animation, the engaging characterisations still all make it the landmark re-imagining of the classic anime series. But seriously, this film came out five years ago, its sequel four. We’ve been waiting for 3.33 for four years now. Four years of hype have killed what expectation I had for it. The constant updates, release date shifts, the constant to and fro about tweaking the dub, with Studio Khara taking a closer involvement after not being happy with Funimation’s first efforts... I no longer care! I’ve probably outgrown the show by now. Remember Revelation’s release of Peach Girl, an anime aimed at young, teenage girls, which finally concluded its release by the time those girls would have graduated college. Same deal! Frankly I’d much rather have the original series on Blu-ray, which is a thing now in Japan.