Bad Anime Opening 101: Kurenai

A lot of people I really like have been claiming this show is the best ever, and yet I simply can’t go beyond the first episode. My body simply won’t take it, I still shiver thinking about the sheer boredom I endured watching the first episode some weeks ago.

So there is a girl and she’s real important, but she’s also sad and in danger one unexplained way or the other… then because of some weird circumstances the girl is taken away willingly by even stranger women, who walk around in the dark standing next to brightly lit bridges to avoid being seen, and the girl is finally handed to a student because the blond chick somehow trusts him even though he is a student and… Ugh.

The story is simply too ridiculous. And not in the good way either. Instead of using some sort of logical structure to get me involved in a believable world, the story drops the ball by making crazy jumps from one point to the other, and giving bad reasons for the characters doing what they do. It might make all sense at some future point, but why should anyone care? Especially the way the protagonist just leaves the little girl in his room, saying he’ll be back in 10 hours or something, what the hell is he thinking? It would make sense if he was in kindergarten, and can therefore not see the consequences coming, but he is like 16/17 years old! And after he has lost her, some weird Ninja employed by the blond chick appears, looking really cool and defiant just like a real operative, because operatives are all emotionless robots and therefore are not easily spotted. Give me a goddamn break. For me the whole story reeked of a bad setup to get the protagonist to live with the girl, so they could have humorous and/or other melodramatic (and unexplained) episodes together.

You might argue that the story gets better later on, but I simply don’t want to watch. It’s not like I can’t take some boring starter episodes, but the story just gave me the unwavering feeling, that this series is going to be another overly melodramatic bore.

Sorry Kurenai, no second try.

Bad Anime Endings 101

As every good comedian knows, one must “finish strong” to leave the best impression on the audience, even if the part before was at best mediocre. But what happens when you put on a great performance, dazzling the audience with wit and originality, but put a huge chunk of bad melodrama, about how you lost a dime needed to buy some plastic transformer and that’s the reason you didn’t get invited to the party of the fat kid next door and this somehow skewed your sexuality or something, at the end? Well, first you will be egged and whipped by your listeners, secondly you get endings like those of “Potemayo” and “Beating Angel Dokuro-Chan”.

I don’t know when studios started their abuse of forcing people to watch badly acted, trivial drivel at the end, but it has to stop.

Why do studios do this? Is it because the authors feel the need to somehow justify their comedy series, as if bad melodrama is somehow of a higher level? Why should it be? Good comedy is essential and great satire can form the human mind just as much as monologues about love, hate, the bigger jugs of the guy standing next to you, and so on and so forth. But instead of giving the people what they want, the authors insist on talking about trivial crap, put in orchestral music (because music with a lot of instruments automatically sounds better) and decide to have some sort of weird melodramatic circle-jerk. But most people watching comedy/satire series first of all don’t really care, and secondly, if they haven’t been just watching the show because of the pretty pictures, will see right through the bad efforts of tugging at their heartstrings.

Or is it because they feel they have to “wrap it up” somehow? I don’t know about you, but I prefer open ended scenarios generally more than these “Ok – We’re done now, go on, nothing more to see here, everyone is either dead or happily married”-endings. This wrapping-up reminds me of these “feel-good” movies, whose only objective is to make the viewers feel that they’ve successfully wasted 6 hours of their lives.

In any case, two great anime weren’t completely ruined, but definitely weren’t as orgasm-inducing as they could have been. And one thing is for sure: If I ever want to watch bad drama, I won’t watch anime, but tune in on a shopping channel to buy an axe to kill myself.

Welcome to the NHK – A winning loser

I’m finally done watching “Welcome to the NHK”. I have been an avid reader of the original manga, yet I can not fully recommend the anime.

While the manga is indeed hard to digest, mostly because you weren’t sure what exactly the protagonist is really thinking, the anime may have overshot the target of “dumbing it down” a bit. The story is presented well, and is, unlike the manga, very coherent. Yet somehow the stark coherency negatively affects how much the viewer is really aware, or rather how strongly he is aware of Tatsuhiro’s state of mind.

Also, the resolutions to a lot of conflicts are quite….. clean…. I can’t describe it any other way. The viewer might wonder, why Tatsuhiro’s sensei wants to have a love affair with him, even though she is in a happy marriage. In the manga one experiences why this is the case, one learns that clear cuts are a thing of fantasy; Problems are not simply resolved by one event, drama doesn’t stop when you have achieved some sort of “goal”. And while this is displayed  as a problem in the anime regarding the main character, it is not regarding the other cast. Instead of a grating back and forth, the resolutions come at one point, and then are never questioned whatsoever. The ending was especially disappointing. I do not want to spoil it, but it was definitely written with a younger demographic in mind.

The anime is also heavily censored. Do not misunderstand. Not censored in the “black bars over genitals”- Japanese kind of way, but rather certain situations are skewed in favor of the protagonist. His pedophiliac tendencies are played down drastically, and one must wonder if this is rather a marketing trick than a necessity. And while perversion is a theme, violence and hate are two things which are shortly touched, but are never explored in detail, and this severely detracts from the female leads background and credibility.

One might argue all these steps were needed to cram the packed anime into 24*30 minutes. I am not so sure, especially if I look at the rather slow and uninteresting beginning.  It takes about 5 episodes to really start getting hooked, early on one might wonder what all the fuss is about.

I am a little disappointed, this anime had the potential to be so much more. But in all fairness, “Welcome to the NHK” is still a strong anime, even worth a look for people who have read the manga. The excellent soundtrack adds immensely, and will make even the most cynical shed one or the other tear. Knock knock knock.