Ray wrote:All I can say is, Japan needs Jesus if this is what they think of Christianity.
I'm wondering which one would earn a higher offensiveness score from the Christian Anime Alliance,
Sins of the Sisters or
Ninja Resurrection. The former has more dickgirls, but the latter has way more gore and dragons.
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Dagashi Kashi:
Is it vapid garbage? Pretty much, as each episode is 20 minutes of snack food product placement, tied together with some naughty jokes. But on the other hand, I understand the appeal of this particular brand of garbage, as it's basically antidote to boring main girl syndrome. While I'm not a huge connoisseur of romcom and harem genres (which of course have a huge overlap with LN and VN adaptations), it is my understanding that the "designated main girl" is a fairly rigid archetype. In order to have a broad waifu appeal in the eyes of the Japanese audience, the main girl can't be anything too outrageous, and whatever wackier characters the author might come up with must be delegated to the sidelines. My most recent encounter with this situation was with
Kannagi, which IMO would've been a fabulous fujoshi comedy had it had the good sense focus on Takako instead of the incredibly run-of-the-mill plot with an average Japanese schoolboy meeting a supernatural tsundere. Talk about not realizing your strengths.
Luckily there are sometimes shows that put the weird girl front and center, and Dagashi Kashi is a good example of this, even if it's not a good anime per se. Even Saya, the "normal" girl and the tsukkomi to Hotaru's boke, looks like an overcaffeinated borderline yandere, and while Hotaru is clearly designed to be fetish fuel, she's also self-assured, brash and incredibly driven. It is said that one of the defining features of a moeblob character is having no discernible life goals; Hotaru on the other hand is passionate about her beloved snacks to the point of craziness, so that at least keeps the garbage fire burning with some intensity.
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Gigantic Formula:It takes a while to realize what this show's deal is because it doesn't reveal its hand until very late in the series. In this way it's rather similar to
Zegapain, but whereas it was primarily an inward look at the mecha genre itself, Gigantic Formula actually wants to comment on the outside world. Oh yes, it's a show with a political message, even though you might think early on that its anime-lolpolitics are so wacked that it surely can't be seriously about real world issues. Spoilers follow:
Much like Zegapain, GF is very much a classic super robot show in terms of its final boss, who's a monstrously evil Big Bad out to kill all humans. But while Naga just nuked the planet Skynet-style, GF's main villain is of a craftier sort, working behind the scenes as a puppet master and manipulating various world leaders and armed forces to do its bidding. I'm not going to reveal here who this baddie is, as it's a genuinely good twist and one of the best parts of the show, and it's also not relevant to the show's blunt political subtext. In short, it becomes very apparent towards the end that the writers have a major beef with the Bush administration and its escapades in Iraq. I mean, it pretty much stops being
subtext at the point when an American warship named USS Rumsfeld showers the unarmed and defenseless Japanese robot with a cruise missile bukkake. However, I wouldn't say it's a one-sided anti-American bashfest since the Japanese military is depicted as a bunch of manipulated stooges as well, and there's nothing villainous about the father-daughter pilot duo of the American robot; like all of the national teams, they're just normal people with their own particular hang-ups, and the dad is even
openly disdainful of the Hydra-like backroom assgrabbing going on in the Pentagon. I guess it is that famed American samurai honor. In the end, the web of deceit is vanquished, and the epilogue is all about the UN getting its dignity back and international cooperation resuming in earnest.
If nothing else, at least it's a pretty bold statement from a giant robot cartoon. Unfortunately it's placed towards the very end of an otherwise conceptually undercooked show. The idea of the robots being the 12 major deities of the Greek Pantheon is something pretty unique, and the entire series is basically just one big tournament arc, as the gods want to duke it out Highlander-style in order to decide who gets to be the one remaining Supergod. Each deity chooses two humans to serve as his or her champions, one piloting the mech and the other serving as a telepathic link between the robot body and the god housed inside of it. As you could expect from Greek gods, their champions are similarly larger-than-life dramatic characters (my personal favorites being the British Edmond Dantes and the incestuous French brother-sister duo). The Japanese team is one half there, with the telepath being a girl ninja with a dark past. However, the pilot and our main character is inexplicably just some random Japanese schoolboy who's good at video games. Sure, it's an archetype, but not the sort of archetype I could imagine appealing to
Ares, the god of war, "overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, and man-slaughtering." I could see it maybe working if the boy was a proper controller-smashing rage gamer, the god of voice chat abuse, but no, he's just a chipper kid, and Ares's choice never stops being confounding.
Another big issue with the show is that its tournament arc formula just doesn't work. It actually spends the majority of its running time on what are basically stand-alone episodes that introduce each and every of the 12 national teams, while our main characters spy on them using a magic CCTV. However, the teams barely get to interact with each other prior or after the fights, so nobody has any particular connection to each other, and these episodes basically just exist to tread water while waiting for the show to get all political. Of course, tournament format necessitates episodes where the main characters simply spectate other people's matches, but if the lead-up is properly constructed, even these "sideshows" can be good entertainment. Case in point,
Gundam Build Fighters and the Meijin vs. Argentinian nihilists fight, which is often considered one of the highlights of the show. Or, you know,
G Gundam, which had its share of filler but which always had its national champions interacting and bonding with each other.
So, with that said, I would recommend Gigantic Formula to those who really like their super robots and who enjoy their anime with particularly goofy-ass lolpolitics. If you don't derive enjoyment out of those things, the show is going to feel hopelessly detached and empty.
