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Tell me if you've heard this one before: a taciturn tough guy, loner to the core and with an as-yet unexplained dark past, is reformed by wanting to protect a young woman who believes in him.
A cliche? Only when it doesn't work. When it works, it's entertainment you can sit back, relax and enjoy without reservation.
Saizo Kirigakure, a ronin ninja, stumbles across a frantic miko (priestess) named Isaname on the run from assassins. The killers have murdered everyone at her temple and are after her for some unknown reason.
Saizo reluctantly saves Isanami, and then becomes caught up in warlord Sanada Yukimura's plan to assemble ten brave warriors to intervene in Japan's civil war.
As Saizo proclaims he doesn't need a master, his new fellow warrior Kakei Juzo replies that when he finds someone he wants to protect, he'll be a changed man.
Does any of this sound familiar? Of course - all of it does. It's the same plot as any number of "lone warrior is saved by committing himself to a cause (while also rescuing a good woman)" stories we've seen. The difference with Brave 10 is in the execution.
The script and direction are good. I particularly like how the dramatic and comedic moments are balanced. So often in anime the humor in an otherwise dramatic (and bloody) storyline comes in jarring moments, or in scenes that take you out of the story. Brave 10, so far, has handled this seamlessly, giving you sustained dramatic tension and then - a laugh, just when you need it.
But it's really the seiyuu that make Brave 10 so engaging. Saizo is played by Daisuke Ono and Isanami by Rina Satou, each of whom is letter-perfect. The silent macho type is harder to portray than one might think: the role is mostly defined by the character's lack of reaction, so when the character actually speaks it really has to count - and Ono makes it count.
As for Isanami, this is the kind of female character that usually barely registers with me: the girl or woman who needs to be rescued (and rescued... and rescued again). But Rina Satou is charming, and it helps that she uses a normal voice instead of that affected and artificial high voice you hear with many female seiyuu that always irritates me. She plays Isanami as naive and bratty, but there's strength there as well.
The two have the best male-female chemistry I've seen since Spice and Wolf. I usually don't find the man-as-protector and woman-as-saver-of-man's-soul tropes overly compelling. It's been done to death, but I have to admit that when it works, there's something very satisfying in it.
In short, Brave 10 is much better than it needs to be - if that makes sense. ;) There's nothing very original about it, but when the execution is this good, it hardly matters.
I'm dropping Bakuman S2 from my watchlist.
Not because it's not good; it's excellent. Not because it's not available through the usual channels and I can't find it; I've found it streaming on any number of sites.
No, I'm dropping Bakuman Season 2 from my currently watching list because:
1) I keep forgetting to watch it, because
2) it's not on my usual anime-watching sites, due to the fact that
3) it's not licensed.
There are a few points to be made here. First, the fact that I've been forgetting to watch Bakuman each week is because it's the only anime I'm watching that isn't on: a) Crunchyroll; b) Funimation; c) Hulu; or d) a producer's channel on You Tube (such as Funimation's You Tube channel, etc.).
Think of what this means. Nearly everything I want to watch is available through legal streaming sites. This is a wonderful improvement over even a few years ago in this industry, for us fans.
Second, if I really wanted to continue following the story line, I could subscribe to Viz's Shonen Jump magazine, which is going to digital this year and in which Bakuman is currently being serialized. Or I could buy the manga in print, which is up to Vol. 8.
And finally - I am already buying Bakuman the anime series as DVD singles. They've only released the first two DVDs in S1 so far, so yes, there's a long way to go to the S2 DVDs, but eventually they'll be available and I will buy them.
Bakuman is an anomaly in that I love the story so much that I've committed to buying the DVDs. And so I can let the streaming go right now because at some point I'll own the entire series.
However - had it been anything less than a series I was already committed to buying - say one that wasn't also being serialized as an English-language manga and thus available through other means - I would be facing a dilemma right now. Keep watching it as an unlicensed stream? or drop it on principle?
I'm just thinking out loud here, working through my own process on this issue, and certainly not judging anyone for how they choose to watch and consume anime. But when a site like Megaupload gets taken down, it should sound warning bells for all of us. (I watched anime on Megaupload early on, but soon stopped because I felt it was trying to leave malware on my computer.) If Megaupload is targeted, even a lighter-shade-of-gray site like Veoh may be next.
When the One Manga site was targeted a while back, I stopped reading the Naruto Shippuuden manga that I'd been reading on that site, on principle. I haven't read any unlicensed manga since then. I'm coming close to saying the same for unlicensed anime.
But at the same time - is it fair to expect us fans to buy loads of DVDs to support the industry, when it appears that physical media is slowly being phased out? And what about the argument that it isn't so much piracy by the fans, as the forcing of Japanese-style cost-prohibitive DVD prices on the non-Japanese market that is causing U.S. publishers to go out of business?
I don't have any sweeping conclusions here - because there aren't any. Each of us has to make his or her own choices about how we consume anime and manga and what effect our choices might have on this industry.
I just wish Bakuman S2 was available on Crunchyroll or Hulu. I miss it already.
After a break of seven years, The Prince of Tennis has returned to Japanese TV in the form of a sequel series, The New Prince of Tennis.
For anyone not familiar with the phenomenon known as Prince of Tennis, the simplest explanation is that it's based on a shonen manga about boys playing tennis. The reality is even simpler than that. Prince of Tennis is ostensibly a shonen story, but the audience for it may not be the one you'd expect. ;)
The Prince of Tennis is much more than just your regular manga that was turned into an anime. It has spawned video games, drama CDs, a half-hour weekly radio show featuring the seiyuu cast, over 300 music CDs, two anime features, one live-action movie, 18 stage musicals and enormous amounts of branded merchandise of all kinds. A marathon of 100 songs from the series was performed by the seiyuu in 2008.
What could possibly inspire such fan devotion? Here's the formula:
1. Cute boys
playing
2. Magical tennis
= Win
The Prince of Tennis has millions upon millions of fans in Japan, and if even one of them is male I'd be shocked. PoT isn't for boys; it's for girls. Want some proof? It's as if creator Takeshi Konomi looked into the heart of each prepubescent girl, adolescent girl and young woman in Japan and didn't stop until he'd designed at least one character that that female could fall in love with.
So, here's your proof. First, protagonist Ryoma Echizen and his team Seigaku:
And here is one of Seigaku's opposing teams, Rikkai:
... and another team...
... please...
... make it stop...
... enough, just make it stop...
The Prince of Tennis isn't a phenomenon: it's mass insanity!
It's an anime series where a character like Keigo Atobe has released more CDs than anyone in the PoT universe, except Ryoma - and Atobe's just a supporting character.
The plot of PoT is the same as any other shonen story. The protagonist works hard to become the best ninja/samurai/mecha pilot/tennis champion he can be, while going through tests and trials that mold his character and prepare him for the ultimate battle/showdown/tennis tournament. Along the way, he is mentored by a senpai and learns from his nakama, who also face their own challenges.
Or... not. PoT is a little different in that Ryoma, the protagonist, never changes all that much. The son of a reclusive Japanese tennis star, Nanjiroh Echizen, who mysteriously retired at the height of his career, Ryoma was raised in America and doesn't particularly act like, nor does he see himself as, a team player.
This indifference to others leads to a memorable clash with his mentor, Seigaku team captain Kunimitsu Tezuka, which I wrote about here.
Ryoma is a different kind of protagonist, and the tennis in PoT is definitely a different kind of tennis. First, there's Ryoma's own crazy "Twist Serve," where the ball twists and spins and bounces right up into the opponent's face; Tezuka's "Tezuka Zone," a vortex of kinetic energy that sucks the opponent's ball magically into Tezuka's reach; and Kaoru Kaidoh's "Boomerang Snake" shot that curves around the net, goes out of bounds and then veers back in bounds.
And that's just on Ryoma's own team.
From the other teams, there's Atobe's "Rondo Towards Destruction," which smashes the racket out of the opponent's hand; Gin Ishida's "Hadokyu" shot that gets progressively stronger 108 times; and Kintaro Toyama's "Mountain Storm," in which he rises up into the air and spins madly, kicking up a windstorm that enables him to hit a powerful downward smash.
Why this supernatural element in PoT? Surely normal tennis moves should be exciting enough? At first one laughs at the absurdity of it. Then the magical tennis starts to grow on you. It may (or may not) have been Konomi's intent to satirize shonen heroes and their exaggerated super powers, but the supernatural element adds another dimension to PoT that you soon realize you would actually miss if it weren't there.
By the end of the original story, you've become so inured to suspending disbelief that Konomi actually has Rikkai's captain Seiichi Yukimura using "Muga No Kyouchi," a technique that puts the opponent into a void outside of time and space, in which the opponent stumbles around the court blind and deaf to the world. I am not kidding.
But the best example of PoT transcending the bounds of time and space is the classic "Tezuka Killed the Dinosaurs" shot. In the anime feature film Futari no Samurai (The Two Samurai), a surreal dream-type sequence is shown wherein Tezuka's mighty tennis shot travels back in time to prehistoric earth in the form of a huge fireball that shoots across the land and kills the dinosaurs.
It's hard to explain the appeal of The Prince of Tennis beyond what I've said. I suspect PoT is one of those animes that people either fall into headfirst, or else not even give a second thought to watching. Just remember that if you are in the second camp that millions of Japanese girls...
... can't all be wrong. ;)
Two teenage boys, Sei Inaba and Tsuyoshi Oishi, fall in love with a girl named Yuko.
Yuko is seriously ill and needs a transplant. Inaba's dream is to become a chemical engineer, to construct an artificial heart to replace Yuko's failing human heart. Oishi, from a working class background and with an abusive alcoholic father, dreams of going to night school to study science so that he too can help Yuko. Although she flirts with both boys, Yuko finally chooses Inaba over Oishi.
Yuko is put on a respirator, and it's left to Inaba to authorize turning off the respirator when it appears that Yuko is brain dead. Yuko had told him that she didn't want to be kept alive artificially. But at the funeral, Oishi angrily confronts Inaba, telling him that Yuko had told him she was afraid to die.
Fifteen years pass. Inaba is now a professor of chemical engineering working on his artificial heart research, while Oishi struggles as a post-doctorate student in a medical research lab at the same university. The two young men now compete for funding for their studies, and are still bitterly at odds over Yuko and what her final wishes were.
In the meantime, down a hallway, lies a secret room where a female patient has lain in a vegetative state for 15 years, kept alive by long-term beta blockers until science finds a way to repair her over-extended cardiac muscles...
Breathe Deeply, by husband and wife mangaka team Doton Yamaaki, is an ambitious effort that bogs down in too many science discussions and too little emotional investment in the characters. The story attempts to debate the ethics of transplants, organ donation and stem cell research, but a confusing narrative and lack of any character to positively identify with makes for tough going for the reader.
In my view, if a story is dark and all or most of the characters are negative, something else about the story has to hold my attention because I'm not likely to finish it otherwise. A story like Death Note easily kept me watching for one simple reason: I wanted to know what would happen next. It was the suspense of watching Light make his moves, triumph, fail and almost get caught, etc., that held me in thrall all the way to the very end.
Here, Inaba and Oishi turn twisted and bitter as adults, and are surrounded by bosses and co-workers who are even more manipulative and destructive than they are. An endless round of scenes where the worst of human nature is played out leaves me drained, not entertained - and I learn nothing by it.
Breathe Deeply veers unevenly between medical thriller, fragile love story and horror, and at a massive 468 pages seems destined to be picked up only by hardcore North American manga fans.
One Peace Books, whose motto is "One World, One Love, One Peace," is a small NY publishing house started in 2006 by Ayumu Takahashi. Judging from their book catalog, which contains an eclectic mix of manga, fiction and non-fiction - all licensed works from Japan and translated into English - One Peace looks like a smaller version of Vertical, Inc.
In this economy, and given what has been happening recently in our industry, one hopes that One Peace will consider licensing works that are a bit more accessible to American readers.
FTC disclaimer: I received a free copy of Breathe Deeply for review purposes.
Anime L.A. 2012 started off on a thought-provoking and contemplative note, with a Friday evening panel called "Anime Then and Now" - which was intended to be a nostalgic look back with Robert Napton and his Bandai colleagues Loy Fruel, Anthony Foronda and Taku Otsuka. With the breaking news of Bandai Entertainment's slowdown/shutdown this past week, the hour-long panel turned into something much different: a profound assessment of where the anime industry is now, how it got there and what we as fans can do to support it. More on this below.
Stan Sakai was the Guest of Honor, so Usagi Yojimbo (above, with Ala the Anime L.A. mascot girl) was featured throughout the weekend.
A few obligatory cosplay photos. Amuro Ray and Char rediscover their enmity for each other, poolside in Southern California...
... while anyone who has the skills and puts in the hard work to make the Kusuri-uri costume from Mononoke deserves to have their photo taken as much as possible. ;)
And something odd: a fan gathering, not announced in the program book, unofficial and off the books, for a webcomic called "House Stuck." About a hundred fans, many cosplaying the comic's characters (with yellow and orange horns), took over the patio at the LAX Marriott at dusk on Saturday for their own tribal get-together.
A webcomic, with fans devoted enough to cosplay and carve out their own meeting at a local anime convention. Could this be the wave of the future?
A Journey in the Way-Back Machine
I'll get to the Bandai panel momentarily, but first a bit of personal history.
I discovered anime around the end of 2005, beginning of 2006, when I started watching Vandread, Street Fighter II and Mirage of Blaze on the Starz network. Despite being Japanese-American, I didn't know anything about anime or manga but I was fascinated by what I saw and knew I had to find out more about it.
I remember driving down to Anaheim for Anime Expo 2006, saying to myself in the car, why am I doing this? I don't know anything about this stuff and I'm driving all this way! But I had to find out more about anime, what it was and why it intrigued me so.
At Anime Expo 2006, I bought my first DVD box set (Mirage of Blaze - Media Blasters drew the first blood from my anime fan wallet ;)), and went to a Digital Manga Publishing panel at which they announced their upcoming yaoi manga releases - and that was it. I've been a huge anime and manga fan ever since.
Around the end of 2007, I started working in the industry. I did the English adaptations for Broccoli's sola and Nui!, and the yaoi manga Cigarette Kisses, which was later picked up by Aurora Publishing, for whom I also did freelance work.
For Robert Napton and Bandai Entertainment, I did the English adaptations for the first three Code Geass novels, and copy editing on several Gundam 00 and Eureka Seven novels. I freelanced for Tokyopop, doing copy editing work on over 40 manga books including Hetalia, Future Diary and Gakuen Alice, and for Digital Manga Publishing where, in addition to yaoi novels, I've been the English adaptation writer for the Yashakiden series of horror novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi.
I was thrilled and honored to actually be working in the industry that produced the entertainment that I loved. Everything was fresh and new to me, and everywhere I looked I saw stories I'd never seen before, coming from a lifetime of consuming mainstream American entertainment.
I discovered new anime series and new manga series everyday. Tokyopop's manga books took up an entire aisle at Borders bookstores. It was all big and growing and incredibly exciting.
In 2005-2006, I walked into a world of entertainment and an infrastructure that I thought would be there forever. I didn't know then that I'd become a fan at what was possibly the very peak of anime and manga's popularity in the U.S.
Anime Then and Now
Robert Napton opened Friday night's panel by stating that he and the other panelists couldn't say anything further about the restructuring, other than the information that had already been released.
The four panelists then talked about how early on - years ago - anime companies used to recruit their employees from the fan base, as the fans were the most knowledgeable about anime. Their passion about anime created in them a kind of booster's enthusiasm, and being an anime fan back then meant you were an active promoter and you tried to spread the word about anime as an art form as much as possible.
They said that in the early days fans had to be more social as videotapes of anime were hard to come by, and only by trading tapes and watching anime together did anime fandom spread. Now, people generally watch anime alone on their computers and the social aspect has shifted from old-school anime clubs to conventions, particularly with the cosplay phenomenon.
Napton noted that anime fandom itself appears to be increasing, but that that doesn't necessarily translate to increased market sales. He analogized it to the housing bubble in the U.S., acknowledging that there had been an "over-saturation" of anime DVDs that had contributed to the anime market declining. He added that the Internet has been a "random factor" in further diluting anime sales, and as a method of distribution hasn't been truly monetized yet.
He also noted that the anime series of the '80s and '90s were stronger in terms of storytelling than much of the anime being produced today, citing examples such as Macross, Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop, calling them "hard stories." The others on the panel added that fan service has become a huge factor, noting that K-ON merchandise is the top seller in Japan.
Although Napton and the others were careful not to discuss Bandai's restructuring, Napton did mention that he had read the comments on Anime News Network's interview with Ken Iyadomi this week. He was surprised that many of the commenters were surprised that the Japanese commitment to the U.S. market is now wavering - that the Japanese are beginning to reconsider the U.S. market for anime.
Towards the end of the hour, Napton asked the audience where they thought the industry was heading, and how to support the industry. Justin Sevakis of Anime News Network said that eventually there would be premium box sets for collectors, and streaming anime for everyone else. Yours truly mentioned Crunchyroll as part of the solution, i.e., legal streaming anime with paid subscriptions.
'Art is what links everyone'
Napton concluded the hour with a few personal remarks, saying that this was his last panel and that he didn't think he would be employed in the anime industry again. He encouraged everyone to continue supporting the industry, saying that "art is what links everyone."
If Robert Napton leaves the industry, then the industry has lost a gentleman and true professional. He has been a fantastic representative for anime in the U.S. and he will be deeply missed from the scene.
For myself, all of the companies I have worked for in this industry save one are now gone: Broccoli, Aurora, Tokyopop and now Bandai Entertainment.
What can we do to support the industry? I'm going to keep that foremost in my mind this year, and put my money where my mouth is. We're at a crucial point now for the survival of anime and manga in the U.S. Let's do our best to keep it alive and make it thrive - even as the ground shifts below our feet.
I've not had much time to look at the winter 2012 anime season and what's coming up, but I think I've already decided on a mix of continuing series, a few new series, and a couple of old (and still continuing) series.
Crunchyroll has picked up Brave 10, an alternative Warring States-era mash-up of bishonen samurai and ninja, which is enough to get me on board from the description alone (lol) - so that's been added to the list. The other new series I'm watching is The New Prince of Tennis.
As for continuing series - I'm still watching Bleach, Naruto Shippuuden, Guilty Crown and Bakuman 2. Unfortunately, due to Bandai's restructuring announced earlier this week, the final few episodes of Gundam Unicorn will probably not be released in any format that I'll be able to watch, so I've had to drop it from the list.
I'm hoping to speak with Robert Napton this weekend at Anime LA about what's going on at Bandai. I've freelanced on and off for years as an editor and English adaptation writer for Bandai and their announcement caught me off-guard. The list of anime producers and manga publishers I've worked for that have gone out of business is getting pretty long (Broccoli, Aurora, Tokyopop and now most if not all of Bandai's publishing division). More on this next week.
Finally, after adding Gintama to my watchlist, I'm going to add another old/continuing series:
A gentle supernatural story with a magical cat - how can Natsume Yuujincho not be worth watching? :) The show is just starting its fourth season, so I'd better catch up quickly.
Here's a New Year's greeting from seiyuu Hiroaki Hirata (One Piece's Sanji, Tiger & Bunny's Wild Tiger, Saiyuki's Gojyo). Just FYI, it's eight minutes of Hirata-san cooking and eating cha-han (fried rice):Watching this video (included in one of Anime News Network's New Year's Greetings posts) brought to mind the "day in the life" type videos I've seen on You Tube by other seiyuu.
Set in (allegedly) their Tokyo flats (maybe), and showing them cooking meals, getting dressed, and hanging out in their living rooms, these videos purport to give us fans a glimpse of their private lives and how they live.
Here's one with Hiroshi Kamiya (Durarara!!'s Izaya, Gundam 00's Tieria). He gets extra points for the cute dog.
Note the orange Gerbera daisy on his car dashboard. It's important. ;)And who knew Jun Fukuyama was such a clothes horse??I guess he got into clothes after his Zero get-up in Code Geass. ;)
Finally, this is Daisuke Namikawa (Hetalia's North Italy). This is the life - singing and playing rock music with your band on the roof of your building! Note the orange Gerbera daisy he dances around with:Now, Kamiya-san also had an orange Gerbera daisy in his video.
Hmm...
Does Daisuke Ono know they're seeing each other? ^o^
Happy New Year!
