Most animes are listed with tags like shojo/romance or school/slice of life or shonen/mecha and the like. Most animes aren't any more complicated than that.
There's one series that Crunchyroll lists with the following tags:
action-adventure, aliens, comedy, historical, humanoid, ninjas, parallel universe, parody, samurai, sci-fi
Can any one anime actually be all these things?
Gintama tells the story of samurai Gintoki Sakata (Tomokazu Sugita) in what you might say is a very alternative version of Japan's Meiji Era.
Instead of the Americans coming to open Japan in 1853, aliens from outer space known as the "Amanto" arrived. Gintoki and the other samurai fought to kick the Amanto out, but eventually were forced to lay down their swords.
The Amanto modernized Japan, while remnants of Japan's Tokugawa period like the Shinsengumi found themselves, like Gintoki, superseded.
Gintoki is joined by Shinpachi (Daisuke Sakaguchi), a young samurai-in-training, and Kagura (Rie Kugimiya), a diminutive but enormously strong space alien who eats huge quantities of Earth food at every opportunity. Together, the three make their living doing odd jobs in an Edo where people still wear kimonos, but automobiles, television and other mod cons abound.
Gintama is, at its base, an absurd comedy. In one episode, the opening credits run at the halfway point when the characters realize "we haven't run the opening yet." And the entire plot of another episode consisted of the characters sitting around a nabe hot pot, each secretly plotting to grab the meat for him or herself. Kagura has a pet, an enormous white dog named Sadaharu who likes to bite people's heads. And so on and so forth.
Gintoki is a layabout who reads Weekly Shonen Jump and drinks strawberry milk, seemingly unconcerned about the Amanto takeover, unlike fellow samurai Katsura (Akira Ishida) who leads the underground movement to expel the Amanto and retake Japan.
But in reality Gintoki's samurai spirit remains unchanged no matter who runs the country, and each week finds him a hero once again as he (usually reluctantly) gets involved with whatever person needs his help in whatever way.
You can count on teenage boy gross-out humor, and most episodes feature at least one chase scene in which Gintoki, Shinpachi and Kagura are screaming their heads off:
The one category Crunchyroll left off and should have included is "drama." If Gintama were just twenty-four minutes of ridiculousness each week it wouldn't have the enormous following that it does. Rather, the anime succeeds because it seamlessly blends in a message in each episode - and often beautifully.
My favorite episode so far is Episode 12 of Season 1. It opens with Gintoki arguing about his overdue rent with his old battleax of a landlady, Otose, who runs Otose's Snack House, a seedy rundown bar in Kabukicho.
Otose is actually a soft touch. She takes in a cat-eared alien female named Catherine and gives her a job at the bar. Catherine, however, is a thief, and eventually finds herself being chased by Gintoki and the others after she steals Gintoki's scooter and the cash register from Otose's bar.
Gintoki and crew grab a taxi and go after Catherine, but wind up driving off the dock and into Tokyo Bay instead. Catherine revs the engine on Gintoki's scooter and drives toward Otose at high speed when Otose starts telling her a story - about a half-starved samurai she met one day at her husband's gravesite, who ate the manjuu she brought as an offering and then pledged to the spirit of that dead husband to protect Otose for the rest of her life.
As she finishes the tale and Catherine is about to run her over, Gintoki suddenly appears from out of the bay and leaps in front of Otose to defend her, his sword drawn toward Catherine.
A predictable moment? Maybe. But I literally gasped out loud - the lead-up to that moment was so perfect and the moment itself so thrilling - it was sublime.
There are a lot of other things about Gintama that are funny and colorful and that stand out that I should probably include here, but - perhaps you'd like to see for yourself:
Gintama - Season 1, Episode 12
Both Gintoki and Sadaharu thank you for your attention. ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment