After a few dry anime seasons - dry for me, anyway - I find myself watching more anime than ever. I wasn’t looking forward to anything this winter other than the return of Haikyuu, but suddenly my watchlists on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime are flooded with an episode or two of something to watch nearly every day of the week.
But first... the holdovers from fall 2019.
What to say about Babylon... A series that started off as fantastic has now unraveled into a morass.
I really hate to say that about this series, because it was dark and fascinating at first. A new ward in Tokyo adopts a law that makes suicide legal, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What prosecutor/investigator Zen Seizaki discovers is a conspiracy behind the law involving the ward’s mayor and a mysterious and ultimately terrifying woman - the true villain of the piece – Ai Magase.
There was a break between episode 8 and 9 that lasted one month. Last Monday was Episode 11. The series is listed at MAL as being 12 episodes long. We haven’t seen Ai Magase since Episode 8, the setting changed from Japan to the U.S. for some reason, and the show has gotten lost in philosophizing about good and evil in the abstract, seemingly forgetting its own plot.
I don’t honestly think they can wrap up the series in any real or satisfying way with only one episode left, but I’m invested enough to watch on Monday to see if they can do it.
And then there’s Boruto. One day, I’m going to write a whole post about how Boruto trades too much on our nostalgia for the original characters in Naruto without forcing us to care enough about the new generation of characters... but that day is not today.
Before I talk about Haiykuu... I’ve picked up two other series this season that are nice surprises.
Case Files of Jeweler Richard looks like it would be a light repast, something like the European pastries and royal milk tea the show’s lead character enjoys in his parlor. It is, however, deeper than that.
The fey and lovely Richard is a British jeweler par excellence. He speaks many languages in dealing with his international clientele. One day he’s saved from being attacked by drunken louts by a young Japanese man, Seigi Nakata, who becomes his employee.
Each episode focuses on a single kind of jewel and what its significance is, as a mystery gets solved. Pretty standard stuff, except that the stories so far have been more serious than you’d expect from the set-up. The first episode dealt with Seigi’s own grandmother, who raised him and supported him by – being a thief. The second episode featured a young woman, engaged to a nice young man, who is in severe conflict. It turns out that she is gay, and accepted the engagement in a desperate and doomed attempt to deny her sexuality and the hard road in life it often leads to in Japan.
At the beginning of the episode, Richard cautions Seigi that he is never to show discrimination or judgment toward any of their customers. This is obviously tied in to what the rest of the episode is about, but still, it seems like more than you’d expect from this kind of series.
Oda Cinnamon Nobunaga. With a title like this, you know first off that it’s a comedy. I was expecting it to be one of those satirical anime series where each episode is 8 or 10 minutes long like Skullface Bookseller Honda-san, but actually each episode is the standard 24 minutes or so in length.
Oda Nobunaga, the fierce Warring States general, the scourge of the era, has now been reincarnated in modern-day Japan as a dog named “Cinnamon” by his young female owner.
He’s not alone. The other Warring States generals are here too, and are also dogs: Date “Boo” Masamune, Takeda “Lucky” Shingen, Uesugi “Julian” Kenshin. They and Oda meet up at the local dog park to relive their old battles and reminisce about the past.
It’s light and funny, in part because each sketch or story only lasts a few minutes, followed by some quick funny bits, and then another little story. For a series that only has a single punch line (they’re dogs now!), the producers know that for it to work, they have to keep it moving, and they do.
And now, finally, after a one-season delay, Pet is streaming on Amazon Prime.
Pet was worth the wait. It’s an exploration of what could happen if people had the ability not only to reach into another person’s mind, but also to change their memories. The first episode leaves you a bit puzzled, but the second episode lays out exactly how the “crushers,” as they’re referred to, do it, and it’s a really wild ride.
I never did a review of Haikyuu when the first season came out way back in 2014, so I think I’ll do it now.
Haikyuu is the story of Shoyo Hinata, an enthusiastic, ever-striving volleyball player for Karasuno High. Despite his shrimpy height, he has outsize skills, particularly in jumping insanely high.
His uncomplicated optimism keeps him moving past obstacles, including the people who don’t believe in him. And his radiant smile could power a thousand suns.
As in all shonen sports anime - he has a rival, of sorts.
Tobio Kageyama is already a star in the high school volleyball world, but he has a problem. He’s not a team player, and in fact suffered a dark moment of humiliating rejection from his teammates at his former school after they tired of his self-centered arrogance. When he comes to Karasuno, he’s pretty dismissive of the chibi Hinata, but the odd couple soon becomes the cornerstone of the team’s offense.
Haikyuu - for whatever reason - had a four-year hiatus between this season and the third season back in 2016. I’ll be honest and say that I barely remember what happened in season three, as I don’t follow the manga. It’s not the only anime production that has had a huge gap between seasons (Attack on Titan had a similar long break), but from the more casual fan, in other words, someone who likes Haikyuu but who doesn’t wait with bated breath for each episode - the producers expected an awful lot of patience here.
In any event... Haikyuu follows the basic shonen sports story template to a T. A scrappy but underperforming high school team learns to work together, with each individual player fighting to overcome his own personal obstacles, until they begin to achieve hard-won successes and ultimately advance to the final round tournament of whatever sport it is they play.
Kuroko’s Basketball is by far still my favorite anime in this genre. Plus, the character designs are way more attractive in that series. ;-)
Haikyuu is geared toward more of a younger audience, in my view. The tone is clean and wholesome in that particularly Japanese way of encouraging boys to do their best, play fair, and support others in order to win. As a shonen sports anime, it’s a model of the genre, following the template nearly flawlessly.
So why am I not as enthusiastic about Haikyuu as I am, say, Kuroko’s Basketball?
Well...
Because it’s VOLLEYBALL.
Forgive me if you’re a fan of the sport, but I don’t find volleyball that compelling. As opposed to basketball, which is inherently exciting, volleyball just doesn’t do it for me. I am completely willing to own this as a personal fault. It’s the reason that I simply like Haikyuu, rather than love it.
In addition to all the new series for winter 2020, I should mention that Crunchyroll is adding value these days in terms of extra episodes of older series, OVAs, and movies. In the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed a number of Naruto Shippuuden movies, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet OVAs, and best of all - K: Seven Stories, a short anime series in the K universe I never thought I’d get the chance to see. I’m not sure why this explosion of bonus extras is hitting Crunchyroll right now, but it’s really a lot of fun. Keep it up, Crunchyroll. =D
