It’s been a year where anime seemed almost beside the point, and yet, by the end of it — for me at least — it felt relevant again in a new way.
Back in March, the production of Boruto went dark for a few months, as workers in Japan hunkered down in the pandemic as did those elsewhere.
When Boruto started up again with new episodes in summer, I recall feeling a little guilty almost. Like, there’s a pandemic on, and I missed anime, but not to the point where I wanted animation workers to go back into production offices and get sick drawing my entertainment.
There’s never been an experience like the pandemic of this year, and some of my reactions to things were all over the place. I’ve since settled down, remembering that people in Japan - like people here in the U.S. - actually wanted to return to work, so it’s okay.
The big news about Boruto is that Masashi Kishimoto is returning to write the manga. I’ve written here before about how Boruto has never lived up to Naruto, but the totally obvious reason for that never occurred to me before I heard this news.
One of the main reasons that made Naruto/Naruto Shippuuden so awesome was its storytelling, its amazing world-building. Konoha, the ninja village of Naruto and his friends, felt as real as anything with its large group of characters and all of their fascinating backstories. Not to mention the ninja universe itself, the five great shinobi nations and their histories.
When the Boruto manga began, I recall reading that Kishimoto was going to be less involved with it, but I didn’t really get that he wasn’t writing the story, and nor was he doing the art.
Well — no offense to the people who were, but — now I understand why Boruto’s storyline moved so slowly and had so much filler (or what felt like filler).
The fact that Kishimoto is taking over again would be cause for unmitigated celebration... save for a rumor I heard. The rumor is that the two most important characters in the Naruto/Boruto universe are getting killed off.
If this turns out to be true... let’s just say that I will genuinely freak out. Although it makes sense in story and mythic terms to have Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha, the two main figures in the backstory of Boruto’s universe, die so that Boruto and Sarada and others of the new generation can step up, for me personally that would leave too big of a hole in the whole universe. It would basically hollow out Boruto for me, because the series has for too long traded on our nostalgia for the old characters and their history without building its own standalone resonance with solid storytelling and character development. Without Naruto and Sasuke, Boruto would be like an aftereffect in the Naruto universe, one without a lot of meaning for me.
I can only hope that Kishimoto doesn’t do it.
On a lighter note, Muhyo and Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation had its second season on Funimation this time instead of Crunchyroll, so what I call my “emergency Funimation subscription” came in handy this summer. (I keep a paid subscription year-round to Funimation for those occasional anime series that Crunchyroll doesn’t license.)
Muhyo and Roji is one of those anime series that is enjoyable and not too cliffhangery when a season ends, meaning you can look forward to it coming back at some point without being anxious about it. It’s weird that Crunchyroll had its first season, but Funimation got its second season. Apparently, both companies will be under Sony’s umbrella soon, so I suppose it doesn’t make much difference either way in the ultimate sense.
In this covid year of 2020, a lot of us ate comfort foods while stuck at home. The same principle was followed for entertainment. People watched their favorite movies and TV shows for the enjoyment of the familiar.
I did the same with one of my favorite anime series, K, or rather K’s final iteration—K: Seven Stories, a post-series set of six episodes that beautifully finishes the K universe.
K: Seven Stories is a send-off or coda that brings closure to the entire world of K in a way that respects each character and each clan in all their quirkiness. The characters that intrigued you the most while watching the two TV seasons and the movie K: Missing Kings are explored in greater depth. Knowing how the main story ends, the opportunity to see these characters in their full humanity adds poignancy to the viewing. Even Gojo Sukuna, the young brat in the Green Clan, gets a full episode where we see how he longed for a sense of family and found it in the Greens, the most oddball clan of them all.
The final episode of K: Seven Stories is wonderful. It presents a mysterious situation where characters you know are dead are somehow alive again, and everyone is enjoying themselves in a sort of timeless Groundhog Day world where each day is fun and there are no lasting consequences for anything you do.
Eventually, of course, everyone tires of it, and begins to seek answers and a way out. The final scene brings the curtain down on K as the mysterious observer who has briefly appeared in all six episodes reveals his/her identity as the one behind the timeloop. The universe of K ends with its most emotional episode, one that has the characters affirming life even with its painful losses as something beautiful to be treasured. I love K. It’s a seriously underrated anime series, one that I wish more anime fans would watch.
That being said — a weird thing happened recently with K’s producers, the Go Hands animation studio. Some Go Hands designers were found to have plagiarized character/costume designs from other sources for its upcoming Tokyo Babylon 2021 anime series based on CLAMP’s original Tokyo Babylon series from the 1990s.
This amazes me for two reasons. First, K had awesome character and costume designs, meaning that Go Hands is perfectly capable of doing great original designs themselves. In fact, one of the distinctive things about K was that director Shingo Suzuki was also credited as K’s character designer — which I imagine has to be the only time in anime when those two very different jobs were performed by the same person.
The second thing that makes this odd is that CLAMP has always been known for fantastic character and costume designs. Couldn’t they have asked CLAMP to do these new designs?
Go Hands is hardly the first case of plagiarism in anime and manga — it happens occasionally and it’s always unfortunate. Hopefully they will get beyond this, and we’ll all get to see Tokyo Babylon 2021 sooner rather than later.
Haikyuu returned this fall. I enjoyed this season, though I’ve lost track of which level of the tournament they’re at given the huge gaps of time between each season.
Haikyuu finally got hit by the curse that hits many anime series at some time or another: the badly animated episode. A few weeks before the season ended, there was one episode where the character faces looked a little off, and the comments ensued on Crunchyroll as you might expect.
Production I.G. is known for its quality animation, but many production companies farm out some of their animation work overseas to Korea or Vietnam. Not to blame the overseas contractors, because who knows where the fault lay this time, but it seems production deadlines affect even the best of shows.
So now, Haikyuu is over once again, and who knows when it will return for another season. There was a four-year hiatus before it resumed again this year. Let’s hope it’s not another four years before the next season.
Onyx Equinox is Crunchyroll’s first original series. The story is based on Mesoamerican mythology and represents a departure from the site’s main focus on Japanese anime.
I have a lot of thoughts about Onyx Equinox, so I’ll be doing a post on it in January.
One of the delights of anime is the short-episode series, like Yamishibai (returning in winter 2021!). It’s hard to resist a series with a good premise that gives you five-minute episodes. Who doesn’t have five minutes to watch anime?
With a Dog AND a Cat, Every Day Is Fun has even shorter episodes — about a minute and a half apiece. Astonishingly, not only is it very funny, but its more serious episodes actually have me tearing up.
It’s about a young woman and her overeager, happy-all-the-time dog, and her evil but somehow adorable cat. As one Crunchyroll commenter put it, after watching an episode about the young woman’s former dog who passed away, “GREAT, NOW I’M CRYING INTO MY FOOD.” That's a tribute to the power of anime, seriously. What other form of entertainment can do that to you in 90 seconds flat?
And finally — Attack on Titan is in its last season.
Attack on Titan is unlike any other series, defying easy categorization. It’s shonen, sure, but its alternate Earth setting and those amazing, horrifying titans put it into a category of its own. Not to mention how the show’s popularity basically saved the U.S. manga localization industry in the early 2010s, and by association, anime in the U.S. as well.
The fact that Attack on Titan is ending makes me a little nostalgic. It was around the time of Attack on Titan’s initial popularity that I began to feel out of step with anime in general. My posts on this blog were spotty from 2015 to around 2018, when I came back to anime with renewed enthusiasm.
This is the 11th year I’ve been writing this anime blog. I don’t know what the future holds for this blog or the editing work I do in this industry. Like many, I suspect, this covid year has led to some soul searching for me as to how I want to spend my time going forward.
But for now, there will be no big changes. I’ll continue to blog here on anime and manga as my work schedule permits. I still feel that anime is relevant in my life, and every year there are series that surprise me. Anime can still surprise me with its variety and artistry, so there’s life here yet. And thanks for continuing to read this blog – it is much appreciated. :-)
