Winter Anime 2018 Part 3: Shiptoasting
Now that I have your attention, can I interest you in some dank memes?
See also:
Citrus
So there’s this gal whose mother remarries, so she has to change to an ultraconservative school where she gets hassled by the ultraconservative student council president, who by the way is also her brand new stepsister, very horny and also sexually indiscriminate (i.e. gay but not above kissing guys so that drama can happen). Yep, Citrus is not only aware of the true nature of conservatism but also extremely contrived, melodramatic schlock. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that already because the manga is infamous. So the surprise here isn’t that Citrus is a mess, but that it’s fairly entertaining to watch nonetheless; unlike the edgy nonsense that was NTR Trap, it’s at least a story of sorts and Yuzu is a fun character. The director has some experience with making schlock work far better than it should (he directed Rokka no Yuusha) and tries his hand at some droll Ikuhara-lite visuals here. It also features the first boob joke that I laughed at in ages. The concern here isn’t whether it will crash in a fireball of silly drama, because it certainly will - it’s whether that fireball will end up being sufficiently impressive. Citrus seems well made enough to be a fun time if you don’t expect it to ever be, you know, actually good.
🅱️op Team Epic
Probably already all up in your Twitter timeline, here’s the Pop Team Epic animeme, a show whose main purpose is to make ANN reviewers give out expression_of_disbelief/5 in their previews. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. Apart from defying your normie notions of ratings, you square, I’m not sure though if Pop Team Epic is worth the time spent watching it. For starters it’s not funny (YES I KNOW HEAR ME OUT), neither in the traditional way nor in the absurd way the source 4koma is. In fact, the most entertaining stretches of the anime are a few straight adaptations of bkub strips. But that’s rare and the rest of it is less coherent than that. For the most part, it’s a frenetic mess of ideas that are worth a chuckle on a concept level but not fun to watch. The best example of this is this episode’s Big Idea: Yo bro, what if we padded out the runtime to 24 minutes by showing the same 12 minutes twice, just with different voice actors? Yes, that’s a funny idea and it’s ballsy that they did it, but at the end of the day I’m still watching the same shit twice. And you sure told everyone who correctly thought that Pop Team Epic should have been a short. Not to mention that reckless pacing aside, a lot of the supposed anti-humor here is decidedly standard: a fakeout beginning featuring a “generic” anime. References to things you know. Making fun of how hard a Pop Team Epic anime would be to make. That’s not punk rock true kuso anime or the shitposter’s Helvetica Standard, that’s just Osomatsu-san for the non-fujo set. Of course the show is inherently criticism-proof, because maybe they’re just making references because references are the laziest form of humor, huh? Overall I’m not convinced but I’ll watch the second episode anyway, just to see if they do the runtime padding thing again. That would elevate it from fizzled formalist idea to outright scam, and that’s a thing I would laugh at.
Sanrio Danshi
Did you know that it’s perfectly cool for handsome boys to really be into Sanrio merch? If not, Sanrio Danshi is here to convince you. It’s a blatant infomercial and I have to say that for one of those it’s not all that bad, mostly because it takes the subject remarkably seriously. I expected something like a Sanrio franchise gijinka show here, but instead it’s all about those nostalgic Sanrio feels, like how you bonded with your granny over a cute dog mascot and then she died before you could tell her how much that meant to you since you also foolishly strayed from the way of the Sanrio because your asshole friends called you a girl for it. It’s surprisingly heartfelt, the issue is just whether you think the crassly commercial nature of it ruins it right away (it does). The end of it is pretty incredible too, since it metaphorically depicts a boy’s Sanrio Awakening, with sparkles and everything. You what? It’s not something I’d watch, but I’ll give any show credit for at least engaging me for the duration of the first episode, whatever the reason may be.
Slow Start
Ha ha ha yes we do like making fun of the name of shows in here, well done. Maybe next time choose to not have a slow middle and slow ending as well, though, ha ha. Ha. Slow Start is exactly the type of show that gives moe anime a bad name: A parade of unthreatening cute girls that isn’t chill enough to be iyashikei nor funny enough to be a comedy, so it gets the euphemistically named genre of “slice of life” even though the actual genre is “nothing”. Dreadfully boring even by the standard of bland Kiraralikes (some of which I like, so shut up), and most of the first episode is spent on characters talking about which end they eat their own name from. There’s a gimmick here but it’s so flimsy and forgettable I won’t even mention it. More worth mentioning is the production effort, since the animators at A-1 were so bored that they excessively animated everything. Not that it makes the show much better, but there’s a lot more movement on screen than you’d expect, so maybe A-1 is just angling for the contracts Doga Kobo used to get. Oh yeah, and Maidragon’s Kanna is in it, half of the character design and VA included. So if you’re desperate for more of that Ren-chon knockoff on heroin, there you go: Imagine some insipid family message, get your yuri goggles on, tune your monitor color to orange and yes, Slow Start can be your anime of the year.
