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This Week in Anime
On The First Day of Anime Christmas...

by Steve Jones & Nicholas Dupree,

Nick and Steve secretly decide what anime the other will watch from their backlogs. These stocking stuffers include classic (and infamous) anime series like BECK, Guilty Crown, Key the Metal Idol, and more.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.

And Yet the Town Moves and Majestic Prince are streaming on HIDIVE, Mongolian Chop Squad (BECK) and Guilty Crown are streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation, and Key the Metal Idol and Noein - to your other self are streaming on Crunchyroll only.


@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @NickyEnchilada @vestenet


Steve
Nick, it is nearly December 25th, and you know what that means:

That's right, Hillbilly Chicken Danger So Good.
Nick
'Tis the season of giving! 'Tis also the season of anime, but that's every season. Nevertheless, we decided to play a fun bit of Anime Secret Santa here at TWIA. Specifically, we elected to force each other to start some of our ever-growing backlogs, and I think Steve can attest that I only left him one lump of coal in his stocking this year.
The magnitude of that lump, however, can certainly be debated. But that is also what the season is about. People, like anime, contain multitudes. Within each of us is a Santa, jolly and round and raring to shower our loved ones with gifts galore. And within each of us is also a Grinch, ready to immolate Whoville at a moment's notice.
I consider myself more of a Krampus, meting out punishment for all your many, many anime sins.
Truly, though, the chance to chip away at our respective backlogs is the gift that keeps on giving. Back in ye olden days, the anime blogosphere did a similar take on Secret Santa, which is how I ended up watching all of Simoun. That remains one of my favorite series! This time, for the sake of variety, we each sampled three shows plucked from our lists with care. And Nick, I'll let you do the honors of starting with one of my precious presents to you. I can't wait to hear your thoughts and/or jokes at their expense.
I knew why you picked And Yet the Town Moves just from one of the first shots of the OP:
This anime was maid for me.
Pictured: You about five seconds after making that joke in front of anyone but me.
I only just checked this one out myself. I did so as part of my research on Masakazu Ishiguro while reviewing Heavenly Delusion earlier this year. The series, an offbeat maid cafe comedy animated by Shaft, was just icing on the cake.
Trust me, the SHAFT part became evident just as quickly as the maid service. They had exactly one way to direct a show for like 15 years, and this show was smack dab in the middle of that.
Look, at least they're using their powers here for good—I mean, evil. Abject evil.
I wonder if I will end up on Santa's naughty list for watching this, but I'm certainly ending up on a list.

I appreciate the artistry. One of the funny quirks of the 2000s SHAFT style is that they certainly let their most talented fetishists work to their strengths. A lot of people on staff have an appreciation for the whole maid aesthetic, and they go for it full throttle. It's a shame nobody skateboarded in the first three episodes.
I'm a sucker for classic Shaft's idiosyncrasies too. Their rhythm works with the physical comedy, and Ishiguro's absurdist tendencies additionally feel like a good fit for their style. It's highbrow smooshed together with lowbrow. Van Gogh juxtaposed with garters.

And hey, no skateboards, but yes, guitars.
I'll admit, my biggest temptation to watch past episode three was to see more of Futaba. A short-haired maid in a choker playing bass is, in fact, a pretty good Christmas present.

I did find myself gelling with the humor as it went on, but I'm also familiar enough with this style that I couldn't shake the feeling of watching Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei but with a more subdued style and more frilly aprons.
I wanted to throw a comedy in your sack, and this was one I had recently confirmed to possess merit. And if you came away from it fancying Futaba, then I'll consider that a mission accomplished.
If the goal was to get each other to crush on an anime girl with a guitar, I think I knocked it out of the park with your gift.
In keeping with the music theme, I've been dealing with the shame of having not yet watched BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad for far too long, so thank you for exorcising that. And wow, is there a lot to love. Including the titular Beck and his mighty chompers.
BECK is hands-down an all-timer for me. It was one of the earliest shows I checked out for myself when I first got into anime in high school, which is also the perfect time in one's life to watch it.
Even within my small three-episode sample size, there is so much that this show just gets. That consistent baseline of teenage ennui is one of them. Another is the gritty, grungy, tactile sensation of rock music and its venues. There's no varnish. Nearly every environment in BECK feels like a real place, and most of them feel appropriately sticky.

It's so good. Osamu Kobayashi had this incredible ability to capture the impression and atmosphere of any physical space, especially the backrooms and basements of small music venues. Even though BECK takes place in a different country and a different music scene from what I grew up with, the vibes of it all are perfect and universal.
It feels authentically counter-culture in a way that almost no other anime achieves. I've loved Kobayashi's contributions to other shows I've seen, but you can tell that this is his baby with all the love poured into it. And all the f-bombs.
Also, god damn, do I love the music. There's a lot of music-themed anime out there, but nothing has ever captured the sound and energy of the stuff that got me into music quite like this. I don't know how many songs you got to hear in just three episodes, but everything from the soundtrack kicks ass.
It's great so far! Nice and loud and fuzzy. I especially loved the live show with the technical problems, which had some of the band vamping while the guitarists figured out which of their cords were malfunctioning. The episode did a great job highlighting the situation's inherent awkwardness reflected in the audience and the know-how/professionalism of both the band members and the sound engineer. Live music involves all these interlocking facets, and you hardly ever see them, even in anime that focuses on music.
I imagine you also watched the sub initially, so I highly suggest you at least check out the dub version of the songs. Justin Cook's Yusuke Urameshi voice was made for rap rock.
I certainly will. Though I respect how bilingual the Japanese dub is. It's accurate, too, considering how half of the English dialogue is swear words. It's like they were basing it on my conversational style.

The shirts in this are so good, too.
I was pretty sure you'd like it, but I was curious how it would land now for an (ostensible) adult. I know a sizable part of my attachment to this series is catching it at the exact right moment in time, like all the '90s kids who discovered Radiohead.
I also love [looks at smudged writing on hand] Radioheat and their seminal art rock masterpiece [squints] From A.

But really, this spoke to me. I could relate a lot to Koyuki and how he initially feels left out of his friends' conversations about these cool rock bands. I was similarly out of the music loop in high school, but that desire to connect to people I liked helped spur me to branch out into different groups, genres, and overall music history. That was a huge part of my personal development, so I love seeing that reflected here ostentatiously .
That rules and I'm really glad you ended up enjoying it. So much of that story and soundscape has stuck with me since I first encountered them. The duet version of "Full Moon Sways" plays in my head during any romantic scene in anything I watch or read and probably will for the rest of my life.
Definitely a great present. But not the only music-themed anime covered in this Christmas experiment. Because for some people, music is the lifeline through which we communicate with the handful of people we care the most about. For others, it's the best way to amass 30,000 friends. Give or take.
In the industry, we call that "300 Komis", but Key is understandably new to how things work, what with being a robot and all.
To be fair, Key also predates Komi by two to three decades.
Considering the kind of people she meets on her journey to friendship, she's lucky it's not 300 Yamadas.

Remind me to make somebody watch B-Gata H-Kei next Christmas so they can get that joke, by the way.
Meanwhile, this was an easy one for me to recommend because I would recommend it to anybody and everybody. It's the quintessential mid-'90s anime OVA, with all the baggage that distinction carries, yet you don't see anyone discussing it these days. If it falls on me to fix that, so be it.
While there's a style to Key the Metal Idol, these intro episodes left me wanting in a way that was hard to pin down. While far from the worst of my three assignments, it was the one where I felt the least sure of whether I wanted to keep going with it.
It's an imperfect series. I can't and won't deny that. It writes a pretty huge check for itself that it ultimately can't cash to completion. The final two episodes are also notoriously long, muddled, and unsatisfactory. But Key the Metal Idol has such a vibe and is a product of its time. I consider it the perfect stepping stone to Evangelion with its 1994 debut and combination of robot conspiracy with psychological elements.
I certainly got a buzz from just how goddamn '90s the whole experience is. Gawdy neon lighting, chunky computers that look like bricks filled with weird tubes. The psychic violence of imagining what eating at a place called PIZZA SHOCK would do to my intestines.
It's also one of the shows I brought up in my (I hope) infamous "Twin Peaks Is Anime" Sakura-con panel. The timing is right; aesthetically, it has some Lynchian energy.
There's an odd atmosphere to it that isn't wholly congruous with the sleazy '90s OVA aesthetic. Several silent, lightning-fast montages are never explained in the episodes I've seen but built a sense of horror and mystery separate from the story. Key herself gives off an extremely surreal vibe. It's not even entirely clear if she is a robot or something else entirely is up.
Yeah, that's low-key/low-Key, one of the best parts! Is she a robot, or is she just a weird girl? One of anime's perennial questions!
It's also got a pretty interesting intersection, crossing the streams of "gritty sci-fi thriller" and "grimy backstage entertainment drama" in a way that hasn't fully congealed but has potential. It's funny to think this was coming out right alongside Macross Plus and treading very similar ground completely differently.
Yeah, while not grungy in the same sense that BECK is, it confronts the seedy side of the idol industry head-on. The fact that anime creators wrestled with that 30 years ago also provides a valuable data point. But on the opposite, positive musical side, it has one of my favorite OPs ever.
Hopefully, that song wasn't produced by a hyper-controlling tech mogul who wants to create an army of robot slaves AND robot singers to do his vague bidding.
Fun fact: every record company executive is trying to do that exact thing right now. This is what your Spotify subscription is funding. Don't say anime didn't warn you.
For real though, the music in this is pretty slick. Miho's concert is probably the strongest sequence of these three episodes, where it felt like I could see the vision behind this weird, convoluted genre mashup.
Again, Key is strange and flawed, but I wish we had a more contemporary series with that kind of ambition. And that kind of commitment to fake pizza brands.
That's a dangerous path to go down, Steve. Getting caught up in the past and trying to change the future to match it is precisely the kind of bad impulse I made you watch your second present to prevent!
I don't know much about parallel dimensions and giant ouroboroses, but I do know this: there's No E In "team." Wait. Shit. Goddammit.
So this one was a gamble. I like Noein - to your other self, but I also acknowledge that it's a finicky story that takes a good while to get going. Even when I first watched it, it was mostly because I was on an Escaflowne kick and wanted to see everything Kazuki Akane ever made.
You underestimated my inherent infatuation with intentionally confusing, prickly, and abstract anime series that ground themselves in the psychological trauma and realities of their main characters because I enjoyed the heck out of Noein's first three episodes.
I never said it was a risky gamble.
Fair enough. But I can't exaggerate how much I jived with Noein's wavelength. I can't cover it all in a survey, but the loose and expressive character designs and animation direction immediately pop. There are too many good shapes to highlight in a single post.

It rules so hard. It plays so loose and fast with its art style, making for great (if aged) digital animation while keeping the characters expressive and distinct. They also let individual directors and artists cut loose, with the same scene looking different between episodes.
There's a perfect exhibition between the first and second episodes, where the climactic confrontation is reanimated with enough variation for even an amateur anime connoisseur to notice. Most series would lean towards a unified style, but I love the confidence Noein places in its animators.

It's no surprise a lot of the same staff would go on to make Birdy the Mighty: Decode, an equally audacious animation project. But Noein sticks with me more just for how wildly it swerves and how hard it pushes all that visual ambition into its original story.
It's also cool to see some of writer/director Akane's pet themes surface here. Stars Align had some pretty rancid parents, but Yu's mom is already showing a lot of promise.
Now, I'm not saying the second half of Stars Align would have featured some of the coolest sci-fi action sequences ever put to screen, but Noein certainly sets a good precedent.
While I didn't grab any gifs, these jpg files still show how much character and kinetic energy is in these scenes.


Three episodes in, the story holds a lot of cards close to its chest, so I can't comment too much on how the narrative might unfold, but the presentation is a standout.
Honestly, it holds onto those cards for over half its runtime, but at the very least, that presentation never slows down. It's such a wild, unique production that sadly got lost in the tumult of the U.S. anime industry at the time. Like with Key, I'm glad to have an excuse to go to bat for it.
It seems like the space afforded to abstract, anime-original, creator-driven projects like Noein and Key shrinks with each passing year. The big announcement this weekend was a new One Piece adaptation. While we already have an ongoing One Piece anime. Think about how many man-hours will be devoted to reanimating a wildly successful manga that already has a well-regarded animated adaptation. Is there anyone left who would foot the bill for another Noein? I have no idea, but the prospects seem grim.
If nothing else, we can at least appreciate the shows like these that we do have. This means it sure would be a bummer if, after talking about some interesting, ambitious, and distinctive projects, our last gifts to each other were total duds.
What are you talking about? I made certain that all my gifts to you were nothing short of majestic.

I'll give Majestic Prince this much: for as bad as its character designs are, they're still miles above the molten-rock bottom of the new Gundam Seed ones.
Absolutely nobody is doing it like Hisashi Hirai. And thank god for that.
The man is my enemy, and I recall his designs being a big reason this show didn't take off when it started airing. No matter how interesting the rest of it may or may not have been, there was no getting around the fact that everyone had a permanent droopy dog pout and noses made of melted candle wax. I thank god he hadn't discovered giving all the women lip fillers back in 2013.
I have yet to watch it myself, mainly for that reason. I only know it by reputation and its temporal association with all the other questionable mecha series to air in the early 2010s. So naturally, it seemed like a perfect fit for Christmas.
Honestly, the rest of the show is fine. The setting is fairly interesting, and the gimmick of the main characters' mechs linked to their Fight or Flight reflexes is cool. Outside of the human designs, the biggest flaw is that the characters aren't exciting. They've got pretty one-note personalities that, as of episode three, have yet to develop or charm much at all. Funny enough, the robots have the most appeal and personality.
Oh, yeah! Wow! Those kick ass. Even the one that looks like it's dressed in a candy bar wrapper.
To be fair, they needed the sponsors to fund their robot repairs. More importantly, this is a super early effort from Studio Orange, who partnered with Doga Kobo for the show and handled all of the CG animation. And even ten years ago, you can see them flexing on everyone else working in TV anime at the time. The robots move with a liveliness and heft that gives them a lot of character, and the fights capture the speed and dizziness of zero-g fights like some of the best 2D robot shows.

As somebody who remembers what most other CG mech looked like back then, it's wild this didn't catch more attention at the time.
Hah, I forgot that this is their first major credit. So, you're saying everyone who enjoyed Trigun Stampede must watch Majestic Prince, right?
Only if they have a thing for mechanics, big tiddies, and flesh flaps where her nostrils should be.

Otherwise, I want to see what today's Studio Orange could do if they animated a Macross Valkyrie Fighter. Which probably tells you how memorable the rest of MJP was for me.
I should've known you'd find yet another way to shoehorn Macross into this column.
Every time until Lynzee lets us do a whole column on it.
Heavy lies the Macross crown you must wear. And speaking of crowns, here's a girl interfacing with hologram via her buttcheeks.
This is only making my theory that DARLING in the FRANXX is the Guilty Crown of the 2020s stronger.
The guiltiest crown of all was my own, because everyone I knew had already seen it and bemoaned its existence, yet there I was, blissfully ignorant of its intricacies. So, thank you for correcting that.
Watching—nay, experiencing Guilty Crown is a rite of passage for a certain generation of anime fans. It was a huge, original project from some of the biggest names in the industry, many of whom went on after it to make even bigger hits. And somewhere across its runtime, it managed to crap its pants so hard and loudly that the echoes of its muddy butt cheeks could be heard years later.
I'm assuming that the first three episodes are just the tip of the iceberg that is Guilty Crown because most of what I saw was more inept than actively insulting. But I did toss a knowing smile at these early glimpses of both fervent nationalism and social Darwinism. Surely, combining these philosophies can only portend careful, thoughtful developments later.

Yeah, that's the rub of this experiment. Guilty Crown is a grower, not a shower. It takes until about midway for the full weight of its awful ideas to bear fruit. But if nothing else, it makes it nakedly obvious how tied up in bizarre ideas of masculinity it is with its main character.
Now that you've said that, it is extremely funny because Shu manages to be both barely a character and a pathetic loser in everything that I've seen so far.

This also makes the presence of his hot, circumstantial girlfriend/servant even funnier.
Ah yes, Shu's girl-shaped sword holster. Like everything else, she becomes way dumber and funnier as the show goes on, but, amazingly, this show had the misguided gall to make Straight Utena.
Even funnier, considering Ichiro Okouchi helped pen this. He's not the main scenario writer, so I can't say if the Utena allusions are his fault, but he certainly applied them a lot better and more appropriately in The Witch from Mercury.
I will say for as bad as most of everything in this show is, I hope you at least appreciate the OP. Because that thing still slaps.
I wouldn't dare besmirch the good name of certified banger factory ryo/supercell. And to Guilty Crown's additional credit, it's got Tetsuro Araki directing and Hiroyuki Sawano composing, so at least I know it can commit to its insanity when it gets there.
My biggest regret is that you didn't get to the episode where Shu sees his not-girlfriend walk out of another guy's bedroom, and we see his entire psyche shatter like a Faberge egg.
Don't worry, I'll get there. I already had a great time regarding the friend he formed a Dr. Pepper pact with, instantly betraying him 90 seconds later. Zero time to soak in any emotions besides utter misanthropy. I love it.
It's a particular brand of sociopathy at play. We are meant at once to find Friendy McTraitor's betrayal insulting, but we also see Shu as a naive pawn for believing that anybody would be trustworthy or sincere about anything. Would you be surprised if I told you that eventually leads to a lot of morals where authoritarianism is the solution?
Considering the show came out in 2011, maybe Guilty Crown's greatest sin was airing too early for us to properly heed its warning about the allure that fascism would have for maladjusted young men. Or maybe it's just a crock of right-wing power fantasies dressed up in form-fitting ass fabrics. Either way, I was happy to see this lump of coal in my stocking.
Well, I'm glad you... "enjoyed" is probably a strong word. I'm glad you got something out of it, I suppose. It feels like I gave you a graphing calculator for Christmas, though.
Honestly, my TI-83 Plus and I had some great times together, so that wouldn't be the worst present. I had Tetris and Mario on that bad boy.
Well then, here's hoping somebody license rescues Earth Maiden Arjuna by next year so we can do this again.
We have to keep up the tradition now. Who would want to experience Christmas without an anime grab bag of questionable quality? Not me. But in the meantime, we at "This Week In Anime" wish all of you a happy holidays, peace on Earth Maiden Arjuna, and goodwill toward manga.

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