Winter 2020 First Impressions – Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!, Pet, and Sorcerous Stabber Orphen.

Life’s been busy lately. In addition to the new anime season, I’ve been attempting to keep up with the Awesome Games Done Quick stream, which has become a wonderful Winter tradition that I look forward to every year. I’ve been a fan of video game speed runs for a long time, ever since discovering TAS (tool-assisted speed run) videos way back in the day. It’s difficult to strike a balance between watching the new anime I’m excited about and experiencing the video game speed run culture I’ve grown to enjoy; in the end, both things are fleeting. Yet, the thing about new anime is that people talk about it on the internet, and there are a lot of spoilers, so sometimes it’s better to spoiler-proof oneself than to worry too much about whether the blindfolded Punch-Out run will be successful.

Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: From the moment she saw some episodes of Future Boy Conan as a child, Midori knew that she wanted to tell her own stories through animation. Her sketchbooks are now filled with concept artwork and environmental layouts, inspired by the incomparably weird architecture of her high school. Midori’s friend Kanamori, ever the shrewd realist, doesn’t have much of an interest in anime, but she knows what a potential cash-cow looks like and gets the feeling that Midori’s aspirations may not be just a child’s fruitless and unrealistic goals.

The pieces begin to drop into place when Mizusaki, a classmate and part- time fashion model, reveals her love of anime (and her willingness to disobey her parents to work in the industry). With her character artwork and Midori’s background layouts, their collective creativity really has the potential to shine. Kanamori detects a potentially advantageous situation, and suggests that they ditch the school anime club entirely to form their own club focused around their goal of creating anime together.

Impressions: I’ve loved animation almost as far back as I can remember, but the point at which it dawned on me that the cartoons I loved so much were somehow the product of human hands was when I was watching old reruns of classic Warner Brothers cartoons and realized that some of them had some aesthetic similarities with How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Phantom Tollbooth. It was, of course, primarily the influence of the great Chuck Jones, whose contribution to the landscape of American animation is undeniable. While I’ve never been someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of animators and directors like some folks with a talent for it, just coming to the realization that hand-drawn, moving pictures were human-made and had consistencies among them is a revelation that I continue to carry with me into my anime fandom.

Nowadays I have a small stable of creative minds I follow, and while some, like Osamu Kobayashi, are considered more controversial (limited animation is art too, and I will fight to defend that opinion), there are others, like director Masaaki Yuasa, whose work is finally starting to get the widespread acclaim it deserves; a fact that I could only dream of when Mind Game was nothing but a weird, obscure fever dream of avant-garde animation. Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! is Yuasa’s most recent directorial foray, and if producer and long-time associate Eunyoung Choi is to be believed, part of the reason it exists as animation in the first place is because Yuasa did a search for his name on the internet and discovered that fans of the manga were throwing his name around as someone who would do a good job adapting the material. Whether that’s true or just a funny story, the fact is that Yuasa’s loose, atypical animator-influenced style really does seem like the perfect fit for a story that seems reliant on its visual inventiveness.

Unlike most anime, this episode’s beauty isn’t in how its characters look; the three girls (yes, even the model) are almost the polar opposite of any bishoujo or moé visual ideal. The girls are cartoonish, with sideways grins and rough voices. In essence, they are cartoonish as is fitting for the quirky reality in which they exist, and their limber, expressive bodies transition perfectly into the dreamy imaginary world that Midori and Mizusaki produce when their minds meet and start forming sparks. The world in which they live is as fantastic as a real-life environment can be, and its charm is that it’s so poorly-conceived from a city planning perspective that its bits and pieces awkwardly connect together and build on top of each-other almost like a competition. It’s rich and weird and wonderful.

As someone with a love of art and animation, as well as an unapologetic Yuasa fan, I was so, so looking forward to this. Part of me dreaded that the episode wouldn’t live up to my own astronomical expectations, even though I honestly didn’t know exactly what to expect. What I was presented with was somewhat less bombastic and silly, but more heartfelt and raw than I anticipated. Seeing young Midori’s eyes light up as she watched Conan was the simplest, most straightforward and powerful connection I could have made with this episode. With each new Yuasa anime, I suddenly transform into that little girl in the chair, eyes sparkling with wonder at the power of animation.

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Pros: Captures the feeling of becoming enthralled with animation. Visually-inventive. The character designs are quirky and have tons of personality.

Cons: I want to watch the rest of it right now!

Content Warnings: Mild slapstick humor.

Grade: A

Pet

Streaming: Amazon Prime

Episodes: 13

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: In the world there exist individuals whose heightened psychic senses allow them control over the minds of others. Hiroki and Tsukasa are two such individuals, although their boss and landlord Kenji doesn’t yet realize it. Kenji’s been involved in plenty of dubiously-legal “odd jobs” on the side at the behest of a shady guy named Katsuragi, but it isn’t until much too late that he comes to realize that Yokota, a good friend of his who allegedly ran off to Bali a few years prior, actually got more deeply involved in Katsuragi’s problematic dealings and has now met a horrible end.

Having seen too many things he shouldn’t have, Kenji cobbles together his own escape plans. It’s soon made abundantly evident that Katsuragi is more than a couple steps ahead of him. Suddenly (after a horrifying bout of hallucinations) Kenji is convinced that poor Yokota was actually a murderer, that Katsuragi is completely on the up-and-up, and that Hiroki and Tsukasa are two completely normal young guys who didn’t just manipulate Kenji’s memories before making their escape.

Impressions: This was yet another anime off of my lengthy list of most-anticipated Winter series, although realistically I knew in my heart that this one was unlikely to reach the same heights as Eizouken (because, I mean, what could?). While I’m always excited when older source material receives an anime adaptation, there are additional considerations in those cases – increasing social awareness means that certain jokes may fall completely flat, or changing tastes within the fandom might make the subject matter irrelevant. In this case, I feel like the particular sort of “edgy” atmosphere this series is attempting to project might date it somewhat.

That might be the case, but despite some issues with the tone of the show (I’ve heard the term “edgelord” thrown around pretty liberally online in relation to the first episode and… it’s not wrong), I found the first episode entertaining in spite of that. This episode begins by introducing Satoru, a child who exists in a catatonic state. The cause of his affliction is that he’s sensitive to the emotional projections of others, especially his mother – she’s suicidal over her inability to figure out Satoru’s mental illness, as well as frustration over her husband’s infidelity. Satoru meets a man who provides him the tools to handle the influx of different emotions; his mental “happy place” becomes a space called his “peak,” while the garbage dump where he slots all the mental off-gassing from others is called the “valley.” Later on, we see Satoru as an adult working alongside Hiroki and Tsukasa as “employees” of Katsuragi, so it will be interesting to see how that situation came about.

The second half of the episode is rife with some disturbing imagery that I found to be effective within the context of the story (though I’m not sure it’s the type of material I’d seek out specifically). As I mentioned in my preview post, one disturbing thing about human memory is that it’s more malleable than we would like to think. In this episode it’s Kenji’s memory that needs alteration, so the characters produce some visual contradictions and impossibilities to break his brain down before supplanting his memories with something more agreeable. While on a surface level what we see isn’t all that scary (unless you’re creeped-out by eyeballs or smoldering cigarettes), what happens to Kenji is disturbing on a visceral level. At this point, our “protagonists” are acting in an ethically antagonistic way, which if explored correctly could at least prompt some interesting discussion about the ethics of the power that they wield.

The visual elements of this episode honestly aren’t that great. The character designs aren’t particularly appealing – this isn’t a “make-or-break” aspect of any series for me, but I do admittedly enjoy attractive character designs in anime, and most of these seem purposely ugly and gritty (especially the “bad” characters, which is a pet peeve of mine). Most of the colors are muddy and brown, and the character animation isn’t consistent. Based on some of the key art I’d hoped this show would be more visually-creative, and perhaps it’ll get there as the characters delve more deeply into the memories of other people, but it’s certainly not there yet.

This series doesn’t seem like it’ll be what I’d call “good,” but I definitely found the first episode to be entertaining as a dumbed-down psychological thriller. The ideas it plays around with aren’t fresh by any means, but they make for a solid introduction into this mental playground for really bad dudes.

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Pros: The first episode is entertaining in a low-brow kind of way. The muddy ethics of the main characters could make for some interesting stories.

Cons: The overall tone is very Edgy™. The visual quality is on the low end.

Content Warnings: Suicidal ideation (including visual hallucinations/invasive thoughts). Psychological violence.

Grade: C+

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 13, plus 1 unaired episode

Source: Light Novel (also a re-make of a prior anime adaptation)

Episode Summary: Several years ago, Orphen could only stand by in horror as his sister Azalie transformed into a terrifying dragon. After the incident, he left his training as a sorcerer and broke out on his own to try to attempt to save her and help her become human. In the ensuing years, however, he’s become lazy and jobless, dealing as he sees fit with minor con artists and criminals about town.

One day, two dwarves who owe him money invite him in on a scheme to get paid, and Orphen tags along only to find that it’s a marriage scam and he’s the prospective groom. The second daughter of the rich family they’re targeting has some interesting information regarding a visit from a sorcerer that occurred recently, and coincidentally it isn’t long until Orphen hears Azalie in dragon form roaring through the skies outside the mansion. It’s unclear whether she recognizes her own brother, as she seems more interested in taking the sword stowed away in the family’s storage shed. The other sorcerers who’ve been chasing after the dragon are, needless to say, surprised to see Orphen, their missing comrade.

Impressions: Orphen was one of those anime series that I heard about frequently around the time my anime fandom kicked into high gear in the late 90’s/early 00’s, but despite that I don’t think I ever actually had the opportunity to watch (or read) any of it at that time. Needless to say I don’t feel the sort of nostalgia toward the original that other fans my age might have. That’s in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing; being attached to an earlier interpretation of something can make it more difficult to judge a later one on its own merits. At the very least, though, in watching this episode I definitely feel like I’ve been transported back to the late 1990’s and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

This first episode absolutely reads just like a fantasy anime from that time period. While the establishing events of the story are fairly serious, with terrifying creatures and magical betrayals at play, after the prologue the episode settles into some kooky hijinks and slapstick comedy. While I’m not morally opposed to “laffs and yukks” in my anime, one thing that’s often bothered me about Japanese animation in general is its tendency to muddy its emotional tone by dropping overly-comedic gags into serious stories. It’s a balance that can work (I was just chatting with a friend earlier about how odd it was for Crunchyroll to nominate Sarazanmai as a comedy, when I’d describe it more as a character drama with Ikuhara’s specialized brand of humor included as usual) but which more often than not can spoil the emotion of a more solemn storyline. It’s difficult to believe that Orphen’s sister’s situation has traumatized him (as it seems to have in the episode’s opening scene) when he spends much of his time and energy acting like a complete goofball and roughhousing with a couple of annoying kids for two-thirds of the remainder of the episode.

The setting of the series, on the other hand, is sort of charmingly anachronistic. It reads as any typical fantasy setting, with European-style locales and historical architecture (a place many modern light novels might literally describe as “a typical fantasy setting”), but a lot of the characters wear modern-looking clothing and for some reason my mind was amusingly conflicted over this. Obviously a fantasy setting can look however the author wants it to look, but “swords and sorcery” almost always feels like something lost to an ancient past rather than the sort of human activity which might continue on into the modern day.

I don’t exactly know how popular the previous anime version of this story was; it might be that it was just one of only a few series around and available at the time which is why I had some awareness of it. It would be difficult to say whether those who were fans of the original might enjoy this updated version of it. As for myself, I enjoyed this brief dalliance with the ghosts of anime past, but there’s nothing about the episode that makes me feel as though I’d be missing out on anything very exciting beyond that taste of nostalgia.

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Pros: It seems like a nice, straightforward fantasy series in an era when that’s rarely the case. Gives off some fun, nostalgic vibes.

Cons: I’m not sure anyone was begging for a remake.

Content Warnings: Body horror (transformation into a monster). Some physical violence.

Grade: C