Digest: Kill la Kill, Flying Witch, and Anne Happy

Kill la Kill's Over the Top Cheese Takes me Back to G Gundam

There's a certain strain of straight-faced, over the top cheese that I just love. It's pretty hard to pull it off, but when well done, it is sublime.

The first time I knew this about myself was in my early teens. I was familiar with Gundam. I'd seen Gundam Wing, and I think also a few of the UC shows, 8th MS Team and 0080 maybe, and possibly bits of the original Mobile Suit Gundam. I was no Gundam superfan, though. In fact, I was consistently underwhelmed by the Gundam shows, with their slow-paced action and long, murky digressions into politics and philosophy. That's why, when Toonami announced a new Gundam show called G Gundam, I didn't bother to tune in for the premiere. I had no intention to watch it, but in those days I spent about six hours a day watching TV, so I ended up seeing it.

I loved G Gundam.

G Gundam eschewed the bland political intrigues and staid battles of the UC Gundam shows. It was simple, direct, flamboyant, absurd. It takes place on a future Earth where most people have moved into space on colonies, as in the original Gundam. Unlike the UC timeline, the colonies have all retained national and ethnic identities from their days on Earth. The colonies/nations take turns ruling over, as the show superlatively puts it, "the universe" by holding a contest called "The Gundam Fight" every so often. Each nation builds a Gundam and finds a pilot from among its people to take the thing into battle against the other nations, with the winning Gundam's nation becoming ruler of the universe for the next while. All the nations build their Gundams to be as representative of their national stereotypes as possible, from Neo-Egypt's Pyramid Gundam, piloted by a mummy, to Neo-France's Gundam Rose, which wears a dueling cape and has a giant metal rose and is piloted by an aristocratic duelist. Italy's pilot is, of course, a Mafia boss; China's is, of course, a kung fu master; Germany's is, for some reason, a ninja whose mask is patterned after the colors of the German flag. The pilot of Neo-America's Maxter Gundam, which wears a football helmet and boxing gloves, is Chibodee Crocket, a rich and famous playboy with a rags-to-riches story. The Gundams in G Gundam aren't controlled by joysticks and buttons; the pilots are housed inside large rooms in the Gundams' bellies, wearing motion capture suits that make the Gundams mimic their movements. So everyone in G Gundam is a fighter both in and outside of a mecha. At first they're just regular martial artists, duelists, and soldiers, but as the show goes on they start to achieve Dragon Ball Z-like powers both outside and inside of a Gundam.

G Gundam is that sublimely straight-faced, over the top cheese. The hero, Domon Kasshu, always makes a giant speech before he finishes off an enemy. Then he says, "This hand of mine glows with an awesome power! It tells me to defeat you!" And defeat them he does, using his ultimate attack, the Shining Finger. 

The Soul Taker, a show that (rightfully so) no one has ever heard of, also had a bit of that over the top cheese that I love. In Western cinema, Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds both have it. I thought it was gone from anime until roughly 11:00 PM yesterday, when I realized that the show I was watching, Kill la Kill, was in fact the successor of G Gundam's over the top cheese.

Kill la Kill doesn't have as many awesome speeches as G Gundam. I doubt I'm going to remember any of its dialogue ten years from now the way I remember the speeches from G Gundam. (Well, maybe Naked Mohawk Guy's "Let me give you two pieces of information".) But it definitely has the same deadpan dedication to presenting its absurd, flamboyant, hyperbolic setting and characters. Kill la Kill trades the sleek, shiny look and gentle character-based humor of most 2013 anime for a retro look with lots of shortcuts and repeated animation, and lots of spastic, hyperactive humor and visual gags. In pretty much every way, it feels like something out of the 90s. In 2016 we've started to get lots of anime that are 90s in a bad way, or an indifferent way, but Kill la Kill is 90s in the best way possible. The studio responsible for the show, Trigger, was founded by Gainax alumni, so this makes sense; Gainax was a giant in the 90s, and some of my favorite shows ever (e.g. Eva, FLCL, and fine yeah I'll admit it Mahoromatic even with that ending) came from late 90s / early 2000s-era Gainax. 

Kill la Kill takes place in a weird dystopian alternate Japan where the Student Council is so powerful that the entire country is ruled by various Student Councils and the giant corporate cartels whose owners are the parents of the Student Council members. In Honnouji Academy, where the main action takes place, Satsuki Kiryuin rules over all with her minions, the Elite Four. The students are ranked according to various criteria, including grades and stature within the school. Apparently the economy is also controlled by the conglomerates, because a student's rank determines where their family lives, with "no-stars" living in the slums. Higher ranked students also get Goku uniforms, uniforms containing magical Life Fibers that give them special powers. The main character, Ryuuko Matoi, comes to the academy after her estranged father is killed to find out the truth. She ends up with a Kamui, a uniform made from 100% Life Fibers, called Senketsu, as well as one half of a giant pair of scissors, which she can use as a sword to cut through her enemies' Goku uniforms. 

Yes, the entire show is about clothing-based special powers, and it's so weird that one paragraph can't even scratch the surface. The haves at Honnouji seem to all be members of various clubs, so their Goku uniforms usually give them powers related to their club. Nonon Jakuzure, one of the Elite Four, is leader of the Band Club, and her Goku uniform lets her transform into a jet with gigantic speakers on it that can fly around and shoot beams of concentrated sound and recorder-shaped missiles. Uzu Sanageyama, another member of the Elite Four, is from the kendo club, and his uniform lets him turn into a giant robot suit that resembles kendo armor. Then there are the anti-clothing rebels, the underground paramilitary group Nudist Beach, who all run around pretty much naked except for a giant utility belt that just barely covers the nether regions. One of their members wears crossed bandoliers full of thread bobbins, and carries a submachine gun shaped like a sewing machine that shoots out sewing needles. Their insignia is a big red X over a pair of underwear. 

Unlike G Gundam, which was very PG, Kill la Kill is full of nudity and sexual innuendo, another trademark of Gainax at the height of its glory. Ryuuko's kamui (and also that of her rival, Satsuki) goes into battle mode and becomes an absurd skimpy bikini-like garment. At least some people interpreted this, and Ryuuko's transition from embarrassment to acceptance of it, as some kind of metaphor about female adolescence and patriarchy. I don't know if the creators intended that, but I can see how someone could read it that way; like FLCL, Kill la Kill is bizarre enough to be interpreted in different ways. Doesn't matter to me; no matter how you interpret it, it's hammy dialogue covered with over the top cheese with a side of fanservice and a sprinkling of lolis (Jakuzure and the main villain, Nui Harime), and I enjoy that, even if I had a hard time getting into it because I couldn't see where they were going right away.

Flying Witch is Kiki's Undine Service

I hardly ever watch new shows. I hate having to wait a week in between episodes, especially when there's so much completely published stuff that I've never watched or never finished. But I read ANN's preview guide review of Flying Witch, and I had to check it out. ANN's reviewers are usually pretty hard on slice of life and iyashikei. I guess I know why; when your job is getting paid to watch anime, you're already living a sweet life covered in flaky crust, with no need to try a slice of someone else's; and rather than healing, you need some trauma to help keep in perspective that you get paid to watch anime. But even they said good things about Flying Witch.

Makoto, the show's heroine, is older and a bit ditzier than Kiki, but her situation is similar: as a witch, she's supposed to go out at 15 and start living on her own, using her witching powers to get by in life. But her parents wanted her to finish high school since the witching industry is in a downward trend, so they tried to have it both ways: they made her leave the house, but they made her go stay with her second cousins, Kei and Chinatsu, and finish high school.

The show follows Makoto, Kei, and Chinatsu's daily life and encounters with weird magical things. The magic in the show is treated in a very mundane way. In Episode 2, a strange looking being called the Harbinger of Spring arrives at the house to say hello to Makoto. Chinatsu, rather than recognizing him as a magical being, treats him like a creepy stranger and tries to lock him out of the house. There's also a hilarious scene involving a mandrake (yes, like in Harry Potter) at the end of Episode 1, and some cute hijinks with crows in Episode 3. The show maintains a good balance between magic and slice of life by giving the magical scenes the same mundane slice of life tone as the scenes involving planting a garden or going to a festival.

So far I like the show, but it hasn't wowed me yet. I'm going to stick with it, though. It took me a long time before I appreciated Aria. That's just the price of admission for a show like this; you often don't see the beauty until you come back to it. I have to admit that the forested mountains of Aomori where the show takes place, while quite beautiful, don't quite match the canals and Renaissance architecture of Neo Venezia. But Flying Witch is a charming show, and I'm glad to see it in a year when 90s-era middle of the road action comedy seems to be coming back into style.

Anne Happy Pulls a Bait and Switch

At the same time I read ANN's positive review of Flying Witch, I also read a negative review of Anne Happy. The reviewers complimented the show on an original concept, but complained that it was shaping up as another fairly mediocre cute girls doing cute things show. Given my total weakness for cute girls doing cute things, I had to check it out.

Sadly, Anne Happy is not really a cute girls doing cute things show. I can see why it would look that way after the first episode, but in the second episode it starts to shift towards zany comedy, and Episode 3 completes the transformation. Anne Happy is really the sort of high-concept repetitive madcap comedy that was popular in the early 2000s with shows like Digi Carat, Comic Party, and Excel Saga. It just pretends for a while to be a cute girls doing cute things show, until it pulls a bait and switch.

The concept is that the main characters are all horribly unlucky girls, and they've been gathered in a special class where blah blah and crazy stuff happens. The show is named for Hanakoizumi Anne (who is mysteriously known as Hanako—why bother giving your characters weird names if you're not even going to use them for anything?), the main heroine who is just ridiculously unlucky in every aspect of her life. In Episode 1 she forms a trio with Hibari, a normal girl who somehow fell in love with the guy on the warning sign at construction sites, and Botan, a horribly clumsy and sick girl who gets hurt by everything. Episodes 2 and 3 toss the girls into increasingly zany challenges and also introduce Hibiki, another horribly clumsy girl who is an overly competitive tsundere and has no sense of direction, and Ren, who is beloved by all animals and is constantly covered in cats or rabbits.

Not only are the jokes repetitive, they're also stale. The late 90s shows were doing similar stuff and sometimes doing it better. In Episode 3, the characters play a big crazy life-size board game! As penalties, they have to shout the name of their crush and wear cosplay costumes! There's an annoying rabbit thing! I'm not a big fan of mascot characters (especially in a moe show, where the girls themselves are basically mascots), but if you need to have one and you can't have it actually be part of the story like Kero or Kyuubei, the model to follow is Gochiusa's Tippy, who looked cute, occasionally did contribute to the plot, and mostly just sat on Chino's head not bothering anyone.

On the plus side, the art is pretty good. The characters all look cute, but I just haven't felt the moe. The only character I like so far is Botan, who has over the top low self esteem and constantly apologizes and demeans herself. I like characters like that—Sayounara, Zetsubou Sensei's Ai Kaga and Ritsu Souma of Fruits Basket are other examples—because I identify with them. But Botan is also constantly getting hurt, and it gets a little tiresome. In Episode 3 I was even feeling sorry for her because she keeps breaking her bones, and we see it all in graphic X-Ray detail, and it's not funny; it's repetitive, and it looks horribly painful. Towards the end she even breaks all her front teeth out and talks with a mouth full of mush for the next scene, and there was no way I could laugh; I just wanted to give her a hug and take her to a dentist.

I haven't made up my mind yet whether to keep watching Anne Happy. I probably shouldn't; I know there are much better shows out there, and I know that next episode, poor Botan is just going to break her bones again. 

The Monogatari series stories, ranked

I just read a The List column on Anime News Network that included a poll at the end where people had voted on their favorite story arc of the Monogatari series.

It's interesting how much the arcs really did vary in quality. A lot of the time it had to do with the quality of the heroine, but not always: for instance, Suruga is a great character who makes me laugh more than almost anyone in her comedic moments, and also makes me feel deep sympathy in her more serious moments. Yet her two arcs were some of my least favorite. I recently started watching the series again, but I stalled out at Suruga Monkey Part III (and this seems to be pretty consistent whenever I try to rewatch the series). Here's how people voted on the ANN poll:

1. Hitagi End 14.95% 
2. Hitagi Crab 10.44% 
3. Nadeko Medusa 8.12% 
4. Tsubasa Tiger 7.09% 
5. Shinobu Time 7.09% 
6. Tsubasa Cat 6.70% 
7. Mayoi Snail 4.77% 
8. Mayoi Jiangshi 4.77% 
9. Suruga Monkey 4.38% 
10. Suruga Devil 3.99% 
11. Shinobu Mail 3.09% 
12. Karen Bee 2.71% 
13. Tsukihi Phoenix 2.58% 
14. Nadeko Snake 2.06% 
15. Tsubasa Family 1.93% 
16. Ougi Formula 1.42% 
17. Sodachi Lost 1.03% 
18. Yotsugi Doll 0.64% 
19. Sodachi Riddle 0.64%

I'm not caught up on the Owarimonogatari stories, but here's how I would rank the stories I've seen:

1. Tsubasa Tiger
2. Hitagi End
3. Nadeko Medusa
4. Tsubasa Family
5. Mayoi Snail
6. Tsubasa Cat
7. Karen Bee
8. Shinobu Time
9. Tsukihi Phoenix
10. Hitagi Crab
11. Nadeko Snake
12. Suruga Monkey
13. Yotsugi Doll
14. Mayoi Jiangshi
15. Suruga Devil
16. Sodachi Riddle
17. Ougi Formula

I haven't seen the others, and they left out Koyomi Vamp, so I will too. 

You'll notice that I ranked Hitagi Crab drastically lower than the ANN poll did. That's because it's boring. I just watched it again and it does not get better the more you see it. It's twenty minutes of Hitagi cheesecake and a lot of yappity yap yap. Hitagi is definitely in fine form–she gets in some good ones while she's flashing Koyomi at her apartment–and the conclusion is sweet, but Mayoi Snail is a better Hitagi story than Hitagi Crab. (More on that below.) 

On the other hand, I'm puzzled that Tsubasa Family ranked so low. Granted, I have a total fetish for it because it had the best Tsukihi scenes of the series (which were watered down in the anime compared to the novels, but still pretty great). Hitagi is a dangerous chick, but she comes on like a freight train, immediately threatening physical violence in her very first appearance. What makes Tsubasa and Suruga so interesting, and so different from your usual light novel haremettes, is that they're dangerous and slightly unstable, and there's some pretty dark stuff going on in their heads, but no one actually knows it because they're the kind of people to bottle things up inside and put up a front of cheery normality. We viewers find out about this slowly: in Suruga's case, we find out late in Suruga Monkey that Suruga was not a pawn of the Rainy Devil when she committed violent acts, but rather a willing accomplice. And in Tsubasa Family, we discover that Tsubasa is allowing the Sawari Neko to use her body and call upon her intellect to run around and wreak havoc, because some part of her enjoys it. 

But the construction of Tsubasa Family is much more clever than Suruga Monkey: it's one of the few Monogatari stories where I feel the plot moves along on its own, naturally, instead of through exposition. Tsubasa's personality leads her to touch the dead Sawari Neko on the roadside and become cursed by it. Her inner darkness, borne of her bizarre and uncomfortable living situation, drives her to yield herself to the Sawari Neko and become Black Hanekawa, a new sort of being. Koyomi's actions, too, seem natural and justified, at least if we accept Koyomi's usual over-the-top style as a given. His confusion over his feelings towards Tsubasa, the strange mixture of friendship, sexual attraction, and pity that may or may not be love, lead him to make a strange and confusing decision to die for her. Koyomi concludes that he doesn't love her, but reveres her, like a religious figure; yet he's still confused about his real feelings all the way up through Tsubasa Tiger, and that confusion makes the love triangle between Koyomi, Hitagi, and Tsubasa much more than just a simple love triangle. Tsubasa Family an amazing story, dark, bleak, complex, and emotionally revealing. As a Monogatari viewer, I come for the fan service and fun dialogue, but I stay for stuff like this, and I'm surprised that it wasn't more widely appreciated. 

Mayoi Snail is just about where it should be in the ANN poll, but I'm surprised the people like Mayoi Jiangshi so much. I thought it was a pretty lame story. Seeing grown-up Mayoi was fun, but nothing really came of it and the rest of the story was rather boring. I generally don't like time travel in fantasy stories and I'm not a zombie fan, so shoving a zombie apocalypse into Monogatari didn't do anything for me. Mayoi Snail was just so, so much better. Even if you don't like Mayoi, it was at least half a Hitagi story, and had some of the best Hitagi moments in the series, the parts where you actually understand what Koyomi sees in her. (I've long suspected that he agreed to go out with her more out of fear and curiosity than attraction, and only later grew to love her; another blog, perhaps.) 

In particular I loved two moments, both of them moments where a less skilled writer would have botched the characterization but Nisio Isin and the anime writers just completely nailed it. One is towards the end of Mayoi Snail Part I when Hitagi, who keeps becoming less and less subtle in the hopes that Koyomi will realize she's coming on to him and ask her out, inquires out of the blue if Koyomi wants a girlfriend. Koyomi asks what will happen if he says yes, and Hitagi tells him that he'll get a girlfriend. The way Hitagi keeps on becoming less subtle through this episode was already completely on-point: unlike a lot of anime heroines, she's not the type to let one failure, or even a dozen, put her off. Even though she claims to be a delicate maiden, she's not the sort to sit around fantasizing and cursing fate for conspiring against her love. And she's also not very good at subtlety—this is the girl who put a staple in a guy's cheek—so it was inevitable that she'd come to a point of just saying "Do you want a girlfriend? Because you can have one if you want." Koyomi never asks the obvious question—who exactly is going to be the girlfriend? He seems to be avoiding it the whole arc because he's afraid Hitagi is going to say "Me", and when she finally gets back around to it at the finale, he approaches the topic gingerly. The wording of the line is also perfect, Hitagi's trademark bluntness mixed with her attempt to retain a final scrap of subtlety. 

My other favorite Hitagi scene of Mayoi Snail comes at the very end, when Hitagi presses Koyomi to give an answer to her confession. Koyomi responds with "I hope it catches on. Senjougahara tore", referring to a word Hitagi made up earlier to replace "moe". When Hitagi gets over confusion, she just smiles, one of the nicest smiles we see from her in the series. It's so characteristic of their relationship; neither one of them ever wants to talk honestly about their feelings, but they find these little ways to communicate through actions and symbolic language, like when Hitagi steps in to save Koyomi at the end of Suruga Monkey saying that she swore to be the one to kill him, going back to a joke she made in Part I. 

The last few where my list and the ANN list differs are Shinobu Time, Karen Bee, and Tsukihi Phoenix. With these ones, I understand more where people where coming from. I found Shinobu Time Part I and Part II static and boring, but Part III's final scene for Mayoi was a definite tearjerker. And I understand that not everyone loves Karen and Tsukihi like I do. Tsukihi in particular seems to be thought of mostly as a background character. I see a lot more in her, but there's no denying that Tsukihi Phoenix is not a particularly good story. The Tsukihi scenes aren't very good; she had much better scenes in Tsubasa Family and Karen Bee, and even her scenes in Tsubasa Tiger and Yotsugi Doll were better. It also always bugged me that the Araragi house gets smashed up by Yozuru and Yotsugi, but is magically repaired by the next arc (I believe Mayoi Jiangshi was chronologically next) and the damage is never mentioned again.

Karen Bee, though it has its moments, is also not a very good story. It tries too hard to squeeze in everyone. The scenes with Mayoi, Suruga, and Nadeko, as funny and iconic as they are, pretty much add nothing to the story. As with Tsukihi Phoenix, we learn very little about Karen's personality even though she's supposed to be the heroine. It's a Hitagi story more than anything, but as a Hitagi story, it's far too drawn out. It would have been better to leave Hitagi and Kaiki out of it at the beginning, and do an entire story about the investigation that led up to Karen confronting Kaiki. Then Hitagi comes into it, and we do a three- or four-episode arc just about Hitagi and Kaiki, where Karen fades into the background. The story we actually got was almost all Hitagi material, and it felt thin, as if the scenes with the other characters were just there to fill out seven episodes so they could draw out Nisemonogatari into an entire cour. 

On the other hand, Hitagi End is exactly the skillful mixture of Hitagi, Kaiki, and one other character that Karen Bee wants to be but isn't. In this case, the other character is Nadeko instead of Karen. Some of the contortions that Nadeko Medusa goes through to make Nadeko plausible as a villain really aren't fair to her; while it's acknowledged that Nadeko was manipulated by Ougi, she also gets blamed (within the story by Shinobu, but the narrative seems to agree) because her childishness facilitated Ougi's plot. But Nadeko is only fourteen; it seems unfair to blame her for being childish. Hitagi End remediates this. Through Kaiki's observations, it builds on Nadeko Medusa's critique of the cutesy moe shy girl personality that Nadeko embodies, but in a way that feels fair to Nadeko as a character, that acknowledges her humanity. Nadeko childishly gets drunk with power (and sake) after she becomes a god, but Kaiki talks her back to her senses. Even as he lies to her and expresses contempt for her to Hitagi and Tsubasa, Kaiki seems to recognize that she's only a child acting out because her fantasy love with Koyomi was destroyed. Kaiki is very much part of the adult world of money, greed, and selling out, so it's both fitting and ironic that he uses adolescent "follow your dreams" pablum to convince Nadeko to become human again. 

I ranked Suruga Monkey lower than the people did because, while Suruga has some hilarious scenes and even a few scenes that make you go "Aww..." (the scene when she admits to Koyomi that she was rejected by Hitagi comes to mind), a lot of it is rather clumsy exposition. As much as I love listening to Yui Horie's voice, I can't call an episode that ends with fifteen minutes of Tsubasa talking on the phone great storytelling. Monogatari's great weakness is that it can never seem to consistently convey drama with the same cleverness that it does comedy. It has its moments—the final scene of Hitagi Crab gets in some good ones, as does Hitagi's phone conversation with Nadeko at the end of Nadeko Medusa—but it often bogs down when it tries too hard to be dramatic and tragic, and this is the plague of Suruga Monkey and even more so Suruga Devil, as well as Ougi Formula and the Sodachi stories (which I haven't finished). 

Otherwise it seems like my opinion hews pretty close to the will of the people. Therefore, we, the people, request that Nisio Isin please write more stories like Hitagi End and Tsubasa Tiger, and stop writing stories like Ougi Formula and Sodachi Riddle. If that isn't possible, I'll take the laughs and fan service of a Karen Bee over the ponderous philosophizing of a Suruga Devil, please.