The Kawaii Menace

The second episode of Denno Coil introduces the adult members of Yuko/Yasako’s¹ family and adds another layer of complexity to the story. We meet her parents, but it’s Mega-baa, her grandmother, who dominates the episode. The crafty old woman runs the combination sweets store and cybershop where Fumie buys her kuro bug spray and other toys. Mega-baa can cure Yasako’s cyberpet of its virus, but there’s a price.

The connections between the real and virtual worlds become increasingly complicated. “Satchii,” a powerful but stupid antivirus program, cannot enter homes, schools or Shinto shrines. By slapping the appropriate “metatag” on the traffic light post, Fumie can change them to red — useful when Satchii is chasing the girls. By slapping a different metatag on Yasako’s forehead, Fumie enables her to fire beams from her glasses. (The beams looks like bolts of energy, but they seem seem to act by disrupting data, causing flickering gaps where they strike.)

There is evidence that the humans in Daikoku City are themselves at least partly cybernetic. There’s also the puzzle that, although Yasako can pick up and hold Densuke, implying that there is some tactile feedback, she can’t tell if he is as soft and fluffy as he looks.

Besides the cybernetic paradoxes, Yasako also discovers that she may have forgotten important details of an earlier visit to Daikoku City when she was quite young. As she investigates the mysteries of the city, Yasako will likely discover much about herself and her family.

It’s too early to be sure, but I think that Denno Coil is probably the outstanding show of the spring.² These two episodes are as re-watchable as the first three of Kamichu! Everything is done well. The colors are muted, suggesting water colors, and the character designs are simple but expressive. There’s no cloying KyoAni prettiness here; instead, this highly artificial world seems natural and believeable. Yasako is an attractive character, and Mega-baa is quite formidable and interesting.

Thus far, Mitsuo Iso and company have been introducing the characters and setting up the rules of their world. What the story will ultimately be is not clear yet. Iso’s theme, according to one writer, is “the distance that separates everyone.” It’s not much in evidence yet, but there are twenty-four episodes to go. If Denno Coil ends as well as it begins, it might be a classic. (Of course, it could degenerate into an illogical mess, but given how sure-footed these two episodes are, I think we can reasonably hope for the best.)

1. Yuko asks her friends to call her “Yasako.” [↩]
2. The other contenders are Seirei no Moribito, about which I’ll try to write something coherent soon, and Darker Than Black, the first two episodes of which are excellent, though it’s not what I enjoy. Astro discusses the latter here. [↩]

… quack.

Today is the anniversary of one of the darkest days in cultural history. To commemorate the event, consider what if Star Wars were an anime.

Yuko, newly arrived in Daikoku City with her impulsive little sister Kyoko, loses her dog Densuke when it chases an “illegal” — a sort of computer virus — through a hole in a fence into an “obsolete” cyberspace. Fumie’s business is retrieving lost cyberpets, and Yuko hires her to rescue Densuke. It’s a more difficult job than they anticipate.

Episode one of Denno Coil is the first episode of any of this season’s series that I watched a second time, which automatically makes it the coolest show currently being broadcast. In some respects, it really does seem like Serial Experiments Lain retold for youngsters. Virtual spaces are coincident with the everyday world, and one can open holes to the cyberspaces with “bug” spray. Children have cyberpets that look and behave like real dogs and cats but are visible only to those who wear special glasses. It is possible to pick up and hold these pets, and they can freely pass through the holes into cyberspaces. They don’t like it when you drop a backpack on/through them. Numerous small floating spheres constantly monitor Daikoku City for cybernetic breaches, blasting suspicious areas with a sort of ray.

The first episode is very promising. The characters have distinct, non-cliche personalities, and the Denno Coil universe is the most interesting I’ve come across recently. Whether Denno Coil remains cool depends in part in how carefully and consistently director and writer Mitsuo Iso works out the logic of the intersecting real and virtual worlds. It also depends on whether he has twenty-six episodes’ worth of story to tell. The character designs are simplified but serviceable (though the characters who wear visors instead of glasses look like they have pig noses), and the art and the animation are adequate. The background music sounds interesting when I’m aware of it.

(Via Cartoon Brew.)

Let’s be brazen:

The offense is slightly mitigated by the fact that the fifth season never was licensed and thus there is no legitimate region 1 release. Still, usually it’s the “marketplace” dealers who sell bootlegs, not Amazon.com itself.

Update (5/22/07): Sailor Stars is “currently not available,” and the link above returns a 404.

According to historical costumers, a properly-fitted corset is quite comfortable. Evidentally, in Foreland the craft of corsetry has sadly declined.

After the over-the-top first episode, the second episode of Murder Princess is a bit of a let-down as the former bounty hunter¹ discovers the challenges of palace life. It’s still quite watchable, though, and it’s hard to dislike a series in which the good guys look like this:

(Read on …)

1. What is it with bounty hunters, anyway? I would have thought that Cowboy Bebop adequately covered the subject, but they keep turning up everywhere. Half the characters in El Cazador are bounty hunters. [↩]

Alex saw Tales from Earthsea and has a surprisingly positive take on it. (I don’t think he’s read the books yet.)

You can legally download the first episode of Death Note for $2, which is not a bad deal, assuming that there is no limit on how many times you can play the file. However, as Astro discovered, if you’re on a Mac, you’re out of luck. You can only watch the show on a Windows machine. This is not mentioned on the download page; you have to do some clicking in the “support” menus to discover this. It looks like I’m going to wait a few months, or years, for the DVDs. I wonder if Viz will stick a mandatory Naruto trailer at the begining of the Death Note discs, as they do with Hikaru no Go.

The English-language dub of Sailor Moon is notorious for dumbing down and bowdlerizing the story, but it could have been worse. Much worse.

Consult Picofarad’s Recurring Convention List.

(Via Lynn S.)

Pythagoras Switch is a science show for small children. Each episode follows the same format. Puppets introduce a video on a such topics as how the shapes of objects are clues to their manufacture or use, or static electricity, or how technology imitates nature. After that, a youngster controls his father or grandfather with a cardboard “father switch.” There is also some very simple animation, and either the “algorithm march” or the “algorithm exercise,” sequences of simple movements performed in canon. Children old enough to read the subtitles are likely to be bored by the very elementary level of most of the show.

What makes Pythagoras Switch worth watching are the Rube Goldberg mechanisms that open and close the show and separate the segments. Here’s a collection of these “Pythagorean devices.”

Here’s the algorithm march, performed by ninjas:

Five episodes that I know of have been subtitled. There’s quite a bit available on YouTube.

There’s a mysterious door in the floor of five-year-old Ami’s room in her family’s new home. It leads to Animal Yokocho, or AniYoko, a parallel universe inhabited by talking animals. Three of the animals pop out of the door every day to play with Ami: Kenta, the high-strung bear; Issa, the gentle panda; and, Iyo, the playful, deranged rabbit. They do things differently in AniYoko:

(Read on …)

Somebody ought to introduce Ross Douthat to anime.

I could complain about the manifold implausibilites of Rocket Girls, but it would be pointless. How can you expect logic in a universe where a space agency drafts random high school girls to be astronauts merely because they’re lightweight? Instead, it’s better to focus on the incidental pleasures, such as classic calculators

or cigarette lighters

or girls wearing skin-tight space suits. (Never mind that the suits are basically three millimeters of silicone rubber, and the story is set in the tropics. Heatstroke doesn’t happen in anime.)

The story zips right along, and there’s no time for teen angst. Yukari, spending her vacation in the Solomon Islands looking for her father who disappeared seventeen years ago, is variously bewildered, shocked, appalled, outraged, exasperated, disgusted and just plain angry as she learns just what her “part-time job” entails and discovers a few things about her family. If Yukari really had sense, she would run away from all these crazy people as fast as she could, but then there would be no anime. She’s soon joined by Matsuri, a native islander, and one of Yukari’s classmates from Japan should arrive on the island shortly.

Despite all the nonsense and the bad computer animation, Rocket Girls is enjoyable. It’s partly because it doesn’t take itself terribly seriously, and partly because, although the show gets the details wrong, it gets the story right. The people who made Rocket Girls, I think, really do want to go into space.

The best Pythagoras Switch contraptions may be more elegant, but for sheer Goldbergian bloody-mindedness, nothing tops this.

(Via Dale Price.)

Here’s the storm that struck Greensburg.

Jeff Masters comments on the storm here and here.

The Wichita Eagle has extensive coverage, including lots of photos.

I’m experimenting with different themes. The appearance of The Kawaii Menace may change without warning during the next few days.