かみちゅ！ 1-16

“Watashi, kamisama ni nacchatta.”

Sadly, I missed this anime, which I consider one of the best I’ve seen, when it rode in under my radar, and it wasn’t until a few months after its conclusion that I realized I might have missed something great. Part of the problem with slice-of-life anime is their necessary balancing act between interesting elements to carry the inertia of the series while maintaining the level of normality necessary for a series to be, well, slice-of-life. More than any other series in my memory, Kamichu! perfected this balance by mixing the life of a clumsy middle schooler who has become a god in the Shinto tradition.

While it has its own hiccups, such as the odd political Martian diplomat episode – odd, as in it stretched the illusion a bit too much – Kamichu!’s handling of Yurie Hitotsubashi’s forays into her teenage years and self-identity, mirrored by her stumbling steps as a god, is wonderfully entertaining without being contextually unreal, extraordinary without being fantastic. (Well, not too fantastic!) While Yurie is a god, and with all the powers of one, this series is not about solving the world’s problems including her own with her magic words, and her line “kamisama nantte taihen nanda!” pretty much sums up the creators’ philosophy in writing the series. What results is a down-to-earth, small-town tale of a girl that wakes up one morning and realizes without reason she has become a god of… well, she’s not sure yet. But she’ll try her best!

Kamichu! is at times sweet, other times nostalgic, and every now and then unapologetically cute, but it remains a lighthearted story about the world’s first middle-school god.

イノセント・ヴィーナス 1

“Yukkuri juu wo mieru tokoro he dase!”

While I’m a Kyoto Animation fanboy for the consistant animation quality they can produce, Innocent Venus is among a slew of reasons why saying such-and-such anime stands out from just that standpoint is becoming harder and harder. There’s an obvious division between Naruto and its ilk and animation exhibiting upper-tier technical powress, but those of the second category seem to have grossly inflated recently; before, it seemed normal to have one shockingly beautiful animation every half-year (if even that), but now there are several one can uncontestedly say that about every season. Either that or I really just wasn’t paying attention. Having said that, Venus is still really something, and its opener is an obvious showoff attempt by Bandai’s animation team to create a world that may or may not hold together all its plot, but will remain wonderfully watchable due to sheer amount of attention put into its creation. (Assuming it keeps at this pace, which most anime are incapable of, sadly.)

Anyhow, Innocent Venus’s premise is that in the near future, the world is consumed by hyper-hurricanes that quickly rewrite the world balance politically and militarily. (Apocalypse rewriting world balance, check!) The world forms into several large conglomerate countries, except Japan which is obviously special so they stay their own way (Japan is special, check!), independant of these world unions. Conflict over the powered suit technology that Japan used to rebuild arises (robots being the key to the future, check!) but the invading forces are quickly defeated by a new Japanese military capable of wielding these massive machines in combat, which have a extremely high similarity to the SDF military suits in GiTS’s. Oh yeah, one of the heros has a severe Heero Yuy complex and there’s also a random moe character that everyone wants dead for some reason too.

(I think, anyway.)

So okay, it’s not rampant with originality, and it’s like (at least) the second anime this season with a sense of Japanese military wish-futfillment through humanoid tanks, but at least so far it’s a marvel to watch. Venus’s CG just goes to show how it needs not look like another work was randomly spliced in at points anymore, flowing in and out of the cel animation beautifully. Bandai seems to have pulled out all the stops for animating this, at least for the first episode, and attention-to-detail otaku like myself will get a kick out of the intricately animated sequence where Jin loads a special ammunition round into his pistol to blow up half the ruined train station he and Sana is escaping down.

I have a feeling Venus is doomed to never enter what I consider to be the best anime I’ve watched, but if we can judge a series by its first episode, it will at least be an entertaining ride to follow.

僕等がいた 4

“Omae no deban datsu-no.”

The confession that was due from day one of the Bokura ga Ita was, in the fourth episode, finally realized. By itself, the scene was nothing special; combined with the rest of the series’s beginning, it developed into something much more. What exactly made this scene more poignant than I expected it to be?

From its onset, Bokura ga Ita is the epitomy of the classic girl’s shoujo manga; its female lead wanders and frets over her relationship with the happy-go-lucky male lead hiding a tragic past. Granted, the interactions between the irresponsible (but characterized by the phrase yaru toki ni yaru – he gets things done when they have to be done) Yano and continuously worried Nana is entertaining, but Bokura doesn’t blatantly try anything particularly fresh except for its soft pastel feel and one-eye zoom-ins.

Even then, it feels like there is something special about the way the confession of love in Episode 4 was wrought out. Due to her relationship to the watcher, we’ve known from day one that Nana has a heavy infatuation with Yano, just as clearly as we know her irritation toward his antics and constant teasing. We also know that Yano’s past contained another girl, and although he is a little taken aback by Nana’s inability to leave the one she likes alone to both his irresponsible antics and hidden suffering, the nature of Nana’s relationship with Yano, and to what degree it is progressing (or not) is much of the time anyone’s guess.

Perhaps that is why Episode 4 seems so monumental. Nana, although in love with Yano, is reluctant to be in an one-sided affair, and thus constantly worries if she has said something that has driven Yano away or actually brought him closer to a relationship with her. Her thoughts are made clear to us, but Yano’s are a bit more of a mystery, just like they are to Nana, and as Nana ponders what Yano meant by his last comment, it somewhat becomes the viewer’s role to interpret what his reactions meant as well. In the end, Nana’s sincerity seems to have won over, but neither Nana or the viewer can be completely sure of much of the process through which it occured; the scene itself comes as a surprising eventuality, a plot twist that was expected to happen sooner or later, an out-of-the-blue event whose only unpredictable element was its actual placement in the plot.

Although we hold one advantage to Nana – the knowledge that her dreamed-of relationship will occur, at some point – her surprise, in a way, likely mirrors our own when Episode 4’s finale draws near and Yano decides to accept her into his heart.