Akemi’s Anime Blog

A couple episodes into the second season of Welcome to the NHK, and thoroughly enjoying it. It’s one of those quirky, underhandedly intelligent series that mix goofy situation comedy with realistic characters to make something that gets you engaged with the characters while you’re laughing at them.

It’s fundamentally a series about people with severe psychological problems. Not “this character is crazy,” we’re talking “this character has major psychological issues and needs counseling at minimum, if not some psychotropic drugs.” At least one of them, in fact, has a wide array of medications that she most definitely needs, and the protagonist could probably use some psychiatric help himself.

What’s most interesting about the series is how it gets you laughing at things that really shouldn’t be funny. The season climax, for example, has the main character unwittingly joining a suicide club on their final journey in an attempt to get his life back in order. This shouldn’t be funny–it’s serious stuff, and everyoe but the loony odd-man-out is played straight. Yet his cheerful comments to the morose crew have that tragicomic flavor that have you laughing despite the obvious drama. In a way it’s tapping into the tragic absurdity of people’s all-too-real problems.

What’s also interesting about something that treads such a fine line between humor and psychodrama is that it’s sometimes hard to tell when, exactly, you’re supposed to stop laughing. It’s not that you don’t care about the characters–several are rather affecting, in fact–it’s just that the tragic absurdity of it has you laughing (and I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be) well past the point when most similar stories would have gone into full-on drama. The suicide club eventually gets some full-on drama, but it starts well past the point when by all rights it should have, and in fact what should be the dramatic climax is actually one of the funniest bits–most unintentionally awful suicide counseling ever. The drama is far lower-key, and more of a follow-up.

It reminds me a little of how Trainspotting played its black-comedy game; the Worst Toilet in Scotland scene early on was so patently absurd it let you see some humor in the comparative tragedy later. Welcome to the NHK, for its part, opens with the protagonist’s appliances talking to him and a particularly surrealist scene (compared to the completely concrete remainder of the series), introducing you to his humorously-over-the-top, if unhealthy, worldview. (Aside: The captions for the hearing-impaired during that Trainspotting toilet scene are the single funniest bit of subtitling I have ever read–if you have the DVD, go watch for yourself.)

The other thing it excels at is when-you-think-about-it humor. Most of this is fueled, again, by the protagonist, in particular his penchant for spectacular levels of apathy. One of the best conceptual parts is where he discovers porn on the internet. His request for computer help after deleting his operating system in an attempt to make room for more porn is funny (and, speaking as someone who does tech support periodically, entirely realistic). The unspoken implication that he lacked the initiative to find porn on the internet, now that’s just hilarious.

It’s also a nice looking series in a weird way; the character art lacks a lot of detail and the shading is usually very flat, but the character design is memorable and the character animation quite good. It’s often quite stylized in terms of shading or color, but otherwise the backgrounds are detailed and realistic, with a satisfyingly lived-in look (also props to the realistic computer hardware, which plays something of a central role–for once the art geeks made it look like a real geek’s hangout, rather than a parody of one). It’s something of a departure from expected Gonzo fare (or much else, really), but overall appealing.

I’m very much liking the series, and while the second season starts on a relatively morose (though still emotionally engaging) note, I’m wholly optimistic that it’s gong to hold itself together. It even dodges what at first looked like it was going to be a lame excuse for two characters not properly getting together; the initial excuse is followed up by an entirely valid reason.

Also, a theory, though the sample size is small: The protagonist’s appliances talk to him and say unhealthy things when he’s asleep, but when he’s awake and hallucinating that they’re talking to him, they try to be helpful. Maybe.

Though it’s only four episodes, I had high hopes for the Ghost Talker’s Daydream anime adaptation; it seemed like exactly the sort of series that could be bumped up a notch in animation thanks to the opportunity for creepy sound effects, atmospheric music, and appropriately suspenseful timing. I also thought that it had a lot of potential to benefit from a tighter sense of what was going on visually and in terms of story, my only real complaint about the manga.

Having watched the first episode, it’s hard to call it anything but a major disappointment. I’ll reserve judgement about the whole until I finish watching it, but it’d take a small miracle to be anything more than mediocre on the whole. I’m also a bit torn, as I kind of don’t want to ruin the story of the manga by watching the anime, which from the looks of the first episode and preview is going to try and give a highlights-only version of the whole series.

Crime #1: Terrible soundtrack. Honestly, this is one of those manga series where you can practically hear the music when you’re reading–creepy atmosphere a la Perfect Blue’s fantastic sountrack, maybe some funky, chaotic jazz mixed in. Instead, bland, grating, poorly suited to the scene, and way too loud. That alone was enough to ruin the mood in the whole thing.

Crime #2: Sacrifices most of the jaded, sarcastic edge of the humor to focus on the obvious slapstick jokes, making the whole thing seem more juvenile than it should.

General flaws: The character designs are relatively faithful, but the art is simple and not particularly good, and the animation is below average. It also fails to fix the weaknesses in the manga, and if anything makes them worse. The condensed story is also a tad on the rushed side, and the characters aren’t developed well as a result. At least so far it’s not the least bit creepy.

Oh, well. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, and at least it’s a relatively faithful, if very abbreviated, adaptation on the whole.

Strike Witches sounds kinda neat on paper: Yukikaze meets Sakura Wars, with some Harry Potter and Geobreeders thrown in for good measure. After an alien invasion, the countries of the world seek out witches and recruit them into a military force to fight off the invaders’ advanced aircraft. Old-fashioned brooms not being up to the task, they equip the women with mechanical-magical leggings (and huge guns) that let them fly fast and fierce enough to fight the aliens. Thus is the set-up for a mix of vaguely WW2-flavored Top Gun-style ship-borne dogfighting and character drama centered around a very colorful collection of attractive women with magical powers.

In practice it’s more like Great Balls Of Fanservice–my thoughts for the first bit were pretty much stuck on two things:

1)  It is somewhat incredible that not only do the witches sprout cat-girl ears while being magical, but, on account of the big metal leggings with jet/propellor things on the ends they are effectively also plane-girls while involved in combat. Planegirls and catgirls simultaneously. That’s got to be some kind of record.

2)  Where are their pants?! Seriously, the witches never wear pants. At all. I assume the excuse is they need their legs free for the big mecha-leggings, but that makes little practical sense (there’s this great invention called a skirt) and doesn’t explain why they dress that way under all circumstances. It also doesn’t in any way reduce the impression, due to the microscopic “shorts” they are wearing with normal military jackets, that they got up in the morning and entirely forgot to put on anything below the waist.

The result is that while I like the concept, and the series is all kinds of pretty (slick action, alien craft that remind me of Yukikaze’s JAM for their mix of sleek and unearthly, colorful character designs), I felt like it existed for no reason other than a weird conglomeration of unrelated types of fanservice. The very young-looking (not quite Geobreeders, but in that direction) character designs didn’t help at all, given the whole lack-of-pants thing.

Can’t say it did enough for my head to get me to watch any more of it, though I suppose if you are somehow blind to the weirdness or fall into the fanservice categories it’s targeting, it might be worth a shot.

I will close by quoting one of my favorite The Tick lines, since I worked it in nowhere else:  “Ahem.  Do you have pants?”