New Anime

Well, a few weeks into another new season and there are, as usual, a lot of new shows. I decided last weekend, to pull a bunch of first episodes of new stuff and see if there was anything worth watching. As it turns out, some were good and some were really bad.

Ergo Proxy
Probably tied for my favorite show this season. It's one of those dystopian future/dysfunctional society sci-fi settings reminiscent of Texhnolyze. Like Texhnolyze, there are tons of mysteries and the viewer is left constantly guessing about how to piece together the various story elements. However, Texhnolyze's fatal flaw was that it was too confusing with too many character threads and every character knowing more about the world than the viewer (although I really like the genre, I never finished Texhnolyze). Ergo Proxy seems to avoid that trap by focusing in an a single main character who acts as the audience's tour guide and doesn't know more about the situation than we do. Plus, there's much less unnecessary beating and dismemberment. The art and production value are also both kickass.

xxxHolic
The other tie for favorite show this season. I liked the structure and stories in the manga this is based off of, and the anime doesn't disappoint, adding stylish artwork and very clever color schemes into the mix in a way that accents the plot and themes. The stories have a self-contained dramatic quality that is most reminiscent of Tokyo Babylon, as far as CLAMP works go, and is probably some of the best writing since TB as well. (Tsubasa Chronicle was an unfortunate disappointment that was like a watered down Card Captor Sakura but lacking all the stylish characters and personalities.)

RAY the Animation
Watched 1 full episode of this. It's a Black Jack spinoff about this girl that was saved by our favorite scarred doctor and grows up to be a brilliant wandering surgeon following in his footsteps. The problem is, while the show has the same serious medical drama tone of the Black Jack anime, RAY is full of weird gimmicks. Ray is not only a brilliant surgeon, but has x-ray eyes that she uses to dramatic medical effect. In episode 1, she is roped into performing surgery on a dying yakuza member by the director of a hospital. But for some reason, this director is a hulking bearded giant of a man with an eyepatch and a peg-leg who has staffed his hospital with ass-kicking martial arts expert nurses (who beat back a horde of yakuza who come to the hospital to interrupt the operation). Sure, Black Jack is sometimes a bit over-the-top, but this is ridiculous. Still, the structure of the show has potential and I'll give it 1 or 2 more eps to prove itself.

Demonbane
Zhang, being way far up on the anime-game tieup scene, would probably laugh at me for even considering watching this show. Needless to say, it sucked. Couldn't even get through the whole episode. By the time they introduce the 8th girl with huge breasts covering all the major fetishes after 10 minutes, I knew that there was no hope. Do not watch this show!

Tokko
Summaries seemed to indicate that is was a modern-day supernatural mystery show that had potential. Summaries did not say that this is a sis-con police fetish show. Not as unwatchable as Demonbane, although I didn't make it through the whole episode of this either. (I was interrupted by meal service on the plane and couldn't bring myself to come back to it.) While on one hand I feel like I should sit out the rest of the episode for completion, I don't know if I can. It certainly won't last past episode 1.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Cliche servicey high-school comedies are interminably boring to me. However after much positive buzz about this show (in particular a directive to watch at least 2 full episodes since ep 1 is strange and out-of-sequence), I was convinced to give it a shot and wasn't disappointed. Perhaps it's not everyone's cup of tea (Doris found it unexciting), but this show has a particular combination of wacky characters and wacky humor that totally cracks me up. I find this show quite creative, non-cliche, and very amusing. One could summarize this show as being about a wacky title character who ropes her schoolmate comrades into all sorts of crazy ventures, but then there are aliens, weird magic, and various apocalyptic scenarios that gum up the works.

Ouran High School Host Club
This one almost slipped under the radar, but a positive mention from Lawrence put it on my list. It's a shoujo high school comedy (thus non-servicey and with less familiar cliches) with an amusing premise. Prevalent in Japan and other parts of East Asia are "hostess bars" where female employees cozy up to male patrons to get them to buy larger volumes of watered down alcoholic beverages. The setting for this show is the reverse-gender concept at an elite private high school (and with tea instead of booze). I've seen two episodes of this. The first is really worth watching, even if you're not sold on the whole concept of this series. It's fast paced and full of wacky and amusing humor. The second ep. was also good, but hints that the series formula might end up being in the vein of CLAMP Campus Detectives (not that it's a bad thing, but the unique hook in CCD is that they were strangely mature elementary school kids which this show doesn't have). The art style is an kind of cute classic shoujo, kind of like Rose of Versailles or Onisama E, except cuter and non-angsty.

GITS: SAC2
So, this isn't new and I watched it for the first time quite a while ago. I just finished re-watching it because it's very plot and detail intense, and my first viewing had such long intervals between sequential episodes that I didn't get a lot of stuff. This show was really really good. What especially makes SAC2 worthwhile is that besides being a good political and covert-ops tale (like SAC), there is a lot of really good character drama and development in this series. There is considerable character build leading up to a strong climax in the last episode in addition to excellent plot build. Particularly exceptional is how multiple character punchlines as well as a strong plot punchline all coincide at the last episode in a way that was so well-built, that the multitude of events doesn't seem rushed, compressed, or forced. There's even time for an epilogue. Watch this show!