2465: Keijo!!!!!!!!

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I watched the first episode of a new anime called Keijo!!!!!!!! today. This is an anime that I became aware of after Kotaku did one of its sadly predictable outraged articles about, dubbing it “deplorable”. (After that, a number of people I know actually watched it, and had good things to say about it.)

“I don’t care that it’s well-animated,” writes the apparent latest “name to avoid” on Kotaku, Cecilia D’Anastasio. “I don’t care that the women have discernible personalities—no cookies for you. It is beside the point that Keijo!!!!!!!! was previously a manga. It could have died in obscurity. Now it’s on Crunchyroll.”

But what has got this angry young woman so infuriated? Well, here’s the premise: Keijo is a fictional sport somewhat akin to sumo wrestling, only on platforms floating on water. The aim of a Keijo match is to be the last one standing; if you fall into the water or touch the platform with anything other than your feet, you lose. It is a contact sport, but you are only allowed to touch other competitors with either your arse or your chest. In other words, it’s Dead or Alive XTreme’s “Butt Battle” taken to the next level.

Keijo!!!!!!!! is a sports anime through and through, focusing on protagonist Nozomi as she strives to realise her dreams and be the best at a sport she has come to love. Like most sports anime, there’s a heavy element of exaggerated action in there, with the Keijo battles themselves incorporating all sorts of physically improbable/impossible stunts, including a girl who is so fast she can smack people in the jaw with her arse and knock them out before they even have time to react to her presence.

I’ve only seen the first episode so far, but it’s already clear that each of the cast members introduced are there for different reasons. Nozomi is there as the typical “underdog” that we’re supposed to root for through the series, and she’s a likeable, spunky character that sits well in the lead role. Besides her, we have the older woman that everyone looks up to, the “rival”, the clumsy idiot, the shy one (who is inevitably going to “snap” at some point, since she was already showing signs of it when Nozomi got a bit too close for comfort in this episode) and plenty of others besides.

There’s a wide variety of different personality types on display — and a wide variety of body types, too, unusually for anime that focuses on female characters. Nozomi is relatively “normal” in stature; her best friend is small but with a formidable butt; her comrade from trials is a tall, muscular young woman and their instructor — dubbed “The Siren” — is a rather portly mature woman who would doubtless be a formidable opponent in a Keijo match; the first episode ends just as Nozomi and her classmates are preparing for their first training session with her.

Inevitably, given the subject matter, there’s a fair amount of fanservice going on, but any lingering boob or booty shots come during the Keijo matches themselves, which kind of makes sense, given that’s where the “action” is, so to speak. Outside of the Keijo matches, we get to know the girls themselves and see that, so far, they all appear to be well-defined, likeable characters that I’d certainly like to know more about.

Keijo!!!!!!!! may not be an entirely original concept — aside from the fictional sport that it’s themed around, the show seems to follow the standard “sports anime” formula fairly closely — but it proceeds with style, charm and so many likeable characters that I find myself wondering quite how joyless you have to be to dub it in any way “deplorable”.

But then, if you read D’Anastasio’s article you’ll see that the sort of person who does think Keijo!!!!!!!! is “deplorable” isn’t exactly the sort of person who seems willing to even attempt to engage with it or see what’s really going on. Much easier to judge it purely on its premise than to actually do some research, after all.

Sigh. One day we’ll have “critics” who actually care about their jobs… maybe.

2253: It is the Piece of a Smile Everyone Acquires

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I’ve already written generally about how much I like yuri/shoujo ai slice-of-life anime Yuru Yuri, but I wanted to single out a particular episode as a great example of what this genre does really well: the third season’s eighth episode, boasting the impressively Engrish title It is the Piece of a Smile Everyone Acquires.

Yuru Yuri has a few aspects in common with other, similar slice-of-life shows, but the show it reminds me of most is Squid Girl/Ika Musume — a show where, despite its fantastical, ridiculous premise, manages to be oddly believable and comforting in how it depicts its relationships between characters. It’s not so much the thematic similarities that I’m concerned with, more the format: Ika Musume explicitly splits each of its “episodes” into several smaller vignettes that tell miniature stories in their own right, and within these vignettes the show often experiments with form, structure and even aesthetic. Its most striking episodes are the ones where it goes completely off-piste, such as those that feature the “miniature Squid Girl”, whose sequences are completely dialogue-free, and which make wonderful use of music and animation to produce surprisingly evocative, emotive scenes.

The similarities between Yuru Yuri and Ika Musume struck me during the pre-credits opening of It is the Piece of a Smile Everyone Acquires because it adopts a similar approach to the aforementioned “miniature Squid Girl” episodes: it’s completely dialogue-free, focuses on a character that isn’t normally at the forefront (or, in the case of mini-Squid Girl, isn’t normally in the show at all in that form) and does all its storytelling through its soundtrack.

In the case of It is the Piece of a Smile Everyone Acquires, the episode opens by focusing on the student council president, a character who is so meek and timid that we only ever see her mouthing words in regular episodes; she has no voice, so far as the audience is concerned. The characters always understand, her, though, which is the core joke of her character, but this opening sequence approaches it from a different angle, showing how she understands people — and makes herself understood — without the use of words.

Yuru Yuri already has a wonderfully evocative soundtrack that complements its on-screen action perfectly, but this opening sequence in It is the Piece of a Smile Everyone Acquires takes things to a new level: adopting an almost programmatic approach to its music, with distinctive themes and instrumentation being used for the individual characters who show up over the course of the sequence, it’s a fine example of how words, sometimes, simply aren’t necessary: you can make an interesting and heartwarming piece of art using only visuals and sound. (You can make an interesting and heartwarming piece of art using only one of those things, too, of course, but this is a TV show we’re talking about here; to deliberately refuse to use one of the core features of the medium is noteworthy.)

The rest of the episode is entertaining in itself, too, but somewhat more conventional for the most part; this pre-credits sequence, however, was so striking I felt I had to write something about it. I’d share the video here if it was on YouTube, but no-one appears to have ripped it; you can, however, watch the full episode on Crunchyroll at this link, and I can highly recommend the whole series from the very beginning if you want some enjoyable, lightweight fluff to cheer yourself up with.

2247: Yuru Yuri: Charming, Dumb, Gay as a Window

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I finally started watching the third season of Yuru Yuri, an anime whose first two seasons I found immensely enjoyable despite it being one of those “slice of life” affairs where pretty much nothing of note happens throughout.

Yuru Yuri is packed with charm and some wonderful characters, though, and it’s through the strength of these characters that the show truly shines.

For the uninitiated, Yuru Yuri follows the total lack of adventures of a group of four schoolgirls who form a club that doesn’t really do anything except hang out and drink tea. Over the course of the first couple of series, a few other regular cast members were added, and each of these put in frequent appearances in the third season — so frequent, in fact, that, judging by the new title sequence, they’re now considered to be core members of the cast rather than regular recurring characters.

The astute and/or weebtastic among you will know that yuri is used to refer to Japanese popular media with lesbian undertones (or indeed explicit overtones) and the inclusion of this term in the show’s title is no coincidence. There are no male characters in the show whatsoever, and there are numerous members of the cast — both regular and irregular recurring — who clearly have the hots for another one of the girls.

The most obvious is first-year Chinatsu’s infatuation with her cool, calm and collected senpai Yui, but there’s also the clear attraction between the mostly sensible (but painfully tsundere) student council vice-president Ayano and the utterly chaotic, hilarious Kyouko, who is a total dick but somehow immensely likeable with it. Then there’s former series protagonist Akari’s older sister Akane, who puts up a facade of being the sensible onee-san, but is actually a complete siscon, degenerating into wildly inappropriate acts with Akari’s possessions whenever she’s by herself (or thinks she’s by herself). And Chinatsu’s sister Tomoko, who is infatuated with Akane. And… you get the idea. There’s a whole lot of lady-love going on.

This isn’t an ecchi show by any means, though; the yuri side of things isn’t fetishised at all, and we never actually see anything going on between these characters. It’s a show that, when it deals with feelings of affection, prefers the more romantic side of love in the schoolyard rather than anything overtly sexual. It’s all sidelong glances, lingering looks, wondering if that contact was intentional; of course, some characters make their feelings more obvious than others — Chinatsu and Ayano both being the most obviously gay for their respective objects of affection, albeit in different ways — but still, for the most part, the show depends on the feeling of “will they ever realise or acknowledge their feelings for one another?” and actually resolving one of these strung-out instances of romantic tension would almost certainly throw the rhythm and feel of the show off somewhat.

Mostly, though, Yuru Yuri is a show that makes me feel happy when I watch it. It’s not deep and meaningful and it doesn’t have anything especially profound to say beyond “friends are great”, but it’s always a pleasure to enjoy an episode. It’s one of those shows where you feel like you’re being included in a group of friends just hanging out and having fun; there’s no real point to it all, but it’s nice to experience nonetheless.

1997: Chromecast Initial Impressions

Picked up a Chromecast today, Google’s little HDMI dongle that you can plug into your TV (assuming you have an HDMI socket) and stream stuff from your phone, tablet or computer to. Andie and I had been thinking about getting one for a while — primarily so if we want to watch TV at night we’re not forced to suffer Dave’s endless reruns any longer — but hadn’t got around to it. Finding myself at a loose end today, I went and forked over £30 (they’re the same price wherever you go, which is nice) to pick one up.

Setting it up was pleasantly simple. It was a matter of going to the Chromecast site on my phone, which subsequently redirected me to Google Play to download the Chromecast app. (I could have skipped that first step if I’d known there was an app involved.) The Chromecast app then walked me through the process of setting it up — a process which took about two minutes, the most complicated part of which was going downstairs to find out what the Wi-Fi password was — and it was then ready to go.

Using it is pretty easy, too. There are several ways you can use it: certain apps such as Netflix, YouTube and Crunchyroll (the three sites where I watch most of my videos these days) support Chromecast natively and effectively allow you to use your phone, tablet or computer as a “remote” and beam the video directly to the TV; other services effectively “mirror” what’s on your device to the TV, and via the Chromecast app itself (or natively in your phone’s OS if it’s one of the relatively small selection of phones that support it) you can mirror your whole phone’s screen and sound to the TV. (This latter option is perhaps less practical than it sounds; it’s no good for gaming, for example, as there’s a noticeable lag of a second or two between doing something on the phone and it happening on the screen, but then it probably wasn’t really designed for that.)

Alongside getting the Chromecast set up, I finally also set up Unblock Us on my phone. Unblock Us is a service that allows you to “trick” sites such as Netflix, Crunchyroll and the like into thinking you’re in a different territory to where you actually are. The reason why this is useful is that different territories have different stuff available — Netflix’s American version, for example, has a bigger selection than its British counterpart, though the later has improved significantly over time. It was a bit of a faff to set up on the phone, because you have to set up IP addresses manually rather than simply downloading a little applet to sort it all out for you (which is how you do it on a computer) but once I managed to find the right combination of numbers to put into the various slots on the form, I was happily streaming Bojack Horseman to my TV via my phone.

I’m really impressed so far. The picture quality is excellent and the streaming seems to be reliable, even though our Wi-Fi signal isn’t all that strong upstairs. It’s definitely going to fulfil our desire for streaming video in our bedroom, and for those of you with a slightly older, non-Smart HDTV, it’s a cheap and effective means of getting most of the benefits of a newer unit without having to break the bank or find a space for a 55-inch behemoth.

Thumbs up to Chromecast, then. Looking forward to playing with it some more.

1904: 21st Century TV

The Internet has brought with it many things both good and bad, but by far my favourite thing about it is to do with video.

No, I’m not talking about YouTube generally — the whole “anyone with a webcam can make videos!” culture it promotes feeds into modern youth’s unhealthy obsession with “being famous” — but rather the fact that, between the various streaming services out there, both legitimate and… less legitimate, there is probably some way of watching all those programmes/adverts/movies you wish you still had 1) the VHS tapes for and 2) something to play them with.

This last week, for example, Andie and I have watched Police Squad!, the TV-based precursor to the Naked Gun movies. Only six episodes were made, and back at university, when I “discovered” the show for the first time, I had a VHS cassette with two of them on it, so I had only ever seen those two episodes. Now, however, some helpful Polish person has kindly uploaded the whole lot onto YouTube for anyone to enjoy at their leisure. No waiting for TV networks to license them and show them again. No tracking down video tapes and VCRs. Just click and go.

The ability to rediscover old favourites is one of the best things about streaming video, then, as my rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time in about ten years will attest. But the fact that streaming services makes new favourites easier than ever to discover, too, is rather wonderful. I doubt I’d have become so interested in anime without my Crunchyroll subscription, for example; prior to widespread streaming video, the only real way to get into anime was to buy VHS tapes or DVDs, and with anime being niche-interest and somewhat “exotic”, particularly when it first hit these shores in the mid-90s, it was a rather expensive hobby. Anime DVDs and Blu-Rays still cost up to twice as much as a regular ol’ Western film even today, making online services like Crunchyroll much better value.

This is the TV of the 21st century, then; it really is the vision of the future we had twenty, thirty years ago: decide what you want to watch, then just watch it. In most cases, that’s possible to do, even if you have strange, bizarre and peculiar tastes. And even if you’re more fucked up than most, I can almost guarantee that there’s some dark corner of the Internet out there somewhere more than willing to cater to your particular interests, whatever they might be… for better or worse.

In these days of people seemingly constantly yelling at one another on social media and comments sections on large sites being widely (and, sometimes, justifiably) regarded as fetid cesspits, it’s easy to forget the great and wonderful things that the Internet has brought to modern life. I’m a strong believer that its ability to “archive” — for future generations to be able to enjoy movies, TV shows, animations and other videos from years ago — is one of the best things about it. And as technology improves and we find more and more ways to interact with this world-wide network, I hope we never lose sight of these simple pleasures that it’s allowed us to enjoy like never before.

1001: Yuriyurarararayuruyuri

Hello! And welcome to the first post-1,000 post on this blog. I hope you like the “New Game+” redesign I’ve done. I figured it was worth doing something noticeable to highlight my achievement. And now I’ll stop blowing my own trumpet. Back to business as usual.

I’ve been continuing my journey through the strange and bizarre world of anime recently. I finished watching The World God Only Knows a while back, so I was looking for something new to explore. I have a few DVDs of recommendations from my friend Lynette on the way, but I was interested in trying something a little bit different while I waited for them to arrive.

So it was that while browsing Crunchyroll I came across Yuru Yuri, an anime that I’d seen mentioned by a few people around the place. I didn’t really know anything about it save for the fact that “yuri” is a term often used to refer to “girls love” or, to be less euphemistic about it, material with lesbian themes. I had no idea whether Yuru Yuri’s title actually had anything to do with yuri as a genre, or whether it was just part of the name. “Yuri”, after all, is also a fairly common Japanese name that means “lily”.

As it turns out, Yuru Yuri (literally “easygoing yuri”) is most certainly a yuri work, though more in a sense that it focuses on close personal relationships between a group of girls rather than having sexual overtones at its core.

Yuru Yuri centers around a group of middle-school girls who start an “amusement club” in the defunct Tea Club’s premises at their school. They essentially use this as an excuse to goof off and avoid doing anything that would actually require effort, and over the course of the series, their relationships with one another (and with a small cast of supporting characters outside the main four) grow and change — in some cases into love; in others into fantasies about one another that will (probably) never be fulfilled; in others still into close friendship. The show doesn’t make a big deal of the fact that seemingly almost everyone at the all-girls school they attend is homosexual; instead, it’s simply treated as the way things are. People can like each other, regardless of gender, and this can lead to exactly the same sort of awkwardness and confused feelings as in heterosexual relationships. Just like real life! Who’d have thought it.

All this perhaps makes Yuru Yuri sound a bit more serious than it actually is. The girls’ relationships and feelings for one another are an important part of the show, sure, but for the most part it’s very much a “slice of life” anime in which the cast get into various amusing scrapes that are usually resolved by the end of the episode. It’s very lightweight and cheerful in tone throughout, and the characters are all very distinctive and exaggerated in terms of their appearances, personalities and iconic behaviours — though the show isn’t above subverting its own tropes at times if the opportunity to play something for laughs exists.

One amusing aspect of the show is that Akari, the character set up to be the series’ “protagonist” in the first episode, gets some fairly harsh treatment throughout. Not necessarily in terms of the things that actually happen to her, mind — this isn’t a show that does nasty things to its characters — but in the fact that more often than not an episode ends up focusing on the other characters to her exclusion. On more than one occasion she gets sidelined in favour of seemingly incidental plotlines, and in some episodes she’s not even present at all. This particular aspect of the show is lampshaded continually, with the “next episode” previews often consisting of the characters arguing over who is actually the protagonist, regular references to Akari’s lack of presence (often represented by her literally turning invisible) and the pre-credits “Yuru Yuri is starting!” sequence (hosted by Akari) getting increasingly ridiculous as the series progresses. It’s a fun commentary on the “blank slate” nature of a lot of anime protagonists.

There are also plenty of silly things that happen in almost every episode, too. For example, Chitose, one of the supporting cast members, is obsessed with her best friend Ayano the student council vice-president getting together with Kyouko, one of the main four cast members. Every time Chitose takes her glasses off, she “tunes out” of reality because she can’t see and ends up fantasising about what Ayano and Kyouko would get up to if they ever admitted their feelings to one another. These fantasies are usually rather suggestive, but always stop before anything actually happens, usually because Chitose has a near-fatal nosebleed as a result of her pervy thoughts.

It’s a strange show, to be sure, and an acquired taste. It’s one of those things where nothing of any particular note happens in any episode, but the comfortable familiarity of the characters and the gentle sense of slightly suggestive humour that pervades it gives it a very endearing feel, assuming you can stomach its unrelenting moe cuteness. The whole cast — main and supporting — is likable and distinctive, and it’s just a very pleasant watch if you don’t want to have to concentrate too hard or be bombarded with The Feels at every opportunity.

You can watch Yuru Yuri on Crunchyroll.