Subdued Summer of Backlogging #2--School's Out Edition

This was supposed to be up last week, but I made the wrong assumption that I could totally edit screencaps and publish this post while simultaneously going through my last week of grad school. But now that I have my shiny new Masters degree, I've got the whole summer ahead of me! To start things off, here are two more titles from my backlog I finished two weeks ago, both of which I really enjoyed.

Completed


Hozuki no Reitetsu - Episodes 9-13
This was another title that I don't quite remember why I put on hold. I think that this show was another victim of my schedule at the time, when I could only keep up with one show a week. That said, Hozuki no Reitetsu is one of my favorite titles from the Winter season. The show mostly follows its title character Hozuki at his job in the Japanese afterlife as chief of staff to King Enma, poking fun at popular myths and legends along the way. I've heard it described as the supernatural Japanese version of The Office, but I don't think that's completely accurate. (If it were, there would be a lot more shaky-cam close-ups on Hozuki's look of disdain.) That said, one of the main things that makes this show so amusing is the set-up of Hell being structured like any other business, and the demons treating their work like we would treat any other job.

It also made me realize that I know very little about Japanese mythology and history. A lot of the jokes depend on whether or not you know what they're referencing, which could be anything from ancient figures (who may or may not have really existed) to fairy tale heroes. Some of the more obscure references are in the translator's notes, but I could almost hear a lot of them going straight over my head. To the show's credit however, not being in the loop doesn't stop it from being enjoyable. Hozuki's deadpan sadistic reaction to whatever is going on around him combined with the humanizing of popular figures (King Enma is largely clueless, Momotaro starts out as a show-off) makes the show worth watching just to see these characters play off each other. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Japanese mythology and/or a fresh take on the "working life" subgenre.

There's also giant sentient screaming goldfish plants that are learning how to love. Yes, you read that correctly.

The Princess and the Pilot
I've made no secret of my disappointment with the sister series to this movie, yet this title managed to stay on my backlog list because it looked like a better take on a similar story. It turned out that assumption was right, and the movie is the far more entertaining version of the two. The plot also follows a pilot and his love interest, a princess promised to marry a foreign prince, as they journey across the vast ocean in the center of their world. The two are separated by class and their respective situations are defined by the world of war in which they live, but a past connection and the shared experience of the journey brings them closer together.


The worldbuilding in this movie is tight and easy to follow, giving the impression that we're only seeing a sliver of a larger history and conflict without bogging down the pace with unnecessary exposition. Initially it's much less steampunk than The Pilot's Love Song, with planes more similar to the ones that we're used to in the opening acts, but the later battles with airships and dreadnoughts more than make up for it. While the animation is not as high-end as I would normally expect from a movie, the character designs are very well done (I could even easily tell the difference between the military ranks and branches with the secondary characters, despite their uniforms looking similar) and I can't think of any off-model moments. The CGI is very well done, feeling natural alongside the characters and detailed enough to be believable without any strange movements from the models.


But even with all that said, I feel like I would've been far more critical of this movie if I'd seen it before The Pilot's Love Song. The majority of the plotline strictly conforms to genre conventions, so it is very easy to predict the story beats. The voice acting felt flat to me sometimes, feeling like the actors weren't convinced by the obvious plot points and resulting dialogue either. Also, was it just me, or did Princess Juana's voice sound too young? That said, the cliches in this movie are general genre cliches, not anime cliches, and the ending more than makes up for it. I won't spoil it here, but its pretty hard to create a feeling of catharsis and hope for the world after showing that there's nothing that the characters can do to change their situation, but this movie pulled it off. Overall, this is a throughly entertaining movie that manages to not just be a decent anime movie, but a decent movie in general.

Tune in next week to find out if I actually make a post on time.

Images from Crunchyroll.com.