Even though I didn't get far on my reviews for last season, I still liked the format, so I'm doing it again for the Spring shows! The first two up are the "artsy" shows, Mushishi Zoku Shou and Ping Pong the Animation!
This was the show I was most excited about watching from the Spring season. I discovered Mushishi pretty early on when I started watching seasonal anime online, and its slow and sometimes creepy tone fascinated me. I loved that the show was about a thin line between the supernatural world and reality, telling cautionary stories about people who'd gotten on the wrong side of nature. It also carried an interesting sense of realism with it as well; I could believe in the existence of mushi and how they affected the lives of people in past Japan, even as only a fictional construct.
The second season and the OVA that precedes it have this feeling as well, so if you liked the first season you'll likely love the rest of it. However, as a whole I felt that Mushishi Zoku Shou is weaker than its predecessors overall. The previous installments worked very well as stand-alone episodes with some themes recurring throughout, but it was possible to watch the show in any order and not get confused. This season opens with a rambling side story about glowing wine called kouki that serves no purpose other than to introduce it into the Mushishi world and does not stand very well on its own. The very last episode falls prey to the production problems that caused the show to be delayed for a few weeks and spends an absurd amount of time lingering on still shots or black screens, not to mention that the episode's story itself clearly didn't have enough going on in it to fill the running time. This unintended finale (the other two episodes will be broadcast later) made me think of an adjective I never thought that I'd use with Mushishi--boring.
Which is not to say that I found the whole season boring--more than a few episodes still capture that feeling of a story about mankind and nature, the conflict between mistakes and the inevitable. The episode about the blind and deaf woman who didn't age was my favorite from this season, with the one about the woman who summoned rain as a close second. However, the last couple episodes slipped up a bit for me, and even being aware of the budget problems I couldn't regain my sense of disbelief when the series couldn't deliver on what I'd come to expect from it. It's still a solid show, but it's a shame that issues in real life ended up bringing it down.
Ping Pong was a last-minute addition to my watchlist, so I came into this with zero expectations. For the first few episodes, I mainly just enjoyed the animation. Ping Pong obviously does not adopt the style we generally term as "anime," going for an interesting blend between realism and comic book panels, breaking up the screen into self-contained movements and words. But while watching Masaki Yuasa at work was great, I had very little investment in the first half.
The story followed a high school ping pong team, specifically focusing on two of its players--Smile, a cold and reserved player who is gradually being recognized as a prodigy, and Peco, an overconfident player who's always done well at the sport. The scope gradually includes a Chinese player named Wenge who's been kicked out of his home country until he can improve, and Kazama, the undefeated champion who's skill are being used by his uncle's company to sell more ping pong products. While I generally liked the characters and found interest in Smile's rise in the ranks while Peco cut out because the sport was no longer easy for him, it was hard to see any overall point to the story. That changed in the second half, when the pieces finally came together. I won't get into spoilers here, but while I feel that it was a clunky way of going about it--there's a lot of lead up time to the "oh, so that's where they're going with this" moment--but once the goal was revealed, I got very interested in how the show would get to that point.
The result was the best sports anime I've seen to date, and easily one of the best shows I've watched so far this year. I was on the edge of my seat with every match in the final act, which is really saying something for a show about a sport I never gave a second thought to before. It's a show that's more focused on the journey than the goal, although the cathartic payoff in the last episode is amazing. I imagine that the show lost more than a few viewers during its slow start, but if you are even a little bit interested in this show, I highly recommend watching the whole thing. While it's likely that this show will fly under the radar and be quickly forgotten, I'm glad that it aired, and I hope that more people take a chance on it.
Images from Crunchyroll and Hulu.com.
Ping Pong's based on a 1996-1997 seinen manga written by surrealist manga artist Matsumoto Taiyo, which explains the very distinct artstyle. There was a live action movie from the early 2000s, although after watching it I can say it just didn't have as much visual oomph.
ReplyDeleteI can't even imagine this in live action despite the realistic bent. It's definitely a style that exists in-between both worlds, and that's one of the reasons why I loved it.
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