A Review of the Anime School Days

I watch a lot of anime, and now that I have an outlet for reviews, I may just use it. Here's hoping this becomes a long running series. I'd also like to remind everyone that today is Shinkai day in celebration of legendary director Makoto Shinkai. If you don't know the man's work, you should.

This anime has 12 episodes of roughly 25 minutes each, and is based on a bishoujo game (bishoujo literally translates to beautiful young girl). These types of games generally focus on either the romantic or sexual side of relationships around the high school years, and may or may not be considered hentai (hentai translates as literally pervert and in the west refers to erotic comics or animation). 

*clears throat for actual review*

Be forewarned! This review may contain spoilers, but I'll try to refrain.

So, the protagonist of this story (bear in mind while watching it that protagonist does not mean the good guy, but rather the guy who the story is focused on) is Makoto Itou, a young man with a kind heart, and a very romantic view of the females he knows from what I can tell. He rides the same train on the way to school as a quiet girl, Kotonoha Katsura, who often reads. He falls in love with this girl essentially through staring at her every morning on the train ride to school, however, he is too shy to approach her and feels content to stand silently by and watch her through the camera on his cell phone. That is, of course, until Sekai Saionji takes an interest in his delimma and befriends Kotonoha by sitting with her during P.E. class in an attempt to set the two of them up. She is eventually successfull in this endeavor, and spends the next few episodes doing whatever she can to teach Makoto about how to properly deal with women. At this point in the story, I liked the show fine, but was fairly unimpressed with the direction in which it seemed to be moving. At times, for example, the fanservice, unnecessary elements of a storyline (IE odd camera angles) used to highlite girls in the show in a sexually explicit way, got completely ridiculous, and I get tired of stuff like that because I tend to watch a lot of shows about high school aged kids, and there tends to be lots of fanservice in those. However, when you realize that the story is being told through the eyes of a seventeen year old boy, it seems not at all unnecessary and even adds a touch of sincerity to the story. Not only that, but it is rare for an anime to actually emphasize sex, and by emphasize I don't mean in a wierd and fetishist way, I mean in the traditional sense that I, as a high school student, think of it as being emphasized in my everyday life which is noteworthy by itslef. Now, lets talk about symbolism, there really isn't much to be had here in the way of symbolism, its a fairly cut and dried story with few loose ends or arguable plot points which is odd for a genre that is almost defined by how subjective the ideas in the story are. This is not to say that the story isn't deep, as anyone who ever felt like they were betraying a friend or being betrayed will understand that there are a variety of very comlex emotions at play here. So, unimpressed as I was, I determined to finish the show as 12 episodes is rather short for an anime. In doing so, I committed myslef to one strange ride. The first, say, 4 episodes are romantic alright, but otherwise pretty mediocre. From there, however, episodes 5-7 quickly descend into a frankly evil mood that I simply didn't foresee. To make matters even more confusing, episode 8 is truly a funny episode with only momentary blotches of darkness where necessary to make a comment on the character growth. Episode 9, however, sees the show back to its old, evil, depressing, and infuriating (I say infuriating because the show focuses mainly on the interactions of the characters, and the characters in this show are moralless assholes to one another with startling regularity) tricks. Episodes 10-12 continued to fuel my rage towards both Makoto, and various ancillary characters, and fuel my melancholy over the general mood achieved in the latter bits of the story. Now, for anyone still reading and still interested, this show has a twist ending, I won't give it away in case anyone decides to ever watch this, but I will examine the method in which it was implemented and executed. So, first the pros of this ending: it has two parts to it, the second even more of a mind fuck than the first, even I with my warped mind didn't see the events of the second part of the twist coming, which is great, I still can't even believe what happened, and that excites me because I thought I had it well figured out. Now, the cons: I DID see the basic outline of the twist coming, the episodes leading up to the end imply and foreshadow the ending in a pretty obvious way, thats really my only complaint there, but its a big one since a show with this much WHAT THE FUCK infused into it should be able to properly deliver a twist ending.  

I'm not sure what to say about this show as a whole, so I'm going to summarize my feelings section by section in short thought blurbs. Also, please try to keep in mind that I won't be giving this show a review out of ten or on any point scale. If it sounds interesting to you, see it.

Begining: While necessary to understand later episodes, the beginning of the show is not that entertaining but not bad per se either if you like awkward romances.

Middle: Too dark for its own good at times, but overall very entertaining if you like to watch seemingly innocent characters essentially devolve into madness and do things in the name of love and general horniness for each other that they would have, at the shows beginning, considered unthinkable.

End: Poorly executed, still manages to be surprising in just how far things get carried away, perhaps a bit too dramatic to be believable for some, but not for me.

Overall: I'd recommend it for seasoned anime veterans or if nothing else people with several shows worth of experience. For a beginner though,this show is simply beyond your taste, most  likely. If I had to compare it with anything, I'd say that you should try to imagine what would happen if you took the movie Carrie and the movie Say Anything and mashed them together with a porno (Note: even though I said that this show is pretty much focused on sex, you never actually SEE anything particularly explicit).

The moral of the story: *spoilers in this section*

Don't think with your dick, you will lose your moral compass down a well and completely ruin not only your lives, but the lives of most anyone around you. Also, I think that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned works beautifully with this show given the ending. 

For those of you who know me well, you might know that I have a brother in film school. He recently had a part in a movie he and his classmates made for the 2009 Campus Film Festival. It is a far overdone film school cliche to make either an extremely gory horror movie, or a film noir. So, being the non-cliche type, my brother and his friends decided to make the opposite of those things: a musical about a man who's email inbox comes to life and sings to him. The best part? Their movie came in first place. So, without further adue, here's the movie's website:

http://www.inboxthemusical.com/ 

I have no idea why this happened

http://www.mangaupdates.com/series.html?id=40086

Yes, that is correct, do not attempt to adjust your internet. There is, in fact going to be a High School Musical manga. For those of you who don't know what a manga is, they are comics and print cartoons made in Japan and in the Japanese style. However, for all intents and purposes you can just think of them as Japanese comic books only longer and usually in black and white. My question is why. Why in the world would anyone want to make a commic book out of a musical? Isn't the entire point of a musical to make people nod their heads and tap their feet to the beat (please excuse the rhyme as it was unintentional)? I mean honestly, who goes to see a musical and thinks to themselves, gee, this is great, but I'd be enjoying it twenty times more if only it was silent and I had to read it? Really though, how did this happen? Aside from the fact that it makes no sense for this thing to be created because you can't hear the music, why would you want to make it anyway? Wasn't the movie pretty much terrible? I mean, I know it was popular here, but I genuinely thought that the Japanese had better shit to do. The anime, manga, and movies scene is really booming in Japan, so how in the world did this stupid movie gain the popularity necessary to be serialized? Don't think I'm ignorant, I know the Japanese have an obsession with overly-cheery-craziness, but this seems a little stupid even by their standards. The article says the whole first season is already done, so I guess I'm a tad late with this, but hey, if I haven't heard it, it's news to me. 

Seems Inconsistent

I demand an explanation! According to IMDB, the movie My Cousin Vinny saw an eight percent drop in popularity this week. Seems reasonable enough right? I'm sure you're asking yoursef what's so weird about that, right? Well, I'll tell you, nothing is weird about that when viewed by itself, BUT, when you go to Marisa Tomei and Joe Pesci's IMDB profiles, you may notice that this week has seen a twenty three and sixty four percent popularity increase for them respectively. I will admit that Ralph Macchio is down thirty three percent this week, and even that director Jonathan Lynn is down nine percent, but when you average those together, you get a surplus of forty five percent for poor old Cousin Vinny. So what gives guys? If I had to guess, which I do, I'd say its some sort of international conspiracy to bring down the IMDB popularity score of early 90's comedies about Italian people in order to wreck the careers of the various actors who made them for today. See, I think that the man thinks that Marisa Tomei is getting too powerful, it can't be pesci, the last thing he was in was The Good Sheperd, and that movie blew. However, with Tomei doing movies like The Wrestler, she is developing connections to the movie underground, and the government doesn't want the italian mob to be mixing interests with movie-hipsters lest they create some sort of super underground speak easy/french noir movie viewing parlour. I have no evidence for this, of course, if I did, I wouldn't be posting my idea on the internet now would I? I guess the point of this blog, is that no matter how much time you spend leapfrogging from one link to another, be it anything from IMDB to wikipedia, you will never cease to find oddities. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that I have the ability to actually tell others about this useless discovery of mine. See, in the age of blogspot, skype, and stickam, people like me will always have an outlet for whatever stupid thing crosses the vast expanse between our ears. Does this mean we'll always have an audience? No, but if nothing else, we'll be able to ramble on to ourselves because we like to hear oursleves type.

Exposition Blog

Why did I make this blog? I don’t write very much; I procrastinate and bullshit through ninety percent of my school papers. I’m sure that most of you reading this are friends of mine, and are asking yourselves questions such as these. Well, I’ll tell you. I first came to blogspot when Will Kilgore made his blog, bowl of parrots, and when I realised that I had to make an account to follow him, my attitude was pretty much “sure, why not”. Now, I’m sitting in my room watching an absolutely lame horror movie on showtime and listening to the best band from the sixties, and I find that I have the urge to use this profile. See, one thing about me is that I like people, and I like having friends. So, when I make a profile on some website for one reason or another, I usually get an itch to customize it to attract others within a few weeks or so. This is no different, this blog has no real purpose, other than to provide a short summary of who I am and why I’m on blogspot, and to fill up space to make it look like I’m using this profile. This is not to say that I won’t use this profile in the future, but more like I have nothing to say as of right now, but can’t stand having a blank profile floating about with nothing on it. Now, some people probably want to know what my name is a reference to, since my name isn’t Rico.Well, since that’s pretty easy to explain, and because I need to take up a bit more space in this blog, I suppose I’ll answer it. Rico (リコ in kanji) is a fictional character from the anime Gunslinger Girl. She uses a Beretta SCP- 90/70 in the show, and therefore, RicoBeretta. I know it’s simple, and that’s why I picked it. On a related note, I recommend that everyone at least check out Gunslinger Girl, it’s a great show that feels a little brutal at times, but overall has a grace to that brutallity that brings the more happy elements of the story (which are few and far between) to the forefront of your mind when you watch it. So, I suppose that concludes my first blog on this site, thanks to everyone who read it, I doubt you learned much of anything, but maybe you did. Here’s to a (hopefully) beautiful future on the site.