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Random Notes From The Summer Anime Season – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes,

July sees the start of the Summer Anime Season with dozens of new and returning shows being broadcast in Japan and streamed on internet services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Hulu.

The anime industry and the manga/book market are an impeccably-linked symbiotic process: when a Light novel (Young Adult) or manga series gets popular enough, the publishers will commission an anime series according to fan demand, and which will also drive up the profile of the series to increase books sales since audiences that didn't read them before might start buying them if they like the anime series enough. In the last few years, the increase in anime adaptations of Light novels has increased, which is good for the book business since prose novels are cheaper to print than comics. They in term get manga adaptations to increase their profile and profit. It's win-win-win for a successful series that becomes a multimedia franchise. The really popular ones even get video game adaptations.

A current fan of anime might not notice, but there seems to be a contraction of the market. The majority of fans in Japan and the West are teens and early 20somethings, and anime reflects that now: the majority of stories are set in high school with earnest teenage heroes, harem tropes where all the girls fall in love with the self-effacing but clueless hero. Boob shots for fan service. It's all about empowerment fantasies for teenage boys who are starting to notice girls.

Back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, the anime landscape had more diverse stories in different genres. Science Fiction and Fantasy series featured adult heroes, competent professionals rather than greenhorn teenagers. Now those stories are in a shrinking minority as companies concentrate on the teen market to keep the market and industry afloat. Veteran creators bemoan the industry's aversion to risk and some have successfully taken to Kickstarter to fund shows that might otherwise have gotten produced back in the 90s. With a pro-war, right-wing government in power, there's also an increasing pro-war theme running through a lot of anime where war is the main plot and young people being drafted to fight wars. It feels like a drive to normalise the concept of war in young Japanese people as rumours of the government planning to reintroduce a draft continue to circulate.

I'm not going to run down all the shows in the new season. There are at least twenty of them. Instead, I'm just going to take a quick look at a small handful that stood out to me.

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Durarara!!X2 is the continuation of the anime adaptation of the Durarara! Light Novel (Young Adult) series by Ryogo Narita. The series is a kind of action-comedy soap opera set in the real-life Tokyo district of Ikebokuro but one whose urban ordinariness hides urban legends, social-media-created street gangs, characters from myth and folklore and epically strange and crazy people among its inhabitants, all trying to get through the day. It's like a collaboration between Robert Altman and Neil Gaiman. I suppose I have a soft spot for this series because of its celebration of oddballs, eccentrics, social outcasts and outsiders who barely even bother trying to hide their Otherness. Yen Press already publish the manga adaptation and will finally bring out English translations of the original novels this year.

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One Punch Man adapts the pseudonymous One's popular superhero manga that began life as a webcomic that Viz will finally bring out as an English language dead tree book this year. The series is a spoof of both Japanese and American superhero comics that the creator has probably spent some time thinking about. Its hero is probably the most deadpan, unflappable superhero in all of comics, a nobody who trained himself to become the strongest superhero of them all – his name is a clue for what he can do. He's so powerful now that he's become bored and would like to an opponent he can fight, yet he has no ego whatsoever so most people don't even know how powerful he really is other than his closest friends. It's impossible not to recognise the increasingly absurd and surreal heroes and villains throughout the series as an utter piss-take of the genre that still gets to eat its cake since the action scenes are as elaborate and over-the-top as the most insane blockbusters out there, sometimes even moreso. The anime hasn't begun yet, but the fact that Madhouse is the studio producing it makes this a must-watch for the season.

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Gangsta is an adaptation of one of the few crime manga being written and drawn by a woman, the pseudonymous Kohske, that Viz Media have been publishing in English for a few year snow. Set in a fictional small European city full of rvial crime families with a paper-thin truce, the main characters are a pair of freelancers who are often hired to do dirty work that the crime families and the police don't want to get caught doing. There's an adult sense of pulpish grime in its willingness to get down and dirty and the protagonists aren't school kids but grown men for a change. It's also a show that takes the side of outcasts and outsiders.

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Gate is an adaptation of a bestselling novel series – over two million sold – by a former Self-Defence Force officer, a fantasy about Japan's Self-Defence Force being sent through a dimensional gate to wage war against an incursion from a high fantasy world of orcs and demons. Of course an otaku in the Self-Defence Force who plays games and reads manga would be the right guy to be in the ground troops. He has specialised knowledge about that world after all and would be more than happy to make friends with elves and mages. There's a disturbingly imperialist, pro-military, pro-war stance the show has, with the Japanese government eager to claim the new land as their own so they can invade it for its resources. The whole story smakes of right-wing, pro-war propaganda of the type the current government espouses. The animation company A-1 has a track record for producing anime series that are pro-government and pro-military.

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Shimoneta A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn't exist adapts a light novel series by Hirotaka Akagi set in a future where erotica, pornography and sex talk are banned, where teenage boys who say a dirty word will get stomped on and tased by SWAT teams. Japan's Most Wanted Terrorist here is a teenage girl who wears panties as a mask and wages a campaign to spread raunchy pictures and dirty jokes to combat the ignorance and sexual repression in society. The hero is a hapless classmate she blackmails into joining her campaign and finds he might like doing this after all. Yes, this is an over-the-top teenage sex comedy that's mostly about language and puns. What's interesting is its anti-censorship stance that's in opposition to the government's threats to tighten up censorship laws. What's notable is that once again, rebellion and countering government policy begins in prose but will make more impact when it becomes visual in the form of a TV show that gets a wider audience.

And there you have it. Proceed with caution, your mileage may vary, but at least it's never dull.

Ya-tah! at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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