Kuragehime

 

A group of friends bound by love, kindness and a lot of social anxiety. Tsukimi is an aspiring illustrator with a keen interest for everything jellyfish. Mayaya is obssessed with the Han dinasty and the Three Kingdoms period. Banba knows everything about trains. Jiji is always thinking about older, mature men. Chieko is a Ichimatsu doll collector and knows everything there is to know about kimonos. They all live together in an old fashioned inn owned by Chieko's mother. They're NEETs (thought they won't admit it) and spend the day mostly indoors, indulging in their hobbies. Once a week they all go out to the grocery store for supplies.

This is a very interesting group of friends and it's a delight to watch their failing to go outside and other shortcomings of no consequence. Here, social anxiety receives a lighthearted approach to a very nice effect. The chaos element in this rather uneventful, chilled group of people is Kuranosuke, a beautiful boy that looks better in a dress than most women. Little by little he finds his way into this group, bringing a new perspective to their lives, but mostly, at least at first, what he really brings is high quality kobe beef for the special dinner party at fridays. Things take off from there.

Kuragehime is an endearing slice of life comedy and the sparingly placed romance storyline is well played, making it a nice addition to the whole thing. There's plenty of funny situations at every corner with these characters and though you probably won't be laughing out loud all the time, it never fails to be an amusing watch.

What really makes it worthy though are the characters. They make a nice team of weirdos and we can't but find comfort that they found each other. The perfect NEET, nerd team. There should be whole episodes where we watch Chieko sewing new clothing for her dolls or Mayaya's jumping around her bedroom pretending to be one of the great generals of the Han dinasty. Unfortunately there isn't, but the anime is just the first volume of a 17 volumes long otaku friendship mostly indoor adventure, so if you like what you see here, the manga would be the next natural step.

Gyakkyou Burai Kaiji

 

Kaiji is the sort of person who only truly functions under tremendous pressure. His intelligence, gut and motivation only kicks in when he's thrown into terrible, desperate situations. Left to exist on a peaceful world, he's prone to laziness, boredom, self-indulgence, given to tantrums and extremely unsociable. Under normal circumstances he's numb, a little more than a shadow. Kaiji is also a compulsive gambler.

He can't climb the social ladder the regular way. His only chance, he believes, is to get it all at once in a gambling match. That's the premisse of Kaiji Ultimate Survivor. Crazy gambling ideas, tense plots and the exploration of Kaiji's personality as he sinks deeper into the underworld of gambling, organized crime and desperate people. A lot of desperate people, including Kaiji himself.

I find the gambling ideas in this show not to be the most interesting, as far as games go. Kaiji gambles his life in 4 different games during this season, two of them are card games of random chance more than anything else. A third is more of a torture race and the last one is a draft. Although all those games end up being a battle of wits, which makes them interesting, the games themselves are not rather simplistic.

What's really interesting here is the character development for Kaiji and the people he meets on his journey to the bottom of society. One of the very best episodes is the tenth one, when we get to see Kaiji working at a convenience store. This is a critical moment for the show because we can testify how Kaiji is unable to function in normal society. "It's no use, I can't stand this sort of atmosphere. I just can't stand it!" Kaiji thinks to himself while his coworkers socialize over tea and tell silly jokes to each other. He's an outsider and there's no hope for him among normal people.

Yet, he shows deep compassion and sympathy for his fellow men. Many times he will give up everything to save someone. He will go out of his way, puting himself in great peril to rescue a lost soul. He knows this person he's saving would cross him if given the chance. He knows humans are cruel and can't be trusted. He's seen the ugly side of humanity, and yet again and again, he will choose to help others to his own detriment.

The show is filled with very tense moments, carefully and slowly crafted through dialogues and narration. These are not fast-paced stories but their outcomes are always interesting and  well worth the wait. All characters, even minor ones are full of development and infused with worth and emotion. How I wish they would make more anime based on the works of Mr. Fukmoto Nobuyuki. A very nice watch.

Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge

 

Tanaka-kun is always listless. He doesn't want to be the main character even in his own life. It takes too much effort, too many things happen to you when you're the main character. You're always going somewhere, there's always someone bothering you. It's best to be just an extra in a street scene, if you're lucky enough, they don't even need to draw your face. One of Tanaka-kun's abilities is to become almost invisible.

Tanaka just wants a silent place where he can be quiet or better yet, doze off into a nice, ten hours nap. Like his friend Oota mentions, Tanaka is aiming to achieve a form of listlessness beyond anything known to mankind before. He's impressed enough by this resolution that he vows to help Tanaka in any way he can. Is he just curious to know how languid Tanaka can get, or he's convinced Tanaka cannot function without him? Maybe a little bit of both. Oota is a really nice guy and a really good friend.

While Tanaka is the heart of this show, such a character can only go so far on his own. What really hold things together here is the people around Tanaka, specially Oota. The responsible, reliable and incredibly abled-body Oota, who will literally carry Tanaka around and make sure he can function at the most basic level. Their friendship is the reason this anime works so well. They're opposite of each other in many ways and oftentimes their relationship become something of master and apprentice thing. Even if Oota is not on the path of becoming listless himself, he's always interested and intrigued by his friend's take on life and is always ready to listen to Tanaka's surprinsingly insightfull take on things.

Oota's dedication to his friend seems contagious and is a delight to watch. Tanaka's gratitude and appreciation is enough to make him worthy of such friendship and everything else in the show grows around that. Miyano, a classmate of the duo, wants to follow Tanaka and become a languid master herself. Ehizen is the fake delinquent beloved in the neighborhood for her helful disposition. Shiraishi grows fond of Oota and Tanaka after realizing they respect her for what she truly is.

It's one of those shows where everyone is actually kind-hearted and caring and so nothing can ever go too wrong. It's a circle of friends that keeps growing and everyday life is an opportunity for amusing, delightful moments... and for Tanaka to doze off to a gentle summer breeze.

Barakamon

 

Barakamon is about the emotional journey of Handa Sei, a young calligrapher from Tokyo. He goes from punching one of the judges who criticizes his work to a caring, sensible person. The plot has a lot of very good 'emotional intelligence' moments and it's hard to believe this was written by a 23 year old sometimes. This is one of those titles that really makes me curious about the original material, which I plan to check out sometime.

Barakamon's weakest point is its comedy. It's not bad but if depended on it, this would be a run-off-the-mill slice of life show. Not bad but not really funny, more like amusing most of the time and at least not annoying in its worst puns. No, this characters and stories really shines in its emotional moments, brought about by life lessons Handa goes through while living with a colorful cast of charaters in the Goto islands. It's actually very straight forward stuff. Never give up. Be caring. See the bigger picture of things. 

Just like in real life those rather obvious realizations only really make sense through a meaninful event and Barakamon manages to do just that. Each episode is a self-contained story and almost all of them are interesting and endearing enough to make you care. Even minor characters have real weight to them and even though you only ever know one of two things about them (like Tamako's younger brother, the village elder Nomura or the village chief Yuujirou) you're always glad when they show up to say something. Not a single character here feels like padding and I find this is rather unsual, be it on anime or other entertainment media in general.

Handa Sei, the main character in this tale is really well written and his broad emotional depth makes for excellent interactions with everyone he meets, from his Tokyo business friend to the elemental school kids that visits him daily. He's one of those people that can learn from everyone and his rather self-effacing and sometimes self-doubt, self-debasement behavior brings out the best on everyone around him. And that's how he ends up being friends with everyone in Goto, to our great enjoyment.

Bakemonogatari

 

I began watching Bakemonogatari because I read there were lots of Japanese mythology into it. There is, but the presentation of the material is rather hectic. Maybe in the novels those stories have a better passing. Here, a lot of it is told, not shown. It's a dialogue heavy show and the dialogue is entirely on this very Japanese wit style 当意即妙, with lots of retorts being a pun over Kanji radicals or how two words sound similar. If you don't know Japanese and you're not interested in the Japanese language, then it's likely you'll be missing out on half this anime has to offer.

The characters are very self-conscious about being anime characters and I'm still undecided if that's an thing I like or not. Lots of meta jokes about it and lots of playing around with anime and manga cliches. It's sort of hard to get into some of this characters but if you manage to stick around I'm sure you'll like most of them by the end. Animation is also rather different. Lots of collage and sorta hidden written jokes everywhere. The mythology in Bakemonogatari is intimately connected with language, so again, if you really want to enjoy this, knowing some Japanese will really help you appreciate things that are completely lost in translation.

Plot development is not linear and character development is not always connected to the actual plot. You know more about them because they talk to each other about lots of things, not just what is actually going on in that particular episode. Once I realized that's how the whole thing was going to play through, I learned to curb myself and enjoy the talking.Other than that there's lots of fan service, but it's so forced that's even more ridiculous than it usually is. 

So, Bakemonogatari is about this highschool student, Araragi Koyomi, that goes around helping other students that for some reason or another are cursed. Sometimes it's a clueless god, sometimes it's a demon, other times it's just stress. He'll help anyone in need and that all of the people he helps are cute girls is purely just a coincidence. The show itself is, of course, very aware of such fact and it's also a running gag throughout.

There's a lot of quirky things in this show and I feel it by reading the MAL reviews, it's a sort of love or hate thing but for me it ended up being a little bit more balanced than that. I enjoyed the mythmaking and some of the endless dialogues but it did feel too quirky at times. Hard to really explain. I think you'll just to check this out for yourself.