Monday, September 24, 2012

Anime Sunday

Monday September 24, 9:21 p.m.

It had been 3 weeks since meeting up with The Anime King....last Sunday was a family dinner outing. Of course, the day was bracketed with another tour of restaurants but I'll leave that to the next entry. In the middle was the usual stopover to the King's place for a few hours of anime viewing and soundtrack listening. He let me listen to his Precure soundtrack which he had enthusiastically bought the week before. For the past number of months, we've been viewing the latest series in the Precure Odyssey....basically a 9-year set of Sunday morning anime in which specially selected junior high school girls become magical heroines. Currently, it's the Smile Precure series which has fairy tales as its overarching theme....five girls who live in a conventional Japanese suburban neighborhood and all of whom are good buddies. The King also showed me for the first time the first couple of episodes from the preceding series, Suite Precure, which has a distinctly different feel. For one thing, the two protagonists there start off yelling at each other and continue to do so for most of the program. And the town they live in is somewhat more fantastical in appearance.

The clip here is pretty much self-explanatory. One of the heroines has a bad case of entomophobia.

The other anime that has been getting some good play in the basement of my good buddy has been "Joshiraku". Just imagine combining five female rakugo storytellers with the mind of a Japanese-speaking Robin Williams, and that will get you closer to understanding the madness that takes up the 30 minutes. Ability in comprehending the Japanese language will need to be at an advanced level, although the ladies often riff on pop culture on both sides of the Pacific. It also helps that the show is serviced by a couple of head-invadingly catchy theme songs.

I've also been continue to borrow anime from the King as well. After "Mawaru Penguindrum", "Usagi Drops", "Madoka Magica"and "Ben-To", I've just started on "Haruhi Suzumiya". I'm admittedly getting into this very late into the game since the anime came on the scene back in 2006. And I've been hearing raves about the movie for its cinematography and the drama. So you can imagine, my surprise when I saw Episode 0 and first saw the homemade movie directed by the main character and starring the timid beauty, Mikuru. I've also got to admit that Haruhi strikes me as being one of the crabbier and more self-absorbed characters I've seen in this medium....kinda like the J-version of Lucy Van Pelt. The series starts off like any other high school-based anime but I just left off where the bookworm Nagato gives her surprising news about herself. I told The King this and he just told me to put on my seat belt.